As I mentioned in a previous post, there is a lot of agriculture around Willcox. In addition to vineyards and orchards, they grow ALOT of beans.
And really. Who doesn't need a 20 pound bag of pinto beans?!?! Grin.
Bonita Pinto Beans are grown right around Willcox. And actually, we were there during harvest time. Fortunately, Ron and Judy O agreed to split the bean haul with us. So now we are down to 10 pounds of beans. So, Mom? If you are reading this, I'm thinking you will need about 5 pounds of what we have left, right?? :)
Yesterday we headed east out of Willcox, bound for Ruidoso, New Mexico. Once we hit Las Cruces and headed north, we drove through some beautiful terrain -- from mountains to desert. It was great to learn about it. Judy grew up in this area and Ron is really familiar with it, so they provided a great commentary on the walkie talkies.
One of the many interesting places we encountered (at least for this flatlander) was the border patrol station... All traffic headed northeast was diverted through it. And yes, it looked like a permanent fixture.
As we drove up, there was an amazing array of cameras aimed at each vehicle. We finally decided later that it was probably an array of infrared cameras, checking for body heat in our trailers, semis, trunks, etc. All they asked as we stopped was if we are both US citizens. When Max said yes, he just waved us through. I suspect that if they had detected any heat signatures in our trailers, we would have been thoroughly inspected. As I said, pretty strange for a flatlander!
Then somewhere between Alamagordo and Tularosa, we found the pistachio orchards. And I decided that I was in heaven! I sincerely love those nuts!
So nothing would do but that we had to stop and browse the shop attached to one of the orchards. Yep, we have a bag of nuts and a few other goodies from there. Yummy.
As I said, we were headed to Ruidoso, a little mountain town. After a lot of climbing (on pretty darned good highways, thank goodness), we finally arrived in town. We found the turnoff for our rv park and as soon as we started up the road, I thought "Dear God, what have I gotten us into?!?" It was a VERY narrow road to the park and VERY, VERY narrow roads within the park. ACK! Fortunately, Max is getting pretty darned good at hauling that trailer around and with the directions from the park host, we were in and setup in no time.
This picture really doesn't do the park justice......
We are perched on the side of the mountain. Btw, the tallest peak around here is Sierra Blanco at around 12,000 feet, so these definitely aren't small mountains. To give you an idea of how steep the area is where they carved out this park..... the park office is at about 6500 feet elevation and the top of the park is at about 7000 feet elevation.
But it is beautiful!. Pine trees all around us. And they have a beautiful mountain pine whisper when the wind blows. Just can't get something like that in Kansas.
However, we did have a helluva thunderstorm during the middle of the night.... from about 12:30 this morning until about 2:30am. The thunder kept all of us awake and edgy. And mud..... oh lord, it is bad!
We always have a couple of throw rugs down in the girls pen, because most of the rv parks around here are rock. We didn't think to pick up the rugs before we went to bed last night. What you are seeing above is a very colorful striped rug, with about half of it covered in mud! On one side of our site is a railroad tie retaining wall that is about 4 feet high. When Max took Ginger out during the middle of the night, he said the water was just pouring from between the ties. And of course, it ran across our site carrying all that wonderful mud with it. Things were pretty darned squishy here today!
On the road again tomorrow.
Cheers,
Dr J
