Time to Go

We have stayed at the North Rim as long as we can, it is time to go.  We have to report to our next assignment on St. Simons Island, GA by the 1st of November and there are at least 3,000 miles to traverse with a multi-day stopover in Texas.  A lot of the people we worked with this summer are already gone.  We have had a few good-bye pizza parties and are now down to a skeleton crew.  We have worked with most of these people for two seasons now and knowing that we won't be back next season makes the goodbyes harder to do.  These folks are a special bunch.

DAY 1, TRAVEL

First stop is a couple of days in Flagstaff.  We have several errands to run and an appointment with the audiologist to get my hearing aides tuned up.  J&H RV park is our base of operation for the next couple of nights.  This is a very nice commercial campground that is "senior oriented".  It is a bit pricey with a pretty long list of rules.  I have been in parks that do not allow smoking but these guys even say that one cannot smoke inside their own rig.  A rule that really gives me a problem is the one that says you cannot get on the roof of your rig.  It makes it pretty tough to sweep off the leaves and other junk from the slides before pulling them in to hitch up.  Maybe I'll get up there before the owners get up and come to work.

Flagstaff has become a favorite town for us.  It is big enough to have major shopping opportunities but still has an old mountain village ambiance.  We developed a few favorite places where we liked to shop and eat.  We became a quasi-local and would go back at first opportunity.

DAY 3, TRAVEL

Our next overnight stop is Albuquerque.  It should be a 5-hour drive to cover the 324 miles at the pace we make with Big Gulp hooked up to the trailer.  The weather is great and no wind to speak of.  As we approach our goal it is still early and we are both feeling fresh.  We decide to press on and see how things feel by the time we get to the next RV campground.  Cyndee got on www.rvparkreviews.com and started looking up campgrounds 20 miles ahead.  As we approached and decided we could go the next 20 miles Cyndee would look up the next campgrounds.  We finally called it a day at Tucumcari, NM, another 172 miles beyond our original goal.

 It was completely dark by now and when we pulled into the campground, which was right in middle of the old part of town, it appeared to be a former motel.  The registration office was still intact, and that is where we checked in, but what used to be the courtyard no longer had any buildings around it.  Our host climbed into her pilot vehicle and guided us through a pathway knocked into what was the back wall of the property.  The site was dirt but was level enough that we did not even unhitch, just put the landing gear down enough to steady things and called it a night.

DAY 4, TRAVEL

Our intermediate goal of Texas is going to be a lot quicker to get to since we got in the extra miles yesterday.  With just a mere 2.5 hours between waypoints today we'll be settled in our city park camping spot before lunch time.

Huber Park.  A city park that has a 10 RV hook ups to electric and water.

Our destination for the day is Borger, Tx, the place where Cyndee and I spent the first 30 years of our lives.  Family is here, school mates (grade school, middle school, high school and college) and life-long friends.  We are going to touch base with as many as we can as well as get some TX DOT regulations met.  The safety inspection sticker for Big Gulp is expired by 5 months so we will be doing some work on him to get up to code and then find someone that can do the inspection.  Borger is a small town, there may not be anybody certified to inspect a class 5 truck and we may have to make a trek to a neighboring town to get it done.

As towns go, Borger is a young one.  At the beginning of 1926 it did not even exist, but by the end of the same year it had a population of 10,000.  There is only one thing that can spring a town of that size to life so quickly - gold! or in this case, black gold/Texas tea, and lots of it.  Despite the size, there still were no permanent structures until the first brick house was built in 1932.  The town was hard-edged and relatively lawless for many years.  The town's namesake, Ace Borger, was shot to death in a quick draw gunfight on Main Street in front of the post office in 1944.  Barely more than a decade later Cyndee and I came along, her being born in the town of Groom and me in what was then a fairly new hospital in town.

High Plains Hospital circa 1955

Oil, ranching and farming dominates life in all of the 26,000 thousand square miles of the Texas panhandle.  Geologically the panhandle sits atop what is called the Caprock and is on the southern border of the high plains.  Although almost everywhere you look is flat for as far as the eye can see, it is at an elevation of 3,000 feet or more.  The exceptions to the vast flat plains are two prominent features.  One is the Canadian River and the other is Palo Duro canyon (a canyon second only to the Grand Canyon).  Borger sits on the edge of the Canadian River Breaks, where runoff from flash floods have carved thousand of side canyons that feed the Canadian.  It may be called a river but flowing water is not assured.  The river bed is dry far more than wet.  What flows there is usually subterranean.

The Canadian River bed runs along the bottom of the cliffs in the distance. 
Hard to tell but those cliffs are several hundred feet tall.

But that dry river was a massive playground for us and our friends.  We hiked, camped, drove river buggies and four-wheel drives, hunted and had more cook-outs than anyone can count.

