We had a bit of a family reunion a couple of weeks ago. We met up with my mother, sister, brother-in-law, niece, and nephew who were on a road trip from St. Paul, Minnesota to Colorado. Mom and my sister, Amy, are Colorado natives. My brother-in-law, Mark, is from New York, and the kids, Iris and Richard, are Minnesota natives. We met up with them at Sand Dunes Pool, colloquially known as the Hooper Pool. The pool, a hot springs in the San Luis Valley, is a welcome respite in the flat, strange, sandy valley. On the first night, a day before the family showed up, Angelica and I camped in the RV overflow section in the flat, flat San Luis Valley. No hook-ups, but fire pits, and a hot spring pool about a hundred yards away! In the early evening, we went to the Great Sand Dunes National Park. It's best to tackle the sand dunes in the morning or the evening. The sand can get above 100 degrees in the daytime.
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We had a busy Memorial Day weekend working at the Coney Island Hot Dog in Bailey. The weekend warriors were in full march, and we were slinging hot dogs as fast as we could through Monday. Highway 285 was a constant stream of cars, trucks, campers, rvs, and boats. Angelica and I were ready to go camping as soon as we got off work. We headed up the recently opened Guanella Pass around 5 pm. All the traffic was headed in the opposite direction, back to Denver.
We found a lovely spot in the recently abandoned free campground on the pass, lit a fire, opened the wine, and relaxed. It was a great evening. El Paso looks like a cool city. It has an international flavor, sitting just across a fence/checkpoint from Juarez. The tourist pamphlets and magazines are filled with pictures of colorful exotic foods and breathtaking art. We drove right through. It does look like an amazing city, but we didn't have a plan on where to go or where to park—serious considerations when towing your house around America. It was interesting to see the actual border on I-10 north, a curving ribbon of fence that hugged the interstate, the shanty town dotted hills of Juarez just beyond. And you say to yourself, “That’s a different country over there.” Instead, we headed to Las Cruces, New Mexico. We had been hoping for a campsite with electricity because our battery was running low in the trailer. We stopped at Leasburg Dam State Park, about fifteen miles north of Las Cruces, and talked to the guy in the office. He was sad to report that all the electric sites were already accounted for, but we were welcome to set up shop in one of the available dry camping sites. Then he regaled us with the history of the area, showing us around the little museum at the park, offered us books in the over-stuffed exchange library, and encouraged us to continue our travels.
Since we had to dry camp anyway, we decided to go to the Aguirre campground in the Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument west of town. The campground is on the east side of San Augustin Pass on highway 70, right at the base of spectacular peaks in the Organ Mountain range. Aguirre has no hookups, but the view and surroundings more than made up for it. We took pictures, made dinner, and enjoyed an evening fire with wood that smelled like the finest incense. It’s been almost a month since our van, Big Red, was stolen in St. Louis. In that month, we have rented at least five cars, bought one lemon van, moved our trailer to central Tennessee, had Big Red recovered (thanks to a friend of a friend of a friend who saw a post about it on Facebook), and begun our winter jobs as Christmas robot elves for Amazon. The saga of Big Red, including its theft, our efforts to make it to Tennessee for our job at Amazon, its rediscovery and our ultimate reunion, is going to be for another post. There are just too many details and hairpin curves in that story to keep it clean and simple. This is just a post to tell you all that we are back with our old van, Big Red, and are safe in Tennessee.
We leave Florida in one week. It's been an interesting five months. Florida is a state that plays by its own rules, and it was a bit of a culture shock being here for the winter. This is the first winter that any of us haven't seen snow. The temperature dropped to around thirty degrees once or twice, but otherwise stayed pretty nice. Flagler Beach is about an hour away from our campground in Eustis, and about 30 miles north of Daytona Beach. Flagler is dog friendly anywhere north of N. 10th Street and south of S. 10th Street, leaving lots of room to roam on the beach and play in the water. Dogs must be on a leash and cleaned up after. Gamble Rogers State Park is just across the street and a great place to camp, if you can get a site. We managed to get a walk-up reservation two days before Christmas, but weren't as lucky when we tried getting a last minute reservation later in the season. Reserve your site early. Despite the forecast for thundershowers, we decided to spend our last day off in Florida at the beach. And good thing we did! Not a drop of rain and the calmest ocean water we've experienced on our trip. A travel capsule built for exploration, Big Red is a rolling fortress, a storage shed, a dog bed, and granny cottage. Under the hood, this twenty-six year old redhead sports a foxy 5.9 liter V8, plenty of power to pull our house along America’s highways. Inside, there is plenty of room for travel essentials, while still being comfortable and spacious. The massive windshield makes sightseeing a pleasure, like a 3D IMAX screen, only real, and revealing the beauty of the open road. We bought Big Red because we realized that my small Nissan truck would not be strong enough to pull a Casita. We needed something bigger. Deciding that a van would be the ideal vehicle, we started looking, particularly on Craigslist. We figured that a cargo van would be a good blank template for incorporating a bunch of storage. After test driving a number of over-used and abused clunkers, we expanded our search to include conversion vans. Turns out, conversion vans had important features that cargo vans mostly lacked: they were much more comfortable, quiet, and designed for passengers. Then, this firecracker of a conversion van popped up in the Denver area. We liked the look of it, so we set up a meeting. The van looked sweet, had fairly low miles, ran well, and, honestly, we were a little desperate. Money changed hands and we drove home with this hulk.
Next, we needed to find our Casita. I’ll save that story for another post, but at least now we had a vehicle with the power to pull a trailer with some authority. Luckily, we did not have to wait long to find a trailer: a Casita popped up in the Denver area just two days after we got Big Red. We were the first people to check her out, and the Dove came home with us that day! |
The Campers
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