My wife’s great great grandfather discovered a massive cave system under the same farm in southern Minnesota where we were married, so the Mystery Cave – and others – have been part of the family lore ever since.
Having married into a cave family, it was only appropriate that we make a trek to one of the most impressive cave systems in the US, the Carlsbad Caverns.
Saying goodbye to the Baxters
We left on Monday, February 5 after an early morning Bake n’ Broil feast with the wonderful Baxters, who’ve been such a big part of our lives the past few years.
I ran a couple last minute errands, returning my cable modem and picking up two replacement blade valves for the trailer. The pregame was finally at an end.
Stephanie drove the first leg out of LA, and other than some missing cotter pins and a quick learning curve with the weight distribution hitch, it was an uneventful hundred miles or so. I took over in Cabazon and had a much more exciting first few miles, with heavy crosswinds, too much speed, and not enough tongue weight. We got through it, and then I managed to trigger a Check Engine light in the truck. Thankfully I bought an OBDII reader and Google helped us figure out that it was the Mass Airflow sensor, something I could deal with a little later.
Pipeline over the Colorado (and our campsite)
We landed for our first two nights on the banks of the Colorado River, our last nights in California for what may be a long time.
Cats are surprisingly OK.
A quick dip in a cold tub
Hanging out in Blythe, I took apart the air intake, cleaned the Mass Airflow Sensor, put in the proper heavy duty air filter for the truck, and other chores. The Check Engine light extinguished, everything else seemed to be running well.
I flew the drone for a bit, and we managed to get confused about the time thanks to camping right along the border of two timezones.
We took a dip in the (cold) hot tub.
We hit the road, crossing into Arizona. Our plan was to meet up with friends in Phoenix, before heading to Tucson for a few nights, but our plans changed and we ended up finding a place out in Benson.
After a long drive, we dropped the trailer off, then turned right around and went back to Tucson for burgers and drinks with Jordan at Lindy’s on 4th. I had the Kush, topped with raspberry preserves, green chiles, bleu cheese crumbles, and bacon.
Cousins at Deep Sky Winery in Sonoita, AZ
Jordan came out to our campground for pancakes in the morning and then we all rode together to Sonoita for wine tasting. I crashed my drone 10 seconds into a flight I was trying to keep quiet about, having not asked permission. Fortunately the crash only hurt my drone, so I didn’t end up having to ask forgiveness either.
After a great day we feasted at the Steak Out, and then headed back to camp. Jordan drove home late, having work in the morning like normal people.
Tombstone
We spent the day in Tombstone, and then came back to camp to get ready to hit the road again.
Stephanie got another desert nose bleed, right after passing through a Border Patrol checkpoint.
I fixed the gray water tank’s blade valve, narrowly averting disaster.
Our plan to stay halfway to Carlsbad, NM for a few nights was cut to one night when we saw the facilities. We left first thing the next day, heading to Alamogordo instead of staying another moment in Lordsburg.
There was one one big positive to this stop – we filled the fresh water tank to see if it’d help stabilize the ride at all, and it turns out it made all the difference in the world.
White Sands Missile Range Museum
On the way to Alamogordo we stopped at the White Sands Missile Range museum, which we all thoroughly enjoyed. We headed into Alamogordo, which turned out to be a lovely little town, and we wished we could stay longer.
Lunch was at the Hi-D-Ho drive-in, an original 1950’s joint with really great burgers. Waze pronounced it “Hawaii D’ Ho”, which I found amusing for hours.
White Sands National Monument
Our campground host offered us sleds to take to the dunes, so we hopped back in the truck and headed for another sight we wouldn’t regret. The White Sands National Monument was a mind-bending place, sand dunes so soft and snow white the brain doesn’t quite know how to process it.
Exhausted from such a wonderful day, we hit the sack early so we could get up and haul ass to Carlsbad, eager to see the caverns.
Heading up to Alamogordo for the night we had to cross the White Sands Missile Range, and couldn’t resist making a stop when we saw they had a missile museum.
Sadly the V-2 exhibit was closed but the open grounds brought back a flood of recognition from my childhood interest on military hardware and, of course, rockets.
