Liberal, Kansas (Wednesday)

The wind shook the RV all night and just howled all day.  Our agenda this morning was Dorothy's House and the Land of the Wizard of Oz.  This is a wonderful museum.  I don't think I've ever actually seen that movie, but they did a great job here.  A home built in 1907 was restored to reflect the Gale farmhouse.    You check in at the Coronado Museum next door, then follow the yellow brick road to Dorothy's House.

You can buy a brick for $65 and have it "engraved."  Some famous people have bricks here including Liza Minelli (Judy Garland's daughter) and President and Nancy Reagan.

The rooms and furnishings are that same as the movie.  It was amazing how much of the "artifacts" here and in the museum are things that Joe and I can remember at our grandparents' homes.

Something we had never seen was a "mustache cup," designed to keep the waxed mustaches dry when these old guys drank their coffee.

Another interesting display was an old Sears & Roebuck catalog from around 1938, I think.  They had enlarged some of the catalog items, including a picture of a house that you could order and put together by number.  The house that Joe's mother lives in is one of those houses, and it strongly resembles this picture.

From there our tour guide took us over to the Land of Oz, and that was a WOW.  She took us on a route with movie sets from the movie, and she "reenacted" the gist of the movie.  After school and on weekends, they have school children dress as Dorothy and guide these tours, describing everything in first person.  But the kids were in school, and our tour guide did a great job.  She had a little girl's voice and made it very interesting, but she did it in third person.  Here's some of the sets.

Of course, the main characters were represented as well, Scarecrow (without a brain), Tin Man (without a heart), and Cowardly Lion (without any courage).  And the witch.

We finished up here and went back over to the Coronado Museum.  Here are some of the artifacts from here.  My maternal grandmother had a Victrola, and a Singer treadle sewing machine.   My paternal grandparents had the wood cook stove.  I would love to take my mother and sister here and let them reminisce with me about some of this old stuff.

There were several statues on corners on the main thoroughfare in town of Dorothy and Toto.  And a great picture of a "horse of a different color," although the one in the museum was just white.

We loved this museum and would recommend a stop here to anyone coming through.  If we come through here again, we would go back but try to time it when Dorothy is one of the kids.  I think they have kids dressed as the Tin Man, Scarecrow, etc., as well.

One other interesting tidbit, when the author was writing about the "land," he didn't know what he was going to call it.  Next to his desk was a 4-drawer file cabinet, with the files separated alphabetically by drawer, e.g., A-D, E-I, J-N, and O-Z.  He saw the OZ, and that's where the name came from.

We drove back to the Campground.  It was extremely windy and I wasn't sure if we were traveling today but you know Joe, the old ex-truckdriver.  Nothing scares him.  So we decamped, hooked up the car, and off we went to Dodge City.  It was only 80 miles away, and he was sure he could do that.  He had to crank on the steering wheel all day to stay halfway in our lane, and it was funny, as we came past these rows of grain elevators, which would block the wind for a few seconds, we would end up in the other lane.  The a gust would hit us as we cleared the elevators, and push us to the other side of the road.  This was not a day for the faint of heart to be driving an RV.  It was 51 degrees when I got up, had dropped to 44 by the time we pulled out about 11:00 a.m., and continued dropping all day.  It was was 36 when we went to bed, and 36 when I got up, but we got a smattering of snow overnight. 

Dorothy's House and the Land of the Wizard of Oz was an Excellent Adventure.  The drive on to Dodge City was also an adventure, but I'm not sure I would classify it as "excellent." 

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.

Taos (Monday)

It was 38 degrees when I got up this morning about 7:00, and the sun had been up for a while, so I assume it got a little colder than that last night.  As we left the campground, there was a group of 10 deer just down the road.

We drove into Eagle Nest for breakfast, and then headed out through Cimarron to Taos, which took all day.  Eagle Nest sits at the base of the mountains and is in a very pretty setting, although most of the businesses in town have not yet opened up for the summer.

Our first stop was a Vietnam Memorial that is on the outskirts of Angel Fire.  It was built in 1968 to honor the son of Victor and Jeanne Westphall, who had been killed in Vietnam in May 1968.  Also on the grounds was a Huey helicopter that had been active in that war, inserting troops in the Mekong Delta.  Thirteen helicopters had gone down before this one was successful.

I heard some geese fly over early this morning before I got out of bed, and we came upon some of them on our drive today.  You can tell we are still in New Mexico, no lack of artists here.

As we continued on our drive, we came upon an alpaca ranch with literally hundreds of alpacas.  Since we had several next door to us for several years, we weren't too excited about them, but we did get pictures.

We did see one animal on this part of the drive.  We thought it was a Mexican Grey Wolf, but at the ranger station we stopped at later we were told it was probably a coyote.  But it did not look like our Arizona coyotes.  It was in the middle of a field and Joe turned around so we could get a better look, and a picture, but we spooked it and it headed off to the forest.  We drove past several forest roads on this drive that were closed, but we finally came upon Forest Road 76 and the gates were open, so we drove back there about 5 miles.  We didn't see any wildlife, but we did find a patch of snow, and I hit Joe with a snowball (you can see the snowball in the air if you look closely).  Then I bravely crossed the raging river on a log.  Quite the athlete!!

We finally made it to Taos about 3:00 and headed over to the Rio Gorge Bridge southwest of town.  This gorge is amazing, it's in the middle of nowhere, with no warning that there is this huge canyon.  Joe wondered what those early pioneers thought when they came upon this unexpectedly.

The river looks pretty small from the top, but I'm sure it's a lot bigger at the bottom.  There were signs saying that rafters come through here, but we didn't see any.  They also do hot air balloon rides from here.  I called about that but it was $240 each and you had to be at the bridge at 5:30 a.m., so both of those elements made Joe decide it was not doable.

We came upon this interesting looking campground on the last part of our drive today, with a very nice covered wagon on display.

We went back into town and stopped at the Carson Forest Office to get information on quad riding in case we ever get the chance to come back here.  Then we went up to the Plaza and walked the shops on the square.  We got a recommendation for dinner from one of the shops, so we ate, then headed back to camp.  By now, it's 5:30 so we thought we might be in prime time for wildlife viewing.  But no luck.  We did see one eagle soaring overhead as we neared Eagle Nest.  We were hoping to see some elk in the open valleys but no luck there either. 

However, when we turned into our campground and went around the loop to get to our campsite, four deer jumped over the fence in the campground.  Guess we were looking in the wrong place.

We drove 173 miles in the car today.  The weather was beautiful, although there were some thunder clouds over the mountains as we came home.  It was in the 70s at the lower elevations, such as Taos, but in the 60s up here at our 8000 feet.  We are moving on tomorrow, and our goal is to get out of the state of New Mexico.  We've been gone 1 1/2 weeks are have only made it to our neighboring state, so I think we need to pick up the pace a little, or we will miss Shooter's birth in Florida in June!