Rollin' On the Shakedown Cruise...Deming,NM & Scottsdale,AZ

After staying in Dallas for over a month and finally getting to see some of our close friends, Ivan and Bunny, Chuck and Jan, and others, we even spent Thanksgiving with Mary Ann's Aunt Willie Mae at cousin Dee Dee's house and met up with lots of other long lost relatives.


They line up at Hard Eight..no wonder!

 Since we were parked out in the "boonies," we really didn't get much time to catch up on the eating out food scene in Big D. I guess the news would be....BURGERS! There are new burger places opening as fast as you can blink. We managed to try a few of them, Hopdoddys (lots of similarities to Shake Shak in Miami and NY..except for one small thing, flavor!), Liberty Burger, Beck's Prime, and they were mostly all ok, but for the most part underwhelming. It seems the harder they try, the less interesting they get..to us anyway. We did get over to Hard Eight in Coppell. We'd heard about this Llano Texas style BBQ place but were skeptical from the start. We were wrong! This place does Hill Country smoker style BBQ as well as any down there we've been to..and do they line up for it!! If you're a true barbeque fan, this is not to be missed. Brother Eddie would go wild for it! We are still amazed at the myriad of food stores in Dallas. It rivals anything, anywhere we've been so far. We do really still miss having the incredible selection...there's Central Market, giant sized Whole Foods, Sprouts, Natural Grocers, Eatzi's (here's a scoop that almost never gets mentioned in Dallas foodie blogs...their grill has an "A" list burger!), and now TJ's (Trader Joes). Even some of the local Krogers are gourmet oriented stores due to the heavy competition. It's as if the grocery store gods all got together and chose DFW as their center of the universe! We kept our dueling convection cooktops going, and whipped up lots of serious dishes with all those great available foods. HEADLINE: "H2's New Galley Exceeds Expectations!"


 

 There is a whole list of new restaurants we missed, and other than a quick bite at old favorites, R&D and La Duni in Highland Park, we'll have to wait for our next trip to check out more of them. We wanted to start working in the new galley in H2, so we did do lots of grocerying.
 We took H2 to our dealer a couple of times to work out some "baby bugs," and finally on November 30th, 2012, we pulled out of the urban trailer park like place we'd been having to call home ( there are no really nice rv parks right in Dallas or many large cities, for that matter ), and headed out I-20 for West Texas.

M A captaining H2 on his inaugural run 

The shakedown rollout was finally underway! Now, H2 is truly a rolling home on wheels. He not only sports the luxury amenities mentioned earlier, but has capabilities which allow us to stay off the grid for extended periods. We wanted to test this new capability on our first night out, so we cruised to just before where I-20 and I-10 converge and landed in Mary Ann's birthplace, Pecos, Texas. We found a more isolated spot in the local WAL-MART lot, asked the manager if it was ok to stay, and set up house. We turned on our powerful generator, cooked a nice dinner, watched a French movie on our new big screen tv( HEADLINE: H2's New Home Theater Lounge Exceeds Expectations"), took showers, and settled in for a good nights sleep....in the parking lot......at the WAL-MART! What a great country!
 The next morning, we rolled out towards Deming, New Mexico. This time, we actually stopped at one of our Escapees Parks ( the folks based in Livingston, Texas, who are our full timer support for our snail mail, etc.) and hooked our shorelines up to the grid. Deming has a really neat combo movie theater/bowling alley called Starmax, and it was Saturday night after all, so after the movie we went and rolled a few games, all the while quoting quotes from one of our favorite movies, The Big Lebowski.
You see, it's a movie that has a lot of bowling....well if I have to explain, you probably won't get it anyway ( I'd suggest you watch it, if you haven't seen it*). By the way, Mary Ann's a natural bowler! The girl can roll! I, on the other hand, only know how to rock. A fun Saturday night in Deming....when in Rome. On December 2nd, H2, smoothly as silk, continued across New Mexico and into Arizona, until we reached our destination, The Eagle View RV Resort, at the eastern edge of Scottsdale. While we were setting up H2, our friends, Don and Greta, who live in Scottsdale, drove over to surprise us. We'd spend the next month there until just after New Years 2013.


H2 relaxing after his long run to Scottsdale

 HEADLINE: "Three full days of hard driving, and H2's Ride Exceeds Expectations!" We'd hoped that it would be a significant tradeoff for our venture into the rv life. After more than three years (two full-timing), trading Harvey, a 32 foot C class coach sailboat, for the much larger and way more complicated H2, a big A class land yacht. The tradeoff, at least in this beginning, is a really good one.

"The Dude Abides!"

*DISCLAIMER...The Big Lebowski is NOT a family movie! But...The Dude really does Abide.