Tuesday, October 31, 2017

HAPPY HALLOWEEN, and Happy Birthday to our daughter-in-law, Lori!  We arrived in Willcox, AZ in good shape today, and early!  We are now on Arizona time, so we fell back an hour.  They never do Daylight Savings Time, so we are done changing our clocks for this winter!

When we were in Manitou Springs, Colorado, they were all decked out for Halloween!  I've been saving these shots for today! 

             We liked this guy the best.  It was at a very good custard shop, so we had to indulge!

These are just some of the mountains surrounding this area.  We had several warnings today, to watch for blowing dust that could impair our vision on the interstate.  We had no problems. 

We did arrive in Arizona today, and it's a good feeling.  We will spend two weeks in Willcox, and do our hiking and geo-caching here.  It's a beautiful area and I will only send you the best pictures (of many) that I will take.  We have our dish up, and we should get the Badgers and Packers, so life is good! 

Monday, October 30, 2017

Our one full day in Deming,NM and we wanted to wrap up some caches that, we hadn't looked for in previous visits.  Deming is a nice stopover on our way to Arizona, as it's easy on and easy off.  We got a good glimpse of this little town today with caches on both ends of town and in the center, as well.  It's a poor community, but the homes we did find south of town, were quite nice.  That's where the bigger vegetable farms are found.  One cache took us to a farmer's outlet for fresh fruits and vegetables, so we stocked up on melons.  They have a wonderful museum here, and we had seen it on a previous stopover, but we would highly recommend people to see it. 

        This is a Native American symbol that was painted on the side of a restaurant in town.

         This geo-cache took Jim to the center of a Labyrinth.  The trail leads to the cache!

This is a huge pottery piece that is by the visitor center.  This symbol is on their license plates and represents the sun.  It had to be three feet tall. 

We found many of the caches aren't maintained very well, so it was a bit disheartening to find so many missing, or log sheets are gone, or way too full, so there was no place to sign your handle.  We leave tomorrow for Willcox, AZ and will settle in for a couple of weeks.  

Sunday, October 29, 2017

We haven't posted anything since Thursday, and it's because we haven't done much.  The cold front arrived Thursday night and with the winds, it blew up the sands and dust from the area.  We opted to just stay in Friday.  Saturday we watched football.....the Badgers did get a win, but it wasn't pretty.  They have lots to do down the stretch, if they are to be a contender.  We did watch the Ohio State and Penn St. game, and it lived up to the hype! We are also, watching the World Series, and it seems that they are well matched.  Today, we move to Deming, NM and will be there two nights, arriving in Willcox, AZ on Tuesday.  I will be bombarding you with beautiful scenery, once we get back to our favorite hiking area.  We have made the southeastern part of AZ our destination, since we discovered it, back in 2006.  We missed one year, when we traveled to the Northwest and down the coast.  We usually don't repeat places to visit, but this is definitely our favorite place, and The Chiricahua National Monument is very special.  It has a lot of history and it gets us in shape for our hiking in The Valley, when we settle in Apache Junction for the winter.  I probably won't post anything until Tuesday, unless something exciting turns up! Well, I was wrong!  We had a good travel day today but I want to post a couple of pictures of our trip today.

This is the scenery we had to enjoy on our travels today.  We had to go over this mountain range after we left Alamogordo.

I always have my camera handy, when we travel, as I never know what I'm going to see.  Well, today was a first!  This U-Haul was towing the back half of a Volkswagen car, attached to a motorcycle (somehow).  There was a back seat in the car portion, so I suppose three people could ride in this contraption.  We are at 69 degrees, sunny and somewhat hazy.

Thursday, October 26, 2017

We have been to the White Sands National Monument before, but we see a few new caches out that way, so that's where we headed today.  It was 82 degrees out there today, so it was HOT!  We did a Virtual Cache there, and just spent a little time driving around.

