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One Last Sweep Through the South: Month #34 of RV Life

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We sought out springtime in the South in hopes of less rain than last spring in the Pacific Northwest. It’s kind of crazy how much more the weather impacts life in a camper compared to being in an apartment somewhere. The number of rainy days has been fewer in the South, but the storms have been bigger. We’ve escaped the tornadoes and hail you may have heard about in the news, but we’ve still had our fair share of thunderstorms knocking out power and scaring the daylights out of poor Monkey.

Month #34 kicked off with a Gulf Coast bike trip and then moved at record speed through northern Texas and Oklahoma. We’ve since made it back to our familiar home base of Albuquerque, New Mexico, with an island vacation just around the corner.

Here’s a quick recap of this past month’s batch of homes on the road.

Biloxi, Pensacola, Orange Beach & New Orleans: Home on the Road #113

We called it our “MissFloBamaIana bike trip,” but unfortunately, not a whole lot of biking actually happened. The goal was 100 miles over the course of a long weekend, but we didn’t even reach half of that goal. This was because of the high 20+ mph winds, time-consuming bike repairs, thunderstorms, and the time constraints of scheduling in a social visit. But we still managed to tent-camp in four states in four days, thereby checking a few more places off our “full-time RV life map.”

  • Highlights: White sand Biloxi beaches, visiting my aunt and her husband in Orange Beach, delicious seafood, not getting sick after tent-camping, Gulf Island forts, walking around Pensacola
  • Lowlights: Consoling a dog terrified of storms, broken spoke, rain and mud, insane winds, no time to party in New Orleans, so much driving

Shreveport, Louisiana Area: Home on the Road # 114

Our stay in the Shreveport area was a short one – just a couple days for the purpose of visiting our favorite nonprofit sanctuary, Chimp Haven. It wasn’t a scheduled tour day at Chimp Haven, but as occasional donors, the staff let us drop by anyway to bring in some donation items and see a few chimps.

  • Highlights: Seeing some fun research-retired chimps being well cared for, mountain biking trails around the sanctuary where you could hear the chimps hootin’ & hollerin’, a surprisingly decent campground in Greenwood at a TA travel center, being invited by the campground long-termers to their Easter lunch
  • Lowlights: No time to actually check out anything in Shreveport, terribly maintained roads to get here in an RV that’s already insanely bumpy on the smoothest of roads

Tyler, Texas: Home on the Road #115

Tyler State Park was a lot like our stay in Huntsville State Park, and Texas’ state parks are by far the best things about Texas. Right from our spacious campsite, it was easy to get to mountain biking trails, trail runs, quiet paths for long dog walks, and a lake for boating. Lately I find myself much happier staying out in the boonies in a place like this and only going to town about once a week.

  • Highlights: Continuing to get a little better at mountain biking, peaceful campsite, magical time to hang out outdoors, eating dinner on a stand-up paddleboard without toppling over, working on a craft project for Mother’s/Father’s Day, the beautiful rose garden in town, True Vine Brewing’s super-sweet outdoor space
  • Lowlights: More thunderstorms, lots of mud

Roadside Stop: Argyle Texas

With the take-down, setup, gas/propane stops, slow driving speed, etc., RV driving days always take more time than you’d think. Finding a place to park this monstrosity often prevents us from making too many stops along the way on moving days, but we made an exception in Argyle, Texas.

I first heard about Gnome Cones in 2017, an all-natural snow cone stand in a Texas town of 4,000+ people. I finally got to experience the world’s only gnome-shaped snow cones for myself along this drive, and it was nothing short of incredible.

The shack is super-cute, the flavors are creative (I chose Troll’s Blood, which was a mix of cherry, strawberry, and coconut), the onsite gnome collection is pretty impressive, and they’re damn delicious too. I bought a keychain and t-shirt as souvenirs and arbitrarily joined their Gnome Cones club in hopes of making it back here someday for round two.

Transition Week Stop 1: Lake Murray, Oklahoma

Transition week, collectively Home on the Road #116, was a whirlwind week of state park stays in three states. This was an intentional plan to break up the long drive from Tyler, Texas to Albuquerque, New Mexico. The first stop was Lake Murray State Park, which was our first-ever time camping in Oklahoma.

  • Highlights: Peaceful site with no neighbors, nice weather to work outside, adding the Oklahoma sticker to our RV life map, getting in a good run
  • Lowlights: Not enough time to take the boats out on the nice lake, not much in the way of hiking trails

Transition Week Stop 2: Copper Breaks State Park, Texas

Our second stop for transition week was Copper Breaks for a three-night stay to get substantial work done and spend some time on the trails. This was an awesome place to mountain bike and also see colorful wildflowers, with some landscapes that surprised me that they were in Texas.

