Kartchner Caverns State Park, Benson AZ

One of the main reasons for coming to Benson, Arizona was to go to Kartchner. Five years ago we came here with our two older grandgirls and their Brownie troupe and I was able to take the tour with Lia (the older) while Emi and Dave sat it out - she got to freaked out with the darkness. I had explained to Dave that this cave was unlike any we have gone in - we need to go on our own some day - and today was it. We were not allowed to take pictures, weren't even allowed to carry anything or have jackets on - they don't want anything touching the sides of the cave due to dirt, lint, etc. being introduced into this living cave. We saw where bats roost, saw where an 80,000 year old skeleton of a sloth was found - they don't know how it got in or why, saw so many different formations and colors, just truly astounding. And this cave discovery is new - was discovered by two men back in 1974 and kept it a secret for a couple of years while they tried to figure out how to keep the cave pristine and not let vandalism take over. They contacted the family (Kartchner) who owned the property and explained what they found and the family decided to get help financially to formalize the cave and allow the public to view it. In 1999 the first of the two large rooms was opened to the public and the second room (Rotunda) - we did not see this one because the bat colony was active in there and they don't allow tours while the bats are active - was opened in 2003. Some day we will come back and see the Rotunda Room. We said in South Dakota when we visited Wind Cave National Park and was very disappointed in that cave and the tour guide that enough caves already! However, Dave agreed with me that this cave was definitely interesting, amazing with colors and shapes, and worth the time to come. I think also our tour guide was so interesting and informative, and he kept encouraging questions - made our tour well worth our time and money. We will come back some day when the Rotunda room is open and do that tour.

Afterward we decided to hike the trails of this state park. We are in the desert so it is not pretty per se this time of year, and the trail was rated as moderate to hard - and they were right. Again, we had to keep a lookout for rattlesnakes and for tarantulas - thankfully we didn't see them. Did see lots of scat (deer poop) and bugs and cacti and vegetation, but we stopped half way through because it was really steep and hard to climb and we were loosing the daylight and didn't want to get caught hiking in the dark. Ended the day with a great Mexican dinner right near our campground - and paid for it with indigestion from the spices and peppers. But was still good food. A very good day in Benson! We still have lots to do before we leave on the 10th of December. Weather has been good - daytime about 74, nights in the low 40's but we have heaters and furnace when it gets a tidge too cold. Campground is still not full - they said by the 1st a large group will come in and then another the 1st of January. We are waiting.

Grandchildren Fix in Tucson

This Thanksgiving weekend was busy for us. We had a nice turkey dinner here at the campground at 2pm, six turkeys and 3 hams were cooked for the residents and we all brought a side dish to share. I wish I had many of the recipes of these side dishes - very yummy. Then we all came back together at 6pm for dessert and more friendship. Nice day. Jill and Erez and the 3 grandgirls had planned to a 3 day get-away in Tucson, traveling down from Phoenix, and we planned to drive up from Benson to Tucson to meet up with them. Wasn't planned - but almost exactly the same distance for each of us to travel to get together. They stayed at the Hilton Tucson El Conquistador Resort, lovely place which was nestled in the Santa Catalina Mountains. The parents did not tell the girls we were coming, so it was quite a surprise Friday night when we got to the Hilton and they came down to the lobby with the pretense to go out to dinner and we were sitting there. After many hugs and kisses we went to a really nice Italian restaurant and had a great time talking and getting re-acquainted. The original plan was that Zoe, the five year old granddaughter, would come back with us and spend the night, but we got 40 minutes into the ride south and Zoe wanted to go back to Mom and Dad. Turned around, got her back to the hotel and started the trip home again.
Saturday we drove back up to Tucson and had planned to go swimming with the girls in the outdoor heated pool. Between the heated pool and the jacuzzi, the girls had a great time and Dave and I got a great granddaughter fix! A very fun day. After getting back to the room and showering, we again went out to dinner and had more fun time with the girls. Today, Dave and I are recouping - resting and just catching up. It's really hard becoming a kid again! Here are pictures of the outdoor pool with the mountains in the background and another with Jill, Erez, Lia, Emi and Zoe on the bed. And one with me and the three girls at dinner last night. How I love interacting with them! And yes, my face is sunburned - I spent the entire time in the pool with all three girls while Dave, Jill and Erez hoovered on the sidelines. Cold out of the water where I think it was about 68 degrees and the wind off the mountains was fierce. And, if you got into the pool - you didn't get out! BRRR.