We drove along the park road, and it looked like snow banks along the roadside.  It's sand!  It's quite an interesting place to visit.  When we were here last time, we saw the white lizard, that evolved over time to adapt to this environment.  The only way we could identify it, was to see his shadow in the sand.  Otherwise, he was totally white, and if it weren't for his shadow, we would have never seen him. It was too hot today to stick around to see if we could find another one.

Wednesday, October 25, 2017

We are staying longer in Alamogordo to do more caching, and today we tackled the 100 caches in a one square mile.  They are laid out east to west with ten caches in a row.  We tried to go from cache to cache (at least the required 528 feet apart), but the terrain didn't allow us to do that.  In 6.3 miles we found 40 caches and had one that we think was washed away with recent rains.  There wasn't much sign of life out there, except for the desert plants, creosote and catclaw bushes.  You learn in a hurry, which one to stay away from.  We rerouted several times to get over, around or through washes that were quite deep, so that added to our difficulty of trying to stay in a straight line!  We did see an Agave plant mangled, and we think it was a javelina that had just eaten it.  It looked pretty fresh.  We saw one lizard and no snakes!  This was definitely desert, but I have never seen so many rocks in one area as we saw today!

All of the caches were hidden under rocks, so how hard does it look to you, to find them?  We did see that there was a pattern to what this cache owner did, so we got wise to that right away.  A few of them gave us a hard time to find, but we felt good at the end of the day.

All the caches were preform tubes, so they were all nice and dry.  It doesn't rain out here very often, but it did rain last Wed.  As you can see, we are prepared for the sun.  Long sleeved cotton shirt, jeans, wide brimmed hat, and I even wore my visor!  Of course, we put sun tan lotion on and carried our water pack on our back. We'll sleep good tonight!

We were caching in the foothills of the Sacramento Mountains.  The closer to the mountain that we got, the more treacherous the terrain.  We kept our eyes on the three domes that you see here.  Nice backdrop.  I think we will do something less strenuous tomorrow, and possibly go back out Friday.

Tuesday, October 24, 2017

When we first arrived in Alamogordo, we made a trip to the pistachio and wine shop near by.  We bought pistachios for all of our children and shipped them off.  They were a surprise, and Lynn's were the last to be delivered, on Monday.  I guess she must live the farthest away, or the postal system isn't as effective.  They are in NJ, but our daughter in VA got her pistachios on Saturday.  Anyway, I can post that now.  We always buy from the Eagle Ranch, and the Heart of the Desert.  They harvest their pistachios from September to October, so they are fresh, and wonderful.  We also stocked up on their Chardonnay wine and did buy 3 bottles of a Pistachio Rose'. 

We have learned that it takes less water to grow grapes, for wine making, than it does for pistachios.  They plant mostly female trees with a male tree in the middle of a section.  The female trees are the only ones that produce edible nuts.  The male tree is only used for pollinating.

This bronze statue is to all my quilting friends.  It's titled, 'Crazy Quilt' and it's a cowgirl wrapped in a Crazy Quilt.  This was at the beginning of the River Walk Trail that we did yesterday in Ruidoso.

Today we mainly geo-cached and found 30 caches, which took us over 5,000 finds!  Our weather is beautiful, and it looks like we will continue to have 70 degree temperatures for a few more days.  I'm sure we will geo-cache again tomorrow.  There is a section south of Alamogordo that we want to check out and also, the White Sands area has some new caches since we were here last.  We have time.

Monday, October 23, 2017

After a slow start to our day, with trying to see if Garmin could help us with my GPS, we went to Ruidoso today.  Bad news on the Garmin, as we will have to upgrade but they will give us a discount if I send in my old one.  What recourse do I have?  So, I will follow Jim around until we get to our park in Apache Junction, and get this rectified.  We found Ruidoso not as appealing as Cloudcroft, but we did find some interesting places to see and geo-cache.

               This is a view of our drive north to Ruidoso.  It was again, a pretty drive.

This was an awesome display at the Billy the Kid National Scenic Byway and Visitor Center.  The horses were so life-like, and they had some of the major horse breeds here.  I was partial to the Paint, as I had a brown and white pinto, when I was a 'farmer's daughter'.

