Free boondocking at A Riverine Park
tI packed up a few things in the camper, laced up my traveling shoes, the truck started up normally, despite its battery problems, and I moseyed down the road listening to the tires humming a happy tune as I quickly covered the miles to San Antonio, New Mexico, the gateway to the Bosque Del Apache.
I pulled into a boondocking area about a mile outside of San Antonio, known as a Riverine Park due to it being beside the Rio Grande River, figuring I would spend the night here and go to the Bosque tomorrow. But problems started showing themselves as soon as I got here.
Rundown, decrepit, and worn out describe me fairly accurately, but it doesn't even scratch the surface of this Riverine Park. The rocky road to get to it is an abomination; the only good thing about it is that it’s only a couple of hundred yards long. To say it’s cramped inside the little park is an understatement. There is supposed to be room for five or six RVs, but they need to be pretty small ones, since the curves inside the park are so sharp that it would be difficult for a trailer to drive around the place.
It's in a heavily wooded area, which means I'm not getting hardly any sunshine at all on my solar panels, so that alone will make my stay here brief. The trees are all very mature and apparently slowly dying off, so that there are huge trees that look like they’re gonna fall over any minute, crushing any vehicle in their way. I believe a lumberjack would refer to half the trees around here as "widow makers."
The concrete picnic tables are broken or cracked, some barbecue pits are buried in debris, and bushes are growing everywhere. There are three or four RVs here now, so at least I'm not sitting here all alone, and I think this place would give me the willies if I were sitting here alone.
But the worst thing by far is, this place is a floodplain for the Rio Grande, and by the dried mud vehicle tracks in the park, I can see this area must turn into a mud hole fairly quickly, maybe before you can get out.
So all in all, I'll go to the Bosque tomorrow morning, and may not come back to this riverine Park for another night. Elephant Butte State Park is only an hour away from here, so I may spend the entire day at the Bosque and then head for Elephant Butte late afternoon...... but nothing I do or say is written in stone, so we shall see.
PS.... I'm going to try writing how many comments there are at the end of the title, it bothers me that everybody has to go back to previous blog posts to see if there are any comments. That's very inconvenient for everyone. So I'll write them at the end of the post title, on the main page, and see if that's more convenient for everyone.
theboondork
Sunrise at Valley of Fires this morning.
Me and a few neighbors boondocking at a Riverine Park just down the road from San Antonio, New Mexico.
In the background is the road I came in on, Highway 380.
It blends in with the yellow leaves quite well, but on the right side of the picture is a Schoolie taking advantage of some free boondocking.
Near my camper, you can see a big heavy limb hanging in a tree, and some are already on the ground. And there are plenty more broken branches scattered around that are waiting to fall on someone. Not parking under one of those had a lot to do with my choice of boondocking spots