Author: Jon Arnold

On Tuesday we left Alamogordo, NM and started our trek North. Along the way, we stopped at the Very Large Array about 50 miles west of Socorro (i.e. middle of nowhere, New Mexico.)

This array is a collection of 27 movable radio telescopes arranged in a “Y” pattern. By bunching up or fanning out the individual radio telescopes, scientists can get different resolution images from deep into space. This is the place used in the 1997 movie Contact (which we rented and watched later that evening.)

This was just a cool rock formation that we saw as we drove through El Malpais National Park and pulled off to take a closer look:

We reached Grants, NM by late afternoon on Tuesday, but the RV park we intended to stay at turned out to be rather scary. This was the only photo I was able to get as Amy sped away.

We found another place a few miles down the road that — believe it or not — was better than the previous RV park. Good enough for one night, anyway. (As an aside, I see this quite a bit in these podunk RV parks: RVs that don’t exactly look ready to hit the open road at a moment’s notice.)

The next day we drove a bit further and landed at Bluewater Lake State Park in Prewitt, NM. It was supposed to be really scenic, but it was merely ok (way better than the RV park, however.)

There was a nice lake where people would fish every evening:

There was also some reasonably good hiking not too far from our camp spot:

Our internet and phone service wasn’t very good, however. We drove back into Grants and crashed at the library on Thursday so both Amy and I could get some work done.

My girls are always glad to visit a new library.

On Saturday morning, we drove another 45 minutes northwest to Church Rock, NM. We parked the RV at a place called Red Rock Park and hopped in the car for a day of sightseeing.

The first stop was at the Zuni Pueblos, which is a community for the Zuni people. The brochure we read beforehand set an expectation of a vibrant community of Zuni artists. It was unfortunately not at all what we expected. In the few minutes we spent at this old mission, for example, we were approached twice by street vendors selling rather rudimentary handicrafts. As we drove around, we saw packs of dogs roaming the dirty, impoverished streets.

I felt like I was in another country, complete with the discomforts of being a foreigner on someone else’s land.

Unsure of what to do there, we didn’t stay long. We drove around in the “safety” of our car for a few minutes, and then left.

In hindsight, I’m a bit embarrassed by my reaction to being in Zuni-land. The people we encountered were quite kind, and both Amy and I feel our reaction to withdraw was a missed opportunity to engage with other human beings from a very different background.

But we did have other things that we wanted to see, namely El Morro National Monument:

One of the main attractions of El Morro are the centuries of carvings on the rock walls:

There are petroglyphs from Native Americans, and hundreds of inscriptions from travelers between 1605 and 1906.

It was also good hiking with some breathtaking views:

At the top of the mesa were some ruins dating back to 1275!

We made our way back to the RV just in time to catch the sun setting on Church Rock off in the distance. We vowed to do a hike the next morning.

As planned, we got up early (early for the girls and me — late for Amy) and made our way toward Church Rock.

We sort of made our own path, which meant scaling some pretty steep rock faces:

There were a few tense moments, but everyone made it up safely.

We didn’t make it all the way to the spires of Church Rock, but it was a good hike and climb nonetheless.

We see little lizards like this everywhere:

Evidence of how the desert is quite full of life:

I love the layers in these rocks and the patterns created by millennia of wind and water:

Off in the distance there is Shiprock, one of the landmarks of New Mexico. We wanted to see it up close, but we couldn’t find the road to get back there. Never saw any signs either. Bummer.

So, we went on to the Four Corners Monument where Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona meet:

Carrie and Em forcing me from Utah into Colorado (this was my first time in Utah). Natalie is behind Carrie doing a backbend and touching all four states:

According to Google Maps, the real “four corners” is here (about 20 feet away from the plaque):

There were several Navajo artist there selling jewelry, painting and other art (Natalie bought a bracelet):

We continued North into Colorado toward an RV park in the city of Cortez, CO (we needed to ensure good internet since I have a busy meeting schedule this week.) But on a whim, we drove on to a nearby National Forest campground to see what it was like. I’m so glad we did. Not only is the internet great here, we practically have the whole place to ourselves.

It’s hard to believe we went from mesas and desserts to mountains and pine trees in less than an hour today.

Amy spotted this little place up the hill across from our campground. In all of our travels so far, this is the closet thing we’ve seen to the type of house we’d like to call home. But we’ve still got time to figure that out.

Speaking of houses, our house in Indy is rented again! WOOHOO! We’re really excited about our new tenants. Unless they are just the nicest couple to ever run a meth lab, we are expecting another great house-rental experience.

I’ll end on a completely random note: this past week I shot my 10,000th photo of the trip.

After spending Monday in El Paso, TX helping our friends Jake and Melissa move, we moved on to a quiet little park in Alamogordo, NM. For the second week in a row, New Mexico has delivered the goods. It’s lovely here.

A beautiful sunset from atop the RV:

…and a beautiful sunrise from atop a nearby mountain the next morning. Before work and school started, Amy and I took a quick morning hike. Note how our campground below is in the shadow of the mountain even though it’s well after sunup.

