Our RV Adventures

Since we didn’t unhook last night, we pulled out of the Root 66 RV Park about 8:30am after a breakfast of coffee, pizza, and half a cupcake each. We’ll lose an hour this morning on our 216 mile run to Albuquerque since we’ll be coming into the Mountain Time Zone from Arizona Time. Since Arizona doesn’t observe Daylight Savings Time (except for the Indian Reservations, for some reason), during DST they’re the same as Pacific Time.

As I said yesterday, Root 66 RV Park is a nice little stay-1-night park about 10 miles east of Holbrook with 50 FHU sites for $20 PPA.

And you can even buy some petrified wood,

or even a whole stump.

But it does have a really nice view.

The only downside is the Verizon service. Most of the night I was alternating between 3G and 1X.

1X!

As I indicated yesterday, I tested my theory on my genset/transfer switch problem by starting up the genset before I disconnected shore power. And the transfer switch worked perfectly. So I went outside, disconnected shore power, and got ready to pull out.

But as my genset is wont to do sometimes when it’s cold, it stopped after about a minute. And when I restarted it, the transfer switch did not kick in. So this time as another test, I went back to the bedroom, lifted the bed, removed the cover on the transfer switch, and pressed down on the generator contactor.

And the contactor latched right up and started feeding power to the coach.

Everything worked fine for a couple of hours until the generator stopped again. But this time I think I might have reached the low fuel point on the tank feed. With this new diesel tank and sender unit I’m not exactly sure where the cut-off point is on the gauge. But luckily the temperature never got out of the 70’s along the way, with the windows open and fans going, it stayed about 75 degrees in the coach. Very nice.

We pulled into the Enchanted Trails RV Park a few miles west of Albuquerque about 2pm, and got parked and set up. Like Root 66, this park is also a $20 50 amp FHU PPA park, but much nicer than Root 66. And even better, this park has a really strong, really fast Wi-Fi system, and I’ve got 5 bars of 4G on my phone. Nice,.

About 3:30 we headed out to have dinner at La Salita, a place that Nick and Terry Russell had recommended.

As we were heading into Albuquerque, we noticed a lot of black clouds to the north, accompanied to some really high winds. In fact this guy in the RV in front of us may have wished he’d delayed his trip.

When we got to La Salita, we found that they didn’t reopen for dinner until 5pm. So checking Google, we found that the Golden Corral Nick had also highly recommended was only about a mile away, so off we went.

And Nick was right again, with this being one of the best Golden Corral’s we’ve ever eaten out.

Not sure yet what’s on tomorrow’s schedule, but I’m sure we’ll have fun.

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Thought for the Day:

“I dream my painting, and then I paint my dreams.” – Vincent van Gogh

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We pulled out of our site a little after 9am, with Jan following in the truck. Our final destination for today was Sun Valley, AZ. about 160 miles away. But right now we were heading for the Camp Verde shopping center parking lot.

We were leaving the rig while we drove back up the road about a mile to have what unfortunately turned out to be a so-so breakfast at the Denny’s.

So-so service, so-so food, and really bad coffee. So bad that I only drank about 1/4 of mine, and I think Jan even less. I actually tried to redeem the coffee situation as we left by walking right next door to the Starbuck’s. But apparently the word was out about the bad coffee at Denny’s, and there was a line almost out the door. So no coffee for me today. At least it will be my coffee tomorrow morning.

Coming back to the rig, we stopped off at the Maverik station to top off the truck before parking behind the rig to get hooked up. I had left the fans running and a couple of windows open while we were gone, so it was still nice inside.

But we figured we’d need the AC’s today so I started up the generator to warm up while I hooked up the truck. And as I was finishing up, I heard the generator doing its speeding up and slowing down thing that it did when it didn’t work when we left Prescott a couple of weeks ago. So I was not surprised to find no power to the coach when I came back in.

Since it was now about 11am, the time I wanted to be on the road, we just went with the fans and windows.

Regular readers will be remember that I tested the generator a few days after we got to Verde Valley from Prescott, and everything worked fine, so I couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t working now.

As we drove along I was thinking about the problem. Why did it not work in Prescott,  then it did work in Verde Valley, and then it didn’t work today? After some further mulling, the only differing factor I could think of was that the two times it didn’t work, we were NOT plugged into the shore power when I started the generator. But at Verde Valley, when it worked, we were plugged in.

So tomorrow I’ll try starting the generator before I unhook shore power and see what happens. If it now works, then I’ll get on the phone with my transfer switch’s manufacturer and see what’s up. If that does work, at least I’ve got a workaround until I get a permanent fix.

We pulled into the Root 66 RV Park in Sun Valley about 3pm and were quickly pointed to our $20 FHU pull-thru site. This is not a destination park. It’s a two minutes off the Interstate to the spend the night, park.

Oh, and it’s also a petrified wood store.

Tomorrow we’ve got a 216 mile run to Albuquerque where we’ll stay for a couple days before moving on to Amarillo.

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Thought for the Day:

“Nobody in the game of football should be called a genius. A genius is somebody like Norman Einstein.” — Joe Theismann, Former quarterback

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