Once the weather finally warmed up here in the Southwest, time seemed to speed up as quickly as the fat grew around our waistlines from all of the good eats and tasty Shiner beer we’re consuming (we are in Texas after all!).

Our road trip adventures are happening faster than we can write about them, and as much as we don’t want this blog to be a “this-is-what-I-did-today” journal, for the sake of catching up, here’s a quick recap of a few of our favorite stops:

The Pepper Pot, Hatch New Mexico

Hatch is nothing more than a wide spot in the road, but it’s got a worldwide rep for being the green chile capital of the world. When we heard that Anthony Bourdain once said that he had the best red enchiladas of his life at the Pepper Pot, we had to find out if it was true.

Bourdain was right. The Pepper Pot’s menu was the finest of traditional New Mexican cuisine, and I’ve never had a better green or red sauce than theirs (with the exception of my Mom’s, of course!). The aromas and flavors were a smooth, smoky blend of New Mexico’s finest chilies, the staff was friendly, and this massive lunch was just $25 for the two of us.

The Texas Hill Country

There’s an unexpected beauty to the Hill Country region that’s drawn our rig back since 2008. This year the countryside was especially green and lush, with incredible spring flowers and overflowing creeks and rivers.

We love Texas so much that next time a pile of money falls from the sky, we’ll buy a small piece of Hill Country land to winter on. The food can’t be beat, the people are friendly and open, and most aren’t afraid to express their opinions. Texans tell it like they see it, which even when I don’t agree with it, I can appreciate.

Luckenbach

Still, we love Texas but we’re not sure if Texas loves us. Last year the trailer got stuck in the mud at Luckenbach. This year, a flash flood almost took our rig on the Guadalupe. After that near-death experience, once again, our truck almost drowned in the slippery, deep mud of the Luckenbach parking lot.

But it was totally worth it.

Come hell or high water, nothing was going to keep the good people of Luckenbach from holding the first annual Texas Hat Festival.

If anyone knows about hats, it’s Texans. The Luckenbach Hat Festival was all things hats, with a ton of incredible Texas bands, vendors, games and contests.

Like the ugly hat contest I entered. I didn’t win, but at least I can say I got my fifteen seconds of fame, on stage at Luckenbach. I also got a pretty nifty cowgirl hat for just twenty bucks, then ended up wining one later from an event sponsor!

Staying in the Hill Country hasn’t been cheap. Texas doesn’t believe in free public lands or have a whole lot of national forests, so we haven’t boondocked since New Mexico. While it’s been a luxury hooking up to the grid for the last few weeks, RV parks are spendy, costing no less than $27 a night. While there’s deals to be found, like the “By the River” campground we almost died at in Kerrville, they are few and far between.

Despite all of our misadventures here and the high cost of RV parks, it’s the Texas music, the diverse scenery, the food and the people that make it all worthwhile.

Of course, there are always exceptions . . .

You meet all kinds on the road, especially if you like to camp on the cheap in free (or almost free) places, like the Greeley Missile Silo Campground where we stayed for a few weeks, in Greeley Colorado.

I found this $5 a night campground in FreeCampgrounds.com. It’s located far enough off the freeway that there’s not a lot of noise, and what made it especially appealing, other than the price, is it is literally located in farmland, and sits right atop a decommissioned missile silo. You can even go on a free tour given by the caretaker, and go deep into the bowels of this creepy military space.

As one of the only cheap boondocking spots between Loveland and Fort Collins, it’s a central place to stay for a night or two. But we pushed the limits of our tolerance for cheap RV camping spots, and stayed here for almost 3 weeks while we started our real estate search.

It was mostly quiet, but one afternoon, we crossed paths with another camper, a sketchy character who had been staying at the park in a tent. She stumbled out of the bathroom and short of breath, asked me to call 911. I screamed at Jim to get the cell phone. As he went to get it, her likewise sketchy boyfriend showed up, and told Jim “Oh don’t bother, she’s just been drinking. She does this all the time.”

Meanwhile, the woman collapsed on the grass, writhing and clutching her chest as if she’s having a heart attack. In short quick breaths she tells me “I . . . can’t . . breathe! Get him away from me!”

Jim is stunned. I grabbed the phone and dialed. We didn’t know if this was going to turn into a domestic violence episode or what, but I made the call, not wanting to take the chance that this woman was really going to croak.

While we waited for the paramedics, we realized that both she and her boyfriend were loaded, and both reeked so bad, like they had just hijacked a truck full of MadDog 20/20.

When the EMTs showed up, Jim and I ran inside the trailer. From the window, we watched them go through the motions of attempting to treat the woman. After a while we realized that they were weren’t moving too quickly, and were actually smirking at each other while the drunken woman was still on the ground. It was obvious there was nothing wrong with her, other than alcoholism.

