The worst part about long driving days is that there is so little to recall at the end of the day.  There’s just a sense of ennui from looking at too much concrete, combined with agitation from unspent energy.  This is the price we are paying for delaying our trip and having to rush through New Mexico.

Finding interesting rest stops and overnight stops provides some relief.  The best stop we made all day was a four-mile detour to Pecos National Historic Site in northern New Mexico.  The site interprets and preserves ruins of a Native American pueblo, along with  the ruins of Spanish Conquistadors who occupied the territory while they were searching for fabled gold.  The site has a long and interesting history, and the Visitors Center does a very good job of showing it, with a nice display of artifacts (mostly pottery) and dioramas.  I don’t think it had a Junior Ranger Program but in any case we arrived too late in the day for Emma to complete one.

Pecos was a nice break, but it did chafe to pass so many other possible stops. New Mexico is loaded with Ancient Puebloan history, early American settler history, Route 66 history, and attractive natural areas that were begging us to just pull over for a few hours.  But we got a late state this morning and ended up a solid 100 miles short of our expectations for the day.  If we procrastinate any further we will disappoint a lot of people, so we really have to keep on truckin’, at least for another day.

Our stop tonight is at Storrie Lake, a little state park just a few miles from I-25 near Las Vegas, NM.  It’s like a miniature version of Elephant Butte Lake, not as majestic, not as large, but pleasant in a small-town kind of way.  The sites are the same: primitive, developed, electric, and at the same prices.  Since we had full sun most of the day, our batteries completely recharged during the drive and so we chose a non-electric site by the shallow little lake.

I had forgotten how disciplined about work I have to be when traveling.  At the end of a day of driving, I have to immediately jump to the computer and catch up on email. But today I got caught out:  while the phone works fine here at Storrie Lake, the Verizon Wireless Internet card does not.  It connects, but no data transpires — so I can’t get online.

This happens sometimes on the road, and I have a variety of strategies to combat it.  In this case, the solution is to leave early on Friday, and stop along the way (perhaps at lunchtime) to catch up then.  But I was still worried this evening about certain problems that were up in the air, and that was bugging me.

The answer came courtesy of the iPod Touch.  As we tow, the iPod is constantly in touch with the Internet because our Verizon card is installed in a Cradlepoint wireless cellular router (in the Airstream), and I leave it on all day.  This gives us a wifi hotspot in the car in case we want to look something up from the Internet.  Translated from geek-speak, that means that the iPod Touch was picking up my email as we drove.  So although I can’t reply to anything tonight, I can at least read the 21 emails that arrived since this morning.  Fortunately, in the batch there was nothing urgent.

Tomorrow looks like a rather dreary day.  We have to tow about 300 miles through what is expected to be rain with low temperatures.  Part of the drive will bring us up to nearly 8,000 ft elevation (at Raton Pass).  It was snowing in our destination, Colorado Springs, this morning, which does not bode well either.  I do not want to see snow, and I especially don’t want to drive through any of it.  It could be a very long and slow drive …

It seems like at least once a year a virus enters our lives and messes up some travel plan.  This time it was the long-anticipated trip to Palm Springs for Modernism Week.  Yesterday, as we were packing the Caravel, Emma began showing symptoms of “something” with a slight fever and nausea — and as easy as that, our trip evaporated.

If we had been planning a trip in the big Airstream, we might have gone anyway.  It has plenty of space for a sick kid (her own bedroom), a roomy bath, and all the little comforts of home (extra blankets, comfort foods & tea, room to prop up with pillows and watch movies, etc.)  We spent enough years on the road to have many episodes of 24-hour stomach bugs and 7-day colds, and we know we can deal with that even as we travel the country.

But this trip was to be spent in our tiny Caravel, a “weekend trailer” that is well-stuffed with three people in it, and two nights of the trip we would be evicted for the Modernism show and sleeping in a hotel room.  With all the things going on and the limited space, it didn’t make sense to uproot Emma for a long weekend.  So off I went, on my own in the Caravel again.

Since I am not expected in Palm Springs until Friday, I was able to take the scenic route along I-8 through the southern Sonoran desert.  This allowed me to avoid Phoenix (always appreciated when towing), plus I was able to see the desert already green and starting to bloom from all the rain we’ve gotten this winter.  It will be a beautiful spring this year.

Along I-8 in Arizona there isn’t a lot to see from the highway, but a few stops are worth making.  One is Dateland, a tiny oasis where you can take a break, buy fuel, and most importantly shop for eight or more varieties of locally-grown dates.  Actually, that’s hardly doing justice to the date theme of Dateland.  You can also get a terrific date shake, and park any size of RV near the groves of date palms that line the southern flank of the rest area.  It was a good spot to stop for lunch in the Airstream, in stunning clear and warm weather, approaching 80 degrees already.

