A Spring/Summer Travel Saga, Highly Condensed

Lately I've been so distracted by life that I've felt little like chronicling it beyond a scribble or two a week in my reading journal. So the Farm has been evolving into a quarterly effort to get things down for family, friends, and passers-by who might find any of it interesting. It also reminds me to go through the Blogger list of my subscriptions to see what I've missed (since my subs go to the seldom-visited owlfarmer gmail address, rather than my eponymous version). So I'll be spending some of this sweaty afternoon checking back with folks who probably think I've fallen off the planet since my last post.

Our trip west in May was interrupted by an apparent electrical glitch in Porco Rosso, our travel trailer, which gets lassoed into use every year or to to visit the Owens River Valley and points in between here and there. This year's impetus was a family get-together to bury my step-mother's ashes next to my father's in the family plot. She lived a good life, and was nearly 94, so the occasion was celebratory rather than funereal. I got to see a cousin I hadn't seen in about thirty years, and all of my living siblings--and even, in a way, my late brother, who is also buried in the plot, and for whom we had a similar gathering in 2019.

Palo Duro Canyon from the park store overlook.

Resident burro at Homolovi

Deer behind our campsite at Santa Rosa State Park

The trip out began well, with a two-day stay in Palo Duro Canyon State Park, near Amarillo. Because of recent rains, most of the trails were closed, so we've already vowed to return. But the park itself is gorgeous, the campsites pleasant, and has popped up to the top of our Texas state park list. We stayed for a night at Santa Rosa State Park in New Mexico before moving on to Homolovi State Park in Arizona for two nights--which turned into three because we liked it so much--even though Molly decided to go walkabout in the middle of the first night (squeezing out when TBH went out to check on a flapping noise) and scared us half to death. As is her wont, however, she didn't go far and was easily located. 

Some of the amazing variety of ceramic
remnants at Homolovi I and II

Our goal was to avoid RV parks in favor of state parks, Corps of Engineers campgrounds, and dispersed spots on BLM land, but we also wanted to revisit a segment of Route 66 (where we stayed at a campy tourist spot near Seligman, Arizona) and a favorite RV camp in Lone Pine for the two days set aside for family time.

On the day before we were to de-camp and head for our favorite boondocking site in the Valley, however, our freezer and fridge conked out and we had to ditch plans to head north and then eastward into Nevada to visit old family stomping grounds there. We had wanted to visit the Great Smoky Valley, where my great grandfather ran a stagecoach business in the late nineteenth century, and where my grandmother was born and lived before the family moved across the border to California. But this leg of the trip had to be abandoned because we were relying heavily on the stuff stored in the fridge and freezer. Porco has recently been kitted up with electrical appliances, battery backup, and solar capability--which wasn't much help with defunct cold storeage. Winds had also become a problem (again!), so we just gave up and headed south and back to Texas. Further adventures included flat tires caused by bad rims on our new Porco tires, and a night in a sleazy Vegas RV dive, further unwanted stays at questionable locations chosen only because they facilitated our quick trip back to Texas. We spent the last night in a Safety Rest Area near Hedley, which we can recommend because 1) it's free and 2) located in a rather lovely area along the road out of the Panhandle. 

By then, of course, the fridge had somehow reset itself and made that part of the problem go away. But without our half-hour stay at the Discount Tire in Vegas, though, we'd undoubtedly have been stranded in the desert somewhere near Belmont, Nevada, population 38. We'll just have to make a more leisurely trip at the next opportunity, knowing what we now know about caravan refrigerator mechanics and tire rims.

The otherwise really cheesy RV park in Las Vegas
provided some interesting views sky-related subjects.

Well, I've spent so much time wrangling photos and trying to compress our short adventure that I'm out of steam, with more to tell. So I'll post this now and hope to get back to the non-travel-related events I intended to include. Perhaps trying to stuff life into too-small containers makes them even more difficult to narrate than simply trying to keep up with things as they happen. Meanwhile I'll take some time to look at what's going on in my particular blogosphere and enjoy what folks have been posting while I haven't been paying attention.