This morning we engaged in the RV travel ritual of gathering up our stuff, disconnecting from the utilities, closing up the slideouts without squishing anything, hooking up the fifth wheel and vamoosing from Moab Rim Campark. We turned north on 191 past Arches, Canyonlands, Dead Horse Point and into the desert to I-70. From there we turned east until we pulled into Junction West RV Park in Grand Junction, CO. The drive through these stretches of road went by quickly since the scenery along the way is almost non-stop. I am amazed that my notion of a desert was a lifeless, bleak wasteland where the weather is crummy. Today the weather, other than some trailer-shoving gusts of wind, was mostly clear. The clean air made it easy to spot extraordinary rock formations on all horizons. A lot of it may look like the surface of Mars but if Mars looks like this, I wouldn’t mind spending more time here. I would require air conditioning, of course.
Our beloved Barbarian Invader fifth wheel trailer has had some nasty electrical woes recently but a new one popped up in the last 72 hours. The batteries are not charging and trailers gotta have batteries or they start doing weird stuff like de-energizing the refrigerator. After picking up some distilled water here in Grand Junction, we headed back to the Invader for some battery service. It is hot here and the trailer is not set up where the battery compartment is in the shade but we started the onerous task anyway. After not too much finger smashing, confusion and colorful language, I was ready to shoot a hole in the side of our home to make the batteries accessible. However, Peggy and I were able to figure out the Chinese puzzle of getting the batteries out of a compartment that has very little room for bulky things like automotive batteries.
The terminals on the cables had some white shit on them and I cleaned all those up. We cleaned off the battery terminals, washed off a good portion of Monument Valley from the batteries themselves and topped off the cells with the distilled water. We would like to think that our battery problems are temporarily over but we are quite optimistic and really only some testing after a day or two will tell us if we are not going to be spending more.
There are RV services here in Grand Junction if I need more than a simpleton can achieve. Tomorrow, I will be taking a truck over to the tire store to have our truck tires replaced. The tires on the truck now were made by an outfit called Hercules which I had never heard of before buying the truck. They were used when I got them and we have driven them an additional 60,000 miles without any trouble whatsoever. They still have some wear left but we decided to replace them before they got scary. Michelins, coming up!
To top off our work outside, Peggy and I were stringing out the cable for the free cable TV here in Junction West and I blindly head-butted the lower outside corner of the Invader’s open hopper window and gave myself an even uglier spot on top of my head. Even defective heads like mine bleed a lot when forcibly assaulting the mitered corners of sharp aluminum extrusions. Washing my hair is going to be fun.
Peggy shot a few pix on our way over here today. You can see them if you click here