Heading Home for the Holidays

When we leave Carlsbad Caverns, it's now a dash across Arizona to make it back to California to take care of some business and get home for Thanksgiving. We stop in Benson, AZ then make our longest stop (2 nights) is at Leaf Verde in Buckeye, AZ. We stop there to visit friends and play pickleball nearby in Surprise, AZ.

We stop at the River Breeze RV Resort on the Colorado River in Ehrenberg, AZ, just shy of Blythe at the California border. We have some business at the California DMV and are hoping that Blythe with a population of about 21,000 will have a short line!

Successfully completing our business, we head to familiar ground, Indian Waters RV Resort in Indio, CA.













Here, we relax, celebrate a birthday, and let Tom test out his shoulder playing pickleball.






















The Cathedral City hot air balloon festival was coming up the next weekend, so while we are there, we are treated to hot air balloons flying overhead.

Birthday dinner is at the POM Restaurant in the Fantasy Springs Resort Casino.

Fajitas for me

Onward to our favorite KOA in Chula Vista, where the crowds dissipate after we arrive...

But the big treat of the visit is to see our son Matthew and his first house!

Unlike last year, Matthew will not be carpooling home with us. We take our time and hit another favorite, Pala...

and a new one for us, the Madera District Fairgrounds, a cheap one night stop.

Carlsbad Caverns, NM

We have one more planned stop in New Mexico before we turn for home, and that is Carlsbad Caverns National Park. We head that way via Roswell, NM and spend a couple of nights at the Red Barn RV Park.








It's just on the outskirts of town with unknown potential for seeing any aliens...

aliens, smaliens, just another hoax if you ask me!

From there, we land at White City RV Park, which is just a gravel parking lot on the entrance road into Carlsbad. The weather is finally starting to turn a little rainy, so maybe it's a good thing we will be underground tomorrow!

When you get to Carlsbad Caverns, there are 2 ways to enter the caverns. One is to take an elevator 75 floors down to the Big Room, or you can walk down into the caverns through the natural entrance. From the natural entrance, it is a 1.25 mile hike down into the caverns. We didn't want to miss anything, so we took the natural entrance.

What appear to be wires are actually handrails of the trail switchbacks down below.