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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We pulled out of the Camping World in Robertsdale just after 9 a.m. yesterday morning, took State Route 59 north through Loxley to Interstate 10, and turned west. A few minutes later we were crossing Mobile Bay on the causeway, past the impressive bulk of the battleship U.S.S. Alabama, her big guns looking mighty intimidating.

On the west side of the bay we entered the George C. Wallace tunnel, and came out the other end, with the downtown area behind us. Every time we drive through here, I think every American city should be laid out the same way. No traffic hassles, just drive under the darn town!

Traffic was light, and we scooted across the lower edge of Alabama and crossed into Mississippi with no delays. We stopped at the Flying J in Gulfport, and I wanted to get propane while we were there, but the way the RV island is laid out, we had to stop just inside the RV entrance to the parking lot at the propane station, and as I was waiting for the attendant to come out and fill our propane tank, a big motorhome towing a car tried to pull in and was left hanging halfway out into the road because we were blocking the way. An eighteen wheeler was right behind them, so I pulled forward to the fuel pumps so we didn’t have a huge traffic jam. We have enough in our tank to last a while, so we’ll wait until we’re somewhere more convenient to get propane.

Back on the highway, we rolled past miles of flooded countryside, with a long line of billboards sticking up out of the water, advertising one headliner after another who will be appearing at the local casinos. We entered Louisiana, and took the Interstate 12 route around the north side of Lake Pontchartrain, avoiding the traffic in the New Orleans area.

We ran into a traffic slowdown in Baton Rouge, and managed to thread our way through to come back out on Interstate 10, where we crossed the Horace Wilkinson cantilever bridge over the Mississippi River. This is the highest bridge on the Mississippi, and Miss Terry commented that I really seem to be handling bridges much better, because I didn’t snivel. I told her I was too busy trying not to run over four wheelers and hoping an eighteen wheeler wouldn’t run over us to have time to snivel!

We made good time all the way across Louisiana, and the promised stormy weather held off, although we did get some stiff wind around Lafayette, and just a sprinkle or two of raindrops. The Atchafalaya Swamp Freeway is an eighteen mile long elevated stretch of Interstate 10 that bridges the Atchafalaya River and its accompanying swamp, where trees stuck out of the water for as far as the eye could see. The roadway is narrow, and about as bumpy a stretch of pavement as you’ll find anywhere in North America. We shook, rattled, and bounced our way along, and I commented to Miss Terry that as nice as our Winnebago Ultimate Advantage is, our old MCI bus conversion handled this rough piece of highway a lot better. Interstate 10 across Louisiana has a reputation as a terrible roadway, and it is much deserved. More than one RVer we know has had things shake off their walls and out of cabinets as they bounced along.

Eventually the road smoothed out, and at Exit 36, on the east side of Lake Charles, we turned north for three miles on Pujol Road, a good two lane that passed a couple of RV parks. The road ends at a T intersection, and we turned right and went another mile to White Oak Park, a nice little Calcasieu Parish park on the bank of the Calcasieu River. The park has eight pull- through concrete RV sites with good 50 amp electric, water, and a dump station. At $12/night, or half price if you have a National Parks senior or handicapped pass, the park is a heck of a deal.

There was one fifth wheel trailer, which is unoccupied, and the beautiful Tiffin Phaeton motorhome of our friends Mark and Sue Didelot. We unhooked the van and pulled into the site next to theirs. Mark greeted us, and a few minutes later Sue returned from town and came over, and then she excused herself to go back to their coach, where she prepared us a wonderful dinner of salmon from their summer trip to Alaska, along with shrimp, and all the trimmings. Yummy! Thanks for the great welcome and the delicious dinner, Mark and Sue!

We had originally planned to push on to the Thousand Trails in Columbus, Texas today, but we can’t pick up the new issue of the Gypsy Journal until Monday. So we decided to stay here two nights, and drive through Houston on Christmas morning, when hopefully, there won’t be as much traffic.

We have three bars of EVDO on our Verizon cell phones, no problem getting a signal on our TV dish, and it’s not cold. Life is good.

Thought For The Day – A friend is someone you can see through and still enjoy the show.

Register Now For Our Arizona Gypsy Gathering Rally

We spent Saturday relaxing at Ray Behrens Corps of Engineers Campground. At least I did. Poor Miss Terry had several loads of laundry to catch up on, as well as cleaning up all of the mud and dirt tracked in during the Escapade at Sedalia.

I had a backlog of e-mail to catch up on, and worked my way through that, then entered some new subscriptions that had come in during the rally. We have very poor Verizon service on our cell phones and air card, only 1X Extended Network instead of the much faster EVDO service we get in most places.

