Happy In Tucson

We arrived in Tucson Sunday after a short, uneventful drive from Bowie AZ.  We had spent a few days here last fall and were looking forward to now having 2 weeks here.  There is good scenery and food in the area.  In fact, Tucson has recently been named the first North American City of Gastronomy by UNESCO.

first-unesco-city-of-gastronomy

We're not sure what that means, but it has to be good.  Tucson is also the home of some friends, one former Kenosha librarian and her partner, who have very kindly invited us for Christmas as well as other fun activities.

We were also excited by the appointment we had with a mobile RV couple who agreed to come find us Monday afternoon despite their busy pre-holiday schedule.

We got to the Tucson KOA campground, a huge facility that was more than three quarters empty.  Our first site was very un-level and we went on a hunt for something better, which just happened to be a site directly across from laundry and pool.  It wasn't perfect, but it was good enough to get 3 slides out and allow us to settle in  and then head out for a good dinner Sunday night.  Monday dawned and we were really un-level again.  It seemed that the gravel base had settled over night.  We shoved the cats into their carriers, pulled in the slides, disconnected the water and electric and jockeyed around in the site until we were better and then damned the torpedoes and put all 4 slides out.  Chuck must be happy fully extended since we've stayed pretty level ever since.

Ken and Rachel - RV Techs Extraordinaire came later that afternoon, solved out electrical problem, showed us how to solve it ourselves next time, confirmed that our jacks were fried and we need the big repair and then chatted with us about RVing, repairing and life in general for a while.  Upon leaving they tried to NOT take any money, saying they hadn't really done anything.  Luckily the Navigator got Rachel to finally take something, but they restored our faith in RVing.

Tuesday was set aside for the usual restocking of the larder, especially now that I can cook again.  A Google search didn't show any familiar grocery chains but the Navigator, now Researcher Extraordinaire finally, after an exhaustive search, assured me she had found the perfect market.  It would have EVERYTHING my heart would desire.  We set off on our errands including a stop at Petco for the cats, a stop at Trader Joe's for wine, cheese and snacks and then headed for Hilltop Market.  Again, I heard about the great reviews Hilltop Market had on Google and how much I would like it.  The Navigator assured me it would be the Tucson version of Woodman's (chain of massive grocery stores familiar to Wisconsinites).  We drove, following the GPS, and drove some more, and some more until there it was, exactly the address, the long-promised nirvana of groceries...

What you don't see in this Google streetview are the bars on the window and the neon beer signs in the dusty, fly-specked window.

Not exactly what I was expecting.  Laughing, we conceding defeat and saved grocery shopping for another day.

More again soon, but in the meantime we're level in Tucson!

Gadsden Who?

Every time we told someone we were going to Las Cruces and the adjacent old Spanish town of Mesilla, they would remark, “Oh, where the Gadsden Purchase was signed” and I would be a bit befuddled.  I’m a fairly decent student of American History but it rang only very faint bells, so clearly a refresher was in order.  (Larry Negri-I admit I should have known)  Google is our friend so if you’d like to read more about it, check https://history.state.gov/milestones/1830-1860/gadsden-purchase

Suitably educated, we set out to enjoy the area.  It’s a city of about 100,000, home to the state’s agricultural university and at least one UU church – both things close to my heart.  The Navigator turned Tour Guide and mapped out 2 days of eating and touring.  And best of all, we had a very level camping site and were able to put out our fourth (and largest) slide just about doubling our living space in the main area.  I was doing a dance.

Highlights of the tour included the small, free but very cool Zuhl Museum on the university campus, full of petrified wood, fossils and rocks and crystal.  

Fossilized dinosaur eggs in the nest.

Fossilized dinosaur foot next to mine.

Then off to the Ranch and Farm Heritage museum where we got a private golf cart tour of the working ranch part of the museum and followed it with wandering around the inside exhibits.  

Part of the living museum.  My goat pictures weren't any good.

The original Chucklewagon in the museum.  Even with our challenges, I prefer ours to this.

