March 23, 2023 – Day 36 Lucinda Williams? Not The Rolling Stones? Yeah, you see, you can’t always get what you want, that’s the theme today. We woke up this morning in Luling Texas, had a quick breakfast. We’re not even sure what time our bodies are on, partly we’re still on Arizona Time which doesn’t observe Daylight Savings Time. We wanted to do some birding, Gavelston TX and Lake Charles Louisiana are both great for birding. The plan was to stay overnight 3 days, a vacation from our vacation if you will but also just to “stop and smell the roses” (or look for birds). But… the weather is…

March 23, 2023 – Day 35 Cotton. Who knew that Texas was a big source of cotton? Neither of us did. Over dinner last night we asked Clinton, the owner of the Fillin’ Station “So what do you all do for work here?” He told us that the main source of employment in the area was farming cotton and cattle or oil & gas jobs. We saw fields of cotton, not planted, but with remains of last years crop still visible. We drove through the fields for a bit, eventually stopping for gas in the little town of Eden TX and found this awesome mural. Soon the terrain was replaced…

March 21, 2023 – Day 34 We headed out early to escape the wind. Hopefully, this will be the last you hear from us about wind. Don’t worry, we’re getting tired of it also. Actually, there might be some wind tomorrow but then we’ll be done with west Texas. So what’s with the blog title? Today is all about energy. We were surprised when we crossed Texas on our way to Phoenix we saw very little oil activity. We later looked it up, we were too far south. Coming back, well, it was all different. We saw oil activity everywhere. We drove through about 250 miles of oil fields, really,…

March 20, 2023 – Day 33 Today was a rest day so we headed off to Carlsbad Caverns National Park. The ride into the park through Walnut Canyon was spectacular, words cannot really describe it, but we’ll give a single photo. Ok, two photos… Once you are inside the Caverns words really fail you, pictures also fail you, but take a whole lot of them. and just spent about an hour winnowing them down to about 40 from roughly 400 photos that we took. But before you get to the pictures, check your calendars, make plans, come see this place. It is amazing. You’ll probably want to get tickets in…

March 19, 2023 — Day 32 We work up in a new time zone, so it was a slow start. But I kept on hearing a bird I didn’t recognize. There were lots of crows, but there was another one in there. So I got up, got dressed and went outside. I’m not sure if I was more surprised by the birds or the water, you see, the field wasn’t flooded when we went to sleep! We got two new life birds, the Long Billed Curlew and the Cattle Egret, so that was nice. Oh there was also about 1,000 other birds. We headed out with the GPS to “Avoid…

March 18, 2023 — Day 31 Last night we pulled into a dark, fenced in parking lot with 2 other rigs and we woke up to an empty parking lot with lots of sky and quiet. Susan was first to rise, I had a bad night’s sleep, and she yelled, “A coyote!” So I jumped out of bed and we watched the little guy for a few minutes until he trotted off out of sight. (Before I went to bed I had gone outside to look at the stars, it both seemed overcast and the loneliness really freaked me out so I quickly jumped back into the trailer.) Now I…

March 17, 2020 – Day 30 On the trip to Phoenix we had a deadline, we just saw what miles we could make and we made those. Going home was going to be different. (Ominous Music Here) Going back without a deadline means we can go wherever we want and whenever we want, right? Right? Old Man Winter is in no hurry to leave. Although this season has been a milder winter for the eastern two-thirds of the United States, the final days before spring officially begins on Monday, March 20, will be marked by harsh cold from the Arctic that will make its presence felt as far south as…

March 10, 2023 — Day 23 We’ve left Phoenix and headed north on 87 for a short ride to Star Valley AZ, just outside Payson AZ. It is a short drive, but a beautiful one. The recent rains in Phoenix must have hit north of the city also because the desert yellow flowers were in bloom everywhere. As we left Phoenix went entered the Tonto National Forest, which is a beautiful place. It seemed that a better vista was around each bend, but I suspect the same is true driving southwards also! So why the blog title, The Rim Shot? Star Valley, and many other places here, are within sight…

March 2, 2023 Thank you all for following along in our journey out west. It has been wonderful reading all your emails and texts back to us. It has kept us connected with our home and our families. Now that we’re in Phoenix we’ll not be updating on a daily basis, probably not updating at all. We’re also undecided about blogging on the way back. We do know we’ll be taking a slower pace back. If you just count travel days were averaging about 350/miles day for 11 days. Of course there will be rest days in there, so if we travel and then stay one day we’ll take 22…

March 1, 2023 — Day 14 We slept in nice and late, maybe 7AM, who knows if this is early or late. We had an easy ride ahead so we started off with a lazy morning. Then I checked the weather. Wilcox AZ was getting snow that night and a high wind advisory was in effect that afternoon. So I launched the Windy app. It seemed like we needed to be there by 1PM or we’d be seeing gusts to 45mph. So we had a mad scramble instead of a lazy morning. I did check out the bathhouse. Given the dive bar nature of the place I expected something horrifying.…