Jim has been avoiding my camera all day, but I finally caught him in the bathroom with 'Care Bear'.  There just are no limits!

A geo-cache took us to Ruidoso Downs, racetrack and casino.  We just found the cache and left with "our own cash"!  The Ruidoso downs has been in existence since 1940 and this year, they had a purse of $3 million.  In comparison, the Kentucky Derby carries a $2 million purse.

This Ruidoso River Trail was one of the nicest things we found in town.  We did a hike on it and they also, had several caches on it.  It was a beautiful day up there.  We were at 7,000 feet elevation.

The trees were really pretty in Ruidoso today.  We should be seeing more of Autumn, as we proceed to travel south.  We did re-up to stay in Alamogordo until Sunday, as we are running out of time, and still have things to do.

We ended our day in Ruidoso with pizza at a recommended place in town called, Cafe Rio.  It was kind of dumpy and eclectic, but their pizza was delicious!  Those places have the best food!  We could only eat half of it, so we'll have it tomorrow again.  I'm all over that!

Sunday, October 22, 2017

We skipped yesterday, as we didn't do much of anything, except watch the Badgers play and win!  We also watched part of Penn St. and MI.  Not that yesterday wasn't an important day, that we didn't do our blog entry, as it was a very important day.  It was our third daughter, Judy and her husband Philip's, 22nd wedding anniversary.  We did extend our good wishes to them and hope they had a great day!  Today we watched the Packers and they did okay, considering Aaron Rodgers is out for a long spell.  They didn't win, but they will get better.  After the game, we decided to get the geo-caches near us and it's good to get them off our slate.  They must be put out there by a 'cowboy', as they were all connected to a bullet.  He had some interesting titles to his caches, and they all pertained to 'shots'.  For instance, 'Long Shot', 'A Shot Heard Around the World', Double Shot, etc.   Pretty clever, really.  The log sheet was hidden in an empty gun shell case and most were dry, which amazed us.  The bad thing about today, is that my GPS quit on me.  Jim has tried everything to get it to work again, so we will have to call Garmin in the morning, and hope they have a quick fix for me. Now that I have mastered using a GPS, I dislike having to follow Jim to the cache :-/

They have what they call, the pony trail down here.  They have painted horses at different places of business.  Much like, Dane Co., where we used to live, had cows painted to pertain to their business.  This one was pretty clever, as it has apples painted on the rear end, and it's called, Apple-oosa. 

I noticed this very cute 'arch over the driveway' at one home.  It is three dogs chasing a javelina!  We don't see javelina's very often, but we have seen them occasionally, on our hikes.  They look like a wild pig, but they are actually in the rat family!  They cluster in packs, and can be dangerous, when cornered.  We were hiking a couple of years ago with about ten people, and we stopped to catch our breath, and when we stopped, we counted 24 javelinas, running on a trail across the way from us!  That's the way we like to see them run.....away from us!  

We did eat at Si Senors Mexican Restaurant the other night, and it was very good.  We both had chicken enchiladas, with rice and refried beans.  It was recommended by our campground hosts.
We had a cool down today.  It was in the low 70's today. 




 

Friday, October 20, 2017

Happy Birthday to our daughter, Lynn today!  It sounds as though they have a nice weekend planned, with Sam coming home.  We struck off to Cloudcroft today, and geo-cached all the way up that winding and very scenic road!  Cloudcroft is an old western town tucked into the mountains, and we found some interesting places today.  We saw several places that sounded like they had apples for sale, but they were just 'junk' stores and used that to draw people in!  We thought it would be interesting to see what they have out here for apples, but not today.  So, we ventured into Cloudcroft and for one cache, we parked right by a quilt shop!  How convenient was that?  Of course, we went in and certainly, I found something that I needed!

They had one tunnel that we needed to go through to get to Cloudcroft, so that was pretty neat.

Another cache took us to this old wooden railroad trestle.  It was built in 1899 and they ceased using it in 1947.