Tomorrow Dave and I have reservations to go to Kartchner Caverns State Park, a park we went to 5 years ago with the two older granddaughters (Lia and Emi) and their Brownie troupe. I was able to go on the tour but Dave was not - Emi got scared before they entered the cave and had to be escorted out. Tomorrow I hope Dave will be impressed with this as much as I was 5 years ago.

San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area

Yesterday's weather was beautiful - clear skies, 72 - so we inquired about hiking trails and drove to an area just west of Tombstone to Fairbanks - a historic town, but a ghost town. This town started in 1881 and was quite a boom town, with the rapidly growing Tombstone down the road, three rail lines came through and quickly became a supply and transportation hub. Fairbanks had an elegant hotel, schoolhouse, restaurants, bars, post office, several businesses and of course homes for the residents. By the mid 1970's the last residents left town and the buildings were left abandoned. Most have been razed but a few still stand. There was a warning to not enter the buildings because they were infested with rattlesnakes. Fairbanks is located on the San Pedro River and when we drove from Benson to Fairbanks we crossed over this river and it was dirt dry, so naturally when we walked through the town to view it, there were many trails to go, one of which was to the San Pedro River. We opted not to walk there since it was a dried up until we met an older lady and a teen with an ancient dog walking back from one of the trails. The woman said that the river goes under ground in St. David (where we crossed over the bridge of the river) and that indeed, the river is flowing if you take the trail, you will see it. Also, she said that her friend grew up in this town and lived across the road at the horse ranch, and as kids her friend and brother used to play in the abandoned school house. She also said to go to the Presidio (down the road a bit and gave us directions) where the remains of an old Spanish fort was located. She thought it was very interesting.

We walked to the old cemetery - was very quieting to the soul. I could picture the procession of the funerals up to this mountain and then with rituals of the burial's service, then placing of the stones on the grave. Someone had visited one of the graves recently and placed a small stuffed bear on it with beads and a plastic dinosaur toy. My mind was so active in seeing these visions that we didn't stay long. I said a prayer for all these people and we hiked back down. Walked to the
river and found it to be a lovely, peaceful area. And the water was so clear, did not go in it though. A bench was set up so you could sit and watch the world go by. Next week we will go to the Presidio ruins and see what that is all about. One last thing - as we neared Tombstone on our way to San Pedro Riparian Area we noticed a Border Patrol check point on the north side of the road. We didn't have to stop but on our way back to Benson, there were Border Patrol cars out everywhere watching the roads. We read on the news this morning that Arizona wants to put a fence up across the entire length of the border between Mexico and Arizona. Private donations have been coming in since July to fund this project. Maybe Arizona ought to look at what Texas does and take lessons.

Heavenly Camping Experience

We decided the other day that Benson is not a fit for us in the winter months, so we drove to Sierra Vista to look around and do some shopping. This town is about 25 miles south of us, very easy ride. On the way back we looked for 3 different campgrounds to review - just in case something really hit the mark. And we found one - in Tombstone. Very lovely, looks like it could be a great match if we have trouble finding a park after the end of January's stint near Phoenix. The other factor is that maybe next winter this campground would be the place to start our winter stay.

Once we got home I did laundry and decided that last night would be a great night to go to the campground's observatory for their free star gazing show for resident campers. They charge to the public if not camping here. Little did we know that Butterfield RV Resort (where we are) is the only campground in the US that has an observatory within the park. People are now coming from all over to camp one night to see the show. Sad for them if they come and it's cloudy, or the moon is out - too bright to see other constellations, or windy (the opening of the observatory cannot handle the stress). The show started at 7pm. Had to dress warm since the top of the building opens up to the sky. As the gentleman set up each viewing - we took turns gazing into the telescope - he gave us background as to what we were viewing, how far away (trillions of light years), saw various constellations outside our universe, viewed open cluster (bunches of stars), a closed cluster where gravity held the planets together, a dying star and a new star, and other views, then got the wowed at the very end. We saw Jupiter and it's four main moons through the telescope. Jupiter is the brightest star you see at night and right now it is rising out of the south at dusk. Here's what it looks like - not our picture but from the internet.... And this picture doesn't do it justice - there are two bands of gray around the planet that we could see. While I was up and viewing through the scope I saw a shooting star but was told that in all likeness, it was probably a satellite. Still, pretty cool.

Pretty special day - how many of you all have been to an observatory and looked directly through a telescope into outer space? Seen a new planet beginning or one that was dying?

