Here and There and Boondocking Chores

Saturday we decided rather late in the morning to take a jeep road trip to Ruidoso, NM—beautiful country, mountainous and chilly with water running in the creeks—unusual for New Mexico.  Ruidoso was the cowboy’s nightmare and my idea of a fun afternoon—it was late in the day when we drove through the little bustling town, lots of cute shops and restaurants.  Packed with people it appeared a holiday function of some sort such as a parade was about to happen. 

We drove through Lincoln, NM—where Billy The Kid made his famous escape from jail.  A lot of the historical buildings are intact and operated as museums.  Driving on into the mountains we stumbled upon Fort Stanton established in 1855 as a military fort to protect the residents of Rio Bonita in the Apache wars.  “In 1899, President William McKinley transferred Fort Stanton property from the War Department to the Marine Hospital Service, converting the military reservation to America's first federal tuberculosis sanatorium,” Wikipedia 

Photo courtesy of Wikipedia 

It appeared most of the original buildings are still standing and there is a conservation effort under way—the fort now belongs to the state of New Mexico.  We stopped to stretch our legs at the cemetery:

There were several tombstones with coins covering the entire headstone, we had neither one heard the “story of the coins.” 

Back on the road it was getting late and we still needed generator gas and water—we had looked throughout the afternoon for outdoor water spigots without success.  In Roswell Michael said, “there is usually an outside water faucet at Wal Mart.”  I gave him “the look” as if to say, “are you nuts or what???”  Well, danged if we didn’t find a water hydrant, the non-freeze variety in of all places, the parking lot right outside the gardening center.  We carry several collapsible 5 gallon containers with us to supplement the holding tank—we arrived at our current boondocking spot without a full 100 gallon holding tank and needed to supplement it as Emmi is getting a bath in this special shampoo twice weekly!   Last stop, the gas station.  We run our little Honda generator about two hours per day to recharge the coach batteries, seldom running our big generator unless I need to use the convection oven.

Each morning we are getting out and taking Emmi for a walk, she is still “honking” (that’s what her cough sounds like, a honking goose) but the cough seems to be getting better, we think, we hope???  This afternoon late we took the ATVs out for a spin and she went with us, riding in her basket and getting very excited when we would see a rabbit tearing through the low lying creosote bushes. 

Judging by the appearance of the rocks I would say this guy had friends to visit??  Judy—what is he, it was a large bird!

My $4 Dollar Store little Christmas tree.  It is lighted with battery operated, tiny LED lights.  Life is good.