ARIZONA, CALIFORNIA AND HOME

 March 9, 2024

After finally getting out of New Mexico, we spent 10 wonderful nights at one of our favorite state parks - Patagonia Lake State Park, between Patagonia, AZ and Nogales, AZ.  The weather was great. Mostly, we had highs in the 70’s but one day it got up to 81 degrees. We spent a lot of time sitting outside of the camper and soaking in the sun. 

We did lots of birding and Mark finally saw his first Vermillion Flycatcher of the trip. We went to the Paton Center for Hummingbirds in Patagonia and saw 3 different types of hummingbirds as well as the rather rare Arizona Woodpecker.

Broadbilled Hummingbird

Violet Crowned Hummingbird

Anna's Hummingbird

Vermillion Flycatcher

Eared Greebe

Lesser Scaup

Great Blue Heron

Black Crowned Night Heron

Arizona Woodpecker

Green Tailed Towhee

Black Throated Sparrow

One day, we drove an hour and a half to White Water Draw Natural Area and saw thousands of Sandhill Cranes who winter there. We didn’t see too many other birds there because it was so windy that I think most of the birds were hunkered down. Tumbleweeds were flying all over the place!  

We took a lot of hikes. We walked the birding loop in the park almost every day. One day we hiked at Sonoita Creek Natural Area adjacent to the park. The scenery there is totally different than that in the park which is more riparian being closer to the lake. The Sonoita Area is more desert like.

Birding Loop 

Sonoita Creek Natural Area

Sonoita Creek Natural Area

Sonoita Creek Natural Area

Birding Loop

We took 2 park sponsored boating tours on the lake. One was a birding tour in the morning, and the other was a sunset cruise, which blessed us with a very beautiful sunset. Mark also did a lot of kayaking and got up quite close to many of the birds.

We went wine tasting at 2 wineries in nearby Elgin. They were the Twisted Union Winery, and Sonoita Vineyards. It was a lot of fun. We also enjoyed pizza at the Velvet Elvis Restaurant in Patagonia and breakfast at the Gathering Ground Cafe also in Patagonia. Our ten days there went by very fast.

Twisted Union Winery

Sonoita Vineyards

The Velvet Elvis

Pizza at the Velvet Elvis

Next, we began our trip north. We spent 3 nights at River Island State Park on the Colorado River south of Lake Havasu. We also had very nice weather there. We took a walk on the Wedge Hill Trail in our state park to some very nice vista points. We also took a hike on the Buckskin Loop Trail at nearby Buckskin Mt State Park. The scenery was stunning, but boy was that trail rugged and steep!

Colorado River

Buckskin Loop Trail

Buckskin Loop Trail

On February 29, we moved North and West into California. We spent that night near Barstow, California at Calico Ghost Town Recreation Area. The town was a huge silver mining area in the 1890’s and produced $86 million of silver. The town was restored in the 1950’s on the original building sites by the owner of Knott’s Berry Farm who gave it to the county in the 1970’s. It was fun to visit but a bit too touristy for us. 

Calico Ghost Town

Calico Ghost Town

The next day we turned north at Bakersfield and traveled north to a Harvest Host Winery Vista Ranch Winery near Merced and had a fun time tasting their wine. Our original plan had been to go home straight up Interstate 5, but the weather forecast was so cold and snowy in Northern California and Southern Oregon, that we decided to cut over to the coast north of San Francisco and go home that way. We spent Saturday night at another Harvest Host Winery in Hopland, California The Brutocao Family Vineyards. We had a nice time there also.

Brutocao Family Vineyards

Vista Ranch Winery

Sunday, after we left Hopland, it started raining pretty hard and then turned into a pretty heavy snow shower. Luckily, it was not sticking on the road. By the time we arrived at our destination for the night, Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, it had stopped precipitating  and turned into a lovely afternoon. We were able to take a nice walk through the magnificent redwood and even saw some elk.

The next day, we continued north on route 101 and crossed into Oregon. We spent 2 nights at state parks along the coast admiring the beautiful scenery and all the green. We dragged it out a day longer than we originally planned because the weather forecast for Portland was for some pretty cold nights and we didn’t want to have to winterize the camper. We arrived home on March 6. It was a wonderful trip, but it is always good to be home.

Made it to the Pacific

To summarize our trip, we were gone 206 days and drove 17,700 miles through 32 states and 1 Canadian province. We stayed in 44 state parks, 8 Harvest Hosts, 5 private campgrounds, 4 county parks, 3 provincial parks, 2 relative’s homes, 1 national park and 1 repair garage parking lot. We spent between $2.34 and $4.79 a gallon for gas (about $7.06 a US gallon in Canada). We visited 5 national parks, 4 national seashores, 4 national monuments and 1 national recreation area. We observed about 218 bird species. When asked what our favorite place was, we can’t begin to say, as there were so many. 

Thanks for following along and your comments. We have no big trips planned for the future, so come and visit us in Oregon. Happy travels!

West Texas to New Mexico

February 20, 2024

On February 2 we left South Llano River State Park and headed west on I-10 right into a strong headwind. We stopped at an RV park in Fort Stockton, Texas. It was very windy there also. While there I got on the web site for Guadeloupe Mts National Park where we were scheduled to go next. There was a severe wind warning for sustained winds of 45 mph and gusts to 90 mph and the wind chill was predicted to be 8 degrees. We decided that it might be better to forget this stop. We were lucky to be able to get reservations at Davis Mt State Park farther west and a bit south of I-10 in Texas in what is known as the Sky Island area of Texas.