We can get online and make calls, but we have to be patient to do so. I did a speed test, and our download speed is only 66 kbs, while upload is 28 kbs. That’s a little better then the dismal service we had in Kingman, Arizona back in March, but nowhere near the 1500 to 2200 kbs we had in Apache Junction and other places around the country.

If you have not been to a Corps of Engineers campground before, you have no idea what you are missing. They are some of the best values in the RV world. Our site at Ray Behrens Campground on Mark Twain Lake is typical of the other Corps parks we have visited, with the added plus of a full hookup site, which not all Corps campgrounds have. But every one we have visited has had huge sites, is super clean, and at a great price.

As these photos I took yesterday show, there is room for any size RV. With our 40 foot MCI bus conversion and extended length Ford cargo van in our paved site, we could still park another full size car or truck. We have neighbors in everything from tents to fifth wheel trailers, and lots of room between the sites so we don’t feel cramped. The restrooms are clean and the grass is carefully trimmed.

Yesterday, longtime Gypsy Journal readers Joy and Phil Brown stopped by to visit. They are in the area doing genealogical research, which is one of Joy’s passions, and it was nice to see them. Be sure to check out their Backroad Chronicles blog.

Also yesterday, our friends Bob and Molly Pinner pulled into the site across from us in their beautiful Monaco Dynasty motorhome, and we had a nice visit with them. Bob and Molly are a wonderful couple we have enjoyed meeting up with at our Gypsy Gathering rallies and other RV events across the country. Bob and Molly share their traveling adventures in their excellent Moon River And We blog.

Speaking of Gypsy Gathering rallies, several people have been asking me if Chris and Jim Guld of Geeks on Tour would be putting on their Computer Boot Camp at our Ohio Gypsy Gathering rally in September. I have confirmed with Chris that they are going to hold the Boot Camp, so visit their website or send them an e-mail for more details.

At last year’s rally the Boot Camp was so successful that they repeated it a second time. Miss Terry participated in the second session the Boot Camp, at the end of the rally, and learned a tremendous amount about how to get the most out of her computer.

Thought For The Day – The aging process could be slowed down dramatically if it had to work its way through Congress.

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Well, did your computer crash from the Conficker worm April Fool’s virus yesterday? Obviously not, because you’re reading this. But dire predictions filled the news for the last few days of March about how bad it was going to mess up our computers. It makes me wonder how real the threat was, and how inflated the news media made it.

Bad news sells, and if you were to believe all of the talking heads on your television, we are drowning in a sea of doom and gloom. But somehow things never turn out quite as bad as they tell us it’s going to.

I still remember New Year ‘s Eve, 1999. We were at the Escapees Rainbows End RV Park in Livingston, Texas, and people were walking around telling each other that airplanes were going to fall out of the sky, electrical systems would fail, and modern life as we knew it was all going to come to an end at the stroke of midnight. Guess what? It didn’t happen. It never seems to happen! But who would watch a news program that said “Nothing bad’s happening today, but it rained in Florida.” People thrive on predictions of disaster and news of mayhem.

I’m reminded of a story a friend told me yesterday about an uncle who was a farmer during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Prior to the fall of Wall Street, the man fed his family by raising his crops, and selling whatever excess he had at a roadside stand he had built in front of his farmhouse.

That was before the days of television and computer news. He was illiterate, so he never read a newspaper, and he was stone deaf, so he could not hear a word that was said to him. He just didn’t get the news that there was a depression going on. And all through those dark days, he just kept on doing what he had been doing all along, and he managed just fine. I think we could all take a lesson from that.

Terry and I are trying to decide what we’re going to do today. Kingman does not have high speed EVDO wireless service, so our Verizon air card is working on the town’s terribly slow Extended Network service, which makes it very hard for me to get any work done. To give you an idea of how slow it is, last week in Apache Junction, and before that in Tucson, our EVDO download speeds were averaging 1500 to 2200 kbps. Here our download speed is 12 to 13. Not 12 to 13 hundred, just 12 to 13!

When I tried to post yesterday’s blog, a process that normally takes less than a minute, the task took me three hours! Every time I clicked the Publish button, the system just sat there until finally it knocked me offline. Then I would have to log onto the Internet again, which took several minutes, and then spend several more minutes connecting to the blogging website, only to repeat the Publish process and get knocked offline again. 

We’re having a good time visiting with our friend Mike, but we really want to get over to Show Low and see those grandkids of ours. However, according to the weather reports on those same news broadcasts mentioned above, from Friday on, very strong winds are predicted for this region, as well as very cold temperatures in the Show Low area. So do we sit here and wait it out, being frustrated by our internet service, or do we make the run to Show Low and be cold?

By the time you read this, we will have made a decision. Tune in tomorrow for the next installment of What Would Nick Do?

Thought For The Day – The trouble with bucket seats is that not everybody has the same size bucket.

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