February 22, 2005

February 22, 2005

Elephant Butte State Park to Deming, New Mexico

DAY 249

 

Today was sunny and warm, with a thunder shower in mid-afternoon.

This morning we hitched up to leave, drove over to the park's dump station, emptied the holding tanks, then drove into Elephant Butte to fill up with diesel. I'm a little paranoid about running out of fuel lately, when we're planning to drive across sparsely populated areas, like we did today. After filling up, we headed south on I-25 for about 40 miles to the town of Hatch. At Hatch, we got off the Interstate and onto Hwy. 26 heading southwest, to take a diagonal short cut from I-25 to I-10. Plus we just wanted to get off the Interstate. Driving the secondary highways gives us more of the flavour of an area than the Interstates do. At Hatch, the chile growing capital of the world, we stopped at a road side produce stand to buy some vegetables and fruits.

Hwy. 26 meets Interstate 10 just a couple of miles from Deming. At Deming, we stopped to fill up a propane tank, before checking into the Escapees RV Park here, which is where we are now. As soon as we got settled in here, I got to work installing the fifth wheel landing leg / front jack spring pins that I bought at Camping World in El Paso. I was finished and cleaned up just in time for 4:00 P.M. social hour. After social hour, I started work on all the photos I took yesterday on our ghost town outing. I downloaded, and captioned them all. After a late supper of fajitas, using the very fresh tortillas we bought today at the road side stand, we watched TV for awhile.

DSK