We ended the day with a drive up the foothills of the Organ Mountains (so named for their organ pipe shape I believe, not for liver or spleens) and Dripping Springs National Monument and more history involving cattlemen, failed businesses and sanitariums.  Look it up for more info.

Small section of the foothills of the Organ Moutains

No sightings yet but I'm still hoping.

Old Mesilla was only a mile or so from out campground and it is a traditional, historic town with adobe buildings surrounding a plaza with a bandshell in the middle.  A basilica anchors one end of the square and shops round out the other 3 sides, including the building where Billie the Kid was tried and hung.  There’s a fabulous bookstore with shelves overflowing with all sorts of books.  I restrained myself and bought only 5 or 6 books and got out for less than $100.

We had beautiful weather throughout, sunny, dry and in the 50’s during the day and below freezing at night which was OK with our little electric heaters going.  We ate our weight in New Mexican Green Chili dishes including enchiladas, burritos and eggs.  These roasted green chilies are a New Mexican signature product and I can see why.

The four days were going swimmingly.  Slides out, water in our tanks so freezing wasn’t an issue, it was all good….until…

Friday morning, our last full day, the little heater was running and I dropped toast into the toaster, all plugged into the same power strip.  After a minute or two – pop.  The raw toast popped up and the heater quit.  Neither would restart.  The nearby GFI outlet wouldn’t reset.  The circuit breaker in the back wouldn’t reset.  To make the story a bit shorter, after we bought more fuses, more tools, flipped a couple of breakers, scared ourselves by killing all the power to the rig and it not coming back on immediately, we conceded defeat.  The kitchen outlets are currently dead which prevents all cooking at the moment except for the microwave but the rest of the rig is OK and we have a mobile service tech coming tomorrow (Monday) afternoon to help us out.  As I commented to Robin as I hauled the now-heavier tool bag out to the bay, “the tool bag gets heavier but we don’t get any better”.  We have high hopes for the guy tomorrow.

So Saturday we left New Mexico but have very fond thoughts about it and will be back.  We made it to Bowie, AZ for one night and then came on to Tucson today (Sunday).  We have 7 nights here at the KOA and then another 7 nights at a little RV park in downtown Tucson.  The cats and I are excited about the long stays.  Merry Christmas to all!

Why I blog so slowly.

Cocoon

Clubhouse porch at The Ranch

It would be easy to laugh at the residents, the citizens living in the 118 sites of this rv park called The Ranch.  The 30 or so we met easily averaged 75 years old  and they assembled cheerfully for “happy hour” in the clubhouse where the tables were decorated with crocheted faux candle holders with wisps of cotton as a flame and the happy hour beverage was coffee.  Soft drinks were available for $0.50 and ice cream bars were a $1.  Popcorn was free.  One woman introduced herself by her given them but then confessed that she was “Ding-A-Ling” for the day, the leader of the meeting as she handed out candy canes.  Agatha, sitting on her walker, told us that this was the first time she’d be out of her rig for 4 days, fearing that the high winds would cause her to fall.  She hasn’t been too steady since her stroke 3 years ago but today was determined to get out.  Jane admitted having recently had her 70^th birthday and her 85 year old husband was back at the rig making dinner.  His recent heart attack hadn’t slowed them down much and he still did all the driving of their rig.

This is a park owned by an RV club called the Escapees.  We’ve been members since the beginning of our RVing and it was the Escapees who held the boot camp where we gained enough knowledge to be dangerous.  Among other things, the Escapees own several RV Parks where members can lease long-term lots and stay for extended periods, even years.  If they aren’t in residence, their lots can be rented out to transients like us.  It’s very inexpensive, as little as $50/month for the long terms folks, plus utilities.  Many lots have small cabins on them for additional living space and built-in ramps and stairs for getting up into their rigs.  We rented a site for 2 nights for $35, less than half of what we pay in many RV parks.  It was our first Escapee park and it was an interesting experience.