That shadow creates a very unusual sunrise experience down at the campground. It seriously feels like the sun gets switched on like a light every morning. I timed it:

Fruit smoothies were a breakfast staple for us before this RV trip, but we unfortunately didn’t bring our blender with us. Melissa (the one we helped move) kindly donated her blender to us, so fruit smoothies are back!

There was some CRAZY wind midweek that stirred up the Tularosa Basin that our campground overlooks (White Sands, off in the distance, looked like a huge cloud rising up from the ground.) It made for an eerily beautiful sunset:

The next evening was much clearer, so we did a family hike up the same trail Amy and I took a few days earlier:

Towards the end of the week, the electrical box at our camping spot fizzled — not good on a 90-degree workday.

This worked out for our benefit, as we were able to upgrade to an unused “campground host” spot, which had one of the few sewer connections in the campground. (Our previous spot had no sewer connection, and that was causing some serious concern since the community dumping station was out of order. Our conservation abilities were being tested!)

I’m still not quite used to seeing cows grazing by the side of the road. It’s pretty common out here.

We’re close to White Sands Missile Range. We heard some explosions earlier in the week, and we’ve been told to expect some sonic booms starting tomorrow.

On Saturday we drove out to White Sands National Monument. We started with some sledding!

After we were done sledding, we put the sleds in the car and ventured deeper into the park.

Another fascinating example of critters adapting to their environment:

Taking a snack and water break under some scarce shade:

Sand angels!

These White Sands dunes are made of gypsum (the same stuff that’s in drywall), so when a plant’s roots secret moisture, it hardens the surrounding gypsum. Over time, the dune blows away, but the hardened foundation and the plant remain:

I absolutely loved this place. It’s 275 square miles of stark beauty. If it weren’t for Jake and Melissa needing help with their move, we would have missed this. This has been one of my favorite places, 2nd only to Death Valley.

After a late lunch, we drove up to the White Sands Missile Range visitors center. Of greatest interest to me were all of the artifacts related to the Manhattan Project and the detonation of the world’s first nuclear bomb at the Trinity Site in 1945.

Outside, it was a sobering display of mankind’s inclination to destroy itself. There is something mesmerizing about these doomsday devices set against a serene backdrop of natural beauty.

We’ve been repeatedly warned about rattlesnakes since we got to New Mexico, but this little guy is the only snake we’ve encountered so far. (However, we did see a good size snake on the road yesterday that had just gotten run over by a car…I don’t know if it was a rattler, but it was big.)

The hummingbird moths are fun to watch.

I’m not really into flowers, but these are everywhere out here and I think they are incredibly cool: a fiery clump of red pedals held up high by a stalk that looks like a medieval weapon. The other day, I saw a bumble bee impaled on one of those vicious thorns. How cool is that?!?

The moon is out at night now and casting shadows.

I have to use a long exposure to get my camera to record what my eyes naturally see. It really is this beautiful out here at night. Maybe there is something to that “Land of Enchantment” thing.

We made it back to New Mexico last week. I’ll stop short of calling it “enchanted” as this sign says, but Amy and I sure were glad to be there (Northern Texas was humid, and with the right cloud cover it felt way too similar to Indiana.)

Our spot for the week was at Brantley Lake State Park, a rather remote little place with nice, dry air and wide-open spaces. This is the sort of thing we like. We thought we were only going to have electric for the week (which means would have had to be ultra conservative with our water usage) but we got one of the few full hookup sites. (Whew!)

Every morning on top of a nearby tree, this bird would sing his little heart out. He sounds a little like R2-D2…take a listen.

There were some other cool birds too:

And lizards:

And jackrabbits the size of cats:

Being amongst nature has its down side, however. After sundown, the bugs come out, like those tiny Canadian soldiers (those things that look like mosquitos but don’t bite). We had to bust out the vacuum cleaner one night and literally vacuum the ceiling:

But nothing has been as maddening as these moths. I’m pretty sure they are hiding in various nooks and crannies in the RV because they appear out of nowhere every evening.

At first, we’d gently capture and lovingly release them, but after the first night it devolved into remorseless squishings. I wonder when we’ll have our first night of NOT seeing one (or twelve) of these things!

The pleasant weather combined with clear skies made for some wonderful stargazing. On three separate nights, we all climbed up on the roof of the RV to enjoy the view.

It was amazing (and the girls thought it was pretty cool being on the roof.)

Here are the girls helping make dinner – homemade noodles!

We ate outside a lot this week…our version of “eating out.” 🙂

I tried hard to sell our bikes over the last couple of months, but now Carrie and Emily are starting to enjoy them again. So, perhaps we’ll hang on to them. Here’s Carrie and me on a late afternoon bike ride, a little too much off the beaten path:

Saturday morning we hit the road and landed in the Guadalupe Mountains National Park, which put us back in Texas for the weekend.

It felt good to do some hiking again.

This whole area was underwater millions of years ago, so there are sea life fossils everywhere. Pretty weird considering it’s now a desert.

Our campsite was really just a parking lot, but it was way better than Walmart.

Here we are from this morning, all geared up for our hike in Slaughter Canyon, one of the many caves of Carlsbad National Park.

