2006/01 Southwest USA trip (MN-TX) - Introduction |
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January 2006
Dear All,
We set off south just after the New Year on our first-ever lengthy winter trip within the USA. We were headed in the general direction of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, with a list of interesting places to visit, but no fixed itinerary. Although all those places are over a thousand miles south of us, and much warmer on average than Minnesota, they can all have some violent winter weather at times, particularly in the mountains, and our objective is to go to wherever the good weather is!
That’s important when planning the trip south. Very often, when it’s very cold and dry in Minnesota, very easy driving weather, the weather to the south of us can be ugly. Iowa may have a blizzard and Missouri and Kansas can have freezing rain and ice storms. So anyone planning such a trip looks at the weather forecasts for all those places and then picks a day to blast south and avoid the storms.
We have to leave home with the camper still winterized, with antifreeze in the water and sewer tanks, and we take along a keg of water inside the camper, and hope we hit warm weather before we run out of water! We had a couple of bags of firewood inside too, as I’d found that the ice and snow made it too dangerous to climb up onto the camper’s roof and put it in the luggage pod.
Tuesday January 3rd
This year we were lucky with the weather, and the middle of the country was having a warm spell. Instead of our usual -5 to -10, we had 20s and 30s, with the states to the south of us being mainly above freezing. The downside of this was that we had been having freezing rain and snow just about every day, really messy driving for Sandie’s work. The forecast was for snow every day except Tuesday so that was the day to go.
Next.