A geo-cache brought us to this beautiful old building.  The cache title is "Where is Rebecca?"  It didn't mean anything to us, at the time, but the cache description encouraged people to go inside and check it out.  We did, and it's a posh, turn of the century building that hosts a lodge and spa, it has an upscale restaurant, and also has a golf course adjoining the property.  As it turns out, Rebecca came to stay at The Lodge, and she disappeared.  No one knows what happened to her.  I tried to find more info on that mystery while we were there, but I wasn't able to.  I'll Google it and add to this if I find something out.

This is the ornate gathering room in The Lodge, and the huge wall hanging, is Rebecca.

It looks like we'll get the Badgers in the morning, so we'll stay home and watch the game, and then we may go bike to some caches that are nearby.  Today was fun, and we traveled to 9,000 feet elevation at our highest point, just north of Cloudcroft.  It was worth the trip.

http://strangestate.blogspot.com/2010/09/redheaded-rebecca-haunts-lodge-at.html

This is the only website that I could find about the mystery woman, Rebecca.  It's an interesting read, if you care to delve into it.  You will have to cut and paste the above website to your search engine to see it. 

Thursday, October 19, 2017

I missed a day of posting on our blog again, but nothing important happened. We just moved from Santa Rosa, NM to Alamogordo, NM, and we'll be here a week.  We will mostly geo-cache here, as we have been to this place many times before and have done the touristy things to do.

This scene shows us approaching the mountains to the south, and we feel that we traveled mostly in the High Plains of New Mexico for most of our trip yesterday.  Our elevations varied from 5,000 feet to over 7,000, so it was a little tough on the fuel tank with all the up's and down's!

This is Boot Hill RV Campground and our motor home is in the distance, behind the cowboy boot.  We love this campground and always stay here.  It is laid out like a cowboy boot, and we are parked in the toe!  Of course, you can't tell that when you are in the campground, but if you look at the map online, it definitely is the shape of a cowboy boot.  We are just on the northern outskirts of Alamogordo, and they call this the Tularosa Basin.  We see mountains on both sides of us.

Jim captured this lightening show that we had this evening.  We were expecting more rain than we got, but it could rain off and on all night.  The desert is quite interesting when it rains.  You don't want to be in any low spots.  Tomorrow, we hope to get some geo-caching done.

Tuesday, October 17, 2017

We decided to stay in Santa Rosa, NM for a couple of reasons.  It's too hot in Alamogordo, our next stop, and we wanted to get some caching done in this little town.  We had good luck and have surpassed 4900 caches found to date.  Caching did take us to some interesting places, as usual.  We found one near the Santa Rosa State Park, which we didn't even know they had a state park.  Nice camping area, but it's about 8 miles north, out of Santa Rosa.  Farther than we want to go for an overnight.  Then we went south to Puerto De Luna, which was a beautiful drive along the Pecos River.  The terrain there is so much different from Hwy. 54, that we usually take out of here.  Unbelievable!  It's very rocky, with high cliffs, and red rock.  It took us to the area where the Spanish Conquistador, Francisco de Coronado was believed to have camped here in 1541.  He was on his mission to find the Seven Cities of Gold, which he never found.  The caches there took us to two cemeteries, much alike, but one serves the residents on the east of the Pecos River and the other on the west side. 

I didn't post any pictures yesterday, but this is our entrance into New Mexico, from our motor home.

I took this view of the Pecos River and the high rocky cliffs to the right.  It was a pleasant drive.

This is a sampling of the cemeteries in this area.  They are laden with many flowers (fake) but they are very colorful.  They also put many symbolic statues on their graves.  Notice the high cliffs in the background. 

This is the little church that is close to the cemetery, and it looks like it would hold 6 people!  There is a larger church in the little town of Puerto De Luna, so this must have been a very early church.

This marker is just on the edge of the little town, telling of the history of Puerto De Luna.  We found it very interesting.

This is the Blue Hole, where the water is 81 feet deep, 60 feet wide, and has a constant temperature of 61 degrees.  The outflow is 3,000 gallons per minute, and is called an artesian spring.  A geo-cache brought us here.  They had two caches here, but one was to scuba dive to the bottom of the pool to get some information.  We do have limitations!  We have always seen the sign for 'The Blue Hole', as we passed through town, after spending an overnight in the campground.  Today we found out what The Blue Hole is all about. 

