Hey Guys!! Are you ready for more of the story?

It took us three days to drive the 1,400 miles or so to get back to Missouri. We were in sunny and warm Arizona when we started out. We said goodbye to Lost Dutchman State Park early Friday and took off for Las Cruces, NM. Now, there are three ways to get from Phoenix to Las Cruces. One path goes up and over and takes you up the steep Colorado Plateau, one path takes you straight east through Globe, NM and some steep grade mountain passes and the other path takes you down to Tucson and then over.

We chose the down and around route to avoid the steep grades since our engine was acting up. We ended up at the Hacienda RV Resort the first night after a fairly uneventful day. We’ve stayed at…I don’t know…close to 100 RV parks and this was the first one to give us treats for our cats! I thought it was super cute and the cats appreciated the treat. I don’t know how the RV park is other than the treats. We got in right before they closed and we left before anyone was in the office the next day.

We started out even earlier on day two. We had a long day ahead of us and there would be some elevation gain that would slow us down. Our route took us through El Paso. You’re looking at Mexico in the picture above on the left. We’ve heard a lot of…not so great…things about El Paso. We didn’t stop. We just drove on through. It’s a big city and took forever to get through, but we made it with no issues. The engine was behaving.

We got to our RV Park in Abilene pretty late that night. It was so dark on the road we weren’t really sure we were in the right spot at first. Thank goodness the office had the forethought to put us in an easy in and out spot. It was dark when we got there and dark when we left.

We woke up to ice on day three. We’ve driven in a blizzard, we’ve driven in wind storms, and torrential rain…but, Guys…driving on a sheet of ice was a whole new ball game.

We crept along at around 20mph and noticed our windshield wipers were freezing up so we thought we’d be smart…and safe…and stop at a gas station to recoup and fix a few things. We didn’t know we were driving onto a thick sheet of ice until it was too late. Our only course of action was to go with it and try not to run into anything. We slid past the gas tanks with the cars…we slid past the propane fill up…and somehow we got stopped without hitting anything. I think Jerl and I were in shock at this point and  sat wondering how the heck we were going to get out of the ice covered parking lot. The only out we had a chance at making it to was the one in the pic above and we watched car after car slip and slide up and down it. My (Jennie’s) dad had the idea to use cat litter to get enough traction to get out. Luckily, the gas station had one bag of it left. It worked and we made it out of the parking lot an hour and a few heart-attacks later.

It took us four hours to go 90 miles that morning.

We made it though. It took us 15 hours that third day to make it to Missouri, but we made it safely. It was the most stressful day of driving we’ve had in the three years we’ve been nomads…I’m getting all stressed out again just thinking about that day.

I’ll leave y’all here and next week I’ll give you all the updates and the plans for the rest of the year!

See y’all down the road!

#itsnotallfunandgames