Arizona Adventures!

Leaving New Mexico behind in a plume of dust, we headed across the border into the Apache Sitgreaves National Forest of Arizona.  We still had more than two weeks to kill before our little (potential) rental cabin in South Fork, CO would be ready.

We had decided not to push it too hard with the driving any more, both in terms of distance covered per day and types of road traveled.  From now on, we would be planning our routes much more carefully...

Our first day in AZ, we decided to stop and camp in the national forest, which I was concerned we could not actually do, since the federal government shutdown was still on.  But, Nate had faith that we would not only be able to camp, but we'd camp for free since there was no one around to collect fees.  He was right and we found a great spot in the Blackjack Campground-- alone except for one other group of campers, way across the park, that we only saw once.

Here is our site, which was great except all the trash that had been left behind by other campers.  I spent an hour picking up and figured that paid our camping fee.  :)

There was plenty of firewood around the campground, so we had a great campfire.  Check out the pile of cats on Nate's lap: they seemed thrilled to be staying anywhere besides the Walmart parking lot!

The next morning, we packed up and drove out along one of the most breathtaking roads we've been on (which was, thankfully, all downhill):

From there, our goal was to make it to Payson, AZ, another long day of driving.  So much for taking it easy.  ;)  On the way, we passed lots of dry desert, some surreal cotton plantations (yes, in the desert!  Who knew Pima and supima cotton came from Pima county in Arizona?!),

and then Lake Roosevelt with its hillsides full of saguaro cacti, which looked a lot like they were standing guard:

As we neared Payson, Baba G decided she'd had enough of the hills and the heat for one day.  Just south of town, we had to pull off the road and let her cool down for almost an hour before we could continue!  Then, a quick trash drop off in town...

~Classy!~

... and we were on the other side of town, happily finding the free campsite we'd googled up was (a) real, (b) really free, and (c) accessible.  We weren't expecting it to be very nice, given the price tag, but were happily surprised to get a prime spot right next to a cute little river with a fair amount of firewood nearby.  Here I am, driving across the bridge into the campground:

And here is Nate at the campfire, enjoying another microbrew (sorry, Mike... hehe):

After just one night (which was a Thursday), we packed up and moved on because LOTS of campers started arriving for the weekend.  We continued northwestward to Sedona, AZ to visit the famous Red Rocks: so gorgeous.

Sedona is a pretty upscale town.  So, just imagine the horror we must have caused when we brought Baba G and the paint-peeling Civic to town.  (hehe)  We imagined that locals and visitors alike were averting their eyes as we cruised the roundabouts in the center of town.

And then, to make matters worse, we pulled into the Safeway (grocery store) parking lot to google up a plan for where to stay next.  Yes, we were really flying by the seat of our pants on this part of the journey.  We were also committed to finding free camping, since we had been so successful at that, as of late.  The only free camping near Sedona, however, lay up the BIG hill between Sedona and Flagstaff.  So, we did the most reasonable thing we could think of: we called Mike and Diana, since they had visited Sedona just the year before.

The news wasn't good.  This was no "big dirt highway."  Mike and Diana both said the road was not just hilly, but also curvy and pretty heavily trafficked.  We rechecked our maps.  There was just no other good way out of Sedona, besides backtracking the same way we'd come in.  We are a lot of things, but we are not backtrackers.  ;)

So, we left the kitties locked in Baba G in the Safeway parking lot, and took a test drive in the car.  We came back too late to drive the RV up that night, but decided we thought we could actually make it up the hill the next morning, if we went right at the crack of dawn.

Fortunately for me (Sherri: not a morning person), when you "camp" in a parking lot, there are plenty of natural alarm clocks to make sure you don't sleep in too late.  In this case, it was a group of mountain bicyclists who were gathering before an early morning ride.  We were up and on the road before 7am!

I was still insisting on driving the RV at this point, so Nate led the way in the car and let me know whenever I was ok to cross the center line going around the tighter curves (which was quite often, actually).  So, for your astute types, yes, I took this picture (not very good) while driving the RV up the crazy hilly road.  Safety first!

Well, as you might have surmised, we made it up the hill in one piece (technically two, since we are always driving separately...).  And, we found another free campsite, but it was populated by a weird crowd and the sites were not anything even close to level for the RV, so we continued to drive north and then got on I-40 eastbound, with no real camping plan in mind yet.

When we had to stop for gas, we lucked out and found a station with a garage right next door.  We had been slowly leaking power steering fluid, which was coating our left front tire and brake and posing us a serious hazard if it continued.  So, while Nate consulted the mechanic-on-duty and bought some hose and hose clamps, then climbed under Baba G to fix the leak, I took some banana-pineapple-coconut bread to the mechanic to thank him for his help and got to work, looking for our next campsite.

