Their Winnebago LeSharo, with the too-small Renault engine, had proven itself to be a failure. It was really too small for two people to be comfortable for a long trip. PLUS, there were, according to my dad, two kinds of trip in that thing: "the ones where we limp home, and the ones where we are towed home." They weren't going to Arizona in the Winnebago. That's a long tow to Florida.
In fact, there was nothing about their RV ownership experience that made us want to follow in their tread tracks. They were members of an RV network, Good Sam I believe was the name. The news letters were full of people trying to unload their expensive and maintenance-intensive monstrosities at a horrendous loss, and people wanting to rent their monstrosities to strangers, just to help with the payments and maintenance costs during the 95 percent of the time that they were not using it, watching it rot in the yard. Do I paint a clear picture of the joys of RV ownership?
So they called around and found a woman who was looking to rent out her Coachman Leprechaun, a twenty-six foot long box on a truck chassis with sleeping accomodations cantilevered out over the cab, a Class C motorhome. According to the owner it was "the last of the classic Cs." We met my parents over in Titusville one Sunday morning to inspect it and get the lowdown on all of the jazzy innovations her husband had invented for it. I wish I could remember what they were.
A couple of weeks later, on a Friday late morning in early May, my dad arrived in our driveway on Wisconsin Avenue in St. Cloud (our third and final residence in St. Cloud) driving "the last of the classic Cs." We loaded up our two weeks worth of gear and had a nice liesurely lunch before setting out on our last epic journey together.
My dad drove us north on the Turnpike to I-75 to I-10. It was time to pull into a rest area and have some supper. This is a given when traveling with my parents: you don't eat in restaurants, especially if there's a refrigerator and stove in your vehicle. As darkness was descending, Carmen took over the driving. After a while, my dad decided to go to their bedroom in the back of the box to try to sleep some. My mother went back there too, as there wasn't much to do or to look at on that long long haul across the panhandle of Florida in the dark. Soon we heard my mother giggling uncontrollably. We were greatly amused by the possible goings-on back there, but were disappointed to learn that the giggles were a result of the fact that the back bedroom, which hung way out beyond the back wheels, was pitching, rolling and bouncing like an E-Ticket ride (old time Disney World patrons will remember E-Ticket rides.)
Daylight the next morning found us in Louisiana and breakfast in a rest area. Lunch was in eastern Texas, and we pulled up in front of Carmen's mom and dad's house in Crosby, Texas in early afternoon. Olen came running out to help us get electricity and water to the RV and get 'er leveled up. Then we all went inside for conversation, a nice dinner and a real bed for Carmen and me - no giggling.
Sunday was Mother's Day. We both got to spend time with our (and each other's) mother. After a grand lunch and some more conversation, we loaded up and headed out. It was getting dark when we motored through San Antonio. The group agreed to pull off the interstate and drive by The Alamo. Nothing could have prepared me for it. It was like an old, oddly shaped storefront packed into a street lined with storefronts.
Since I brought up "the group," I should explain a few things about decision-making on this trip. We evolved a system during this adventure that has worked well for the four of us for all the years since. Each member of the group, when asked what they want to do, would answer, "Whatever the group wants." We figured out as time and mileage progressed, that my mother had three votes, Carmen had two votes, I had one vote, and my dad had no vote. In the event of a tie, Carmen and my mother would try to acquiesce to the other for a spell, until they (or my dad and I) got tired of it and swung the vote one way or the other.
Part of the plan all along was for the second stop to be Carlsbad Caverns. So we exited Interstate 10 at Fort Stockton early Monday morning and followed US 285 northwest into southeastern New Mexico, arriving in time for lunch. We secured our parking space in the campground, then followed the signs up a 600 foot tall hill and parked near the entrance to the 600 foot deep caverns. "We could have stayed down at the bottom of the hill and walked straight in!" I observed. We took the elevator down to ground level, and bought lunch at the concession stand deep inside the hill. So we did the caverns, which were very interesting. They had narration headphone thingies to tell the story of the caverns over many thousands of years, including the time a mere century or so ago when some entreprenurial humans busted into the side of the hill and extracted bat guano for sale as fertilizer. "See?" I said.
