Goodbye Palo Duro Canyon, We'll Miss You! Now in Tijeras, NM

Today is my brother-in-law's birthday so Happy Birthday John! Hope it isn't too cold in Ottawa.

We were sad to bid goodbye to Palo Duro Canyon. We really enjoyed our time there in spite of my back problems. Here's a couple of last photos from the Canyon.


Our truck, Big Larry for those of you who haven't been introduced did a good job pulling Big Harv (our 5er) out of the Canyon but there was some strain involved!

We left the dump station in the Canyon at 9:30 a.m. and the truck was registering 55F (13C) under bright, sunny skies. It took us 15 minutes to get from the dump station to the road and were soon merrily on our way. We are now in the Mountain Time Zone so for those of you in the Eastern time zone, we're now 2 hours behind you.

It was interesting to see the terrain and vegetation change as we headed toward New Mexico. Just before we got to the border of New Mexico we started to see lots of cactus, mostly of the cholla variety as well as some scrub trees.

This was different from the plains of Texas where mostly everything is flat. As we proceeded into New Mexico we started climbing and climbed to about 7,000+ feet just before we reached our destination when we lost about 300 feet. We are now around 6,700 feet at Tijeras, NM which is just to the east of Albuquerque, NM.

This is Mesa Redonda at 5,052 feet.

Lots of bales of cotton ready to go and be processed.

A windmill in a typical New Mexico setting.

Mountains as we're approaching Tijeras.

We arrived here at around 1:45 p.m. Mountain time. Hidden Valley Resort, Inc. is a Passport America RV park so we wound up paying $20 for two nights. The park is on different levels. We're on the top level so we could access the satellites. The sites are quite close together and it's not a place where I'd want to spend a lot of time and quite a letdown from Palo Duro which to use Howard Payne's phrase (rv-dreams.com) definitely had the "it" factor. However we do have 50 amp service and we're here and set up so all is well. And here's our site.

Since we're now in the mountains, the temperature will be cooler registering about 65F (18C) when we arrived. The temperature is to drop to near freezing tonight.

We're here mainly to get the scheduled service done on the truck and get the laundry done. I also have some mail to post so will have to find a post office. Back to the mundane things from our little vacation in the Canyon!