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!

On The Road Again!

BACK TO FLORIDA!

We finally left Truth or Consequences NM and drove 40 miles to get to our favorite little Ghost Town of Chloride NM!  LOL! Long drive! But what better place to spend Halloween than in a real bona fide

ghost town???

We love any excuse just to go there!

This year we had visitors of the UNghostly kind!

Mule deer! They came up just at dusk every night.

We had two other campers there hunting deer!

But they can shoot only bucks and all they could

find were does! These does were cautious but

not too shy.

 

We gave you a lot of photos last july when we visited Chloride so I won't do that to you again. If you want more photos you can hunt them up in the July Archives. What I will do is give you a link:

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

This is a great link all about Chloride NM !!!

After we finally tore ourselves away from Chloride,

we returned to Three Rivers Petroglyph Park.

This is another of our favorite places. We posted about it last year with a lot of photos so this year

I am just gonna give you a few pics and this link that will tell you all about this interesting area!

          http://www.desertusa.com/mag98/mar/poi/du_3rivers.html

You can click onto the signs to make them

full sized and readable.

If you want to see more photos you can click onto the post from last year or the link!

Our good friend from Truth or Consequences, the tie dye king! :-) Jeff Dukatt came up with a wonderful logo for TheMotherShip! We put it on while we were camped in Chloride!

We just love the Logo! Thank you Jeff!

Then when we left Three Rivers, we visited a friend

in High Rolls NM. We met her last year at the

Three Rivers Trading Post. Sue now has her own

shop in High Rolls, near Cloudcroft NM. When we

walked in, we passed by this fellow!

He became our alien mascott for the MotherShip! Now we need a name....  any suggestions??

Tonight we are in an Escapee RV park in Lakewood NM. Tomorrow we will finally drive out of NM and enter Texas! Ya'll know how long it takes to get through Texas???  A danged long time!

Especially when you follow the 4-4-2 rule like we do.

4 hours driving or 4 PM or 200 miles, whichever comes first!

That is why we still love travelling! 

We don't push it! We take our time!

Good advice!!!

Happy Trails from The MotherShip!

Geri, Chuck and our furkids

Scotty and DoogieBowser 

On the road to Chloride NM

Beautiful Back Roads

To get to our favorite ghost town, take exit 83

 from I-25, just north of Truth or Consequences NM

 

On highway 52 headed West, to Chloride, you will see layers of blue mountains in the distance.

The clouds started building on the horizon.......

The clouds covered the distant mountains

Soon we could see rain off in the distance

Our roads were clear and beautiful. It is about a 35 mile drive from the I-25 to Chloride, wide open vistas and back country roads.

The rain moved closer to us!

Finally caught us about 15 miles from town!

It rained hard for about 3 minutes

Then you could see the sun beyond the rain

An abandoned adobe dwelling we passed along the way! Lots of adobe is still being used!

The sun keeps trying to make an appearance!

Finally the rain moves on and so do we 

Flowers on the side of the road loved the rain!

The ride to Chloride NM is a beautiful journey! One you will not regret! If you ever get the opportunity, Chloride should not be missed!

As you enter Chloride, the first thing you will notice is the hanging tree in the middle of the road!

Next post will be about the town of Chloride!

http://www.pioneerstoremuseum.com/