Sunday, 12-31-95

Sunday morning I checked the weather report for the route ahead of us. We were going to be going into "Light snow flurries with winds up to 20 MPH". We left Tucumcari at about 9:30 Sunday morning. We enjoyed the scenery as we headed into the mountains. The wind picked up and was blowing at a right angle to the highway. We made it to Albuquerque for lunch. While eating we had a beautiful view of a cloud topped, snow covered mountain outside our window. The temperature was in the high 50’s. We headed out again toward a dark sky.

The winds picked up more and we were experiencing winds that were greater than 20 MPH. I would guess more like 35 to 40 MPH. Dust and dirt was becoming airborne along with tumble weeds. I saw more tumble weeds blowing across the road during this trip than I've seen all the rest of my life. By the time we got to western New Mexico, the wind was gusting to over 50 MPH. We felt every gust too. The motorhome was trying to change lanes now and then and was rocking all the time. It got bad enough that we even considered waiting it out in a campground somewhere. But I knew the area well enough to know that it may take several days to blow over. So we continued on into the storm.

It began to rain, but it wasn’t a cleansing rain. It began to rain mud. The rain mixed with the blowing dust and dirt to form a very dirty downpour. But that was only the beginning. The rain changed to snow mixed with dust and dirt. So here we had 40 to 50 MPH winds blowing snow and dirt. The snow got heavier but it wasn’t sticking to the road. The wind seemed to be blowing too hard for the snow to stick. It got heavy enough that we had to slow down. We could only see a short distance in front of us. The snow packed up on the windshield around the area wiped clean by the windshield wipers. I was concerned that the wipers were going to become ineffective due to ice building up on them. So here we were in another exciting adventure driving through what was supposed to be "Light snow flurries." All of a sudden the snow stopped and the sky opened up to white, puffy clouds. We had driven out from under the storm but the wind was still blowing hard.

It was now late afternoon and we were close to the border between New Mexico and Arizona when we had a close call. We were following an 18 wheeler in the slow lane doing about 60 MPH. There was a car in the fast lane traveling slightly faster, slowly passing the big truck. An old, beat up pickup truck approached from the on-ramp. I expected the driver of the pickup truck to adjust his speed so as to enter the freeway behind the 18 wheeler and in front of our motorhome. Instead, the pickup truck just kept going, entering the freeway as if the big truck wasn't there. The driver of the tractor-trailer rig had to hit the brakes and swerve to try to miss the car in the fast lane while avoiding the pickup truck entering the highway. All the time the big truck driver was struggling to keep his rig from "Jack knifing." This was all going on right in front of us and I was hitting the brakes hard and trying to take evasive action without causing too much of a problem to traffic behind me.

Fortunately there was no vehicle next to us in the fast lane, that gave me some room to maneuver. There were three people in the pickup truck and I figured that the driver was just distracted by his passengers. But that apparently wasn’t the case. It wasn’t very long until the driver of the pickup truck decided to move over to the fast lane without any regard for the car that was next to him. Brake lights went on as panicked drivers scrambled to avoid being hit by the pickup. But he still wasn’t finished yet.

There was a group of souvenir stands along the westbound side of the highway just west of the border between New Mexico and Arizona. The driver, with his pickup truck in the fast lane, decided at the very last minute to get off the freeway to check out the businesses. Again, without regard to any vehicles on the road, the driver of the pickup truck cut across traffic from the fast lane to get to the offramp and again there were cars and trucks taking evasive action to avoid a collision. The driver of the big rig must have had enough of the foolishness because he hit his brakes hard so he could get off at the same off ramp. It appeared as if he was following the pickup truck, probably to have a very serious discussion with the driver of the pickup. I figured that the whacko driver must have already filled up on New Year spirits. It is amazing that no cars were hit. It was about an hour before sunset and I was glad to be done with the jerk.

Something we found ourselves doing, to pass the time during the day, was noticing the different license plates from around to continent. Highway I-40 replaced a lot of the old Route 66 which was referred to as "America’s Highway." We found this to be a pretty good description of the current highway, but it might be more appropriate to call it "North America's Highway". We saw cars that represented 29 states including Alaska and Vermont. There were automobiles from five Canadian provinces and one car from Mexico. There were three plates from states we were unable to identify and we only looked at plates on automobiles. The numbers may have been higher if we included tractor-trailer rigs. There were a lot of cars from Minnesota and Nebraska. A lot of the people from Nebraska were on their way to attend the Fiesta Bowl football game in Tempe Arizona. I don’t know where the others were headed.

We had another fantastic sunset shortly after entering Arizona. The sun dropped below some clouds and shined through other clouds. It produced an orange and pink glow that had to be experienced. I took a picture of the sunset, but I doubt that beautiful glow will be captured on film. We drove on into the night.

About 20 miles from Flagstaff it began to snow again, but it was a lighter snow than earlier. We stopped in Flagstaff for our evening meal. When we finished eating the snow had stopped and the night sky was clear of clouds and full of stars. I figured we should continue on our way so as to get away from a possible snow storm situation. The wind had decreased to about 20 to 25 MPH and the drive was uneventful for the rest of the night. We were headed for Kingman, but we ended up at the KOA campground in Needles. Kay said that she thought I had got "the scent of the barn" and had to get to California for the night. We arrived at the Needles KOA campground at 10PM and the temperature was a great 70 degrees. But we had yet another surprise waiting for us at the Needles KOA.

The Needles KOA is where we stayed on our first night on our way to Wichita. When we arrived on that first night, we pretty much had the pick of any camp site. There were only 2 other motorhomes in the part of the campground where we wanted to stay. So when we came in to the campground on New Year’s Eve and found it full, I was somewhat surprised. The campground layout map showed that every campsite was taken, or so I thought.

A New Year’s Eve party was underway at the clubhouse. I asked if anybody there was connected with the campground. The owner came out and introduced himself. He was very nice and told me that a flock of migrating "Snowbirds" had arrived right after Christmas. He said that he had what he called overflow campsites. There is one overflow site on the end of each row of full hookup campsites, but only electricity and water is available. That is all I use anyway, so I was very happy to have a place to stay for the night. It had been a long drive, so we turned in without waiting to welcome the new year.

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