March 7, 2023 Day 1 Walmart Parking Lot, Soroco, NM

Do you ever have a day when every decision you make, seems to be wrong? Today was my Bad Decision Day for 2023.

We left the campgrounds in Willcox Arizona about 7:30am, driving east on I-10. During the night we heard some strange cooing noises periodically and in retrospect, we think it was the Sandhill Cranes making their way home for the summer. At least when listening to an audio recording, it sounded like what we heard that night.

The rough conditions on I-10 continues for the reminder of Arizona, making it a rough day of driving for Ron. We soon reach New Mexico, and the road improves some but still has some bad patches and fortunately within an hour we reach Deming where we head northeast on a state highway to Hatch to catch I-25. The state highway is a vast improvement over I-10 and we feel like we can relax some and enjoy the scenery here. After getting on I-25 north towards Alburquerque, we find it also is in good condition – whew, what a relief!

I hadn’t picked out a campsite yet for tonight and thought we’d get one enroute after approximately 3 1/2 hours – 4 hours of driving. I checked the Campendium app and found a campground I thought was a good fit for driving time and location. Bosque Birder’s RV Campground is located 3 1/2 miles off of I-25 and is located next to a 57,000-acre National Wildlife refuge. This area is a waterfowl area for over 15,000 Sandhill Cranes and 50,000 Snow Geese each winter. I guess it’s a sight to see why they take to the air. So the birder in me takes over, and I decide this is the campgrounds for us. To my defense, I read the reviews and overall, they we pretty good but after we arrived there, I don’t know what those people were thinking.

This place should have been named Nightmare on Elm Street RV Park, well maybe it wasn’t quite that bad, but it was close. The road to it was deplorable, shaking the truck and camper the entire 3 1/2 miles before we pull up to the property. The sign was falling down, literally and there wasn’t any grass or vegetation surrounding this rundown house that sits in front of the campgrounds. We could see a couple campers back there but when Ron said I guess we’ll try it, and I said, ‘WE ARE NOT STAYING HERE’, rather emphatically to put it mildly. There wasn’t much room to turn around with a camper, but Ron made it, and we bounced our way all the way back to the interstate.

In checking Campendium again, there was a campground that looked like it had good reviews located in the town of Soroco just 8 miles up the road. I gave the campground a call and a manager told me to drive there and pick out a site, get hooked up, and give him a call to come check us in. Ron said ‘red flag’! If there is no manager onsite, he doubts this is going to be a decent campground. Well, he was right. This place is a tiny parking lot about big enough for 3 or 4 campers and all of them have a small area to try to back into the site. On top of that, the neighborhood was iffy and we decided not to stay here. We were both exhausted and needed to get a place to stay and decided to check the local Walmart.

Here I made mistake #3 for the day by having Google maps navigate us to the Walmart from the current location we were at. It works great for navigation but doesn’t take into account we have an RV in tow and took us down a street with a huge dip where we knew the camper would bottom out on. Yikes! At the last minute, Ron was able to turn off on a side street and then was going to swing around another street to head back the way we came. Mistake #4 coming up, in following Google maps I said, ‘no, go straight here and then turn left’. Hehe, wrong! The city was working on a water line or something and had vehicles on both sides of the street that was narrow to begin with. How he slithered through we are not sure, but I think he had a whole 2 inches of leeway on either side :)!

But we made it to Walmart without incident and in checking at the service desk, they do indeed allow RV’s to overnight in the parking lot. We were able to get level, so the refrigerator worked, and I fixed a meal of baked chicken breasts with baby red potatoes, my one good decision for today – it was delicious. I also picked up some items at Walmart and it was the cleanest, most organized, and least cluttered Walmart I’ve ever been to – it was enjoyable to shop there! We soon were in bed for the night reading, then sleeping. Overnight, several other campers parked nearby us for the free campsite overnight.

Even though it’s not ideal, Walmart was a far better campsite then the other 2 we looked at put together! I did learn a few lessons today about picking out a campground: 1) If they don’t have a website, don’t select them; 2) If they do not have a manager on site, nix them; 3) Compare reviews from multiple apps, I sometimes wonder if some of the reviews are legit or fake??? Don’t know but I think we can weed out some by comparison.

We picked out a good campground for tomorrow and it’s located on Historic Route 66 in Tucumcari, NM. Sounds like a good place in reading reviews from multiple apps and has a Campendium award (but starting to wonder about Campendium’s standards)! We have traveled every day for the past 4 days and think we’ll take a day off and spend 2 nights at Blaze in Saddles RV Campground. We are close to the Texas panhandle and then on into Oklahoma.