After a brief orientation, we met at the trailhead for a short half-mile hike to the cave entrance.

The rangers took it at a very slow pace (which actually made it seem way longer), but it did allow plenty of time to soak it all in.

More desert fossils of prehistoric sea life:

Finally at the cave entrance:

It was nice and cool inside.

It was nearly impossible to get any good photos since the hardhat LEDs were the only source of light.

Emily “on rope” scaling a slippery section:

At the farthest part of our cave hike (we hiked about a mile total inside the cave), the rangers had us turn off all lights and devices and experience a complete absence of light. It was cool.

Back in the 1950’s, Slaughter Canyon was mined for guano – something I had never heard of before today. It’s basically bat poop, and it makes good fertilizer. When you look at this stuff closely, you see what looks like little twigs mixed in. These “twigs” are actually skeletons of a long-extinct species of bat.

Our hike was a good 5 hours long, and after the trek back to the car we were all pretty hot (it was an almost-90 degree day). So we hung out at the air-conditioned Carlsbad Cavern National Park visitor center for a bit.

The girls and I were hiked out (Amy was fine) but it was easy enough to take an elevator down 750 feet for a leisurely stroll through Carlsbad Cavern.

This was a much different cave experience than Slaughter Canyon. This one had paved paths, handrails and museum-quality lighting.

We’re boondocking one last night here in the Guadalupe Mountains. Tomorrow morning we’re getting up bright and early and heading to El Paso, TX to help our friends Jake and Melissa move. Then it’s on to Alamogordo, NM for the week to see White Sands National Park.

Our last campground was right on the Texas/Oklahoma border, so Amy and the girls took a field trip into Oklahoma to see a local pioneer museum. I didn’t go (I needed to work) but it sounds like what this museum lacked in outdoor sign creativity they made up for inside with meaningful exhibits about pioneer life. (I’m just realizing that my family has been to a state that I have not been to yet!)

We broke camp mid last week and headed west to Bridgeport TX, which is about 50 miles northwest of Fort Worth. Along the way, Amy and I split up — I continued to the next campsite in the RV with Carrie and Natalie while Amy and Emily took a side trip to Love Field at Dallas-Fort Worth airport to do some plane-spotting:

These are just a few of the many photos of planes Emily took and identified: (Clockwise, starting from the top left) An AirBus A340, a Boeing 737, an AirBus A319, a Boeing 747 (aka “the whale”), an Embraer ERJ 145, and another Boeing 757. Emily is just a little fascinated with planes.

On Saturday we drove into Fort Worth to visit the Cowgirl Museum, which Natalie was pretty excited about. We didn’t know quite what to expect, but it was a pretty inspiring history of women in western entertainment, sports, art, and agriculture.

Natalie sitting on a saddle seat watching one of the museum movies about women in western films. (Yes, I believe that’s a woman gunslinger popping a cap in some poor dude. Go girl!)

After the Cowgirl Museum, we drove over to the Fort Worth Stockyard. These stockyards opened in the 1890s and became a hugely popular marketplace for Texas ranchers to sell their cattle for the next 90 years.

We stopped at M.L. Leddy’s handmade boot store. Amy picked up and looked at one pair of boots and I thought she told me they were $285, which sounded rather expensive to me. I just found out I misheard her: they were $1,285!

The boots, the hats…it all just struck me how “Texas” Texas really is:

For $5, you could sit on this longhorn to get your photo taken. That sounded like a pretty good deal at first, but it turns out they want you to pay them the $5.

One of the old buildings where cattle deals went down. In its heyday, about a million cattle per year would change hands here.

In the afternoons, they trot a herd of longhorns down the road. It’s just for show now, but this is how they used to bring in all the cattle to be bought and sold. Those horns sure make an impressive animal.

The girls trying some local $3 cupcakes:

Though today is Sunday, it was a school and work day (we’re traveling tomorrow so that will be the rest of our “weekend”). It was a rather overcast day and even rained hard last night, but the clouds completely disappeared by the end of the afternoon. Perfect weather for baseballs and mits.

We’re breaking camp early tomorrow and will drive for about 8 hours until we get to New Mexico. All I know about our next campground is that it’s electric-only (no water, no sewer), so that means we’ll be in water-conservation mode for the next several days.

It’s been a while since we’ve NOT had full hookups (we’ve gotten spoiled), so it will be interesting to see how we do. We’ll have to make sure everyone gets showers before we pull out of here.

Amy and the girls make a point to read books set in whatever location we’re near. They just finished reading Holes, set in Texas, and a major plot point of that book involved eating Texas sweet onions:

Emily found a solution to her watering eyes:

We did a “dinner and movie” night with Texas Onion Soup and Kate Barlow’s Spiced Peaches, and then watched Holes the movie.

We didn’t see any tornados (as was reported in nearby Dallas), but some hail did make quite a mess. I spent a half hour hosing this off, and my white roof is now off-white with yellow stains. If I can help it, I shant be camping directly under any more trees.