Hours later... (I wish I was kidding)... Nate finally had Baba G all patched up and we continued east, with a destination in mind: Winslow, AZ (yes, like in that Eagles' song)-- specifically, a little city park with free RV camping!

Up Next: Standing on the Corner in Winslow, Arizona...

The City of Rocks and The Big Dirt Highway

If you every find yourself in southern New Mexico, you should try to spend a night or two at the City of Rocks State Park.  It's like a natural Stonehenge!  Don't be put off by the giant stone male genitalia near the entrance.  (hehe) 

We spent two nights camping in Baba G: the first at a water/electric hookup site (sort of parking lot-ish and not really our ideal kind of spot) and the second at a dry camping spot on the outer loop of the campground:

Since our lone solar panel had already impressed us with its output, we knew we would have no problem staying at a site without hookups and still being able to run lights and computers (and even the coffee grinder in the morning!).  It's so nice to be able to camp out in the more remote tent-camping-like sites and pay cheaper fees too!

We had a great campfire in very close proximity to Baba G (sorry, Mike...).  And during the days, we took a couple of nice hikes to check out the main attraction.  Yup.  Rocks.

While the scenery is mostly drab brown, the rock formations are striking, as were some of the smallest of the wildlife:

Gorgeous, aren't they?!  And flightless: obvious once you notice the tiny stunted wings.  They are either flightless adults (maybe locusts) or the last instar (larval form)... [maybe Ace and Kathie can ID these: all we've gotten is wrong answers so far!]

After City of Rocks, we headed northwest a bit to Silver City, which was intended as a quick stop before we visited a Buddhist couple with an off-grid piece of land where they suggested we might be able to start offering classes.

Thus begins the tale of the "big dirt highway," as it was called by the female half of the Buddhist couple.  We had explicitly asked whether she thought a big, old RV that did not like hills could make it to their place, since it was fairly deep in the Bear Mountains of the Gila National Forest.  We asked this before we even decided to head south from the Jemez Mountains.  Her answer was a resounding yes, so imagine our surprise when we determined (3/4 of the way into the mountains) that Baba G had absolutely NO BUSINESS driving on that crazy, bumpy, steep (up and down), awful forest road.

Yeah, that is SO not a road for our RV!

So, we stopped at the bottom of a really long, steep hill, parked Baba G, and took the car up the next big hill to the last turnoff to the Buddhists' place.  It was a no-go, even for the Civic!  There were giant ruts in very soft red earth: we would have gotten everything we owned stuck in there.  :(  So, we turned the car around, got back to the RV, took a deep breath... and started the slow drive back out again.

Once we made it back to Silver City, we decided we were too frazzled to even cook dinner... so we ordered some Domino's pizza, wolfed it down, and then with our proverbial tails between our legs, headed back to the nearby Walmart parking lot, where we spent the night before bidding a not-so-fond adieu to New Mexico the next morning.

Up Next:  Arizona Adventures!

It's All Fun and Games Until Somebody Puts An Eye Out...

Actually, it's not even necessary that someone completely puts an eye out: a close call pretty much puts an end to the fun and games.  And so ended our time in Jemez Springs.

Nate, while chopping some kindling at our lovely campfire on October 1st, got a "stick to the eye."

Sadly, we have no pictures to post to show you just how horrific HIS eye looked when it first happened... but here is someone else's eye with the same injury (yes, shamelessly copied from the internet):

is

So, when Nate came into the RV (where I was making hot cocoa... I think...), holding his hand over his right eye, and said "I think I really screwed up," that is about what his eye looked like.  In Nate's case, though, the blood was all the way up to the center of the eye (this is called a hyphema).

I knew it was bad, as soon as I saw it.  At MIT, I studied visual system development, so I knew just how fragile is the eye and all its delicate internal anatomy.

And, in the Jemez, we were an hour away from the nearest emergency room (east of us in Los Alamos).  So, I had him lie down with his head elevated on a pillow, while I frantically searched the internet and made a couple of phone calls for the right place-- not just the nearest place-- to take him for medical care.  In the end, we drove west and south, heading to the Sandoval Regional Medical Center ER (a branch of the University of New Mexico hospital system) just north of Albuquerque: it was over an hour and a half away.

Totally worth it.  It would have been better if there had been an ophthalmologist on duty at midnight, when we got there, but what are the chances of that?!