She demanded that they take her to the hospital, and the EMTs complied. They took her away in the ambulance, while her boyfriend was questioned by the cops.

Suddenly, the lure of cheap camping had worn on my nerves. The next day after learning we didn’t get that dream property, I had a meltdown. Five dollars a night or not, I was done with that park, and wanted out.

Once we left the Missile Silo campground, I was actually relieved to be paying $500 a month rent at a KOA campground in Wellington, just north of Fort Collins. As much as I hate KOAs for all of the franchised predictability they represent, my paranoia slowly disappeared as summer kicked off and hoards of happy RVers started rolling in.

We’ll be hanging out in this trailer park with slightly more conventional people for the duration of summer, or until we find our ideal piece of land in the nearby mountains. This park is way more expensive and it reeks of the feedlot down the road, but at least it has a pool, and no bum fights either.

I was bad last month and forgot to post our road trip expenditures, so here’s two months worth, April and May, check our a PDF of our RV Road Trip Expenses for April and May 2009.

Some of our biggest expenses in those months weren’t really suprises, just the unpleasant realities of what it costs to maintain a fulltime RVing rig, such as $823 to repack the trailer wheel bearings, four new tires, a water heater repair and $111 on truck maintenance.

April also included paying taxes and our CPA, and $200 to join Escapees. Our phone bill went up, because we dropped our Virgin Mobile account after getting sick of their poor coverage in rural areas. Now we have Verizon, which gives us better service, but at a higher cost. Finally, all of these expenses seemed to have led heavy drinking because we overspent on booze again!

With these hefty spending months behind us, we’re hoping for some low budget months ahead. The plan is to find some land, get our remaining stuff out of storage in CA and bring it to Colorado, and then camp for “free” on our own property until the snow files.

I’m embarrassed to say that like most Americans, Jim and I have done relatively little foreign travel. We’ve been to Spain, Canada and Mexico, and that’s it. But while we do aspire to be globe hoppers, until we feel like we’ve uncovered enough of the best places in this gigantic country of ours, we’ll stick to the highways and byways of America.

Even after two years of living on the road, Jamie Jensen’s book Road Trip USA: Cross Country Adventures on America’s Two Lane Highways has been helping us uncover countless hidden gems along the way. With our limited bookshelf space in the rig, this is one book that we’ll never let go of.

See What’s Really Out There

The newest edition of Road Trip USA has just been released, along with two pocket guides – Road Trip USA Pacific Coast Highway Guide and Road Trip USA Route 66 Guide. If you’re like us, and drive the blue highways instead interstates, while seeking local Mom and Pop cafes and sticking it to Starbucks, you need these books.

Jamie Jensen’s books suggest 11 distinct road trips bisecting the U.S. From north to south, or east to west, the classic routes include The Pacific Coast Highway, Route 66, the Great River Road, and the Appalachian Trail. Detailed maps and clear directions to plenty of points of interest provide for unlimited day trips and side excursions. You’ll also find accurate contact information for lodging, car rental companies, state tourism boards, and road condition numbers.

The best part of Jamie’s books are their emphasis on finding the quirkier, offbeat attractions and towns across America. While there’s enough useful information about major cities and attractions to give you a head start on your research, Road Trip Nation will help you plan more unusual itineraries.

Plan Your Next Offbeat Adventure

The Atomic Tourist, for instance, might select a route from the Trinity Test Site in New Mexico, to the Titan Missile Museum in San Xavier, AZ, to Arco, Idaho, home of the remains of the Experimental Breeder Reactor Number One.

Music lovers will enjoy discovering blues festivals in the south, and cowboy gatherings in the West.

Teetotalling travelers can find their way from the wineries of Westfield, NY to Napa, CA, to the world’s biggest six pack in Lacrosse, WI. They’ll also learn to steer clear of Shamrock Texas on St. Patrick’s Day, even though they could kiss an actual piece of the Blarney Stone in that town’s Elmore Park. Why stay away? Because Shamrock is a dry town.

Road Trip USA identifies attractions one might easily otherwise miss, like the birthplace (and burial site) of On the Road author Jack Kerouac, just 20 miles off highway 2 in Lowell, MA. And how else would you know where the geographical center of North America is? (the answer: Rugby, ND). You’ll discover things like just how many places in the U.S. claim to be the home of Paul Bunyan. Statues of the Lumberjack giant can be found from Maine to Minnesota to our old stomping grounds of Northern California.

It’s also a useful tool that teaches you how to properly pronounce town names before you arrive and look like a tourist. Learn how Sequim, WA is really annunciated (“Skwim”), or Cairo, IL (Ki-Ro).

