Oct 21 2009

Home life didn’t last long …

We’ve been in the house for nearly a week. Time to hit the road!

I’m serious. We haven’t even unpacked the Airstream from our four month odyssey this summer, and we’ve already found a reason to take off again. On Sunday I was doing what suburbanites do all over the USA: reading the Sunday paper. (In my case, it was mostly for the novelty of it, since I haven’t read a Sunday paper in about a year.) And there it was — an ad for the Copperstate Fly-In,the fourth-largest fly-in event in the USA.

To appreciate how that hit me, you need to know that I was for several years a card-carrying member of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA) and the Experimental Aircraft Association. In those heady days B.K. (Before Kid) when we had disposable income from two well-paying jobs, we owned an airplane which we flew all over the east coast. My mother, father, and one older brother all have pilot’s licenses.

In the era B.K. my brother and I flew to major aviation events including EAA’s Oshkosh, the world’s biggest fly-in, and camped next to the airplane in a tent along with 13,000 other aircraft. My brother and I also flew to the 2nd largest fly-in event, Sun-n-Fun, in central Florida, and camped there too.

The third largest fly-in is the Arlington Fly-In, held up in the northwest. I haven’t made it to that one yet. But I was pleasantly surprised to see that the fourth largest fly-in is held only about 80 miles from our home, right here in southern Arizona, this week!

It seems like the perfect diversion from sedentary suburban life. The weather in southern Arizona is ideal right now, and it’s a shame to spend the time cooped up in the office. I think Eleanor is not in a hurry to settle into housewife mode either. All I had to do was mention the existence of Copperstate, and she was immediately on board.

Hey, what’s not to like? Dry RV camping for ten bucks a night, right by the action. Aerial demonstrations, rides, exhibits, and all kinds of aircraft. We’ll see warbirds, ultralights, historic aircraft, plenty of home-built aircraft, helicopters, and who know what else. When the action slows down, I can return to the Airstream to do some work, take a nap, have lunch — or we can drive a short distance to Tempe and Scottsdale for some retail action. (We’ve got a few things on our list at REI, IKEA, and other places up there.)

One of the really great parts about camping at a fly-in is that you can always hear the sound of engines coming and going, all kinds of different engines. Old rotaries radials on the antique fabric bi-planes, pistons on the modern single-engine craft, turbines on the big boys, little 2-strokes on the ultralights, and lots of variants. Pilots love aircraft noise. It is part of the fun of being on the field. I remember one damp morning, very early, at Oshkosh when we were overflown by a low-altitude diamond formation of WW II bombers. I’ll never forget it. The sound was so thunderous and menacing that we all were shaken from a sound sleep and rolled out of our tents thinking (in our half-awake state) that we were going to die. It was great.

So I hope for a few exciting moments like that, this week. Feeling the ground shake as 50-year-old warbirds fly over gives you a tiny taste of the fear of war. In that moment when the bombers passed by, I suddenly knew the terror and helplessness that people must have felt in Europe when the machines of World War II visited them. I think that’s an experience that would be good for anyone, to have perspective on what it means to go to war.

And during the rest of the time, I hope Copperstate causes us to meet some local aviation folks, and maybe a few RV’ers. I’d like to explore the possibility of getting back into aviation in the next few years. It would be fun to do a little flying again, perhaps in an ultralight like we used to do in Vermont.

So now we are re-packing the Airstream. Since we took very little out of it, our re-packing efforts are more about removing things than loading up. Eleanor has unloaded some heavy items like Emma’s schoolbooks and her sewing machine, and we’ve taken out the things that we were transporting from Vermont. We’ve filled the fresh water tank and defrosted the refrigerator. Tomorrow I’ll toss my office bag back in there and hitch up. That should do it.

Still, I’m keeping a lot of stuff in the trailer that, strictly speaking, we don’t need for a three day trip. I can justify this because it’s more trouble that it’s worth to remove those things, but the real reason is that I want to leave the option open to extend the trip. What if we suddenly get the brainstorm to keep wandering, say, up to Roosevelt Lake for a few days? It would be a drag if we couldn’t only because we left some piece of equipment behind. So we are packed as if we are going out indefinitely. I doubt we will stay out more than three days, but anything could happen …

Oct 15 2009

Walnut Canyon National Monument, AZ

We’ve been chased by weather for the past few weeks. It seems that lately every time we leave a place, it gets inundated with horrible weather. We fled the upper peninsula of Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Wyoming, and Colorado, each time two steps ahead of cold rain, storms, and even snow. The weather we have experienced has been very fine almost consistently, despite the fact that we have been running on the ragged edge of winter in these northern states and higher western elevations. We’ve been lucky.