The RV was due for an oil change, so we stopped at this random place:

What a find! The owner was a white-haired “man’s man” kind of guy with a thick Texas drawl. He called me “young man,” I called him “sir.” He took me underneath my RV and showed me where everything is and how easy it is to change the oil and transmission fluid (he is also an RV’er). It was nice to hear his opinion that our rig is in excellent shape, and that, in his opinion, the Allison transmission is “thee fahhh-nest” transmission ever made. The $58 I paid for the oil change was worth the RV maintenance tips alone.

Here’s Amy and the girls taking a break at the end of an afternoon later in the week:

Our camping spot was in a shady but not-so-densely-treed area near a lake:

Saturday morning, we made Easter baskets out of grocery sacks:

It was super-duper fun and Emily said my basket was the best!

After lunch, we drove in to Dallas to visit the 6th Floor Museum, located in the Texas School Book Depository where Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK. (No photos were allowed inside the building unfortunately.)

My view from behind the fence at the “grassy knoll:”

This “X” in the road marks the spot where Kennedy took the fatal head shot. Circled is the window from which Lee Harvey Oswald was perched with his rifle.

Overlooking Dealey Plaza: The “grassy knoll” is above Amy’s head, the spot of Kennedy’s fatal shot is behind Carrie’s head, and the road leading under the bridge was the escape route after the assassination. Crazy.

I thoroughly enjoyed seeing all of this, and I thought the 6th Floor Museum was excellent. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but there are many fishy elements with the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. On a positive note, I learned that Jackie’s blood-stained pink outfit from that terrible day will finally go on display in the year 2103 (mark your calendars!)

For dinner, we met up with one of Amy’s friends from high school, Sarah Moseley, who lives in Dallas. We ate at a fantastic BBQ place, got free ice cream cones, and Amy enjoyed catching up with a friendly face.

Stopped at Half Price Books after dinner, and I got some DVDs for cheap. While one could argue the artistic merit of any of these cinematic works, one thing is certain: I’ma see me some man-movies:

We had a critter scratching at our front door this morning. It is impressive how fast a squirrel can shell and consume sunflower seeds.

Our Easter morning bounty (sandwich bags had to do in place of plastic Easter eggs):

Let the sugar rush begin:

Natalie wanted to color eggs, so Amy created some DIY dyes with whatever was on hand: coffee, tea, wine, boiled spinach, and cherries:

Not quite a rainbow of hues, but still a job well done:

So here we are for the next several days, camped directly under some ominous-looking trees:

I have my hose ready.

[It was a different kind of week, so this is a different kind of blog entry: a conversation between Jon and Amy.]

Jon: Wow, week 30. Can you believe that?

Amy: No, I can’t. Are you sure you’re counting right?

Jon: I have a blog to prove it. Ok so, if we do this conversation thing, I think it would be easier to read if we have different colors. What color do you want?

Amy: Blue.

Jon: I wanted blue, but ok. I’ll be green. So last week was a short week at Lakehills TX. Quiet place. I liked it.

Amy: Yeah after being in several cities, it was great to get back out in the open. Our campground was a nice spread of 260 acres right next to this lake:

Jon: Nice lake.

Amy: For the last two years Texas has been experiencing a drought. This “lake” is also controlled by farmers for irrigation purposes. It made for an interesting walk.

Jon: Oh right, the point of the walk that morning was to see some deer. Good thing we saw some on the way back. That was a real crowd-pleaser.

Amy: Yeah my reputation was on the line having promised that we’d see lots of deer if you all came on a morning walk with me.

Jon: By the way, it totally cracks me up when you refer to us as “you all” and especially “you people”…that’s how I know when you’re frustrated. 🙂

Amy: You’ve got the signals down.

Jon: So yeah, fun quiet place, but I was eager to get to Austin for SXSW. When did we leave? Wednesday?

Amy: Thursday.

Jon: Right, because Thursday was registration, and sessions started on Friday.

Amy: For me it was fun to see the place that you talked about so much after last year.

Jon: I like this photo you took of the girls with me, but you really need to clean your iPhone lens.

Amy: Sorry.

Jon: Ugh…the rain. It rained and rained and rained and rained. We had not seen rain for MONTHS and the one week I actually need to leave the RV, it rains.

Amy: Remember that “lake”?…the Texans were glad to see that stuff.

Jon: It was really nice to see Josh and have him over for dinner. Everyone, that’s Josh…we work together, and he too was in town for SXSW.

Amy: Yeah it was really fun to have a dinner guest from “back home.”

Jon: This was one of the many sessions I was in. I just wanted to capture some random experiences throughout the week so I could show you a little bit what SXSW is like.

Amy: All I got to see was the traffic on the outside when I dropped you off!

Jon: This was the tumbleweed house guy I was telling you about:

Jon: He designs and sells plans for houses that are between 100 and 800 square feet. Thought you’d like that.

Amy: I’d love that. I’ve enjoyed our smaller, simpler space and am having hard time imagining going back to a normal house.

Jon: This is just some of the hustle and bustle of SXSW.

Jon: So when did you go to the LBJ library??

Amy: That was Saturday afternoon. It was a small museum that we could catch before picking up my mom and dad from the airport.

