CuRVWander

Its Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, our first day off after our second round of duty on the North Rim, cold and damp.   Let’s blow this popsicle stand and see if we can change things up a bit.   Page, AZ is only about three hours away; we’ll just pop over there and see what’s what. As we pull out of the North Rim it is in the upper 30’s with not much promise of improving.   But our hopes of it being warmer in Page have us dressing in layers so we can pare down as the day ages.   Cyndee decided to forego the thermals she had been wearing for the last week for the convenience of not having to do a full change of clothes later on. The route we are taking is totally counter to what the GPS wants us to do.     The GPS does not know that the road between Marble Canyon and Page has suffered a quarter mile long avalanche and is indefinitely closed.   So, rather than drive the southeast route along the Vermillion Cliffs and across the Navajo Bridge before ...

Spring time is migration time for hummingbirds and they come across the North Rim in droves.   As we and our co-hosts got our rigs parked and the sun began to catch the highly reflective reds and yellows of tail and clearance lights, you could hear the strum of tiny wing beats as hummingbirds streamed by to check out all the color. Most of their movement was so fast that getting a lens on them was nearly impossible.   Cyndee made up a batch of hummingbird food and we set out a feeder for a couple hours to see if we could get them to linger just long enough to snap a couple of shots and identify what was coming through. At the end of our quick little study we had identified three species: the Broad-Tailed, Black-Chinned & Magnificent Hummingbird.   Many of the hummingbirds look so similar it is hard to tell one from another, especially on the wing.   But with stop-action photography and a great birding app on Cyndee’s phone we were able to sort out the smal...

After our little SWAT team raid yesterday I thought that it might be an early culmination to weird goings on in the campground for awhile.  Not so. In the middle of the afternoon I was alerted to a possible squatter on one of our campsites.  Sure enough, when I got over there, there was a fire going in the fire pit, at least six empty cans of beer on the table and what appeared to be a full glass of wine and a half melted pint of Haagen Dazs ice cream with a single, young male prancing around the table and delighted to see me.  I recognized him as one of the evening cashiers from our General Store and asked him what he had going on and if he knew that he was breaking about nine different rules.  He said that he was just having a little party (by himself??) and how pretty he thought my name was.  Wow, this guy is toasted. I told him that he was going to have to get his stuff and get cleared out and while he was doing that I would go get water to kill the...

Opening day/week of the North Rim has passed.  Cyndee and I took the first four days on duty and got to experience what it was like getting the first wave of campers checked in.  We also saw how rusty everyone was at using all the procedures that need to be done to get everything to work smoothly.  But by the end of this first week it is going pretty well. It did not take long before we were out at one of our favorite spots, the place we call cell phone point. Ten miles as the raven flies across the canyon is the only cell tower that has a signal that can just barely reach to the North Rim.  It is a bit of a hassle to make the half mile walk to place a phone call but the bonus is the awesome view. In our first four days Cyndee and I saw more service rescues than we did all last summer.  We aired up two flats, jumped a dead battery, made arrangements to replace a busted radiator, and towed a truck out of a campsite with our all electric Polaris...

Last night we thoroughly enjoyed hearing the wind rustle through the tops of the giant Ponderosa Pines without ever feeling a gust shake our camper.   And no dust either.   We slept like babies but not yet adjusted to the 2 hour time zone change, woke at 5:00am.   Laying there in a waking grog we began to realize we were hearing the tinkling sound of ice pellets on our fiberglass roof. Getting up to check the temperature, it was found to be 35 deg.   No worries, too warm for anything to stick around and besides, the sun was coming up and it would get warmer.   Yeah, no. With each passing half-hour the mercury dropped and before 8:00am the temperature was 30 deg   and the ice pellets had become a full-on snow storm.   And it just kept snowing, buy mid-day we had several inches piled up on non-road surfaces.   That’s when the temperature started jumping around.   It would get above freezing for a while and melt most of the accumulation, ...

The day after the last post was spent entirely shopping and running errands, trying to squeeze in all the things we needed to do before once again parking ourselves in a very remote area. The dry cleaner delivered on their promise to have our bedspread finished in 24 hours, it looks great.   We knew it needed cleaning but were surprised at just how different it looked.   Five months in the desert took its toll.   Sam’s Club and Walmart were thoroughly scoured for everything we thought we could find a place to store food and dry goods we will need for at least the next month, and more if possible.   Big Gulp is packed to the gills with three large thermal bags and an ice chest as well as big packages of paper goods and 40 pounds of oranges and 25 pounds of apples.   The space in the bed of the truck not being used by the 5 th wheel hitch has cases of water and I lost count of how many six-packs of bottles of Coke Zero. One last stop at the mall on the...

