#58b Santa Rosa Lake

The next day we headed out and we went to the Dodge dealer in Albuquerque and I bought the 23.00 fancy pants bolt. I went to Harbor Freight and got the big wrench and a 3-ton jack so that I could lift it off the ground and do the work that needed to be done.

We landed in a little town called Santa Rosa. Santa Rosa Lake had a recreation area with RV sites. The lake was about half dried up, but it was still a pretty place to be for a few days. After I settled in that evening, I took a look at my bounty that I had recovered from the shoulder of the road in the dark from the night before. Since the stuff had been drug under the RV for a mile and run over by 100 trucks the stuff really wasn’t worth having. I guess reason I did it was that at least I wasn’t a litter bug. The next day, I decided I needed to lift the truck up off the ground and take this whole thing apart. I put the bolt in, and it worked great and that problem was solved.

We went to a little church there on Sunday. We try to stick with UMC, but this might have been some other similar denomination. I just wanted to avoid hard core Southern Baptist as I have had plenty of that growing up. It was a nice little fundamentalist type UMC kind of sort of. Nice people, about 22 people in the congregation. Six were the minister and his family. After the service I asked one of the ladies if she knew where I could take my recycling. She said well there's a dumpster right over there if you want to use it. I begin to understand that out west we don't do all that recycle stuff. She just said oh I think we did that a couple of years ago, but nobody participated we just quit.

We decided to join the minister and family for lunch at the western sizzling type place and got to know them better. I noticed Santa Rosa was on a couple of miles of the remnants of the original route 66.

We helped kill route 66 by putting the nail the coffin by leaving and getting on big interstate 40.