Escapees July-August 2024

camping chair chat

The Kindness of Camping Strangers is Wonderful! The Camping/RV community has consis tently impressed us as a friendly, kind and respectful group of folks, willing to lend a hand or share a camp fi re, but also respect ful of your privacy and safety. On two occa sions this proved to be especially true. I n Northern New Mexico, at the start of our spring trip, we were plagued by various RV mechanical failures, mostly due to our own failure to properly winterize before storing it in November. We thought we had adequately blown the water out of the pipes with compressed air, but obviously were not successful! The consequence was a week of many trips to repair shops and parts stores. At Fenton Lake State Park, in the Jemez Mountains north of Santa Fe, we had intended to fi sh and hike for a couple of days. We camped near a lake that had been recently stocked. Insteadof fi shing or hiking, we had an interior fl ood and the next day a failure of our electrical system. The fl ood was due to the water freezing in the pipes that we thought we had adequately drained…but hadn’t. So, they cracked and the moment we went to fi ll upour tank, water was gushing all over the place. We spent the next day looking for replacement parts at the nearest towns, but had no luck. Returning to our campsite, we noticed that the engine was not recharging our coach batteries. And we were camping in a place without electric hook-ups. After spending two nights without water and intending to drive out for repairs, we discovered that, even with the engine on, we couldn’t bring our stabilizers up because the coach was getting no power. With no water and no power, and no cell service, we came to truly appreciate the kindness of strangers. Fortunately we had befriended our “neighbors,” over the camp fi re in the evenings. They were a Latino couple our age, but both disabled, and their teenage grand-daugh ter, Brianna. Charlie’s quick wit and jokes distracted us from our mechanical miseries. When our electrical failure immobilized us, Charlie came to our rescue with a portable generator and a recommendation for a repair shop that was able to fi t us in without waiting a week. Thank Heavens for good neighbors! It meant we had to drive two hours back to Albuquerque, so off we went. The repairs took all day and we returned to our

campsite to blessedly fi nd Brianna waiting to give us the six trout she had caught for our dinner. They were amazingly sweet and succulent and, we were so grateful to this lovely family for their kindness. Another spring, we were anxious for a new adventure and to get past the raw cold days we’d had recently in Connecticut. Driving south, we were fast forwarding through spring several days every day. But the fl ora, even just along route 81, was gorgeous. Once we got to Maryland and Virginia, the ubiquitous red bud trees colored the mostly lea fl ess roadside forest with brilliant magenta drifts. The grasses were the glowing emerald of Ireland, and at lower altitudes and further south the crinkly emerging leaves of trees were chartreuse. Some trees wore colorful coronas of maple-like helicopter seed pods in shades from champagne to apricot to burnished copper to burnt sienna to brick. The skeletal white limbs of sycamores, always the last to leaf out, provided a dramatic contrast to the vibrant colors of new life on other plants. In some places, it was as though nature had made her own fl oral arrangements with dark green juniper bushes and scrub brush of a frosty sage color, red bud trees poking up through them in a halo of magenta, occasional stark white dogwoods, and vivid green grass in front dotted by bright yellow wild mustard weeds. I just kept smiling like a giddy child at all the beauty around us.

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ESCAPEES Magazine July/August 2024