As I mentioned, traveling in the shoulder season also means fewer campsite choices, but there are still options. We wanted to visit Walnut Canyon National Monument after leaving Petrified Forest. There’s no campground at Walnut Canyon, and the Coconino National Forest campgrounds closed over the weekend, but there is a Cracker Barrel restaurant and a Wal-Mart just a few miles away in Flagstaff. That’s what I meant yesterday when I talked about flexibility. There’s always a way, even if it is perhaps not the most glamorous. So from Petrified Forest we drove directly to Walnut Canyon, hiked the 0.9 mile Island Trail (with 240 stairs up and down), and then continued on to Flagstaff for the night.

Walnut Canyon is a remarkable ancient cliff-dwelling site, with literally hundreds of ruins in a relatively small area. The Island Trail brings you past 24 cliff homes, many of which you can enter. The trail is a little strenuous if you aren’t in shape because of the 185 foot stair climb at nearly 7,000 ft elevation, but most people seem to handle it just fine.

We’ve seen a lot of cliff dwellings over the past couple of years, but they still inspire a tingly sensation of ancient mystery for me. For hundreds of years, people lived here in these lofty rock homes. They struggled hard to build houses of stone where mountain goats would struggle to walk. They farmed squash and corn in a climate so dry and soil so sparse that large trees cannot live. Generations of people, raising families communally, experienced all the drama of our modern lives, rich with stories … and hardly any record of their experience survives. I can only look at the stone alcoves and wonder.

The park closed at 5 p.m., before we had time to see everything. So in the morning we towed the Airstream back over to hike the Rim Trail (flat) and complete the Junior Ranger program. (Emma now has over 50 badges, nine of which were acquired this summer. We’ll do a full inventory when we get back to Tucson.)

We could have lingered in Flagstaff, or detoured north to the south rim of the Grand Canyon, but we’d already made the decision to head home. From Walnut Canyon it is an easy drive to I-17 and then down, down, down from Flagstaff off the rim of the Colorado Plateau. Farewell, high elevations and chilly weather. In less than two hours we bottomed out at 3,400 feet and then climbed back up to 5,000 in the town of Prescott, AZ.

We are still at moderately high elevation but we’ll continue downward soon enough. We are making one last stop before we return to home base. Prescott is where our friend Rich C now lives. We traveled with Rich for months back in 2006 while he was full-timing and searching for a new home. He found a new life in this funky western town, and has built a small business downtown making art prints and selling his photography. We haven’t seen him in over a year, so it was time to drop in and check on things. As a bonus, our gruff and itinerant friend Gunny also happens to be visiting Prescott, so it’s a reunion of sorts.

The final trip segment is now determined. We’ll spend two nights here in Prescott, then drive 222 miles to Tucson (with a brief stop in Tempe for an extra bag of frozen Swedish meatballs from IKEA). Our summer travels began on June 17 and will end on October 16 — almost exactly four months on the road. The total mileage will come to about 12,000 (including side trips and unhitched travel), of which about 85% is towing miles.

If you are looking for grand conclusions, you might be disappointed. Although our travels will cease again for a little while (perhaps six weeks, perhaps longer), I don’t see this as an end at all. We are simply switching gears for a little while. I can’t conclude my thoughts because I don’t see a conclusion yet. We are still traversing the Maze of life, still trying to grow bigger in relation to our surroundings, still trying to understand the world. At most, we will pause to reflect, but the long walk through The Maze will continue. I’ll keep writing, too.

Oct 14 2009

Petrified Forest National Park, AZ

There is always a way. Keep that in mind when you travel. When you have little time off (say, a long weekend), and many things you want to do it’s easy to get worked up when things don’t go exactly to plan. In the Tour of America blog I always emphasized the importance of flexibility, because only by being flexible could we deal with the many unexpected events that travel threw at us.

In other words, we had a choice: we could go through life on the road constantly being disappointed by things … things we couldn’t do, things that went wrong, things that made life a little harder … or we could roll with the punches, think creatively, and look for alternatives. “Always look on the bright side of life.” This has been particularly applicable to our overnight stays lately. To get to the places we wanted to be, we’ve had to work a little outside the box.

On Monday we drove from Cortez CO down through the Navajo Nation on Rt 491 about 100 miles to Interstate 40. As drives go, Rt 491 is not especially fantastic but it is not bad. The Navajo Nation is sparsely settled, with a few small towns that hold most of the population. Along the road you’ll see scattered homes and small farms, and almost every home has a traditional hogan beside it.

