Author: Steve

The Bounder in all its glory.

Saturday. Another leisurely leaving. Check in time at our next stop is noon. We’re
an hour and a half away. We hung out and enjoyed the morning sun. Left at
ten thirty. This is not a trip to measure fuel economy. We drive down the road with two
engines running: one to move us down the highway, and the generator to power
the air conditioning. Whatever it takes to run the extra engine, it’s worth
it to keep the interior air conditioned. We’re booked into one of those high-end RV parks where people buy and fix up
their own lots. It’s more expensive than a KOA, or the RV Park at Circus
Circus, but compared to two-hundred fifty dollar a night rooms at the
Venetian, it’s a bargain. We plugged the address into the GPS navigator. We hit the highway. We hit
resume. The miles were effortless. Our RV park is on the south end of
town. The freeway traffic through Las Vegas was painless. Getting to
within a mile of the park was painless. Actually getting into the park was
not. Judy called and got the street address so we would know where to go.
Missing a turn, and turning this rig around on small roads can be a
challenge. Well, the person on the phone gave Judy the correct street
address, she just didn’t give her the correct name of the road. Get off at
Blue Diamond Road, and go to 8175. She neglected to mention that we wanted
to turn right on Arville road before we went to the address 8175. There is
an 8175 on Blue Diamond Road. We had to go there to discover that there is
no motorhome park there. So there we were. Completely outside town.
Two-lane, high-speed highway. Lots of traffic. Both directions. No
traffic lights. No intersections. Time to turn around. It took a while, but I found a shoulder I could get on, with an opposing
shoulder I could drive on, once I had made the dash across the traffic.
Only a few things fell down. We disconnected, Judy got the park on the
cellphone again, and drove the Jeep, while they talked her into their
location. I waited by the side of the road. Then she called me on my
cellphone and talked me into her location. Yea for cellphones. There is no
sign for the motorhome park out on Blue Diamond Road. There is no traffic
light. You just have to know. But once here, what a beautiful place. It’s a little hot. It’s over a
hundred. And I called it an RV park, but it’s not really an RV park. It’s
a coach resort. Class As only. Mostly pushers. Hardly any gas. And
they’re all bigger and more expensive than ours. More than half the coaches
here are those dual rear axel rigs, up around 45 feet long. They make us
look small by comparison. The sites are landscaped. Some are way
landscaped. Some have fountains, pools, streams, entire outdoor kitchens,
fireplaces, cabanas. The basic lot costs $100,000. Some people spent that
much more adding goodies. It turns out that getting here was not our most difficult challenge of the
day. After we got set up, we decided to go find the easiest way in to the
Venetian Hotel for the conference tomorrow. There aren’t any sessions
today, but it’s worth a drive in just to get oriented. Saturday afternoon.
How hard could it be????? Traffic. Gridlock. Accidents. Construction closures. Detours. More
traffic. More traffic than the roads could bear. Horn honking that had no
chance of helping. An angry mob. It didn’t take long to get deep enough
into it that all I wanted was out. I didn’t care where the Venetian was. I
didn’t care about the conference. I just wanted out. From the moment I
realized that all I wanted was out, it took another hour before we could
break free of the traffic. It really, really sucked. It took a while to calm down from that. Don’t know if I’ll try it again tomorrow or not. There is good news for this day, however. 298. The list has expanded to
two hundred ninety-eight birds. After a few hours, when I felt ready to
venture out again, we headed to Red Rock Canyon Park, twenty miles outside
Las Vegas – the other direction. West. Beautiful place. And guess what!
It’s filled with red rocks. And birds. We didn’t go there until late, so we didn’t see very many. Gambel’s quail.
Nighthawks. Phoebes. Different from the birds we usually see. We were
looking through the bird book when we realized that those nighthawks buzzing
us, low in the desert washes, were not the nighthawks we see in the evenings
circling high in the sky in Colorado. These are lesser nighthawks. They’re
a different bird. 297. Then, on the drive home we spooked a poor-will off
the road. They look something like a nighthawk, but they’re smaller, and
they don’t have those white stripes across the wings. We’ve seen these in
the desert before, but didn’t realize what they were. Poor-wills. 298.
Only two to go.

