Forget Covid and enjoy this Cow-vid. My Amazing Molly Mare shows me the ins and outs of cutting cows as I get my first lesson in sorting cattle from rancher, trainer, and rodeo director Will Lann in San Marcos, NM.
I promise to be gentler on the reins next time, Molly, since you clearly have everything under control!
Join us for the first part of our adventure through eastern New Mexico and the Texas panhandle.
PS — if Youtube decides to come after us for copyright violation, please don’t let it be because we used a few seconds of a cheesy song by, of all people, Jimmy Dean the sausage king.
Highlights from our first camping trip in 2019! We spent two nights at Villanueva State Park on the Pecos River—only an hour from home—to see what needs attention on Culutiwa (our travel trailer) before making any longer trips.
The weather was great, the scenery was beautiful, and we didn’t find any serious repair issues beyond perhaps needing new batteries. What more could you ask for? (Well, maybe liverwurst…)
It’s been over a month since we got home from our April trip across Texas to New Orleans and back. As noted in our previous post, that adventure ended abruptly when Mike came down with his first real fever since childhood and Maureen had to drive 10 straight hours from Dallas back to Santa Fe. Thanks to everyone who saw that post and reached out to express their concern about… What? Nobody asked how I was doing or even seemed to notice? Nice. Real nice, people.
Anyway, I survived a week of whatever mystery illness afflicted me (not that any of you care) and I’m finally getting around to finishing a post about Louisiana and New Orleans that I’d started before getting sick. So let’s step into the Wayback Machine and set the dials to late April…
Louisiana has a lot of nicknames: The Bayou State. The Pelican State. The Creole State. Sportsman’s Paradise. (OK, so the only person who actually uses that last one is whoever designs the license plates.) The glut of names reflects the wide range of things to see and do here in The Boot, as well as the fascinating history and geography of this area.
Our original itinerary had us spending four nights in the Sugar Cane State (three in New Orleans), but we quickly decided we wanted more time in The Mardi Gras State (see, there are two more) and juggled our schedule to add another day. Maureen had been to the Big Easy before, but I hadn’t, so there was a lot to discover while we were here in the Cajun State.
Click through the following photo gallery to learn more about what we learned about the so-called Child of the Mississippi.
Those who have followed our travel trailer rambles over the past few years know that a persistent “check engine” error code has been a recurring theme. It’s been undiagnosable, but generally indicates a possible overheating situation. It used to freak us out, but after several expensive, failed attempts to address it, we started ignoring it and just using a code reader we bought to clear it.
Well, it must be contagious, as my own temperature regulator is on the blink. Yup, I’ve come down with a fever. So we’re cutting things a couple days short and heading home from west Texas today.
We have a big blog write-up about New Orleans almost ready to post, and tons of footage for our next video. But that’s going to have to wait for now.
If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to pass out now.,.
We’re in New Orleans for the next few days, but here’s a new video offering a brief look at our favorite things to see and do from our recent time in these two Texas cities.
Moist, savory, smoked brisket that falls to pieces in your mouth. Tangy, smokey, homemade jalapeño sausage. Tender new potatoes swimming in a cup of warm butter. A grilled chicken sandwich served on two halves of a garlicky, deep fried donut. Handmade lemon cream popsicles dipped in white chocolate and dusted with toasted coconut.
And we’ve been trying to eat light.
The food here is delicious but, I fear, deadly unless one exercises some restraint. And restraint seems to be in particularly short supply in the Lone Star State. Everything is bigger in Texas, including appetites… and waistlines.
Creative
Our most entertaining meal was at an Italian place in San Antonio where our dog, Zora (and Maureen’s blue eyes), charmed our server, Esteban—a Colombian refugee whose brother had been murdered by the 1990s cocaine cartels—to the point where he started bringing us free beer and bottles of sparkling wine, then showed off his hand-painted pizza boxes while tearfully proclaiming his faith that America, the shining light of the world, would soon find its inner goodness again.
Confusing
Our most confusing dining experience, however, was ordering barbecue at a roadhouse behind a gas station here in Austin, where we struggled to figure out what we needed to ask the cashier for (meat and hot sides, it turned out), what we needed to procure ourselves from the cold cases (beer, soda, slaw, and dessert), and what was simply not available (plates of any sort, as dinner was eaten off sheets of butcher paper lining a plastic soda crate). The cashier rolled her eyes so hard at our inability to master the barbecue buying process that I thought she was having a seizure.