If I were 30, or maybe even 20 years younger than I am, I might be scoffing at this tiny, hokey community.  They sing happy birthday at Happy Hour.  A keyboardist plays Christmas carols as the group assembles and they take a vote if they want her to continue to do that every afternoon.  They update the group on Margaret who apparently has been ill and now would welcome visitors but preferably in the morning and a get-well card is available for signing.  They hug everyone, including us.  And they have visitors stand up and tell the group about themselves.  They ask for volunteers for the Christmas Eve potluck and gently, teasingly push an older gentleman into being the next day’s Ding-A-Ling.  When someone says they’re leaving the next day, the group sings “Happy Trails” to them and when one woman gets agitated and distressed for no apparent reason, they gather around her soothing and helping her calm herself.

This a picture of how some are surviving, even thriving, as they age.  It’s a tiny community, easily less than 150 long term residents.  They are living in their RVs in the middle of scrubby desert in rural New Mexico.  They probably have families somewhere but have chosen to make this group their family.  They apparently look out for each other even as they have disagreements and disputes.  Our very elderly neighbor explained that he had to shut off his yard light after 8 years because of a complaint. 

Chuck parked next to a long-tern resident

I look at this with some fear and some comfort.  What circumstances would bring me to a place like this?  And if it happened, would I fit in and not be discomfited by the hominess and homeliness not to mention all that hugging?  Yet we talk often about ending up in a communal setting, “The Compound”, full of friends, good food and wine.  What is this Escapees park but that dream realized for these people who had nothing in common initially except that they were nomads and now have settled down together.

As for touring, we drove to Carlsbad Cavern this morning, hoping the reportedly broken elevators were fixed.  Without them it was a 3 hour walk down 750 feet and then back up again.  Sadly they were still not working and we agreed that neither of us was up to the hike so we contented ourselves with touring the visitor’s center deciding we’d maybe hit it on the way back home in spring. 

Visitor Center model of the cavern.  Note the little Visitor's Center building way up high and the long drop into the caves.

Then off to an early dinner in Artesia, NM, 15 miles north of our campground.  The food was outstanding and they had a good wine list with some really good New Mexico wines.  

Green chili bacon mac and cheese and a house salad to push the cheese through my arteries.

We’ve found wineries in every state we’ve visited I think.  Funny how that happens.  There’s much less petroleum odor here despite the many working derricks we see.  It reminds me of my days working for Abbott Labs when we’d drive by the manufacturing plant and get an unpleasant whiff of antibiotic fermentation.  Our bosses were always quick to remind us that it was the smell of money.  Same situation here.

Tomorrow on to Las Cruces, NM.  Stay tuned!

New Mexico

It's been a quiet couple of days.  The Navigator got back from her Chicago dental appointment safely, I picked her up at the airport and we carefully navigated the 7 miles back to the hotel.  DFW has a spaghetti-like system of roads leading in and out and no matter what, you have to pay $2 to approach the terminals.  Quite a racket.  And, Dallas drivers are frightening.  I'm going to sound like a curmudgeonly old person but don't they put turn signals on cars in Dallas?  Pickup truck speeding 80 mph on crowded freeways, zooming across lanes...ok, rant off.

Thursday we picked up Chuck and headed out of the Dallas area for a nice KOA campground in Abilene, TX.  Chuck is driving well and we're slowly getting settled into the reduced space.  We haven't felt level enough to put the big slide out yet, but we can get by with the 3 little slides if we have to.

From Abilene we headed into New Mexico, arriving in Hobbs on the eastern border on Friday.  This is oil country, and the RV park is full of towables (trailers) that are settled in for the long haul with external propane tanks and built-on steps and decks.  It's well-kept and tidy and not at all creepy as some of these worker camps can be.  If the wind is from the wrong direction, we smell a petroleum odor coming off the oil fields.  Our plan was to only stay one night but the weather forecast yesterday morning called for high winds and rain so we decided to stay in place.  It gave me a chance to assemble the Navigators new desk chair among other things.

The winds came about 4pm and the rig started rocking.  Looking at NOAA (gov't weather site) and other sources, we were clear of tornados, but the prediction was for higher winds and heavy rains..  Deciding to be cautious, we loaded the cats into their carriers and drove to the RV park's clubhouse - reassuringly solid brick building with comfy furniture.  At one point I asked the Navigator if we could move to the LaQuinta Inn if Chuck blew over.  We settled in there for a couple of hours until the worst of the weather passed and then came home to Chuck which was still standing on all 4 wheels.

