9/17/2014 Destination: New Mexico

(On the road WEST)

We got a fairly early start this morning, let me make that clear, early for us.  Eight-ish.

We had a beautiful day to be driving.



It was shortly after we got on the road that Bob happened to look down at the odometer and said, “We’re turnin’ 100,000 miles.”  Everything in my book is photo worthy.

 

We soon noticed we were back in the land of long, long, trains.  This train had 136 cars and 4 engines.


We went through this town called Hooker, Oklahoma.


You wanna call your hardware store Hooker True Value?  Not a problem.  That said, if I owned the only motel in this small town I think I’d find another name.



It didn’t take us long to cross over into Texas.

We went through this small town and I really liked their town sign.



We were going under some overpasses and we noticed these bird nests.



Some overpasses had many more nests than this one.  Enlarge the picture and take notice that they are around the columns holding the overpass up too.  I shudder to think how many baby birds never make a second flight when exiting the nest for the first time.  It sure didn’t seem like a safe place for a nest to me.

We passed lots of pretty scenery along the way.



We started seeing the windmills again. 



And we saw cattle, lots and lots of cattle.


The wind picked up a ways down the road.  Lucky for us by the time we got there the dust had dissipated.


We reach New Mexico!  Our destination for today.


Our normal stop for this trip would be Tucumcari where we would stay at the Elks Lodge.  This is going to change this trip.  We were thirsty and pulled over when we found a gas station/convenience store combo that had a large parking lot.  While I went inside Bob did his usual thing and walked around the truck and 5th wheel to make sure everything was intact and ok.  It is during these walk around inspections that he checks our tires.  He touches each one and the rims.  Today, we had a hot tire.  Hot, as in burn your hand if you left it there too long hot.  Tucumcari is a rather small town so after checking the map we decided to go 60 miles further to Santa Rosa.

We stopped every half hour or so to give a wheels/tires a rest and to cool down although because we were stopping frequently the one tire wasn’t getting as hot.

So we limped into Santa Rosa and chose the Santa Rosa RV park to stay in.  Hopefully, we’ll get this fixed easily and inexpensively tomorrow.  Regardless, we're going to stay two nights here.