Happy Trails

Hello Emily!  Emily is our friend from Kansas! She also blogs under the url:http://followingthewinds.blogspot.com/

Emily solos in her 16' Casita! We met her at Birdwatchers Campground in San Antonio NM. After setting up campers, we headed out to Socorro to eat pizza. Stuffed and sleepy, we went to bed early with the anticipation of visiting Bosque del Apache Wildlife Refuge in the morning! Vee's of Sand Hill cranes were in the air, flying to the refuge and we were excited!

Here is Em standing next to 2 bronze sandhill cranes.

Below is the link to Bosque del Apache.

http://www.friendsofthebosque.org/

Nov 17th and 18th, Chuck and I will be going back for the Festival of the Cranes!  Thousands of Sand Hill Cranes come to the refuge every year! It is quite breath taking!

                   Chuck and I strike a pose!

Snow Geese against an Autumn landscape!

The Autumn colors are amazing! Cottonwoods are turning gold while various reds and bronzes add to the overall beauty!

At dusk, just as we are about to leave, we see our first cranes! Chuck and I are going back for more hopefully before the festival!

This is why we are called The MotherShip! Many of our friends have smaller Casita or Oliver travel trailers! They are like the satellites to our MotherShip! This is Emily's Casita she calls "Eggie" parked next to us!

Emily, Chuck and Sue in front of the old saloon in Chloride NM, our favorite ghost town!

http://www.pioneerstoremuseum.com/

http://www.ghosttowns.com/states/nm/chloride.html

Sue also travels solo in her Casita! That is Sue with her "crew" of rat terriers Spike and Bridget. This is the first time Emily and Sue have met in person! They have been reading each other's blog for some time. Sue's blog is here:

http://rvsueandcrew.wordpress.com/2011/10/27/keeping-it-real-along-the-rio-grande/#comments

Emily and Sue photographing the Doodle Dum house in Chloride NM!

Ok, I had to get a picture of it too! This is where Cassie Hobbs made her furniture and all of her wonderful crafts! Cassie is gone, but her art lives on in the general store!

Below is Donna Edmund. She and her husband, Don, have lived in Chloride 32 years, slowly restoring some of the buildings there. This is the old style cash register found in the "general store" now a museum.

The store once belonged to a mining company, when the price of silver declined, the mining company boarded up the store and moved on.

When Donna and Don purchased the store some 33 years ago, they found a perfectly intact general store from 1922! Everything was covered in bat guano and rat droppings. It took 3 years to clean the shelves,

to clean everything on the shelves

and re-open the general store as a museum! It is full of everything from chewing tobacco, baby shoes, mining equipment, well pulleys, saddles, and a post office!

Chuck, Donna and Sue stand next to a table full of chemists tools needed for the mine!

Even the hoop for the old hoop skirts the women wore in those days!

Donna demonstrates how the old post office typewriter still works!

Next to the campground, behind the museum, sits Harry Pye's cabin! Don, Donna and their daughter Linda totally renovated the interior of the old cabin, leaving the outside as original ad possible! I love this bathroom sink!

The outside of the Harry Pye cabin!

Emily, Sue and crew and Donna outside!

The outhouse even comes complete 

with a satellite dish!

Chuck and I love Chloride, we go every Halloween! What better place to spend Halloween than in a ghost town? We would love to have you come join us sometime!

While shopping in downtown Truth or Consequences NM, believe it or not... Chuck found a beer called..

MotherShip Beer! Can you believe it??? An organic beer brewed in Colorado! I just had to take a photo of it to show ya'll because I knew you wouldn't believe it either!

Happy Trails to you from Geri, Chuck and our hound herd, Scotty, DoogieBowser and Radar!