We spent yesterday playing tour guide, showing our pals Greg and Jan White around our former home, here in Arizona’s White Mountains. It was fun seeing some favorite old places we have not seen since we hit the road eleven years ago through their eyes.

A lot of people think of Arizona as all sand and cactus, but the White Mountains rise over 10,000 feet, and this is a land of thick Ponderosa pine forests, sparkling lakes, and one of the best known snow skiing areas in the Southwest.

We started our day with a stop at Anasazi Trading Post in Lakeside, where Jan and Miss Terry did some browsing while Greg and I sat outside in the truck and solved most of the problems in the world. Then we stopped at Pinetop Sporting Goods to introduce Greg and Jan to my good friend Lyle Worman, and Terry popped into the locksmith shop next door to get an extra set of door keys to our motorhome made, so we will not find ourselves locked out again, as described in yesterday’s blog. 

Then we stopped at Pinetop Book Exchange, owned by another longtime friend, Jim Lewis. Greg and Jan bought a few books, and we had a nice visit, even though it was short. By then it was early afternoon, so we stopped for a late lunch/early dinner at Red Devil, which is a small restaurant that serves excellent Italian food and pizza.

About halfway through our meal, I realized that I did not have my Blackberry with me, though I knew I had it earlier in the day. I used Greg’s phone to call my own number, and it rang twice before Jim answered. Just as I had suspected, I had left it at the bookstore. Fortunately, we were only a 1/4 mile or so away, so we went back and I ran in to fetch it.

We drove out through the White Mountain Apache Reservation, where Greg and Jan admired the beautiful forests and lakes we passed by. We took a side trip off of State Route 260 onto State Route 373, for the short drive to the little mountain hamlet of Greer, known as “The Town at the End of the Road,” because the road literally ends five miles from the main highway. 

We were amazed at how much Greer has grown since we were there last. For years the only things there were a few scattered summer cabins, a couple of gift shops, and the historic Molly Butler Lodge. Now there are several huge lodges, beautiful log homes that serve as “summer cabins” for flatlanders, and the place was packed. Greer is no longer the sleepy little community we once loved. It has grown up.

From Greer, we drove to Springerville, where we stopped at Western Drug, one of my favorite stores. Western Drug is kind of like an old time general store. You can buy cooking utensils, fabric and yarn, fishing supplies, guns and ammo, medicine, clothes, boots, and just about anything else your heart desires.

Standing on the corner near Western Drug is this Madonna of the Trail statue, one of 12 identical monuments located from Bethesda, Maryland to Upland, California, along the route of the National Old Trails Road, established in 1912.

We returned to Show Low by way of US Highway 60, completing a circular route of about a 115 mile loop, including the detour to Greer and back. While State Route 260 traverses pine forests most of the way from Show Low to Springerville, US 60 travels through open high plains and scattered juniper, where we saw a lot of antelope standing a hundred yards or so off the highway.

Back at our motorhome at the Elks lodge campground, Greg fiddled with some settings on my RV blog and website to try to resolve some problems people are having trying to subscribe, and then we polished off the last of Miss Terry’s wonderful cinnamon rolls before we called it a night.

In yesterday’s blog I told you about WalMart Bingo, and in response, my friend Joyce Space sent me this link to a fun little You Tube video about RVers and WalMart. 

The video may be fun, but Bad Nick has some not so funny things to tell you in his latest Bad Nick Blog post titled Our Tax Dollars At Work. Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – It is never too late, unless you’re dead. If you’re not, go ahead and try for your dream.

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Everywhere we go in this great land of ours we find interesting places to visit and stories to share with our readers. We spent yesterday playing tourist here in west central Missouri, covering everything from Civil War history to a one of a kind canine.

Fifteen miles north of Higginsville is the historic Missouri River town of Lexington, once an important riverboat port. We wandered through town a while, admiring the handsome old buildings in the downtown area, and discovered that Lexington is the home of one of the twelve Madonna of the Trail statues that were erected from West Virginia to California to honor pioneer women. The first of these statues I saw was in Springerville, Arizona, near our old hometown of Show Low, and I have seen a couple of others in our travels.

The purpose of our trip to Lexington was to visit the Battle of Lexington State Historic Site, scene of a vicious three day battle in 1861 in which the town was wrested from Union control by volunteers of the ragtag Missouri State Guard.

The Oliver Anderson home, once called the “largest and best arranged dwelling west of St. Louis” was pressed into service as a hospital during the battle and changed hands three times before the bloody fight ended. Today the walls still show the pockmarks and scars of bullets and shell fragments.

From Lexington we drove 40 miles east to the charming little town of Marshall to check out a story my buddy Ron Speidel told me about a while back. It seems that back in 1925 a local man discovered that his bird hunting dog Jim was not just your regular mutt.

Jim had the amazing ability to do things like obey commands in several languages, he could pick a person out of a crowd by the color of their clothes (even though dogs are supposed to be color blind), he picked the winner of seven consecutive Kentucky Derby races, his owner could tell him the make, model and license plate number of a car and Jim would walk down the sidewalk and stop at the car indicated, he could determine the sex of unborn babies, and a host of other unbelievable feats.

Jim was examined by expert veterinarians who could not explain how he could do the things he did, and he was featured in Ripley’s Believe It or Not and several national magazines. Today Marshall has a small memorial park dedicated to Jim the Wonder Dog, and it is a popular stop for tourists visiting the area.

From Marshall we returned to Higginsville and stopped at the Confederate Memorial State Historic Site, once the location of the Confederate Soldiers Home of Missouri, which provided refuge for over 1,600 veterans and their families for nearly 60 years. The Memorial includes a cemetery where Confederate soldiers have been laid to rest, and a striking monument to the men who served the Lost Cause.

We’ll have feature stories on the Battle of Lexington, Jim the Wonder Dog, and the Confederate Memorial State Historic Site in the next issue of the Gypsy Journal if you want to learn more about the interesting places we discovered on our outing.

It was a long day, but we had a lot of fun. I’d rather be out exploring the back roads and small towns of America any day than spending my time watching a ballgame or swinging a golf club.

Thought For The Day – It’s okay to fail. Learn from it and you will succeed.

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