Benson, Arizona

We packed up Saturday morning in Las Cruces, New Mexico and drove 250 miles west to Benson, Arizona, our home until the beginning of December. We have paid for the month and we will move before that, it is much cheaper to pay for a month versus paying by the week. We had no issues with the brakes on the trailer, thank goodness. Dave still has to tweak the disconnect while we are here, it is still a tad too short on sharp turns. We have signed up for Thanksgiving buffet dinner here so at least we will be some sort of 'family' on the holiday. They have so much food that they split the meal up to two different times - one sitting for the main meal and then you come back at 6pm for dessert. I signed up for home made cranberry sauce - a recipe from my maternal grandmother - I think it was one she passed down from her grandmother from England. This is a really nice campground, has everything we could want and level sites. Our view out the living room area is the mountains.

Benson is a small town but has 9 campgrounds. We have already checked out this one as to staying here long term in the winter and decided it is not a fit for us, price is right - but there are train tracks about a mile from here and at times it gets too noisy. There are 5 more campgrounds right in this vicinity - and another 3 up the road are club-type campgrounds meaning that you have to be a member of that particular camping club. We are members of one of them - Escapees - and did check out that place yesterday, they have a 6 to 8 year waiting list to buy a lot which you can either park your rig on or put a small one-bedroom park model. However, it has a great view being tucked into a side of a mountain and you look down into Benson. We do feel that Benson is a tad too far out of the way - if we had to fly back to Cleveland we would have to travel to Tucson or even Phoenix to get a decent flight - too far.

There are hiking trails, birding trails, caverns, copper mine tours to see while we are here - so we will be busy for awhile - until we get bored and want to more closer to Phoenix.

White Sands National Monument

Yesterday we drove to White Sands National Monument, the world's largest gypsum dune field at 275 square miles of blinding white - looks like sand, dunes. Amazing. We had been to the sand dunes in Michigan but this was awesome. The surrounding San Andres and Sacramento mountain ranges, part of the original Rocky Mountain range of 70 million years ago, have gypsum within it's peaks and the ranger who talked with us showed us the white band in the mountains of where the gypsum lies. Weirdest feeling, this sand. It is so soft. And hard! We drove around the park, stopped here and there to take pictures and walk on the dunes, watched kids on saucer sleds sliding down dunes, walked the Alkali Trail for about 2 miles then headed back to get to the area where at 4pm there was a ranger guided sunset walk. Very informative. She explained different aspects of how vegetation grows, or dies, pointing out tracks in the sand, showing us how the dunes move in feet every year. One of the amazing things is you could dig about 4 inches down and find wet/water. When it rains, the water has no where to go and just sits in this basin. Did you know that gypsum is the major ingredient for dry wall? It is also in tofu, beer, shampoo, fertilizer for crops, to name a few. The 'snow plow' guy is out every day plowing the sand off the roads. Sometimes 3 times a day if it's windy. Looks like snow from a distance. The tracks in the sand typically are gone by the next day. It is amazing that most of the vegetation we saw survives - the ranger said that most have a root base of 30 to 40 feet deep to get at the water. This picture is a sumac that has roots down 30 feet and when the dunes are moving, the plant will adapt and grown deeper roots to survive. Many animals will burrow into the base to live. We were on land that belonged to the White Sands Missile Range and were treated to a number of (we think) Air Force jets flying overhead. At times you could here when they broke the sound barrier (boom!). Fortunately there wasn't any missiles or target shooting going on that day, when there is the park is closed. The sand, feels like talcum powder.

Still in Las Cruces

Has been a quiet week. We got the RV in last Monday to the dealer and they had the brakes fixed and we were back at the campsite settled by 1pm. I think until we pull the rig any distance will I feel more relaxed, still a little scared of what happened. Since last Monday we have putzed around town, Las Cruces isn't a place that we would come back to for any length of time, only for a night or two as we pass through going east or west. Very steeped in Spanish culture and everyone speaks Spanish as well. We are only 15 miles from the border of Mexico, and fortunately there isn't any problems.

We tried a couple of nights last week to catch the full moon rising over the Organ Mountains near Dripping Spring but with the fading light, this is the best I was able to capture. What struck us the most was the quietness of the area at sunset. A few birds came out but nothing else. We had to watch for rattlesnakes, thankfully didn't see or hear any. Still very dramatic. To see the lights come on over the city to the west as the sun was setting and the darkening purple/pink of the night to the east - breathtaking.

