RV Trip Day 20: Bryce Canyon

Kenji, who is normally a late riser, woke us up at 7am saying he was ready to go to the Grand Canyon. I made coffee and we drove a couple miles to the visitor's center while my kids were still in bed. I dragged them out, and we saw the Grand Canyon:

Then we hurried to get on the road and get back to cell phone service so Sonya could get into her class at 9:30 Mountain time.

The directions about road closures were very unclear and we didn't have cell service so we couldn't check them, so we probably added more than an hour onto our trip by driving all the way back to Flagstaff when we didn't have to. The shorter road was closed Westbound, but we didn't realize till it was too late that it was not closed Eastbound, so we could have taken it. Oh well.

We drove all morning, then in the afternoon, we stopped at Horseshoe Bend. I had never heard of it, but we saw a sign on the side of the road, and this picture made me want to stop:

It was pretty spectacular:

Then we stopped at Lake Powell to go swimming. I remember having an amazing swim in Lake Powell in 1999 when it was 120 degrees out, but the only places we could find to swim during covid was kind of muddy and weird, and it's not quite the same when it's only in the 50s. The Osunas weren't interested, but the McKagans went anyway:

Then we drove to Bryce Canyon. We were originally going to stop at Zion National Park first, but since we had left Silver City so late, we skipped that. The only campground in Bryce that is open in the winter is first come first serve, and with all our stops we weren't going to make it till after 8pm, so it wasn't at all clear we were going to get a spot, but we decided to try it anyway, with the backup plan that we could just camp in the Subway parking lot outside of the park if we couldn't get a spot. (I never get over how awesome it is that if we can't find a nice place to stay or get stuck, we can stay on the side of the road or in a parking lot, and it is still perfectly cozy and nice inside.)

Since I don't know whether there will be signal wherever we are camping tonight, I'll go ahead and post this from the road before we stop. UPDATE: We made it to the Bryce Canyon campground and the first spot we saw was available! There is also excellent cell service here. Settling in for the night with homemade chili!

Today's route:

RV Trip Day 19: Grand Canyon

Posting this a day late because there was no cell service at our campground in the Grand Canyon so I couldn't post last night.

Today our goal was to get to the Grand Canyon, which was a 400-mile drive through windy roads, so we wanted to get started early. We packed as much as we could last night, then set our alarm to wake up early. Michael went straight to the RV and drove it out of the steep driveway onto the side of the road, and my dad drove the bikes and bike rack down and helped Michael put them on. I gathered up the children and the last of our things, walked down to the road, and made everyone breakfast in the RV while Michael was attaching the bikes. Then we headed out and the kids zoomed into classes from the road.

We stopped for gas and snacks in rural New Mexico and found we were in Trump country. There was a huge Trump sign outside of the gas station, and a sign on the door saying they would serve you with or without a mask, in spite of the governor’s order saying you must wear masks. Inside, no one was wearing a mask, not even the people working there. I was glad I had just bought some new N95 masks, and tried to get out of there as quickly as possible. I would have preferred not to give them any of my money, but it was the only gas station for hundreds of miles, and we wouldn’t have made it to the next one.

I knew there would be some cellular dead spots today because we were going through the mountains, and I had been carefully following the T-Mobile signal map trying to time the dead spots with my kids’ school breaks. However, the signal map was overly optimistic, and the kids had some frustrating times trying to get into classes and missing some classes. We spent way too much time troubleshooting internet problems. Then, just when we thought we’d gotten through the worst of it, google maps rerouted us around construction and into a bunch of dead zones just in time for Lucy’s Hebrew class.

I was relieved to see at the end of the day that our meters were reading "low" for both the gray water and blackwater tanks, which means the gray water was leaking less than it was before (before it would empty so fast that it wouldn't even get up to low), and the blackwater wasn't leaking much at all (it fills less quickly than the gray water tank, so it should have been low even if it wasn't leaking). That means all that work Michael did actually did make it better! When the sun started to set and it got cold, I turned on the heater and it got warmer. And there was no noise so I actually had to feel it to check whether it was on!

I bought a cart full of groceries, and baked salmon, potatoes, and kale in the oven for dinner, timing it to be ready as we arrived at the Grand Canyon. We arrived with no RV troubles, and settled in for an early night so we could see the canyon early in the morning.

Our route for the day:

RV Trip Days 13-18: Agave House (Silver City, NM)

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!

RV Trip Day 12: Agave House (Silver City, NM)

The mechanic came first thing in the morning, and immediately got the RV running by injecting fuel directly into the carburator to bypass the thing that was blocking it. He said now that it was running we should bring it into his shop so he could address the underlying problem. He immediately seemed like he knew what he was talking about way more than any of the other mechanics we had talked to, so we decided we should go for it and have him fix anything he could. He figured out that the fuel filter had gotten clogged so he replaced it. He said we also might need to get the fuel pump replaced, but that would take all day and we could get by without it for a while, and he knew we were eager to be on our way, so he recommended we just get it done next time we were stopped. He also figured out the cause of the problem that was making the car not start, which all the other mechanics had incorrectly diagnosed: there is a problem with our ignition safety switch, where it incorrectly thinks we are in drive when we are in park, so it refuses to start the car. He said that's an easy replacement, but he would have to order the part and it would take a while, so he recommended that Michael order the part and replace it himself, and taught him how to start the car without a screwdriver in the meantime. He also gave us great advice about our generator (which he thinks is now fine due to the fuel stabilizer) and our noisy heater, let us use his wifi so the kids could do online school while he worked on the car, and let us fill up our water tanks, which were so close to empty we had let our dirty dishes pile up and stopped flushing the toilet. And he charged us way too little. The mechanic was Mexican, and justified my feeling that it's always better to hire women and people of color when possible because they have to be better than white men to succeed, so they're probably pretty good at what they do. If you're ever in Eloy, Arizona in need of a mechanic, I can definitely recommend a good one!