Since I was taking I-8, I decided to drop in for one night to see Bert & Janie, Eric & Sue, at Anza-Borrego. Bert and Janie have been boondocked at Pegleg for two months now, and show no signs of wanting to go anywhere, which is unusual for them.  Eric and Sue are fellow outdoor writers and photographers, who we last met a couple of years ago in Yellowstone National Park.  Stopping at Anza-Borrego would add about 50 miles to my trip, but it had the compensation of a chance to see good friends for an evening rather than boondocking somewhere alone.

Tonight in Pegleg, it is cooling off rapidly and the wind has been up since 4 p.m.  We started the evening with a fire in the handmade rock circle that Bert built, and talked about the brilliant star constellations overhead, but with the chill setting in it wasn’t long before the group broke up and retreated their individual homes.

In addition to my friends, there at least a couple of dozen long-term residents of Pegleg, all of whom are feeling their trailers rocking in the breeze as the evening deepens.  Most likely I will be the only one leaving in the morning.  The rest of the residents have little incentive to leave this free and quiet parking spot.  Part of me would like to stay and stretch out like the others have, but mostly I am looking forward to what Palm Springs has to offer.   By 10 a.m., I’ll be towing the Caravel again, to see what’s over the next hill.

We are still wandering the Sonoran Desert, rather slowly and without much mileage, which is a good way to go.  There are many subtle pleasures of the desert, and a primary one is taking the luxury of ignoring time and society while picking up a lot of dust on your boots. So we’ve hiked and explored, cooked dinner over an open fire, watched moonrise, and many other completely inconsequential things that encourage a relaxing of the spirit. That’s a good vacation.

However, with the holidays behind us, the world is once again getting to work and so I am being swept up in the tide of obligations once again, ready or not.  Business will take us further down the road before we return to home base.

Dan and Marlene, our friends at Mali Mish, blogged about a nice park near the Palm Springs area.  We’ve avoided that area in the past because of the prevalence of overpriced, snobbish (“Class A Motorhomes only”), and age-limited commercial campgrounds.  But it turns out that in nearby La Quinta there is a fine county park up by the foothills, called Lake Cahuilla County Recreation Area.

I can second Dan and Marlene’s assertion that Lake Cahuilla is a fine place to stay while you’re in that area.  The “lake” is actually rather small, calm, and artificial (it’s a reservoir). Swimming is not allowed.  But the scene is very pleasant and the campground is friendly.  Sunsets, as we discovered, can be spectacular.  (Water and electric sites seem to be unaffected by the larger California state budget crisis.  Still $22.)

In the previous blog I mentioned that it was time to do something about our repeated tire problems.  The solution I chose, based on recommendations of people who have a lot of experience with Airstream tires, was to switch to Michelin LTX M/S tires, specifically the LT235-75/R15.  We took a look at all five tires (including the spare) and the tally was two bad tires (broken internal belts), one questionable tire, and two good ones (the Carlisles we installed last September).  None of them, by the way, had been patched.

The Michelins are considerably beefier than the Load Range D “Special Trailer” tires they replaced, with deeper tread and much more durable construction.  They are Load Range C, but don’t get alarmed by that.  The load rating for each tire is 1,985 pounds at 50 psi, which equals 7,940 pounds of total weight-carrying capacity.  We never run that heavy and we use tire pressure monitors to ensure that we stay at optimum pressure.

The downside, of course, is that this is a monstrously expensive experiment.  The bottom line was about $700 with installation, balancing, new high-pressure stems, California environmental fees, and tax.  If the tires last two years without premature failure, I’ll be money ahead compared to the amount I spend on replacement ST tires, not to mention the hassle.  I’m told the Michelins will wear longer in addition to being more resistance to belt failures.

A lot of people have tried going to a 16″ Michelin XPS Rib tire, and I considered it as well.  But the Michelin LTX allowed me to avoid changing the wheel rims, which cut the cost of switching considerably.  They also fit better in the Airstream wheel well.  Whether this change will solve the problem of the constantly-failing ST tires remains to be seen.  I’ll report as we go.  [UPDATE April 2015: I’ve had these tires for over five years and over 40,000 miles. Not one problem.]

While we had the wheels off, we had the opportunity for a brake check, too.  The Kodiak disc ceramic brake pads were, as always, wearing more on the outer pad than the inner, and it was time for replacement.  It has been a year since the last wheel bearing re-pack as well, so I decided to plunge in and get it all done at once.  It has been an expensive service stop, but adding up everything we did in 2009 and this early 2010 session, we are still within annual budget we set for service and maintenance when we were full-timing ($2,000 per year).

It is 2010 and good things lie ahead.