Totally worth it.
The first couple of drives, the trailer was a little bit squirrelly at speeds above 55, especially with crosswinds or when a large truck passes us. This isn’t entirely unexpected, and it’s always hard to gauge what’s normal when you’re a 50 foot long, 8 wheel, jointed rig, but the white knuckle moments were common enough to be tiring.
Yesterday we decided to add some ballast towards the front – we are probably a bit tail heavy as we have a motorcycle and a dozen or so cases of wine as far aft as they’ll go. We haven’t been using our fresh water tank since we’ve been hopping from campground to campground where we have ready access to limitless pressurized water, and it seemed like a lot of weight to carry if we weren’t using it: 100+ gallons at 8.34 pounds per gallon. But the tank sits in front of the axles, so it’s a good candidate for ballast, and in any case worth a shot, I could always drain it if needed.
Turns out it made all the difference in the world – we had a much smoother ride today, totally stable at 65 even crossing a windy valley in New Mexico, and hardly responded at all to large passing trucks. Proper weight distribution matters.
Another lesson learned.
As we left Tombstone this afternoon there was a Border Patrol checkpoint a few miles north of town, maybe 40 miles inside the US. As we approached, a very serious agent approached the window and asked if I was transporting anything as he peaked in the back of the truck.
I responded, “No, just stuff”.
It doesn’t look as funny in writing, but it was a very odd way of answering his question, and it got a little giggle and a “Have a nice day”.
It was just as cheesy as we expected, but there was no way to pass up the chance to visit Tombstone, AZ, knowing that it was less than 30 miles away from our campground. There’s not much to say about the place: it’s like a very sad, very run down Knott’s Berry Farm, but even sadder because it’s a real place with real history masquerading as a fourth tier tourist trap. Most of the souvenir stores are half empty, and the wares would be more at home in the blowout sale at the Dollar Store up the road. The folks standing around in cowboy costumes in the street are actually barkers looking to sell you a ticket, not the reenactors you were hoping for – the reenactments take place behind closed doors so that passersby can’t even get a peek without paying the cover charge. And there were more guns strapped to the open carry tourists than cowboys.
But it was still Tombstone. Hot. Dusty. Sad. Desperate. Just now in a 21st century way.
Yesterday we left Blythe with a plan to stop in Phoenix to say hi to some friends, and then to push on to Tucson for a few nights of camping, wine tasting, and hanging with a cousin. Without reservations yet, we began to call around expecting to find something quickly but after a half dozen or so calls with no vacancies, Stephanie called a friend in Tucson who reminded us the Gem and Mineral Show is going on, one of the biggest annual events in town and a huge draw for exactly the kind of people who pack RV parks in warm states in the dead of winter. Oops.
After another flurry of phone calls with an increasingly large radius, we finally found what looked like a clean and safe KOA outside of Benson, AZ, about 40 miles down the road from Tucson and equidistant from wine country.
The long push through Arizona, past Phoenix and Tucson, brought us to a lovely desert KOA – some of the facilities are in need of repair, but it’s clean and quiet and most of the guests are in nice rigs. The hosts, an aging Korean couple, are lovely and friendly.
That first night after unhooking and setting up, we jumped right back into the truck and headed back to Tucson to get burgers at Lindy’s on 4th with Jordan. A 90 mile round trip for burgers after driving 250 miles that day was a bit extreme, but those burgers are damned good and the company was excellent. We made plans to see Jordan again the next day to go wine tasting, and headed back to camp for a hard sleep.
We had a slow morning allowing everyone to decompress from the road, and I got some much needed work done. Jordan arrived around 11 and we had pancakes. By noon we piled into the truck and headed towards Arizona’s wine country, centered around Sonoita, about 45 minutes from camp.
Stopping in at the local mercantile, we picked up a map of local wineries, and eyeballed the cowboy joint next door, The Steak Out, that had served us up some incredible slabs of beef a few years before when we were touring after Stephanie’s level 2 somm test. We made an oath to return that night.
Our first, and longest, stop was to Hops and Vines, a funky place run by two sisters – it has an eclectic, shabby chic vibe, with unique wines paired with Cheetos, Cocoa Puffs, and other unexpectedly good weirdness. This was our second visit, and we’d come back again.