Jon: So was this all his stuff from his oval office?

Amy: I believe so. We watched a Troy McClure video about LBJ and all the events of his presidency. It was really good and very interesting because it tied in to all that Cold War stuff that we’ve been seeing. And we really liked Lady Bird Johnson…she reminded us of my grandmother.

Jon: I wish I could have seen that, mostly due to the Cold War tie that you mentioned.

Amy: So we made it to the airport early because Emily wanted to watch the planes. But with low cloud cover and security, she didn’t get to see a single plane. But we were all very happy to see my mom and dad!

Jon: I’ll second that.

Jon: This is from that Lytro session I was telling you about.

Amy: Oh yeah, I heard about that on NPR, about that new type of camera that uses light waves to capture the image?

Jon: Light fields. Basically, instead of focusing and taking a photo like you do with a normal camera, this captures a whole mess of “light data” that lets you focus on whatever you want after you’ve taken the photo. I’ve never seen anything like it. It was funny to see all the other photographer enthusiasts completely geeking out over it.

Jon: This was from another session about business, and figuring out what you’re supposed to be doing, and I found this Venn diagram particularly meaningful. I think I’ve been in just about every part of that diagram, wouldn’t you say? 😉

Amy: I’m afraid so.

Jon: Glad the sun finally came out on Sunday.

Jon: I stopped in where all the new games were being featured early in the week. Think we could fit something like this in the RV? It was quite cool.

Amy: uh…no. Another reason I like my small space.

Jon: I wanted to make sure I got a shot of our camping spot.

Amy: I loved that we were only a mile and a half from downtown and a quarter of a mile from a very cool running trail.

Jon: I LOVED riding my bike around Austin once the weather cleared.

Amy: First time I’ve heard you say you liked your bike.

Jon: Well, I still regret bringing those darned bikes, but it was the ideal vehicle for this past week, that’s for sure.

Jon: One of my favorite sessions: Adobe demoing their new Edge app (for animation) and unveiling a not-yet-released app, Shadow (for mobile web developers). I love feeling like I’m at the center of the tech universe for a week and being the first to see this stuff.

Jon: Ray Kurzweil: amazing scientist, inventor and futurist. Pretty much all of his tech predictions have come true over the last 30 years. He predicts sentient computers by 2029.

Jon: Al Gore and Sean Parker were great.

Amy: How so?

Jon: Sean Parker was the co-founder of Napster, so he’s sort of internet-famous for bringing down the music industry (he was portrayed by Justin Timberlake in The Social Network), and I guess I just had low expectations of Al Gore. I’ve only known him as the rather wooden politician. But he was engaging and just…real. Changed my opinion of him.

Here’s lunch with Josh at Iron Works BBQ:

Jon: So where was this?

Amy: It was near the RV park. Austin has great green spaces. The whole city feels great.

Jon: And then we ended our time in Austin with the bats, which apparently are quite the tourist attraction.

Amy: It’s amazing: an urban colony of millions of Mexican bats living under a bridge.

Jon: And around 7:30 pm, they leave the bridge en masse. They eat 10,000 to 30,000 pounds of bugs per night. Yum.

Amy: They were really fun to watch.

Jon: Agreed. It was a great time in Austin. Looking forward to next year.

Amy: Should we bring the RV again?

Jon: Definitely. I LOVED having my family here with me this year. It was exotic tech stuff by day, comforts of home by night. Loved it.

 

We spent last week camped at the Pima County Fairground in Tucson AZ. It was pretty modest accommodations, but it was quiet and friendly. And they had a sweet sign.

Amy and the girls attended the Tucson Rodeo Parade, the “largest non-motorized parade in the country.” I unfortunately had to stay back at the RV and work.  The Rodeo is such a big deal in Tucson, the kids get out of school for a “Rodeo break.”

On Thursday afternoon, I risked financial ruin by blowing off work to join Amy and the girls at the Pima Air and Space Museum:

It was a very cool place, with more hangers of planes than we had time to see:

…and a very large outside lot of various aircraft from the past 60 years or so.

The big draw for us with this museum however was the “boneyard tour” of the Airforce Material Command just down the road:

This place is basically the US military’s storage lot for unused aircraft. Over 4000 planes and helicopters sit on about 2000 acres awaiting their next phase of service.

Some will be put back into service, others will be sold to allied countries, and the rest will be harvested for parts or scrap metal.

I was particularly excited to see this Boeing EC-135, which was one of the Looking Glass “doomsday” planes used throughout the Cold War:

Here’s why that fascinates me: from the time I was born until I was a young adult in college, one of these planes was up in the air for the sole purpose of maintaining continuity of government and control of the US nuclear arsenal if a nuclear attack took out command centers on the ground.

The only down side to this tour was that we had to experience it from within a crowded bus, but I still loved it and found it fascinating.

If you’ve been following us on this blog, you know we hike a lot. But on Friday we did something new: a night hike at the Saguaro National Park.

