Traversing New Mexico

 Central New Mexico is awesome!

While Cyndee and I have spent plenty of time in northern New Mexico backpacking in the Wheeler Peak wilderness area and exploring Albuquerque southeast to Roswell, Carlsbad and Los Alamos we had never been in the Ft Sumner and Milan areas.  It ranged from rustic, very rustic, to breathtaking.

The last blog left off with us departing Granger, TX for Sweetwater, TX.  Our RV park accommodations were basic but the stay was short.

All dirt and gravel, backed up to a truck stop and adjacent 
to a very active freight rail line.  BUT, level and plenty of room to 
park all our equipment.

Sweetwater was a little shy on things to do.  We spent about two hours going through a W.A.S.P. museum (Women's Airforce Service Pilots).

The W.A.S.P. museum encompassed two hangars.  One covered the story of the women with well appointed displays and artifacts, the other static displays of aircraft and support equipment.

Abilene was less than an hour away so we popped over there and went to Frontier Texas!.  Another museum that told the story of Texas starting with the Jurassic period up to the present.  We kind of expected a cheesy, low budget operation but were very surprised to find it to be one heck of a museum. 

Entrance to Frontier Texas!.  Those metal cut-out bison are all wind vanes.
They would all move in unison as the wind changed, just as they would running 
across the plains.

The museum is well appointed with period displays and artifacts but with 
a touch of technology.  There were hologram storytellers throughout, each with multiple stories you could choose for them to tell. 

The drama in this diorama was palpable.
Standing next to it you could feel the power of these animals.

Our time for touristing ran out quickly, preparations for moving in the morning had to be done.

And with that move came the next stop, Ft Sumner, NM.

Valley View Mobile Home and RV Park, Ft Sumner, NM

Our campground was adjacent to Main Street with wide dirt roads and spacious gravel RV pads.  There was no problem parking our entire caravan in one spot.  Utilities were good but the water pressure was really high (80+psi) and put our eleven year old water pressure regulator out to pasture.  The diaphragm ruptured and that was that.  We filled our on-board fresh water tank and operated off our water pump to protect the plumbing.  Rebuilding the old pressure regulator, now out of production, was going to be more expensive and complicated than buying a new one.  Let the research begin for a replacement.

Another thing about our campground, it was owned by the same family that owned and operated the Billy The Kid Museum about a block away.  In fact, after setting up we went down to the museum to "check in" and pay for our stay.

BTK Museum.  A little on the rustic side but long on history, 
artifacts and old west memorabilia.

The next morning we set out to see what Ft Sumner had to offer.  Turns out the list was short.  But what they had proved to be impressive.  The BTK Museum was way more than we thought it would be.  The relative small store front belies the cavernous interior that is filled to the brim with literature and artifacts, some famous, some not.  But there was lots and lots to see.

The museum had displays that included the "modern" era.

The main attraction; Billy The Kid, aka William Bonney.
But other famous characters, Pancho Villa and Pat Garrett
 to name a couple, were also featured.

The gun room has rifles dating from the flintlock
times to cap and ball to modern center fire.  The main
attraction is BTK's personal rifle.

If you wind through the entire museum you will have seen more than 60,000 items.  We tried but I think we became saturated at about 50,000 and had to head for the gift shop.

Our next stop was a memorial, El Bosque Redondo (The Tree Circle).  

El Bosque Redondo Memorial

What an education.  This place was a memorial for a "trail of tears" we never learned about in school.  While very familiar with Cherokee having their native lands taken and being marched from the Carolinas and Georgia to Oklahoma, we had never heard about the Diné and Navajo being rounded up and marched to New Mexico.

The memorial building is beautiful and the displays do an excellent job telling the story of this dark period of our history.  So much so that Cyndee came out of the memorial crying.

That was enough for us.  We headed back to town to find a bite to eat (there were two places open) and then started prepping for tomorrows move to Milan, NM.

The Sun Has Set On Our Granger Lake Experience

 

We're done.  Our stay at Granger Lake has come to a close.  Now we begin our slow crawl to Red Canyon Visitor Center in northern Utah.  We are to report to our new volunteer positions the week before Memorial Day.  We're going to cover a little over 1,300 miles to get there but we are not making a beeline, we're going to spread the drive out over five weeks.

The plan is to see and do many things between here and there.  We'll follow our usual routine of driving in segments that will get us to our next stop before Cyndee's little Hyundai, Pepé, needs fuel.  Depending on wind that usually works out to be a little under 5 hours.  First layover, Sweetwater, TX.

