Mammoth's Arizona Adventure, Day 4

 Sat 11 March

Today the Mammoth Motorhome stayed in place while we headed out to tour the Chiricahuan Mountains. We crossed seamlessly over the Arizona State boundary--didn't even know it--and headed up into the heights. Everyone had remarked about the magnificent bird-watching opportunities in the river valleys there, but we didn't see all that many birds. Except the Bridled Titmouse and a whole bunch of Western Scrub Jay. And this lovely flock of turkey:

 

What we saw instead were views, wonderful, wonderful views. And waterfalls and rapids and stairstep drops. And mountain vistas--ahhh!

 

We returned in mid-afternoon to lots more birdwatching. It was a little too windy for the best of pictures, so I took Molly for a one-hour jog in and around the RV park and the trails they've cut through the low scrubbrush all around. We didn't go fast, but we did feel good. When we came back the wind had died down and Ed was grilling fajitas--shrimp and steak that I'd marinated back before we left home.

Brewer's Sparrow

Canyon Towhee

Curve-billed Thrasher

Eurasian Collared Dove  (sleeping?)

Gambell's Quail

White-Crowned Sparrow (female)

Yellow-Eyed Junco

Yellow-rumped Warbler (aka Butterbutt)

Leaving Molly to rest, I walked over to Rusty's little menagerie and garden  My favorite were the what-cha-ma-call-ems, strange animals sort of like little mini burros. I've seem them before but can't remember the name.  And she had a few cages for turtles and lizards, which were all hiding at the time. And some African birds of various sorts.

NOTE: at night it got so freaking dark that I had to use a flashlight to walk the dogs!   Unbelievable. And on that 'night it was mostly overcast when we went inside to eat but mostly clear when I went outside to walk dogs. The Milky Way was awesome, even more than always.

Not being able to see my way around, I headed along the path to the community center/garden/menagerie.  She had the menagerie lit with blue and red lights, very cool.  Not especially bright, but very beautiful. Mind you, when you walked a few feet away from it the lights totally vanished in the all-encompassing darkness.

Mammoth's Arizona Adventure, Day 3

Fri 10 Mar

On to Rusty's RV Ranch!

As much as I liked the little RV park in Anthony, it was still too near a city with lights, traffic noise, trains, sirens, and NO wildlife. A few birds, nothing special. I'd recommend it, and I'd stay there again if I needed to, but I was happy to leave it behind.

We had a very short and simple drive across New Mexico on I-10. We pretty much went from one edge of New Mexico--Anthony is a suburb of El Paso--to the other, near Rodeo New Mexico. The mountains we can see to the west are in Arizona, I think...yes. We are less than a mile away from the Arizona border.

 So it was a boring drive, but from time to time we could see mountains scattered in the distance, some with snow on top. When we got off I-10 to head south on highway 80, we could see the Chiricahua mountains off to the west with a scattering of snow on top. We headed down, down and more down a very long, slow slope for miles and miles, with the snow-frosted mountains still on the western horizon. And then we arrived!

This place is beyond all comparison the best private RV park I've ever seen. And pretty much the best place we've ever camped, period. At the moment I can't think of any place better. Mountains to the west, south and east, birds all over the place. A huge property with very large spaces for the RVs, about twice as long as we need. While they've grouped the spaces in pairs with the utilities in between, each person's door-facing spot opens onto a large plot of ground with firepit, picnic table, little trees and shrubs and other desert plantings.  We've encountered not a single stickerbur in the dogs' paws so far, either.

 

And so beautiful!  It was warm and sunny when we arrived, almost too warm. About the only thing that would have been really nice would be an awning or big picnic umbrella to cast a little shade. We don't use our awning anymore (which is stupid) because it is too prone to tearage and too expensive to replace when it does. So it's pretty much useless to us.  If I'd wanted to sit outside and read I could have gotten my chair out and put it under a tree.

Since we left pretty early (8:45) and only had a 3-hour drive, we took a quick jaunt over to the Chiricahuan Desert Museum. The reptile exhibit was really good and well worth the $7 admission, but the garden out back was even more so. Awesome! Full of birds, too.

Review Rusty's $35/night
I can't say enough good things about this place.
Beautiful, beautiful view, way out in the ranch lands of southern New Mexico. It's dry there and the winds were gusty, but Rusty and her team have made the place into a sweet little oasis on the range. Trees, a couple of ponds, and enough birds to drive a birder wild. Stargazing is great, too--no matter how cloudy it was during the March days we were there, by bedtime the Milky Way was out in full force.

Utilities work fine--50-amp electric, water and sewer. Spaces are spacious. The ground is mostly dust and gravel, and can be a little dusty in the wind, but hey--this is New Mexico.

