New Mexico Here We Come!!

Sunday morning.  We woke up outside of Carthage, Missouri to cooler temperatures and lower humidity.  It was a gorgeous, sunny day, and we were excited to get back on the road.  We spent the day driving through Oklahoma.  

There were so many cattle!!   Lots of ranches but not all that much to see.  We stopped at an awesome tourist trap called Cherokee Junction.  They had all manner of Route 66 tchochkes, leather wear, and Native American style artwork, pottery,and woven baskets.  It was a fun diversion, but also a little depressing.  I love big tourist traps, including South of the Border and any Stuckey's, but there's a whiff of desperation and sadness about them too.  This place was supposedly run by the Kickapoo Nation, but I can't say I saw anyone working there who looked native at all.   But what do I know?  There are supposed to be a lot of fun stops along "Historic Route 66" in OK, but we had to stick to the highway, so we missed all of that.  Here are some fun pictures of things we missed:

 

Boy it would have been fun to see those, huh???  Anyway, after Oklahoma City, my favorite sight was the wind turbines.   You could see them from 12 miles away!   There were hundreds of them!!!  At first I couldn't tell what they were, but as we got closer they seemed to multiply and spread, and they were just beautiful against the stark, brown, flat landscape.  

Not the best picture, but hey, we were driving!  Please note the bug splatters on Old Gal's windshield!  Gritty realism...

 We stayed at a campground that was more like a glorified parking lot near Elk City, and the rest of the night was unremarkable except for the fact that there we saw some men in a restaurant with cowboy hats on!   For this Jersey girl, it was kinda cool; a real indication of how far we were from home.  

The next day we went through the panhandle of Texas.  It was filled with ranches and cattle and open land and those windmills you see in old movies. 

The highlight of our day was our lunch at The Big Texan - Home of the 72 oz. Steak, near Amarillo!  We had seen this place on the Travel Channel but had no idea where it was in Texas, and never expected to be there.  But how can you not stop when it's the only thing for miles and they advertise it every tenth of a mile from 50 miles out???!?   Plus, depressing as they can be, you know how much I love a good tourist trap!  And this was The Best !!!  They had a fantastic Route 66 tchochke collection in the enormous gift shop, plus steer heads and cattle horns, and a lot of Native American items similar to what we'd seen before like dream catchers & woven baskets.  Some even made in China!

 The restaurant was as big as a barn and two floors high.  Heads of every animal imaginable were mounted to the walls around the entire perimeter of the room.  It was so stereotypically "Texas" it was a little silly, but the steaks were not.  They were seriously juicy, seared to perfection and delicious. 

my normal-sized steak!

They are semi-famous for their 72 oz. steak contest.  If you can eat an entire 4 lb. 8 oz. steak with all the sides (baked potato and 2 fried shrimp) in an hour or less, you get it for free.   As if this weren't enough, if you do decide to take part in this meat-fest, you have to do so sitting at this table you see here with a spotlight and a big timer.  No thanks, and Yuck!!!  My arteries hurt just thinking about it!

We goofed around and took some silly pics for a bit, and then got back on the road.

Jimmy in the giant rocking chair

They have big boots

Jimmy is such a good sport!

I'm not sure if  Amarillo is that windy all the time, but it was intense and non-stop the whole time we were there.  I was glad to move on.  We had another 2 hours or so to get through Texas.  The wind made it difficult to keep the car in my lane and the flat brown landscape was dull and featureless, when suddenly the land got a little grassier and then it opened up on either side of the highway into small gorges as if we were on top of a mesa when before it was nothing but flat.  It was a welcome change and so beautiful!   Gradually the land became hilly, until finally we made it to NEW MEXICO!!!!  It took us 7 days and a few setbacks, but we made it!!!

However, all was not well with Old Gal.  The hills were a problem, and she was going slower and slower on every incline.  There was nothing but open scrub land on either side of the highway,  and Jimmy was getting worried that she was going to break down altogether at any moment.  We got off at the first stop, where the lone gas station was closed.  We continued on but now the adrenaline was coursing through my body, not knowing how far the next exit was and if anyone there would be able to look at our RV.  


