060824 - New Mexico

Tuesday, August 22, 2006
Tucumcari, New Mexico,

Having made a mad dash west to escape the heat spell of triple digits in Oklahoma, we ran smack dab into a Monsoon weather pattern that has run havoc throughout the state of New Mexico in the form of massive and continuous thunderstorms that have produced flash floods all over the place. Towns that haven’t seen rain in months have had their river banks and arroyos overflowed, and metropolitan areas such as Albuquerque have been flooded and paralyzed for a week or more.

We arrived here on Saturday as on overnight rest stop, but with a night full of high winds and severe thunder and lightning accompanying the deluge, we opted to stay until the storm front moved on. It seem that the worst is over and we will be moving on to Albuquerque in the morning.

Wednesday, August 23, 2006
WE drove around OLD TOWN looking for a parking space for the Beast so we could get a good Mexican lunch and browse the area but it was not to be. We are too big for the local area so we pulled in our steps and headed out of town. In a way we were lucky, because a massive storm had hit Albuquerque after we left and created quite a lot of damage with flash floods and slides so we laid low for a few hours in Flagstaff as we waited out a rain storm and finally settled in Cottonwood for the Evening at a Huge Wal-Mart.
The next morning we got an oil change and headed for one of our club membership sites at Camp Verde.