It was miserably hot when we came back up and drove back down. We hooked up to the electricity and ran the air conditioner full blast, barely making a dent in the stiffling interior heat. We blew the breaker on the panel three times. But as a wise and wonderful person once said to me, "When the sun goes down, it cools off." In the early evening Carmen and I walked down to the gift shops over by the road. When we returned to the campsite, there was a mule deer wandering the grounds. We roused my dad to come see it, but it wasn't near enough to see in the dark. Later, when we walked down to the bathrooms, there were several mule deer licking the floors in the showers. I guess you get your water where you can in an arid environment.
Tuesday morning after breakfast we packed the Leprechaun for the final push to the canyon. We mosied on up 285 to Roswell, where we saw no aliens that we knew were aliens, and turned left onto US 380. It was getting close to lunch time when we saw signs for the Valley Of Fires National Recreation Area. We turned off the highway and drove into a strange and beautiful place. The Valley is as green and lush as any place I've seen in New Mexico, but with ridges of black volcanic rock poking out of the green, looking like plowed furrows in the landscape. So we ate lunch without taking any pictures of this magical place, and moved on. Hey, I live in New Mexico now. I could nip down there any time I want. It's only about a hundred fifty miles from Albuquerque.
We crossed the Continental Divide at about 8:00 Tuesday night. Not long after, we pulled off for gas. We entered the Parking Lot of Potholes leading to a truck stop. I was driving, trying my best to avoid the big, deep holes, but there were just too many. The front right wheel went down, and the Leprechaun pitched hard to the right, popping open the cabinets on the left side. It straightened up in time for the left side to go down, popping open the cabinets on the right. While I pumped the gas, the others were busy picking up all the crap that had come flying out of the cabinets.
We were all getting pretty sleepy in the wee hours of the morning. We pulled into the rest area near the Meteor Crater and grabbed some shuteye. The next morning, on the way to the restrooms, Carmen spotted a tiny bunny in the huge rock arrangement by the building. It was very cute, and it just sat there. I guess it was accustomed to gawking tourists. The other thing that happened there was that we decided to go to the meteor crater on the way back east. Tonight was the full moon, so we didn't want to dally.
We reached the campground at the village of Grand Canyon around mid-morning. We secured our space, then drove to the nearest parking lot at the rim of the canyon. I could spend all day describing the grandeur of this massive hole in the ground, but until you are there you can't begin to get a sense of its awe-inspiring size and beauty. So go.
The only shoes I brought for this adventure were my flip flops. Walking the trail along the rim of the canyon is not a task best done in flip flops. By the time we returned to the campground, my feet had canyons of their own cracking open in my heels.My dad and I were ready for a shower, so we walked down to the bathrooms only to find that the showers were coin-operated, four quarters for five minutes. He went back to the RV, and I went to the trading post, both of us seeking quarters. By the time I returned, he was done with his shower and back in the RV.
After resting awhile and eating our supper we cast off lines (electric and water) and went back to the rim. We found ourselves places to sit on the rocks, and watched the sun set and the full moon rise over the canyon. Very beautiful.
Carmen and I wanted to go to the Ranger Talk that evening, so we were dropped off at the Visitors' Center on the way back to the campsite. We were early, so we did some shopping at the trading post before following the trail to the outdoor theater. The ranger had a slide presentation about the history, geology and wonderfulness of the canyon. Two aspects of this presentation struck us as odd: his visual aid for the layered geology of the region was a Milky Way candy bar; and his segues into arial views of the canyon were pictures of him dressed as Superman! Silly boy.
Thursday morning we packed 'er up for the return trip, which now included the Meteor Crater as well as a short visit to West Helena to introduce the parents to Carmen's grandmother. So we took our sweet time leaving, driving up to Desert View, across the Painted Desert, through the Petrified Forest with several stops to check out petroglyphs and such, and then backtracked on the Interstate to the Meteor Crater. It was definitely the smallest hole we saw on this trip, but pretty cool nonetheless. If you saw the movie "Starman," you got a pretty good look at it.
