We made it to New Mexico and are staying at Navajo Lake State Park on the San Juan River. Nice campground, with cell service and electricity. The first picture is one of the many thousand-year-old ruins nearby between here and Farmington. I had hoped for a picture of the river, or of the reservoir, but we have lots of clouds and a cold front coming. It is just not good picture weather.
Cottonwood Campground
The campsite is at Cottonwood Campground, Navajo Lake State Park. The campground is on the San Juan River and the first three miles of the river downstream of Navajo Dam is a trout fishing dream come true. Year-round, cold clear water from Navajo Lake flows out of the dam at a constant temperature, perfect for trout and bugs (which the trout eat). There are more fish (big fish) per mile in this section of the river than any other place that I know about.
No fishing for me, we are driving (in the car, without the RV) to Albuquerque to see my brother and his family. Will we be back for an extended stay and fishing? Absolutely!
Back to the back story on how we became full-time RVers.
Tami had a friend from work that went on extended retirement vacation in an Airstream and loved it. She would send updates occasionally about their travels and locations it all seemed dreamy and unreachable.
I had a friend that when he retired one of the things he did was take an extended vacation in an RV and drove all the way from San Diego to Key West to New England and then back to San Diego only to move back into his house in San Diego and settle down to a more typical stationary retirement. At that time, I understood the desires of a huge trip but I didn’t understand the effort involved with such a huge trip. At the time, I made the comment that it seemed impractical and expensive. I did see the adventure aspect and that appealed to me.
Tami coupled the knowledge of her friend with the airstream — with the new experience at the RV show — with our travel bug and with little hesitation started looking into the entire idea of traveling in an RV as a vacation idea. It wasn’t too big a jump from traveling in an RV to the idea of living in an RV and occasionally traveling, to the next jump of living in an RV and traveling all the time.
I was on board with Tami every step along the way. We didn’t get there all at once but there wasn’t much hesitation at each step. Remember that we are talking about more than a year prior to going full-time when these ideas started working through our thought processes. At the same time, we started sensing that we were not going to work forever, started thinking about retirement. Still, everything became a huge rush in the summer of 2017 we were not jumping in both feet without looking first.
Decisions – Decisions – Decisions
Decisions on when we would transition from full-time workers to full-time RV travelers were somewhat not within our control, but we could have resisted the urge and continued working.
Going to ABQ tomorrow, leaving the RV here. We will be back here Sunday and drive the house back to Utah on Monday.
Here is a link to the google map for the area.
Link to our 2018 Route.
Link to our route Las Vegas to New Mexico
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Lots of miles. Relax tonight. Do you BBQ?
to Aron: Not as much as BBQ as in Carlsbad. It is colder and windy out here. We will be driving 3 hrs to and from ABQ. That’s why we’re leaving the RV here.
Sure. Not too bad from there. Worth Barbara and I going there?
to Aron: It is worth seeing. Especially Northern AZ. If you want to catch us I would wait for Oregon. Rustic hotels around here would be a generous description.