We made a mistake last night, when we impulsively jumped on the $10 RV park in Carrizozo without checking the Valley of Fire Recreation Area.  After leaving the park in the morning we went the extra four miles to check out Valley of Fire (administered by BLM) and discovered a beautiful campground sitting atop a height of land and surrounded by the exotic and mysterious black lava flow that gives the area its name.

Well-developed trails ran through the lava flow, so access looked easy, and from our experiences at the lava sites in northern New Mexico and Hawaii, I know we would have liked exploring the area.  Best of all, had we stayed here overnight we wouldn’t have heard the trains honking at the grade crossing all night.  It definitely would have been worth it to us to skip cheap full hookups and stay here.

Because of this, Eleanor suggested that we start a list of places we’d like to visit during our return trip in September, which Emma is now keeping on a notebook.  I used to do that sort of thing when we were full-timing, since we kept crisscrossing the country, and it paid off with an abundance of ideas no matter where we were.

As I had expected, following Rt 54 has given us a very different and worthwhile path to follow through New Mexico.  The road rolls and winds through a series of decayed villages and outposts, past mining ghost towns and recreation areas, and tiny slices of humanity clinging to remote homesteads despite the loss of any economic rationale.  There aren’t a lot of people, but for the independent and sharp-eyed traveler the road still has stories to tell.

Part of the story can be gleaned from the dead motel signs, all former neon, advertising places that seem to follow a narrow theme: Sands, Sun & Sand, Desert, Western.  Route 54 joins the famous Rt 66 in Tucumcari, and of course there you’ll find a slew of old road artifacts, but even when Rt 54 travels alone the signs hint of a past when this road was a main byway through the west.

For the most part the road is fairly smooth, but there are a few rough spots.  I hardly notice these in the Mercedes, cushioned by a full air suspension and extensive soundproofing, but poor Eleanor felt every kidney-pounding pothole and pebble thanks to the stiff suspension of the Miata.  That may have accounted for the bathroom breaks every 60-100 miles.

In Oklahoma and Texas the road flattens and straightens as it passes through vast grasslands and mammoth feedlots.  There’s not much to capture your eye except vastness, and the intermittent towns filled with grain silos and businesses that service the farming industry.  Oklahoma has one notable town (name withheld) that seems to be solely populated with single-wides.  The place gives the impression of being one tornado away from returning to grazing land permanently.

In keeping with our plan, we tried to make some mileage today, and ended up going 400 miles to Liberal, KS.  There was no firm plan of where to stay but Eleanor put in one criterium: stay away from the rail line, so she could get a good night’s sleep.  Unfortunately the rail line follows Rt 54 apparently forever.  We immediately rejected the first RV park we spotted along the highway because of the nearby railroad grade crossing.

This led to a minor “find” just a few miles further, the relatively unknown Arkalon Park & Campground, which I believe is run by the city of Liberal.  It’s a mile down a dusty washboard road, across the railroad tracks, and past the house with the Alaskan Husky who will pace your car for several hundred yards.  The campground sits in a shallow river valley, surrounded by tall cottonwood trees.  A railroad trestle is visible perhaps 1/2 mile away, but no crossing, so no horns.  The camp host was glad to see us since most people stop at the first RV park, and take our $15 for an electric site with concrete pad.

The only fault of this park, from my technophile perspective, is that Verizon offers only a weak bit of  “extended” signal here.  That means I have no Internet connectivity and intermittent data services on the iPhone.  I was able to post a tweet from the iPhone last night with some effort, but this blog is being posted from the road after leaving the campground.

