We were sad to say goodbye to our dear friends, but it is time to move on. While in Camp Verde on Tuesday we had thunderstorms and more than 1 inch of rain fell to the delight of our hosts. It kept the temperatures cool allowing us to enjoy the outdoors on the covered patio. Yards and surrounding hills greened up nicely. Peggy was happy to take credit for the weather that accompanied us to Arizona especially since she was accused of bringing record breaking heat and a hurricane to San Diego.
The unique beauty and topography of the Southwest continues to fascinate me. Peggy says that I should find an online course to take to learn more about it’s geological history. The summer monsoon clouds and rains followed us on our south eastward trek to New Mexico. While it helped to keep us cool (a little too cool for Peggy at times), we were moving fast enough to keep the top down and stay dry.
Today as we headed into New Mexico, we traveled through several National Forests including Cococino, Tonto and Stigreaves/Stigreaves Apache/Apache Stigreaves National Forests. The roads we traveled on were fun: with ascents, decents, curves and switchbacks. Camp Verde is about 3100 feet in elevation. We climbed as high as 7796 feet at the Continental Divide. We ended the day at 5,429 feet. We crossed the Rio Grande River at San Antonio, NM.
Today was a long travel day for us. As we crossed into New Mexico, we lost one of those hours that we had gained earlier in our trip! So in addition to it getting darker earlier because the days are getting shorter, all of a sudden it was one hour later! To add to our long day, we had planned on staying in San Antonio, NM for the night. Surprise! San Antonio is smaller than it looks on the map and there was no lodging to be found. We soldiered onto Carizozo. (That was a grueling 50+ miles in the dark with heavy rain and wind on a curvy, mountainous, road.) Fortunately, we found a delightful small motel in Carizoz called Four Winds Motel and bunked down for the night. (In future, even if we don’t make reservations, we will at least verify that there are lodging options for our night’s destination.)
Fun signs for the day: Ranchos Obscuros Road which appeared out of nowhere and led nowhere (that we could see). And in the middle of another nowhere, there was a sign reading “Vehicle Noise Laws Enforced”.