Santa Rosa is on the old Route 66 Highway, and they have a Classic Car Museum in town.  One sign for the Route 66 Highway said it was dated, pre-1936.  We've enjoyed our stay here and will move on.

This following picture is for our friend, Jeanie.  She mentioned that they sell Barbecue Ribs in the restaurant, connected to the campground office. We tried them tonight, and they were quite good.  We'd do it again.  I didn't use a flash, so it's not as bright as it should be, but you get the idea.

Monday, October 16, 2017

We had a nice stay in Trinidad State Park, and found out from our 'neighbor camper', who is from the area, that southern Colorado is very depressed.  We asked him about our experience in Trinidad, when we geo-cached, and he said there are a lot of homeless people, drugs and crime.  He said the same holds true for Walsenberg, and Pueblo, all towns we came through after we left Colorado Springs.  So, we are glad we stayed at the state park, as that was very nice.  We left this morning, after packing up, and had a beautiful drive south.  We were actually, in the High Plains!  We rose to 7800 feet elevation crossing the Raton Pass, and stayed between 6,000 and 7,000 feet until we started descending into Santa Rosa.  We saw the grazing cattle on the High Plains area, then we went through an area with lots of cedar trees and signs to watch for elk.  Then we were back to the plains area again.  In one section by the Raton Pass, the low shrubs just glistened in the sunlight with hues of bright gold, and rusty red's, and it was just gorgeous.  We saw lots of Pronghorn Antelope again, but I am not going to take a picture of them until I can get up close and personal!  We still have time!  We will stay in Santa Rosa, NM two nights and geo-cache tomorrow.  We have found some interesting places to visit, through caching, so it will be fun to get familiar with this little town that we have always just passed through.  We are in the mid-70's now and breezy.  That's warm enough! 

Saturday, October 14, 2017

We have had a lull period.  We moved from Colorado Springs area on Friday to Trinidad, CO.  We are just north of the southern border, going into New Mexico.  We thought this would be a good stopover to check out 'what seemed like an interesting little town' and we came away quite disappointed.  It is a very depressed area, lots of homeless people, or people wanting a handout, the buildings are quite run down, so we are glad we are camped in the Trinidad State park, just west of town.  The only campground we found in our 'Trailer Life' book, didn't look very appealing, so Jim went on Google Earth to check it out.  That confirmed our thoughts.  We opted for the state park, and found it quite nice.  We ventured downtown this morning to get some geo-caching and check out the town.  We got two caches and decided to do the ones that are outside of town.  A geo-cache took us to a small town west of our campground called, Cokedale.  We did find that interesting.

The Corps of Engineers built the dam near the state park, but they don't run the campground.  We can still see the mountains to the west. 

This sign greeted us on the outskirts of the little two street town of Cokedale.  Two surrounding counties in the area generated over 60% of the Colorado coal output in the early 1900's.   Coking coal is a necessary ingredient in smelting and refining iron, since it burns with intense heat.  Making coke from coal removed all moisture and much sulfur and phosphorous.

This is what remains of the row of coke ovens, that they used during the coal smelting period.  They are much different from the coke ovens that we have seen in Florence, AZ, and Death Valley, CA.  They are individual 'beehives', where these seemed joined together like a small strip mall.  They closed the operation in 1947, and the people who were working the mines, wanted to continue living here.  So, the mining company sold them a house for $100.00 per room, and $50.00 per lot.  The Town of Cokedale was incorporated in 1948.  Because we chose not to geo-cache in Trinidad, we were home in time to watch the Badgers pull out a win over Purdue.  Tomorrow we will watch the Packers and there is a nice laundry room in the activity building here in the park.  I'll get my laundry done before we move south to Santa Rosa, NM on Monday.  That will be just a stop over for two nights.  We are prolonging arriving in Alamogordo, NM, as they are experiencing mid-80 degree weather, and we prefer the 70's!  Back to the heat! 