Full confession: I tried to make a stealthy flight with my drone, and it ended up in its first crash ever, colliding with a beautiful scrubby tree about 15 feet up, taking it out of service until I can do a little work on it.
We had planned to hit Rune next – the last time we were there it was just a tent and camper on a beautiful lot – but they were closed, so we got recommendations from Shannon at H&V to go down the road to Callaghan and Deep Sky.
At Callaghan Vineyards Archie met a friend Kiva, and Stephanie and Jordan grabbed a glass or two, and then we moved on fairly quickly.
Deep Sky was essentially the polar opposite of Hops and Vines – a big, shiny, new place, but the wines were good enough to keep us there for a flight, lots of pictures, and to take a bottle of “Orbit” – a 50/50 syrah/grenache blend – to go. We stayed until the sun was going down and the air temperatures dropped enough to start thinking about the BBQ that was awaiting us on our final stop.
We hit Steak Out just after they opened, but we weren’t the first people there. A few larger groups showed up, and the place was short handed with someone out sick, but our waitress was a superhero. We ordered a rack of pork ribs, a ribeye, and a half BBQ chicken, and it was pure, unapologetic, carnivorous gluttony long enough that Wes passed out before we were finished.
Finally, we headed back to camp, fully sated from a wonderful day of sun, wine, food, and family. The best part of the day was the rare opportunity to spend time with Jordan away from the large clan holidays where we usually see her.
As we break in all the systems, dormant bugs are bound to show themselves, as was the case with the gray water holding tank’s blade valve.
Most RVs have three holding tanks:
The black tank and valve (the pipe and handle on the left), and the gray tank and valve (right), joining into a single outlet (with a cap on). The wet ground is from washing the trailer, *not* gray water on the ground.
The black and gray tanks each have an outlet so you can empty them at a dumpstation, or right in your spot if they offer sewage hookup. How often you do this depends on how big your tanks are, among other things. The outlets for each tank have a “blade valve” which opens to let the stuff out of the tank and through a Y connector which joins both outlets into a single pipe which you connect to the outside world. By having two valves upstream of where the tanks are joined, you can keep them isolated from one another – you wouldn’t want the smell of sewage, or worse, coming up through the kitchen sink right?
After the first time I opened the gray water tank’s valve to empty it, it never quite closed up tight again – it was a little drippy. This is a bad sign that one of its seals isn’t watertight anymore, so I picked up a replacement valve – plus one for the black tank, just in case.
Being on the road and not having easy access to an RV repair yard, and since I was planning only on fixing the gray valve for now – being basically just dirty water – I decided to do the fix stealthily at our first stop, while Stephanie was napping with Wes. The change looked easy enough, involving these steps:
Everything seemed easy enough, a 10 minute job under the best conditions, but the first challenge was that the bolts I was trying to remove were completely rotted – 75% rust, then just fell apart when I applied a wrench. I had to improvise to remove them, which meant taking a little longer than I hoped to take, making the illicit job more obvious to our neighbors should they look out their windows.
Once I finally got the bolts removed, I wiped things down, popped in the new seals, fit the valve in place, and started to tighten the bolts down.
About halfway through the process, though, I heard the water come on in the trailer – Stephanie woke up and was running the sink… oh fuck! That water was now about to come straight down into my lap if I didn’t get the valve bolts tightened, or if I hadn’t done something right – so instead of a controlled test, I got a live test of whether the new valve would hold. If it didn’t, we’d be dumping dirty (though again, not toxic) dishwater out under our trailer.
I wouldn’t be writing this if it had turned out badly – I’d probably still be dealing with the EPA or something – but it was a nice wakeup, and taught me a few new lessons:
An Aside about Valves
Valves are, in essence, logical devices, and the same logic that governs electronic circuitry also applies to water, air, and other types of valves. In fact, in many parts of the world, what we call “vacuum tubes” – an essential early computing technology – are called valves.
Many people have created computing devices – for fun, or even practical reasons – using complex arrangements of pipes carry water through valves.
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