Winter Road Trip 2026
Bend Oregon to Big Bend National Park Texas
And back to Bend Oregon
Part 4 - Big Bend National Park to Tuscon AZ
Day 28 - 29 Davis Mountain State Park
It was sad to leave Big Bend, but we were very excited to get on with our trip! We headed north to Alpine, and then up to Fort Davis and Davis Mountains State Park. When we got to Alpine the clouds were getting thicker, and since we had some time to kill we stopped for a quick lunch at DQ (hey we had been in booniesville for a week, and our bodies craved the high quality and healthy diet that DQ provides!). During the consumption of said healthy diet, the clouds decided they would drop their load of moisture, and soon it was raining at a rate of about 5 feet an hour! I did get up and check the parking lot where we had left the truck and trailer, and surprising enough it was not a mud pit yet... So we finished lunch, ran through the rain (it was letting up by then) back to the truck and headed north to Ft. Davis. During this portion of the drive, once again the clouds felt the urge to drown us, and slowing to about 25mph we kept up the adventure of driving a submarine on land. Anyway, it finally stopped in time to get setup at Davis Mountain, and true to ORV fashion, the trailer showed no signs of it's under water adventure for the last 2 hours. Needless to say, the first thing we did was empty the tanks after the 7 day adventure in Big Bend, and started to explore the park. The next day it was back to sunny and warm, so we decided to take a road trip (without the submarine) up to McDonald Observatory. Wow way cool as the saying goes, but inside, the viewing areas were closed except for the newer telescope. It was a very nice adventure into the unknown wilderness of space, something like the final frontier from the 70's. So one of Jill's major goals of this entire trip, was to see a wild Javalina (much like the friggin Road Runner for me) and today was her day! We had stopped at the picnic area at the observatory, and I had walked a few hundred yards to get a pic of the visitors center, when along the fence line I saw two of them running away from where Jill was. Oh cool right?, but did Jill see them? I got back to the picnic area and asked, but all I got was "don't even tell me" (which meant NO you lucky #%%$#$%^). So we get in the truck and about 500 yards or so later Jill spotted 2 of them across a large field, and they were headed right at us. Of course we just parked in the road and let it happen. They continued coming right at us and Jill snuck out her door to take pictures. As they got closer I kept telling her to watch out, them dang tusks are lethal, but she just kept clicking away. Well they get to about 20 yards or so I'm pretty much yelling at her to get in the truck, which she finally relented to. The lead Javalina got to about 6 feet from of her door and poised like a good little piggy for her. Holy Moly mr piggy, smile for her would you, and it basically did! We let them both continue on their stroll past the truck, high fived each other, and kept going. We did the loop around the back way and ended up at Fort Davis taking the tour of the partially restored fort (oh ya, once again the Geezer Pass came into play, FREE!). During our walk around the old fort we stumbled across another prize sighting, Barbary Sheep! We could not get close, so no good pics, but we still checked it off the list as a "SCORE"! Back to the submarine, walk around the park, dinner, a DVD movie, sleep and off in the morning to El Paso!
Day 30 - War Eagles Air Museum - El Paso area.
After leaving Davis Mountain we headed north to Balmorhea to catch I-10 heading back west. After the trip up to the observatory yesterday, we did not want to try taking the trailer that way. This is the official first day that we have done a 180 and are heading back west towards home, plus our last day in Texas. Our goal today is in Santa Teresa New Mexico (NE of El Paso) and the War Eagles Air Museum. This was on our radar as it is a Harvest Host overnight for one, and two it was an air museum, what else do we need to say! After a trip to Camping World to get a new seal for our toilet bowl (a 5 minute fix so it held water again) we made it to War Eagles. We checked in at the office, they were so friendly and walked us out into the HUGE parking lot and said "park wherever you want", so why not next to the artillery? How often can you camp next to a tank, mobile radar, and missile launcher??? How often do you get a level, flat place to park so we didn't even unhook the trailer. This place was an AWESOME place to stay, and all behind guarded fencing, how secure is that? Turns out that there was no fence from our camp spot out onto the main runway of the airport so we enjoyed the occasional plane landing and takeoff for our evening activity. Super quiet at night, and as secure as it gets, we did not even lock the doors! Next morning we got up and enjoyed coffee by the runway, and then hit the museum at 10am when it opened. Took a couple hours for the tour, which was very interesting, more than just planes and a lot about women in the air force during WW2. We took off about noonish and headed towards Deming New Mexico for our next stop!