We aren’t sure where we are going from here.  It’s still sunny, warm, and dry out in the west, and we know for sure that we will soon cross into the humid and flooded central states.  It’s hard to get psyched to continue plowing east (even though I picked up another obligation yesterday that requires our presence in Elkhart IN by Thursday), so we will probably will find a place to hole up on Monday for purposes of doing some work and malingering.  Also, as we were leaving the washboard road from the campground, the Miata’s “Check Engine” light went on, so we’ll need to look into that sometime (the engine is running fine and there are no other symptoms, so I’m thinking something got jostled loose).  All of those factors define our goal for today: find a halfway decent spot somewhere in eastern Kansas to spend a day or two.

We’re out of the house box now (and into the tube), traveling northeast.  Even though we left a day later than originally planned, we have plenty of time to get up to our destinations in the swamped central states.  And once we reached the bright sunshine and warm desert sands of New Mexico, I began to wonder if it was such a great idea to zoom-zoom north and away from this fine weather and scenery.

When we reached Alamogordo NM, we paused at the roadside to talk about this.  (Since Eleanor is in the Miata following Emma and me in the Airstream, we have our conferences during rest breaks.)  There was a fierce temptation to pause at Oliver Lee Memorial State Park just south of Alamogordo for a couple of days of hiking.  There are some nice trails in that park that we’ve wanted to explore since our first visit several years ago.

But we have only a few days available for play on this voyage. Stopping this early in the trip would force us to do more driving mid-week, when I’ll be needing time off for work.  Not only that, but we would have to do three or four days of driving in a row, which will make us all crazy.  We eventually decided that it would be better to press on and have a break on Monday and Tuesday even though that break will probably be in some dull flat mid-western town where rain will be in the forecast daily.

So we continued on, up Rt 54 through Tularosa and eventually here to the little town of Carrizozo, elev. 5400, pop. 1000.  The drive was beautiful but thankfully uneventful.  Uneventful is what you want when you are trying to cover miles.  The Miata seems to be in fine shape and turned in a remarkable 37 MPG on its first highway tank of fuel.  Eleanor is finding it reasonably comfortable for all-day driving, and she’s cocooned in there with a collection of CDs, snacks, drinks, and even a few leftover Mother’s Day mums in a tiny jar of water.

Part of the Miata’s exceptional fuel economy must have been the mild tail wind we enjoyed all day, since the Airstream/Mercedes combination gave us 14 MPG at a consistent 65 MPH. I’m glad for it, since it means we can coordinate fuel stops from here on in; each of us can easily go 300 miles with plenty of reserve.

There’s a steep climb out of Las Cruces heading west on Rt 70 to  White Sands Missile Range, which reminded me of the only weakness of the Mercedes as a tow vehicle.  It won’t blast up any grade at highway speed.  I don’t know the grade percentage of this particular stretch of road, but it felt like 10%.  Normally we blow past tractor-trailers on grades, but when steeper than >8% we start to lose steam.  In this case we ended up in the “slow lane” at 30 MPH for about half a mile.  The Merc’s 3-liter diesel six is very torquey, so it always gets there, but not always at top speed.

This is less of an issue than you might think, since such grades are rare and there’s always a lane for slower traffic.  My take is that it’s just a chance to observe the scenery in greater detail.  I actually don’t mind this, since our prior tow vehicle (Nissan Armada, 5.6 liter gas V8) wasn’t much faster on hills and either its engine or transmission tended to overheat when stressed.  The Mercedes doesn’t seem to have that issue, and the transmission is smart enough to tell the engine to limit power if it is in danger of overheating.  So while we weren’t tearing up the asphalt on the way up the mountain, I didn’t have to be concerned about damaging the vehicle.

We are getting back into the routine of Airstream living.  It has been nearly 7 months since we last traveled long-term, with only a week-long trip in December to keep our family-coordination-in-a-tiny-space skills in practice.  Each time we do this Emma takes up more space, which requires small adjustments.  Not only is she physically bigger (now 11 years old and 58 inches tall) but she is more of an individual each time with her own ideas.  When she was little she was more like (oh, don’t take this the wrong way) a pet.  Now she’s a third person.  Fortunately she’s an easy-going third person and isn’t yet trying to tell us everything that we are doing wrong.