Concerning
And then there was that donut sandwich. Last night, after watching the Austin bats put on their nightly show emerging en masse from the Congress Street Bridge, we ate a late dinner at Gourdough’s Public House, which is famous (infamous?) for making donuts a staple item in just about everything on the menu. The marquee appetizer is a donut stuffed with mozzarella cheese. Salads come with donuts instead of croutons. Burgers and sandwiches are served between piping hot donut halves. And, of course, you can get all sorts of decadent, donutty desserts buried under fudge sauce or filled with cheesecake or otherwise pushed past the point of caloric insanity.
Tomorrow we will waddle our way out of Austin. But not before meeting a former colleague of Maureen’s for lunch today, when we’ll get another shot at trying to order barbecue without humiliating ourselves, and then dining with a Bay Area friend who happens to be in town for work.
Not to worry, though. I’m sure we’ll be eating much more healthily at our next destination: New Orleans. That’s a town that’s known for moderation in all things, right?
As we get ready to leave San Antonio (which has been a ton of fun) for Austin tomorrow, here’s a video with some highlights of our time in Big Bend, featuring three short hikes in different parts of the park.
We are out of the Big Bend dead-spot and finally able to use the internet without waving our iPhones over our heads trying to catch a faint, passing breeze of cellular service and hoping we don’t get whacked with roaming charges from a cell tower in Mexico.
That means three things:
Today we’re off to downtown San Antonio to see the Riverwalk and… hmmm, what else were we going to do? Some kind of historical site… Oh, I remember: the Alamo.
Anyway, while we go make new memories you can catch up on a few older ones here.
First up, our adventures (and misadventures) getting out of New Mexico and into Texas:
And next, a brief tour of three towns in funky, far-West Texas:
We’ve spent the better part (in more ways than one) of a week in Texas, and we like what we’ve seen so far.
Davis Mountains State Park and the area around it—including the towns of Fort Davis, Alpine, and Marfa—provided a warm introduction to “Far West” Texas. We saw a historic fort named for the president of a country that fought the U.S. in our bloodiest war, ate ginormous breakfast burritos in someone’s backyard, and strolled through an indoor/outdoor botanical and cactus garden.
Our next stop was Big Bend National Park. I’ve been kind of obsessed with visiting here since grade school back in Massachusetts, when we studied the National Parks and I wondered what circumstances might ever bring me to this remote slice of southern Texas jammed up against the Mexican border. (I was similarly obsessed with Glacier National Park in the wilds of northern Montana, which I finally got to see a couple years ago.) Still, I was worried that three days would be too long a stay at Big Bend and we would run out of things to see and do. In hindsight, that seems like a pretty stupid concern.
With 800,000 acres of varied terrain—from the dry Chihuahuan Desert, to the rugged Chisos Mountains, to the lush green ribbon of the Rio Grande—there was more than enough to keep us entertained. You can check out some of what we saw and did in the gallery below.
This was also one of the least crowded National Parks we’ve been to, so we really got to feel the isolation of the region. The oppressive heat probably scared away some visitors. It got progressively warmer each day we were there, and last night trying to sleep in our tiny travel trailer was like being in a tin can on a hot stove. There is full-hookup RV parking on the other side of Big Bend, where we could have used our air conditioner, but I had chosen a more scenic and rustic campground—a decision Maureen was kind enough not to criticize even after a sweltering night without sleep! Poor Zora with the last of her winter fur coat had the worst of it, and panted like a steam engine all night long.
The heat wave is supposed to break tomorrow, when we head to San Antonio. The place we’re staying tonight, Seminole Canyon State Park, has electricity to run our air conditioning and there’s even a passable (depending on which way the wind is blowing) T-Mobile signal that I’m using to write this post as we hunker down against the heat. Unfortunately, there’s not enough bandwidth to post videos yet, so that will have to wait until we reach civilization—or at least what passes for it in San Antonio.
…that’s what time we’re rolling out of Davis Mountains State Park in hopes of scoring a first-come, first-served campsite at Big Bend. (We met another R-Pod owning couple here who told us the competition for sites is cutthroat.)