_____________________________________________
From: Steve Taylor [mailto:spt@thetaylorcompany.net]
Sent: Sunday, June 13, 2004 6:30 PM
To: Bill Taylor (E-mail); David Taylor (E-mail); Tom Taylor (E-mail)
Subject: 51a The desert view.

Friday Way back at the start of this trip, I accidentally filled up with Number 1
diesel. Since then I’ve managed to put Number 2 diesel in it like I’m
supposed to. In Durango, we discovered Biodiesel. We stopped at a station
to fill up the Jeep, and the diesel they sell there is Biodiesel. Blue Sun
Biodiesel. What a great sounding idea. It’s made from vegetable oilseed
crops. It works in existing engines. There is no drop off in engine
performance. It is biodegradable and less toxic. It produces about 80%
less pollutants from combustion. That’s what the literature on it says. We only found it in that one station. We’d have tried a tank of it, but it
was a small station we couldn’t have gotten the Bounder in and out of.
We’ll keep an eye out for it. Did I mention the service intervals on the diesel? We took it in for an oil
change before we left on this trip. It takes a lot of oil, they measure it
in gallons instead of quarts, but it turns out we only have to do that once
a year. I asked about a tune-up. How do I know when it’s time for a tune
up? The service writer told us to drive it for a hundred thousand miles,
then get back to him. I like that. We were farther west in the time zone yesterday. It was hard to wait for it
to get dark before falling asleep. We didn’t make it. The badlands of Utah. One hundred fifteen uninhabited miles. Cones,
spires, castles, turrets, parapets, canyons, gorges… and flowers. It is
hot and dry here, but we can see fields of late spring flowers from the
road. Nice. Stopped at the same rest stop we always stop at to admire the view. There
was one other car there. From somewhere else. It was filled with a family.
They got out. We don’t think they are veteran travelers. Mom, Dad, and two
early teenage girls. One daughter headed for the rest room at the other end
of the view area. It wasn’t really a restroom. It’s an outhouse. She went
in. She came back out. Distressed. “Mom” she shouted, “It’s round! It
looks just like a can!” They all went to see. Most of the freeways we drive on are asphalt, but it seems to us that states
tend to take out asphalt freeways and replace them with concrete freeways.
Why do you suppose they do that? Maybe concrete freeways last longer, and
so, cost less in the long run. We drove on some concrete freeways in Utah.
Lots of Interstate 15 in Utah is concrete. Concrete freeways suck. I think
this Freightliner chassis provides a pretty good ride, but it sure shakes
and rattles on an old concrete freeway. Stopped at a rest stop, and was watching a Western Kingbird with the
binoculars. It was more yellow underneath than some. I was struck by how
yellow it was. Then it quit fluttering around and landed, facing away from
me. It was gray. The entire top of his body was gray, while facing away.
So much for the mystery bird yesterday. It was a rear-view of a western
kingbird. Here we are in Mesquite Nevada. Ninety-five degrees. Not that hot. Hot
and dry. It feels good. We checked out a motorhome park attached to a casino in the center of town.
You know how, sometimes you look at an RV Park and think it’s going to suck,
but after you’ve been there a while it grows on you and after that you end
up loving it? Not going to happen here. We moved on to a nice park on the
outskirts of town. Not a birdy place at all. Saw a house sparrow. Saw a
grackle. That’s it. We waited for it to cool off to 85 outside, then sat in lawn chairs and
watched the stars brighten. We can see the big dipper every night. The
North Star sure is high in the sky this time of year. We’re used to seeing
it low on the horizon from southern Texas in January. A three hundred fifty mile day. Not very far to go tomorrow to Las Vegas.

The Green River camp.