Tucson to Las Cruces

On Thursday the 9th, we left Tucson headed east with our destination as Las Cruces New Mexico.  Neither one of us had ever set foot in New Mexico before, so we were rather looking forward to it.  Along the way, in Eastern Arizona, the scenery was ever so blah! It was too blah to bore our readers with even one photo of it! So we won't. There was only one spot with some rather interesting looking rock formations, so I did snap a pic of them.

Then it was on to Las Cruces. It took us about 5 hours to drive the 262 miles. After miles and miles of total blahsville, we finally saw our destination in view.

Once there, we set up at a nice in-town RV park called "Sunny Acres". They had everything we needed, including plenty of TV channels and decent internet. Maybe I should rephrase that to say: "They had everything we WANTED", not needed.  Originally we thought we'd stay just one night here, but then we decided it would be nice to take part of a day and explore the area. We were glad we decided to stay.  Las Cruces (meaning "the crosses") is a nice, moderate sized town of about 95,000.  We went to a historic area nearby called Mesilla.  Love this photo of all the dried chiles!!

A very lovely statue, set outside the Catholic Church in Mesilla.  

We stopped by a winery tasting room too.  Who knew they grew grapes/made wine in New Mexico?  We sure didn't. Had fun in the tasting room where I found the cutest Gingerbread Man - music box at 75% off!!  We also bought a bag of roasted pistachios that are farm grown nearby.  Of course we did some wine tasting!

Then we left Mesilla and drove around the area a bit - hoping to get a good photo of the beautiful mountains. On the way, we passed a school yard where the kids were playing what I initially thought was Lacrosse.  John literally turned the car around to have another look... they weren't playing Lacrosse - they were playing Cricket!  CRICKET??  I quickly snapped a photo and hoped no one would think we were stalking the school kids.

We did manage to get fairly close to the mountains and got one more pic.

I should title this section: "Keepin' it Real".  Things are not always hunky-dory on an RV trip...  it's not all blue skies and perfect roads.  Nope, we have issues, just like at home.  Here are the "issues" for this week:  

The shower started leaking.  John took it apart and finally figured just where the leaker was.  As luck would have it, we didn't have the proper part to fix it - I mean, who carries plumbing parts with them??  It was too late in the day to find any parts in Las Cruces, so the shower has gone dry.  Here's John doing some diagnosing.

Then there was Jinx the RV cat.  During the past 5 days or so, we'd noticed that he had begun losing fur around his left ear. See photo below....

Poor Jinx!  Now Jinx had never EVER lost any fur on any part of his body before and the nurse in me tried to diagnose the cat.  My thought was that maybe he had ear mites which caused him to scratch the fur off.  We called the Banfield Pet Hospital in Las Cruces (where Jinx has his own "wellness" policy!) and made an appointment. Banfield has pet hospitals all over the US and his health records easily transfer from one to the next. We took Jinx in for his late afternoon appointment.  Jinx yowled all the way.... he does SO well in the motor home and SO poorly in the car!  After a thorough exam, the vet said he did not know for sure what could be causing Jinx's alopecia, but that it most definitely is NOT ear mites....so much for my veterinary skills. They did a fungal culture which will take ten days for results, and sent us home with some medicine to put on his skin. Some sort of lime "dip" that the vet admitted was made for horses.  Hmmmm.  Guess there must be lots of horses with hair-loss problems in Las Cruces.  Here's Jinx sitting in one of his favorite spots - John's seat at the dinette.  See, you can't even tell that he has "unidentified alopecia" (his official diagnosis). 

So much for our adventures in Las Cruces.  More next time with updates on both the shower and the cat... plus, what we hope will be an "out of this world" experience in Roswell New Mexico. :-)  Hope you'll stay tuned!