Deming

Our first stop in New Mexico was Deming, a sleepy little town off of I-40 with the usual suspects for stores: A Super Walmart, a Dollar General, a Dollar Tree, Auto Zone and Subway. What else do you need.

Our itinerary for this stop was Silver City, Gila Cliff Dwellings, City of Rocks and a dash to El Paso to get Texas license plates and register the vehicles there. More on all of that later.

We rely pretty much on the navigation in the motorhome to get us to our campgrounds and although the route and the environs sometimes seem sketchy it hasn’t let us down yet. It was telling us to exit off the interstate, go north for five miles, then east for eight miles. As we got to the east turn, all we had in front of us was a hard pan gravel, rutted, potholed, dusty road. And a little blue sign telling us the RV site was 8 miles ahead…one mile in was another little blue sign telling us not to give up because we were gonna love the resort! We couldn’t get the RV going any faster than 7 or 8 miles an hour because of the rough road and because it was giving us both a massive headache.

Why we persevered I have no idea, but any place that tells you the reward at the end will be worth the effort deserves a chance. Even if it was going to take us another 45 minutes to get there.

And then this…

Well, as you can tell it was kinda a pretty day so we ignored the warning and the posted speed limit cuz no one could go that fast on that “road”. And then this…

Hmm, we stopped and took a good look around to make sure there were no sharpshooters out there taking aim at us and motored on..and saw this.

Well, if the shooters could hit the sign but not the broad side of a cow, we felt pretty good about our chances, and besides there was another blue sign telling us we were only four miles from the resort and not to give up. We did not. And about 20 bone rattling minutes later we rounded a turn and saw this…

Wow! What kind of a place was this? I mean all the hype about how we were going to like it, kinda like George Zimmer, and I’m telling you we were not prepared for where our imaginations were leading us. But, I don’t think there are very many places of doubtful repute out in the middle of a god forsaken desert (one does come to mind, but only one), and this turned out to be a harmless place geared to the retired crowd.

They gave us a site that was not level at all and when the automatic levelers were finished our front wheels were significantly off the ground which we really didn’t notice until we missed that last step getting off the motorhome. A good thing we didn’t end up in the cactus bush that was right next to the door. A note to ourselves to get a step stool. ASAP.

The resort, as it turns out, was geared to fifth wheelers towing toy haulers because the only thing to do there was go off road in ones ATV at breakneck speed, shoot at road signs and dodge open range cattle. But the view out our front window was beautiful, and although it was brutally windy, the temperatures were quite pleasant. We got our step stool, had no more incidents and patronized Walmart, much to our dismay. The excursions were great – all in the next post.

Avocados were in season, and cheap. Hass avocados at 69 cents a piece and good. The following is a great appetizer. Enjoy!

guacamole-nirvana