We had planned to end up somewhere that was nowhere, and we have succeeded.  Carrizozo is not known for much except the large volcanic flow nearby known as either Carrizozo Malpais or more poetically “The Valley of Fire.”  Otherwise the major feature we have noticed is the active Union Pacific railway line directly adjacent to the diminutive motel/RV park where we spent the night.  The $10 full-hookup price is somewhat offset by the passage of fast-moving Ferromex and UP trains, four or so last night, each of which was obliged to give long and loud blasts of the horn because of the grade crossing nearby.  Still, we managed to get a night of sleep. The plan is to swing by the Valley of Fire overlook on our way out this morning a take a few pictures.  That will be the bulk of our touristic activities today.

Our route deliberately bypasses the quicker Interstates for a scenic tour through New Mexico, the tip of Texas, a fraction of Oklahoma, and a whole lot of Kansas, along old Route 54.  This is a very direct route, which promises to take us through grasslands today.  Perhaps not the most fascinating views but we’ve learned to accept that the central portion of the country is relatively featureless whether you travel through Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, or South Dakota. You take what you can get, and at least this is different.  I bet we’ll spot a few oddities worth mentioning on the walkie-talkie, like the giant pistachio nut in Alamogordo that looks like “Audrey II” from Little Shop of Horrors.

One of the nicest things about traveling by trailer is that you aren’t locked to a fixed schedule, most of the time.  Last night, when it was obvious that Eleanor and Emma were going to be completely stressed trying to hit our target departure time, I bowed to reality and suggested we simply delay our launch long enough to allow everyone to complete their final tasks in a relaxed fashion.

It was actually a pretty easy call.  Had we continued to aim for the 10 a.m. Thursday departure, Eleanor would have been up until 1 a.m., Emma would have been anxious about forgetting something, and neither of them would get a good night’s sleep.  We’ve been in this situation before, and it has worked out only because I do the driving and the two of them can collapse into the car and doze for a few hours on the first day.

But this time Eleanor is following in the Miata, and so she needs to be alert and feeling good.  So it made sense to offer a 24-hour extension last night to which, after considering, Eleanor reluctantly agreed.  She had really wanted to hit the target — a phenomenon that you’ve heard me mention before called “get-there-itis.”  It can be dangerous to let your desire to make a deadline overcome your good sense and survival instinct, and it’s hard to see that you’re getting into the get-there-itis trap, so it was my role to look at the situation from a more distant perspective and make the suggestion.

If we’d been traveling by any other method, it would have been expensive or impossible to make such a wholesale change in our plans.  Just imagine the frantic calls to hotels and airlines, not to mention the brutal cancellation or change fees we would have paid.  Traveling by Airstream means we don’t need to have a plan.  We have a rough idea of the route we will take to get to Ohio (with several approximated stops along the way), but we have no reservations, no obligations for the next week, and no need to make apologies.

The route has gotten a little more convoluted than I had first thought.  In a desperate attempt to avoid covering the same asphalt that we’ve run many times before, I have mapped a route through the lonely grasslands, crisscrossing old Route 66 at times, and largely off the Interstate highways.  It may or may not be interesting, but it will certainly be different.  The first part of the route will actually cut our total route miles a little, which is nice considering current fuel prices, but we will negate any savings later by meandering north to Chicago and (after Alumapalooza) up into Canada for a while.  Fortunately, I’ve got a fuel card and I’m not afraid to use it.

I’m also not afraid to just toss the routing and find another way.  Why limit ourselves?  As long as we get to Indiana by Friday the 27th (for dinner with friends), we’re fine.  I really hope we’ll spot something along the way, or think of something, that makes us detour to a completely unexpected and wonderful new experience.  That’s the best part of roadtrips.  There’s a lot of stuff between here and there — let’s go find some of it, when our trailer and our brains are ready for travel, tomorrow.