Lowell's Blog
Updates from the road

I’m finally putting together a little update on the McCulley’s while setting in Gallatin after resting up a bit.. The transition from living on the Sea of Cortez to relaxing in the green mid-west is always a big push. This year it was especially true. We always want to enjoy our last days in Cholla but must prepare the house for the long summer with our absence. Then there’s the Phoenix family compound. We came back to Phoenix to roofers and painters recovering the property from last fall’s hail damage. Then the big stress item, our truck Diesel. The truck still has a extra noise in it after it was repaired in March from water in the fuel. We took it to a 2nd repair shop and then back to the original repair shop. After delaying our departure 4 days we headed east with the truck noise still with us.. The noise is probably a bad fuel injector that creates a “fuel KNOCK” which wasn’t too bad. The repair shops couldn’t figure it out and said it would be okay to drive as is.. That little knock turned into a loud knock when we loaded him down with Homie our 5th wheel RV.. SO I drove 3 days working the accelerator to avoid the knock as best I could. Very stressful. This problem will be fixed before we move on as I can’t take that kind of stress again…

The car we snapped above just screams ROAD TRIP… Anybody know the model/year? Cool car!

Our first overnight was in Santa Rosa about 100 miles east of Albuquerque NM. It’s an old historic route 66 city where the famous Blue Hole dive location is. Above, typical old route 66 neon on an interesting restaurant and the historic Santa Rosa Chapel near downtown.

Right.. A great way to blast across country. Fueled by Red Bull.

Night two we made it to Wellington Ks and stayed in a KOA. Driving north from Oklahoma City we ran into rainy weather that dropped the temp from 103 to 70 making for a cool night. The KOA had a big fireworks show to help us get into the 4th of July mode. Frankie and I sat on a dock and watched the show from across the small fishing lake.

Arriving at the Missouri border we crossed the extreme flooded Missouri river. Below left is a farm field near the river and right the river flowing into the tree line on each side of the river and it’s still rising. Thankfully, We have no family impacted.

Home in Gallatin at 2pm on the 3rd day, greeted by the 4th of July flags at the town square court house. Another greeting was the chairs on our back patio. Time to chill. Weather is perfect making it comfortable to have dinner with family on the patio. Mom is doing great and happy to have us home.

Fireworks went on late in the night. Lots of big rockets in the sky all around us.. It rained 4 inches 2 days ago so there is no fire danger.  Our horses didn’t like it much.. Today the horses are much calmer and Frankie got a chance to introduce herself. We don’t know their names yet but hope to meet their owners in the coming days and find out if Neely is safe to go into the pasture with them. She loves going down to the pond and is ready.

Now that we’re here things are relaxing out nicely. We don’t have any big projects pressing and hope to take it easy for a while. We’re loving the cool weather and the transition to GREENESS.

Happy belated 4th of July to all…

Lowell, Frankie & Neely