The museums in Santa Fe are closed Mondays so we decided to get some mundane chores out of the way today so we could free up tomorrow for unfettered cultural and window-shopping activities.
The first item on the agenda was to contact Capitol Ford nearby in Santa Fe to discuss our pending truck engine replacement. After spending the better part of two hours in fruitless efforts to contact the appropriate person at the dealership by phone, we decided to go see the uncommunicative personally. Instead of speaking with the service writer assigned to ignore our phone calls, I elected to speak with the service manager.
The service manager was a very nice guy who was quite capable of answering all of my questions. After about 10 minutes I learned from the manager that:
1. Our truck replacement engine had not only been ordered but will arrive tomorrow.
2. It is possible to remove the current engine from the truck and to set it aside for inspection by the insurance adjuster from my horrible warranty provider, Alpha Warranty Services. This allows installation of the new engine into the truck.
3. My horrible warranty provider was not communicating with the Ford dealership, probably in an effort to avoid paying out any benefits.
4. If I had purchased my warranty from Ford, they would have replaced my engine for $0 instead of the $18,000 we expect to pay with the Alpha warranty.
5. The service manager seems to now be my service writer and future communications will be with him instead of Victor, the service writer who so steadfastly ignored me this morning.
This seems like it could have been accomplished by phone this morning, if the apparently deaf staff would answer it. Maybe the manager will be more adept at communicating.
After the fun at Capitol, we went back to Harry’s Roadhouse for breakfast but all the unanswered calls and personal visit to the dealership made it too late for breakfast. Harry’s did not have much on the lunch menu that interested me so I got a cheeseburger. Peggy got some salmon tacos and said they were tasty. About $25 out the door, minus drinks and tips.
Then the really dreadful stuff started for me. We went shopping, an activity for which I have scant interest and personally loathe. Peggy doesn’t seem to mind it and she is a clever and resourceful shopper but she would probably prefer I be tied up and gagged on the lower shelf of the shopping cart for the duration of the trip. We ended up getting most of the stuff we wanted but were again unsuccessful at getting any substantial liquor purchases completed. We have now been in four places with liquor, very little of which we desired and never at the volume or price we prefer to buy. Santa Fe is a beautiful place but buying liquor here is a pain in the ass.

Today we took the day off to recover from our pending truck repair cost impoverishment. We stayed around the Santa Fe Skies RV Park all day. We were slugs. We did nothing productive. We got to watch the NASCAR race, thanks to our Dish Tailgater satellite antenna. We watched an old George C. Scott movie, The Flim-Flam Man.
We have nothing interesting to report.

It was our first day without our beloved truck. The Camry we rented yesterday seems tiny compared to our Charlotte. We had no items on the agenda so we chose to do some exploring north of Santa Fe.
Our first destination we selected was the former hippie commune and artist community called Taos. The roads we traveled (US-84 and NM-68) follow the Rio Grande and the Rio Pueblo de Taos through some spectacular canyons before topping a hill southwest of town. From the road the massive gorge of the upper Rio Grande can be seen to the north and it is a gigantic crack in the earth extending many miles to the horizon.
We drove down the main drag of Taos (all 2 lanes) through many southwestern style buildings, quite a few of them vacant. Back in the day, Taos was a famous for the arty crowd but it seems either the artists ran out of money or folks quit liking their art because many of the downtown commercial buildings are for lease. We stopped in Taos for some lunch food from Michael’s Kitchen and took our to-go stuff up the road about another 10 miles to a gorgeous concrete and steel bridge spanning the very deep Rio Grande Gorge. It is a very long way from the bridge deck to the river below. We pulled out in a rest area at the east end of the bridge and took our grub into a very nice shade structure with a dining table and great views of the Gorge, the Rio Grande and surrounding snow-covered mountains.
We continued west and south back to US-284 on our return trip to Santa Fe. The terrain we passed through today was breathtaking but the Camry we rented is miserable to ride in compared to Charlotte. The Camry steers well, has plenty of grunt and ample bells and whistles but it rides like a asphalt roller and the seats are like sitting in a bucket. I already miss Charlotte.
There are some pix of today’s travels you can see if you click here