If you look closely you might see small hand-lettered signs for “Indian Frybread” or other items for sale, but it’s not until you reach I-40 that the big-time tourist traps start to appear. There are several along I-40, including Geronimo’s, Chee’s, and Indian City. You can get authentic Navajo rugs and other crafts in these places, but beware … if you see a rug (not a wall hanging) that costs less than $200, it’s probably not a true Navajo rug. They are meticulously hand made and quite expensive, even in the small sizes. $600 for a 3×2 rug is not uncommon, if the quality is high.

Our goal for the day was Petrified Forest National Park. For drive-by park visitors, this has to be one of the most convenient in the USA. You just exit I-40 and there you are at the Visitor Center. The entire park is a drive-through, with pull-outs or parking lots at all the interesting spots. Almost all of the parking lots are big enough for any RV. If you have a full day, you can putter down the 28-mile road, stop at half a dozen good places, and exit the park at the southern end with time to spare. That puts you on Rt 180 which brings you northwest to I-40 again.

There is a little hiking to be done in Petrified Forest. We’ve done most of the hikes before, but somehow managed to miss the “Long Logs” and “Agate House” trails from the museum/visitor center at the south end of the park, so we did those this time. Both are well worth the short walk (about 3 miles in total on level ground), but don’t be surprised if there’s a strong breeze. There’s not much to block the wind here, and it seems to be windy more often than not.

Along those trails are the best concentrations of the beautifully agatized ancient pine trees that give this park its name. You’ll also see a partially restored home (dating from about 1100 AD) made from blocks of petrified wood — that’s “Agate House.”

When you see all of the incredible and colorful petrified logs, the temptation to pick up a tiny piece as a souvenir is strong — but don’t do it! The park is amazing because people have been restrained enough not to loot the logs, and so they are still lying there at your feet as if you were the first person to discover them.

Besides, the fine for taking a piece, no matter how small, starts at $325, and every visitor to the park gets a “snitch sheet” for the express purpose of turning you in to the authorities! (If you want a big chunk, wait till you get up Rt 180 to the town of Holbrook, and you’ll find “Bob’s” has an incredible amount of legally-collected petrified wood for sale.)

There’s more to the park than just petrified wood, too. You’ll find some fantastic concentrations of petroglyphs at Newspaper Rock, and the remains of a small Ancient Puebloan settlement, called Puerco Pueblo.

For RV’ers, the minor challenge of Petrified Forest National Park is that there is no campground anywhere in the area. You have two choices: just drive through and continue to your destination elsewhere, or spend the night at one of the two large gift shops at the southern entrance of the park. Overnight parking there is free there, but if you want them to turn the electricity on you need to buy something in the store. Since there is no traffic in or out of the park at night, it’s beautifully quiet for sleeping.

That’s where we ended up for the night on Monday. On Tuesday we towed the Airstream back into the park for a second shot at some of the places, then had lunch in the Airstream, and finally departed to the west. I’ll describe our next stop, and the dodge we had to invent to make a national park visit possible, in tomorrow’s blog.

Oct 12 2009

Chasing 72 degrees

Full-timers often say they are “chasing 72 degrees,” meaning that they follow the weather around the country to maintain that perfect summer day as often as possible. Normally that’s our plan as well, but it’s harder than you might think. If you’ve followed this blog for a while, you know we often run into unexpectedly hot or cold weather because the timing is never perfect.

Lately we’ve been chasing 62 degrees, with freezing nights. We spent too much time in September getting across the midwest, and as a result we arrived in the higher elevations west of Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah in time for fall. Rather than head to lower elevations, we’ve taken advantage of the shoulder season and enjoyed relatively uncrowded campgrounds and trails.

But the late season is putting a cramp on our activities. At night we’ve encountered temps as low as 18 degrees, which forces us to burn a lot of propane (and hence buy a fresh tank every four or five days). Morning hikes have been chilly, and the sun is setting early. Seasonal stores and attractions have shorter hours. Evening Ranger talks have ended.

The big limitation of fall is that some campgrounds are closing. We were considering visiting three Flagstaff-area national park sites (Sunset Crater, Wupatki, and Walnut Canyon) but the only camping nearby is at National Forest Service sites in the Coconino NF. Those sites close for the season today, October 12.

This is happening all over, as overnight temperatures dip to freezing. So we’ve decided to skip those three national park sites this time, and start working our way toward the low desert. Eleanor and I realized this morning that we’ve been deliberately delaying our return to Tucson only because we have a house there and we know that once we arrive, we’ll settle into a homebody routine. Ironically, if we didn’t have a house, as in years past, we would already be in Tucson at a park enjoying the dry 85-degree days because we would know that in a week or two we’d continue on.