Oh, and the WiFi here is a lie. It may be a while before we’re connected again, so you’ll just have to wait a few days for any videos. We’ll try to make it worth it.
See that gorgeous campsite in the photo above? The big one with a perfect view of the lake, full hookups, a long and level trailer pad, no immediate neighbors, and shade trees for privacy? Yeah, that’s our site. We reserved it months ago, after scouring online campsite reviews, Google Earth, and multiple RV apps to find the best site here at Brantley Lake State Park.
There’s just one teensy, weensy problem. That’s not our trailer parked there.
We arrived a little after 3 pm to find that raggedy-ass rig you see above squatting in our spot, with no sign of anyone we could politely ask to move. After circling the campground a few times, we headed back to the visitor center where a ranger made well-rehearsed sympathetic faces while telling us there was nothing she could do about the trailer if there was no one at the campsite to evict. She offered us the one remaining vacant site, disclaiming “I ain’t gonna sugar-coat it: It’s the last site in the park for a reason.”
Sure, it’s cramped and unlevel—but it’s ours.
So here we are in our tiny, consolation prize campsite with a view of the bathrooms, a broken water faucet, and big-rig RVs hemming us in on all sides. But our cooler is full of cold beer, Maureen just cooked dinner, and our three-week camping adventure is finally underway. So life is good.
We had a nice drive down here, too, including a stop at the Bosque Redondo Memorial at Fort Sumner Historic Site and lunch in UFO-obsessed Roswell. Our next stop, Davis Mountains State Park, allegedly has excellent WiFi, so we hope to post a video soon–hopefully with no footage of Mike getting into a screaming match with the owners of the mobile meth lab parked in our original site.
After nearly two decades in the Bay Area—much of that time on the coast, where one season looks a lot like another—it’s a big change living someplace with a more variable climate.
This is our second March in Santa Fe, and we’re realizing that local meteorologists really have their work cut out for them this time of year. It’s not so much “in like a lion, out like a lamb” as it is “lions and lambs chasing each other back and forth all month long.” Late last week it was in the low 60s. On Sunday we got a couple inches of snow. And now, two days later, it’s all sunshine and shirtsleeves again.
Our next big ramble (across Texas to New Orleans and back) starts in less than a month. I had planned to bring our camp trailer in for its annual maintenance yesterday, but with the melting snow and chilly breeze our mechanic requested that we postpone until Thursday. Right now the forecast is calling for lambs all week, but I know those lions can show up anytime, so we’ll see.
This week’s video takes a look at a local landmark that terrified drivers between Santa Fe and Albuquerque for years: La Bajada Hill—a somewhat redundant name, since “bajada” is Spanish for “descent,” but it does reinforce the steepness of the slope!
We’re in between travels right now, but fortunately there are plenty of places to ramble right here in northern New Mexico. Last weekend was sunny and warm, luring Mike out for a hike in a place we can see from our living room but had never visited: Galisteo Basin Preserve.
A lot of other people had the same idea, perhaps motivated by recent news coverage of the financial difficulties clouding the preserve’s future and threatening its protected status. The parking lot at the trailhead was full of hikers, bikers, dog-walkers, and even a rescue team practicing their tactics. But once I headed out into 10,000 acres of open space, I didn’t see another soul for 3 hours.
Join me on this diverse and beautiful hike by watching the video here:
Tucson, we hardly knew ye.
After a whirlwind day and a half with Maureen’s friend Jana and her family, we left Phoenix for Tucson. A high wind warning made it a white-knuckle drive, but we arrived safely at the Lazydays KOA without being swallowed by a sandstorm or roadside arroyo.
The campground was easily the largest we’d ever stayed at, and looked more like an airport parking lot than a place to commune with nature. After lunch (and a quick trip to the fitness center to work it off) we visited with Maureen’s cousin Ryan and his family. His parents—Maureen’s Aunt Susan and Uncle Stretch—were hiding out in Arizona from the single-digit temps in Iowa, so we got to see them, too, before heading back to the KOA. Despite being smack in between the Tucson airport and Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, we passed a restful night before pulling up stakes this morning for our triumphant return to New Mexico. More on that soon.
This “a new day, a new destination” kind of travel is not our favorite. Heck, we got to know Pie Town better than either Phoenix or Tucson. But our main purpose of this trip was to see friends and family, not sightseeing. There will be plenty of that this spring and summer.
