2 Travel Days & A Week In Anthony, TX

Travel Day to Phoenix, Arizona.  I packed up Chicken Cream Cheese Taquitos that I made yesterday so we could have them for our lunch today.  I asked Kevin if he wanted to change things up and pull over for lunch on Travel Days or to do what we do and eat on the drive. He wants to eat on the drive. I agree; we both like to get where we are going.

Crisping Up The Taquito! Laveen, AZ 02/26

The taquitos didn’t fare well in the fridge and were soft. Kevin called them soft burritos. HA I even set one on the dashboard so it would crisp in the sun. Worked barely. HA  ***In the picture above, you see a long skinny thing on the right. That actually holds my iPad in front of me. That way I don’t have to hold it all the time. We use Apple’s accessibility for voice to text so I can read Kevin’s words when he is driving and he doesn’t have to use American Sign Language, since I am deaf. That also works when I read a book out loud from my iPad.

I Looked For Spurs At The Bottom Of This Light Pole! HA Wickenburg, AZ 02/26

99% of the drive I read out loud to Kevin. We are enjoying this book about Kennedy’s assassination immensely! Driving through Wickenburg, Arizona, we saw we definitely want to come back. We had driven through the town to get fuel at Maverik (it was on Gas Buddy app) but it was too small for us to get in. If we had low fuel, we would have made it work but we still had plenty. The town of 8,000 people has a lot of shops downtown and a ton of horses and horse trailers. There was a big horse event going on, too. Autio (footnote 1) told us the story about Mr Wickenburg and how he was coming through with other gold seekers. He looked up and saw the line of quartz and staked a claim. Everyone else kept going because they didn’t believe him. It was the richest gold mine in Arizona. It was called Vulture Mine. He didn’t do well with his money, like so many others. 

Drive through Phoenix was fine, a few slow spots but not stopped. At Tucson we went to Voyager RV Resort. This place is huge and very nice! The grounds of buildings are beautiful – very resort looking. They have all sorts of rooms for wood, crafts, glass, leather, ballroom (huge), 3 swimming pools, pickle and tennis courts, and more! A guy lead us to our site and it was one of the few that was a pull through.  We got set up and walked around the grounds. We sat for a long time in the breezeway and shade in comfy chairs and hung out. I had planned, and set out to thaw, homemade sloppy joes for dinner but Kevin wanted to eat at the  restaurant right there. We did and it was good. I had a BBQ chicken pizza (the sauce was spicy, not sweet) and Kevin had a huge chef salad. Rated: “A Close Walk When We Don’t Want To Cook.” We hope to come back here sometime.

Travel Day to Anthony, Texas. Got up again at 7:00 a.m. and quickly got ready to go. Kevin didn’t hook up the sewer, since we were only here one night. In fact, he didn’t even unhook from the truck. Just sent the jacks down to stabilize. We made a note on a paper because we saw on YouTube where someone had forgotten the jacks were down and drove off. Oops. Again, I read out loud most of the time. Intense!!!

I only stopped reading to Kevin when the road of I-10 was so bad I couldn’t keep my eyes on the words. That road was horrible! Our first stop was at Maverik (Kevin’s favorite gas station chain) just outside of Benson, Arizona. This is near the Kartchner Caverns where we stayed last year. While fueling up, another Alliance pulled in. The lady said, “Hello Allie!” (That is what people with Alliance RV brands call each other.) HA They are heading to Michigan to visit family and then to Alaska. The day was full sun and beautiful. This whole area of the country is 20 degrees hotter than normal! Should last a few days. 

I laughed and gave Kevin a very hard time – Anthony town is a twin town, one in New Mexico and the other one over the border in Texas. Our campground is in Texas. He won’t let me put New Mexico on the new state sticker map even though we are literally less than a mile from the border. (His rule is that HOWE (footnote 2) has to spend the night in the state before we can add the state sticker. (We are on our 2nd U.S. map!) I think that is hilarious! 

This campground had a different name before and it is hard to find on GPS and when you look up campgrounds online. Anyway, we had booked this place for 2 weeks but due to doctor appointment changes, changed it to Sun-Sat. It is right behind Camping World. Oh goodness, in the rules I read online, it said if there is a tornado warning or severe weather to go to the bathhouse. Well, we see that it is a trailer! That isn’t any safer than being in our own 5th wheel! Crazy. There is a bare mountain behind us and a low mountain range way across the large flat land.

From The Freeway, Looking Into Mexico Across Border Fence, El Paso, TX 03/26

We got set up and then went for a drive just to discover and look around El Paso. We drove through here back in 2024. The area of the campground is really growing and we see lots of new businesses and houses. Along I-10 you can see the border wall of U.S. and Mexico. You can see a lot of the area over the border wall. We got off the freeway and drove around downtown. We didn’t see much of interest to us. Then we went home and had the homemade sloppy joes.

This morning I put together my paper for Find A Grave (footnote 3). I see that Fort Bliss National Cemetery has 140 photo requests. All but 4 had plot listed. As I put them together by lot, I noticed all had died in 2025. We headed over when Kevin was done with work and went over the mountain pass to the east. El Paso is on the west, south, and east side of this little Franklin Mountains range. The cut off was nice and easy. Ah, Texas roads! So confusing! Even to GPS devices – with roads underneath freeways it doesn’t know which one you are on so the driving directions can be wrong and actually dangerous!  Don’t like. This cemetery is huge with over 68,000 residents; beautifully laid out and well marked. Kevin would take off with our paper and find a grave by the time I was done adding the photo. Sadly, the sun set and we weren’t able to get all of the requests fulfilled.

Adding Hooks So I Can Hang Stuff, Anthony, TX 03/26

We bought some tiny screws with hooks because the command strips pulled off the veneer on top of the slide where we like to hang white twinkly lights. These little hooks that are screwed in worked great! I hadn’t even noticed the command strips had come off near the fireplace where I like to hang stockings. He put some there, too. Yay! Up went the St Patrick’s Day banner and the twinkly lights. Delightful.

I stayed up last night so I could get reservations at a state park when the booking window opened. It is a very popular place. The booking window opened this day so I stayed up until midnight pacific time, which was 1:00 a.m. where I was. Well, the registration then gave the notice to wait until 6:00 a.m. pacific time. Sure would have been nice if that was written where they talk about the booking window. HA To bed I went but couldn’t get to sleep fast. This morning I was on the computer and got the reservations at 7:00 a.m. my time. I was able to get a site that has open sky, for Starlink, which is amazing in that area! 

*The blog posts are taken from my daily travel journal. Would you believe – it takes me a 1/2 day every week to whittle down a week’s worth of journal so it won’t be too long for the post each week. HAHA Thank you for reading!

1. Autio is an iPhone app that tells all sorts of history and stories about places all over the country. It is narrated and with my iPhone on accessibility, it shows captions of the words being said. So thankful!

2. “HOWE” is what we named our Alliance Avenue 36-ft 5th wheel. See: Home On WhEels and we pronounce it Howie. We live and travel in it full-time around the country.

3. Find A Grave – https://www.findagrave.com/about