Well, we are not going to delay much longer. Last night the catalytic heater refused to light. It has been getting increasingly balky over the past two weeks, taking longer to light and occasionally going out if not run on the maximum setting. These are symptoms of the catalyst pad being “poisoned” by contaminants. Since this heater has been used only infrequently over the past eighteen months I suspect bad propane may have killed it. Dust can also terminate a catalytic heater prematurely, but we have had a dust cover on it. When we get back to Tucson I will have to investigate “an authorized Factory Service Technician” as the owner’s manual suggests. I suspect that catalytic heater service technicians are not on every corner.

We used the furnace instead, so we weren’t cold last night. I just hate listening to it cycle on and off in the early morning, especially when it comes on every five or ten minutes. That’s a sign that we need to move somewhere warmer. If we were going to skip the house I’d aim at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in southern AZ, but the lure of suburban life is calling us. It is time to chase — and overtake, for a while — 72 degrees.

Oct 07 2009

Curecanti National Recreation Area, CO

It was time to break camp at Cheyenne Mountain state park. I took a short walk to drop off the trash in the bear-proof dumpster, and the camp host gave me a cheery wave and a big “HEY! How’s it going?” as I walked by. I thought he was being a little enthusiastic for a casual greeting, but when I returned to the campsite I found the ranger standing there and she said:

“Are you the guy who posted that nice blog about us?”

Turned out she’d been tipped off by Google Alerts. Everybody’s using it now, and that means within a few hours of my posting anything, random people are coming to blog to check it out because it mentioned something they’ve asked Google to monitor for them.

I’ve got to be more careful. Sometimes I don’t like a campground or a town. If I post my thoughts before we depart, the rise of technology means that people in the local area will find out before we’ve safely escaped the area. You might think I’m paranoid, but it has happened before. I once was threatened with a lawsuit for “defamination” by a campground owner in Creede CO for expressing my opinions. He carried on a campaign against me for weeks, with phone calls, faxes, and emails. I still get angry comments on the Tour of America blog for having dared to write sarcastic remarks about Solvang CA. I’m not afraid of the counter-criticism, but I’d prefer not to have to deal with grumpy locals at my campsite.

Fortunately, I can say nice things about our overnight stop. We drove the beautifully scenic Route 50 from Canon City, through the Royal Gorge, and up to Salida, Gunnison, and eventually to Curecanti National Recreation Area. I recommend this road trip to anyone who likes western scenery. We are parked in one of eleven campgrounds strung along the edge of Blue Mesa Reservoir (the largest body of water in Colorado). The Blue Mesa’s name is apt, as the water is stunningly blue at times, almost rivaling the color of Crater Lake. All around this long reservoir are pinnacles and scrub-covered hills, and the road follows it for many miles from just west of the town of Gunnison to Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park.

We have stopped at the Lake Fork marina and campground, 27 miles west of Gunnison. There are only two other campers here, since it’s so late in the season. The visitor center is closed, there’s no campground host, and the campground is dry and self-service this time of year, but that’s all fine. Frankly, having nobody at the desk just means we can check in a lot quicker. I bought a $6 overnight ticket from the self-service machine and we picked a spot. Every spot here has a view of the water.

On the way here, we paused at Monarch Pass. The last time we stopped there was in 2006, and the grade leading up to Monarch Pass hasn’t shallowed one bit since. It’s a long pull to the top, several miles of 6% grade leading up to over 11,312 feet of elevation. I took this photo for those who still don’t believe that you can tow an Airstream comfortably in the mountains with a V-6 turbodiesel. The car was perfectly content to haul us up the hill, and the engine stayed at normal operating temperature.

As I write this, the sun is rising over the reservoir. It was cold last night, and right now the official temperature in Gunnison is 18 degrees. If I’d thought it was going to be so cold I would have run the catalytic heater instead of the furnace, to save electricity. The Tri-Metric battery monitor says we managed to use 40% of our battery capacity in one night, and most of that was due to the furnace cycling on every few minutes, sucking up 7.5 amps as it ran. I got up at 5:45 and switched over to the catalytic heater but the damage to our power supply was already done. Fortunately, the skies are projected to be very clear again today, so we’ll probably get back to 90% charge by afternoon.

The plan for today is to continue heading west on Rt 50/285 through Montrose and up to Grand Junction. That’s about as far as we’ve gotten with it. We need to decide today if we are going to Dinosaur National Monument in northwestern Colorado (a big detour), or Canyonlands National Park in Utah, or both. Since it is getting cold at the upper elevations, weather will be a big factor in the decision. We can see the end of our travels in this part of the country approaching quickly, but we’re milking it for all we can.