CuRVWander

 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 th...

  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 word...

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 ...

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 ...