Snowbirding Magnus Style, Day 5

Saturday Nov 8

It was a difficult morning for planning. The check-in time at our next site, Great Escapes RV Resort of Anthony Texas, was 4pm. And they were an hour behind us, so I couldn’t expect the lady at the office to answer her phone before 9am our time at the earliest. So we had a three-hour drive with a gas stop and a rest stop, but with the time change to Mountain Standard Time, in order to get there after check-in we’d need to leave around noon. Which is really hard to do.

But we tried our best to be lazy and somehow managed to poke around until 10:30. I called several times but didn’t get an answer, so we just got ready and left.  The lady did eventually call back and say it was fine to check in early, which was a mild relief. But we were already on the road by then.

 The drive was pretty tame until we got into the road construction on I-10 in El Paso. That was horrid. The whole highway was shut down at exit 11, and the highway department signs were telling through traffic that they should take the mountain loop. Wow. We took that route in the Jeep once--it goes way up, way back down, and way, way far around. We ignored the signs and went on the route that Ed’s trucker app chose, which wasn’t great but not too awfully bad either. It had us getting off, crossing under the Interstate, going north, crossing under again and then turning south into the park.

We arrived to find that the place was better than I remembered. They’d apparently joined the two areas of the park that were formerly separated by a gate. It’s all hard, hot gravel although of course it wasn’t so very hot right then in November. I remembered that it was very hot last time we stayed there, which was probably why I never let Molly use the dog park. It was in blistering sun and was completely grassless—her feet would have been destroyed. 

But right then it was nice. Both of the two dog parks were free (one in each area), so she got to do a lot of sniffing and even some tennis ball chasing. Very nice.  But on the way back we saw that there are buttloads of dogs at the park.

It was very crowded but the sites were large, although unmarked except by a little light on a pole, a picnic table, and the hookups. So it’s basically just a huge, gravel parking lot for RVs. There’s no shade or grass at the sites.

We ate at Corralito Steakhouse. Pretty expensive, but very good food—what there was of it. I had made a note that they had expensive rib-eye but lots of cheap vegan options, and that was completely wrong. Completely. I must have been looking at a different restaurant. Instead they had normal-priced ribeye and no vegan options at all. I ended up with a salad topped with a $10 slab of salmon. It was good, but not at all what I was hoping for. And Ed’s steak was good but his sides were meager.

We probably won’t go there again unless we win the lottery. And we definitely can’t afford to take the kids there.

WRITTEN LATER:

It’s weird walking Molly in the dark out here. The area is very open and very much well lit. There are dark corners, and there’s that ravine where creature might lurk, but I’ve never even seen a rabbit.

Other people walk their dogs at this time—between 7:30 and 8—but not many. I saw only one woman with a couple of dogs; they left the dog park and headed back to our campground.  And since in the mornings, Ed and I usually get out walking Molly before most people are out of bed, I can assume that the average dog owner expects their dog to sleep from about dusk (6:30 or so) until an hour after sunrise, say around 8. That’s almost 14 hours. Is that sensible?

At home Molly gets to stay outside until almost 10pm  and goes out in the morning at about 7:30. Earlier in the summer.

But when camping, she never seems to complain about the extra hours.

Back to me. It feels a little creepy walking up and down the street in front of the campground. It’s wide open and well lit—although not as well lit as the campground itself is. But it still feels creepy. Unlike a state park or a COE campground, there are all sorts of people who might decide to cruise through here. Not that I’ve seen any. The only people I’ve seen driving around seem to be residents at the RV park.

State parks are sometimes gated—Balmorrhea was—and they’re often far enough away from civilization that not many criminals would expect to find anything stealable there. So I can’t imagine them taking the time to make the extra drive out. Opportunistic thieves, maybe. Or homicidal maniacs…although even they wouldn’t expect to find a lone woman walking her dog out on the roads after dark. I feel safer in the remoter places than I do here. Strange.