Our trip home had an early surprise, at 4:40 am we got an alert on our phone, a tornado warning in our area of phoenix. It was totally calm outside, but looking at the radar we could see a line of red coming our way. We went into the showers which seemed to be the safest place. It did get pretty windy but no tornado, we did chat with some Portlanders who proceeded to tell us how horrible Portland has become. Pretty funny since we plan to move there soon. Since this storm also brought snow to the Grand Canyon we decided to head east first before turning north. That worked well as we were able to stay in warm weather all the way through Kansas.
With the rains I didn’t want to risk any mountain roads being washed out, so we stopped at Apache Junction casino for the night. We passed on the buffet as the reviews were pretty bad, but after dinner we did go in to gamble some, we first lost $20 each. We then got a drink and decided to put in $10 more each. This was nearly gone when I hit a small jackpot, this folded into both of us winning some money on penny slots. I walked away even and Charissa walked away $30 positive, so not too bad for an evening of fun.
The next day had us travelling the rest of the way across Arizona, this state was both more mountainous and greener than I had expected, many beautiful sights. We decided to drive about 3 hours a day for 9 day straight to get home, so that left some time to explore a bit, but not a whole lot. Just over the mountains from Las Cruces we found Aguirre Springs campground. It was only $5 a night and had amazing views over the valley. Turns out New Mexico and Kansas are cheap places to camp.
The next morning we made a side tour through White Sands National Monument. One of only 3 places in the world where their are gypsum sand dunes. It was pretty cool to be surrounded by white sand in every direction. Their is a drive into the dunes and lots of places to stop and climb on the dunes. And some nice trails with lots of information on the unique animals that have evolved to live in the white sands. A good place to stop in New Mexico.
In Almogordo we stopped at the Space Museum, next door is white sands air base, so they had quite some space artefacts and it was a well setup museum, it took us about 2 hours to walk through, another good stop in New Mexico.
We drove on and camped outside of Roswell, campground wasn’t so nice and unfortunately no UFO sightings overnight. We visited the UFO museum the next morning. It was fun to see, and definitely something happened many years ago, but we will probably never know if it was aliens or just some top secret Air Force coverup. Its surprising to see how much this story seems to be the only thing keeping this dusty ranch town alive.
We then continued on to Hereford Texas where we were disappointed to see the BBQ restaurant had gone out of business. We ended up staying at Buffalo Lakes Wildlife Refuge. A nice little campground, but there isn’t a lake there, it costs a whole $2 to stay the night. There was only 1 other camper in the whole place, of course they had to park next to us, ran their generator at night and made a racket leaving at 6:30 the next morning. Throughout this trip I have noticed two distinct types of RVers. Others like us prefer to be on their own and will pick spots leaving gaps and as much distance as possible between spots. The other type seem to follow herd mentality, huddling together at the entrance to the campground or closest to the other campers who arrived before them. I really don’t understand these types of campers, but we have had this same experience many times during our trip.
We got a late start in the morning, checking out Cadillac ranch which was more mundane than I thought it would be. We stopped for Texas BBQ in Amarillo, of course the brisket was fantastic. We continued on this day up through Texas and the panhandle of Oklahoma. I have to say this section was the worst are we drove though on the whole trip. Oklahoma was mostly just ranch land with rusting oil derricks dotting the landscape. West Texas was giant cattle feedlot after giant stinking cattle feedlot, each surrounded by enough irrigated hay land to feed the cows. Between the sights and smells its nearly enough turn me off supermarket beef forever. We made it up to Meade Kansas and the state park there. It was a nice campground on a lake, which we had to ourselves, though the staff lady seemed very put out to help us.
This post is getting a bit long, so I will continue the second half of our journey through Kansas, Iowa and Minnesota in The Ride Home – Part 2
