During my shower the water rose in the shower pan. The trailer has electronic sensors that provide green-yellow-red status of the tanks. The gray water indicated “green” prior to Marcia’s shower, and we both take navy showers, so having the water rise unexpectedly is annoying. We’ve had this problem before.
You can’t just drive to a dump station with water sloshing about the inside of your trailer, although I once read an account of a guy that tried it. So I drained to the ground enough gray water to empty the pan, then we drove carefully to the dump station and emptied the rest – deer watching us all the way, with disapproving looks.
What to do to cheer up? Why, a hot breakfast and coffee at the nearby lodge, of course. The Indian Lodge, a 1933 CCC project, looks quite nice, and we had a good breakfast with gigantic surely unhealthy biscuits. Neither of us had really needed being cheered up, but a break in our usual trailer breakfast routine was indeed nice.
We left camp at probably 9:30 AM, bought $20 of diesel in Ft Davis for $3.65/gal and drove a very scenic Hwy 118 to Hwy 166 to Hwy 505 to Hwy 90 to I-10 west.
On Hwy 90 we drove through the town of Valentine, a typical desert community of brown adobe or stucco wood frame structures leaning this way and that, and abandoned stuff all about. The sign gave a population of 468, but we couldn’t imagine 50. All the homes and businesses face on the highway and almost all showed signs of abandonment sometimes in the last ten years. Why did everyone so suddenly leave? We don’t know, anymore than we could understand why they were there in the first place. Ranching? The railroad?
But someone had a sense of humor: about a half mile west of town, a single white storefront stood with large display windows. We could see a few pair of women’s shoes, and the sign above the store said “PRADA”. [In April 2011 I learned this was/is an art project supported by Prada, and it certainly got our attention in the middle of nowhere. The article stated that it has been repeatedly vandalized and may have outlived its purpose, considering the costs of repair. People seem to either love it - we are in that category - or hate it.]
El Paso was our only traffic snarl, complicated by a drizzling rain and a need for diesel ($3.25). But for some reason today our 15.8 MPG decreased to 15.7 and then 15.6. Marcia thinks a headwind.
We drove through Texas and New Mexico into Arizona, and spent the night in Willcox at the Lifestyle RV Resort ($26), maybe 40 miles into Arizona. Not a bad camp for gravel, but more than we needed on this 440-mile 9-hour driving day—exercise gym, pool, etc. Well, maybe we did need those things, but we didn’t use them.
Unfortunately, couldn’t get the WiFi to work.
No comments:
Post a Comment