Day 31 through 34 - Deming New Mexico
We took off from the Air Museum (pun intended) and headed back towards Los Cruces. Our original plan was to keep going north to Albuquerque and then heading west, but that nasty four letter word "SNOW" had started falling in northern New Mexico. So as all good "chicken" snow birders do, we said (F**K THAT) and headed west on I-10 to Deming. Our new main target next was the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument (if it stopped snowing in the mountains). Cliff Dwellings was the number one highest priority for Jill on this trip, so KA CHING she was going to get to cash in as the saying goes. We heard that the road getting there was not that "Trailer Friendly" so we stayed at Little Vineyard RV Park in Deming. Turns out it is just a big gravel parking lot with hookup posts separating the RV's, but it did have a indoor pool and hot tub which was very inviting. So what the heck, we dawned our "old farts" swimming attire and walked over to the pool. We are about 10-15 minutes into a good warm soak when the skies opened up and KA BOOM the rain (rather waterfall) started and down it came. Well darn, we had to sit for another half hour or more in the hot tub to wait for this storm to pass. By the time we were walking back to the trailer, it was pretty much dark, and in the distance we spotted this fantastic looking, new travel trailer and awesome new Chevy truck parked in the middle of a huge mud puddle! Hey, is it? YUP... GREAT, I think was my first word, followed by a bunch of (*^&%A*&^%")'s language the average child should not hear. So tip toeing through the tulips was not quite the term, but rather sloshing through ankle deep COLD water was. Well there goes a good hour in the hot tub shot to heck! So anyway we actually got some /tv reception here and watched the Olympics that night for the first time.
Next morning after checking road reports saying it was a localized storm the night before, no snow in the mountains, we headed north with the truck (left the trailer at the park in the semi dried out mud puddle) to the cliff dwellings. When they say "not trailer friendly" they pretty much hit it on the head as this was a 20mph winding twisting up down and around venture that covered some great territory but we were glad we left the trailer in the mud puddle. About the only term for this whole day was AWESOME, as we were finally out of the desert, and into the forest, first time in what seemed like forever! Even had Elk Crossing signs everywhere, now we're talking! The dwellings were more on the FANTASTIC side of things, as once we finally did get there, the hike, the dwellings, the area, was nothing but magical!!! Gila Cliff Dwellings highly rated on our trip-o-meter, Little Vineyard RV Park not so much...
We'll just let the following photos tell the story!
Day 35-36 - Tuscon AZ
We were originally scheduled to leave a day later from Deming, but the forecast had 35-40 mile an hour westerly winds with gusts to 60 that day so we left early to beat driving into the headwinds. So off we go heading west on I-10 and within 100 feet of crossing the NM/AZ border we remembered how bad the roads are in Arizona!!! Holy moley, grab the hold bars everyone, we're in for a ride!!! Anyway, we took advantage of our extra day in Tuscon and spent a large portion of the day at the Pima Air & Space Museum. So the museum in El Paso was cool and all, but meet the Giant Bigfoot Daddy here in Tuscon! This place is plain and simple overwhelming, but an awesome inspirational place for sure! The great thing about Pima is that you can walk between, under, around all the aircraft. The sheer volume of aircraft is overwhelming as well, but to be able to walk under a SR71 that was such a secret for so many years, accompanied by it's D-21 reconnaissance drone was an inspirational highlight to say the least. Air force one from JFK there for you to touch, meeting Sgt Walter Ram, surviving WW2 POW from stalag 17, it just goes on and on and on!!! Military, prototypes, civilian, small, big, and HUGE. Highly recommend this place with two big thumbs up!!! Plan on the entire day though, again it is HUGE....
These are former Air Force One planes, the one shown to the left (A Douglas VC-118A) was used during the JFK and Johnson administrations.
We stayed two nights at the south Tuscon KOA, which is very nice although big, and once again, citrus trees full of ripe fresh fruit. We'd give it a 4.5 thumbs up on a scale of 5 if your into the full amenity type RV park, but the FREE oranges and lemons tipped the scale to a 5... Now as we are setup to go a week or more with no hookups, this full tilt treatment is kinda nice and all, but not really our cup of tea. But, we're not complaining other than the price tag that is associated with such opulence. Anyway, the hot tub was GREAT although we always had company, but did we mention FREE RIPE FRUIT TO PICK???
From the KOA in Tuscon we moved north to Picacho Peak State Park, less than an hour away. Click below on part five for the rest of our trip!