We were reassured by the doc that Nate had a completely "closed globe injury," which meant he had not ruptured the eye.  Great news, because open globe injuries most often result in blindness.  ;-{  Even so, I put Nate on strict bed rest (ok, propped up on the couch watching dick flicks, actually: there is just NO way to keep Nate lying in bed, doing nothing all day!).

Two days later, we returned to Albuquerque (to the main UNM hospital) for what we thought was an already-scheduled follow up ophthalmology appointment, only to find that no appointment had actually been set for us.  So, we did what anyone in such a situation should do:

We found a local brewery (Marble) and had lunch and a couple of beers!

The beer was great, but the menu was very small and the waitstaff seemed thoroughly uninterested in us.  Oh, well.  While we were there, we scrambled around on the phone and internet with various other options for ophthalmologists, hoping to score a miracle appointment that same afternoon... but no luck.

Meanwhile, back at the RV park (cue the dramatic music...) and unbeknownst to us, Steve (the owner) was trying to repair a leaking pipe on the main water line for the whole park, since he had taken a couple of reservations for the coming weekend, and, well, people sure do like to have their water.  We still don't know why Steve decided to do this on his own while we were gone, since the plan was for me to help him the very next day.  But, he ended up not being able to fix it and actually made it a bigger leak, while also getting stuck-- in terrible pain-- in the mudhole that was the only access to the leak.

So, the next day, I geared up in warm clothes (since it was VERY cold already: near freezing) and walked down to the pump house to help Steve with the leak, and-- surprise!-- got an angry earful about how we had totally let him down and were bound to keep letting him down.

In response to this totally out of the blue outburst, and already stressed out to the limit by Nate's eye injury and followup, I quickly decided we could not stay in Jemez Springs for the winter.  I came inside, told Nate what had gone down, and got online to see what Craigslist might hold for us.

Miraculous!  Just a few hours earlier, a small, inexpensive cabin in South Fork, Colorado had been posted.  Nate has always wanted to spend some time in Colorado, and we had actually tried to figure out how to spend a Christmas vacation in Colorado for the past couple of years, with no luck.  So, I called the cabin owner and found out the place sounded like it would work for us, but wouldn't be available until November 1st.

So, just ten days after his eye injury, Nate drove the Civic and I drove the RV out of Jemez Springs and to a second followup eye appointment in Albuquerque.  We stayed Friday and Saturday night, parked in front of our new friends' (Robert and Christine) home in ABQ and had a fabulous time hanging out with them.  They were so sweet to agree to having us come and stay with them, especially since we had JUST met them the previous weekend at Trails End!  Here they are, with their kitties, on their front porch:

Robert and Christine insisted we stay in their guest bedroom, but we felt our cats would totally freak out if we left them locked up in the RV without us overnight, so we slept in the RV both nights.  But, we ate every meal (including one brick-oven pizza dinner out on the town) together and went for a long walk around their neighborhood too.  Such a great visit!  Thanks to you both!

They also told us about City of Rocks State Park, which ended up being our next destination.  So, on Sunday October 13th, we pulled out of ABQ and headed south!

Up Next: The City of Rocks and The Big Dirt Highway...

Hot Springs and Hail!

Since our main purpose in going to Jemez Springs was, well, the springs... we tried out several that were nearby.  Our ratings:

(1) Most Convenient & Grossest (as in, so nasty we didn't dare even dip a toe in for fear of a microscopic lethal toe-eating pathogen): Spence Hot Spring. 

Here is Nate checking out the lower pool at Spence (note the sopping wet discarded towel... blech): 

 

 There is a nice big paved parking lot right on Highway 4 between the towns of Jemez Springs and La Cueva, which is apparently how Spence went from being one of the best hot springs in the area to the most crowded and disgusting.  Note to self: NEVER provide parking to any free, wilderness hot spring!  We hiked up from the parking lot one very chilly morning, only to find the springs littered with broken beer bottles, caps, cans, plastic bags, and even a left-behind (how, I ask you, HOW?) bikini bottom, pathetically floating in the lower pool (yes, the one in the pic above: we just couldn't bring ourselves to take a picture of it).  Blech.

(2) Coolest Mineral Formations, but not for soaking (the pool was way too tiny and fragile to even think about getting in): Soda Dam.

Here is what it looks like from the highway:

 You can see the river that flows through the right side of the dam, which creates an incredible roar that you'll hear in the video that follows.  The long gap right in the center of the dam is the entrance to the cave that contains the tiny warm pools and beautiful intricate, scalloped mineral formations.  Here is a closer view:

And, now, let's go inside for a little video (that gets cut off at the end... meh):

And just a couple more pics of the formations around the pools inside... because they are gorgeous!

