9-6-2021 Monday (Labor Day)
Happy Labor Day Everyone.
Another early start on our marathon trip to Sierra Vista, 7:30 after a breakfast stop ay McDonalds. We got along fine last night without electricity. Joe ran the generator for a while to cool down the RV and our little 12 volt fan kept us comfortable all night. By the time we stopped last night (6:40) it was too late to try to find a campground so we just stayed on the Walmart parking lot.
The largest town we drove through this morning was Guymon, Oklahoma. We were only about 5 miles from the Oklahoma state line where we camped last night. Every town through here has grain elevators right by the railroad tracks. You can usually see the elevators in the next town as you leave the one you’re in.
We drove for an hour in Oklahoma then crossed the Texas state line at 8:35. And again grain elevators.
I thought we had managed to miss Texas on this trip. In fact, Joe and I had just talked about how many miles we had made the loop around to avoid Texas, then he mentioned that we were coming up on Texhoma and I looked that up on the map and -- sure enough, we were after all having to go through Texas for about 100 miles. Well, I guess that’s better than 880 miles to cross the whole state.
We started seeing feedlots again today. We came through Dalhart, Texas and there were two feedlots almost across the road from each other; one of them was huge. If I researched the right one, their feeding capacity is 74,000 head.
At our lunch break in Vaughan, New Mexico, we pulled in beside a semi hauling a wind turbine body. At the back of the parking lot were more of these truckloads and also some with the blades -- those things are enormous.
Just outside of Vaughn we saw six semi’s with these wind turbine blades on them -- looks like they might be waiting for a pilot car or clearance to move ahead since they are oversize loads. This is where we ran into a problem. Somehow we missed a highway split out of Vaughn and ended up back on I-40 -- probably added about 50 miles to our drive today. Good thing we gained an hour in time zones today. But all was not for naught -- our little detour took us past a small herd of Belgium belted cattle, one of my favorite things to see. There's even a brown one in there, which I have never seen before.
We did see a few antelope today crossing New Mexico.
As we crossed New Mexico, we saw a train loaded with Fedex trucks, at least 50. We saw lots of trains today, going both ways, some sitting and waiting for another to pass.
We made it back to our route and eventually got on I-25. We had never driven this I-25 section south from Socorro to Las Cruces, so this was a new road for us, and it was pretty scenic. We took the exit at Hatch Valley (highway 26) which was a good road and it ended up being a good choice -- it cut off about 50 miles on to Las Cruces on I-25, then back to Deming on I-10. Hatch seems like an interesting town -- there are hatch chilies all over the place, lots of gift shops with long strings of them hanging down from the rafters. Here was also a much needed fuel stop -- we were way below a quarter of a tank. But the pump shut off at $100, which is normal, and Joe couldn’t get it to take it the credit card after that so we didn’t get full. But we were running really low and we’re happy to have had the $100 worth, but that didn't even get it half full. However, it was our highest price gas on the trip ($3.299) so maybe we can find some a little cheaper in the morning.
The road from Hatch to Deming was a good drive; we saw several solar farms--one with really big panels and two with the normal size. We had never seen these large panels before. You can see normal size ones on the ground at the left side of the picture, just for perspective.
We kept looking for fields of hatch chilis but we never did see any. Joe googled it, and they should be harvesting them now. That would have been interesting to see.
We got off of the road at 6:15, staying just right outside of Deming, New Mexico at Desert Vista RV Village. This is a nice enough park for an overnight, about 4-5 miles out of Deming, just right off Hwy 26. Joe drove 624 miles today -- a long day, especially with our extra 50 mile detour, and I didn't relieve him any. My bad. As soon as Joe got the electricity hooked up, we drove into town to get some dinner and let the RV cool down. After dinner we drove through town looking for a gas station to finish filling our tank in the morning. We drove all the way to the last street in town, which forced us up onto the interstate and we ended up driving an additional 3 miles before he found a place to cross over (illegally) to come back. We thought we were going to have to drive 12 miles to get turned around. So we have an additional 6 miles added to our log driving day, even though this was in the Jeep. We finally got back to the RV and called it a night. It didn't take Joe very long before he stretched out in bed.
We traveled today from Kansas, through a corner of Oklahoma Panhandle, through a corner of Texas Panhandle, and across and then down in New Mexico. When we got up this morning, it was 67 degrees. When we got off the road, it was 91! Yuk. We should be at Mazie's around noon tomorrow, and our marathon drive will be over.
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