The only problem with Road Trip USA is that there is so much information, if you forget to consult it before planning your itinerary, you could miss important landmarks like we have. For instance, we passed by the World Largest Frying Pan in Long Beach, WA, and in that same trip, drove right through Curt Cobain’s hometown of Abereen, WA (may he rest in peace!) without even knowing it until later when flipping through the book.

Try Jamie’s Handy Pocket Guides for Short Trips

Road Trip USA’s Pacific Coast Highway Guide and the Road Trip USA Route 66 Guide are a neat addition to Jamie’s encyclopedia of quirky attractions. They’re jam packed with useful information, and you won’t have to lug around the biblical-sized Road Trip USA book if you’re just traveling within those geographic areas.

As West Coast natives, we’ve frequented a lot of his selections in the Pacific Coast Highway Guide, and have to say that his descriptions are accurate, truthful and unbiased.

We wish we had these books when we lived on the West Coast, as Jamie reveals stuff about places we’ve been to but were oblivious to some local finds, like the Olympic Game Farm in Washington. We thought it was a repulsive canned hunt farm, but it turns out to be a home to retired Hollywood animal actors!

The Route 66 Guide is also handy for anyone traveling near that famous route. You don’t have to follow it exactly, as Jamie offers lots of tips and ideas for attractions that are within a reasonable distance of the original highway. We especially enjoyed how he lists local indie radio stations for drivers to listen to, which can give you a taste of local flavor far better than any syndicated radio station can.

So turn off that satellite radio, drive off the interstates and onto the blue highways, and go find the real spirit of America, because believe it or not, it is alive and well. You just have to look harder these days to find it. But first, pick up your copy of Road Trip USA today.

Stay tuned for a guest post from Jamie, about ways you can save money on the road while traveling . . .

During our stay in the Hill Country, I found a great article in Texas Monthly called “The Best Small Town Cafes in Texas,” and mapped out our eating route where we would get to try out some of these hidden gems. If you’ll be traveling through the Lone Star State, I highly recommend printing yourself a copy of this article and keeping it handy.

If there’s ever a state that could turn me into a carnivore, Texas would be it. As we drove across West Texas and into the Hill Country, BBQ aromas wafted out from so many eateries along the way, that, even I, a 23-year vegetarian, had a hard time turning down the flesh.

But I stayed true to my convictions, because we all know that aromas are oftentimes more powerful than taste. Whenever I get close to pondering what a spare rib would taste like after all these years, it’s pretty easy for me to turn it down, once I consider what meat would do to my guts (ick), and the guilt I would feel after eating it.

Luckily, as I discovered at Paula Deen’s restaurant in Savannah, southern cooking has a huge variety of side dishes (some with vegetables!) that I enjoyed, as well as catfish done up every way imaginable. Plus, with the Tex Mex influence, I was happily chowing down on beans, tortillas and all sorts of mismashes of southern and Mexican dishes at the same sitting (like homemade mac and cheese and pinto beans!) wherever I went.

Granted, most of the food in Texas is made with a TON of sugar, bacon fat and salt, but if you’re an easy-going vegetarian like I am and can look the other way, then you won’t starve. You won’t stay skinny (check out these Texas-sized onion rings!), but you’ll certainly eat some of the best downhome cooking in the U.S.A.

All things in moderation, right?

Not when it comes to  Allen’s Fried Chicken in Sweetwater! This home cookin’ haven was listed in the Texas Monthly article as Ma Allens, and has to be one of if not the best regional food experience from our entire trip to date.

The food is served family style, and there’s lots of it. Both food and that down home family feeling that is. We waited in line outside the small nondescript building for just a few minutes before joining a party of bikers from Lubbock, at a table with teo seats left.

These good folks were practically regulars, and knew what dishes to ask for, like butter potatoes! But the dishes kept coming, roast beef, cole slaw, okra, squash, mashed potatoes, potatoe salad, green beans, pea salad, creamed corn, macaroni and cheese, yams, homebaked rolls … and of course a massive pile of some of the best fried chicken Jim has ever had. Sorry mom.

Moderation? not in Texas.

If you’re familiar with Austin’s South by Southwest music festival, you know that it took place in mid March. It’s now mid-April. So as you can see, we’re a little behind in our postings but hey, we’re busy out here on the road.

We were so stoked to finally catch this scene. The whole city comes out for it, and they’re really quite welcoming to the hordes that show up from around the country, clog the streets, and run around showing off their prestigious wristbands to bartenders.