(3) Easiest, but Most Expensive: Bodhi Mandala Zen Center.

For a suggested donation of $20 per person, the Zen Center's hot springs are nice, but they were just a bit too much for our budget line item entitled "Soaking Our Buns."  ;-)  We went twice.  Here are the pools, which ranged from "lobster pot" in the tiny one to the right of the statue to "too cool" nearest the river (at center top).  The two large pools in between them were, as Goldilocks would put it, just right!  You definitely come out stinking of sulfur, too... but in a nice sort of way.  :-)

(4) Perfection, if your car can handle 7 miles of rough forest "road" (each way) or you can handle a 7-mile round trip hike:  San Antonio Hot Springs.

Our first foray to San Antonio was by car.  Honda Civic, to be specific.  A tried a true 4WD vehicle.

What?  The Civic is *not* 4WD, you say?

Whoops.

The forest road to the spring is seven miles long and took us 49 minutes to cover, and apparently we were lucky to have missed Donkey Kong lobbing boulders at us!

We made it in one piece, and thought the car did too... though, after we had to replace the front right axle in December, we're not quite sure.  :(

Here we are, basking in the sun, and soaking in the natural springs that cascade down the mountain, starting with the hottest pools at the top and gradually cooling as they flow down through each successive pool.  Can you tell Nate was happy?

We made it to San Antonio one more time, the "honest way," as we like to say: on foot.  Going was great, soaking was fabulous, but the return trip left us wishing there would be another hot spring at the other end of the hike... if nothing else, for our weary feet.  ;)

 Yes, yes, we know: total Corona commercial.

After all our lovely soaking throughout August and September, we got a wake-up call on September 22nd that fall was abruptly ending and winter would be fully upon us sooner than we thought:  a hailstorm!  Time for some sensible RV footwear!

Here's a sample of the hail (it was so big and loud, we covered the Civic's windshield with a tarp to protect against cracking!):

Rather than having another month to laze about in hot springs, we suddenly found ourselves in a panic over things like winterizing Baba G for the first time ever... while we were still living in her!  You see, the geologist from Arizona who was living in the little cabin we were going to move into (at least temporarily) had not moved out in mid-September, as was his usual schedule.  So, we were about to be up the creek without a paddle...

Up Next: It's All Fun and Games Until Somebody Puts An Eye Out...

Arriving in Jemez Springs!

So, how on Earth did we decide to go to Jemez Springs, NM?

(Even the town's residents seemed sort of perplexed that we had found our way there...)

Well... before we left the Solar Ark, Nate and I had spent a goodly number of hours at the Three Ravens Coffee House in Tierra Amarilla, using their wifi to figure out an escape plan. 

This is Paul, the owner, who is also a professional musician, drum builder, joke teller, foodie (he was finishing construction on his new brick pizza oven when we were there last), perfectionist in all matters, and defender of Tierra Amarilla real estate interests from big-haired, loud-mouthed Texans (of course, there is a story behind that one...):

Our escape plan was not elegant, nor long-term: (1) run from the Solar Ark; (2) go somewhere with natural hot springs (Nate's idea) where we could soak our disappointment away and feel like we we at last having something resembling a honeymoon; and (3) stay somewhere cheap.

Nate zeroed in on Jemez Springs for its hot springs, and then I found an RV park called "Trails End" that looked more like a tent-camping park in the nearby town of La Cueva.  I emailed asking about site availability since the website said the park was for sale and only open on a very limited basis.  Steve, the owner, emailed us back within a day, said we could stay for the weekend (I told you it was a short-term plan, right?), quoted us a price we could handle, and we said we'd see him Friday (August 9th) afternoon.

We made the drive from MadDog Andy's place to Trails End, which took all of Friday.  Now, on the way from Key West to the Solar Ark, we had had plenty of long driving days that were long and torturous: mile after mile of asphalt with nothing much to look at, and almost constant hills to overheat our poor old Baba G.

But, this drive was spectacular!  Pictures don't do it justice, but here goes anyway:

And then once we turned off of I-550 onto NM-4, the scenery was even more spectacular as we drove past the high desert "Red Rocks" region,

 

a winding roadside river lined with aspen and cottonwood trees,

the Jemez Pueblo,

the quaint little town of Jemez Springs itself (no pics, somehow...), and then up up up into coniferous forest that surrounds La Cueva:

And, at last, we arrived at the camp (with cows, to the chagrin of the cats) that would be our home, not for the next two days, but for the next two months!