It was less than half full when we were there, so it seemed very quiet and peaceful. Other campers were considerate about their outdoor lighting, too, keeping it to a minimum. Just lovely.

Mammoth's Arizona Adventure, Day 2

 Thu 9 March

Bye to the lovely sand:

Today's drive was the opposite of the day before--instead of making record time, it took us three hours and 45 minutes to make a three hour 5-minute drive. There were two fuel stops, one of them slow; a pee stop/dog walk at a picnic area; and a road construction delay going north on I-10 through El Paso. I'm glad I planned the trip the way I did, with a 6-hour day, a 4-hour day, and then a 3-hour day. It got the hard stuff over with first.

Today's nemesis--other than the stops and delays--was the mountains. After leaving Monahans, we were going uphill pretty much all the way.

 

Scenic view at rest area

 

We passed through El Paso--with the delay--and arrived just over the border into New Mexico at El Paso West RV Park. I need to write a glowing review of it--it's a pretty place, for an RV park. The sites are tiny and squished together like sardines, but they're nicely laid out, perfectly long (at least for us, with our 32-foot RV and toad), and have all the utilities set up correctly. It was full according to the sign in the office window, and it sure looked full. When we arrived at about 3pm the office manager was working outside, and she'd placed the only two arrival envelopes nearby so she could just hand me ours. It contained our receipt and an itemized bill, plus the park rules and information.

Although it's small, it has a nice little fenced dog run, with poop bags, and a big dog walking area out at the back where there is some extra parking for trailers and stuff. It's not a fancy place, but basic and perfect for our needs. Not too far off I-10 but nicely placed in a residential/mixed retail neighborhood. If we'd needed stores or restaurants, they'd have been easy to find.

They're working on getting the grass to grow and have little "keep off the grass" signs in some places. Don't blame them. And there are several trees around. It's just nice. I'd stay here again.

The only drawback at all is the traffic backup and delays on I-10. But then, if you're heading through El Paso East to West (or West to East), you're stuck with traveling on I-10 anyway. So why not?

We ate out at L&J Cafe in the old downtown area, I think. It was by a cemetery and they bill themselves as "The Old Place By the Graveyard". The beginning of their online bio goes thus--
Back in the days of “the Great Depression”, Antonio O. Flores established what would then become a well known, respected, and family oriented business. The year 1927 marked the opening of Tony’s Place.

 

Story has it that bootlegging was popular at Tony’s as well as Juanita G. Flores’ (Antonio’s wife) famous cooking.
Read the rest: https://ljcafe.com/about-us/our-story/

The food was great. I didn't choose well, but that was my issue and I'll not fault the restaurant. They had "potato tacos" on the menu, which turned out to be corn tortillas with mashed potatoes and strips of mild chili inside. The mashed potatoes were great, but the dish didn't go well as a whole.  The guac was fine and the refried beans good. I'd love to try the place again. Oh, and the service was lightning fast.

Oops, food gone before picture taken:

Mammoth's Arizona Adventure

 Wed 8 Mar 2023

Woke up at home and am going to bed in Monahans Sandhills State Park. This is a great place! Full of birds, mysterious holes in the sand, and sand--lots and lots of sand. Tall bare dunes you can climb all over, and little scrubby dunes that you can walk all over. Except for the sand burs--Molly got into lots of them, poor thing. If we were staying here longer, I'd put her booties on her.

But first, how did we get here?  We drove. We left home just before nine o'clock and had a pretty good drive except for a whole lot of slow-ish traffic around Midland/Odessa. I kind of dozed off then and didn't really notice it.

So we made the six-hour google maps drive with one 11-minute gas stop and one 20-minute gas/dog walk stop, and arrived in six hours and 10 minutes. Pretty impressive. It is true that Ed was hitting 85 to 90 miles per hour a good bit of the time, especially when the wind shifted and was pushing us. I see no reason for the extra speed, but it didn't seem all that dangerous. Traffic wasn't heavy except in the cities.

This place is very close to the interstate (I-20) and so you can hear the traffic noise, but it is still a wonderful and wild place. It's chilly today and the park is not very crowded. It just so happens that the campsite I chose is sort of a "double" pull-through. Typically they'll have a camping loop and the pull-throughs will be sort of a semi-oval off to each side, one per campsite. But this particular one (site #1) is on the same oval as the campsite in front of us. There's a trailer from Kansas parked there, and their hind end is so close to our front end that pulling out again in the morning is going to be problematic--if they're still here. I can't imagine too many people spending too much time here, so there's a decent chance they will be gone before us.

 

I have not seen a sign of the people in that trailer. Mind you, it's pretty chilly and windy outside and I imagine most people are staying huddled in their homesites. We will see.

