Well, no entry for a day or two from me, too much driving. It turned out the trains near the campground in Vicksburg did not bother me, so I awoke refreshed and we headed out of Vicksburg on Monday morning with a goal of making it to the Grand Canyon by Wednesday. That’s over 1400 miles and we seem to have been averaging about 50 mph on the road, so that’s 28 hours of driving. Yay!
In breaking this up, I decided that I wanted to try and get to Amarillo, Tx on Monday night, that would get about 700 miles out of the way. So we headed across I-20 through Louisiana and into Texas. Lady CurbCrusher was adamant about wanting to skip the stacked freeways in Dallas, so we headed up US-69 around Tyler to Greenville, then across US-380 to Decatur where we caught US-287 and headed up to Amarillo. The worst part of this drive was from Greenville to Decatur. It was a lot of stop lights, and some of the worst drivers I’ve had to drive amongst in a long time. I wish we weren’t on such a tight schedule though. There was a jet-way graveyard along US-69 that I would have liked to stop and photograph, and along US-380 there was a WWII POW Camp sign that I would have liked to follow. Once we turned onto US-287 the ride was nice. There is little traffic and it is a four lane road. There are also a number of picnic areas, some are just that but two or three are really nice rest stops that rival any state welcome station. The only thing is that there are signs “Beware of rattlesnakes.”
We arrived at the Amarillo West RV Park around 11 pm. This is mostly an overnight kind of place. The roads are dirt and the sites are gravel with water, electric and sewer. There appeared to be cable, but we didn’t hook it up. If you show up after closing you look for an empty spot and park, which is what we did.
We woke up and visited the Cadillac Ranch, which is only a mile down the road. Came back, hooked up and went on our way.
Day two of the push was to try and get to Holbrook, Az. This puts us in a spot to go visit the Petrified Forest National Park in the morning before heading over to the Grand Canyon. We made it in about 9 hours and covered approximately 500 miles from Amarillo. The drive across New Mexico is fairly desolate, but it the hills and mountains are beautiful to look at while driving.
We’ve ended up at the Holbrook KOA. A large gravel parking lot with campsites marked out. Some trees, and full hookup, so no complaints there. Wireless is a bonus. There is a pool and playground although it is a bit cold for the pool right now. Little CurbCrusher had a good half hour or so on the playground, which was probably a relief for her after being cooped up in the RV the past two days.
That sums up the trip to date. We’ve done about 2000 of the 6600 miles we plan for the trip.