Today was a travel day but the distance was easy. We loaded up our stuff and departed Trinidad Lake in Colorado and drove through the strange circuitous route in Trinidad back to I-25. We took I-25 south over Raton Pass at about 8,000′ before descending into the prairie of New Mexico. Along this road you can see the Rockies on the right and to the left is plains all the way to the horizon. On both sides of the road are big crowds of pronghorn antelope along with a few cattle grazing in some pastures visible from I-25. If there are so many pronghorn visible from the road, I wonder how many are not in view. They are gorgeous animals. They are also smart enough to stay out of the range of men’s guns. They split when we get anywhere near them.
We covered the 160 miles or so from Trinidad to Las Vegas, NM, pretty quickly so we arrived at Storrie Lake State Park near town around noon. The cute little Ranger at the gate took some money from us and directed us to the locations of water and power hookups in campsites. We initially selected a nice one and completely set up our Barbarian Invader before finding out that the 30 amp breaker in the site’s pedestal was henshit. We decamped, moved and set up in a new location where the power pedestal was not so cantankerous. That burned some valuable fooling around time. When I mentioned that site 8S had a wonky main breaker to the park staff, the guy who apparently doesn’t take care of maintenance issues stated that he had problems with the very same breaker the day before. What an asshole – he could have labelled the pedestal so ignorant Californians wouldn’t completely set up their RVs before discovering he was a poor electrician. He also stated that he would have to call an electrician. I doubt he scored well on his SAT test.
We turned on the air conditioning, drank a drink and both took short naps but after a bit we were seized by a startlingly frightful idea and drove down the road to Scab-Mart. Despite this particular Wal-Mart being about the size of an ordinary metropolitan football stadium, they don’t have cashews or sunflower seeds unless they keep them in the sporting goods sections. We retreated to our second choice spot back at Storrie Lake SP where Peggy performed some wonderful magic and produced a chicken Caesar salad that I greedily consumed in record time.