This town is very easy to get around and by the third day here we did not need a GPS. We drove down to El Paso couple of days ago to look at RVs just to get a feel of what other options we may want if we park this rig somewhere. Nothing looked appealing. Have managed to get to some great Mexican restaurants - Dave got his hot chili pepper/jalapeno breakfast fix. We will definitely do this one more time before leaving. We have sat tight since Friday since it's been overcast and dreary, catching up on things. We plan to go to White Sands National Monument tomorrow since it's the best weather day of the week. We will be leaving here hopefully by the end of the week, about 1 1/2 weeks earlier than we thought, to head to Benson, Arizona to do sightseeing. We are bored here, not alot to see or do. When we do get to Benson - about 4 hours west of here - we will be close enough to Jill and family that we could spend the holiday with them, if they will be home.

Organ Mountains and Dripping Spring

Friday we decided to go hiking, to get out of the funk of having this rig broken and knowing we cannot move until fixed. The Organ Mountains which sits on the east side of Las Cruces has an interesting history. Back in the 1870s a General Van Patton set up a mining camp and built a hotel near a spring (called Dripping Spring) for those drawn to the mountains and fresh air. A large hotel, picnic area, and even a roller skating rink was built. Then he sold it to a doctor who turned it into a sanitarium for tuberculosis patients of which his wife was afflicted. We understand during a rainy time this spring is really dripping - but all we saw was ruins of the reservoir and a slight drip-drip of water. Amazing how the buildings are still standing after all this time. Long story short, the doctor ran into financial difficulties, the sanitarium closed and the land passed to a rancher and then another. When we started out on the hike we knew it would take us up 1000 feet but what we didn't know was how hard it would be to walk this path 0f 2 miles. This area is run by the Bureau of Land Management and these folks have paved the roadway with large stones making it very difficult to walk up and very uneasy and unsteady on the way back down. Thank goodness for our walking sticks - we slipped and slid on the way down. Never the less, we did it, walked around the ruins, got some neat photos, and then rewarded ourselves afterward with a trip to Si Senor restaurant about 2 miles from our campground, one of two run by the same family, the other in Chandler, Arizona near where the grandkids live. Food was yummy but Dave suffered big time afterward because he enjoyed the hot sauces a tidge too much - many Maalox's later he finally had a settled stomach. Saturday our legs were very sore from the walk. We said we would not go back to the other walking paths there, the stones made it too difficult to comfortably walk. We have some other things on our to-do list before we leave here so we may stay for the month, or not.

Missing the Sunsets

While it is nice to be in a more southern area of New Mexico, we were spoiled with the awesome sunrises and sunsets of Santa Fe. We haven't come across these colorful skies anywhere else we have traveled. Truly amazing. Needless to say - words cannot express what you see. Here are a series of photos taken on the last night spent in Santa Fe - spectacular! I have kept these photos because some day I want to make a quilt with all these colors to remind us of this enchanted area.

Las Cruces, New Mexico

We packed up and left Santa Fe by 9:20am yesterday and the temp was a whopping 37! Brrr. Dave's fingers almost got frost bit. Drove the 280 miles south on Interstate 25 - a lovely drive but we decided we didn't want to drive that road again. Road surface was great, traffic very light, but the scenery was kinda boring. A set of mountain ranges on one side for awhile, desert conditions, then that mountain range went away and the next set of mountains appeared on our other side. We followed the Rio Grande again all the way down, crossed it a couple of times. I am still amazed that this river flows all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico and for the most part -is a shallow wide river, you could wade across it. Visible were many flash flood washouts.

We made a quick stop in Truth or Consequences - New Mexicans call it T or C - (the town was renamed to this from Hot Springs because a game show host said that he would host the show from the first town that renamed itself after the show). This town is quite small and it is right near the huge Elephant Butte State Park which is New Mexico's largest - 200 miles of shoreline. You can see the lake from I25 but from what we saw was quite muddy and very low. New Mexico is experiencing a drought and we saw it via the Rio Grande and also some of the dams and reservoirs we toured while in Santa Fe.

Got to this campground, Sunny Acres, just west of the town and registered and pulled up to the site to see how we would back in. And got into trouble. Our emergency brake system for the trailer locked up and it caused the tires to freeze. Could not budge the thing at all. Dave ended up cutting the wires just to get us in the sight. Can you imagine if this would have happened while on the road going 60 miles an hour? We were lucky we were in a safe place and could still maneuver the rig into the spot. We have since put a claim into our Jayco dealer and on Monday we will limp into the dealer about 1 1/2 miles away (thankfully that close). The good news is that it was 76 when we got here at 2:30pm. I saw where Santa Fe had a temp of 18 last night - are we lucky, or what? Our plans are to get this rig fixed and stay until the beginning of December, then we will move to Picacho Peak north of Tucson and south of Casa Grande for about a month, or two?