Steve and Judy's Travels!

An uneventful day. An easy drive down Interstate 25 to the middle of New
Mexico: Albuquerque. It was a good raptor day: a golden eagle, two
swainson’s hawks, and many red-tailed hawks. Saw a falcon fly over tonight,
probably a prairie falcon. Have you ever noticed that some of the trees at the top of Monument Hill
aren’t really trees? They stand out over the top of the forest. They look
like trees, but if you look carefully, you can see they’re full of antennae.
I can’t really look too carefully as I’m driving past, it’s not a place to
pull over. Military monitoring devices I suppose. The Montezuma quail. Only lives in a few places in Arizona and Southwest
Texas. Secretive. Prefers grassy oak woodlands. Sits motionless when
alarmed. How hard could that be to find? Sounds like a slam-dunk bird to
me. Here is a picture (I didn’t take) of what it looks like. Looking forward to a football game tomorrow: the Broncos at the Bills. The
Bills have hardly won anything this year, so that should be a really easy
win for the Broncos….. unless maybe something totally unexpected happens,
like it’s cold in Buffalo or the weather is bad. But, hey, what are the
chances? C’mon Broncos. Let’s see that offense this week. Today’s crockpot torture: beef stew.

What I really like about these big pusher motorhomes is that there is so
little to go wrong with the motor. They are very simple and reliable. It’s
the same motor the over the road truckers use, a million mile motor. We
have 10,000 miles on ours. That’s how many miles on ours when it lost power. Cruising down the freeway
at sixty-five miles an hour and we lose power. Wait! We have 990,000 miles
to go! It happened gradually, the power loss, just after crossing Monument Hill.
It didn’t sputter or blow smoke like a fuel problem would. It just wouldn’t
go when I pressed on the accelerator, like we had a governor, like a
computer needed to be reset or something. We pulled over at the next exit
to a truck stop. We let it sit for a few minutes and fired it back up.
Perfect. So off we went again. Until the north side of Colorado Springs.
Loss of power. We pulled off on the shoulder and called for help. We have
a 24-hour service line to Monaco (who owns Beaver Coach). They found a
repair shop for us on the south side of Colorado Springs. They told me if
we could get there, they could look at it tomorrow and we couldn’t stay in
the coach on their property. We limped there. Judy went inside to talk to them. They said they’d get to
us as soon as they could, and in the meantime we could park in the next lot,
put our slides out, and stay there as long as we needed to. Things always
get better after Judy goes in to talk to people. They got to us by one o’clock. We were done by dark, drove a few more miles south, and hooked up for the
night at the KOA. A ninety-mile day. The problem didn’t have anything to
do with the engine. It’s a Caterpillar C9. It’s not going to break down at
10,000 miles. A duct in the air cleaner system had come loose. Sensors
detected conditions they didn’t like and powered down the turbo. When we
pulled over and shut it off, the abnormal conditions went away, the sensors
relaxed, and everything would work fine again until the sensors realized
there was a problem again. We were parked stern-into-the-wind during that
last storm in Golden. Maybe the hurricane force wind blew it apart. At any
rate, an easy fix. We’re set to continue on our way tomorrow morning. Two temperature zones
south, to West Texas and Montezuma Quail.

Enough of the deep freeze and record-breaking mountain snow. Tomorrow
morning we’re off in search of warmer weather and the elusive Montezuma
Quail. We’re not through with work for the year yet. One more job, a week
from now, in Las Vegas, New Mexico. We could lurk in Golden, a day north,
until then, or we could drive down to West Texas and lurk there, a day’s
drive south our client. Our motorhome has been in Golden for a month.
We’re back to single digit weather here. We’re headed two temperature zones
south. And that’s where the Montezuma Quail are: West Texas. Not many people get
to see Montezuma Quail. They aren’t very many places, but they’re in West
Texas. I looked them up on the internet. We’ll pop down to West Texas,
pick off the Montezuma Quail, then back to New Mexico for the job. How hard
could it be?

Know how big trucks have those backup alarms that go beep beep beep when
they’re in reverse? Some motorhomes have them too. Ours has one in fact.
I don’t think it’s necessary. I think everyone around knows when I’m
backing up. I think the alarm is unnecessary, but I didn’t get to decide
whether they put it on our rig or not. I don’t think anyone else did
either. What brought this up, is the first night we were here. Weather permitting,
we generally sleep with the window open next to my head. That night, before
dawn, I awoke to the beep beep beep sound of a large motorhome backing up.
It’s not uncommon to hear someone start and leave before dawn. It was
taking this guy a while to get going, so I just reached over, closed the
window and went back to sleep….. kind of. I could still hear it. It
seemed like it would get fainter, so I knew he was really leaving, but then
it seemed like it was louder again. This guy was taking forever to get out
of there. Finally, after a very long time, I got up to see what he was up
to. I walked out into the living room, figured out the alarm on the Bose
radio was going beep, beep, beep, turned it off and went back to sleep. I
have no idea how the alarm got triggered. We never use the Bose radio for
its travel alarm. Guess it just jiggled on while we were driving the day
before. More mysteries of life on the road.

No more cold weather. No more January weather in December. We’re set for
highs in the forties, lows in the twenties. We got through that deep
freeze. Some people here had a lot of trouble with things freezing up. Our
pipes never froze up completely. We had a few faucets that didn’t work in
the morning a couple times, but they each thawed out later in the day. No
damage. We did go through a lot of diesel fuel to keep warm. The furnaces
ran nonstop when the temperatures were single digit or lower. We used sixty
gallons of diesel over a period of three weeks for the furnaces and had to
drive across the street to the gas station to refuel.