We waved goodbye this morning to my sister, Julie, who departed for the long drive back to Pasadena at about 10:00. Soon after, we left Goulding’s RV Park with No Repair Services Available Locally headed for Watkins RV Repair concealed in the brush between Cortez and Dolores, CO. We had a great drive through the desert of Arizona, Four Corners and into Colorado primarily because the scenery on US-160 between Kayenta, AZ, and Dolores, CO, is different but very interesting and almost bizarre. Geology has had a field day in this part of the world. The remote location (down a mile or two of dirt road) of Watkins RV was not really a problem because when we got there, the RV mechanic, Clark Watkins, jumped right into our trailer with diagnostic equipment in order to determine the source of our recent electrical woe.
We received good news! He had the necessary parts and expertise to fix our problems and would have us on our way in 3 hours. Since it was plain he needed no help from me, we asked where we could find some good local food, including chicken fried steak for me. He suggested a place in Dolores called That Place in Dolores. I was able to continue my quest to find the best chicken fried steak in the U.S. which has been my probably unhealthy search for the last two years. Happily, the CFS here had probably the best coating of anyplace yet. I would have to rank the chicken fried steak here right up there with the leaders, Jake’s in Bend, OR, and Dean’s in Clackamas, OR. This great restaurant also has superb pies that are made on site, great sides with your meal and great prices. The chef owner used to be the bigwig for food at the casino in Tawaoc where we were scheduled to spend the next three days.
After dining, we stopped in at the Dolores railroad museum which was free and pretty good but quite small. We were filling up with fuel after lounging around the museum for a while when we got a call from the mechanic who told us we were ready to go. We parted with about $785 and were on our way. We drove back to Watkins RV Repair and picked up our newly re-energized trailer, towed it to the casino and promptly set the trailer up in the wrong space. We were pretty scorched over our long drive, subsequent repairs, dining, museum viewing and return from Dolores to Tawaoc’s Ute Mountain casino and RV park.
We had just started to relax when there was a knock on the door of the trailer and opened it to find a Ute security cop named Sherwin who was big as a tent. He wanted to know why we were in space 38 when his records indicated the space was supposed to be empty. I explained that we were merely stupid and had not noticed we were supposed to be in space 19 instead of 38 when we set up. He was very nice about us blowing it out our ass and left us alone after directing us to square our location anomaly out with management in the morning, which we agreed to do. He was very nice about it which was fortunate because he did not appear to be the type of person sane people would want to wrestle with. We got to sleep pretty early tonight.
There are a few pictures we snapped along the way and you can see them if you click here