Author: Steve

Check out the tow car.

Annie, dressed for the rough weather outside, a couple days ago, when we
were in rough weather.

Hacienda RV Park in Las Cruces. It’s a nice enough place. It’s clean and
new and big. It’s a lot like Grizzly RV Park in West Yellowstone, but with
less trees and more gravel. High Desert. Big rig friendly. WiFi. Great
staff. Friendly people.

Work day. Got my WiFi hookup and work to do on the website. We’ll have a
couple more buttons on there soon: “Request a Proposal”, and “Why Choose
Us”. The sun came out and Judy did some errands. It’s a beautiful blue-sky day.
Calm too. I got a run in the sun today… I mean walk. I got a walk in the
sun. Larry the mobile RV repair guy here came by and fixed our fresh water pump
for us. We’ve had more trouble with the fresh water pump. We’ve replaced
it several times. We replaced it with a really expensive one last time.
The expensive one lasted almost six months. Larry said he replaces a lot
more expensive pumps than cheap ones. We replaced it with a cheap one. It
works great. Picked up two more jobs at the office today: one in Denver, one in Bailey.
We’ve scheduled several new road jobs for 2005. We have a job scheduled in
Edwards at the end of January, followed by one in Montrose. Then the Bailey
job. All three of these are new this year. They’re doing a good job at the
office following up on inquiries, sending out proposals, and scheduling
jobs. Annie is starting to look more like Annie. It’s been tough ever since the
new groomer carved a schnauzer out of our Cockapoo. The new groomer is now
the used-to-be groomer. The old groomer is a mobile service that came to
our house in Louisville. If she won’t come to Golden, we’ll go meet her in
the driveway at the house in Louisville.

More rain. A visit to Tony the Freightliner mechanic. It took about an
hour for him to rinse everything out and put in a new filter, while
explaining it all to us. We got a lot of valuable conversation out of that
exchange. We’re always interested in learning more about what we’re doing. Speaking of learning more about what we’re doing…. We’ve been motor
homing for years. We know a lot about motor homing. But know what? There
is a lot more to learn about full-timing. Full-timing in cold weather, you
have to know how to hook in an external propane tank so you don’t have to
move the motorhome every two weeks to refill the on-board tank. And then,
you have to know how to tell when that 100 pound external tank is running
low so you can get it refilled without it running dry overnight on a really
cold night. You have to know whether you can leave the dump hose connected
in really cold weather. You have to get a heated fresh water hose so you
can still have full hookups even in weather below freezing. You have to
know what to do for an address and how you’re going to get your mail. You
have to know where to vote. You have to figure out what to do about a
telephone number. You have to decide where to register your motorhome for
license plates. Your home address matters a lot for filing income taxes,
paying property taxes, and paying sales tax if you buy a new rig. You have
to know what to do when the shop needs to keep your RV for several days when
they work on it. You just gave up your house. There is a lot to know.
We’re still finding out how much we don’t know yet. Anyway, Tony was the greatest, and we’re happily on the road again. This
new fuel filter may not handle all of the rest of the junk in our tank. We
may have to stop and do this again. Just in case, we bought two more fuel
filters to carry with us. If I need to, I can stop and change it myself. There really isn’t much to go wrong with this diesel motor. It is so
simple. It looks like an old Chevy in-line six-cylinder engine from the
fifties, except it’s a little bigger. It doesn’t look like these new fancy
car engines with all the stuff crammed in together under the hood. It’s
just a simple old six-cylinder engine with an alternator and a radiator.
And a turbocharger.
We drove to Las Cruces, New Mexico. Here we are on the Las Cruces trip, and
we finally made it to Las Cruces! Cold and rainy all day. When the clouds
lifted, we could see the snow on the mountains just a few hundred feet
higher than us. Cold rainy and windy when we got here. The weather was so
bad, I had to put on long pants.