Thursday, October 12, 2017

It's a warm and sunny day here, so we struck off for Cripple Creek, CO.  If we went by the way the crow flies, it's 15 miles from here.  But we had to traverse around Pike's Peak and take the winding and curvy road, which took us an hour.  It was very scenic, though, and the roads were very good.  Cripple Creek was built quickly in the 1890's and 1900's, during the mining boom.  The miners worked for $3.00 a day in wages, but they carried out some of the richest ore, in their pockets and lunch buckets, when they left at the end of the day.  They called this, "high grading".  It was very hard work, as it was all manual labor, using a pick axe, shoveling, and washing the ore.

I took this picture (of a picture) in the Heritage Center in Cripple Creek, and this was a log cabin that the miner's built in which to live, during that time.

This is another picture I took, that shows how they used the donkeys to transport the ore.  When the rush was over, the miners left Cripple Creek and left the donkeys to fend for themselves.  They roamed and reproduced and used to visit the townspeople!  We saw none on this trip, so they must be dwindling.

This is Bennett Street and where most things are happening in town.  We tried to find a 'mom and pop' restaurant to eat lunch at, but were told by the local firemen, that everything is owned by the casinos!  Oh, yuck!  So, we took their recommendation and ate at the Mexicali Rose Restaurant.  It was terrible, but then I've never known casino food to taste good.  We walked the streets and they roll with the change in the terrain, so we found it a little difficult to breath comfortably at nearly 10,000 feet elevation!  We found several caches here, and learned a lot about the mining industry here, and couldn't think of a better way to spend our last day in this area.  We returned by Hwy 1, and it was quite different from what we saw coming up the other way.  The Aspens have lost all their leaves, but I can only imagine how beautiful it is when they are in their blaze of glory! 

      Thank you, Cripple Creek.  You gave us several hours of entertaining and we leave enriched.

Wednesday, October 11, 2017

We had a slow start to today, as it was 33 degrees when we got up, and it is always slow to warm up.  We wanted to finish our exploring in the Garden of the Gods and finish up the caches in that park today.  We had to hike to one of the caches, and had some elevation climb, and we certainly felt it.  We are at 6300 feet elevation and it was 68 degrees, and we 'hiked up at a slower pace'!  We are slowly getting acclimated to the elevation difference, and the sun seems so much hotter here.  The sun is closer to us here, than back in Wisconsin, so that makes it seem warmer. We saw on the news last night, that Big Horn Sheep were spotted in the park yesterday.  

This is their 'Balancing Rock', and I wanted to get a person in the picture to show you how big it is.  It is estimated to weigh 700 ton.  This was an Earthcache in the park.

This rock structure is called, 'Siamese Twins'.....but wait.....I see someone else in the picture!  It's Jim and this was another Earthcache, and we needed him in the picture with his GPS.

After finishing up in the Garden of the Gods, we went to Manitou Springs, just west of Colorado Springs.  We loved this little city!  I had loaded some caches, not knowing what to expect, and we couldn't be happier!  It took us to the busy section of town, so we walked the whole area that we needed to cache.  This clock was in the center of town, and was donated to the city in 1889.  Jerome Wheeler donated it, to celebrate the opening of his Mineral Water Bottling Company.  He was born in NY, served in the Civil War, married Harriet "Macy" Valentine, and was Vice-President of New York Macy's Department Store!  Hummm...get the connection?  Harriet's health failed her, so they moved out to Manitou Springs in 1883 and he became a millionaire in mining.  He founded banks in Aspen, Colorado Springs, and Manitou Springs.  On a lull day, I will write about the 'springs' here.  This is an old city, but full of character. 

I can only imagine what went on in this old building, back in the late 1800's.  We ran into a fellow that proceeded to tell us that Doc Holiday was kept in a house not far from where we were caching.  He had 'consumption', and was quite ill.  He may have died there, for all we know.  We have one more day left and I'll report in tomorrow night, when we get back.  Today was really fun!