More "Adventures"

Fall colors in the Black Hills

It's 5:45 Tuesday evening as I write this. Hamburger rice soup is simmering on the stove. Outside it's 58 degrees and sunny, but the "sunny" has pushed up the temperature in the coach to 77. You gotta love solar energy. We have opened up the windows.

It's been a few days since I posted, and quite a bit has happened during that time. The adventures continue...

Saturday we drove through the Black Hills and visited Deadwood and the Petrified Forest. It was a beautiful day. It felt like summer. The Petrified Forest is a small sampling of petrified Cypress trees that grew in South Dakota before the Great Flood. Of course, that's not what their "informative" video suggested. It spewed the same tired dogma of a 4.something billion year old earth, which you can believe if you want. But I'm going with the Bible version because, well...God said He created the earth in six "morning and evening" days about six thousand years ago, and I'm not about to call Him a liar.

Petrified tree-sitting

Deadwood is a quaint old town. We walked up Main Street with all the old buildings, which are all now housing modern businesses. We might have stayed longer, but we only had enough quarters on our person to fund the parking meter for an hour. We did have a nice lunch there, though, before we headed back down Highway 385 to Rapid City and back to Piedmont.

Downtown Deadwood, WY

Sunday morning greeted us with rain. So we watched our online church service and spent the day inside, resting and getting ready to move to our next site -- the truck stop near Butler CAT. We left our campsite around 4 pm, gassed up the coach, ate a quick dinner, and retired for the night.

Monday morning, bright and early--more like dark and early (6:30 am), we dropped off the RV at Butler for the final (we hope) batch of repairs, went to breakfast, and then waited around for them to finish. By lunchtime, as promised, we had our house back.

Part of our process, every time we travel, is a light check. We make sure all the lights on the RV are working properly-- turn signals, brights, emergency flashers, and brake lights. And before we left the Butler CAT property, we did our usual light check. Everything was working as expected, except for the brake lights on the trailer. I think we might be carrying a gremlin around with us unbeknownst. It seems like as soon as we fix one thing, something else breaks. (He's certainly persistent.)

Mark drove the rig right back to the truck stop where we spent the night and someone in their garage looked at it for us. He more or less narrowed down the problem, but wasn't familiar with where to find the connection in the coach that needed to be checked and probably replaced. He sent us up the road to a local RV sales & service company, but of course, they were booked up. Everyone is winterizing. In fact, of the three businesses we contacted, every one was "booked up! - Sorry."

So we are now traveling down the roads with no brake lights on the tow vehicles (car or trailer).  I'm pretty sure this is completely illegal, but perhaps the Highway Patrol that pulls us over (the way things have been going, I'm more or less expecting it) will be understanding when we tell him our sad tale. It's possible.

In any case, our plan is to wire up the car when we get the body work done (from the Texas crack-up), which we'll be doing in Spokane. Then we can get rid of the portable trailer lights we've been using. They're hard to see and mostly useless anyway.

With the late start getting out of Rapid City, we didn't arrive at our next campsite, in Lusk, WY, until a little after 5 o'clock. It was cold. Mark was eager to get the coach leveled, the slides out, and  plugged in for the night, but the comedy of errors continues...

At about 7:30 or so, well after dark, we realized the electric heater wasn't activating. We had no power. He called the office to let them know and they suggested that we move to a different site. Here is where I should insert the concept of shortcuts...and why they usually get us into trouble. What I learned the next day is that our power cord from the coach to the electrical plug-in was stretched too far, which caused the power connection to keep breaking. No power, no heat. Had we, at 7:30, pulled in the slides, retracted the jacks, and moved the coach a few feet, Mark would NOT have had to do it at 10:30 at night...after we had been sleeping for nearly two hours. Shortcuts are not our friends. They just delay and usually intensify whatever inconvenience they are intended to avoid.

We needed the power because our furnace, which operates on gas, was still not working quite right. It was making sounds that resembled an idling Harley Davidson motorcycle. Mark finally solved that problem by taking it apart and making some adjustments this morning. Now it runs as quietly as the mouse in our air conditioner.

High plains of Wyoming, elevation - 8,000+ feet

Today's drive was amazing. Things just may be looking up! We decided not to drive all the way to Rawlins, WY, which was our intended next stop. Instead, we are boondocking at the Laramie Super Walmart. We pulled in about 3:30 and spent the rest of the afternoon resting and recuperating. And by the way, Denver might be the famous "mile high city," but it's got nothin' on Wyoming. Cheyenne beats it by a full thousand feet, and Laramie is sitting at about 7,400 feet.

Our route is taking us across I-80 and then up I-84 through Ogden, UT, Boise, ID, and Kennewick, WA. Barring any other mishaps, we expect to be in Spokane on Sunday.

Here are some pictures from the week's travels...

Petrified Cypress

This wood pile will only work in a gas fireplace

High plains of Wyoming...in October