Datil Well Campground, NM

Datil Well Campground, NM

December 21, 2016
Datil Well Campground, NM

When I set up yesterday, it was lovely. I took Argos for a little walk and discovered that we had the campground all to ourselves.

It started raining last night and didn’t stop.
I wrote this morning.

It’s raining. I’m not good at sitting and just “doing nothing” so perhaps this is good for me. I do wish I had connectivity though so that I could check the forecast and find out how long this rain is expected. This is one of the problems with having my house on my back – in order to go somewhere, I have to pack up. However, packing up isn’t a big deal. I could pop-down and go into Datil proper. It’s only 8:30am, so that’s a distinct possibility. As well, I don’t really want to run my propane heater all day. My batteries are at 11.8volts, which is okay for now, but with no sun to bolster my roof-top solar, I might want to go for a drive later today. My plan was to visit the Very Large Array, but seems rather pointless to try to see outdoor structures in a rainstorm.

I wrote about worry the other day. I was thinking about this on my drive north on State Route 180 yesterday. I revisited a few road trips from my younger days, when weather didn’t concern me and a snow storm was an excuse to test my winter driving skills. I didn’t sleep well my last night at the Gila Hot Springs because I heard the pitter-patter of rain on the camper roof and could only think about the icy, curvy, mountain road I had to traverse to get back to Silver City. It occurred to me that I used to be a lot cockier. That cockiness probably put me in more potentially dangerous situations, but it certainly kept the worry away. There has to be a happy medium where the worry is only around for helping with logistics, but doesn’t cause sleeplessness.

Last night I texted to a friend that I miss people. I wrote that I so enjoyed my freedom during my October trip, but I wonder if it’s because now I have nothing that I’m pushing against. I have no job time-constraints or other constraints, except to be in southern Illinois by January 4th, but that deadline isn’t oppressive. I also speculated the feeling was both because of my fatigue yesterday from poor sleep the night before at the hot springs, and that I’m still in ‘getting used to being on the road’ mode. It has only been about a week and a half, and a good chunk of that was spent dealing with dental issues while staying at friends’ house in Tucson.

Along 180 I notice that pickup trucks wave at each other. I test this and wave at a couple of sedans, and receive no reply, but every truck that goes by either waves back or initiates the little steering wheel finger wiggle we acknowledge as the vehicle-wave. It’s a comfortable occurrence for me. In the country where I grew up in Southern Illinois, there were so few drivers on the backwoods barely paved road, the likelihood that the other car was a neighbor was high, and we all waggled our fingers at each other.

4 thoughts on “Datil Well Campground, NM

Comments are closed.

Comments are closed.