For our departure we were seen off by a couple that are long-term volunteers.  They've seen quite a few volunteers come and go and they stopped by to give us a going away prayer.  Very much appreciated, and comforting.

Our drive to Sweetwater couldn't have been better, in other words, uneventful.  There was a typical Texas wind and it kept the truck's fuel economy below 8 mpg.  Fuel cost for just the 260 miles from Granger to Sweetwater was $135.  Oooff.

Next stop, Ft Sumner, NM.

The Granger Lake Chapter Nearing Its End

This post is a mixed bag of activities that we have been constantly on the move to do.  There has been plenty of volunteer work to fulfill our obligation to earn the right to occupy an RV pad, with utilities, but we also have been taking in the sights of parts of Texas that we have never seen before.

Between drought, disease, infestations and plain-old old age, the trees around here have been hit hard.  The hard and prolonged freeze of 2021, when the Texas power grid failed, didn't help either.  But beginning in 2022 hundreds of saplings of various oaks and other hardwoods were delivered to Granger Lake.  A lot of work has gone into maintaining these saplings and removing the dead and dying so that the new could be set in.  We played a small part in the bigger plan by planting six oaks and one cypress in one of the three campgrounds of Granger Lake.

It's hard to see but there are three oak trees, protected from browsing by wire cages, planted in this field next to the campground host site.  Of note is the the tree in the foreground, it is planted adjacent to the stump of the tree it is replacing.  It was a large oak we estimated to have been well over one hundred years old.

The tree in the foreground of this photo is a cypress and planted in memoriam.  The brother of one of our rangers had succumbed to COVID and this tree was dedicated to his remembrance.

The planting of these few trees was an experience.  A thin layer of soil lay on top of some of the most dense clay I have ever experienced.  It took mechanized equipment to coax out enough lumps of clay to plant the root balls.  Those lumps of clay took on the shape of the bucket of the excavator that dug them out and breaking them up to fill the hole back in took the better part of the day.  Then came caging that keeps the browsers at bay.  I've put protective wire around saplings before but never anything as robust as what we used here.  It took two of us to unroll the wire and a pair of bolt cutters to cut the wire to length.

But this post is more about seeing the sites than doing the work.  Our off days are Thursday thru Sunday and that gives us time to do long weekends.  Now that it has warmed up we're taking advantage of that and spending time on Texas' south gulf coast.  First stop, Corpus Christi.

Corpus Christi has done a good job developing its water line.  Their marina and adjacent park are case in point.

Corpus Christi skyline from the marina.

Definitely one of our favorite new places to eat, Landry's

Corpus Christi is old, it received its name in 1519, had its first but short lived colony in 1747 and then permanently occupied starting in 1839.  There is a lot of cool, old architecture around town and one old building downtown had been repurposed into a live music/event center/restaurant.  The House of Rock.

This place took up a large part of the city block it was on but none of these things is what caught our attention.  What brought us to their door was that they made authentic, Chicago-style, deep dish pizza!  When done right, there's nothing better.  But finding it done right is a challenge outside of the Chicago metroplex.  We tried places that claim to be deep dish but we have more often than not been disappointed.  Our first clue that the House of Rock might be the real deal was that it took a solid hour to make and cook it.

The hour-long wait for our pie wasn't because it was a packed house.

The wait was definitely because that is how long it takes to cook this beast.
We ate off this thing for three days!

With that done it was time to get our touristing on.  For being such a small city (pop abt 318,000) it has a lot to offer.  We visited a World War II aircraft carrier, the USS Lexington on our first full day in town.  We have visited several of these floating museums around the country and this one was the only one that had used what appeared to us as every square inch of the ship.  We climbed a lot of stairs, ships stairs.  Metal treads, open, very narrow and very steep and so many of them.  Our step counters said we had climbed 15 floors by the time we exited the ship.

Got an early morning start before the sun turned the ship into an oven.

From this position you can see many of the static aircraft displays on the flight deck.

Walking up the entrance ramp the Lexington makes for an impressive site.

Stem to stern and keel to crow's nest there were stairs, stairs, and more stairs.

It took a good chunk of the day to take in the Lexington.  It wasn't just big but it was also well endowed with displays of historical significance, story boards, and hundreds and hundreds of models of incredible detail.  We were enjoying taking it all in but our plans to visit the Texas State Aquarium were getting cut into.  We had to call it and move on.

