Hitting the road !

April 28, 2015

Today the girls and I

 

cleaned the fridge, the oven, polished all the kitchen counters and cleaned the bathrooms.  I swept out the garage and the sun porch and vacuumed the whole house.  Then the Golden's and I stepped outside, locked the doors and ...."left home"!  Russ was waiting in the truck and once we all piled in our retirement began.  To say it felt weird to leave brick and mortar behind is an understatement....it was more a matter of excitement and wonder mixed with a big chunk of  " oh my gosh WHAT are we doing?!?!?!" 

Off we drove to our new home lovingly named the "Beast".  The truck is named "Bruiser", so it works well together ... "Bruiser and the Beast"! 

The RV is huge (thus the Beast) but is also very small.  I have total empathy for all the Meridian residents as they had to scale down from their homes to move to the Meridian!  Russ and I have scaled down from two homes, about 3500 square feet between the two of us to a 41 foot RV which has about 400 square feet of living space!!  Talk about living small !  So, to get started here is a picture of Bruiser and the Beast:)

OK, it is now May 15th already...where does the time go???  We've had some ups and downs - but mostly we learn more about this RV life everyday.  So far we have traveled from Temple to Grants Pass Oregon.  As many things have happened they all deal with us learning...but let me share with you my first time driving Bruiser with the Beast attached... We were just about to drive out of Texas into New Mexico...most of those roads are pretty straight and non-threatening right??  well, not if you drive up to  a semi tanker accident!  The highway patrol decided to detour everyone around the accident - via a single lane dirt farm road that wrapped around a piece of farmland.  Now you might be thinking, "well, that's not so bad - it actually is a good idea" right?  It was, until we realized they sent the opposite traffic around from the other direction on the same single lane dirt road!!  This included semi trucks!  Not only was it a single lane..it was dirt..dry dirt..and every time I had to share that tiny single lane with a huge semi truck we were covered with so much dust I had to stop due to the lack of visibility!!  Our poor Bruiser and the Beast were both totally covered in this nasty red dust!!  And, oh yeah, I made it through OK.  Even made the turns without hitting anything!!   So yea for "Girl Power" right?

We spent a few days in Albuquerque driving in on:

that's right..Route 66!  It was fun seeing some of those famous stops of yesteryear as there are still some of the original diners and such.
Albuquerque has some interesting bridge supports - like this one:

We visited the Petroglyph National Monument where we really wore the girls out.  Here is some of what we saw:

And as I said we wore the girls out:

The desert even presented some flowers for our enjoyment:

Needless to say .. the entire park was pretty rocky (of the volcanic sort):

Then off to Nevada for a short stay in that state - mostly drive, stop, sleep, drive, stop, sleep, drive,  well you get it!  Here's how the girls handled it:

Finally out of Nevada, through California and into Oregon.  Through mountains and valleys that are only a hint at all the beautiful sites we have to look forward to.  Here are some samples, hope you enjoy them:

 

Our first Oregon sunset from outside our RV door:

Travel with the Golden's to be continued....