Here we are getting a briefing from Ranger Jamie on what all we’d be doing and seeing on our night hike:

I was unsuccessful at getting any good night shots, but I tried:

Another poor shot, but this is still interesting: under a black light, scorpions are bright green:

On Saturday we visited the Titan II Missile Museum in Green Valley, AZ. This was sort of a big deal for me, as it was one of the first destinations we listed out when we first thought up this trip almost 2 years ago. And ever since we visited the Minuteman missile silos in South Dakota back in June, I’ve been eager for more Cold War action.

If you’re interested, this explains the Titan II missile — and the Cold War in general — better than I can:

This has been de-nuked and emptied of its rocket propellant of course, but it’s otherwise how it was left when it was taken offline in the early 80’s:

Steps leading down into the control center:

At the bottom of the stairs, looking at the first blast door:

Jim was a fantastic tour guide. He was a fast-talking, no-nonsense guy with a thick New York accent.

Here’s Jim explaining the ins and outs of the control room. There was no shortage of processes and procedures for handling a nuclear weapon.

I was struck by the carpet, worn from countless steps spanning 20 years by people checking dials and readings, waiting for a call that fortunately never came:

One of my biggest fears growing up in the 80’s was World War III, so to see all this stuff was pretty sobering, almost sickening. To be in a place whose sole purpose was to launch a nuclear weapon, which would forever change life as we knew it, is simply chilling. (Btw, these missiles were about 650 times more destructive than the bombs dropped on Japan near the end of WWII.)

This is the underground hallway leading from the control room to the actual missile silo. Note the shock absorbers that line both walls:

Top side, it’s rather plain. Just antennas and such. And visions of mushroom clouds out there in the distance.

Crazy:

Later that afternoon, we hit the road and found a verrrrry remote campground (if you could even call it that) out in the Arizona grasslands. It took some work to get there — 4 miles down a rough unpaved road isn’t easy in an RV — but we made it just after sunset.

This was the most remote camping we’ve done so far on this trip, but having 2 or 3 other campers within eyesight kept it from being creepy.

Conserving our energy, we had dinner by a single light:

The sky was clear and the stars were out, so we did some stargazing with Emily’s telescope. Here’s my attempt at a long exposure photo. (That glow you see in the lower left is light pollution from Tucson over 30 miles away)

This morning, Amy, Em and I got up for a sunrise walk:

On our way back after the sun was up:

Just wanted to show how rough these “roads” were. Yes, we do off-road RV’ing!

More border patrol:

We covered some ground today: we left Arizona, drove through New Mexico and made it to El Paso TX. Along the way we saw a few little dust devils kick up. Looks like those can get pretty bad:

We made it to El Paso and got to spend time with Jake and Melissa Pryor who used to live in Indy. We’re looking forward to spending more time with them and their little girl Kaine this week.

We don’t make reservations (keeps us flexible) and that has never been a problem. Today, however, our luck ran out. We’ve got our eye on a spot that should be opening up tomorrow, but for tonight, we’re boon-docking in a casino parking lot next to a horse track within eyesight of the Mexican border.

This trip never stops being interesting.

We started our second week in Phoenix with a trip to a local dentist to get our semi-annual teeth cleaning. (Hard to believe we’ve been on the road that long already!)

3 hours, and countless xrays and oral probings later, we got a detailed punch list of what Amy, Carrie and I “need” in the way of dental work (they were unable to fit in Em and Nat). The estimated cost? A mere $15,000 for the 3 of us! They tried to sell us on the whole fix-it-before-it’s-a-problem philosophy, but they’ll simply have to find another – how shall I say – “insured” set of mouths in which to construct their monuments to dental perfection.

Carrie does have a pretty nice cavity festering, so I’ll either bone up on DIY dental procedures or we’ll find a more reasonably priced dentist. Probably the latter.

Valentines day was a mixed bag of festivities. All the ladies in the RV got a rose for V-day, and then we celebrated Christmas with my mom:

…and then we celebrated Amy’s half birthday. Amy didn’t really get a birthday this year since it was so shortly after my dad died. My girls make a big deal about their half birthdays, so hey, why not Amy too?

One of the pluses of this RV trip is all of the time we get to spend together as a family, but the downside is that Amy and I don’t exactly get very many “date nights.” So being with relatives, we made darn sure to exploit them: my girls had a little sleep-over with Grandma at my Aunt Bonnie’s and Uncle Bob’s house, and Amy and I had an eerily quiet RV to ourselves.

We got up early the next morning for a rugged sunrise hike:

At Piestewa Peak in the Phoenix Mountains overlooking the city. Great hike and an amazing view:

The mountain air was great, which is more than I can say for downtown Phoenix. Check out the yellowish haze:

After our hike we grabbed some breakfast. Weird name; great pancakes!

During our stay in Phoenix, my girls got to meet and spend time with their younger cousins. It sure brought back memories of when my girls were that little!

On Saturday we stopped in to see my grandma one last time before leaving town:

She enjoyed looking at old photos and could remember some names and faces from way back. Unfortunately, most of the memories from the last 10 or 15 years seem to be gone. I don’t think she knew exactly who I was, but she seemed to know that I was a vaguely familiar and friendly face. It was great to spend time with her and very hard to say goodbye.