Sand, sand, sand.  Brakes and wheel bearings did not last long in this environment.

Four wheel drives were okay but the home made river buggies were tailored to the task.

When you say "Texas" to most people they think of a blistering hot climate punctuated with wind that blows in a twisted way.  For sure that is plentiful throughout the state but the panhandle of Texas has an equally brutal winter.  Going to the river in the winter was a different experience because what little moisture there was froze the sand into an almost pavement.  You could really scoot (much faster than your reflexes could react to a mesquite bush full of thorns in your path).

It can and does get cold in the Texas panhandle.

Spring and early summer can make for photographic opportunities

One of our favorite cook-out spots got tagged by a tornado.  But on the bright side, firewood was easy to come by.

When mentioning hunting earlier I probably should have explained that we did not necessarily stick with the classics.  Oh sure, there were the bird hunts for dove, quail and pheasant and then rabbit (usually Jack Rabbit) and coyote.  But a favorite hunt was for snake.

A live-caught prairie rattler. 

In the photo above Cyndee and I came across this buzz-tail while out on a drive down Dixon Creek, yet another dry wash that has a name that would make you think different.  We saw him crossing the road and I stopped, jumped out and caught him before he could get into the brush.  Cyndee took several pictures but with all the writhing around and rattling of the tail, she was shaking pretty hard and all but this one were pretty blurry.  And I could not get her to come in for a close-up either.

Things have changed considerably since those days.  Places we use to have unfettered access to are now gated and locked up tight.  We can only get to a tiny fraction of the places that were our favorite hangouts.  Seems the Department of Homeland Security has concerns about people having easy access to producing oil fields and the refineries and chemical plants they are hooked up to.  This is just about every square inch of where we used to hang out.  Now we have to be satisfied with looking at it from the roadside.



All of this and more used to be our playground.  The refinery and chemical
plant twinkling in the distance are the reason it is all locked up now.

Hey!, if any of my Solvay colleagues are reading, you are getting a peek at the Ryton business you just bought.  Just to the right of center in the photo is the Ryton unit.  It is buried pretty deep in a chemical complex known as Philtex, or at least that was what it was called when I left there in 1984. 

And if there are any Solvay colleagues still reading, I dug deep in my photo archives and found some pictures from when I was a plant engineer and working a plant turnaround in the early 80's.  This thing is a beast to operate.  It runs hot, really hot from top to bottom.


And did I mention it gets cold in the Texas panhandle?

That's a twenty foot tall icicle wrapped around a pump. 

Another giant icicle encroaching on a steam jacketed
rotary dryer that is supposed to be over 300 degrees.

Good luck you guys.

Back to the tour of the hard scrabble little town and our youth.  Which brings me to Cyndee's first salaried job; a custom photo printer for a wedding and portrait photographer.

Wanda Guinn Photography.  That is Cyndee's red '68 Cutlass sitting out front.
Did I mention it gets cold in the Texas panhandle?  This picture was taken in May.
There is nothing but a bare lot here now.

 While Cyndee was holding down the fort in Borger in the year before our marriage I was 75 miles away at college.  It was routine for me, and practically everybody else at West Texas State University (now West Texas A&M), to pack up and go home for the weekend to work in the oil field or help out on the ranch or farm.  Those weekend drives were usually routine but a good share of them required an exercise in extreme driving.

Did you know it gets cold in Texas?

That list of weekend and summer jobs I mentioned was something that I got to do a little of all of them.  In the summer of '74 it was wheat harvest.  We zig-zagged our way across western Oklahoma, a few places in northern panhandle and then a jump up to northeast Colorado and finally into the San Louis Valley of Colorado to thrash barely.





This was my combine and truck rigged up for travel.  That's Borger High in the background.

Something that could be done on weekends and holidays during school, and paid much better than farming, was rough necking.  A long-time friend, college buddy and soon to be best man at Cyndee's and my wedding got me hooked up with Service Drilling Co.'s rig #1.



Service Drilling Rig 1 somewhere in the middle of nowhere Texas panhandle.



This guy was known as the "chain chunker".  Here he is throwing a
perfect loop that will spin the pipe and screw the two pieces together. 
This is the position I worked up to before graduating from WT and
 getting a white collar job.

But it was not all work and no play.  Cyndee and I had plenty of adventures before we got into this fulltime RV thing.

There were lots of wide open spaces with hidden gem destinations for motorcycle rides.....

And hiking and camping opportunities abounded....

Our adult and professional lives took us out of the panhandle but in those years John's folks built up a boarding stable operation.  We could not introduce our kids to all the things we did as kids and young adults but now there were new things (besides seeing loved ones) to make the twenty hour drive to  Borger more anticipation and less drudgery.

