Well, looks like we didn’t stick to our plan of updating this blog every week! To get us back on track, I’ll run through a quick update of our traveling for the past five months.
Last time we posted we were in Tucson Arizona. We had just received word that the truck was totaled from the hail damage so we paid it off and decided not to fix the dents. We stayed in Tucson longer than we thought for the repairs that never happened and that messed up our west coast loop. We had planned to visit many California National Parks but cut it back to just Lassen Volcanic. We’ll write a different post about Lassen. For now I’ll just say we plan to return to that park when it’s warmer and we can visit the geothermal area.
From Lassen we went to Bend Oregon to spend time with family and downsize our storage unit (we now have a 5’x5′ of mostly stuff I don’t want to get rid of). We had delicious smoked turkey and homemade ice cream, played games, and retrieved all the mail from our personal mailwoman (thanks Karen!). Sage drove out to play games with us one night. We were able to see two performance/shows by our 9-year old niece, an art show and a play.
Next we went to Portland to visit more family and friends. We had lots of delicious food, played board games, attended one of Michael’s concerts, hiked to Wahkeena Falls, and went to two Timbers home games. We were very excited to get the El Diablo chicken sandwich at McMenamins (which inspired us to make our own version). We were disappointed by the sandwich which did not live up to our memories but pleased that Scott’s recreation is much more delicious. Luckily we had good friends, cider, and games to make up for the poor sandwich showing.
Then we headed to Missoula to continue our look for a mountain property. While there we went to a baseball game, the Missoula Paddleheads, wearing their special Powderheads alternate uniform.
We really like Missoula but a potential property purchase is still up in the air. Nothing will be as cheap as our Texas property and we are debating on a house in town versus a piece of property in the hills. We’re thinking a house in town but those are pretty pricey so we want to take our time with this purchase.
We left Missoula in August and made our way through Wyoming to Colorado. We had a bit of a tire issue in Sheridan Wyoming. As we pulled in to a one-night-stop on Saturday, we noticed our rear tire on the passenger side of the fifth wheel was getting low. We got to our spot and pumped it up. We checked it a few minutes later and it was low again. We called a tech who was able to come out and replace our tire (at like 2pm on a Saturday). Scott noticed a loose spring behind the tire before we got the tire replaced but we couldn’t tell if the loose spring was important or not (spoiler alert: it was, but more on that later).
We spent the next 6 weeks in Colorado. Lots of food and games with friends and family. Scott visited Tomahawk Girl Scout camp for the first time. My sister convinced me to attend my first bio-blitz. My 9-year old nephew had baseball games (we were able to make one) and my 7-year old niece had soccer (we were also able to see one). We had Shabbat dinner with Serendipity and family. I went to a CU Buffs game with Sacha, Briana, and Brian. We went to the Dragonboat festival with my sister and dad. My brother-in-law came over and took a look at our fuse box which has had a broken connection for a while now. We did a lot of debugging but couldn’t figure out where the issue was without tearing things apart so we will just continue to live with that. We rarely use the devices it powers (our satellite TV and an internal radio system for the RV).
My sister invited us to do a Monarch butterfly tagging project. I feel like most people know about the Monarch migration and can recognize a Monarch butterfly (they’re big, orange, and pretty much all over North America), but we learned so much from the tagging project guide (40+ PowerPoint slides worth). In the middle of the US they migrate with the warmer weather, moving between Canada and Mexico. Their northern trip puts them all over the US but their trip south is to one particular forest in Central Mexico. The full trip from Mexico and back takes four generations of butterflies. The first three generations live ~14-35 days (plus 30 days to mature from egg to adult). The fourth generation does not fully mature and lives for eight to nine months, from around September until they head north in the Spring. This is the generation that gets tagged and tracked. Unfortunately we didn’t catch any Monarchs (although we did see a few fluttering about), but we did capture a similar species called a Queen.
We took a side trip down to Austin (our first “vacation” since hitting the road) with our friends Aaron and Sarah to celebrate Scott and Aaron’s 50th birthdays. We brought games and played them all: Parks, Cascadia, That’s What She Said, and Codenames. While we were in Austin there was a huge music festival going on, which we observed but did not partake. We saw a lot of self-driving cars and tried unsuccessfully to ride in a Waymo (using the Uber app). We also saw many Grackles, a blackbird whose flock is called a plague (not kidding) and sounds like a “rusty gate”. We had many street tacos and visited a lot of the bars on 6th Street looking for live music. We found three live music artists and one karaoke night. I think I speak for everyone when I say Sidebar (on 7th Street) was by far our favorite bar.
We left Denver on Friday, October 10th and had an exhausting 3-day travel weekend, making it down to Las Cruces by Sunday afternoon. As we exited the highway heading to the KOA in Las Cruces, we heard a metal-on-metal sounds coming from our 5th wheel tires. It did not sound good but it went away after about a minute or two. We decided since the sound stopped it wasn’t important (it was) so we didn’t get it looked at. We spent the week stocking up on hard-to-find items for our stay in Terlingua.
At the end of the week we left Las Cruces, traveled through El Paso (not as terrible as we remembered but still our least favorite city to drive through with the fifth-wheel), and made it to Alpine. The trip from Alpine to Terlingua is short, about 80 miles, so we thought it was going to be a super easy travel day. We spent a relaxed morning on Saturday, leaving the Alpine RV park around 11 am. As we were leaving, Scott noticed a grinding sound and we pulled over across the street from a repair shop just outside of the town. The shop was closed but there were some folks working overtime who came over to take a look. We raised our passenger side wheels off the ground, they spun the tire (with difficulty), and it was bad grinding metal sounds. They said to drive on it as little as possible before getting it looked at and recommended a mobile repair tech, Big Bend supply and repair, who they thought might work on Saturday. We called and waited for about an hour on the side of the road wishing we had listened to those sounds earlier and had a tech or repair person take a look at it during the week when we weren’t trying to travel. The tech, Dan, was amazing and actually had a brake assembly from an axle he had replaced the night before. He was able to swap it out for us in less than an hour. We were missing most of the springs that keep the brake assembly together. One spring and a bolt from the assembly were what were making that grinding noise. Good thing we talked to someone about that spring Scott saw back in Sheridan Wyoming, around 1500 miles prior…
This back axle might be bent, as we’ve now replaced this particular tire twice and had this issue with the brake assembly. We had one other tire replaced, but this back passenger side one seems to get the most wear. It tends to run hotter than the rest of the tires and we don’t really know why. The axle is around $7000 to replace, so we hope that’s not the issue.
Once back on the road, we made it to Terlingua in no time and stayed at our favorite RV park, Roadrunner RV, for a week before heading out to our property. We are looking forward to checking out the first and largest chili competition in the United States, the Frank X. Tolbert-Wick Fowler 58th Chili Cook-Off.