Trekking to Tucson
- dougsmith51
- 1 day ago
- 6 min read
NOTE: Have you ever looked at the "Maps" tab on the Ciaowagen website? On it, you can see the progress of our 2026 trip-so-far, as well as maps for every Ciaowagen travel year since 2018. You can also see where we're currently located, and upcoming travel plans for the next few weeks. We update all that frequently.
We left our Virginia home on March 1, right after the last of the February snows had melted.
One of the challenges with planning a vacation in the western part of the U.S. is that you have to drive most of the way across the country first. We've done this multiple times in past seven years, but it's always a slog.
We set a goal of traveling 300-350 miles each day. This might not seem like that much if you're driving in a car, but it's about as much as we can handle in an RV. That's because there is only a foot or less between the left-side of the RV and the highway dotted line, and a foot or less between the right-side and solid line on the side of the road. The result? You have to pay attention to your driving ALL the time. Fortunately, most of this year's trip west was on interstates - it can be even more harrowing traveling on secondary roads.
We usually take a break for lunch, and we never travel more than 65 mph. The Ciaowagen only gets 8 miles-per-gallon, and that deteriorates quickly if you exceed 65. Therefore it can take 6-7 hours of travel to complete that 300-350 miles. We usually try to arrive at our campground or other overnight spot no later than 4 or 5 pm so we have time to set up while it's still light out.
To give us more overnight options, Doug recently joined the Elks (officially, the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks). Many Elks Lodges across the U.S. have RV spots, and often these are located closer to towns and cities than regular campgrounds. Thus, we included several Elk Lodge overnights on our route to Arizona. Before you ask they do not have a secret handshake nor do they have to wear hats with horns!
During our first four days, we traveled 1,356 miles. We stayed at a KOA in Wythesville, VA, an Elk Lodge in Nashville, TN, and a Cracker Barrel in Bryant, AR. We crossed from Eastern to Central Time on our second day of travel. Arriving in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area, we camped at the Elk Lodge in Grapevine, TX. Our past RV trips had not taken us to this part of Texas, and we did a little sightseeing in the area.
On Thursday we visited the Meow Wolf art space in Grapevine Mills, the second largest shopping mall in North Texas. We'd been to the original Meow Wolf in Sante Fe back in 2021, and the Grapevine site is their fourth. In the exhibition, you enter a normal seeming house from the 1960s. However, as you duck through openings like a fireplace, you're taken into other rooms full of color and whimsy. Each room is designed by a different artist.
Entering the kitchen, we walked through the refrigerator into a "refrigerator portal" room, each door leading to a different space, including a very funky-looking RV.
Friday morning we traveled to Fort Worth and visited the Fort Worth Water Garden, a four-acre park in the middle of downtown designed by reknowned architect Phillip Johnson in the 1970s. Shaped by concrete blocks, the park features three different water spaces.
On Friday evening we visited with Kathy and Gary Grubby, who we'd gotten to know on our trip down the Mississippi River last fall, and who live in Keller, TX. We met them at a local restaurant (delicious!) called Hard Eight BBQ.
The next day, we traveled to Waxahachie, TX (a suburb south of Fort Worth) to visit with Susan Thompon, another friend from our Mississippi River trip. She has a large driveway, so we "moochdocked" there for two nights.
Susan is a lively hostess and a great storyteller. Her sister-in-law Cindy was also visiting from Dallas, and the four of us spent the afternoon visiting, and then traveled to the town of Clerburne for a concert at the Songbird Live! music venue. The artists were a husband and wife duo, Ariella & Nicolaas, and they were terrific, performing songs in both English and Spanish. It was a mixture of old standards, blues, and love songs they'd written themselves.
The next day Susan took us out for a tour of the area. We visited the remnants of the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), which would have been the world's largest particle collider (54 miles in circumference) but was cancelled by Congress in 1993 before it was completed, leaving CERN's Large Hadron Collider (in Geneva, Switzerland) to discover the Higgs Boson. Most of the above-ground buildings sit empty or have been taken over by corporations.
We also walked around the town of Waxahachie, with its beautiful historic courthouse and lots of shops.
The change to Daylight Savings Time forced us to adjust our clocks again, and then we need to adjusted even further a couple days later when we crossed into New Mexico and Mountain Time.
Leaving Monday morning the 9th, we headed through west Texas (a whole lot of nothing - apologies to any Texas friends). We overnighted at a Love's Travel Stop in Sweetwater, TX (Love's is our go-to place to gas up when traveling the Interstates - some Love's have recently added overnight RV spots). The next day, we crossed into New Mexico and camped in the small village of White's City, the gateway to Carlsbad Caverns National Park.
Carlsbad Caverns limits the number of daily visitors to protect the fragile environment, but there were plenty of spots left since the tourist season had not yet kicked off. We last visited the Caverns in 2020,
Carlsbad has a large natural entrance that leads down over a mile-and-a-quarter to the main level. However, since Jeannette was still recovering from her two recent bunion surgeries, we took the elevator down (750 feet) this time.
Carlsbad Caverns is one of three "cave" National Parks (the others are Wind Cave in South Dakota and Mammoth Cave in Kentucky) and, in our opinion, the most spectacular! It has a huge variety of cave formations (stalactites, stalagmites, columns, flowstone, soda straws, drapes, and even popcorn).
A few years ago, the park replaced all the lights with LEDs (which both saved energy and reduced growth of algae in the caverns) and worked with a light designer from Hollywood to up the wow factor. They were successful!
Packing up the RV, we headed to Alamogordo, NM, settling in at the Elk Lodge there. The next day we visited White Sands National Park. We'd been there in 2020 and in 2024 and it's a favorite of ours with its blisteringly white sands.
The dunes are made from gypsum (the same materials used in drywall) and stretch on for miles.
Some people rent sleds from the visitor center and slide down the dunes.
Ten thousand years ago (at the end of the last Ice Age), this area was a large lake. It dried up over time and winds scoured the lake bed, creating the gypsum sands. A few lake beds (usually dry, but can fill during rains) still exist in the park.
Recent discoveries in the park have revealed footprints under the sand from many extinct animals (e.g., mammoths), as well as human footprints that are at least 23,000 years old, making scientists rethink theories of when humans first crossed into the Americas.
While we were in the Alamogordo area, we visited McGinn's PistachioLand. They have the world's largest pistachio, and also delicious pistachio ice cream!
Finally, on Saturday, March 14 we crossed into Arizona (another time zone change, as Arizona does not recognize Daylight Savings Time) and drove to our campground near Tucson. We'd traveled 2,436 miles over 14 days, and were ready for some downtime!
We'll talk about our month in Tucson in our next blog post. Stay tuned!
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