We spent the rest of the day working on the RV. Cleaned ‘er top to bottom. I even got rid of the ugly yellow haze baked onto my headlight covers. Check it out:

Before:

Sand off the jive:

Buff in the shine. My headlights seriously look brand new now.

That night we hung out one last time at my Aunt Bonnie’s and Uncle Bob’s house. It was so nice to spend time with them the last couple of weeks. Bob & Bonnie: Thank you both for your kind hospitality and letting our girls run wild in your house and annoy your grumpy geriatric cat.

This afternoon we had a nice sunny drive to Tuscon. Here’s our camping spot at the Pima County Fairgrounds:

It’s a dry, windy place — noticeably cooler than Phoenix — but I like it.

We’ve got lots planned this week: Titan Missile Museum, Pima Air and Space Museum, and Saguaro National Park.

Welp, it’s been a busy last couple of weeks, hence the delayed updates. And if it wasn’t for Amy doing the last few blog entries, we’d be even more behind. (Thank you, my dear!)

It feels great to be out of California. Nothing against CA — loved it — but moving on to AZ feels like progress. Here’s the sunrise from our first morning in Quartzsite, AZ. (It seems the town of Quartzsite is comprised almost entirely of RV parks and retirees. Seriously. It’s striking.)

During the week, Amy and the girls found a nearby remote-control airstrip. I’ll let Amy describe it:

Amy: We found a Remote Control Airfield near Quartzsite’s park. We pulled in to see what was going on and met a new friend, Art Hastings. He invited us to come back in the morning when the place would be hopping. Emily and Natalie were really excited about this idea, so we went back. Art and his friends showed us the many cool RC planes and how they work. Then they let us try out flying them! They made it look so easy, but we had to consider the direction, wind and speed to get the plane to go where we needed it to go. It took a lot of concentration and they were very patient with us. We had a blast! Even better, we made some new friends.

It’s pretty common for Em and Nat and to create entire worlds in the dirt and gravel of our campsites. This was a campground airport I believe:

If you smelled something delicious on the evening of February 3, this was it:

The campground had free RV-washing equipment, so we put the whole crew to work:

Careful where you walk. (We kept seeing these signs on the side of the road and had to inspect.)

Amy is a sucker for local fruit. Fresh, local, delicious fruit. (As an aside, that’s broccoli growing in that field. Broccoli!)

We drove to Yuma to check out the Yuma Territorial Prison. Not a place you wanted to be in the summer. It was sort of the Alcatraz of the late 1800’s.

Some prison guests got special accommodations in the “dark cell.” Again, not a place you want to be unless being locked naked in a 5-foot tall cage with a dozen other people for 21 days straight is your thing.

Being so close to Mexico, Border Patrol is out in full force:

There’s a lot of land in Arizona controlled by the BLM (Bureau of Land Management), where you can basically just pull off the road and camp in the desert. For free. It’s like a Wal-mart parking lot, but without the noise and lights of a city. There are zero amenities of course, but it felt great to get away and “rough it” in such a remote setting:

It was a great place for another rare campfire:

Letting the morning sunshine in through the big windows helps wake the girls:

A Sunday morning stroll through BLM land:

A shot out the window as we rolled out of Quartzsite. It is simply RV stuff everywhere in that town:

We arrived at our campground in Phoenix last weekend, but ran into (literally) a few problems. I pushed one of the slide-outs right into the electrical box, scratching the RV and cracking the cement pad. Ugh…it made me sick. To top it off, the sewer connection leaked everywhere. We later moved to a different spot, but I still have that scrape in the RV to take care of. I guess I’ll try to paint it.

My Aunt Bonnie and Uncle Bob live in Phoenix (just a couple miles away from our campground). It was so good to finally see them:

We spent Super Bowl Sunday at my Aunt and Uncle’s house along with my cousins Alyssa and Derek, Derek’s wife Jen and their kids. It was weird seeing all the shots of Indy during the game.

The next day we visited my grandma at the nursing home. She lived next door to us in Indy during the summers until just a couple years ago. It was good to see her, but also very sad — she has no memory of me, Amy, or my girls.

Despite her memory loss, she still has her pleasant personality and seemed happy to have visitors.

If you smelled something delicious on the morning of February 7, this was it:

Amy helping Nat with school:

My mom flew in from Indy mid-week, so we went to the airport to get her. Ever since we toured the Boeing plant, Em has been fascinated by airplanes:

My mom being greeted by my other girls back at my Aunt and Uncle’s house:

Finally did some hiking this weekend, sort of. I’m seeing a lot of this though:

We eventually found a better location. It still wasn’t a rugged hike, but it was at least away from the crowds and the signs. And it just felt good to be outside!

There are a lot of cacti out here, but let me tell you about one lil’ guy in particular: Cylindropuntia fulgida. Also known as the “jumping” cholla cactus. Looks fuzzy and cute, right?

They’re not. They drop these little grenades on the ground that latch on to one’s shoe at the slightest touch:

They also latch on to one’s middle daughter’s shoe:

…and one’s oldest daughter’s shoe.

