Westward Ho! Vegas and Back With A Travel Trailer

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be" - Douglas Adams  Williams, Arizona - just outside the Grand Canyon Another early morning. Another cup of coffee. Another sunrise walk with the dogs.  I need to be careful, I could get used to this life.  After breakfast we started the breakdown procedure, Katherine and I had become fairly adept at it at this point. The finer points that we had to fiddle with at the outset of our journey had become just another part of the routine - each task decomposable into a nearly infinite number of sub-tasks on a mental check list, each with their own sequence, measurement, and checkpoint.  First the amenities: Wash & stow the dishes and the table. Final bathroom call for the kids, drain and flush the tanks (black then gray), pack the sewer hose (yuck!), water hose, breaker off?, stow the power cable.  Then the mechanical: Load the dogs, back in, hitch the trailer...locks, chains, breakaw

"The desert was the apotheosis of all deserts, huge, standing to the sky in all directions for what seemed like eternity" - Stephen King From a truck stop outside Vaughn, NM We had a long road ahead of us, so we got started as early as we could. This was the first day with a full breakfast too - eggs, and leftover fajita meat from last night's dinner.  Having learned from previous pit stops, we opted to take a few moments to grill an expedient lunch (hot dogs) on our little portable barbecue and wrap it in aluminum foil before we left.  Departing mid-morning, we left Roswell on US 285, headed north toward interstate 40. Small-town Roswell, replete with rolling irrigated farmland quickly dissolved into vast, open New Mexico desert.  It's impossible to overstate how desolate the New Mexico plains are on this stretch of road. In West Texas the desert landscapes could be described as barren, but are at least punctuated by little sprigs of life; tall shrub and the occasion

"Of all paths you take in life, make sure a few of them are dirt." - John Muir I was up at dawn. The lonely crow of a rooster in some far flung distant farmland carried over the desert plain and pulled me from my sleep. Katherine stirred in bed while the children, exhausted from the previous day's adventure, didn't budge from their little bunks in the back. I sipped my coffee and enjoyed the cool morning air breezing through the open windows. It was going to be difficult to leave this place.  After everyone woke up, had their breakfast, and washed dishes it was time to start the pack-up routine.  At some point, after encouraging the children to wash their hands for approximately the 475th time this trip, we heard little three year old Ian utter a phrase uttered that no one ever wants to hear in an RV. "There's a BIG problem in the bathroom." Alarm bells instantly set off in my head, and in Katherine's. Thankfully, the problem wasn't so big as exp

"May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds." - Edward Abbey We slept deeply that first night - perhaps not so much from comfort but from exhaustion. The trailer's little air conditioner rambled endlessly, and managed to keep us at a about 78 degrees but no cooler, a byproduct of the south-Texas heat and humidity. Not to say that we were uncomfortable: the RV experience is somewhere between camping and staying in a motel. Space is limited, you're never quite as warm or quite as cool as you'd like to be. The showers aren't as long...but they are THERE. For years I rejected the thought outright.  An old boy scout, my notion had traditionally been that camping should be roughing it. If you're not hot during the day and cold at night and dirty all the time, if you don't wake up and stretch with stiffness and pain in your joints, if you don't ever have to

"My needle ... always settles between west and south-southwest. The future lies that way to me, and the earth seems more unexhausted and richer on that side" -  Henry David Thoreau  Hitched, packed up, and ready to roll out We departed as the first crest of sun crept over the horizon... Or at least that's what I would have liked to have been able to say.  In reality, I have two young children and a wife who likes her beauty rest. My days of doing much of anything at dawn are well past me, at least for now.  Some day I plan to turn into one of those doddering old retired men who are out of bed before everyone else - the kind who stir around at the hardware store and have done more of absolutely nothing productive by 8am than most folks will do all day. For now, I get my day started when all of the pertinent stakeholders are good and ready.  Yes - the dogs are coming too. Their accommodations might be comfier than mine... So we didn't depart at sunrise. Instead, let'