Uh-oh. Bad news today. The irritating clicking noise emanating from our truck engine finally made the sound when we were in a location close to a Ford dealership. We were headed for the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe for a visit when the noise made itself known so we abandoned our day’s agenda and drove straight to the Ford dealership.
Initially, the Ford guys thought it was a sensor issue but once the tech got ahold of it and had an opportunity to unleash his fancy tools, the news got worse. Our beloved Charlotte was diagnosed with a lifter and camshaft problem and we need a new engine. Heavy sigh.
We bought an engine warranty when we bought Charlotte that covered us up to 200,000 miles and we were at 175,000 miles at failure so I figured we were okay. Unfortunately, I listened to the salesman when we bought her instead of reading the extremely fine print on the policy itself and found the warranty only covers the engine or turbo for $3500 which is less than any substantial repair cost. A turbo alone is about $6000. Purchasing a repair warranty from Alpha Warranty Services, repeat – Alpha Warranty Services is a poor decision and should be avoided at all costs. We paid $1800 for the warranty at purchase and the maximum claim outlay by these reprehensible crooks is only $3500 so I brand these assholes as bandits, shitheads and scrotums. Do not buy an Alpha warranty. Never assume the warranty provider will do what the dealer promises which was to repair any mechanical issues for nothing other than $100 deductible. When I get back to San Diego, I am going to visit the car salesman who sold us the warranty alleging they would fix everything that went wrong and I might saw off his penis or maybe cut off his little spindly arms and legs and shove them into his bottom. I am pretty pissed off.
We are left with few options. We can buy a used truck with less than 100,000 miles to replace Charlotte for about $35,000 or fix the engine for about $18,000 out-of-pocket. After getting on the internet and looking at used truck costs, it became quite clear that the $18,000 to fix the truck is the most economical way to go. A new engine is guaranteed by Ford for 2 years / unlimited mileage so it appears we are going to give Capitol Ford a shitload of money to replace our beloved Charlotte’s motor.
We spoke with Santa Fe Skies RV Park about keeping our trailer in their park for about 10 days and they said “okee-dokee.” We went to Enterprise Car Rental here in Santa Fe and got ourselves a shiny Camry to drive about while we await repairs. I just was a bit flabbergasted by the truck repair cost but we are unlikely to give up our traveling lifestyle due to this irritating and costly setback. We will get through this but it is unlikely we will do it while smiling.

Noises emanating from under the hood of our Ford F-250 can be hard to identify, particularly when they are intermittent. We jumped into the truck this morning to take it to the local Ford dealership so they could attempt to discern the origin of the mystery noise from Charlotte’s engine compartment. Of course, the engine would make no funny sounds while we were at the dealership service facility. Realizing that even the most experienced and savvy mechanic could not determine the sources of sounds that cannot be heard, we decided to take the truck for a spin to see if some stop and start or some challenging roads could cause the resurrection of the mystery noise.
We started by going to a restaurant called Harry’s Roadhouse where they served us a good breakfast. We had all we wanted and got out for about $25 plus tip. We then didn’t really have a specific destination so we got lost in old Santa Fe for a bit before finding our way to a National Park Service visitor information center. The nice folks inside stocked us up with all the literature about national park and forest service attractions nearby but they could not tell us anything about a local site called Tent Rocks (also called Kasha-Katuwe which means something in a language) because it was under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Land Management. We decided a national park or monument would be a good alternative to Tent Rocks and chose instead to go to Bandelier National Monument about 35 miles from Santa Fe.
Bandelier is a big facility but all the neat stuff is in a canyon where you can drive right up to the visitor center at the end of the park road. A short hike behind the visitor center will take you by a big kiva and to the remains of a giant circular long house built by a civilization that has left artifacts indicating 11,000 years of presence in this gorgeous canyon. In the south-facing cliffs of the canyon walls there are numerous cave dwellings, some with multiple rooms. The cave houses started as little holes in the tuff formation but lots of gouging and digging by the residents enlarged the holes dramatically. A bit more of a hike from the long house will get interested, fit folks up to some ladders so the curious can go into a few of the cave dwellings. Archaeologists postulate that the long house, kiva and cliff dwellings were inhabited by around 500 people for 4,000 years. The inhabitants apparently had a pretty good deal here with sturdy shelter, agriculture and year-round water. One of the docents indicated that the cliff dwellings may have been the winter lodgings because the longhouse and kiva go into shade at about 2:30 and it gets cold in the canyon bottom at 7000′ in northern New Mexico.
After our hike to the long house and back, we took off to go see the town of Los Alamos where the research for the Manhattan Project (the A-bomb) was performed by many awkward scientists and social misfits who were also extremely bright. Los Alamos had and still has the highest concentration of PhDs per capita. Los Alamos was not what we expected.
First we had to go through a guard station on the highway where the nice man told us how to get to the town of Los Alamos but warned us not to make any right turns for the first 2.5 miles of road because we would be traveling through Los Alamos National Laboratory property. We were not to take any pictures of anything and he suggested we put our camera away (possibly in order to help us avoid anal probes,waterboarding or enhanced interrogation by zealous security personnel tasked with keeping idiots and tourists from taking pictures of ugly government buildings).
We finally got to the town itself and the homes there are very nice. The medium family income here is $90,000 and their massive and shiny municipal buildings may be the result. There are some old structures in town that look like they were barracks for the thousands who worked here during the last years of WWII. In town, there is also an ample scattering of buildings that look like they used to belong to the feds – ugly, unimaginative but expensive. Many have been re-purposed as businesses but once on the other side of the fence everything looks very government-ish. The whole place was a strictly-controlled government town in the 1940s with nothing but civil servants and their families living here. Now there is a civilian population but I bet almost all their dads and moms work in the hideous buildings beyond the security goons or at Starbucks.
We headed back down the steep road from Los Alamos back to Santa Fe, stopping at a crummy, expensive liquor store at Jack’s casino in Pojoaque. Beer prices at Jack’s are okay but the liquor prices were horrifying. We continued to Trader Joe’s in Santa Fe to replenish our stores that were severely depleted during our last stay in Tucumcari. Wouldn’t you know it – the truck started making the mystery sound again, right after the Ford dealership closed.
There’s some pix of Bandelier and Los Alamos to be seen if you click here