Until then, if the recap above leaves you wanting more, check out the video below.
There’s not a whole lot to see in Pie Town, NM (we actually missed our turn and sped right through it on Friday night), but there’s plenty to eat. By the time we doubled back and set up camp, however, everything was closed for the night so we had to wait and enjoy our pie—complete with a big scoop of ice cream—for breakfast the next morning.
After that, it was on to warm and windy Arizona. We met Maureen’s friend Jana and her family for dinner, then spent a sleepless night listening to gale force winds howling through Lake Pleasant campground and feeling our tiny camper shake.
Our first video of this trip is posted below. More to come soon, after we head to Tucson tomorrow morning.
It’s been a very mild winter here in Santa Fe. We’ve only had a couple days with any measurable snow, and the high temperatures have consistently been in the 50s or even 60s. The entire state of New Mexico is experiencing a serious drought, and the lack of precipitation or snowpack is going to be a real problem this summer.
As the saying goes, when life gives you lemons, make delicious lemon squares—preferably with a shortbread crust and just a light dusting of powdered sugar. So we’ve decided to take advantage of the unseasonably warm weather by taking off on a spontaneous winter camping trip. We’re hedging our bets by heading to southern Arizona, where it should be warm and sunny even if winter finally descends on Northern New Mexico over the next week.
Don’t squint! Click for larger map.
Given the season, our goal is to travel south; but getting from New Mexico to Arizona also involves a big chunk of going west. We plan to do most of our westwarding on desolate Highway 60, passing the Very Large Array radio astronomy complex (featured in several science fiction movies, most notably Contact) and spending the night in tantalizingly named Pie Town.
After crossing into Arizona we’ll turn southward again, spending a couple days in the Phoenix area and then visiting Tucson before we buttonhook eastward and back into the Land of Enchantment. Depending on the weather forecast back in Santa Fe, we might dawdle for a few days in the warmer climes of southern New Mexico before we head home.
A big reason for this trip is to make sure all our camping gear is in good shape before a much longer excursion to New Orleans in April—and our gear has evolved a bit in 2018. Rambles is going multimedia! The plan is to supplement these posts with short videos showcasing highlights of our adventures. We’ll post links here, but if you’ve spent any time watching YouTube then you know I’m supposed to tell you to “like and subscribe” at our channel, whatever that means.
So far, this whole video endeavor has really just been an excuse to buy a bunch of gadgets, including a new iPhone X and a fancy drone. Now that the credit card bills are starting to come in, we need to justify all those expenses by doing something productive with our new toys. In fact, we’ve already made a few videos here in Santa Fe, which you can check out while you wait for us to do something more interesting on the road:
Some friends and family who subscribe to “Rambles” (What, you didn’t know you could subscribe?!? Just enter your email address below or to the right of any post, where it says “Never Miss a Ramble.”) have expressed concern that we are lost somewhere in the wilds of Wyoming.
Much has changed in 40 years, but (as my brother pointed out) the altitude has not.
We had a great time with family in the Mile-High City, including multiple birthday celebrations for yours truly: a concert at Red Rocks, a picnic in Chatfield State Park, and a Rockies game. So far, turning 50 has been a lot of fun–it sure beats the alternative!
The original plan had been to end our trip with two days camping in the wilds of northern New Mexico. But we needed to have some repairs done to our leaky hot water heater, so after two relaxing days at Cimarron Canyon we fish-hooked back up to a campground near our RV dealer in South Fork, Colorado, for a couple nights, before finally making it home.
And now we’re getting ready to head back out for one more trip before the weather turns cold, this time to the Grand Canyon and Mesa Verde. Maureen’s brother Patrick is joining us, and he’s already shipped to our house at least a half dozen boxes of camping supplies. We can’t wait to see what’s inside–and how we’ll fit it all into our truck along with three people and one large, space-hogging dog.
We’ve already sung the praises of eastern and central South Dakota. If you’ve read our previous posts, you know that we had a great time in Sioux Falls and the Badlands area. Well, I’m here to tell ya that the western part of the state is even better!
