...published a day late (sorry, no WiFi on Tuesday night).
Finally New Mexico. It is now 6:20pm Mountain Time on Tuesday. We've actually been in the state for a couple of hours now and Deb is getting her first experience in driving the Rig and is doing quite well. After just a little experience it is just about as natural as driving a car except it does require a little extra attention when passing or being passed by trucks where the tendancy is to push each other apart and if you are already near either edge...well, you can figure it out.
Among Deb's other accomplishments thus far, she has been called upon to serve in the uaccustomed role of mechanic on a number of occasions, the most notable of which was reinstalling one of the compartment lights while rolling since at that point we were already later than we would like to have been for the Monday night stop. The screws that attached light to the ceiling had worked themselves loose with vibration and the light fixture was dangling by the wiring and had to be fixed.
Another interesting aspect to the Monday night stop was finding the RV park. We have a book called "The Next Exit" which is great for finding such things as long as you are on an Interstate Highway; however, for a good part of yesterday and today we were traveling US Route 287 (not covered in the book). Deb called Vickie who "Googled" information about the next town we were approaching and within minutes we had a place to stay for the night (isn't technology amazing). Speaking of amazing technology, we've had some great WiFi connections so far and had absolutely no difficulty in making the connection. I know, as Chris pointed out yesterday, I could really be sending entries to this Blog from my cell phone and I may just do that for pictures from my phone, but between my poor eye sight and fat fumble fingers, sending text from the phone would be no pleasure.
As I write this we are travelling Interstate 40 which will be our home for the next 600 plus miles as we traverse New Mexico and most of Arizona. This is parallel to (and actually replaced in many places) the famous Route 66 and we've seen segments of the original from time to time. We'll probably decide to travel at least a short segment of it somewhere in Flagstaff area or perhaps through Winslow Arizona after our visit to the meteor crater.
The landscape of New Mexico is so much more varied than what we experienced in Texas and we are enjoying seeing the great mesas and all the other unusual features that grace the area.
AfterWord: Ah, the end of Tuesday was a bit brutal. Deb had the dubious honor of driving in the dark in the pouring rain as we searched for our intended stopping point. To make a long story...it turns out that the sign we were looking for (Hidden Valley (no less) RV Park was all overgrown with weeds and not lighted but we found it quite by chance just as we were about to ask for help. As I said, no WiFi but nice enough otherwise (excluding the getting drenched during the hook up exercise). Just another experience in motoring across the American SW.
Click here for some photos.
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