Day One
We started 2020 in a one-night-free, municipal RV park in Haskell, TX.
Downtown features this iron, building-mounted sculpture of leaping deer in Haskell.
(Click on any photos on this page to see it full size. Use your BACK button to return here.)
On our way west on US 380, we came upon the old Kent County Jail, built in 1894 in Clairmont, TX. Held “horse and cattle thieves, murderers, moonshiners.” Never broken out of!
By lunchtime we were in Post, TX, county seat of Garza County and, a town started as a utopian community by the Michigan cereal mogul C. W. Post in the early 1900’s after he acquired 225,000 acers. C.W. offered sites below cost to attract farms and businesses.
Post is located at the edge of the cap rock escarpment Llano Estacado, one of the largest mesas or tablelands, in North America, and the southeastern edge of the Great Plains. We could see the cap rock in the bluffs as we went up through some hills leaving town.
Shortly after lunch we encountered this archway in a style we’ve seen around Texas. This one once supported a sign to the Stud Duck Ranch. Now it leads to a cotton field.
Near the arch is this giant arrow. To the east of the arrow is an historic marker commemorating the Buffalo Soldier Tragedy of 1877 in Lynn County when African-American troops pursued a Comanche party. The Comanche, however, led the troops away from any sources of water, with the resulting loss of four soldiers and many horses and mules.
Around mid-afternoon, after traveling about 160 miles, we had reached Brownfield, the largest grape growing region of Texas. We stopped for the night in their free-for-5-nights, municipal RV park.
All told, it was typical of how we like to travel, shunpiking, sightseeing, and making slow progress toward a (possibly remote) destination. The next destination being Quartzsite, Arizona.
One more visual delight before moving on with the rest of our year! (And one of many reasons we love to wander.)
On to Quartzsite
We traveled on through Texas and New Mexico and into Arizona. Stayed a few days at our favorite SKP Co-Op, Saguaro, where we renewed a few acquaintances and made some new ones. (SKP is the nickname for the Escapees RV Club, a decades old club for RVers of all kinds. Saguaro is a co-op RV park started by the Escapees but now an independent non-profit at which Escapees members can rent or lease a space.)
Our next destination is two weeks in the desert of Arizona with a group of Escapees members, the Boomer “Birds of a Feather” or BoF. We had done it the previous two years and really enjoy the companionship and sharing. In previous years we’d received inspiration and ideas for our subsequent travel to Alaska and Newfoundland.
The gathering in Arizona is on land around the town of Quartzsite owned by the Federal Government and managed by the Bureau of Land Management, BLM. The BML allows free camping for up to 14 days on many square miles of desert. Many different groups meet throughout January and February. There is a big RV show for a week in mid-January that attracts tens of thousands of people.
We don’t spend all of our time at the Quartzsite site, we usually take short trips for shopping and sight-seeing. This year we went to see the Bouse Fisherman Intaglio. Bouse is a town to the northwest of our camp. An Intaglio is a geoglyph, or large design on the ground. This one, and many more in the general area, are on unknown age and assumed to have been made by the indigenous people of the area.
We have added to the lower-left corner of the photo a sketch of the intaglio so you can identify the features better. (The circle around the intaglio has been worn by the footsteps of visitors around the fence erected to protect the drawing. The “fish” outside has been made by a more recent visitor.)
On to Big Bend
In 2019 we had considered going to the Big Bend area of Texas, but couldn’t fit it into our non-schedule. This year, however we were more determined. First, however, we headed farther west to revisit a couple of favorite places and find some new ones.
One favorite is the Coachella Valley of California, a major date growing region. One date farm in particular, Oasis Date Gardens, has fantastic date milk shakes.
Another of our favorite places is Julian, California. High in the mountains, about 4,200 feet, between the coast and the desert, Julian, initially a gold mining town, is now known for its apple pie. There are several competing bakeries as well as variety of tourist attractions and services.
We took a different route out of town and discovered a fascinating phenomenon at Cuyamaca Rancho State Park, the “granary tree.” In some parts of the Acorn Woodpecker range they create granaries or “acorn trees” by drilling holes in wood, notably the Ponderosa Pine, then filling them with acorns for later eating!
