Company

The flag is flying on the acre, a good indication that Liberty is in residence.

And although our space may be small inside, we have plenty of outdoor space for company and we love having visitors. This past week has been lots of fun. Our friends Wayne and Lin Schell from Colorado delivered Liberty’s new radiator last Wednesday and spent the night in their beautiful Eagle bus conversion (with matching jeep) in the driveway. LeRoy had purchased the radiator from a bus nut in South Carolina. He brought it to an Eagles rally in Nashville, where Schells picked it up for us.

Since we’re in the vicinity, I’ve helped taxi grandkids to doctor’s appointments a couple of times and we’re looking forward to taking care of the youngest a couple of days while the older ones are at church camp. We’re also taking in all the graduation celebrations of our local friends. Anytime there’s a party, you can be fairly sure we’ll be there!

Even before we moved out of our house and into our first bus, we tapped into other RVers’ expertise on various forums online. We found our PT Cruiser on the Escapees site a year ago and we sold the Jeep on that same site. Recently we had been talking about replacing our living room chair and LeRoy found a Euro recliner on Escapees and had been in touch with a full-time couple who had one for sale. The price was right and we found out that they were on their way from Texas to Kansas City this weekend. Derrick and Shelli Paine are originally from New York and although they’re 15 or more years our junior they have been on the road a year longer than we have. They showed up last evening in their gorgeous coach to deliver the chair. Their tow’d is unusual…it’s actually registered as a motorhome as well!

The new addition to the living room fits right in and is actually a little smaller in outside dimensions than the previous one. This one is a recliner, so we don’t have an ottoman taking up extra space, as well.

Ignore the grumpy looking woman in the chair, please. My iPhone seemed to be taking lots of attention at the time LeRoy snapped the picture. Since we sold the dinette table and chairs that came in the bus at our last garage sale and purchased a small folding table and chairs, we’ve now changed out all the furniture in the bus since we bought it 2 years ago. Next improvement will be new wall coverings. We’ve been saying that for the last year but I think we’ve started moving in that direction. One of the inherent problems with buses, it seems, is that the plywood panels that make up the interior walls shift over time and cause cracks in the wall paper. LeRoy thinks he has come up with a solution, so at least we’re progressing.

I’m headed out for a walk on the country roads to enjoy the warm weather. Go and do likewise!

Lapse

Sorry for the gap in recording our whereabouts. We spent the middle of April trying to sneak home to surprise our daughter Heidi for her 40th birthday. Posting on a regular basis was tricky, since we really didn’t want her to know that we were getting close! So, I posted behind our true location by several days or longer.

April 22nd found us hiding in a hallway in a restaurant, waiting to surprise the birthday girl. While she didn’t know we’d be there, I think she’d have been really disappointed if we hadn’t shown up!

The roses I showed in our last blog entry were even prettier with the whole family behind them.

There’s not as much to tell about when we’re sitting still. Doctor’s appointments, blood work and all that routine stuff aren’t unique to fulltimers! We’ve attended some school music programs and while we were very proud of the performers, I know everyone’s grandchildren are the best in the world to their own grandparents, so I won’t brag. It’s been fun to step back into the grandparent role, though, spending time with the kids after school and on weekends. Today we’re filling in while Mom and Dad are working and taking one of the kids to the doctor. Even those things are special, though, since we spend more time away than here.

Kansas is known for spring storms and just the weekend before we arrived, tornadoes struck in a flurry. We’ve been thankful that, even though we’ve had rain, there haven’t been any tornado warnings since we’ve been parked in our building. We do have access to a storm shelter, though. A young couple we’ve known for several years are our neighbors across the street and they’ve offered their basement at any time. We just hope we don’t need it!

Colors of the desert

Colors? In the desert? Yes, the desert has lots of brown and tan, sand, rocks, scrub brush and cactus, but spring comes to the desert just like it comes everywhere, with color. Probably because the desert usually looks pretty monochromatic, I’ve become much more aware of its flowers, from the smallest to the most startling. I wanted to share some desert color with you. We’re sitting in a pretty good internet service area, so now’s as good a time as ever. Do I know the names of the flowers? Probably not, so if you do, please enlighten me!

This one isn’t bright and cheery like some of the others, but a new hue of green is a definite sign of growth, even in cacti!