We stayed at Davis Mt SP for 3 nights. We have stayed here before and knew that it was a very nice park. Our first day there was very windy and chilly, but certainly nothing as bad as 45 mph winds. We took advantage of several programs at the Interpretive center. One was on bird watching, another on the geology of the area and the final program we went to was on native inhabitants. We also saw a very nice movie on the Civilian Conservation Corps whose projects we have seen in parks all over the country. We also spent a lot of time birding and our best find here was Montezuma Quails. The park has one of the fanciest bird feeding stations that we have ever seen and lots of very nice hiking trails. We enjoyed driving along the Skyline Drive in the park that went up to the highest point in the park and had great views.

View from Skyline Drive

Montezuma Quail

View from the top of Davis Mt

Hiking the Old CCC Trail

While there we also visited the very interesting Fort Davis National  Historic Site. The fort was in operation from 1854 - 1891 and protected travelers on the San Antonio - El Paso road as well as protecting the area from marauding Indians. We visited the museum, saw a movie on the history of the fort and toured the restored buildings. It is a very interesting  place.

Offices Quarters

Fort Davis

On February 6, we headed west and north, crossed  into  New Mexico and spent the night at Oliver Lee Memorial State Park . It is on the slope of the Sacramento Mts and overlooks the Chihuan Desert.

The next day, we drove the 35 minutes to White Sands National Park. First, we stopped at the Visitor’s Center and watched  the movie and walked through the museum. The dunes cover 275 square miles, the largest gypsum dune field in the world. We took the 16 mile Round trip Dunes Drive and took the Interdunes Boardwalk and the Dune Life Nature Trail. The dunes are so white, spectacular and otherworldly!  

As we were leaving the parking lot of the Dune Life Nature Trail, we noticed a very bad sounding noise coming from the trailer passenger side tire. We very slowly drove back the 2 miles to the visitor center. Mark took the tire off and discovered that the bearings were totally gone and it was a big possibility that the trailer axel was compromised also. We spent the next couple of hours finding a garage that would fix it and a tow company with a flat bed trailer to take us back the 20 miles to Alamogordo, N.M. 

The folks at Neudorf’s Enterprises were very nice. They let us stay in our trailer in their parking lot and even hooked us up to electricity. The place was right on a major highway and the semi trucks went by all night and trains roared by on the nearby railroad tracks. The next day they decided the axel was beyond repair and work began trying to find a replacement. This meant making many calls to Forest River Trailers in Indiana to get the right axel. It was ordered the next day (Friday) but was not shipped until Tuesday. It finally arrived in Alamogordo on Friday (the 16th). 

We were so thankful that this had not happened going down the interstate or the middle of nowhere, and we were also very glad that we had the truck, so we could see the local sights. We were amazed at how much there was to do in Alamogordo and the surrounding area. 

We drove up to Cloudcroft, NM twice. It is a little mountain village at almost 9,000 ft that was established about 1899 with a railroad going up to the town to haul down wood for the lumber industry. It has a lovely old restored hotel which people from El Paso went to in the summer to escape the heat, a restored railroad trestle, a cute main street and a delicious barbecue place : Mad Jack’s Mountaintop Barbecue. It was delicious! They marinate the meat overnight, open at 11am and serve until they run out. We were told to get there early. I guess they run out a lot. 

Twice we went to the cute little Alameda Park Zoo. It was established in the 1890’s for the train passengers in Alamogordo to pass the time while they waited for the train tp Cloudcroft. We visited the Tularosa Basin Museum of History and learned lots of information about the area from native American times to the present. One neat thing that they had was a bunch of short films about the history of different things in the area that local high school students made for a film class.

Marmoset

Fastest Tortoise we have ever seen

Another day, we drove a little ways north to the BLM’s Three River Petroglyph Site.

The site contains over 21,000 petroglyphs ( rock carvings) which are outstanding examples of Jornado Mogollon rock art (1,000 years old). Archeologists have no idea what the carvings mean. We walked the 1 mile round trip trail up the hill to all the rocks and saw many of the carvings. It was very interesting! The snow covered mountains in the distance were also very beautiful.

A very interesting museum in Alamogordo was the New Mexico Museum of Space History. It covered the history of space exploration  from the study of the stars by ancient people to current spacecrafts. It was a beautiful glass building on a hill on the outskirts of Alamogordo. You started your tour of the museum on the top floor of the building and worked your way down. There were lots of interactive exhibits. We also went to a planetarium  show about the night sky and a large screen movie about how astronauts train underwater to learn how to work in space. I think the museum is in Alamogordo because nearby White Sands Missile Range had a lot to do with the beginnings of rocketry.

Landing the Space Shuttle ... Nailed It!

Museum Elevator 

New Mexico Museum of Space History

I would be amiss to not mention the pistachio farms and wineries in the area. There are 2 of them. Heart of the Desert Pistachios and Wines was the classiest. We tasted specialty olive oils and vinegar, lots of pistachios, homemade candy and 11 types of their wine (free tastings). We especially liked the pistachio rose wine. The second place was Mc Ginn’s PistachioLand. It advertises itself as the home of the world’s largest pistachio! It is more touristy than the other place. We did take a tram tour through the grape and pistachio fields and learned all about the pistachio industry which was very interesting. We also enjoyed their homemade pistachio ice-cream .

World's largest pistachio

I think that we probably saw more of the area than many of the locals have, but after 9 days of an unexpected stay, we were getting rather antsy. So when the axel finally arrived on Friday about 11:30 am and the technician removed the old axel and installed the new one, we left Alamogordo at 1:45 and drove over 7 hours to our next stop stop, Patagonia Lake State Park in Arizona. It is so quiet and beautiful after 9 nights in a parking lot.  

New Axle Going On

But this a  good place to start next time.