April 11, 2021
We got a corner lot at the Santa Rose RV Park
We finally got out of Texas and made it to Santa Rosa, New Mexico! Santa Rosa claims to be the burial spot of Billy the Kid, but us Texans know that he is really buried in Hamilton, Texas where he died in 1950 having escaped the ambush of Sheriff Pat Garrett in Fort Sumner and living to the ripe old age of 90! He lived under the name of William ‘Brushy Bill’ Roberts in Hamilton and waited until he was 90 to confess that he was, in fact, Billy the Kid. His distinctive eye color and many scars seemed to confirm the fact. The story goes that he returned to New Mexico in 1949 to see if he could get the pardon he was promised back in 1879. Then governor Thomas J. Marry denied, or some say he just rolled his eyes and neither denied nor granted, Billy his pardon. He returned home and died a month later walking to the post office in Chico, Texas. Many say he died of a disappointment.
Billy the Kid’s grave in Hamilton, Texas
Billy the Kid’s grave at Fort Sumner, New Mexico
The tombstone on the right above and now anchored down in a steal cage, has been stolen and recovered twice since it was set in place in the 1940s. The entire gravesite is now enclosed within a steel cage. It was first stolen in 1950 and missing for 26 years before they found it in Granbury, Texas. Stolen again in 1981 it was found at the home of a long haul trucker in Huntington Beach, California. They say someone saw it in the yard of this trucker. Answers my question about what in the world someone would do with a stolen grave marker. Just put it in your yard!
They also have a series of blue holes in Santa Rosa. People learn to scuba dive and just go too swim. There are apparently a series of caves attached to these underwater streams that create the holes. The water is a consistent 61 degrees and this particular hole is 81’ deep. A little too chilly for us, but there were kids and some older young adults playing while the scuba classes were below. It was absolutely beautiful. The water was a deep blue and you could see some of the divers and a suspended platform from a spot above the hole that had concrete steps for those who were brave enough to jump into the freezing abyss.
After leaving Santa Rose we continued west towards Albuquerque and found a spot at the Hidden Valley Mountain RV Park in Tijeras, NM. It is a multi level RV park in that it is hilly here and you have the office area at one level, go up a hill to the lower level and then finally go up another hill to our spot. The slips are pretty level even though they are on a slope. Each site is shored up with rock or railroad ties. For some reason they like to keep all their visitors clumped together while leaving large swathes of spaces empty. Which is a bit of a problem because these are really close together and they put RVs in the same long slip back to back. At first we were pretty cramped in here, but now we are alone on the hill.
We got a call from our friend Judy Walters at the Port Arthur Yacht Club just after arriving here. Apparently some new members of the club are interested in our 32’ Catalina, Son Seeker. I told Judy she is probably very lonely, so show them the boat. Well, these folks loved our boat. They loved the price and the name, so she will continue on as Son Seeker. I was happy to hear that. We were gonna have our buddy, Craig, take them out on a sea trial, but these guys had no poker face. They wanted this boat, no inspection, no sea trial. So, we thought, maybe we should just make a bee line to the island (Pleasure Island, that is) so we can get our stuff off and clean it up a little for them. We drove 15 hours from Albuquerque to Port Arthur swapping seats every two hours. It was a lot, but not near as bad as I had feared. We spent the night on the boat and got busy the next morning. We left the useful stuff, like dishes and pots and pans and cleaned out only the personal things. This took all day. I keep saying the boat did not have enough storage for long voyages, but if I had not had 30 pillows on board we might have had the room we needed. Strange what you find after several years. That evening we met Matt and Leslie Steele at the boat. The winds were 30 knots, so we did not take the boat out, but we showed them around and tried to give them a feel for the boat. I love these people and know that they will take very good care of our, oops, their boat.
We got a room at the Hampton Inn because we emptied the boat and I really needed a good nights sleep. We closed the next morning and decided to check in on my mother and father before heading back to Albuquerque. They are fine and I got another really good nights sleep before heading back.
Since we were leaving Conroe and not Port Arthur, it took only 12 hours to get back. This leg was a bit tougher on me and I think it is because I was slacking on my driving duty. We did not swap as regularly as we had on the way there.
We extended our stay in the Albuquerque area since most of it was spent traveling home, so we will check out all the hiking trails that surround us here and enjoy the outdoors. I will let you know how all that goes.
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