I've gotten behind on blogging because we've been staying in one place and there isn't the time to write while driving, but we are still having plenty of adventures.
My dad has two vacation houses out in the forest in Pinos Altos (near Silver City), Agave House and Raven House, separated by a short path that is probably the equivalent distance of a half a block. We are staying at Agave House and they are staying at Raven House, but the driveway up to Agave House is too steep for the RV, so it is parked at Raven House. Since our whole life is in that RV, we regularly walk back and forth to get some item we forgot or work on the RV. Here's a picture of Agave House from the rock my kids like to climb:
Once we got here we decided to turn our attention to the non-engine related problems the RV is having, which we couldn't really work on till we were stopped: the horrible squeaking noise that the heater makes, which requires a blower motor replacement, and the leak in the gray water tank, which started as a tiny drip, but has become so large that the tank no longer holds water and we are illegally dumping gray water all over the highway. Since we can't avoid producing gray water while we're living in the RV, and it has to be dry to repair it, while we're stopped here is the only chance we'll have to fix it before we get home. And the blower motor for our old heater is a very hard-to-find part. We called the only RV repair person in Silver City as soon as we got here, and talked to him for a while and he said he could totally fix all our issues, except he couldn't get to it till Monday, by which time we will be gone. So we asked him where to get parts, and he recommended a great RV parts shop, which was able to get the blower motor, and Michael resigned himself to fixing stuff himself.
On newer heaters, the blower motor is designed to come out easily because they often need to be replaced, but our heater is from two models before they figured that out, and Michael had to take the whole thing apart to get to the blower motor. And because it is 35 years old, all the pipe connections were rusted together and all the gaskets just crumbled when disconnected, and because the thing wasn't designed to be serviced like the new models, he had to take apart practically every pipe connection and gasket in there. Michael started taking it apart on Wednesday, and then spent all day Thursday taking it apart and removing the blower motor. At the end of Thursday he looked like poor Herbie Hart who has taken his thromdimbulator apart and doesn't know if he can put it back together again:
He spent all day Friday putting it all back together again, and when he was done, just as he feared, it didn't work. The new blower worked great (and didn't squeak), but the pilot light would no longer light, so it was just blowing cold air. This was a more serious problem than the squeaky blower, which was annoying but not unsafe. We were about to go through some very cold places, and we couldn't do it without a functioning heater. Sonya saw that Michael was discouraged and made him a slideshow of pugs and puppies to cheer him up. I insisted on taking a break for Shabbat, which meant there was no way we would be able to leave on Sunday as originally planned. I called the RV repair guy to see if he could still help us on Monday, but he said since we last called, he had gotten booked through next Friday. So we were on our own. On Sunday Michael took the heater apart even more and got a bunch of supplies to test every component, and eventually figured out that he had installed one of the switches a little off, and after adjusting it and putting the whole thing back together, it lit the pilot light and heat came out! But the flame didn't stay lit. He fiddled with it a bit more, and by Sunday afternoon, it was lighting and staying lit and actually producing heat!
Then he turned his attention to fixing the leaky tank. Our tanks are made of ABS plastic, and apparently nothing sticks to that so it is pretty much impossible to patch. There was evidence that a previous owner had tried to patch it, and it hadn't worked. After much internet research, Michael determined that the best way to repair a hole in ABS plastic is to get a plastic welder and melt more ABS plastic into the hole. He couldn't find anyone on the internet repairing sewer tanks this way, but he found lots of videos of people repairing other kinds of ABS plastic tanks this way, and he was confident he could do it.
On Friday morning, I was feeling very grateful that the leak was only in the gray water tank and not the blackwater tank (which holds the stuff that goes in the toilet). A leak in the gray water tank (which holds the stuff that goes down the sink and shower drains) is still kinda gross, but much, much, much less gross than a leak in the other tank. Then Friday afternoon, while Michael was taking a break from the heater to test out melting plastic onto the gray water tank, I noticed a small drip coming from the blackwater tank too. This was very bad. Michael thought he could fix the blackwater tank too, but only if the tank was empty, and unfortunately we had decided not to dump it before going to my dad's. However, I knew from the internet that you could just dump into a house sewer clean out, so I found the sewer clean out and figured out how to park the RV so the sewer pipe could reach it. Then Michael pointed out that the sewer clean out was uphill from the RV, so gravity would prevent the tank from emptying into the clean out, and the yard was configured such that there was nowhere to park the RV that was as high as the clean out. After considering several options, I decided that the best way to empty the tank was to use a 5-gallon bucket and just carry the sewage to the clean out. In my eagerness to get this gross job over with, I filled up a bucket with sewage without thinking all the way through the plan, and then realized I really needed a funnel to ensure that the sewage didn't spill when I poured it into the clean out. My dad and I came up with a plan to make a funnel out of a laundry detergent bottle, but he needed to get the bottle from town, and it was taking too long for him to get back, and I really wanted to get rid of this bucket of poop before Shabbat. So I just carried it back to Agave House on the trail and flushed it down the toilet. It was gross, but it got rid of the bucket. On Sunday we made the funnel and used that the empty the rest of the tank.