It was getting late by the time we finished our tour of the crater, so my mother was searching her campground guide for a place to spend the night. She found a place north of Holbrook, AZ called Buzzard's Gulch. The guide gave it a 4 out of 5 points for scenic beauty. When we arrived, we could easily see why. There was brown dirt stretching to the horizon in all directions save one: the dumpsters and air conditioning units on the back side of a shopping center. Carmen and I walked over to the shopping center and bought me a pair of cheap sneakers, some socks and some moisturizer to try to repair my cracked and bleeding heels. We plugged in the cable to the TV and watched the news. The weather report told us that the humidity was a crackling fifteen percent.
Friday morning we had a liesurely breakfast, unhooked ourselves and set out. By the time we made our way to New Mexico, we were thinking about lunch. We began seeing signs for Red Rock Park. We exited the Interstate near Gallup and followed the signs north to the park and The Red Rock Museum. Large in the landscape was an enormous red rock, hundreds of feet tall and hundreds of feet wide. When we arrived at the museum parking lot, there were no other vehicles anywhere in sight. I got out and walked up to the glass museum doors. They were locked, but I could see in. The doors on the far side were also glass, and just a few feet beyond them was the enormous red rock. Good thing there was a museum there to showcase that rock. But it was closed. We ate our lunch and moved on.
We crossed the rest of New Mexico stopping only for gas and one misbegotten dinner at a diner on Historic Route 66. We drove all night through the Texas panhandle. I was driving through Amarillo. The gas tank was getting low and I was thinking about stopping, but didn't. A long long stretch of nothing but nothing went by, and we made a critical decision to turn around when we had just enough gas to get us back to Amarillo. Good thing, too, because the next gas station east was at Shamrock, about a hundred miles away.
It was mid-morning Saturday when we pulled off the Interstate about fifty miles into Oklahoma. We spent two nights at Foss State Park on Foss Lake, watching the Mississippi kites soar the skies and the scissor-tail flycatchers dart after flies. All this time we had been on the lookout for roadrunners, but had seen none. Oklahoma was no exception.
Monday afternoon, after the long drive across Oklahoma, we camped for the night at Horsehead Lake in the White Rock Wildlife Management Area at the southern end of the Ozark Mountains in Arkansas. It was a gorgeous, lush place, especially after the dry brownness of Arizona and New Mexico. I went for a long walk - my heels felt much better. We saw goldfinches, a scarlet tanager and a bluebird. That evening, Carmen found a luna moth on the floor in the restroom. She enticed it onto her finger and carried it around for a while. Eventually it gathered the strength to fly. It fluttered about ten feet away before a blue jay streaked out of a tree and nailed it.
Tuesday morning we cast off again, making a side trip to Devil's Den State Park. As we were driving down the access road to the park, a roadrunner came running up onto a log and on up to the top of a branch sticking up. It posed there for a moment as we roared by. At last, a roadrunner - in Arkansas?
Tuesday evening, after the three hundred mile trip across Arkansas, we pulled up in front of Mum Mum's house. Olen came running out to help us get electricity and water to the RV and get 'er leveled up. "Didn't we just see you in Texas?" my dad asked. Yes, we did. Hmmmm.
We visited with Mum Mum, had dinner at the Golden Corral (Where Carmen had worked as a "Steerette" in her youth) and went to visit Evil Sister Tammie and her daughter Nikki at their house nestled in the woods a few miles away. Nikki did a fancy dance routine for us in her cowboy boots. Back at Mum Mum's Carmen and I had a shower and a real bed to sleep in before the push for home.
Of course, the push for home included one more stop. There was a CCC park in southern Alabama, Frank Jackson State Park, that the parents wanted to check out. My dad's brother Bob had worked for the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Depression, and my dad has a soft spot for CCC parks. And it was a very nice park and very nice campground. The big thing I remember was on the way there, on Interstate 65 south of Montgomery, the truck in front of us had one of his tires disintegrate, shooting rubber projectiles all over the front of The Last Of The Classic Cs.
I don't remember anything about the trip from Jackson State Park to St. Cloud, other than our last dinner in a rest area east of Tallahassee, for which I drained the macaroni and the lid came off the pasta pot and dumped macaroni into the RV sink. I believe we pulled in late on Friday night, reacquainted ourselves with our kitties Harvie and Ms. Mouse, and went to bed in our own bed.
On Saturday morning we washed down the Leprechaun, had a last lunch together, and my parents drove away to Titusville to trade the RV for their car, and went home.
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