From West Wendover, Nevada by Greg

We are on the Nevada-Utah border a few miles from the Bonneville Salt Flats. This is a small casino town with a lot of trucker traffic for the low (er) cost fuel prices. Diesel has been going down daily sonce we left Klamath Falls the day before yesterday. If feels good to finally get back on the road. We stayed the first night in Winnemucca, parked in a quiet casino parking lot. There are two world class Basque family style restaurants in Winnemucca so we splurged on dinner at one of them, the Martin Hotel. Mucho food and very very good. We were seated next to another retired couple and had a very pleasant dinner and conversation. It was well worth the $50 tab.

We pushed 250 miles yesterday to West Wendover yesterday. Total fuel bill was $230 for both rigs. Gasp. That’s over $100 a day to drive. I had budgeted fuel at $5 a gallon and paid $3.919 so it is looking good from the point that costs are less than expected but ouch. We are in a hurry to get to Texas and establish residency there by October 1. That will result in a net increase to our pension take home of 9% though. We are aiming for a little town in Texas called Dalhart. It is in the northwest corner of the panhandle and is the closest Texan town we could get to from K. Falls. Our actual residence or more correctly, domicile, will be in Livingston but we don’t have to go there to change our drivers license, car and voter registration. Since it would require an additional 2000 miles to go to Livingston and then come back to Nogales AZ we are not going there.

Once we get that all taken care of we will be going west to Flagstaff, AZ traveling the I40 route through northern New Mexico. We will take our time doing that but plan to meet up with my brother and sister, who is flying in from Oregon on the 9th of October. Then we plan to store the motorhome in Flagstaff and drive the Jetta to Mexico and spend the better part of 6 months exploring that country with an eye to living there. Since the Jetta gets easily 45 mpg a 15 gallon tank will get us nearly 700 miles and the savings in fuel over the motorhome will pay for lodging.

That itinerary looks like we will cross over in Nogales, then to Mazatlan, to Acapulco, to Puerto Angel, to Oaxaca, to Guadalajara, to Mazatlan and home. My current expectation is that we will move to Mazatlan with the motorhome come next winter, if not sooner. The cost of health insurance is becoming more and more burdensome to my mind not to say it doesn’t hurt the pocket book to the tune of nearly a thousand dollars a month.

We’ll see though. It is scary to think of giving up the insurance since with my pre-existing conditions we would be unable to get any insurance in America until I qualify for medicare in 6 and a half years.

One last note, yesterday I saw two other classic Airstream motorhomes! I hadn’t seen any at all in a year so that was kinda cool. We talked with one since he was stopped in the parking lot where I met up with Von here in West Wendover. An interesting if odd guy. About 50 years old in appearance, he was traveling with just two large dogs and seemed somewhat at a loss as to where he was going. We discussed the Texas domicile issue with him and he was intrigued by that.

The drive across the high desert here was quite nice as well. I love these open spaces with huge mountains in the distance.

Well, off to cross Utah on I80, then Wyoming, then south through Denver. We hope get to Texas by the weekend.

Greg