From Cuyamaca Rancho we headed back east toward Big Bend. One notable night was spent at the Painted Rock Petroglyph Site, another BLM property, on the eastern edge of the Painted Rock Mountains. Aside from the views , the highlight is a small mound of sandstone rocks with hundreds of 3000-4000 year-old petroglyphs.
We continued to mosey east stopping along the way to visit friends and look for a place that could both sell us a pair of tires through a benefit of the Family Motor Coach Association (FMAC), another RV club, and align the frontend. It turned out to be harder than it sounds for various reasons.
Not to short-change our adventures along the way, but this is a year-end letter, not our travel blog, which you can review by selecting Home above, so on to…
Big Bend
Big Bend, Texas, is an area mid-way between El Paso and Brownsville where the Rio Grande makes a fairly sharp bend from flowing southeast to northeast. It then flows gradually back to the east and then southeast. The Rio Grande forms part of the U.S. border with Mexico. The land is so rugged and arid that there are both a national and a state park covering more than one million acres.
(with added highlights)
The Chisos Mountains are wholly contained within the Big Bend National Park. They were created by volcanic activity and rise to a height 7,825 ft (2,385 m) above sea level at Emory Peak. There is over ten thousand years of history within the park. One of the three campgrounds within the park is essentially within a caldera (green square on map).
Among the three frontcountry campgrounds administered by the NPS there are 183 campsites, all in high demand. We were able to score a site in the Cottonwood Campground (blue circle) and stayed four nights.
There are plenty of amazing sights and vistas in the park, but Cottonwood is near one of the most amazing, Santa Elena Canyon. The canyon is about seven miles long and the cliffs rise to 1,500 feet. A trail starts at the mouth of the canyon and goes upstream about 0.85 miles, at times climbing the canyon wall and at times along the river bank.
The Turn Toward Home
By the time we left the park it was mid-February and we needed to be home by mid-March. We made our way through the Big Bend Ranch State Park, which follows the Rio Grande northwest. Then on through Texas including Wichita Falls, where we finally got a pair of tires but no alignment that would have to wait until Shreveport. Saw the beautiful Wee-Chi-Tah statue, though.
In Gainesville, TX, we stopped to contemplate the memorial to the Great Hanging at Gainesville, which was the execution by mob hanging of 41 suspected Unionists in October 1862 during the American Civil War. Then we made our way to the swollen Mississippi River and up the Great River Road. In Helena, AK, –in the heart of the Arkansas Blues Delta–we learned of the massacre of possibly hundreds of African Americans that occurred in nearby Elaine in the Fall of 1919.
Since we’d been to Paris, TX, we decided to see Paris, TN. Both have replicas of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France.
Home
We arrived back in Pittsburgh in mid-March, a little earlier than previous years since Hanson had an appointment to have two wisdom teeth removed. Unfortunately, his oral surgeon suspended his practice due to Covid-19 the day of Hanson’s appointment.
Since then we’ve been following the Covid precautions and keeping pretty much to ourselves. We resumed the search for a new abode that we had started in September of 2019. The combination of looking for a house where the outside (building exterior, lawn care, and snow removal) would be cared for, think condominium, where we could park our van in the driveway, and following the precautions, meant that the search was complicated. However, we finally found a beautiful new house in a small condo neighborhood of friendly, laid-back people who accept our van.
We closed the last day of July and have spent the rest of the year in moving and making the new house our own. We had Kalyn, Jeff, and Jeff’s parents over to (safely) celebrate the closing. We took a break to carefully go to Chicago to help Isaac (safely) celebrate his 10th birthday. But other than that we have kept to our selves except for essential shopping. Zoom has been helpful for staying in touch with family and friends.
Fortunately, our family has been doing well. Greg’s church has been streaming its services through Facebook. Amelia has been continuing her work as a standardized patient mostly over Zoom. Isaac and Persephone have been attending school virtually. Their house has had to find creative ways to sustain the community they have built. For example, they reconfigured the back yard with heaters and benches so they can share their dinner time yet maintain safe distancing.
Kalyn and Jeff both employed by the Cuyahoga County Public Library which has been working hard to service the community while keeping the libraries mostly closed to the public. They are continuing to settle into the house they bought last year. Its been rough, now that we are closer to Kalyn and Jeff, to have to keep our distance.
We hope for a better new year for you and everyone you know. We are anticipating the day when we can safely wander the back roads of North America again and visit with the many friends we have made along the way.