Category: Personal

Texas bound

Thursday April 2nd 2002

A beautiful Thursday morning here in New Mexico, clear skies, another 80 or 27 degree day, we will have a little tail wind as we head east today on Interstate 40. Our expectations are to get into Oklahoma today after cutting across the Texas panhandle, and knock off another couple of hundred miles (three hundred and twenty kilometres) off of the journey back to Ontario. We have made it to Sayer OK, and after our travel today of 236 miles (380 kilometres) we have covered over 900 miles (1445 kms), tomorrow should have us passing the half way mark, again the highways are empty, I counted the passenger cars that passed us this morning and for the first hour it was 11 passenger vehicles, trucks and RVs only but it is making for a great drive.

Thunder was performing well through the mountains yesterday, but today we noticed a little stumble on a few grades as we rolled into Texas, after we made our way up through the high plains of New Mexico. The weather has been mainly clear and warm, between the coach alternator and the solar we are maintaining full batteries, and are trying to stay up to date with the most recent virus information as we move from state to state. We have tapped out our Verizon hotspot, and are now working on our US cell phone data, which should get us back to Canada or at lest real close … so the blog is safe for now … lol

Oklahoma fuel prices, are as shown here, todays fuel 20.8 gallons (78.8 litres) @ $2.22 per gallon (with our Good Sams Fuel discount) for a total of $46.18.

Much lower cost today because most of the day was across the flat high plains of Texas, in fact the on board computer has increased our fuel mileage 0.2 mpg over the last two days.

So let’s just throw some numbers out for March 2020. Of the 31 days we spent 11 with full hookups, which left 20 days of boondocking, our total cost for camping $347 or $12 per day this included a one year permit for Arizona State Land. We travelled 807 miles (1299 kms), as we moved back from Las Vegas Nevada to multiple spots in Arizona and on to Las Cruces New Mexico as we started back to Ontario. We ran the Generator for 1.9 hours one evening after multiple cloudy days, and 4.1 hours of boiler time to heat water, and we brought in 6817 amp hours of power from solar, in fact 18 days operating solely on our solar.

We are staying in a Flying J parking lot this evening, after topping our fuel tank, we settled in for the evening. We try to stay away from the truckers portion of the lot as Flying J is already very RV friendly, and provides a limited amount of spots for us.

But this jackass has now taken three of the spots by pushing slides out on a dropped fifth wheeler. DO NOT BE THIS GUY!

As Always: Practice social distancing and be safe!

April’s fools day

Wednesday April 1st 2020

Day 3 of our trek north

Day three finds us in an empty parking lot at the Cracker Barrel in Las Cruces NM, enjoying a take out breakfast, it’s what we always try to do for the use of a little piece of parking lot. The Cracker Barrel chain is very good to the RV traveling society, this restaurant alone has 7 RV/Bus parking spots, our coach fits fine but we have to detach the towed to fit. In this case we were able to just tuck into the outer parking ring that we were able to settle into, well because we were the only RV here and one of at most a dozen vehicles.

  • Breakfast to go
  • Biscuits and gravy
  • Pecan pancakes

So you might be wondering how the drive across the country, well in the most simplest terms it’s been really good, other than trucks and RVers there is little to no passenger vehicles. In fact it’s amazing how well traffic moves when the majority of drivers on the road are professional … I talking about the truckers, no more jack asses cutting in and out of traffic, not having a clue what they are doing or where they are going to until it’s too late. Ya not even one hard braking situation because the traffic is moving smoothly, even when construction had closed one lane there wasn’t some jerk in a BMW or Cadillac cutting into traffic at the last moment!

Yesterday was just a straight shot east on I-10 for 265 miles, but today we are headed northeast to catch I-40 east of Albuquerque NM so I-10 to I-25 to US-70 to US-54 then catch I-40 east bound at Santa Rosa NM. Quite a scenic route by the White Sands National Monument the to 6500 feet (1982 meter) of elevation, the roads were pretty good, but here is my question of the day … why when a stretch of road is no longer good enough to maintain the speed limit … rather than repair the road … let’s put up a couple of dozen road signs and drop the speed limit twenty miles an hour which is still way too fast for the bad road condition … so just a simply why?

It turned out to be a bigger day than we usually, with 311 miles (500 kms) which is well over our normal day, but the day was overcast with a little high cloud, the roads were clear, light traffic, a few hours later and we are now settled into a busy Flying J for the night. Temperatures are low 80’s (27 Celsius), a lovely evening for sure. Fuel cost (rolling rent) $117 for 47.3 gallons (179 litres) at $2.48 per gallon. I’m liking the dropping fuel prices but I fear we will soon be having dropping temperatures to match, we are making good time and will be back in Canada soon.

Remember to be safe out there, and stay healthy!