Was hard to believe how many first time RVers we met on the road this year and most were as dumb as we were when we first started. Nice to be experienced and smug. But that’s one of the nice things about most of the RV community, they are willing to share knowledge and experiences to help the newbies.
Our last week was back in Angel Fire, NM so we could stay in the high country with the cooler temperatures and just relax before hitting the long road home, and that’s exactly what we did, a whole lot of almost nothing.
The RV park where we stayed had daily Pickle Ball so Priss was happy, she has never said who she beat up on or who beat up on her. She did make several new buddies from Florida, Texas and Arizona who go there every summer and invited her back for more so I guess she wasn’t too mean to them.
The one common theme we saw everywhere we went this year, from small hamlets to large cities was “Help Wanted” and “Now Hiring” signs. They were everywhere. A burger joint in Arizona posted a help wanted sign in the window with $14.50 per hour starting pay plus benefits and a top salary of $17.00 per hour. They said they have been short handed for months. The owner of a shop in Santa Fe said he had been running the shop by himself since March and had not been able to hire anyone. He said the biggest issue he is up against is the amount of money people are currently making on unemployment. Wish I had that issue on Social Security, but I’m certainly not looking to rejoin the you know who force.
On our way home we stopped in Guymon, OK at Corral Drive In RV Park, a really nice surprise that had the longest and widest spaces of all the parks we stayed at on this trip, and very well maintained. It is built on the site of an old drive-in theatre and still has the screen in place. (A drive-In is an outdoor movie theater where your car was the movie seat for you younger set).
We set up the Rig, turned on the air conditioner for Stu then drove to Elkhart, Kansas, a tiny little town that sits right on the Oklahoma state line and just a couple of miles east of the Colorado state line. Priss and I were transferred there for work shortly after we were married fifty five years ago and had not been back since we left there.Not much had changed even with our faded memories of the place. Don’t think there were any new buildings in the downtown area and wheat farming was still the major driver for the local economy. We stayed an hour or so trying to find some houses we knew back then and where we had lived but think it is now a vacant lot. We did find where I had worked and nothing there had changed except who occupied the building. Was nice to be there and think about some old times but was good to leave too.
Going south out of Elkhart the first intersection used to be a place called Four Corners, aptly named because that was just about all there was, except for a combination gas station, store and zoo. Yep, a zoo in the middle of nowhere in far western Oklahoma just a few miles south of Kansas. The zoo consisted of six or seven cages about ten by ten with chain link fencing for the cages. We remembered they had two African lions that were probably as old then as we are now. They also had a few other animals that we can’t remember what they were but do remember the summer heat those poor animals had to live in. You would be put in jail today for keeping animals in those conditions and probably should have back then. Was happy to see the zoo no longer existed but the old, abandoned buildings and zoo cages were still there, a sad reminder of old times past. Will keep Elkhart in mind and may even go back in another fifty years or so.
We were in nine states this trip and Covid went from an almost non-issue when we started to something to pay attention to toward the end of our trip. New Mexico had mandatory mask mandates when indoors except then eating and drinking as did the Navajo Nation. But was happy to see the vast majority of people were using common sense. I did lose two business friends to Covid while we were away and really hated to receive that news, and both were a good number of years younger than I am. So Be Careful Out There, it’s real. I had one friend tell me he wasn’t going to get the vaccine because it could have adverse reactions. I told him if he got Covid he would positively have adverse reactions.
Thanks for traveling with us for this somewhat restricted year and we’ll sign off until next year when we’re off to who knows where.
Later.
-Tom