Back with Family

Dave and Michele arrived yesterday afternoon. It is good to be with family again. We are now on Route 40 West heading to the Grand Canyon southern rim in Arizona. We should be arriving there by tomorrow afternoon. We have decided not to go to California. It is just to far to go, especially since Dave and Michele have driven a lot of miles since Monday from New Jersey to Amarillo. We will hold Mom's memorial at the Grand Canyon over Thanksgiving. It seems like a very fitting and beautiful place. So long for now and Happy Thanksgiving to everybody.

Amarillo, TX

We left Roswell on Wednesday and headed up to Amarillo to meet up with Dave and Michele. Arrived at the campground in the late afternoon and started to check things out. Amarillo is a good size town with lots of amenities as well as two Ford dealers. The second dealer was more trustworthy and we decided to get a quote for the repairs on the truck. It actually turned out to be not as bad as we thought, but we had a decision to make. Did we want to get the truck fixed to look as it originally did, or should we put on some sort of guard to be better protected in case something else decided to run into our truck? We have seen a lot of pick-up truck with various strength guards mounted to the front since we arrived in Texas. We had talked about getting something like that eventually, but now seemed to be good time to do that. Well it just so happened that the dealer had a "Ranch-Hand" in stock and was able to install it the next morning. It was actually less money to have it installed than have the truck put back in its original shape and all the parts that got damaged had to be taken of to install this new bumper. So Doug went back to the Ford dealer on Friday morning, while I stayed at the rig and did laundry and cleaned house. Should we have another run in with a deer or an antelope, this bumper will not flinch, but as the salesman said "Should you hit a cow or moose, it will leave a dent". Well we are not planning on hitting anything in the future and it sure feels really good to have the truck fixed again.



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Roswell - In search of Aliens

Well, we did not find any aliens, but we had a great time. We drove from Lubbock, TX to Roswell and actually found the "middle of nowhere". There was miles of flat land at an elevation of 4000 feet, once in a while an antelope and about every 30 minutes a house or car on the road. It was an interesting experience. This country sure has some beautiful landscapes. We found a campsite about 12 miles outside of Roswell in a New Mexico State Park called "Bottomless Lake Park". Due to the draught conditions in the southern US most of the rivers and lakes are either very low or nonexistent at this point, but our campground sat right against this beautiful mountain ridge. It was so quiet and peaceful, I really did not want to leave after 5 days.

The only thing that was a little bit of a drag was that our Internet connection was really slow. Verizon does not have towers in this area and in the extended network I could see that I had mail, but was not able to view it, or go online to pay bills for that matter. We finally went into Roswell to the library with our computer and did what we needed to do there. Libraries in the US provide free Internet. One more thing learned since we are no the road. The UFO museum in Roswell was something else. I figured that it would be little bit on the funny side. Oh was I wrong!!!!. They are dead serious that aliens landed in Roswell, there are sworn affidavits from people that they saw something and the government covered it up. Even the street lights had little alien face on them. It was so cute.

And if you are wondering, no, we did not buy a T-Shirt.

Trials and Tribulations

It has been a while since I have last posted, but there are some really good reasons. It all started very harmless. We arrived in Canyon Lakes, TX Wednesday a week ago, found a nice campground for a week and the world was perfect. By Friday I was not feeling so good and came down with a lousy cold. Two days later Doug caught it and except for going to Fredericksburg on Friday and the Wurstfest on Sunday, we stayed in the rig with a lot of cold medicine and tried to get over the cold.
We left this Wednesday, feeling a lot better and in good spirits, heading towards Roswell, NM. We knew that we would not make it all the way in one day, but that was no problem. Went down some new back roads and got onto Highway 10 West about 11:30 am. By 12:30 pm a lot things changed for us drastically. While driving along at about 60 m/h Doug saw a couple of deer running onto the highway on the eastbound side. He slowed down as much as he could in traffic, but the deer came onto the westbound side and one of them hit the left front bumper, went underneath the truck, hit the front of the rig, went underneath the rig and left us with a lot of damage. It was a terrifying experience. We pulled of the highway as soon as we could to identify how bad the damage was and it is bad. The top and bottom bumper on the left side of the truck was hanging loose, when you turned the wheel, we defiantly had a tire rub. So we got out the wheel jack and crowbar to at least bend the metal back so we could continue on to a dealer to check out the damage. The trailer showed damage on the sewer hose and we were not sure if the deer had gotten into the left axle of the rig and did damage there. We located an Excel dealer about 120 miles from where we were and headed on to San Angelo. The dealer was very nice, checking over the left side of the rig and they replaced parts on the sewer hose so that we are able to dump our grey and black tanks. They did not see any damage on the left axle and we decided to find a campground for the night as it was getting dark already.
I can not describe the mood we were both in. It was very upsetting to hit the deer and I feel bad for the deer, however, truck and the trailer are our home and a lot of damage was caused to our home by this accident. When we tried to dump the tanks the next morning we noticed that the sewer hose cap had gotten jammed by the accident and we had to break it in order to get to the sewer hoseo out of its sleeve. Frustration levels were rising, but we decided that both vehicles were in good enough shape to continue on, since we are planning to meet up with Dave and Michele by middle of next week in Albuquerque or Amarillo.
We spent Thursday night in Lubbock, TX and had a nice dinner and a couple of stiff drinks. This has been a difficult week and a lot of thoughts went through my mind. Are we cut out for this? Should we maybe just settle back down? Well, the couple of drinks and a couple of days after the accident we are in Roswell, NM and are starting to feel a little bit better. We still need to get a repair estimate for the truck, but the insurance company has been notified and a claim has been started. We will stay here until Dave and Michele are closer and then head up north.The state park that we are in is beautiful and I will take some pictures over the weekend and post again soon.