Our Mammoth Travels: I wanted to see a volcano, anyway.

Sunday, Dec 26th, 2016

We got ready to leave fairly quickly since we didn't have time to get too spread out. I had to go to the office to pay for our stay, since they were closed for the holiday yesterday and the night before.

When I walked back to the rig, I saw a tumbleweed wedged under the rig! I pulled it out and took a few pics of it, because just last week there had been a photo circulating on facebook of a guy with a tumbleweed for hair, resembling a large Afro. If this tumbleweed had been smaller, I would have brought it along! But it wouldn't fit through the door, and we didn't have room in the basement. Oh well.

We pulled out about 9:30am and made good time, until Dalhart. There we had to take a detour to get around a low bridge in town, that took an extra 15 minutes out into the country and back.

We stopped and ate lunch(sandwiches) in Texline, and fueled the truck from the big tank. We finally did it right this time! Tony added the fuel tank cleaner about a week before, and let it slosh around. Then, we filled up half the big tank to get us to Amarillo. He added the anti-freezing additive once we got to Amarillo and filled the big tank entirely again. This seemed to work, as we had no problems with the pump, freezing or fuel on our trip!

Once we got to Clayton, we realized heading out of town, we were going the route to Raton, not to Springer. The gps was taking us a different way than we expected! I guess we wanted to see the volcano at Capulin, and didn't know it!

Snowcapped mountains in the distance

Sadly, there's no way to turn around a 42' trailer on this route, so we just kept going. At Raton we headed south down I-25, then to a cutoff toward Cimmeron, north of Springer. I don't know why the gos took us that way! Anyway, it felt much longer than it probably was.

Once we got down 64 that runs though Cimmeron Canyon State Oatk, the road is far more winding and hilly. As we got closer to Eagles Nest, there were icy patches. None too bad, but with a heavy trailer and steep ups and downs and curves, there were a couple of slips of the tires as we tried to accelerate. So Tony out it in 4x4, which seemed to help.

We got into the park about 3:30 Mountain time, and got set up quickly since it was in the 20s, falling, and windy! They recently had 6 inches of snow, so it was quite the winter wonderland. There are surprisingly a lot more rigs here this year than last year, we counted around 20 or so! After we were settled, we made some quick nachos and finished getting the inside set up. The Cowboys were playing football on Monday night, and they are looking good this season. So of course we watched. They won!!