Monthly Archives: May 2018

Albuquerque

Posted on by

We stopped at Albuquerque to take care of some of those ‘household’ things.  When you are traveling fulltime it is different than just taking a weekend jaunt or a 2-week trip and then home.  This is our home.  We don’t have the luxury of taking enough clothes, or food, to last the trip.  We have to do laundry about every 8-9 days before dipping into the ’emergency’ underwear supply!  We need groceries sometimes more frequently than that.  We also like to get to civilization every now and then to get caught up on our TV shows (however the satellite has really helped with that), resupply from a Costco and/or Trader Joe’s, and maybe catch a movie or two.  Albuquerque served this up for us.

We stayed at the American RV ‘Resort’ at the west end of town off of I10.  This is across the highway where, in 2009, we met the other Airstreamers to caravan into the Balloon Fiesta.  It was a nice park, it had gates for security and we were right behind the office which blocked most of the freeway noise.

That is a rock embedded in the tree!

We did take a few hikes at the Petroglyph National Monument that is right next to town:

Albuquerque turned out to be a good stop.  The area surrounding the city is beautiful, but watching the news it suffers from my large city maladies.

Time to head north a bit.

On to New Mexico

Posted on by

That’s enough of Arizona for us, we have to move on somewhere else.  We followed the same track as we did last year.  From the Phoenix basin up to Safford AZ toward New Mexico.  Last time we spent the night in a BLM area but Roxie didn’t want to do that this time so we went with the Walmart standby.

The next day we continued to our destination, Las Cruces.  We stayed there about 5 nights and were able to pick up some mail we had forwarded to General Delivery.  Our plan was to head to Texas to get a shotgun as we are Texas residents.  However, Dick’s Sporting Goods policy is to sell firearms to residents of states that touch the state they are in.  I looked into getting a gun in Arizona but Texas does not border on Arizona.  This was good news as we did not have to go to El Paso for the sole reason of purchasing the shotgun.

While we were in Las Cruces we visited the old town area of Mesilla which was very close.  It reminded us a bit of old town Albuquerque but much smaller.  Here is a cactus in bloom there and the church on the square:

After our nights in Las Cruces, we headed eastward, like before.  We went over the hills and did a lunch stopover at White Sands National Monument (we didn’t stop last year):

Last year we stayed the night in Almagordo NM at a Walmart and went on to Texas from there.  This time we headed north.

Our stop for the night was the Valley of the Fires BLM campground outside of Carrizozo NM.  This is a great little campground and I think we got the last electric and water spot.  Another bonus was the price of the campsite!  The normal price is dirt cheap at $12 but Roxie was able to get a Federal pass for being disabled.  This means at a lot of locations we can get half-price camping with this pass.  That was true here also so we did the night for $6!  It even sprinkled a bit on us while there.

On to Albuquerque!