Lotts On The Road: October 2016

September 16, 2016

According to Google, the drive from Tucson, AZ to Carlsbad, NM (if you pass by White Sands NM) is approximately 7.5 hours. We have decided to call this driving time "Google time" and this particular journey actually took us about 30 hours in the Big Rolling Turd-le (did I mention we named our RV?). We stayed overnight in a Wal-mart parking lot in Las Cruces, New Mexico and had a very slow start the next day. I'm not sure why it took us so long to get on the road but I don't think we managed to leave until almost lunch time and we didn't even have the slides out or anything hooked up to the RV. I guess it was just a combination of David trying to work and me trying to help Lorelei with school.

We finally hit the road and headed towards White Sands National Monument which is less than an hour from where we were. My plan was to arrive there, eat lunch, explore the dunes and do a little dune sledding and continue on our way to Carlsbad. I was a bit flustered when we finally hit the road and it wasn't until we were cresting over the first mountain pass that I suddenly thought to look at the gas gauge and saw the needle sitting on E!! I checked the miles to empty screen and it said 66.

My thoughts: UGH! Are you kidding me? We are entering the middle of nowhere New Mexico and we need gas... and lunch! !&@*# @*& @#&!^#*&@
It had taken us about 25 minutes to make it up the stinking mountain so we were way behind the predicted 58 minutes of Google time to reach White Sands and there wasn't a gas station between us and White Sands. So... back down the mountain we went BACK into Las Cruces to get gas and lunch. David found the closest gas station but since we have to buy about 75 gallons of gas the closest won't do... it has to be the CHEAPEST.
As you can probably imagine, going to the gas station in a 37.5' RV isn't the same is going in a car. We use the satellite view of Google Maps to check out the layout of a gas station to decide if it will be easy to pull through and fill up. The cheapest gas station was still being built when the last satellite photos were being taken of it but since David determined it was at a Wal-mart and Wal-marts are RV friendly we decided it would be fine and continued the extra 6 miles out of the way to get to it. We arrived and discovered that it wasn't a Wal-mart... it was a Wal-mart Neighborhood Market and we now know that these are not very RV friendly. We had to unhitch the car and drive around the parking lot to figure out if it was safe to pull the RV through or if we were going to have to back out the way we had come in. Fortunately, there was some room along the side that we could squeeze into so we parked the RV and left in the car to go get lunch. If you are wondering why we didn't eat in the RV, it's because we were too low on gas to run the generator (it pulls gas from our gas tank) so we couldn't cook anything!!
We made it back to the RV after lunch and checked out the layout of the gas station and determined that we could successfully maneuver into one particular pump. After we filled up and finally got back on the road it was after 2:00. I'm not sure where the day went but it was quickly slipping away! We contemplated skipping White Sands at this point but since we had to drive right past it on our route we decided we could at least stop and take a quick look at it to check it out.

David waving across a dune

Once we arrived to White Sands (I think it was around 3:30 at this point) we determined we definitely needed to spend a little time exploring it. We dug our snow sled out of the "basement" and hit the sand slopes! White Sands was great and even the dogs were able to come along with us to play on the dunes. The only thing missing was the ocean!

Wow, just getting back to this post after almost 3 weeks. Instead of dragging it out with anymore words, I'm just going to let the pictures tell the rest of the story. Enjoy!