Popping in and out of Las Cruces

Corinne Boondocking, Family, Las Cruces 1 Comment

The past month we have been popping in and out of Las Cruces as the build of our house starts. I’m not going to detail all the house progress in this blog, after all this is a travel blog. We have another blog for house building (of course!). It’s actually the blog we did when we built our current residence almost 6 years ago, I just started posting there again. If you want to follow along with house progress, take a look at http://house.cjsquare.com/ every so often. You WILL NOT be getting an email when a new post is put up, check in when you think of it. The house blog is wide open for anyone to see…no account or registration required.

As I said, we came back to Las Cruces for a few days to take care of paper work, then we were off to Rusty’s RV Ranch in Rodeo, New Mexico again. We have friends that were in the area that we wanted to see. Rusty’s continues to be very popular, so all they had was a dry camping spot. You know we can handle that with no problems. We were tucked away back in a corner and had full access to the pool, hot tub, etc. It was a nice get-away weekend at a reduced price.

We were tucked into a back corner of Rusty’s with a great view of the mountains.
Shade and a set-up beer (a Goeke-Knowles tradition) at Rusty’s. What more could you ask for?

On the way back to Las Cruces (again), we opted to spend a free night at a Harvest Host, the Lescombes Winery in Deming, New Mexico. You may recall, this is where last spring a sudden dust storm dumped a load of sand in our RV, including on the bed. We are so much smarter about the spring winds this year. Closing the windows really helps. Doh!

We started our free night of camping by spending what could have been our campsite fee on a wine tasting. No complaints.
Because it was a little warm outside, we followed up the wine tasting sitting in some comfy chairs in the air conditioned tasting room and reading. There are worse ways to spend a Sunday afternoon.

After another few days in Las Cruces, we were off to Albuquerque for Easter dinner with my Dad and brother’s family. The visit was excellent. However, because it was a holiday weekend, we had to stay at a not-so-favorite KOA (KOA ABQ-North). How’s this for a view out your RV window?

Ugh. The neighbor’s awning is almost touching our awning. Not all RVing consists of terrific views.

Next it was back to…say it with me….Las Cruces again. We discovered a place to park on BLM (Bureau of Land Management) land close to our building lot. More free dry camping! You can park on BLM land for 14 days out of 28, we took full advantage of it.

The RV was parked on BLM land (the red “BLM”) 1.2 miles from our lot. Our lot is the red dropped pin.
This spectacular sunset happened one night.

At this point, I headed home for two weeks to take care of some business. Jim was on his own. He did his longest hike to date since his knee infections (4 miles) and even climbed to the top of “A” mountain one morning. Go Jim!

The view from the top of “A” Mountain. In the lower left where the road seems to disappear going downward, you can just see the Blue Flame parked on the BLM land. Looking up from the mountain, the first neighborhood you see on the right side of the road is ours.
Zoomed in, you can see the Blue Flame at its 14-day BLM home.
Zooming in on our neighborhood, you can see three lots with the dirt building pads started. We are on the right-most of the three pads.
Sunrise from A Mountain! I give Jim credit for climbing in the dark. He said there were a lot of people out there that time of the day.

Once the 14 days on BLM land were up, the building pad on our lot was finished. So Jim moved the RV over to our lot. I am back from New York now, so we are dry camping at our new address for a while.

Home sweet home for a while. We’ve been exploring the area and meeting some of the neighbors.

Out of curiosity, I just took a look at our camping statistics since March 1. In the past 64 days, 35 of them were spent dry camping. Not all of the nights were free, but they were cheap when not free. The generator has not been turned on once. This just shows with the right equipment (solar, lithium batteries, big tanks), going off grid is very feasible.

We aren’t sure what our next fun destination will be. Planning ahead is hard these days.

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One thought on “Popping in and out of Las Cruces”

  1. dominiquefeather

    Glad that you made it back safely — hope it was uneventful. Interesting sunset. Thanks for the pictures. I’ll have to remember to go back to this blog to watch the progress on your house.

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