Christmas was a quiet success in our household.  Since we are thousands of miles from our extended family, we used Internet technology on Christmas morning to videoconference with my parents and brother while we opened gifts.  I thought it would seem strange to have the family on a laptop screen, perched atop a box in the living room but it was surprisingly like having them there with us.  This may become a Christmas tradition in homes across America, replacing the horror of holiday air travel for many.

Just two days after Christmas, we took off to California for some desert camping.  Almost every trip I take is a working trip, but once in a while I like to try to avoid work and just do the stuff that normal people do in a campground, and the hope was that this quiet week between Christmas and New Year’s Day would allow that.

On the way we stopped in Yuma to visit with Barb & Joe of MobileInternetSatellite. A couple of years ago I bought a used Hughes satellite Internet system from my friends Brian and Leigh, who had recently completed two years of full-timing.  The price was right and I thought I might use it for an extended trip into Mexico.  But that was before the Mexican Drug War ramped up.  We found other things to do and the satellite dish gathered dust in our storage closet.  With the smaller Mercedes as tow vehicle, carting around the satellite dish became less practical and I decided to try to sell it through Barb & Joe.

Unfortunately, satellite dishes are being replaced by cellular aircards, which for most people provide faster, cheaper, and highly portable Internet.  The only folks who need satellite are those who spend lots of time parked beyond the reach of cellular networks and commercial wifi hotspots.   So selling a dish is pretty tough these days, even one that comes complete with all the accessories.

Now that we are out in the desert, we are experiencing the sort of quiet and vigorous life we have come to like.  There are hikes up palm canyons by day, and the soft sounds of birds each morning (Gambel’s Quail and hummingbirds in particular).  In the evening there is the smell of tamarisk wood fires.  (Since tamarisk is an unwanted invasive species, cutting it down is often encouraged.)

It’s a little cool once the sun slips behind the mountains at about 4 p.m., but shortly after sunset we have the compensation of a startlingly large and brilliant full moon rising.  People in the campground are wrapping up in warm clothes and spending the night outside regardless of the temperature, which as been bottoming out in the 40s.With clear skies most of the time, nights have been bright enough that we don’t need a flashlight to walk around.  When there were clouds on Wednesday, they just added to the drama of the surrounding mountains.

Little desert-related surprises come to those who watch,  like the tarantula that wandered by our campsite yesterday.  (Eleanor got some video of that.)  So we are making no plans and letting each day come.  Most importantly, I’m not getting any business phone calls and virtually no emails of importance, so the computer is off except for an hour in the morning.

I have been getting more of the “how does that car tow that big Airstream” comments this week than usual.  Everyone seems to be shocked when they see the Mercedes parked in front of the Airstream.  I’ll answer questions for anyone who is really interested, but most people just boggle at the sight and then wander off.  I don’t think they really care to learn the details; they’d rather just enjoy the novelty of it.

The one big frustration of the week has been, once again, a tire failure on the Airstream.  One of the older tires (date code August 2008) is showing a worn spot, approximately round and rather uneven, that suggests yet another internal steel belt has broken.  It will need replacement shortly.

Well, that’s the final straw.  I have not been able to wear out a set of tires since 2006, because they keep failing internally.  We replaced two in September for the same reason, and many others over the past few years.   We’ve been using the factory-recommended Goodyear Marathons (designated “ST” for Special Trailer use, load range D) as well as similar tires by Carlisle, Trailer King, and TowMax.  We have had, frankly, a completely unacceptable experience, with multiple failures over the past three years.  It’s 2010 and time to try something different.

I didn’t come to this conclusion lightly. We have eliminated as many possible causes of tire failure as possible. We tow at 65 MH or less, we’ve weighed the trailer, we balance the tires and also use Centramatic wheel balancers.  We use a tire pressure monitoring system to ensure proper inflation at all times.  We’ve aligned the axles of the trailer annually, most recently in September.  I inspect the tires at every fuel stop.  Still, the treads keep suffering rapid tire wear in localized spots.

I’m going to toss all the tires and try a different tire design (not an ST) very soon.  Right now I’m gathering consensus from some respected experts, and comparing various alternatives.  Some people swear by Load Range E tires, others use LT (Light Truck) tires, and some say that bias-ply designs are the answer.  Some think a particular brand makes the difference.  What I find interesting is that so many people have trouble with ST tires that are supposedly designed for trailer use, and yet have more luck with tires that aren’t specifically designed for trailers. As one experienced Airstream dealer said to me this week, “ST just means it’s a tire that isn’t good enough for passenger use!”

I’ll report further on the tires we choose, and our experience with them, a bit later.  With a little effort and a little luck, I won’t be talking about tires much in 2010 … I hope.