We're spoiled when it comes to aquariums.  Having lived in the Atlanta area when the Georgia Aquarium was built, and being annual pass holders we experienced a world class operation frequently.  There have been visits to other aquariums around the country, some were very well done and others left a little to be desired.  We had never heard about the one in Corpus Christi but we were going to find out which kind it was.  Happily it was one that impressed us.  It was really well done and we thoroughly enjoyed our time there.

One of the dolphins in the show seemed to take particular delight in splashing the audience.
Everybody in the first three rows were soaked before the show was over.

The aquarium featured more than just things that swim.
This brightly colored character walked right up to me and peered down the lens.

All of the exhibits in this aquarium were very well done.

Having taken in the "city stuff" it was time to get a little deeper into nature.  And where better to do this while in Corpus Christi than Padre Island.

On a map it may look like a thin strip of sand but in person 
there is more than the eye can take in

It is a number of miles to get inside the national park and to 
the park headquarters, but worth the drive.

A sunny day in March and a warm gulf breeze made for a perfect 
break on the visitor center deck overlooking dunes and beach.

Pristine white sand and blue-green water.

We briefly spent some time talking with park rangers about volunteering and had a really good conversation with an off-duty volunteer campground host.  After the talk with the host we know for sure that we want nothing to do with volunteering here or anywhere else near a body of saltwater.  We were shown around this host's fifth-wheel and truck.  He pointed out equipment, some of which was only 4 months old, that were so corroded that they looked twenty years old.  And he said that was in spite of washing down his rig weekly!  Ouch, no way am I putting my equipment in that environment.

As you head east and cross the causeway from Corpus Christi to the barrier islands you have to choose to either turn north or south.  To the south is 113 mile long Padre Island.  The worlds longest barrier island. To the north is 18 mile long Mustang Island.  While Padre Island is mostly national park, Mustang Island is mostly state park.  We took it all in.  The day after Padre Island we returned to the causeway and turned north to the state park.  Neither of us can figure it out but we ended up without a single picture of that whole day.

We sure enjoyed our long weekend in Corpus Christi but it is time to get back to work for our last hurrah at Granger Lake.

Meet the Neighbors - Spring Bloom - Bonfire of the Campgrounds

As mentioned in previous posts we are out in the middle of farm and ranch country.  We're east of hill country and west of the piney woods, smack in the middle of wide open spaces where the cattle population is greater than the people population.  Couldn't be better.

While beef cattle are the primary bovine in the area there are a fair number of ranches that have herds of longhorns.  And not just any old longhorn either, these are registered, their bloodlines carefully traced back to the origins of the breed.  No matter which direction we take to exit the lake to go to one of the surrounding towns we pass by a longhorn pasture.  So one day, on the rare occasion that the wind was not peeling the hair off your head, we decided to stop and get a look at one of the herds without being at 70mph.

This particular herd was a couple hundred yards away so I walked up to the fence and started dialing up the zoom on the camera.  The cattle took note of my presence and without hesitation started ambling my way with what appeared to me as a look of curiosity on their faces.

Longhorns showing interest in my presence.

One fellow in particular walked towards me and never broke stride until reaching the fence.  His posture was not that of aggression but more like a dog walking up to be petted.  As he got closer I was also able to see a very distinguishing feature, his nose was as crooked as it could be.  He looked like he had caught an elbow in a no-rules game of pick-up basketball.

Regardless, he just kept coming to me and directly he was pushing that crooked nose over the fence to check me out close up.  I've worked cattle and despite this ones docile demeanor I backed up 1.5 horn lengths away.  I didn't want a casual toss of his head turning into a bad day for me.

Howdy! You new around here?

You can see from the pasture pictures that things a beginning to green up around here.  We've been anticipating the 'greening' with hopes of seeing the wildflowers that this part of Texas is known for.  And we have not been disappointed.  The Indian Paintbrush and Bluebonnets are coming out everywhere and great prairie carpets of little yellow flowers that I don't know the name of.

Texas Bluebonnet (Lupinus texensis)

Texas Indian Paintbrush
(Castilleja indivisa)

The above pics are of a couple of early bloomers.  But since I took those the masses have emerged.

It hasn't all been socializing with the neighbors and tiptoeing through the flowers.  Work still continues on the massive cleanup of the February ice storm.  One of our burn piles had reached maximum capacity and we caught a break with the weather and had ideal burn conditions.

Going

Going

Gone

But this isn't the end of it.  The above burn is only about one tenth of what needs to be done.  We have plenty of burn piles scattered around the entire Granger Lake Project, and more to go.

Still enjoying our sunsets.