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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Terry and I have been dry camping at Mike and Pam Steffen’s place in Salt Flat, Texas for a couple of days, swapping lies, playing with their herd of dogs, target shooting, and admiring the star filled sky above us at night. In another life, that would be called goofing off, but in the laid back RV lifestyle, it’s called….. okay, I guess it’s still goofing off. But what’s wrong with that?

Mike is a well known and respected RV columnist for Trailblazer magazine, and his work is also familiar to readers of MotorHome magazine, Trailer Life, Woodall’s, and most other RV publications. Mike has been presenting seminars at RV rallies for longer than Terry and I have even been RVers, and I’ve learned a lot from him over the years.

Salt Flat is located on U.S. Highway 180, about 60 miles east of El Paso, and seventeen miles from nowhere. To get to Mike and Pam’s place, you turn north at the cattle guard, drive eleventeen miles down a dirt road, cross a couple of dry washes, take a right at the scorpion crossing, bear left at the pile of cow flop, and then drive for six days and nights. Eventually a wild menagerie of friendly dogs will run out to greet you, and you’re there. Do you get the picture?

This is rustic dry camping. Our Verizon cell phones and air card don’t work way out here, but we arrived with a full tank of fresh water, a full propane tank, empty waste tanks, and our Onan QuietDiesel generator gives us all the power we need. Mike and Pam are so far off the grid that they’re not even in the same galaxy. But, that doesn’t mean that they’re roughing it. When the sun hides behind the clouds and his large array of solar panels doesn’t work, Mike ties a key onto a kite string and pulls power right out of the sky, and if that doesn’t work, all he has to do is harness a couple dozen of his dogs and put them on a treadmill and they’ll crank out some power!

Okay, so it’s not a four star RV resort, but how many of them have a private shooting range where I can play with my toys? Not many! Yesterday I hauled a couple that I had not tried out yet across the yard to Mike’s range and put them through their paces, and after I got a bit familiar with them, I even managed to impress myself.

I love dogs, and this is a great place to get a puppy fix. Mike and Pam have a bunch of lovable mutts, and not a poodle in the lot! I have been licked, nuzzled, and snuggled enough to hold me over for a couple of months, and I’ve scratched behind enough canine ears to send a battalion of fleas across the border into Mexico.

As you can see, we’ve had a great time here, but today we’ll get back on the road and head for the Escapees Dreamcatcher RV Park in Deming, New Mexico. Coming across west Texas on Interstate 10, I fell in love with the big 350 Cummins engine in our Winnebago all over again. It just eats up hills and doesn’t even seem to notice. Today will be its first real test. We’ll avoid all of the traffic in El Paso by taking the 375 Loop through Fort Bliss and over the Franklin Mountains to Interstate 10, just south of the New Mexico state line. Called Transmountain Drive as it crosses through Franklin Mountains State Park, the road has some pretty steep climbs and descents. We came over it in a gas powered motorhome years ago, but we never attempted it in our old bus conversion. I don’t think it’ll be a problem with this rig.

On another note, we have received e-mails from several Gypsy Journal subscribers complaining that pages 7 and 30 of the new issue are unreadable due to a problem with the printing process. If you get a bad paper, please e-mail me, and we’ll send you a replacement.

Thought For The Day – Each of us has our own individual Heaven and Hell.

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Everywhere you turn in the last week somebody is talking about the latest crisis. This time it’s the swine flu pandemic. Oops, that’s the H1N1 Influenza A outbreak. Somebody apparently decided that we can’t call it swine flu, because pigs (or pig farmers) were getting upset.

Somebody e-mailed to ask me if we were still going to the Escapees Club Escapade rally next month. They have decided not to go, because they are concerned about being in large groups of people with this new disease going around. Give me a break!

What about the grocery store, or WalMart? Are you just going to lock yourself inside your house until the “crisis” passes? But remember, as soon as this one is over, there will be a brand new doom and gloom prediction to fret over.

People just need something to talk and worry about between our regularly scheduled media crisis of the moment! The talking heads can’t come onto your TV screen and say “Nothing bad is happening today. Things look pretty good.” What fun would that be?

The World Health Organization (WHO) had reported only a couple  hundred worldwide confirmed cases of this new flu worldwide by Thursday afternoon. A couple hundred people out of the nearly seven billion folks walking around on this planet! I think my odds are pretty good of surviving.

Yeah, the flu spreads fast. But every news report I have heard yet says if you start to feel symptoms, DO NOT go to the emergency room, because it’s probably a minor illness. So we have this major pandemic, but it’s not serious enough to seek medical attention for. Huh?

Yes, several people have died from the flu in Mexico. But let’s remember that a LOT of people die in Mexico every week from things that are no more than a minor inconvenience here. No matter how politically incorrect it is to say, Mexico is a Third World country. That’s why its citizens keep sneaking under the fence to get here!