Today was blissfully a travel day and we were delighted to leave Tucumcari and get back on I-40/Route 66 westbound. We started a slow climb from Tucumcari at about 4000′ and ended up at around 7000′ in Santa Fe.
The pesky noise coming from the truck that has imprisoned us in Tucumcari for five days was not evident this morning and when we got to Santa Fe we thought we heard a bit of clicking but not regular enough to figure out where it is coming from. We set up our Barbarian Invader and made an appointment with the Ford dealership for tomorrow.
We are delighted to be here. We have checked into an RV park called Santa Fe Skies and, in addition to full hookups and good wi-fi, we were assigned a pull-through space right at the edge of the park giving us magnificent views of the snow-covered mountains surrounding Santa Fe, the twinkling city lights below us at night and an extraordinary sunset in between. The park also features a big laundry facility but no pool. The men’s side of their bathroom/shower complex is very clean and shiny. Handicapped toilet stalls even have their own sinks! I might move in there if my money ever runs out.

We spent the today in the trailer because our truck was at Ray’s Diesel having the tranny removed so they could replace the flywheel. Unfortunately, the flywheel was not the problem. The transmission was then replaced but the mechanic was unable to make the ticking noise (our original complaint) repeat itself. Last Friday, it only made noise when the engine was hot.
After giving up $550, I took it to a diesel station, filled the truck up and headed back toward Cactus RV-Park. I could hear the ticking by the time I got back to the trailer. We are not spending any additional nights in Tucumcari because it is a place with few redeeming or interesting features, the most stimulating being a curio shop down Route 66 that operates out of a big concrete teepee. We will hook up the Barbarian Invader and Charlotte and pull out in the morning. We are headed to Santa Fe and a Ford dealership there. If the truck makes it – great. If the truck doesn’t make it, we will have a better idea of what failed when it does.

Today is our fourth day in Tucumcari. We got some lukewarm news from the repair shop where we were supposed to take the truck. We had a deal with them to bring the truck in today so they could take out the transmission in preparation for the flywheel replacement. According to that plan, once the part was delivered in the morning the replacement would take place and a few hours later we would be back on our way.
There seems to be an alternate plan at the shop now. I will take the truck in tomorrow morning and the work will begin. I am worried additional parts might be required and there is no way to tell until the tranny comes out so we may be stranded here for longer than we thought.
Tucumcari is not a particularly stimulating environment other than being windy. We have internet access for 10 hours a day, the phone works, the satellite TV works and we have a lot of food although we are our of milk for Peg’s coffee. It could be worse. We could be in an even more rustic environment than here. Maybe.

Last night the temperature was supposed to go down below freezing but the weatherperson lied because it only got to 37 F. The wind continued all night but dropped down below 15 mph this morning. Having this wonderful fifth wheel trailer negates all but the most terrible weather, like tornadoes, strong thunderstorms and hurricanes. We are quite cozy here.
All of the attractions of Tucumcari await us but, since there seem to be none, we have a short list of places to go. That may be fortunate because the truck is currently crippled and we are reluctant to drive it. We hope the truck issue is ironed out Tuesday because we would like to get on with our travels.
Our big activity for today was a short stroll over to the local Tractor Supply Company. Peggy performed a short perusal of the clothes but we ended up with a bag of bird seed and a length of nylon rope as our take-home treasures. By chance, satellite TV was great for me today; a Grand Prix race in the morning, a NASCAR race midday and Top Gear on BBCA in the evening. With all the alternative attractions in this locale, good TV programming is wonderful.

Today we spent our second day in Tucumcari, awaiting a new flywheel. Tucumari is a small town with few charms for the casual traveler but, taken as a whole, I was wrong to have thought so highly of it. It would be a tough place to make a living unless in the automotive repair business. There are many vacant structures. However, all the folks we have met so far have been very nice.
We did see Susan, the lady running the Cactus RV-Park, outside sweeping the dirt. Peggy says Susan was probably a real beauty when she was young but now she looks like the rest of us. Her dirt sweeping finally yielded a tiny pile of leaves and pebbles which she took away in her wheelie-bin. The park is excruciatingly clean having had its dirt swept regularly.
The park operators run the wi-fi in a strange fashion here. They turn it on and off at designated times during the day. The reason for this is unclear. We have access to the internet from 7 to 10 AM and from 3 to 10 PM. The operators are not absolutely accurate with the time because it came on at 2:15 this afternoon and remained on until about 10:40 PM when our streaming Foyle’s War abruptly went to blank screen.
This morning our trailer was parked in such a way that we had both cable TV and satellite TV but that came to an end when another RVer pulled in right next to us. Rejiggering of our satellite antenna got us back on satellite transmissions but cable went south because I just don’t have enough coaxial cable. We will survive this.
So far, the weather has been crummy with either overcast skies and near-freezing temperatures or slightly higher temperatures with brisk winds accompanied by bright sunshine. Our trailer is nice and comfy but going outside requires hardy souls and dedication.