Now this last picture. Well, the only “desert” thing about it is the long dry spell since we’ve seen that place in Kansas, our daughter’s house and her beautiful roses. Soon, though, we’ll see them for ourselves!

Since we’re parked at a Corps of Engineers Park, Cochita Lake, we’ve been taking in the local sites and what wonderful sights we’ve seen. Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument is just one surprise after another. It sits on the Pueblo de Cochiti.

The first day we went, we started out on the Cave Loop Trail, a 1.2 mile hike. It was a fairly easy hike with just a few steep hills, but all on a wide, relatively smooth trail. We were hiking with Bill and Arlette Klein, fellow full-timers who also live in an Eagle conversion. The rock formations were unique and spectacular, and we thought the additional Slot Canyon trail would probably be worth our time. Since Arlette was having some health challenges that day, we decided to come back and hike the extra 2 miles round trip another day. Shouldn’t take long, right?

We thought the Slot Canyon would be more of the same, but we were very mistaken. The trail is considered difficult (we found out later), but the scenery was beyond belief! We wound our way through a canyon barely wider than shoulder width and hundreds of feet high. The rock formations and strata changed from time to time along the trail.

Along the way, we went around the remains of this interesting tree…

under this one…

and over rocks that were above waist high to me. In the journey to the top, we gained 630 feet of altitude, definitely not “more of the same” of what we did on the Cave Loop.

(Sorry for the view of what probably isn’t my best side, but my photographer was following me.)

Toward the top, we were out in the open. We met lots of people in both directions and one couple from Germany told us to be careful at the top as the path was very narrow. Fortunately, we never came to a part that I considered “very narrow”, so we made it all the way to the point.

Verizon coverage was wonderful at the top, and LeRoy caught me texting to the family. Well hey, we were on top of the world! Why shouldn’t I share?

The view of the Tent Rocks from the top was very different from that at the bottom.

In the far distance we saw storm clouds and snow on the mountains and we were glad they were there and not on Liberty. We’re looking for clear roads ahead!

Valuable lesson in New Mexico

Well, I learned a valuable lesson recently. I was really feeling pretty smug about buying a second battery for my camera last summer and I had even learned to carry it, and a second memory card, in my purse. What apparently I had not learned was that it’s very important to charge BOTH batteries after they are used. At any rate, when my camera told me to change the battery pack, we went back out to the car and replaced it with the one from my purse…wrong! Same message, and it only took one picture before telling me to change again. At any rate, the first part of the tour before the premature death of the battery, we got lots of pictures, but none of them do justice to the magnificence of Carlsbad Caverns.

LeRoy had visited the Caverns in the 1950s, but I had never been there. A year ago in the winter, we toured Kartchner Caverns near Sierra Vista. That site was very impressive, but nothing on the scale of Carlsbad Caverns. I learned in elementary school that stalactites grow from the ceiling down, while stalagmites go from the floor upward. You know, the “mites” go up and the “tites” come down, much like ants in the pants. I know that columns are where the two meet in the middle and continue to grow larger in circumference. Drapes are fascinating formations from the ceiling down that look very much like folds of fabric. Knowing about the formations, though, and being prepared to see them are two very different things.

The thought that came to me as we walked the path through the Big Room was a scripture from Psalm 8:4, “What is man that thou art mindful of him?” When I looked at the magnitude of that one chamber, knowing that places like that exist all over that area of New Mexico, I was in awe. I felt almost as small looking around 754 feet underground as I did walking under the clear, star-filled Arizona night sky. Why did anyone ever even find them? Mankind could have walked on the non-descript surface forever and never have known the beauty that God had created beneath our feet, but He had other plans. Native Americans were probably first, then explorers and today, thousands of tourists from around the world see the enormous cavern. We came just as several busloads, whose passengers were mostly Japanese, were leaving and there were Canadians on our tour of the King’s Palace.

There are times when I wish I were really a photographer and this was definitely one of them. So I’m going to let the woefully pathetic and inadequate pictures tell the story.

Signs apparently weren’t enough to deter people in and/or pushing wheelchairs. Pipe structures were added, impeding access to certain areas.

And at times, a one bar toprail wasn’t enough to assure the safety of park visitors.