I had to get out the pliers to remove these needles — they were long enough and strong enough to go all the way through the sole.

I still love the desert though:

…even if every saguaro cactus looks like it’s flipping me the bird:

DANG IT!…

I just like this photo of Amy:

That night Amy and I helped my mom with a long overdue and daunting task: sending thank-you notes to all of the kind folks that brought meals, sent flowers, made charity donations or in some other way supported us during the extremely difficult days following my dad’s death back in August. It was hard trudging through all that again, but it was a good reminder of how many great friend we have.

Today we visited Montezuma’s Castle (it was mistakenly assumed by early explorers to have been built by the Aztecs, and the catchy name stuck). Oh to have been able to visit in 1951, the last year that visitors were allowed to actually go UP to the ruins:

Hey Arizona, here’s what the Arnolds think of your signs:

It was a little chilly (only by AZ standards); good enough for a picnic:

We stopped by this place called Arcosanti, a community/compound out in the middle of the dessert that aims to be a prototype for sustainable, eco-friendly cities and communities.

It sounded interesting, but it frankly…wasn’t.

McSnack time: (For the record, this is the first time we have set foot in a fast food restaurant since we began this trip 8 months ago.)

I’ll end with this: I just got the owners manual for our RV (it didn’t come with one; we had to order it.) I just thought this paragraph was funny.  I guess Fleetwood RV and I will just have to agree to disagree.

We’re going to be hanging out in Phoenix for another week and spending as much time as we can with my mom, aunt, uncle, cousins and grandma.

 

We left Death Valley on the 31st and headed back to Vegas, as Sherry and Clint needed to catch a flight out of there early the next morning. So New Year’s Eve in Vegas it was…

There were people evvverywhere. And it was only 5:30!

I was not about to get out of the car. We decided it was safest to just drive down the strip a couple times, then go find some dinner away from all the craziness.

That was actually harder than anticipated. After striking out at two other places (one too smokey, the other too expensive), Wo Fat knocked it out of the park. It was cheap and delicious:

As planned, Sherry and Clint flew out stupid-early on New Year’s Day. We had such a fantastic time with them, and it was nice once again to spend a holiday with more family. We hope they can visit us again before this trip is over.

We wanted to see more of Vegas, but we waited a couple days after New Years for things to settle down. We stopped by the Bellagio hotel to catch the fountain and light show. Yes, it was rather ostentatious — as is all of Las Vegas — but it was entertaining nonetheless:

A high-fashion candy store across from the Bellagio:

More sights of downtown:

Later in the week, we took a side trip to the Hoover Dam. Wow:

The electricity-generating turbines deep inside the dam:

The Hoover dam is an engineering marvel. I was unable to capture how huge this thing is.

On Friday, we left Las Vegas for good. Like any freak show, it was fun to gawk at but we were more than happy to leave. Vegas just wasn’t our “thing.”

Amy logging some miles on the road to the Mojave Desert for the weekend:

I thought our campground was called “Hole In The Wall” because of its austere and remote location:

…which it was all that, but the name came from something else (more on that in a sec):

In several places, the pavement just…ended.  We spent just as much time on unpaved roads as we did on paved ones, and many of the “paved” roads were pretty rough. (We are so hard on our little Scion!)

The view from our campsite:

These are solar panels outside a nearby ranger station. I’m including this as a representative photo of all of the solar panels we see out West. They’re everywhere, as they should be. Solar power is sexy.

We got sort of lost on our way to the “lava tubes” (underground caverns made from hardened lava). There were no road signs, and we were a few miles down a pretty rough unpaved road. We decided to hike up a nearby inactive cinder cone (sort of like a volcano) to get a view of the surrounding roads and figure out where the heck we were. This didn’t look like that much of a hike:

…but it was. Size and scale are so deceiving out here. It was a long hike, but we were able to match the roads up with our map and see exactly where we were:

Stopping for lunch:

We eventually found our lava tubes:

Crawling through a low entry:

…to get inside to a larger space:

At the end of the afternoon, we drove out to the local sand dunes for another hike:

It was windy:

We got back to the car right as the sun set, with the moon high in the sky:

That night the wind howled — growled, actually — and rocked the RV like a boat. It was sunny the next morning, but still windy and cold. We bundled up.

…and double-timed it to get the blood flowing on our way to our morning hike:

Buster the friendly brown dog (he belonged to one of the rangers):

These rock formations are from volcanic explosions several million years ago where thick ash and gas hardened to form these interesting shapes. The holes and pockets that you see are where the gas was once trapped:

There were some installed metal rings in a few spots to make climbing a bit easier:

And that hole up there in that “wall” is the reason for the name “Hole In The Wall.”

Though not as spectacular as Death Valley, the Mojave Desert was wonderful. I love the desert. Let me clarify: I love the desert in January.

We’re now in the podunk town of Acton, CA in an RV park right next to train tracks (a train is passing as I type this.) We’ll explore some things around here over the next few days and then move on toward San Diego at the end of the week.  We’ve been in CA for 2 and half months now, so I’m getting antsy to move on to other parts of the country.  I’m talking to you, Arizona.