It was a Monday when Big Gulp was unceremoniously towed into the garage for a major fix.  Now, at 2:30 on Wednesday we get a call saying the work is complete and come get him.  Nobody has to tell me twice.  I have the keys to the rent car in my hand and out the door before the phone call ends. They showed me all the parts that were replaced, what a mess.  But now it was time to pay the piper.  It was seriously painful but unavoidable.  Now all attention is turned toward getting out of Winslow and up to Flagstaff.  It is too late to leave today, we'll have to call the RV Park and see if we can get a spot for tomorrow night.  Luck on my side this time, they had one spot open up in what was an otherwise full park. Cyndee cooked some chicken and steamed some fresh zucchini and we had a quite dinner and spent the evening surfing the web and watching TV.  We hit the sack by 10:00 hoping for a quick night so we can get on our way....

We are hunkered down here at the little interstate-side RV park in Winslow, AZ waiting for Big Gulp to get a major cooling system overhaul.  The exhaust gas return cooler has cracked.  It is a tube-in-tube heat exchanger and buried deep in the valley of the engine.  The oil cooler is clogged with 8 years and 113,000 miles of "gunk".  Also deep in the valley.  The charge air cooler tube (part of the turbo-charger), a silicone hose, has a split forming and is about to catastrophically fail.  And finally, the electric clutch on the radiator cooling fan is not engaging at the proper temperature. All this adds up to days of work for the diesel mechanic at Winslow Ford and nervous anticipation of the check I am going to have to write when this is all over.  In the mean time about all we can do is twiddle our thumbs.  The rent car we have has a 100 mi./day limit and there is nothing within that range that we have not already seen or done....

The drive to Homolovi State Park was uneventful.  We had stayed there last year on our way to the Grand Canyon.  Back then it was a first come first serve only but this year they operate through an online reservation system.  We reserved site number 20, a very long pull-thru with 50 amp electric and water but no sewer.  We'll have to use a dump station for the first time in quite awhile. Like most places we have been for the last three weeks, the wind made it too uncomfortable to enjoy the outdoors.  We had a great view of the desert but only got to enjoy it through the windows.  But it worked out for the best, we have been needing to do some genealogy research and with our downtime in Albuquerque and now Homolovi, we have made some serious inroads in finding John's bloodline into the Cherokee and Delaware tribes. But we were only staying at Homolovi for the weekend.  Next is a few days in Flagstaff where we will do a major shopping trip that...

Out of desperation I left a message last night with the Winegard technician I have been in contact with off and on during the satellite saga.  A saga that has now spanned nine months.  At 7:00am the next morning I got a call back.  I guess I must have sounded as desperate as I felt, they have never got back to me first thing. Anyway, after a long discussion and trying at least a dozen more things Winegard is saying that it is no longer possible to figure out what the problem is remotely.  They want the entire system to be taken off the coach and sent to the factory in Iowa for bench testing.  I spent the next couple of hours stripping all the equipment out of the rig and just about had it all done when Chuck arrived from Action RV to collect everything so they could take care of boxing it all up and getting it shipped to Winegard. Now there is no reason to remain in Albuquerque.  But we had paid for another week of camping thinking we would be hanging a...

As promised, Winegard was contacted first thing the next morning (see previous post), which was a Friday.  To my and the technician's dismay they defaulted to their standard routine of wanting to replace the data cable.  Never mind it has already been replaced twice, they are sure that is the problem.  Now we have to wait some number of days for the shipment to arrive, install it and then by the technician's and my prediction, confirm that the data cable is not the problem. Alb. has a lot to offer so we thought we would make it around to a number of them over the weekend while waiting on UPS to do their thing.  It was a good plan but it was not to be.  The winds we have been having in the preceding days turned out to only be a warm-up for what the weekend had in store.  From the moment we got in bed Thursday night the wind hit a steady 50 mph with long bursts cresting at 70 mph.  For the next four days visibility oscillated between a few hundred...