Up Next: San Antonio: The Hot Spring on the Hillside

After the Ark: Touring Two Sustainable Homes

At long last... the blog is back!

Hope everyone had very Happy Holidays!

I am going to try to catch you all up on the last three months... in short order.  So, without further ado, here is what we have been doing since our hasty retreat from the Solar Ark in early August:

(1)  During and immediately after our stay at the Solar Ark, we toured two very cool hand-built homes in Tierra Amarilla.  Sadly, we took no pics of the first (and I can't find my handwritten notes... sheesh), which was an incredible strawbale house built onto an existing tiny two-room home.  It was a veritable cathedral in strawbale, absolutely breathtaking.  The owner/builders Chris and Amelia built it themselves, in under two years, having designed it with the help of Amelia's brother, an Oregon architect.  Chris and Amelia were incredibly gracious, inviting us to tour their home after meeting us just a couple of times, first at the Chama Farmers' Market and once again at the Three Ravens Cafe.  We learned a lot about the building process from them and they, importantly, shared their mistakes with us so we wouldn't have to make them too!

(2)  The day we left the Solar Ark, we visited MadDog Andy's Log Cabin in the hills.  Yes, hills.  You know, those things Baba G doesn't like.

Having being reassured by Andy that the (forest) road to his place was fairly well-groomed and (maybe) passable in an RV when we talked to him a few days earlier, we fled the Ark and hung out in the grocery store parking lot in Chama, waiting for his call to let us know we was home and we could start out toward his place.  We were so eager to escape from the Ark that we took off right away in the morning, so we waited several hours before Andy called.  We were starting to think he might not call at all.  But, at last, the call arrived around 5:30pm.

The road was pretty twisty-turny and steep, so Baba G was having a pretty awful time climbing it.  At one point, there was a fork in the road that Andy had not mentioned: of course, we took the wrong tine and, suspecting as much, I drove the car up the other tine to do a little recon.  In the mean time, Nate and I lost walkie-talkie contact and he decided to back up and follow me... except that he backed right off the road and into a ditch.  By the time I got back to him, he had whipped himself into a pretty good tizzy.  Fortunately, I have had lots of *ahem* inadvertent off-road experience, driving in snow and ice in winter, so I talked him right through a pretty easy extrication.  :)

Then, we decided it was time to call Andy and ask him how much farther we had to go.  Instead of just giving us a simple answer, he came riding down to us on his mountain bike!  We all drove up to his place together, with him hanging on to the driver's side window and talking to Nate the whole time-- a bit of a maniac.  Of course, we liked him right away!

Here are Nate and Andy, at the start of our tour of his place:

Andy gave us such a great tour, regaling us with the tale of how he built his cool log cabin-- himself, with almost no help-- in a SINGLE SEASON!  Since he finished the cabin, he has also put in seating for an outdoor drum circle (he is a professional drummer), with the seats all made from cement-enclosed recycled tires:

At one end of the circle, he has also built a horno (oven) made of red brick pavers covered in stucco.  His cat, named "Bat," loves to sleep in it because it even retains the solar heat it absorbs each day:

He also put in a root cellar and it was full of canned vegetables for the coming winter:

It was really inspiring to see just how closed-loop Andy been able to become: in addition to growing and canning his own veggies and fruits, he also employs a composting toilet (which makes a lovely stuff called "humanure") and has a recycling shed where he collects all his non-compostable trash and turns it into useful and, in many cases, really beautiful fixtures.  Check out the beer bottle-cap lined door of the shed:

And here is his newest pride-and-joy fruit tree, a dwarf Russian giant purple crabapple (wearing jeans and flip-flops... I guess he paid extra so it could have legs!):

 
Once the sun went down, we were forced to conclude the outdoor portion of the tour and head inside.  Andy had spent just as much attention on the internal details of his cabin and it was really beautiful and artistic.   This is the zia symbol (also on the NM state flag) he inlaid into the tile entryway floor:

We ended up hanging out with Andy, getting quite an education about New Mexico history, sustainable building, and-- importantly, for our next destination-- what to do and see in Jemez Springs, where Andy had grown up!  At 2am (!), we headed out past the anti-bear spikes on the front door frame and past Andy's awesome bear-guard-dog, with Andy's warning still ringing in our ears that if we heard a bear while we slept in the RV (a little way down the road... as far as Baba G could climb!), we should just lay on the horn in several long, loud blasts... and he would come out with his bear gun and his dog and rescue us.

Andy, you are just the BEST host ever!  :)

Up Next:  Eight Weeks in Jemez Springs, NM, Part 1.