More people have died in drug violence along the border lately than the flu will ever get near. In Ciudad Juarez, the Mexican border city of 1.5 million people across from El Paso, Texas, five deaths a day in January and February were attributed to drug violence. And that violence is spreading rapidly in the United States. Last year alone, Phoenix, Arizona reported 366 kidnappings related to drug activity. But how many of us are staying away from El Paso or Phoenix?

I refuse to live my life in a bubble, just because some over-coiffed pretty face on a TV screen says there is a new crisis.

As RVers, we have enough to worry about already. Every minute we’re on the highway, some fool is pointing tons of metal at us going 70 miles an hour. Worry about that!

Even off the interstate highway, we can still get ourselves into trouble, as this picture my daughter took Wednesday proves. Somebody was pulling this fifth wheel into a lot on White Mountain Boulevard in Lakeside, Arizona and didn’t think about their rear overhang, apparently. We drove by the scene a couple of hours later, and there were some serious gouge marks in the pavement!

It reminded me of the time I got our bus high centered in Bremerton, Washington a few years back. (Okay, okay, Miss Terry reminded me of it!). But I don’t see any news bulletins about the dangers of doing really, really dumb things when driving or pulling an RV!

Thought For The Day – The problem with the gene pool is that there is no lifeguard.

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We spent two nights at Mike and Pam Steffen’s place in Salt Flat, Texas, enjoying their hospitality, scratching their dogs’ ears, and telling lies. It was a nice visit.

We’ve known Mike and Pam ever since we started fulltiming almost ten years ago. In our first month on the road we attended Life on Wheels in Moscow, Idaho, and Mike was an instructor who we really clicked with. By the time the conference had ended, Mike was encouraging me to become an instructor. At the time, I told him there was no way I could ever get up in front of a classroom full of people and talk, and Mike assured me that I could do it. Who knew a few short years later I would be asked to join the Life on Wheels staff?

I actually was sort of drafted into presenting my first RV seminar at an Escapees Club rally in Lancaster, California just a few months later, and I was absolutely terrified. Mike was there, and told me “Just remember, Nick, these people don’t know you, and they don’t know anything about you. To them, you are the expert. They came to learn what you can teach them. Just get up there and be yourself. Hell, I like you, and they will too.” Well, that really helped. I got up on stage and did my thing, and by the time it was over I realized that I was having a great time. The rest, as they say, is history. Thanks for your friendship and support over the years, Mike.

We had a lot of fun with Mike and Pam, but poor Miss Terry didn’t fare as well as the rest of us. Their place is out in the middle of nowhere, about 70 miles east of El Paso, and they have a good sized chunk of land. Mike has a little shooting range on his property made of a dirt berm reinforced with tires as a bullet stop.

Sunday afternoon we were target shooting, and Terry was trying out one of Mike’s .40 semi-automatic pistols. On one of her shots, the bullet nicked the target, richocheted off one of the tires, and came back and hit her in the upper thigh. It had lost most of its velocity by then, and didn’t go through her blue jeans or penetrate the skin, but it did leave an ugly welt that split and a big bruise.

She’s fine, it just left her with a sore leg. It was just one of those freak accidents that happen, and we’re very thankful it was not worse. Mke picked up the bullet,which landed at Terry’s feet, and gave it to her as a souvenier.  

I told Terry that in the last couple of months, she was bitten by a tarpon in the Florida Keys, got dunked in the water in Aransas Pass, Texas, and now shot in the leg. And I’m supposed to be the clumsy one! Her Mom may not let her play with me any more.  

Yesterday we left Salt Flat and drove to El Paso on U.S. Highway 180/62, which is a nice two lane road that had several climbs that left me watching the temperature gauge carefully, but we made it fine. Coming into the El Paso area, we passed several miles of junk yards and run down industrial buildings, then cut across the edge of Fort Bliss (which is undergoing a massive building project) on State Route 375, picked up U.S, Highway 54 and eventually ended up on Interstate 10.

I have never liked El Paso, even when I lived there for a while as a kid, and every time we drive through it I am nervous until we get out of the heavy traffic and cross into New Mexico. There are some cities where the drivers just seem extra aggressive, and El Paso is one of them.

There is a State Welcome Center and rest area just across the state line, and we pulled in to have a sandwich and a short break. A sign at the rest area reminded us that we’re back in the Wild West.

Back on the road, in less than two hours we pulled into the Escapees Dreamcatcher RV Park in Deming. It was only about 1:30 p.m., and we had driven less than four hours. We could have pushed on further, but our next stop will be the Pinal County Fairgrounds in Casa Grande, where we will start getting things together for our Gypsy Gathering rally February 9-13. We will have water and electric hookups, and a dump station, but no sewer. Terry had some laundry she wanted to get caught up on before we get there, so Dreamcatcher makes a good stop. Lord willing and the creek don’t rise, we’ll be in Casa Grande tomorrow.

Thought For The Day – How do you tell when you’re out of invisible ink?

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