2021 - 2022 Trip To The Southwest

Day 32, Pancho Villa State Park, Columbus, NM

2011 Trip across the US
2012 Trip across the US
2014 Trip across the US
2015 Trip to Alaska
2015-16 Southwest Trip
2016 New England Trip
2016 - 17 Southwest Trip
2017 - 18 Trip to Pick Up a New Escape 21 Trailer & More
2018 - 19 Trip to Winnipeg & the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta
2019 - 20 Trip to the Southwest

Other Trips

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Sunday, November 21, 2021 - Pancho Villa State Park, Columbus, NM - 338.5 Miles, 3,128.3 Miles for the Trip

The longest drive of the trip. I don't know why pulling the trailer wears me out more than just driving the truck since I do close to the same speed (at least in the east) and about the same number of stops, but it does. Doing 400 miles to Hyannis, MA to take the ferry to visit my brother on Nantucket Island or driving to Takoma Park, MD to visit with my daughter seems fine. In any case, I arrived at the campground worn out. I remembered the section of US90 between Marfa & Van Horn as one of the straightest roads I've driven. Miles without a twitch of the steering wheel - you could tie it down and tale a nap! I did photograph one of the radar balloons on the ground.

A Radar Balloon

I did stop at Camping World in Anthony, TX to pick up the tongue jack. Like all my interactions with Camping World, this one left me less than pleased. When I called, I gave the service rep the stock number of the jack I wanted. It was listed on the website at $219.99. He said they had plenty of them on the shelf. Well, they had plenty of tongue jacks on the shelf, but none of the model I wanted. They did have a "Smart" version of the same brand I wanted for only $87.00 more. Since I didn't like any of the others and all but one of them was rated for a heavier tongue weight and more expensive, I bought it anyway. So, I'm a proud owner of a Lippert Smart Tongue Jack. As far as I can tell, for my extra $87.00, I can program the unit so that it will automatically level my tongue. I will install it tomorrow.

So, I'm in site SL-28, a water & electric site with a covered picnic table on a concrete slab for $15.00 per night + a $12.00 reservation fee. New Mexico has some of the least expensive campground prices in the country. I'm here for a week since I wanted to make sure I had a reserved site for the Thanksgiving weekend. It shouldn't be a problem here - I doubt there are more than 5 RVs or tents in the place other than the hosts.

Site SL-28

After hooking up the trailer, I took a short walk around the campground. Pancho Villa is in the middle of nowhere, a few miles from the Mexican border crossing on NM11. Columbus does have a grocery store & a couple of restaurants; it is about the same size as Quartzsite before the winter visitors.

I discovered something new about Dreamweaver, the Adobe software I use to make this page. I make the next day's page by saving a copy of the previous day, then erasing everything and type the update. After spending 20 minutes typing today's page I realized that the clock on my MacBookPro was off by an hour because of the time zone change to Mountain Time. I reset the Mac, and Dreamweaver told me that I needed to reload the page. I did and it reverted to the original copy (ie I now had two copies of page 31 & my work on page 32 disappeared into the ether) This is strange since I had saved page 32 multiple times. So, this is the second edition.

Since I'm tired, dinner is going to be just a sandwich.

Until Tomorrow -

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Last Update: November 23, 2021