Driving across a large high desert was our task for today. We started out at about 4500′ elevation and, despite a bunch of hills and valleys along our route, ended up at about 4500′ elevation. The weather was clear as a bell and the long vistas to the myriad mountains poking up out of the desert were fantastic. The mountains here are not the nice, green formations we typically visit. Instead, they are huge monoliths of bare, fried stone. They are very jagged and quite striking.
We drove about 20 miles north from Sierra Vista/Huachuca City and then headed east on I-10 again. There ain’t much in the way of cities or towns going east on the interstate. We passed through Benson, Arizona, and Lordsburg, New Mexico, and other than that, it is a broad expanse with a few remote trading posts. These trading posts have dozens of roadside billboards as drivers approach touting incongruous selections of items like, diesel, “real” Indian moccasins, Mexican serapes and blankets and, strangely, knives. We blasted right by them at about 65 mph.
After a couple hundred miles, we pulled off the interstate in Deming, N.M., where we ambled over to the Low Hi RV Park. There was a sign in front of the park that said it was the location where “singles swing” but we didn’t spot any swinging singles or anybody else that appears any differently than ordinary RV park denizens which are predominately middle-aged and elderly adults and dogs.
During our previous visits to Deming, we have stayed at a place called Rancho Lobo RV Park. Unfortunately, the road from Deming to Rancho Lobo is about 10 miles in length and some of it is poorly paved. The last little bit is dirt and, since the last two times we have visited the park it was raining, we carried a little bit of New Mexico all over the country when we departed because the red mud splatter from the road is both a rich color and adheres to anything it touches like Bondo. No amount of driving in rain will remove the material or the color. Fortunately for us, the roads to the Low Hi RV Park are paved. The park is basically a gravel parking lot although they have some trees, none of them with leaves at this time of year. The wifi sucks in both parks. After all, we are in Deming, not known as a place where modern electronic communications is important. They do have a very good county museum here but we will miss it this time because we are continuing our eastward trek in the morning.