CuRVWander

Two days of driving and we are still in the state of  Texas.  Okay, so we only drive four hours a day, but in eight hours of driving you can cross most states and then some.  And we are not even close to crossing the wide part of the state.  That would be El Paso to Orange, Tx on I-10 at a little over 12 hours in perfect traffic through San Antonio and Houston,,, not likely. It's September the seventeenth 2016 and our goal for the day is Texarkana.  Literally, as far as you can go on TX-82 and still be in Texas.  Since we were going to end our day in a little more populated area we searched for a park last night and have called ahead to be sure there is space available.  We'll be staying at Shady Pines RV Park on the southwest side of Texarkana.  It will be our first privately owned campground since Bartlesville, Ok back in mid July. We were pleasantly surprised upon our arrival at Shady Pines.  The park appeared to be almost new a...

It's September 16, 2016 and we are slides in, wheels down.  We are departing Borger, Tx and getting on TX-287.  This road will angle us to the south and east, eventually paralleling the Texas, Oklahoma border.  We don't have a solid idea of where we will end up for the night, we're going to drive for about 4 hours and see where it gets us. For us, TX-287 is the road of our life.  Towns like Clarendon, Memphis, Childress, Chilicothe, and Vernon are little more than wide spots in the road that don't even earn a mental note for the average traveler.  But for those of us that made the pilgrimage to Dallas over and over again from our youth in the back seats of our parent's 1950's-something land yachts to our young adult years in our college student "rides", these towns marked the progress towards our goal.  We knew where we would stop for gas.  We knew where the bathrooms were.  Remember, there was a time when there was not a fast food chain store e...

September the eleventh of 2016 and we are headed south through the wheat fields of Kansas.  The further south we get the fewer plowed fields we see and the more pump jacks that come into sight.  Farm land is giving way to ranch land that is overlaid with oil wells, tank batteries and natural gas compressor stations.  Texas is in our sights. Speaking of farm land.  I think I mentioned it in a post earlier in the spring but, everywhere we have been across the south and into the plains, there has been massive amounts of hay bailed up and stacked in fields.  The rain and temperature has pretty much been perfect in the spring and early summer that almost everybody seems to have gotten in two harvests.  The surplus looks so big I don't think they will be able to give it all away.  But hold that thought, this becomes a big deal in early 2017. The distance between Dodge City, KS and Borger, TX is just right.  We like to keep our driving time to around...

It's Monday (Aug 29th, 2016) and New Horizons is making good on fixing the bad paint job.  They got us in first thing, we should be out of here in a few days.  And that's good because we got a call from our Daughter saying that their house in the Grant Park section of Atlanta is going on the market and it looks like a quick sale.  The market is pretty hot in north Georgia and they are looking to get in on it and make a move out to the northern suburbs.  We are planning a route that will get us back to Georgia in time to help with the move. We will drop back down through the Texas Panhandle and check in with John's mom one more time and then take less traveled roads south and east to Atlanta.  The quick, straight shot would be to take TX 287 to I-20 and just go, but that is a boring road trip. But first we have one more stop in Kansas.  We are going to play a little bit and hit an old west tourist hot spot, Dodge City.  The paint job on the blow out...

A few posts back, when we arrived at the New Horizons factory I mentioned that we had fellow RV'ers here getting service work done.  One couple we saw quite a bit of and spent time with, trading information on things to do and places to go in the area.  Plus, he was an ex-military pilot turned contract pilot for the military as well as an aerial fire fighter, going all over the world fighting fires with water bomber airplanes. Water Bomber in Action His wife, a full-blood Navajo and a real hoot to be around came knocking early Sunday morning (it's August 28, 2016) to ask if we would join them for dinner at an historic hotel in, of all places, Abilene.  Well sure, we wouldn't miss a chance at hearing some of his flying stories and being around her effervescent personality.  So we will be starting and finishing our day in Abilene. By the way, you should see this guy's rig.  It is my dream setup - a New Horizons 5th wheel pulled by a Volvo tractor modified ...

It's late August, 2016 and we are spending another weekend in the parking lot "campground" of the New Horizons RV factory.  A first attempt at painting the repaired skirting and fender damaged by a double blow-out did not turn out so well.  We are hanging around so they can take another crack at it next week.  So for now we will mostly stay in to avoid the heat.  But staying in doesn't mean in our camper, we're going back to Salina to catch a movie and have supper at a sit-down restaurant. The only problem is that we have to go past that chocolate factory again and I just couldn't keep Big Gulp from taking the exit.  We were able to restrain ourselves a little better and only walked out with nine pounds of chocolate this time. Something else we took note of was that we go right past Abilene, KS on our way to Salina.  In fact, the Russell Stover candy factory's address is Abilene.  We made tentative plans to explore Abilene tomorrow, Sunday. Salin...

August 22, 2017 has finally come.  Our scheduled appointment for getting body damage repaired by a pair of blowouts that happened just as we began our summer trip in June has arrived.  The explosive ruptures took out ten feet of fender and 16 feet of skirting on the galley slide-out. 1st blowout 2nd blowout an hour later. This is a prime example of my discussion of being flexible as a fulltimer in a previous post.  Junction City, or Kansas for that matter, were never on our radar when we left Georgia this spring.  After a pass through Texas to see family we were going to go to Wyoming and the Dakotas to enjoy Devils Tower, Custer State Park and Mt. Rushmore.  Instead, here we are in the windswept wheat fields of Kansas alongside Interstate 70 in a little town adjacent to the Army's Fort Riley.  Fort Riley is huge, covering 10's, probably 100's of thousands of acres.  Its population is much greater than that of surrounding communities and ...