For a time the stable had a fare share of mares and colts as boarders.

Chad (our youngest) and John bringing roping steers down the arena alley so Grandpa can get some roping practice in.

This is not a little pony that my younger brother is riding,
it just looks that way because my "little" brother is 6'8".

Chad dressing the roping arena ground.

Shauna (our oldest) on Ollie, one of the best horses I have had the pleasure to know. 
Hard working, gentle, athletic and now living his last years out to pasture with COPD.

After a weekend, trips to surrounding towns to pick up parts for Big Gulp, copious amounts of Mexican food and chicken fried steak we have made arrangements for the needed repairs to get Big Gulp up to snuff for its safety inspection.  Everything is to be done at the body shop.  We are going to have to rebuild the rear fender wells on both sides.  The original equipment design for holding the mud flaps on (mud flaps are required by law for our class truck) was not very robust and the rough roads out west had both of them hanging by a thread in pretty short order.  With this rebuild they should last longer than the truck now.

It has taken the better part of six days to get the needed work done on the truck and spend time with dear friends.  Sadly our family was out of town for all but one day of our visit.  But we are now running out of October and our November 1st report date to Fort Frederica looms before us.  We got to get a move on.

DAY 10, TRAVEL

The route from Borger to Atlanta is well known to us.  If Big Gulp were a horse we could just drop the reins and let him get us there on his own.  We usually break up the 20 hour drive into two 10 hour days with a stopover at a favorite campground in Russellville, Arkansas.  But this time we are going to take it in more bite-size chunks.  Our stop for tonight will be Oklahoma City.

DAY 11, TRAVEL

Tonight will be Russellville.  But as Cyndee got on the phone to secure our site for the night we were surprised with a "no room at the inn" reply.  It would seem our little layover favorite, which was practically empty on all previous trips, has been discovered by other I-40 RV travelers.  Time to improvise.  Being back in civilization is great, Cyndee was able to research parks and make calls to check availability, all from the co-pilot's seat while going down the road.

Actually it worked out for the best.  We got to try out a new campground with an intriguing name; Toad Suck.  It was a ways off the highway and added about an hour to our day but it was worth it.  It was a beautiful state park on the banks of the Arkansas River.  Too bad we were only going to be there for one night, it would have been a nice place to spend a few days.  This park is alongside a lock and dam system and it was pretty cool listening to the barges blowing their horns as they approached the lock for passage.

DAY 12, TRAVEL

A short night at Toad Suck Park which oddly enough was in Perry County and the township of Perryville (we did not have time to investigate if we had distant relatives) and we were off for Atlanta.  It will be a long day but we are anxious to get to Atlanta, or more specifically, Stone Mountain Park, so we can see our kids.  We are going to layover for a weekend and a few weekdays.  Cyndee has some maternity and baby shopping to do with our daughter.  Our first grand-baby is due in late December.

We picked Stone Mountain because it was the closest campground to our daughter's house.  We knew from previous stays years ago that the campsite we get could be a little iffy for a rig our size.  And despite having made a reservation a week in advance and after the park had closed most of its high season attractions, the park was still sold out.  And sure enough our site was a bear to get backed into.  We had to back uphill into the sight while making a sharp turn and stabbing the rear of the rig between two trees.  It took Cyndee and a neighboring camper almost a half hour to get me in.

It was a busy week, we were leaving the campground at sunup and not returning until well after sundown.  Hence no pictures of our camping spot.  I think we saw the park in the full light of day for only a few minutes our whole stay.  But that's okay, we got in some good time with the kids, had lunches with former co-workers, got caught up on a year's worth of doctor visits and visited old haunts.  We put almost a thousand miles on the truck in this week of running around between the southeast and far-north suburbs of Atlanta.

A particular accomplishment in these few days was a modification to our fifth wheel interior.  As received from the factory it came equipped with two pendant lights above the galley island.  When taking possession of the rig I questioned the wisdom of having large glass globes swinging on the end of a 28 inch long metal pole.  I was told not to worry, that they pull their show-rig all over the country and have no problems.

They are pretty but we always questioned if they were a good idea.

I guess they don't end up on the kind of roads I do.  It was not long before the pivot ball and escutcheon plate started to show damage.

Despite taking pictures and sending them to the warranty department I got no satisfaction.  I was pretty much ignored.  We carried on for a few more months but in our travels from the North Rim to Atlanta the inevitable happened.  We were pulled into our campsite after a jolting day on I-40 and when we got level and popped the door open, we were greeted by a floor covered in glass shards.  But that was not the worst of it.  With the slides in for travel it puts the oak dining table almost directly under the pendant lights.  Whatever the light swung and crashed into sent large daggers of glass on a trajectory for the top of the dining table.  There were some pieces of glass sticking straight up out of the top of the table.

