December 6th - The Thing

December 6th:


Woke up at Walmart outside of the Casa Grande area. On the road by 9am which means we may be starting to get this travel thing together. Having dallied about for so many days (it's taken us 15 days to go 1,000 miles! At this rate we won't be in Florida until mid January) we decided it was a long distance travel day to catch up, so only occasional stops for Bandit and for us to take turns driving.

Ron, our friend from Hawaii, always talked about seeing THE THING. As the erstwhile traveller in the Southwest knows, there are billboards galore along the highways and the surest way to get customers is to promise mystery, ice cream, drinks, mystery, dangerous animals, unique attractions and mystery. So, the entrepreneurial owner of a Dairy Queen had plastered the highways with giant billboards proclaiming the never-ending delights that can be found ONLY when you actually see THE THING! 

We obeyed the signs from the universe and followed all the trails to see THE THING but, we didn't pay the $1.00 to go in and actually see IT.  Instead we bought ice cream. A good choice...but.....we took lots of photos of the billboards, but we cannot find them on any of the three cameras we have.  That's what happens when you don't pay the $1.00 to see THE THING.  All evidence disappears.

We ended the day in Las Cruces. Looked around for RV campsites and found they were ridiculously expensive (Doug is a Scot, as many of you know). So we did another night at Walmart, our home away from home.

This particular Walmart was located very close to a Starbucks and we thought we'd park close enough to pirate the WiFi from inside the trailer. We haven't had internet access for days and were behind on the blog and wanted to catch up before we lost our avid readers (Hello! That's you guys! Now you're all world famous as we've mentioned you here!). 

We were parked in a vacant lot out by the street and just settling in when we saw flashing lights outside the windows. Needless to say… WE WERE BUSTED!

We were greeted kindly by a security officer who suggested we move onto the Walmart lot for safety as they didn't patrol the area we were in. So we brought up the stabilizers and brought up the hitch and moved the trailer to where all the other RV's had been herded. We saw a little Casita, which is like our Scamp, but it was dark and we didn't get a chance to chat with the folks that owned it.

Here are some photos or a rest stop just outside of THE THING, and before we reached Las Cruces.