And while you can pay the high ticket price and get into some really incredible shows during the festival, there’s plenty of great bands, free music and free beer (I told you Texans know how to party!) to catch on just about every block. We rode our bikes all around town with Skinny Chef and Flux (thanks you two!), and sampled some great tunes, all for F-R-E-E! Here’s a sampling . . .

Big Bend National Park lies along the Rio Grande River in Texas. In the old days (pre 9/11), you could cross the river and walk right into Mexico, into a quaint town called Boquillas del Carmen.

The people of Boquillas thrived on all of the park’s tourist activity.

But then our government in all its infinite wisdom, decided that it wasn’t safe for us to mingle with the Mexicans, and outlawed this favorite activity of Big Bend tourists.

Today, Boquillas is dying a slow death. Each day, the locals risk arrest by crossing over to the park, placing their handmade trinkets for sale onto rocks where tourists gather, like at the hot springs.

Then the Mexicans run back over and sit all day long, underneath a canopy of shade, hoping something will sell. They were easy to spot along the banks of the river.

Whenever we soaked in the springs, I felt like such a schmucky American. I kept wondering; why are some of us born into such better circumstances than others? Not that I’m complaining, but still. . .

I’m so fortunate that my grandparents came over from Mexico at a time when immigration was not the issue it is today. In this era, Mexicans will risk their lives just for a few dollars a day to feed their kids. My own family had it’s hardships in the early days, but I’m betting they weren’t quite on the same level as today’s.

Being a fulltime RVer is great, because if you miss something good, you can always go back to it again.

Last year we missed the Texas Cowboy Poetry Gathering in the West Texas town of Alpine, by just one week. This year, we hightailed it back in time.

The YouTube playlist below includes six movies Jim made from all the footage I shot of performers including Doris Daley, Jeff Gore, Dale and Brittany Burson, Sam Noble and Gail Steiger;

At 23 years and going strong, the Alpine Cowboy Poetry Gathering is the second oldest in America, just one year behind the much larger Elko, Nevada festival. I’ve always wanted to make it to Elko, but it takes place in January, and being in an RV during Elko’s frozen winter isn’t my idea of a good time. Guess that makes me a real city slicker.

Alpine’s vaqueros though, they know when, and how, to hold a festival for wimps like me. While much smaller than Elko’s, Alpine’s is better in my book. The weather’s awesome, the overall price of attending is more affordable, the performers are accessible, and to me, the atmosphere feels a lot more authentic than Elko, which isn’t the nicest town in the world.

The only bummer is that the poetry and music sessions are held on a college campus, and we wish they would’ve had some in bars or in a campfire setting.

Jim isn’t a huge fan of cowboy poetry like I am, but he patiently endured the festival so he could get a good dinner or two out of it (and he did!).

We both fell in love with the town of Alpine itself. It’s small but not too small, real estate is affordable, and the high desert scenery can’t be beat. We plan on heading back there to look for our winter Texas property in the fall.

We are quickly approaching our two year anniversary of being on the road, and we have no intention of stopping. We’ll keep traveling and working seasonally around the country, but we’d still like to park occasionally on our own piece of land.

Our plan is to buy a small parcel in Colorado, and another one somewhere in Texas. Still, we’re keeping our options open as far as locations go. On our way to Texas, we stopped in three towns I’ve heard a lot of good things about.

Read the rest of this entry »

After leaving Slab City, it was a revelation to think that we’d been back in California since November. I couldn’t believe we’d been there for so long. But when you come from a big Mexican family like I do, it takes about that long to make the rounds and see everyone!

We blew through Arizona, because familiarity breeds contempt. I used to live there in the early ’90s, and I don’t know what it is about the Grand Canyon State, but I just don’t like it. Maybe that’s because when my Dad lived in Jerome (about 100 miles north of Phoenix) in the 1930s, he was forced to attend a segregated “Mexicans only” school while my grandfather worked as a miner.

Headed east, we stopped in Douglas, Arizona along the Mexican border. On a whim, we parked our rig at the border crossing and walked into Mexico, just to be able to say we’ve now been to three countries in our rig.

The contrast between the U.S. side and the Mexican side is obvious. On our side, there’s shiny new strip malls and Wallyworld. On their side, just a half mile away, there are potholed streets and zero evidence of building codes.

We walked around, got some great pan dulces and a jugo de pina. Took some photos and felt sorry for some skinny Mexican dogs. Then we turned around, and walked back over. Just. Like. That. Our five dollar Mexican vacation was over in a couple of hours.

Upon our return, I thought about how my family set down U.S. roots in the 1930s. Both sets of my Grandparents hopped the fence before “illegal immigration” was an issue. All they wanted was for their kids to have a better life, and we’ve managed to accomplish that, and then some.

Three generations later, there I was, returning to the Other Side like it was no big deal. That’s America for you.