I'm pretty sure the leak in the blackwater tank is entirely our fault for letting the tank freeze. Normally if it's going to be below freezing we put RV antifreeze into the tanks and heat the inside of the RV so the pipes don't freeze. But it was so warm during the day that it just didn't occur to me that it had been below freezing every night we had been in Silver City, so we took no precautions, and not only the tanks, but the water in the toilet and probably some of our fresh water pipes froze.
Unfortunately, even after emptying the gray water tank and letting it sit for several days in the desert, there was still water inside, and Michael's attempts to seal the hole on Monday resulted in the hot plastic turning the water to steam, which made bubbles that burst through the melted plastic and left many tiny pinhole leaks in the plastic he had just put on. Also the fumes were horrible, and it dripped everywhere and burned him. We realized way to late in the process that the valve to empty the tank is slightly higher than the bottom of the tank, so it's pretty much impossible to empty the tank completely. This seems like a very poor design. We even tried poking a hole all the way through the bottom of the tank, but even this wasn't enough to dry it out. After several hours of attempting to fix the gray water tank and just making a giant mess, Michael determined that he just couldn't do it, and after that went so badly, he didn't even want to attempt to do the same thing on the gross blackwater tank. We called several RV repair places and parts stores, and they all confirmed Michael's conclusion that these tanks are impossible to repair and we just need to replace them. Also, there are so many different sizes of tanks that no one has them in stock and they have to be special ordered and that takes a week, and then replacing them is a very involved process that takes all day. So basically it was impossible to either repair or replace the tanks before we get back to Seattle. We resigned ourselves to just letting them leak on the highway and putting a pan under them at campsites, and started getting ready to leave Tuesday morning, two days later than we had planned to leave.
Meanwhile, we had arrived last Tuesday night desperate to do laundry to the point that my kids had to go to school naked our first morning here. (They left their cameras off.) I washed all their clothes, then put them in the dryer and the dryer wouldn't start! My dad took their clothes and dried them at the other house so they at least had something to wear, but I had many many more loads of laundry to do and really didn't want to haul them and back and forth between houses or hang them all up to dry. My dad said it's impossible to find an appliance repair person in Silver City, so while Michael was obsessed with fixing the blower motor, I became obsessed with fixing the dryer. After carefully going through the dryer troubleshooting guide that came with the dryer and doing a lot of internet research, I determined that the problem was that the dryer thought that the door was open when it wasn't, probably because the door switch was defective, and it has a safety mechanism that prevents it from turning on when the door is open. Sears apparently no longer makes the switch, but I found it on ebay for $20, and my dad ordered a new one. But it wouldn't arrive till too late for our mound of laundry. So I detached the switch and shorted the circuit to make the dryer think the door was always closed, and now it works great!
We have been doing some fun stuff as well. On Wednesday we went for a hike in the mountains behind my dad's property:
Then the kids made a spa in the bathroom, which was pretty awesome:
We've been having meals together outside, on the porch during the day and around a fire pit in the evenings. Some days this is pleasant, other days it's miserably cold, and some days it's just so cold that we don't do it.
Thursday night was the start of Purim, so we made hamentaschen (we didn't have a rolling pin so Lucy used a wine bottle to roll out the dough):
During normal times our synagogue always has an amazing Purim service where they tell the story of Esther as a musical based on a different theme each year of an existing musical, such as Hamilton, West Side Story, Fiddler on the Roof, or Les Miserables, adapting songs from that musical to tell the story. Purim is our favorite holiday of the year, and we are so sad to miss having Purim at synagogue. It is also a sad reminder that last year, after the rabbi and musicians had practiced for months to put on an amazing Purim spiel, covid exploded and they had to cancel. At the time they thought they were just "postponing" it for a little while, and we would just celebrate Purim late, but now it's been a whole year, and there was no amazing Purim spiel last year or this year. However, the kids had a great suggestion that we should celebrate by watching a video of one of the old Purim spiels, since they are all recorded and posted on Youtube. So that's what we did. It was bittersweet seeing our congregation in the video, and pointing out all the people who we hadn't seen for so long. But also really wonderful to watch.
On Saturday, the kids wanted to go to the hot springs, so we drove an hour and a super windy road that made my kids very sick, only to discover that the hot springs were closed for day use because of covid. My dad said there were wild hot springs nearby that you could hike to if you didn't mind fording a river a couple times, so we did that instead. It was very cold, especially when you were knee deep in a cold river, but we made it to the hot springs and they were very hot and wonderful. Then we had to get out and hike back in the cold. I think the rapid succession of hot and cold made us very tired, and on Sunday my kids were too tired to do much besides lay on the couch.
On Monday, in addition to giving Michael moral support when he was trying to fix the tanks, I cleaned and organized the RV, which was a total chaotic mess after everything we'd done to it (see poor Herbie Hart above), and we packed up our stuff, which was also quite a process. Monday afternoon Sonya was in zoom Hebrew school and her teacher asked who had been outside today. I felt guilty when Sonya did not raise her hand. We've definitely been working on the RV too much to pay much attention to the kids or get them out to enjoy the beautiful scenery enough. But after this, we are off again!
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