We actually got out early this morning – 8:45! That’s better than any day so far. We went through 4 states today. Of course, we started out in Meade, KS.
It was still light out when we got to the location where Mark had intended to stop for the night, in Carrizozo, but I convinced him to go to the next town, and I found an RV park on the map in Tularosa. Tularosa was half an hour away and it started getting dark. When we got to the road we were supposed to turn on, it was too dark to see and Mark passed it. My GPS suggested we turn left at the next road and make a loop back to the highway. We went left down the road and turned right where we were supposed to start the loop back to the highway. It was a small gravel road and when we got to where we were supposed to turn right again, there was only a ranch fence there. We were on a dead-end road. Mark got out with a flashlight and walked up the road to see if there was any way out of our predicament. You can’t back an RV down a road when you’re pulling a tow dolly with a car attached. Fortunately, there was a house at the end of the road and Mark spoke with the owner about our situation. The owner of the house told him there was a way to drive around his house so we could get the RV heading in the right direction down the road. Mark had taken the car off the tow dolly and he told me to take the lead to the campground. I got us to the campground and drove to 2 sites and chose the second one for him to park the RV in. That was where things really started to get hairy. I was watching Mark back into the site and I could see that he was going to get caught under some tree branches. I called him to tell him but it was too late. He hit the branches and I saw a couple of things fall off the roof. Mark stopped and got out to have a look. The branches had hit the dome over our shower and broken it.
When I chose that site, it looked spacious, but I didn’t take into account the lowness of the branches. Why didn’t the campground owners cut those branches? At this point, we decided to try a different campground, but I couldn’t find any that would let me make reservations for the night, and understandably, Mark didn’t want to take the chance of getting to the next RV park down the road and running into problems there. He asked me to plot a course for the nearest Walmart which was 13 miles away. It’s a comparatively tiny Walmart, a neighborhood store, but we called in advance and they said we could camp in their parking lot for the night.
Oy vey! What a night this has been!