Today we have a short, 70 mile drive to Carlsbad (the city) and may see the cavern tomorrow.

Living in Chuck.  Note Beanie in the window and the new chair.

Man Plans....

One of my favorite aphorisms is, “Man plans, God laughs”, or in my UU church it might be more like “the great spirit of the Universe laughs”, but you get the idea.  This is never more true than when one is RVing.  Something about driving a house down the highway at 60 mph leads to unplanned adventures.

So to catch you up, last you knew we were outside Tulsa, OK, staying at a LaQuinta Inn planning our next few stops.  Today, Wednesday, December 09, finds us in a LaQuinta Inn in Dallas, Texas.  Progress of a sort.  The Navigator is currently in the air flying back to Chicago for a planned dental visit while I do laundry and nap with the cats.  In between the La Quintas the following has occurred: 

               

Smokie (the car) and Chuck outside the LaQuinta in Tulsa

We arrived in the rig at our planned 2 night stop at Twin Fountains RV Park in Oklahoma City.  It was a lovely, level, paved site and we started our usual set-up procedure by hitting the buttons to put the jacks down.  These 4 leveling legs, commonly called jacks, are in the four corners of the coach and electrically rise and fall at the push of button to support the coach and allow us to get the chassis level.  If we’re not level, we can’t put the 4 slides out and the slides are what turn the tunnel into wonderful, livable space.  You can probably guess where this is going.  The jacks refused to go down.  The cats were tired and irritable after the drive and the crew wasn’t much better.  Much cussing, button pushing and more cussing and still no jack action.  Deciding we were probably level enough to put the 3 slides out, we continued our set up.  Electric hooked up – check.  Water hooked up ready to de-winterize (flush all the anti-freeze out of the water lines).  Wait – the pressure regulator is reading zero, but water is flowing but it’s also leaking out all over the connections.  No regulator, too much pressure, and now the water heater drain valve is spinning instead of loosening or tightening, and do we have water in it or not and….

               

The events were piling up in an unpleasant way.  I’ll spare you all the gory details and say that eventually we got usable water in our tank and water in the water heater and, given that the propane alarm sounded once, we opted to not turn on our propane and the RV park had a lovely bathhouse with good showers and we managed to sleep in the slightly tunnel-like rig.  The next day (Friday) started a long round of phone calls between the Navigator and Atwood, the maker of the jacks, while I searched the internet RV forums for ideas to fix the jacks.  All the suggested reset procedures failed and as the day wore on we agreed to extend our OK City stay for a third night and eventually a fourth night.  The next day (Saturday) was a day with more failure and the verdict finally was that we needed to find a service person to take a look.  Endless phone calls later the answer was that they could maybe see us sometime after Christmas.  Not good.  We had to be in Dallas today (Wednesday) for the Navigator’s flight, so we started calling Dallas repair shops and got the same answers until finally, one shop in Denton, TX said they could take a look on Monday morning.  Now all we needed was a hotel in Denton where we could hang for 2 nights while the rig was being looked at.  The hotel had to accept pets and have room to park the rig Sunday night before we dropped it off Monday morning.  The Super8 in Denton said yes to both and only lied about one.  We managed to squeeze the rig in anyway reminding them that they said they could do it and if we ate up 12 parking spots it was their own fault.  But that was Sunday. 

Before that, on Friday, we visited the National Memorial to the Oklahoma City Bombing – a sobering experience that put our problems into perspective.  

Each chair has the name of a victim

Child victims are represented by smaller chairs

Then on Saturday we visited the Oklahoma City Zoo which was fun and good exercise.