We spent three nights camping at Custer State Park in the Black Hills. And while the park was a perfect “base camp” for visiting must-see sites like Mount Rushmore and Deadwood, it turned out to be much more than just a place to sleep at night and stow our trailer while we explored during the day. In fact, Custer State Park provided some of our favorite experiences in the area. Within its boundaries we saw prairie dogs, pronghorn, feral donkeys, and a massive herd of bison. We drove scenic roads with pigtail bridges and narrow tunnels carved into rocky spires. We enjoyed late afternoon drinks on the patio and porch of scenic lodges. And we learned about gold-hunters squatting on Sioux Land, a politician with a knack for porkbarrel projects, and South Dakota’s first poet laureate.
Zora admires the scenery in Custer State Park.
Stockade Lake is at the far western end of the park, less than 10 minutes from the town of Custer with gas stations, grocery stores, restaurants, and more. And it’s in a very convenient spot to get to pretty much everything in the Black Hills. But Stockade South is also the most secluded campground in Custer State Park, on a peaceful loop road off the main drag with lots of trees and decent separation between sites. As the name implies, it’s next to a pretty lake that has lots of nice hiking trails around it.
With only 25 sites, it’s one of the smaller campgrounds and seems more geared to trailers and tents than to giant motorcoaches. We didn’t have the best site—we were next to the bathrooms—but that gave us a chance to meet a lot of neighbors! I hear that some of the other campgrounds get more wildlife, including herds of bison and elk, but we got our fill of that elsewhere in the park. When (not if) we come back, we’ll definitely stay at Stockade Lake again.
I hope this is one of the only things we have in common.
Borglum was a bigwig in the Ku Klux Klan. He was a “dear friend” of Klan Grand Dragon and infamous rapist and murderer D.C. Stephenson. His last big gig before Rushmore was the huge memorial to Confederate heroes Lee, Davis, and Jackson at Stone Mountain in Georgia—at least until the United Daughters of the Confederacy fired him for being too difficult to work with.
(Brief sidetrack: we watched a ranger talk about Borglum while at Mount Rushmore, and the speaker did a really awful job of acknowledging the current controversy about Confederate monuments. She could have avoided the topic altogether. She could have touched on it as something that makes Borglum’s work more relevant right now. She could even have offered a bit of personal opinion—although that would probably get her fired by the current gang of idiots running the Park Service in Washington. Instead, what she did was defensively dismiss it as something that had nothing to do with Mount Rushmore and, somewhat angrily, warn her audience that she wasn’t going to answer any questions about that issue. Pretty weak sauce, if you ask me.)
Still, Mount Rushmore is an impressive site. From the first moment you spot it in the distance coming out of a tunnel on the Iron Mountain Highway, to the long walk straight at it along the corridor of flags, to your last glimpse of Washington’s profile as you drive away, it continues to deliver a jolt of surprise each time you see those huge stone faces. It’s also an impressive feat of artistic engineering, completed over 14 years in the harsh climate and rough terrain of the Black Hills, without a single fatality among the men dangling from the cliffs in leather harnesses with dynamite and jackhammers.
All I knew about the town of Deadwood was what I’d learned from the HBO show of the same name. And since that show was canceled after two seasons, there were a lot of holes in my knowledge. We filled in some of those gaps with a self-guided walking tour of the town on our second day in the Black Hills.
It’s a place that continues to trade on its lawless past, with casinos and bars all up and down Main Street and a colorful crowd—more bikers than gunslingers now—that radiates a slightly malevolent energy. I certainly didn’t feel unsafe in Deadwood, but I was never entirely at ease either. It’s the kind of town where you want a seat in the corner with the wall at your back (although even that didn’t help Wild Bill Hickok much).
Wild Bill watches over the cemetery in Deadwood.
And then we headed west, into the sunset (metaphorically speaking, at least—the sun was actually at our backs since we decamped in the morning). Our next stop was outside of Cheyenne, Wyoming, at a gorgeous state park named after famous announcer Curt Gowdy, who suffered through covering the Red Sox in the 1950s and 1960s while they were consistently among the worst and least interesting teams in baseball. Much as his period in Boston was just one stop in Gowdy’s storied broadcasting career, the park named for him was just a brief overnight on our way to Denver. But that’s a story for another day…
A complete recap of our adventures in the Black Hills, Wyoming, and Denver is coming (eventually). But for now, here’s a brief traffic report from Custer State Park in South Dakota.