No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow. --Lin Yutang

Tuesday, June 14, 2011, leaving Tucumcari, New Mexico

We were up by 6:00am, but the cats had nothing to do with that. I think we are all getting anxious to get home. After our day at the garage yesterday, home is sounding pretty good.

We left the campground at 8:30am. Charlie says the RV still doesn’t seem right. I think we’re still burning up the rest of that low octane gas. As we got on the freeway, I could see the pink building where we were parked all day yesterday. So long, Tucumcari!

We stopped for gas about 40 miles east of Albuquerque. After going a few miles, Charlie said we needed to stop to see if he had put the gas cap back on. He hadn’t. We got off at the next exit, planning to go back to where we got gas. Then we saw an Auto Zone and stopped there. They had one gas cap. Is our luck starting to change? Our original gas cap will stay in New Mexico….oh, so many memories here!

The RV ran fairly smooth, although Charlie said he still went into overdrive more often than he thought it should. We were steadily climbing though, approaching the Continental Divide. But, then after several hours and some stops for gas, the engine started acting normal. We relaxed enough that Charlie wanted a chocolate shake and I wanted a hot dog when we stopped for gas near a Dairy Queen.

We got to the KOA campground in Holbrook, Arizona around 3:00pm. We are back in our time zone now. Arizona is on Mountain Time, but they don’t go on Daylight Savings, so California catches up when we roll up one hour.

This is a very nice campground. When we drove in, Charlie said, “I doubt we will have a site in the shade here”. But, our site had the biggest tree in the park and all the shade we could want.

There is a “Cowboy Café” here which serves breakfast and dinner. We decided to treat ourselves to dinner.

Holbrook is not far from our property in Show Low, Arizona. We are not going to stop there this time because we really are getting tired and want to get home. Maybe we’ll come out to Show Low for the 4^th of July weekend—in the car, just us and Sheila. There is a motel we like staying in. On the 4^th of July there is a parade right down main street and it goes right by the motel.

More later……….