Shopping, Elk and Pizza

Friday, March 14, 2014

Today I got up and worked on delivering the final files to a printer... supposedly they made some changes so that I could now upload my files. Unfortunately, their portal was still painfully slow, so after an exchange of emails, we opted for using Dropbox, a cloud-based file storage platform, that makes sharing files across the internet very easy. I uploaded 350MB+ for the printer to retrieve. I am so glad that my AT&T Mifi Liberate hotspot works flawlessly for my work.

After lunch, we decided to stop at Piñon Pottery first, then head into midtown Ruidoso, to shop all the quaint shops. We enjoyed talking to the potter's husband as we shopped at Piñon Pottery, along with their four dogs that made sure we were welcome. We saw an amazing photograph of the surrounding hills, taken at night, all aglow with wildfire. It was a time-lapse photo taken in April 2011, when a careless firework started a wildfire, called The White Fire, that engulfed five homes, several outbuildings and 10,356 acres of Lincoln National Forest in east Ruidoso and north Ruidoso Downs. Piñon Pottery was less than 100 yards from some of the burned areas, but spared as they are located on the opposite bank of Rio Ruidoso. I managed to find a similar pic:

The area is in recovery, you can definitely tell the impact of the wildfire.

We then headed to midtown, we looked all up and down Sudderth street, and enjoyed visiting lots of different places, including one of our favorites, White Mountain Pottery. Tony even located and purchased a wind chime he thinks will work well in his percussion ensemble. After a while, I got an email requesting approval for the files I sent earlier that morning, so we headed back to the trailer so I could check the proofs.

After my work duties were done, we again headed out to get fuel for the big tank, in anticipation of our departure tomorrow. We went to the Casino Apache Travel Center, since the fuel was about 5 cents cheaper per gallon. We fueled up, and headed back to midtown, to get a pizza at our favorite pizza joint, Cafe Rio. We placed our order, but every table was taken! We decided to get it to go, rather than wait for a table. It was going to be about an hour, the waitress said! Oh well, we'll shop some more. We walked around more of the shops, and I found a t-shirt I liked and a new night-light for Mammoth.

Midtown, Ruidoso, NM

 Midtown, Ruidoso, NM

Cafe Rio
(pic at a weird angle because I was trying to get the sign without getting all the people standing out front.)

New "ElkRidge appropriate" night-light for the bathroom

Once the hour was about up, we headed back to Cafe Rio, and our food was ready. We took it back to the trailer, and had a great meal. Their pizza uses a sauce that is like no other... it is almost sweet, but it contains spices that give it a kick that requires quenching, and goes really well with beer.

Pizza and cheesy breadsticks from Cafe Rio

After dinner, we watched some of our shows, and then we started getting the coach ready to go.

Sun sets on Mammoth

The dilemma was that there was a disturbance headed into the central and north Texas areas, and severe thunderstorms with possible tornados were predicted. We were originally planning to drive home in one day, but opted instead to drive until weather deemed we needed to stop, probably somewhere around Abilene.

We were tired from our walking/shopping, so we didn't get the coach completely ready to go. Oh well, we're not planning an 11-hour drive, so there isn't the rush to get out early in the morning.