We said a reluctant goodbye to Mike Steffen and left his place in Salt Flat, Texas a little after 9 a.m. yesterday morning, headed west on U.S. Highway 180. It’s always good to see our friends, and always hard to leave. But, the good thing about the RV lifestyle is that we can always go back and see them again. 

We made a brief stop at Cornudas, a wide spot in the road that has an interesting history. Cornudas started life as a stagecoach station, and today the “town” is owned by May Carson, a feisty lady who is the mayor, heads the water department, and owns the entire town.

May will serve you a great hamburger, and a piece of pecan pie to  die for, but if you give her any grief, she’ll show you the baseball bat she keeps behind the counter and let you know she means business. May is a character, as are most of her customers.

A while back May sold the town on eBay, but the deal went sour and she had to take it back, which made her many fans very happy. Cornudas is one of those places you have to stop at, just to say you’ve been there.

An hour after leaving Salt Flat, we got on the Loop 375, which took us through Fort Bliss and across the Franklin Mountains, past the National Border Patrol Museum. We did a story on the museum years ago, and I recommend it to anyone traveling through El Paso.

Loop 375, also called Transmountain Road, is a divided four lane road up an 8% grade over the mountains, and the Winnebago did fine. We were not setting any speed records, but we went up as fast as I wanted to, and I left our Allison transmission in fourth gear and let the exhaust brake carry us down to the other side safely.

Well, almost safely. As we were approaching Interstate 10, a jerk in an eighteen wheeler pulled out of a business on the left side and across the highway directly in front of us. I slammed on the brakes and managed to stop before we hit him, but it was darned close! I got on the CB radio and told him what a jerk he was, and that I hoped that when he got home, his mother ran out from under the porch and bit him, but he ignored me. He was a typical OPOP, which is a term I stole from one of our readers a few years back. It stands for Only Person On Planet, because idiots like that seem to think that nobody exists except them, and they’ll kill you to prove it.

After our blood pressure dropped back down to a reasonable level, we got on Interstate 10 only six miles from the New Mexico state line. The loop was a steep climb and descent, but a good road, and it sure beats the heck out of driving through El Paso on the interstate. There was about a mile long stretch where it was on surface streets after we left the military reservation, but it was an easy drive.

Except for slowing down for the Border Patrol checkpoint west of Las Cruces, we made good time, and arrived at the Escapees Dreamcatcher RV Park in Deming about 12:45. This is a regular stop for us when we travel west, because it’s right off the interstate, with easy access in and out.

We got parked and hooked up, and then ran to the post office to send out some orders that had come in over the weekend. Our good friend Deb Peters lives in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, about 90 miles away, and we had not seen her in a couple of years. Deb drove down to Deming and we had a nice dinner together, catching up on our lives since the last time we were together. It was a real treat to see her again.

We had thought about staying here a couple of nights, but for some reason we only have the slower National Access signal on our Verizon air card, even though our cell phones both show high speed EVDO signals. I took the air card out of our Cradlepoint router and put it in my computer and updated it, but it did not help our speed at all. We have a lot of online work to get done, and it’s frustrating to keep getting knocked offline, so we’ll see how the day goes. We may hang around, or we may get fed up and say the heck with it and hit the road. Tune in tomorrow to see what we decide.

Thought For The Day – Laughter is the medicine of life.

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Several people have shown us the excellent cabinets, furniture, and RV accessories that Amish craftsman Carlyle Lehman creates at his company, Focal Wood Products LLC, in Nappanee, Indiana. So when we got our Winnebago Ultimate Advantage, we paid a visit to Carlyle and talked to him about building a set of custom desks/workstations for us.

Miss Terry and Ron Speidel put their heads together and came up with a design, we ran it by Carlyle, and he went to work. Yesterday we drove the motorhome out to his place and Carlyle installed everything. All I can say is wow!

Unlike Terry and Ron, I can’t visualize things. I need to see the finished product. I am just amazed what they can sketch out, do some measuring, and come up with! Carlyle built us each oak desks customized to our individual needs.

Mine, in the foreground, has a regular drawer on the left side, and below it a slide out tray where our HP laser printer sits. The center has a pull out keyboard drawer, and the right side has two file drawers.

Between the two units Carlyle installed a matching bookshelf, and then we come to Terry’s unit. Hers has two regular drawers on the left, along with a file drawer. The center has a pull out oak dining table, with leaf, that slides in for travel or space savings. Below the table, two double doors lead to a storage area with shelf.

On the right, there is a pull out tray for her laptop computer, and then a door opening into another storage cabinet with another shelf in it.

Even with the RVs living room slide in, we still have enough room to move about comfortably, and with the slideout extended, the units take up less space than the two recliners and original table that were in the motorhome when we got it. We are very pleased with the results of this upgrade, and after years of working at a tiny desk, I feel like I’m in a regular office now.

Back at Elkhart Campground, Ron and Brenda couldn’t wait to see how everything came together, and were suitable impressed. If you are thinking about upgrading or refurbishing your RV’s interior, I very highly recommend Carlyle and Focal Wood Products.

Unfortunately, now that I have my brand new workstation, it seems like everything I use has stopped working. When I got ready to write the blog, I fired up my Dell desktop computer and we smelled something like hot electrical wires and then the computer went dead. I just bought the thing in March, so I’ll be on the phone to Dell first thing this morning.

Okay, having your desktop workhorse computer die on you sucks, but that’s why I have a backup laptop computer, right? I got my Dell laptop out, fired it up, and it would not connect to the internet thought our Verizon air card and Cradlepoint router. It shows that I have an excellent signal from the router, but every time I tried to go online, it gave me a message saying I had limited or no connectivity. I knew the air card and router were working, because Terry could get online with her laptop.

I tried all of the limited things I knew how to do, and finally gave up and stuck the air card into my laptop and went online just fine using the Verizon VZAccess Manager software. I’m sure this is a simple problem my pal Jim Guld from Geeks on Tour can fix, but it really raises my frustration level when the gremlins get to messing around inside my computers. They are my tools, and I don’t like it when my tools don’t cooperate.

Thought For The Day – The older I get, the better I was.

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