And then came Saturday the Fourteenth!

Actually, it was a good day. Nothing went horribly wrong, and some things went amazingly right.

We made our escape from Horspitality Ranch without being attacked by wild pigs. That was a great start. R was worried about my driving without my glasses, so he took the first shift, even though it was my turn. I did appreciate that, because I discovered that driving with the emergency glasses on made me sick to my stomach, and driving without them made it difficult to read the road signs before they had gone by. (By the way, I am not legally required to wear glasses to drive. I think my eyes have just gotten spoiled.)

We drove the thirty miles or so to Wal-Mart in Surprise, Arizona, which someone had suggested would be the place to get my glasses replaced. I had my doubts, but I went in there anyway, taking along my broken glasses, just in case they turned out to be repairable (fat chance -- they've been on borrowed time since England).  I walked into the Vision Care area and approached a friendly lady whose name I never got -- and that's too bad. I would like to send a letter to her boss. I explained my dilemma. She took my broken glasses from me, declared them beyond repair, and then said "I could probably find a set of frames to fit your lenses." She walked over to one of the three walls full of frames, took a set off the wall, and popped a lens out. Then she popped one of my lenses out and transferred it to the new frame. It fit perfectly. We wasted a few minutes looking at other, lighter-coloured frames, but none of them fit. She had managed to find the one and only perfect fit, on the first try. So she put my other lens in the new frame, I paid for it, and we were done. I donated my old frames to her garbage can.

I can see again, and I'm not sick to my stomach. In the immortal words of Martha Stewart, "That's a Good Thing."

We stopped in at Starbucks, then headed on down the road. Traffic around Phoenix was horrible. Arizona highways are a free-for-all. People pass on the left and on the right, according to their whims, then pull in front of you as soon as they've gone by, so that you have to brake to keep from rear-ending them, and generally behave like fourteen-year-olds stealing daddy's car. Even the truck drivers, who have been very pleasant to drive with on the rest of the trip, have been infected with this bad driving bug. That was really the only unpleasant part of today's trip. Tucson's traffic wasn't as bad as Phoenix's, and after Tucson the traffic thinned out a lot and driving became downright easy.

We've stopped for the night at Fort Willcox RV Park near Willcox, Arizona. We're a couple of hours from Deming, New Mexico, and about four hours from El Paso, Texas, so by tomorrow night we should be in the state we're aiming for, though still a long way from Austin.

We're told that the temperature will go down to 28F tonight, so we've decided not to try using our water hose. We have plenty of water on board. My only concern with this park is that after we had booked in, I saw a sign describing the park as "Ft. Lewis Seniors' Community." Nobody even questioned my right to be here, and that's just insulting.