Saturday, August 24, 2013

A brief recap of the trip from Myrtle Beach to Los Alamos.





We spent our first two overnight stops in Wal Mart parking lots, the first night in Augusta Georgia and the second just southeast of Memphis Tennessee. They are very convenient rest stops when traveling; they welcome RV’ers, the lots are as safe as anywhere with video surveillance and usually patrolled, you can buy anything you need right there, easily located everywhere, and free. We left home with full fresh water tanks and empty holding tanks. We have a fine running generator for power. We don’t need to be hooked up to utilities every night.

Our third night we picked a campground with cable TV because we didn’t want to miss a program we have been following. The Overland RV Park in Van Buren Arkansas is right off I-40, convenient but with some highway noise. After we got hooked up in our site I discovered the cable TV was so fuzzy you couldn’t see much of anything. I carry spare cable parts and quickly made repairs to the campground system, we got to see the episode of Under the Dome.

The next day, Tuesday we ran to our planned stop which was in Arkansas at another Wal Mart. We got there at 2pm and didn’t want to stop driving that early in the day. As we drove further west on I-40 Millie started researching stopping spots ahead of us. We reached the next proposed Wal Mart in Oklahoma; again it seemed too early to stop so we crossed the border into Texas. Millie’s internet search found a campground right on I-40 with resort like description, rave reviews and reasonable price. We found the Oasis RV Resort in Amarillo Texas to indeed be far nicer than campgrounds located along highways and catering to overnight travelers. I learned that it was built as a destination Resort because there was going to be a racetrack on the adjoining property. The racetrack never got built and the Oasis now caters mostly to travelers.

Amarillo to Los Alamos is easily drivable in one day and we arrived at our destination early in the afternoon. The only mechanical problem we had the entire trip happened on the last leg, driving down the interstate we got a warning that one of the leveling cylinders was down. It had crept off its retracted position, just enough to set off the alarm.

That’s enough about the express run across the country, we’ll write about New Mexico in future postings, it truly is "Tierra del Encanto". The Land of Enchantment. 


No comments: