The Trail Ends Here…

Our vacation pretty much ends in the morning, with our departure from Roswell. We watched the stars for a bit, along the back fence of the cute little campground in Roswell. Red Barn RV Resort. We highly recommend, if you’re ever through Roswell and want a peaceful setting.

It’s always a bit sad at the end of a great trip, but it’s always a blessing to have been able to see these sights with each other and with family. As much as we’ve complained about the bumpy roads and the heat, we’ve thoroughly enjoyed exploring the National Parks and the Southwest part of the country.

We’ll still have plenty of fun together on the rest of the journey home, but this is the beginning of the transition to family time in Arkansas for the 4th of July.

So, we’re pretty much making a boring, straight line drive between Roswell, NM and Fayetteville, AR. The no frills trail, so to speak.

We’ll be doing the one night stays as we’re TRUCKIN’ through Amarillo, to Oklahoma City (KOA), then on to Arkansas. Fayetteville first, to visit our daughter and play the part of handyman, for anything around her house that needs attention. Then we’ll be on to Hot Springs Village for the 4th of July festivities.

Before we left Roswell, however, we saw this in the little office while we were picking up ice and water (all on the honor system, so neat). Cute way to help lost socks reunite with their partners.

Our boring “on the road days,” have been mostly uneventful, thus far, which is great! We’re still gritting our teeth on rough highways, but most of our roads today weren’t terrible. And traffic was very light and very spread out, so we could often cruise along in the passing lane, with far fewer potholes and patches that roughly shake the truck and the airstream.

We crossed into Texas (again) and into the central time zone. We are now only an hour off from eastern time, which our little brains generally run on, so the math is getting easier every time we get closer.

It’ll still screw us up for a few days. It’s like slow motion jet lag honestly. It’s a good thing Ben is (mostly) retired, otherwise he would be missing calls left and right! (Well, and we wouldn’t be on this trip, so there’s that too lol).

But we made it to Amarillo where we started seeing lots of neat old Americana stuff going on. Lots of flags, old trucks, little motels, diners, and lots of businesses both big and small that were established in the towns. I’m always amazed how fast Ben can swivel his head for an old truck sitting out in a field or behind a barn.

And boy oh boy, were we in beef country.

We even went through a town named Bovina.

Since we’ve entered into Texas today, everything we’ve seen has very much been cow land. And I’ll be honest, even seeing those cows crammed into pens, standing in their own poo, our mouths are still watering for a good steak. 🥩 I guess we’re not going vegetarian or vegan any time soon.

There were miles and miles of infrastructure supporting the cow business and lots and lots of cows. The poop piles, alone, on each of the transfer areas were ginormous. Lots of trucks, gates, dust and COWS.

The wind was our friend today and blowing away from us, thank goodness. We counted our blessings every time we passed the stock yards and we were spared the nose hammering, sinus scouring, brain melting smell of so many high volume poo and pee-ers in one place. Otherwise, we would have had to trade the truck in after passing through. You’d never get that smell out.

We got near the campground area in Amarillo and while we were filling up the truck, Ben decided to be spontaneous and weigh this whole rig on a Cat Scale, for the first time. We came in much more svelte than Ben anticipated. 18,960 lbs. However, the truck weighs more than he expected and the trailer weighs less. He explained to me that we’re in good shape, as lower trailer weight mostly just means that we are not pushing the tires as hard as we thought, which Ben says is good. Wait a minute! Does that mean I could have brought all the extra, very important things that he made me leave behind in Hot Springs Village at the beginning of the trip? Was Airstream Fat Camp a waste of time? Ugh 😩

So, if you want to weigh the old family truckster for some reason, just pull up on the scale, to the yellow line, push the call button and when they squawk at you through the box, you just tell them you’re weighing your car. They’ll say, ok, they’ll pause, and then they say “good to go.” You go inside, to the trucker side of the convenience store and you tell them your car number. It was like $5. They give you a little print out. Like the one above.

Finally, before we head to the campground, we stopped in at a local store and Ben got a new hat.

It’s Ben first cowboy hat that’s not made of straw, so we’ll see how it breaks in over the next few days.

We already got confused by the time change on the first night on central time. Hot tub closed at 9 and we remembered at 9. Sigh.

Wrapped up for the evening, we got a quick picture of the moon rising over the airstream, then the winds started picking up and inside we went…

The next day was ALL interstate 40 again and it was extremely windy the whole day. We moseyed along, about 10 under the speed limit and we made it into Oklahoma City at the ole KOA.

It is a shocking 74 degrees here! It’s sweater weather! When did fall get to Oklahoma? It was 105 in Amarillo yesterday!

Either way, we will enjoy the cooler temps while we can get them. It is not even summer yet after all! (Maybe by the time this posts, it will be summer. We wrote this on June 18)

We are also slowly dwindling down our supplies, as we only have a handful of nights left in the camper before we move everything into the Hot Springs Village house for a few weeks for the 4th of July. Tonight is grilled cheese sandwiches! Yay!

After dinner, we took a short evening walk, which is pretty much standard work for us in the early evening, usually to find the dumpster, find the hot tub if there is one, and pet any dogs that are walking by with their owners. We are really missing the dogs now.

Instead of dogs tonight, we found…