Day 74, 75, 76 - El Paso, TX

Wednesday (74) - An even shorter drive than yesterday, only 37 miles through El Paso to Mission RV Park southeast of town. We are here for several days. It is not a Thousand Trails or Encore Resort but just one we found on the AllStays app. We have several things we need to get done and, thanks to my colleague who lives here, we have a whole list of things to see and do in the area.

The highways through El Paso had a lot of construction going on so narrow lanes and almost no acceleration lanes for merging traffic. Not a nice city to drive through with a large vehicle. After setting up, we headed out to do a little exploring.The first couple of stops were missions, a Mexican bakery, and a Native American museum. The car was covered with dirt from the trip so we ran it through a car wash. Now, we can see out the windows again.

BTW, this RV Park has a pool and jacuzzi but it isn’t anywhere near as nice as Needles or Benson. But it’s in El Paso and there isn’t a lot of choice. Sous vide’d two turkey breasts from frozen. Added salt, pepper, sage, and a little butter. Vacuum sealed it, 145°F for 5 hours. Came out perfect…

Thursday (75) - We are heading for the Apple Store as Bridget’s iPad needs to be replaced. One of the physical switches doesn’t work. Since there are only three actual switches, that’s a significant percentage. They needed to order one so hopefully it arrives before we leave the area. The Apple Genius said that it was usually only a few days but the weekend is around the corner. We stopped at a couple of other stores along the way. Lunch was at Red Lobster. We hadn’t been there in maybe a decade.

My “project” for the afternoon was stuffed cabbage rolls. There was a recent FB post with pictures and it sounded good. We’ll see how it works with limited counter space...

It came out pretty tasty though neither of us were really hungry at dinner time due to our Red Lobster lunch. The cabbage rolls were made in the Instant Pot and were done pretty quickly (18 min at high pressure) though the prep time was probably close to an hour. What did surprise me is that there was enough counter space in this kitchen.

Friday (76) - Today, we visited the El Paso Zoo. Nice, small zoo with some nice exhibits but a lot of things were closed either for the season or due to very light attendance. It was pretty empty. Some of the animals weren’t out yet due to the near freezing overnight temperature. But came out later. E.g. when we left, all four lions were out.

Like many zoos, many of the animals were not very active such as this orangutan.

Display spaces were generally large with several animals sharing the pens. This one, for example, had antelope and giraffe.

It was a nice visit. When we were getting ready to leave, I received a call from Apple. Bridget’s iPad was ready to be picked up.