Back in California

We arrived in Needles on Monday and have settled in to our site here for the next two weeks.
We are just relaxing. Last night I went up to the clubhouse and played "card bingo". You play with a group of 4 with a deck of cards. Each player gets 13 cards. The caller has a deck and he calls a card at a time. If you have the card it goes into the center. Once you get rid of all of your cards you win bingo! It was different but fun.

This is the clubhouse.


This is a view of the Colorado River that flows right in front of the park.

This is our site



There are a few things we want to do while we are here. We want to go to Lake Havasu to see London Bridge and there is an old town called Oatman that is also on Route 66. And of course, one day we will go to Laughlin!

We moved again

Before we left Lakewood we did go to Carlsbad Caverns. This was the whole purpose of our stay here. We chose to take the natural route down instead of the elevator.


Here we are at the entrance of the cave. We walked down 750 feet and it was 1 1/2 miles to the bottom because it kind of zig zags all the way down.



My calves still hurt. You wouldn't think that going downhill would be so strenuous!!
I wanted to do the bat flight (where you sit outside the entrance at dusk to watch all the bats leave the cave for the night) but the ranger said that most of the bats have already move south to Mexico for the winter so we did not get to see this.



















These are a few pictures from The Ranch.













Yesterday we moved from Lakewood, New Mexico to Deming, New Mexico. We are finally back on the Verizon network so I have a strong signal to post some pictures. The drive yesterday was very slow and stressful. We were battling winds of 25 to 30 miles per hours and some gusts. Most of the time we were driving into the wind so our gas milage was not the best to say the least. We climbed to an elevation of 8,900 feet. The higher we got the colder it got but the winds were not so bad. Coming down in elevation to 4,500 was Alamogordo New Mexico. We drove on to Las Cruces, NM and then on to Deming.

Some good news.....we paid 2.87 for diesel!!!!

There really isn't much to see here in this area. We are mainly here for our mail to catch up to us. Should be here tomorrow. Ed will play his golf in Mew Mexico and I will do some laundry.
The good thing about being in an Escapee park is that you can wash your rigs and cars. So Saturday before we start to California, we will give this rig a good cleaning. The chores never go away!!!

On the move again

Yesterday we left San Antonio and drove to Lakewood New Mexico to an Escapee Park..The Ranch.
It was a long drive, over 450 miles but we gained an hour going into Mountain Time so we decided to push on. Glad we did. We arrived here around 4:00pm just in time for happy hour. (At all Escapee parks, 4:00 is always happy hour, where annoucements are made. Its a social hour.) We were greeted by escapee hugs. This is a very friendly park. We found out that we arrived here at the end of their 'roundup'.
Last night we were welcomed for a night of horse racing! We have never laughed so hard!!
There were 6 horses (5 fillies and 1 stallion). There were squares on the floor made with masking tape and 6 set of dice told the horses how many spots they could move. You could bet a quarter on your horse. Like I said, we never laughed so hard.

Before we left San Antonio, we did go to see one of the missions there. We visited Mission San Jose.


The objective of the Franciscan friars was to convert the indian hunters and gatherers into Catholic tax paying citizens of New Spain. (This was well before it became Texas) Everything changed for the indians, they lost their culture, religion and where required to learn Latin and Spanish. They lived in 2 room quarters that were all along the outside walls of the compound.


They worked as masons, weavers, and builders. Some worked the livestock (cattle, sheep and goats) that were kept 25 miles south of the mission. (These were the first cowboys). It was a very intersting tour.

Our connection is not very good here, its taken me just about all day to get this update. We will take lots of pictures around here and try to post later.