Molly and I took walks to each of the two day use areas. Between digging sand burs out of Molly's paws and taking on and taking off my gloves (to take pictures), I mostly looked at birds. Two groups of sparrows that were probably white-crowned sparrows. I'd hoped for something unusual but probably not. One bird in the dunes that was almost certainly a western Scrub Jay. A Northern Harrier hunting--could have been a Harris' Hawk but the shape and my one good look at the head said Harrier. Tons of doves. And a pair of very large quail scurried away when they saw us--darn.  We went in pursuit but couldn't catch up to them.

It's been a good day, and I'm gradually shaking off the funk and fury of my last few days at home. This is the way retirement is supposed to be!  Not hiding in the office with a floor fan on high and pointed toward the wall (to make noise), and trying to do boring contract work that I have no interest in doing and no hope of ever finishing, And not heading outside to kill time because the inside of the house is full of yelling and crying. And not trying to do my kitchen work in the between hours when May doesn't need to be there. and not retreating into the bedroom as soon after 7:30 as possible, to play on the computer and read and try my best not to go back into the rest of the house for anything except to get a snack and let the dogs in and out.

This is what my life is supposed to be.

Tomorrow, El Paso!

 

Review Monahans Sandhills State Park  $15
Like a sweet sandy beach in the middle of Texas.

This is a lovely little place. Not a large number of camping spots--I expect most people spend a single night here since it is so close to the Interstate. But I could enjoy being here for several days--not just sliding on the sand or climbing over the dunes, but walking the roads to looks for wildlife and birds, sitting on top a dune and staring into space, and enjoying the otherworldliness of it all. You can hear road noise in the distance, but the overall feeling is quiet, calm and serene.

That might not be true in summer, when families with kids are rolling down the hills. But that could be fun, too.

We had no trouble with the electric (50-amp) or water hookups. The dump station was easy to access. The only slight issue we had was that our chosen site, Willow Draw #1, shared its pull-through "loop" with the site in front of it. Each had their own picnic table, but the length of the driveway was split between us and the trailer in front of us. We did not have to unhook our toad, but it was very tricky to pull out of the space without hitting the hookups on the left or the trailer in front.

 

I have never seen dumpsters so decorated!

A cutey of a cozy

Daisies for Innocence
by Bailey Cattrell

I found this book surprisingly appealing. Nothing special, just a woman I like who is running a perfume/soap/candle store called Scents and Nonsense. I guess you'd call it a "scent shop". But she mixes her aromas with an eye to their gentle influence on the emotions. You could say, almost magical. And I'm sure it will be.

I see that she's written a good bit of hints and portents into the first book that will no doubt see development of future ones. I think I want to read them...at least a couple. I want to see why butterflies are attracted to her dog and why her grandmother seems to haunt her garden. And many other things.

Oh, and the mystery? Okay, I guess. A lot of times you don't read cozies for the mystery, it's just in the background and serves to keep the plot moving along. And to be honest, I couldn't even name the evildoer now, after having finished the book. I can tell you what his job was and how he did the deed, but that's about all. So I don't recommend it for the murder plot, just the "real" plot...scents and magic portents.

Short, sweet, somewhat satisfying

 Garden Spells
by Sarah Addison Allen

Very sweet, gentle book. There wasn't even a murder in the mystery, just a bad person who needed to be resolved, and a magic tree who kept trying to butt in to the action. And yet I found it exceedingly enjoyable.

I may read another, if she's written one, but I can't imagine where she might be planning to go with another because she's wrapped up all the plot issues in this one.

If your liking is for sweetness and light and happy-ever-after, go for this. I liked it.

Too large for such a tiny topic

 I Contain Multitudes
by Ed Yong

I'll admit I didn't read every word of this. It's full of multitudes of words and I ran out of steam halfway, reading only tidbits and snippets. I have to either mark it as "read" or delete it, and since I want to preserve it in my record (and not accidentally read it again), it'll have to be "read."

It's excellent, by the way. Full of all sorts of very detailed details about how microbes rule--and sometimes ruin--our lives. More than you'd ever hoped to learn about microbiomes and how the same bacteria can turn up in lots of different places performing entirely different functions for different hosts. It's pretty miraculous.

The book is well written and easy to understand, and my only issue was that he seemed to hop from topic to topic without pause. There's just so much to tell, you know.

And finally, here's an example--and an interesting point.
The microbiome is not a constant entity. It is a teeming collection of thousands of species, all constantly competing with one another, negotiating with their host, evolving, changing. It wavers and pulses over a 24-hour cycle, so that some species are more common in the day while other rise at ngiht. Your genome is almost certainly the same as it was last year, but your microbiome has shifted since your last meal or sunrise.

