10 May 2012

Amarillo, TX

The cobwebs put up a valiant effort as we tried to pull out, clinging desperately to the rig and the adjacent juniper trees. But the F350 has plenty of torque and we finally broke free to get on the road, screaming spiders tumbling along in the dust.

We’ve made it to our first stop, Fort Amarillo RV Resort in Amarillo, TX without incident. Now we have a nice 50A pull-thru for $31/nite. The site’s almost level which means we sometimes stumble a bit when moving around. At $31 it’s a veritable bargain made possible with our Good Sam member discount (or AAA or any number of other affiliations) and competition from a lot of other local parks.

The park is pretty nice in a rustic sort of way. It’s not new by any stretch, but it has an indoor pool & sauna, dog runs, volley ball court, basket ball nets. Looks like they expect folks to actually get some exercise! They didn’t really need to go to all that trouble just for us. We already know just the thing for exercise: breakfast at Calico County Kitchen on Paramount Blvd. Highly recommended by Alaska Linda & hubby Doug. They’re supposed to have biscuits & gravy to die for (or from!). We’ll see… I’m a hard sell. I haven’t had really good biscuits & gravy since they sold the old Forty Niner Cafe in Angels Camp, CA and the new owner wasn’t interested in paying $100 for the recipe.

Diesel fuel is no bargain. Anywhere. We paid $4.16/gal in Santa Fe and it’s $3.96/gal here in Amarillo. So  at these prices we felt lucky to have fairly still air on the drive from Santa Fe. With the gradual drop in elevation from 6,500′ in Santa Fe down to 3,700′ in Amarillo, we were averaging close to 11 mpg. Then, about 60 miles out, the wind picked up and mileage decayed to a little over 10 mpg by the time we got to the park.

I updated the GPS firmware before we left Santa Fe and had hoped we’d not have a problem with out-of-place RV parks. But when I called this AM and asked for a reservation I was told the GPS would never find the park and that I should use the instruction in the Woodall’s guide. Sure ’nuff… Mr. Garmin would have had me drive another 13 miles east on I-40.

After all the rushing around to get out of town we’re both pretty pooped. Probably stay an extra couple nites so we can rest a bit, do some laundry, and commit death-by-hamburger at Golden Light Cafe (on SW 6th) before sending our unhealthy bodies on to Oklahoma City, OK on Sunday.