The afternoon tour of the King’s Palace, the Queen’s Chamber and the Papoose room between the two included a few minutes of total darkness, the kind where you literally cannot see the person next to you or hand in front of your face. Our guide was an excellent storyteller and really drew his audience into the Cavern’s story.

We’ve moved on to a Corps of Engineers lake between Albuquerque and Santa Fe this week. We met up with Eagles friends Bill and Arlette Klein and will be doing more hiking while we’re here. More on that later.

Those little four-fingered men

We’re thinking the little green men were on vacation when we stopped at Roswell because we didn’t see them or their spacecraft. Well, unless you take into account the exhibits in the International UFO Museum and Resource Center.

Truthfully, the museum does a good job of presenting all the evidence of the June or July incident in 1947, including affidavits from witnesses and neighbors. It made a lot of sense, unless mass hysteria accounts for what they had to say.

It all started on July 8, 1947, when the Roswell Army Air Field information officer issued a press release. It seems that personnel from the field’s 509th Bomb Group had recovered a crashed “flying disk” from a ranch near Roswell. It didn’t take long for the story to take a “safer” turn. The following day, the press reported that the Commanding General of the Eighth Air Force stated that a radar tracking device had been recovered, not a “flying disc.”

The incident was soon almost completely ignored, even by UFO researchers, until 30 years later, a physicist and ufologist interviewed someone who was involved with the original recovery of the debris in 1947. And that’s when the theory was put forth that the government had tried to cover up the actual retrieval of a UFO!

Witnesses claimed that a huge military operation was dedicated to recovering alien space craft, along with their alien crews, that many such crashes had taken place and that witnesses had been intimidated to change their stories. Later, even a mortician got involved with a detailed personal account about alien autopsies taking place at the Roswell base.

I’ve most often thought of archaelogical digs taking place to find ancient civilizations, but in 1989 there was an expedition to sift through the area surrounding the supposed crash site or sites for debris proof of alien spacecraft. I don’t suppose there will ever be definitive proof about the Roswell incident, but it certainly put this small New Mexico town on the map!

Smokey Bear

We’ve been on the road this week and it feels good! After spending the night Monday at Huachuca City with our Eagle friends Blake and Pennie Hardy, we headed east to New Mexico. We try to stop and see LeRoy’s cousin Raymond Fuller each spring and fall as we are travelling through. No matter how much we deny aging, none of us are getting any younger and it’s important to keep in touch.

Raymond had received a picture recently that really points out the evidence of aging. Sorry for the quality of the picture-of-a-picture. We didn’t have a scanner available. LeRoy was the “kid” in the photo and Raymond is the one on the left.

On our way toward southeastern New Mexico, we came through San Antonio, NM. A local honey provider had a stand along the road and we stopped for a sample. What we bought was a small jar of desert wildflower honey. It is as thick as molasses and not much lighter in color with a flavor reminiscent of the flowers from which the nectar came.

We couldn’t pass up the Buckhorn Cafe and their famous (and enormous) green chile cheeseburger while we were in the area.

We learned our lesson when we ate there last year. This time we ordered one and split it!

Mid-afternoon we stopped at Capitan to visit the Smokey Bear museum. It was fun looking at the stuffed, carved and painted Smokeys and fire safety posters from my childhood.

I remember hearing the story of how Smokey was found badly singed after a forest fire swept through his area. He was just a few months old and weighed only about 5 pounds. At first they called him Hotfoot, but the name was soon changed to Smokey. And no, Smokey Bear’s middle name is NOT “the”! That word was added to make the rhythm of his name fit the song that was written about him. He lived out his life in the National Zoo in Washington D.C. and retired at 25, the human equivalent of 70, the mandatory age for federal service retirees at that time. He died a year later. His body was brought back to Capitan for burial, in the corner of the park behind the museum. The sign there says that Smokey was loved by all Americans but the people of Capitan love him just a little bit more.

Smokey had a postage stamp depicting him as a cub clinging to a tree, the only time the US Postal Service has issued one honoring an animal. During his life he received up to 13,000 pieces of fan mail each week, so many that he was given his own zip code.

I love this last picture because it shows a time in our history when a government agency wasn’t afraid of showing a nationally known figure in prayer!

We’re currently parked just outside of Roswell, NM, but that’s a story for another day…providing we aren’t abducted by aliens!