For the last two years, we’ve made a little junket to ring in the new year: first on the western half of the Oklahoma Adventure Trail and last year at Big Bend. But we didn’t have a specific destination in mind this time. Also, Evan and I were both a little hesitant to commit — when we started talking about it, I had just been laid off and Evan had confirmed his future employment but it won’t start until February. And the Xterra and the Land Rover desperately needed tires.
But George was determined to make it happen. Evan wanted to, and I wanted to want to — we just didn’t know where to go, and we were sensitive to cost. Then I got a job offer following that interview at the end of the Laidoffroad Trip; suddenly I was super intent on doing something to celebrate. By providence, someone posted something to an overlanding community about a recent camping trip he’d done to the VLA and central New Mexico. And that got us thinking…
And how we wished that we’d thought to camp here?
And how that trip to the Trinity Site was enough to give us a taste of the region but we wanted to explore more of it? Well, how about we just do that? It’s a (long) day’s distance from Austin and Tulsa, but doable. And to keep costs down for the funemployed brigade, we’re going to camp in our cars for at least a few nights. I got pretty good at it in Big Bend earlier this month. Evan thinks the Rover has plenty of room for him and Miles. And George thinks he can sleep in his little Fiat Jeep, but all I can figure is:
So we are about to embark on the most loosely planned of these adventures yet. We have a loose route with some alternates, a stockpile of ideas to explore, and the general notion that we want to camp in San Lorenzo Canyon or thereabouts for NYE proper.
George is going to go as far as he can today so that he can try and stake out our first night’s camp in the Lincoln National Forest tomorrow during daylight. Evan and I both have commitments this evening, so we leave from our respective homes tomorrow morning. We’ll all meet up somewhere near the Capitan Mountains west of Roswell tomorrow night.
It’ll be off a dirt track in the forest. George promises to send us GPS coordinates once he figures it out. But I doubt cell service will be any good, so that may be the last we hear from him. The only way to know if we all made it in one piece is to go find out.