  • Highlights: Nice hiking and mountain biking trails at the park, red rock landscapes, quiet campsite, amazingly colorful wildflowers
  • Lowlights: More storms to scare Monkey, Jeep tire issue that actually required a service from Quanah to come out to us, mounting fuel costs

Transition Week Stop 3: Caprocks Canyons State Park, Texas

The third stop on this very mobile week was Caprock Canyons, which was our last stay in Texas for probably a long while. I loved the scenery here for this one-night stay but never ended seeing any of the resident buffalo that are supposed to be roaming around the park.

  • Highlights: Red rock landscapes along a nearly 7-mile hike on the rim trail, watching the resident prairie dogs peek their heads up from dirt mounts and confuse the heck out of Monkey, sweet potato pancakes for breakfast
  • Lowlights: Where are the buffalo?!

Transition Week Stop 4: Sumner Lake State Park, New Mexico

To round out this multi-stop journey, we camped in a new part of a familiar state. New Mexico is certainly not known for its abundant water sources, but there are a surprising number of nice lakes here for chill boating activities. Sumner Lake State Park took me by surprise with how nice the campsites here, how blue the lake was, and the stunning lightning show under the desert stars.

  • Highlights: Cute outdoor casitas at each campsite that were perfect for working, campsite views of the lake, chill vibe, feeling at home back in the desert, fun lightning in the distance
  • Lowlights: Not enough time to get the boats out, not much in the way of hiking trails

Albuquerque, New Mexico: Home on the Road # 117

Albuquerque has become a familiar home base for us. This was our first destination for the 5-week camper life trial in 2016, it’s where we set out from for last year’s Christmas trip, and it’s now where we plopped down to fly out to Hawaii for an anniversary vacation. We’ve stayed at a different campground each time – this time north of the city more in the Rio Rancho/Bernalillo area.

  • Highlights: Discovering our new favorite “promised land” of Placitas between ABQ and Santa Fe that is more like where we would want to find a future house than anywhere else we’ve seen lately, a great mix of sunshine and storms, finding a local at-home dog sitter nearby via Rover to take care of Monkey while we’re in Hawaii, securing RV storage during our trip, chill hike in the Cibola National Forest, good times at the casino bowling alley, authentic New Mexican cuisine of sopapillas with green chile 
  • Lowlights: Almost getting screwed out of an RV storage space because campground owners are unreliable, hassles with campground mail delivery, not enough time to do more city things in ABQ with work and packing

Looking Ahead to Next Month

I’m sharing this monthly update a little early because TOMORROW, we fly out to Hawaii! It’ll be my first time in the islands, and we’re taking our tent gear for a more rugged and local experience vs. the going the popular all-inclusive resort route that’s not so much our style.

We’ll be spending a week on Oahu and the Big Island and renting a car on each one so we can check out whatever island life has to offer at our own pace. It’ll be a much-needed week of not working and celebrating our anniversary and the husband’s birthday in the mid-May beach tradition that we’ve kept up with over the last four years.

When our time in Hawaii sadly comes to an end, the almost the entire rest of month #35 will be spent in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The corridor between Albuquerque and Santa Fe has quickly jumped to the top of our potential plop-down list after discovering a disappointing lack of good housing options in Southwestern Utah. Post-vacation, we’ll be slowing down the pace of camper life to scope out the scene and take a breath of fresh air.

Until then, aloha!

Catch up with the journey:

Lost Arrow Campground: A Spooky Short Fiction Story for the Campfire

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Lost Arrow Campground

It was about 9:00 pm and both driver and passenger were starting to nod off. They were keeping an eye out for campground signs and pulled over at two different ones. But was a Saturday night and neither had any space left to set up, so they moved on.

Aura, Raoul, and their dog named Chicken had been moving from one campground to the next to see the country and explore the great outdoors. That sort of lifestyle would be spontaneous enough for most people, but these adventurous three had fallen into a comfortable routine after six months and needed to switch things up a bit.

So on this particular day, they had decided to drive their Jeep and pop-up camper until they could drive no more and then look for campground signs along the highway. It was a hot, muggy day in late August, and they had made it as far as Oklahoma. This was a particularly long stretch of road that they were looking to get through as quickly as possible.