 Sunday we moved to Denton and Monday found us dropping Chuck off with Danny’s RV in Denton where they promised to look at the jacks and the plumbing.  We headed off to McKinney, TX, about 40 miles away, to visit Caudalie Crest Winery http://www.goatsngrapes.com/  where the charming Sue and her presumably charming husband, who we didn’t meet, make wine, milk goats, have a motley crew of dogs and generally are living a good life.  They are UK natives, brought to Texas through corporate moves and are setting themselves up for a pleasant retirement.  We tasted, bought and petted and then got the call from Danny’s. 

Sue in the tasting room

The bad news…the jacks needed replacement.  Parts would take 5-6 weeks to come to Denton and repairs would be pricey.  Alternately, we could drive to the home of Chuck, Tiffin Motorhomes in Red Bay, Alabama for repairs.  Which way to go?  What about our plans for December and January meeting friends in various AZ and CA stops? We weren’t loving the Dallas area and the thought of hanging around here was very unappealing.  A call to Red Bay was not helpful, they could order the parts and maybe in 6-8 weeks get us repaired.  After sleeping on it at the very marginal Super8, we decided; we’d go on, just as soon as the Navigator flew home for dental work and returned.  Danny’s agreed to keep Chuck until Thursday and we yesterday we decamped Denton to the LaQuinta here near Dallas/Ft. Worth airport.  Early this morning I put the Navigator out at Terminal A and came back to do laundry and make phone calls to repair shops in CA.  Hopefully they can order the parts and we’ll get there about the same time the parts do.  In the meantime we’ll seek out RV parks with very level sites and hope we can put slides out to live comfortably.  And if not, we’ve got the LaQuinta hotel directory in our back pockets.  Tomorrow, on to Abilene, or at least that’s the plan.  Katie plans…the Universe….?

Escape 2015-2016

Day 3 was a bit of an adventure.  We had a short drive, just 200 miles to Catoosa, OK, just outside of Tulsa.  This was to be our last night in a hotel before dewinterizing and moving into Chuck.  We called ahead to the La Quinta in Catoosa and they assured us that they welcomed pets and had ample room to park Chuck.  They were half right.  Our GPS took us down some narrow winding streets to the entrance, the skinny, curvy entrance, to the La Quinta.  No sign of that ample parking and not an easy in.  We went around the block to the other entrance and it didn’t look any better.  We were on a busy street and in no position to debate out options so we headed around a bunch of blocks while we discussed.

Fortuitously, there was a Hard Rock Casino directly across the street from the LaQuinta, so we approached again and this time took a left and headed into the casino, following the signs to, of all things, “RV Parking”.  The parking gods were with us again.  The lot was HUGE and empty.  Carrying our Hard Rock players cards (acquired in Las Vegas but they don’t care), we went in and asked permission and they cheerfully agreed that we could park Chuck in their lot overnight. Yippee.  

We unhooked, loaded the cats into the car and drove across the street where the LaQuinta welcomed us with open arms and treat bags for Nortie and Beanie.  We settled in and starting discussing food options.  Next to sleeping and parking is eating.  The Navigator identified 2 options, a highly rated burger diner nearby and a barbecue place about 10 miles down the road in Broken Arrow.  We opted for close, only to find that Flo’s Burgers closes at 2:30 on Tuesday.  Off to Broken Arrow. and Smokie’s Barbecue.  The address?  5051 KENOSHA ST.  Yes, a street named for our hometown in Broken Arrow, OK!  We exited the turnpike (aka tollway - $0.85 each way) at Kenosha St. and headed east searching out addresses trying to find Smokies.  On one side of the street the numbers were 20093 and up, the other side was 5000 and up.  It’s a busy street and the numbers were flashing by too fast to read with traffic close on our tail.  Finally the navigator (now Toad Driver) said, “I’m sick of this *sshole on my tail, I’m pulling in here” and swung into a drive.  (Cue the chorus of angels here)  There, in front of us was Smokie’s Barbecue!  Whee!

Too much great barbecue and few beers later, we were out of there.  Oh yeah, another fun coincidence, our waitress's grandparents lived in Delavan, WI and she visited there frequently as a child.  We’ve had a good night’s sleep in the LaQuinta and on to Oklahoma City today.

Photos will have to wait until the Navigator gets out of the shower.