Relief came another 10 minutes down the road, where Exit 2 had an establishment called "Terry's Truck Service".   What dumb luck!   Old Gal sputtered into the lot, and they were able to take her into the garage and get started even though it was about 4:30 pm.  We pulled out our portable chairs, and sat in the parking lot with Freddie for the next 5 hours.  At 9:30 the mechanic told Jimmy he thought the problem was fixed and the two of them went for a test drive.  A half hour later they returned.   Jimmy said they barely made it back.  It wasn't fixed.  


Old Gal wouldn't be fixed for another FOUR days. 

Those next 4 days were the longest month of my life...

Do I Need This??!?

We bought an RV.  


An older one, that had been sitting in south Florida for 3 years.  


Can you say 'musty'?  


How about 'smelly'? 

Oh, and everything has a light green coating of fuzz!   J., my hubby, was so excited about it when he drove it home and into our yard.  It was really hard to put on a happy face when I first stepped inside it and the smell hit me like a basketball to the head - jarring, dizzying, and nauseating.  

"Isn't this great?"  J. said with the excitement of a boy getting his first dirt bike.  "Well, it's something!" was all I could say.  I sat on the off-white leather couch - hmmm, comfy.  I tried to imagine us living in this thing full-time, but the thought made my stomach lurch so I pushed that out of my mind and tried to breathe.  Uck, that smell!  This was not good.  He says I ruin everything he's excited about by my negativity, and I didn't want to do that this time around, but he knows me too well to be fooled by some false optimism.  

"I'll get used to it.  It'll take a while, but right now, this is the best I can do".   Honesty being the best policy, I figured I would have time to get excited about it for real.  In the meantime, we set about fixing it up - I washed every surface, drawer, and closet, eliminating the green fuzz, and he gave it a new bed frame.  We changed it from 2 twin beds to one queen-size platform.  He worked on various mechanical issues - it's a 1987, and even though it has a new engine and a new generator, there are a million little things that don't work and need attention.  Then we got 2 feet of snow.  That put us off our schedule - we were trying to leave by the beginning of April.  The snow melted, we got back to work on the RV, and then I found out I needed surgery.

Do I need this?  Someone came up with the saying "When it rains it pours" for a reason!  It's because it's true!  It turns out I had had an ectopic pregnancy and it had to be removed.  This was not a planned pregnancy, but it made us sad just the same.  We had created a baby, but it couldn't survive.  Don't ask me how we would have raised a newborn in an RV, but that's something to ponder another day.  I went into the hospital for same-day surgery last Tuesday, and all went well.  The doctor did it laporoscopically, meaning he only made 3 small incisions, but he said I had been bleeding into my belly and my fallopian tube was a mess, so he removed it.     I've never really had surgery before, so I was scared to death, but I made it through and am recovering nicely.  I got sick from the anesthesia and my doctor had me stay overnight.  Other than that, it went very well and the pain in my abdomen from the incisions gets a little better each day. 


As I've been convalescing, it made me think: how many stressors can one person have at any one time?  As many as you can handle, I suppose, but I really don't want to find out how many I can handle.  We don't have steady jobs, we're losing our house, we get calls from creditors all the time, we have to ration money for gas and  anything else we need, we have no health insurance, we have to sell most of our possessions as fast as we can, and on top of all that, I had to have surgery.  It's a lot to juggle.  


The one thing we do have is each other, and that's a lot.  J. took such good care of me in the hospital and after, and I have been able to be much more positive about the RV in recent weeks.  I have learned that 'things' don't matter, but people do.  As corny as it sounds, go and hug the people you care about, and be present when you're with those you love.  The love and support of each other, family and friends are what have kept us going.  That love will continue to sustain us, because that's all that really matters.  So when all these stressful things rear their ugly heads, I think about the amazing nurses who made me laugh and gave me pain meds; the friends and family we laughed with yesterday at the Easter lunch; and my friends who don't live close but are only a phone call away.  

So maybe i did need all this, to show me what's really important.  I thought I knew, but now I really get it.  I hope all of you do, too!


We're hoping to be outta here in 2 to 3 weeks, but we still have a lot to do to make that happen!