26 years ago today, God Almighty put us together forever in marriage. Neither of us have ever regretted joining our hearts in Christian love together. We’re looking forward to celebrating our 27th and on and on.
Click on the image to enlarge.
Retirement
Nine Squared
Having competed yet another orbit around the sun, the total of my years is equivalent to the title and graphic shown. In spite of that rather large-ish sounding number, I am still in very good health with only minor symptoms of arthritis and a slightly under-performing kidney. I still see a dermatologist who eliminates some skin carcinoma from time to time, thus reminding me of my younger days of over exposure to the sun’s UV radiation.
Here’s a brief summary of life to this point:
- Born during the second world war in Long Beach, California.
- Graduated High School in the early 60’s
- Active duty US Navy – Avionics Tech School for a year
- US Naval Missile Center, Point Mugu, CA Targets Dept. 2 years.
- Went into Aerospace industry for the next 40 years.
- Retired in Wickenburg, AZ.
I may have left out a few details. There are a couple of blog posts in the works that detail my Navy service – coming one of these days.
Las Cruces KOA — A Hilltop RV Park
We arrived at our campground today without incident. We drove straight through the planned route and stopped only once in Alamogordo to take on fuel.
We were pleasantly surprised that our campground RV park is elevated above the southwest end of the city of Las Cruces – actually a pretty big town in this region of New Mexico. In the image above, you can see our rig parked with the mountain ranges in the distance and the urban sprawl below.
Later this evening, Verna and I took a walk down to the front of the park where there is an overlook of the area. I used my S23 Galaxy phone to photograph the city lights:
In the above image, you can dimly see the mountain range beyond the city we crossed coming here today. We also crossed the Rio Grande River, which flows through the area on its way to the Big Bend and thence to the Gulf of Mexico, where we were just a few days ago.
Click on either image to open the image viewer.
Camping in Junction, TX
Image: Llano River next to the RV Park – Click to enlarge.
We’ve actually been here at the Llano River RV Park since yesterday. We decided to have a more relaxing weekend on the road.
We had some good meals while camping here; we had grilled pork tenderloin on Saturday and grilled Filet Mignon steaks today. Not too bad at all!
Next, we will be headed to Fort Stockton, TX, where we will be doing some provisioning from the local supercenter. We also will be stopping here in Junction to take on Diesel for the RV.
We’re looking to be home by the end of this new week.
Eclipse Day
What we anticipated to be a dismal forecast for the weather on Eclipse Day, turned out to be not so bad, especially during the totality phase. Clouds passed between us and the sun often, but then opened up for partial phase glimpses and during totality, most of the four minutes of darkness, we were able to see the corona and in the image below, a couple of prominences at two-thirty and five-thirty on the disc. The 5:30 prominence was huge.
I wasn’t very well-prepared to take photos given the woeful forecast, which affected my motivation, but I was able to attach the big 100-400mm telephoto lens and shoot bunches of photos hand-held (no tripod) and had a few fair results including the one above. Verna had similar results and captured the “Diamond Ring” at the end of the totality show:
As I’m blogging this, we are getting some moderate to heavy thundershowers with lightning and thunder, but, Praise the Lord, no tornadoes. The precipitation knocked out the satellite TV a few times, but it is up and running now.
We’re here until Wednesday and then off to other parts of Texas south of us towards the Gulf of Mexico and thence via westerly routes heading back to Arizona over the next several days.
Flat Creek Farm Critters
Just across the creek from where we are camping, we saw a flock of sheep, two llamas and a sheepdog watching over them all. I took these photos just before sundown this evening.
Click on any image to enlarge.
