From Cimarron to Liberal, KS (Tuesday)

This morning we are leaving this beautiful campground, Tolby, in the Cimarron State Park and heading to Liberal, Kansas.  After much cajoling, I got Joe out of bed about 8:00, and we de-camped.  There was no water available at the campsite, but they did have it at the pump house, so we drove down to that building and hooked up 2 hoses to refill our water tank.  That took a little time, but once that was filled, we were ready to hit the road.  They will officially open this park tomorrow (including turning the water on at the campsites), along with the other state parks in New Mexico (May 1).  Most of the campsites here were short, but otherwise this was a great place.  We didn't see any deer along the 20-mile stretch we drove Sunday night when we saw the 59 deer. 

From Cimarron, we took Hwy 21, a change in plans, but it turned out to be a beautiful drive along the original Santa Fe Trail.

This route took us past the huge Philmont Boy Scout ranch, which was scattered over several acres.  I didn't take any pictures of the main complex, but we did stop at a secondary area, and there was framework for lots of tents here, along with an old church, and other buildings.

We really enjoyed this drive, through miles and miles of open prairie, with an occasional scrubby area thrown in.  We saw pronghorn all day long, even into Oklahoma.  And Joe saw 3 wild turkeys when I was back fixing snacks.  While the Midwest is flooding, the west is extremely dry, and New Mexico is no exception.  Most of the rivers we drove along should have been running full, but were little more than streams in many places, and many of the water tanks and ponds are either really low or completely dried up, and this is April, when they should be getting snowmelt and spring rains.  The fire danger around Taos was "moderate" but most of the other areas was "high."  Hate to see that so early in the season.

We are always on the lookout for wildlife, and as we were both scanning the open prairie we almost missed 6 deer lying under a shade tree right beside the road.  We were upon them before we even saw them, and they were probably not more than 30 feet from the road.  Our route took us through the town of Clayton, but I missed the town sign.  We were hoping to find a place to pull off for lunch, but didn't see anything so we drove on through.

Right after we got out of town, an emergency vehicle passed us with its lights and siren on, then a state police car came screaming past us, probably going 100 mph.  We never did come up them again so don't know where they went.  We crossed the state line into Oklahoma at 12:35.  The temperature outside keeps creeping up.  It was 41 when I got up and now it's 90.  We are not liking that.  Finally had to turn the A/C on and roll up the windows.  We found a picnic area just across the state line, which happened to be real close to the water tank for a bunch of cattle.  We so had lunch with the cows today.  The wind was blowing in the right direction though, so we didn't get any cow smells with our food.

We fueled in Guymon, OK for $3.459 (of course we saw it 10 cents cheaper in the next town), and arrived in Liberal about 4:45, Kansas (we lost an hour when we crossed into Oklahoma).  We stayed a Seven Winds CG but I would not recommend it.  It was a Passport America CG (which means we get a 50% discount since we are members) but it seems to have been taken over by construction workers or something.  Not very clean, they didn't have WiFi cards available yet.  They did have showers and laundry, which we used, but they weren't the greatest.  After I finished the laundry, we drove into Liberal for dinner and to get a better WiFi signal since the one at the CG wasn't very strong.  So we spent 2 hours in McDonalds posting the last 3 days of the blog.  It's very frustrating when I don't have WiFi in the RV, since we have our own Hotspot.  But if we don't have a phone signal, the Hotspot doesn't work since it operates off the phone signal too, and when we camp in state parks out in the national forests, we usually don't have a phone signal. 

We got back to the RV about 10:00, and the wind had started to pick up.  It's supposed to really blow tomorrow and a cold front is coming through.  (Sure hope it doesn't bring any tornadoes my way.)  We are going in to see Dorothy's house (Wizard of Oz) in the morning and plan on moving on to Dodge City to see if Matt Dillon is still hanging around there, but we may have to hang out here for a day if the weather is too bad.  We have left the mountains of New Mexico, regrettably.  That part of NM is really beautiful, and we would like to return with our quads some day.