After this, we decided to do what we knew we should have done a year ago, we took out the pendants and installed fixed ceiling fixtures.  From our remodeling days before selling the house, we knew of some pretty good resources for light fixtures and spent a couple days searching for the right solution.  Once we made our choice, and then got it installed (which I did at about midnight) we wondered why we waited so long to do it.  We didn't just correct the constant threat of damage from flying glass but we ended up with better light (more watts, better color), less intrusive (it opened up the view between the living and galley area) and I no longer had a head banging experience every time I used the island.

This is the first of the two fixtures.

Tick-tock, our time is getting short for when we have to report to our next National Park assignment.  But that is okay, We have gotten our whole checklist of the things we needed or wanted to do completed.  But as we rise early to hitch up and get on down the road, we realize the wind is howling and the temperature is below freezing.  We'll just wait.

DAY 18, TRAVEL

The wind has let up and the temperature is bearable but still dang cold.  But we are going to go 300 miles southeast which is in the direction of warm.  We're off.

Today's destination is going to be about 15 miles short of our ultimate goal of St. Simons Island.  We are going to stage up at a Brunswick, GA RV "resort" for one night and go scope out our living quarters at the National Park, which is actually a National Monument.  In this case that means it is a tiny place.  There is barely a parking lot, little alone a campground.  We will be putting our rig on a concrete pad adjacent to the maintenance yard.  But first we have to be sure we know the route we are going to use to get in.  The roads on the island are extremely narrow, no shoulder and draped over with low branched oak trees.  A lot of these roads dead end, if you make a wrong turn in a big rig it can be a big problem.

Coastal Georgia RV Resort.  This picture must have been taken in the summer
when it is hot because now it is packed solid with snowbirds for the winter.

Our one night at Coastal Georgia RV Resort was just that, one night, because that is all the space they had.  This place was chock-full of snowbirds and they were settled in for the winter.  Once again we were the "kids" of the campground, these folks had some time on the clock.

It's a nice drive down I-75 and it got even nicer when we got off the suggested route of I-16 (a long, featureless, boring drive) and got onto the Golden Isles Parkway.  It took a little bit longer but it was worth it.  We got registered at the campground and hooked up by the middle of the afternoon which left us time to get to the island and check out what is to be our snowbird location for the winter.

It is Sunday and park staffing is at a minimum.  There was one person operating the visitor center and one maintenance person onsite.  It is the maintenance person that we met with so he could show us the access road to the maintenance yard and walk us through the best path to get in and get parked.  It was getting on towards the end of the day and we were invited to ride along to go close a satellite park's gate about five miles away.  But we had not eaten all day and said we would take a pass in favor of a trip to Southern Soul BBQ, an island favorite.

I don't know if it was because we had not had a bite all day or if it was because it was really that good, but boy that was some good 'Que.  This could become a favorite for our winter stay.  But we are not willing to commit yet as we are on the coast after all.  We have to try the local fare of seafood houses first.  BBQ will always be available back on the mainland.

DAY 19, TRAVEL

Today we travel from Brunswick, GA to St. Simons Island, GA.  After having traveled just over 3,000 miles in the previous 18 days it is hard to think of today as a travel day.  We'll spend more time breaking camp and making camp than we will driving between the two.  But there could be a fly in the ointment.  While it may not be very far we do have to get our 60' long, 31,000 lb rig up and over this........

......Lanier Bridge.  At 480' tall with a steep approach it is going to be a workout for Big Gulp.

Turns out that this was not nearly as difficult as many of the mountain pass climbs we have done, and nowhere near the challenge of the climb out of Albuquerque.  It is just with it being stuck up there in the air that it looked a little more intimidating than it was.

A short distance after exiting the bridge was the turn onto the Torres Causeway.  From there it was a just a few short miles to the island.  Having scoped out our path the previous day, we knew to follow the Sea Island Road around to Frederica Road.  This route had fewer overhanging limbs to dodge.  The keyword here was "fewer", not none.  We still had branches that hung over the road that had to be swerved around to prevent damage to the coach and equipment on its roof.  Several times we had to pull into oncoming traffic.  Luckily it was mid-morning on a Monday and most people were at work.

Nineteen days, 3,000+ miles, 7 campgrounds and tons of fun later we are at our winter destination: Fort Frederica National Monument.  The maintenance people have carved out two RV pads in the thick woods.  We are surrounded by live oaks, pine trees, the biggest muscadine vines you have ever seen and the smell of salt marshes all around.

My next posts will not be of monumental mountains, grand canyons or vast plains.  The next several months will take on a coastal island flavor.