We left around 1pm, behind schedule, but still early enough to make it to my dad's tonight. We grabbed takeout lunch at a wonderful little hole in the wall Mexican restaurant in Eloy, and started heading East again. While we were driving, I ordered the part he said we needed to be delivered to my dad's, and found a mechanic in Silver City who could replace the fuel pump (although later Michael decided we probably didn't need it, as the problem that was supposed to solve had worked itself out). 

We do two types of camping in the RV: camping at a site with hookups for electricity, water, and sewer, which is really nice but expensive, and dry camping, where we just camp on the side of the road and use our tanks and our generator. We can pretty easily do one night of dry camping between hookups, and we can do two if we are extra careful with water and skip showers. Last night was our third night of dry camping, and we made it, but the water situation was definitely getting tight, and I was pretty desperate for a shower today. After we filled up the water at the mechanic's, I could finally wash the dishes!

We stopped at the Texas Canyon rest stop, where we always stop when we drive through Tucson because there are awesome rocks that the kids like to climb:

I took a few pictures of our RV, which we named Sea Lion. It looks huge compared to a person or a car, but it looks tiny next to commercial trucks:

Then we stopped at The Thing, a bizarre roadside attraction that is advertised with giant billboards for hundreds of miles and that I really can't describe, except to say it fit with our dinosaur theme. The only picture we took there is of this weird wine holder in the gift shop:

And then we headed into New Mexico! We'll be spending the next several days visiting my dad near Silver City, New Mexico. He has two houses in the woods outside of town that he uses for vacation rentals. Normally we all stay in the same house, but due to covid, we'll be staying in one house and my dad and his partner will stay in the other house. We are pretty excited to have a bit more space for a while, and are ordering supplies and scheduling work to be done on the RV while we are stopped for a bit.

We finally made it to my dad's driveway around 8:15, but it took another hour to figure out how to get it up the steep rocky driveway (we had to take the bike rack off), and haul all our stuff in. My dad had left dinner for us, and we had a delightful dinner and even more delightful shower, and finally made it to bed not in the RV.

Our route for today:

RV Trip Day 11: Tucson

We got up early and went for a walk to the edge of Joshua Tree National Park before school. It was prettier at night when you could just see the shapes of things. During the day it just seemed like a desert with a lot of dry brown poky things. I know some people love the desert, but I don't understand the appeal.

Today online schooling begins for Lucy and Sonya, so we have a lot less flexibility in our schedule. After our walk, we turned on the generator to charge all the computers, and the kids called in to their morning classes:

We had some technical difficulties with signal going in and out, and spent a lot of time toggling hot spots, but they mostly managed to successfully attend class today. I thought maybe I would be able to do a little work while the kids were in school, but I have no ability to focus on work while hurtling down the freeway with everything shaking, so I spend my time while the kids are in school troubleshooting their internet problems, planning where to stop next, blogging, checking Facebook, and searching the internet for ideas about how to organize the chaos that is all of our crap exploding all over this tiny house.

We tried to stop at some hot springs, but apparently we were supposed to make reservations two weeks in advance, which we didn't, so that didn't work out.

At 4pm, Michael was surprised that we were only an hour from our destination, and said, "Wait, I thought today was supposed to be a long driving day." I pointed out that we'd been driving since 9:30 and hadn't really stopped all day. I think he jinxed us by saying the day seemed too easy.

Shortly after that we stopped to get gas, and soon after we pulled away from the gas station, the engine gave out, along with the power steering, and Michael had to maneuver quickly to get us to the side of the road. After that the car wouldn't start, even with our now-standard screwdriver trick. A woman stopped and asked if we needed help, gave us a bunch of advice, and then came back with her truck and towed us into a hotel parking lot so we were safely out of traffic. I made sure to point out to the kids how this awesome woman was helping us and knew way more about cars than Michael. She recommended a mechanic, and we called the mechanic and he said he could come out tomorrow morning. I googled for mobile mechanics and called 6 of them, but none of them answered their phones or returned my calls. I thought about getting the RV towed, since I now know our insurance will do that, but it seemed unlikely that we could get it towed anywhere that could look at it before the mechanic who had already said he could come out in the morning. Michael did more internet research, bought some oil and poured into "probably the right place", and when that didn't work he decided that this was beyond his ability to fix and we settled in for the night. I had really been looking forward to a night at a place with hookups and a shower after 2 nights of dry camping, and we were almost out of water, but we had enough. Since we had just gotten gas we had plenty available to run the generator, which was still working fine. Arizona is hot, so we tried running the AC for the first time, and it worked great. I guess I should have checked that it worked before we left, but it didn't occur to me that we would need it in February. I made dinner and we played computer games.

Michael and I are lamenting that we are falling into traditional gender roles on this trip, with him fixing the car and me cooking, but also I have no interest in trying to fix the car. We try to break those roles as much as possible by him washing dishes and me fixing stuff on the inside of the RV.

Our planned route for today:

Our actual route: