The next stage of our trip is pretty mundane. Sometimes, you just need to get from one place to another. I can usually find something pretty darned interesting wherever we stop, but if it is cold, rainy or windy (SO windy), it's nice to just spend some quality time with Doug and the dogs, the fireplace, and streaming internet.
A bit about our home-on-wheels: we will spend the next six months, give or take, in our 2022 Tiffin 32SA motorhome. It's about 34 feet long, and we tow our Jeep Cherokee behind it. Doug does ALL the heavy lifting... he knows how everything works, so fixes it if it doesn't, and does all the driving. It's not fair, but it is... wise. We play to our strengths. Because of the 50 mph winds, we kept the slides in on our one night in Casa Blanca, NM. I wouldn't want to live like that all the time, but while it was cozy, we still had coffeemaker, microwave and the full-size refrigerator, plus the king bed and hot shower. In Guymon, OK, although the winds were strong enough that we stayed an extra day rather than drive in them, we were parked in a pretty sheltered spot and so did put the slides out. We have two slides. One is behind the driver's seat and is the full length of the main living space, as seen below. It includes the table and chairs and the 6' couch. The other is in the bedroom, on the passenger side, and so the whole bed slides out a couple of feet, giving us room to access closet and drawers. Doug didn't want to have any of the kitchen on a slide, because he doesn't like the idea of the plumbing doing all that flexing, so that helped guide us to this floorplan.
Packing this year was a LOT easier. Over the last year, we've found storage containers that fit in all the storage spaces, so it was just a matter of filling those and then putting them in their place. We brought a lot less along this time, things we didn't use last year. So far, the only things I think I forgot were the hiking poles and a favorite shirt. In place of the things we didn't bring, I stocked up on items it was hard to purchase while traveling. Although some campgrounds will accept deliveries on your behalf, if you're moving regularly, actually being there to receive them can be tricky. And most campgrounds just don't offer that Last year, I had a few things delivered to Amazon "drop boxes," but that all had to come from Amazon, of course. So this year, I brought six months of the dog's supplements and most of our toiletries. Doug is not a fan... he's a Just In Time kind of guy and if he can't get it, he does without, and I admit they add a lot to the weight, something you always have to watch in an RV.
Our original plan had been to go from Winslow to Albuquerque then north to Pueblo and Colorado Springs. The amount of snow expected during our travel window, especially over Raton Pass, made that seem less desirable. So I missed my research trip to try to turn up clues about the fate of my grandfather's half-sister, Maud Thomas, who was last known to be in Pueblo, circa 1905. Hunkering down in Tucumcari for a night, instead, we turned north from there and spent two nights in Guymon to do laundry and wait out the high winds. We did get out to see Guymon and I have to hand it to whomever is doing the marketing for the town because they sucked us in to sightseeing with glowing write-ups of Sunset Lake, a very nice stocked municipal pond with walking trail and little railroad, but no view of sunset at all, and the Wildlife Park, an enormous fenced enclosure with two bison and some elk (but why?) In terms of "made you look!" they've done a marvelous job! Another first (thank heaven!) was that our campground in Guymon was overrun with cats. I suspect they are feral, but they and their end product were everywhere and ewwww, just ewwwww. Yes Gabe did totally lose his mind over them, and Ziva egged him on, but we did get to work on some desensitization, at least.
If this RV park looks a bit grimy and careworn to you, you're not wrong. One of the things we learned last year was that there are a lot of people who live full-time in RVs in parks like this one. Sometimes, they are transient workers, especially pipeline or seasonal labor, but, often, this is what they can afford. I think we all see the same thing in many small towns, or bigger city neighborhoods. "Run-down" doesn't necessarily mean there's crime or drug use, but more that the residents are already stretched to the limit on both time and money. In any event, these folks were considerate neighbors, and I don't expect they are any happier about the cats than we were.
This was the route on this section of the journey:
You may wonder "why do they stop so often? I could drive that in less than a day!" You're right, you could and we have... but not in a 45' long behemoth. We don't go as fast in the RV, we stop more frequently for breaks -- and not just for the dogs -- and, most of all, we try to keep travel to less than 3 hours of driving time simply because the concentration required is exhausting for Doug.
From Guymon, we went to Colby, Kansas, where I got to take a bit of a genealogical excursion. My great-great-grandfather, George, and his youngest son, John, moved to Rawlins County, Kansas, in 1874 and made homestead claims there. I visited the cemetery where they rest, and took a look at the area where their homesteads were, now rather featureless farmland. Their house was supposedly built over the top of the sod and log structure that the men built together before John's wife, Margaret, joined them. Supposedly, the structure was "beside the creek." There was no creek to speak of, and the only 'landmark' a windmill. I looked up the current owner of the property and messaged her on Facebook to ask whether they knew of any signs of settlement on that bit of land. She responded quickly to say, yes, the windmill had been placed in the middle of the house foundation! I thanked her for her kindness and she said she was glad to help, she loved history.
We'd been keeping a close eye on the wind. Our RV is definitely "a high profile vehicle," and wind that wouldn't make you think twice when driving a car can be a problem in the RV. Wind is pretty much a given in the midwest in the spring, and usually increases throughout the day to peak in the mid-afternoon heat. As a result, we were setting the alarm -- NOT part of the Retired Person's ideal day! -- and getting up early to try to make camp before things got too blustery. The force march approach also meant regretfully driving past some interesting looking museums and historical markers. We stayed a night in Grand Island, NE, and then just across the Iowa border at Council Bluffs in the brand new campground at Lake Manawa State Park.