A life story, told by the living

 One Hundred Saturdays:
  Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World
Michael Frank

Just a simple memoir, by a holocaust survivor who is now in her 90s, telling her life story to a guy writing the book. After the first one-quarter or so, it got very good. My problem with the first part was simply that the details became too involved at times, describing basically the entire lifestyle of the entire population of the island of Rhodes (in Greece), It wasn't a large population, but it seemed like Stella knew them all and wanted to remember all of their customs and lore. It was important to write those memories down--they were very valuable records of a lost time and place. But that didn't mean that I was excited to absorb every tiny detail.

But all of the rest was captivating reading, and I didn't want to miss a word. I listened to the audiobook, which was good for me because it slowed me down and kept me from skipping.

Fascinating woman; fascinating life.

Adventures of the modern, in search of the past

 Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before
Tony Horwitz

An extremely long and very detailed description of a man's attempts to see the places Captain Cook saw. And discovered, or failed to discover. Of course it was impossible to see what he saw, except in the case of volcanoes and beaches and icebergs and deep blue oceans. The people and places had changed too much. But the story of the man's search is marvelous.

As to the book, the writing was unobtrusive and pleasant--I had no trouble reading and enjoying the adventures and the history. But I did get a little tired with the length of it. Especially in the middle, the adventure dragged me down. But it got good at the end. Very good, and it made me do some serious thinking about just how different Cook and his sailors were from the native peoples they visited. Not so much, the author concluded--and so did I. Not so much.

Failure to finish

 Believarexic
by J J Johnson

I'm going to abandon this, one-third through. But I'll write about it to share my reasons with others. (And to remind myself not to accidentally pick it up again.)

I think the author has a pretty intriguing tale to tell. A young lady with some pretty severe anorexia, bulimia, and a whole lot of self-doubt, tries to get help. But everyone in her family refuses to believe she needs help. Then, when she goes to a treatment center, everyone there seems to think she's lying. Almost everyone.

And although I'm dying to find out how this goes, the writing confounds me. She's trying to make some kind of point with short, childish sentence fragments that are more suited to being captions for a graphic novel. Or poetry--very bad poetry. Here is how it reads,
Somehow, she'd always thought that she could do this.
Even at her most desperate,
with her monster at its most vicious,
a part of her thought she'd eventually find a way.
She believed that when she grew up, she'd be happy.
A grown woman, healthy, with a good life.
But now, the path from here to there is gone.
Obliterated.
There is only a chasm.

Etc. And it doesn't stop. Even the spoken dialog is choppy and childish.  I don't have a clue what point she's trying to make by writing in this style, but it makes me nauseous.

Teared up, lots. Dogs will do that to me.

 Free Days With George:
Learning Life's Little Lessons from One Very Big Dog
Colin Campbell


Beautiful, and it made me weep at the ending. Several times, in fact. And not with sadness.

Mr. Campbell is heartbroken and pretty near destroyed by his partner, who suddenly decides she doesn't want to be his partner anymore. And won't say why. I suspect that there were signs all along that she was emotionally distant and growing even more so, as well as selfish and downright cruel. Sure, if you're going to end something, end it--but at least give the person a reason.

And then...well, if you've read the publisher's blurb, you know where it goes from there. Among the better of the many dog books I've enjoyed. It was a little short, a little spare on details sometimes, and a little choppy in the writing, but nothing at all worth quibbling about. I recommend wholeheartedly.

Lovely book beyond my ability to describe

 The Seasons on Henry's Farm

by Terra Brockman 

Not enough superlatives in my vocabulary to describe this book!  Essays, all so short and often so heartbreaking--and beautiful--and majestic--and down to the earth just plain good!  She describes all the stuff that goes into managing a sustainable, old-fashioned farm that supplies both a CSA and the local farmer's market.  And it's a whole lot of hard work!

And rewarding work. And fun, back-breaking work that clogs your fingernails with soil and makes you really appreciate where that cellophane-wrapped produce ought to come from.

I recommend this to anyone, anywhere--and if you're a gardener, you just might learn something.  The people are well-drawn and you just want to hug them all. And the author--I wish she could be my best friend.

With recipes, if you care about that sort of thing.

One of my teen reads, but an especially good one

What I Lost
by Alexandra Ballard

Very enjoyable and scary look into the mind of a teenage girl with anorexia. In this case--and I hope other readers don't think it's true in all cases--her mother had some severe food issues too. She was in denial and only skirted the edges of admitting that she might be as sick as her daughter, except she was able to eat just enough to keep out of the hospital.

I didn't think the author got into her mind quite as deeply as she might, but it was well done all the same. And it would have been great if she'd explored some of the thoughts of Elizabeth's fellow committed girls, such as Lexi, the roommate who both inspired and disappointed her, and the girl with bulimia who came in for day treatment. Could she possibly be considering writing sequels for each of these characters? I'd read them all.