A few miles later, they saw a sign that read, “Lost Arrow Campground.” That sounded just fine, considering it was almost 11 pm and a thick fog was starting to roll in.

They pulled into Lost Arrow and saw a small shack at the front. Understandably, there was no one working at this time of night, so they decided to just set up and check in and pay in the morning. Camper set-up went quickly, and the couple divvied up the last tasks of the day. Aura took Chicken out for her last walk of the day, and Raoul went to a nearby utility sink to wash dishes from their on-the-road dinner.

As typical, Aura was distracted on her dog walk and texting her best friend, Michelle, about their exhausting journey to spontaneity.  She was looking down at her glowing iPhone when BAM! She walked into a towering beast of a man with a huge belly, bounced right off of it, and fell backwards into the gravel. Meanwhile, Chicken, who was always alert-to-a-fault and way too social, didn’t even respond to the fat man that was in their way. The pup had only been startled by Aura’s fall, nothing more.

Stunned and shaken up a bit, Aura brushed herself off and picked herself up off the ground, still holding on to Chicken’s leash. Feeling paranoid and a bit frantic, she rubbed her eyes and whipped her head in either direction. There was no one there. No one to apologize for being fat and in the way, no one to give her a helping hand out of the gravel, and no one to explain why she had bounced back so violently. Exhausted and unwilling to think about it anymore, Aura and Chicken made their way back to the camper to settle in for the night.

Meanwhile, Raoul was behind an old rickety shed hovering over a large sink with a few dirty bowls and spoons. He turned on the water without really looking at it and it instantly felt thicker than any water ever should – even campground water. It was pitch black outside, and his headlamp battery was becoming dim. The water coming out of the faucet was red, blood red. Instead of feeling alarmed, he was just angry. He had grown weary of life on the road and all the shitty accommodations along the way. For a brief second, the thought crossed Raoul’s mind that it could be blood, but he blamed his headlamp, his tiredness, and his color blindness and didn’t get it a second thought.

Back at the camper, Aura and Raoul were too tired and cranky to even get into their respective stories about what had happened on their separate outings. Instead they just crawled under the covers and tried to forget about what just happened.

That’s when they noticed that a smell was starting to creep in. It smelled rancid, pungent, and unlike anything they’d ever smelled before. Over the past six months, they had camped next to landfills, pig farms, and Appalachians with serious BO. Yet nothing compared to this smell. It was the smell of rotting flesh, yet they had no idea.

Still hoping to get at least a couple hours of sleep before the sun came up, they closed all the windows, lit a stick of incense, and covered their heads with a blanket. This seemed to work for a little while until the sounds started up.

Moaning sounds echoed through the trees and bounced off the flimsy canvas covering that separate the inside world from the outside one…and the familiar one from the hauntingly strange one on the other side.

Heavy duty earplugs helped to muffle the moaning sounds better than nothing, and before long, the birds were chirping and the first glimpses of sunlight peeked out onto the horizon. Aura, Raoul, and Chicken weren’t entirely sure where they were, but they just knew they wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible and get back on the road.

Still angry at having stumbled upon yet another disappointing campground, Raoul started packing up. In her usual stubborn way, Aura refused to help and insisted that they go check in at the front office to pay first. They already had an outstanding citation for failure to pay at a campground in Pennsylvania, and the last thing they needed to add to the mix was more legal trouble. The couple went back and forth in a passive-aggressive fashion until Raoul finally threw his hands in the air and gave in just to keep the peace.

The three of them stepped outside the camper and started making their way to the front office to pay for the night’s stay before packing up. There was a low-lying fog that blanketed the ground and hovered about three feet high in all directions. Chicken seemed to disappear in the fog as they walked towards the shack along the road. There were no other campers or tents in sight, which was a bit odd, but not entirely unheard of.

When they arrived, they found no one…only an abandoned, dilapidated shack with splintered wood and broken windows. There was no sign designating the business as Lost Arrow Campground and no pay box in sight. So they gladly accepted that this terrible night was at least a free night of camping and started walking back to the pop-up to take down and move out.

At that moment, the blanket of fog was just starting to lift. And what was under the fog began to reveal itself.

Tombstones. Gravesites. Corpses. Everywhere. And in all directions.

The real Lost Arrow Campground was up the road another half mile, and they just hadn’t gone far enough. Aura, Raoul, and Chicken had just camped overnight in a cemetery.

The residents were none too pleased about it, and they weren’t about to let them get away with a free night of camping for nothing. Mangled limbs began to claw their way out of mounds of dirt, and there was nowhere to run.

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