when is hot...Hot??? 118??

It seems like I just finished the last section but with the demise of our outlets this seems like a good time to write. Cheryl is driving and I can use the DC to AC converter that we bought for the Alaska trip to run some of our ac items in the cab. We use it mostly for the computer but also for the phone charger.

This is a part of the country that I have never seen. As a child, westerns were a big part of our growing up. Many of the tv shows were westerns like the Lone Ranger, Wanted Dead or Alive, Cheyenne and of course, Maverick. They showed us a world that was totally different from anything we had experienced. It was adventure but most of all it was an alien landscape. Many of the movies of that time were also westerns. John Wayne, Roy Rogers and many more were our fare for growing up. Movies like High Noon taught us about courage, Shane taught us to do the right thing and who could forget Old Yeller. Many of these movies were shot amidst some of th most spectacular landscape imaginable. Monument Valley was a busy place providing backdrops to these stories.

I have always wanted to see the west and this is my chance. It is a thrill just driving through it. It will be even more fun when we come back and spend some time actually becoming a part of the west. We have the hats and boots from our soujourn in the west 2 summers ago. That was the warmup for this trip into the heart of cowboy country! I hope the west is ready for us.

We are driving through the range. It used to be an open range but there are fences now. One of these fast moving semis could make a mess out of a herd of longhorns. Last night when we pulled into the Flying J, there was a truck hauling an open trailer with 5 young longhorns with these little footlong horns. I assume they were little but I suppose they could have been miniatures. They didn’t have that real young look, just small.

Cheryl drove for 2 hours giving me a great break. It got a little hairy at the end as we rounded a corner and found ourselves in Albaquerque. The road was under construction and there was no place to pull over so she soldiered on with little trouble.

We did see one dead deer but that is the best day the deer have had since we left town. There were plenty of other roadkill; armadillo’s, possums and some things that were unrecognizable. We started to see more ups and downs and lots of mesas. I am somewhat disappointed that we haven’t seen any of the famous western cacti (or is it cactuses). I am sure we will see them eventually.

We were headed for the Flying J at Winslow Arizona (where I don’t have 7 women on my mind). We weren’t going to make it so we stopped for a bit of gas. As I have said, the Flying Js have had the best prices for gas of anyone so I wanted to fill up there. We are getting closer and closer to California where gas is a whopping $4.50. I paid $3.92 and wondered by how much the FJ will beat that price. In another 45 minutes, I pulled into the FJ, glanced up at the sign and noticed it was .93. OK, I can live with a penny a gallon more. I took my card in and came back out and started pumping. I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the pump until later when I noticed the meter cross $250 with only 40 some gallons. I stopped the pump and looked at the guage. It was only then that I noticed that the price was $4.93……not 3.93. I turned the pump on again and tried to digest what was happening. I checked out other pumps and then looked up at the sign. Yep…..it was close to $5. This has to be a mistake! I stopped the pump and turned it off and went inside to pay. I asked the girl how come the price was so high. FJs have had the best prices all across the country and now this. She looked at me and said that the price had taken a huge jump just 20 minutes before I got there. I told her that I guess that I shouldn’t have taken so much time at lunch. She laughed and said that people weren’t taking it very well but I didn’t notice anyone pulling away from the pumps without gasoline. Diesel fuel hadn’t gone up so now gas was a half a buck more than diesel.

We were thinking about going a little further but after than, we decided we need to get our money’s worth out of the free camping so here we sit. It is 103 degrees here in the desert. This would be the time to check out the suggestion the gentleman from Camper World made. We drove by a beautiful brandey new Camper World so we decided to pop in and give them a chance to help some pathetic travelers. Unfortunately, we forgot it is Saturday afternoon. There was some activity in the service area but we knew we were in trouble. We talked to a gentleman in the service department and he explained that the only people in the service department were setting up new campers for delivery. The repair techs were all gone. He asked about the problems and suggested that since I had checked the fuses and breakers that the breakers on the generator itself may be the culprit….breakers on the generator????? Hmmmm, I didn’t know that! After parking the rig in a space that was about 20 feet too small, I went out to the generator, removed the cover and found 2…count them……2 breakers and one of them was in the wrong position. I flipped it, came in and turned on the generator and voila! The A/c in the bedroom came on and all of the other outlets worked again.

So here I am, working on the blog while Cheryl fixes supper. We are both watching tiger begin to make his move while we try to forget that gas has reached $5 a gallon. It is still fun but our gas budget that was ridiculous to start with is now totally absurd. Maybe we will spend our time where the gas is still $3.72 a gallon……it is still the same….isn’t it?? Please tell me it is………Time will tell. It seems like it would be cheaper to buy a piece of land and just stay there. Actually, we could probably buy a piece on the ocean for this kind of money.

Things are still ok!

Catch y’all later.

Clayton & Cheryl

Ok, so I lied. I had uploaded this morning and the program only allows one upload a day so another day has gone by and I will tell you about it. We are in California, right on the shore of the Colorado River in Needles. It is nice to be off the road and out of the Flying Js. We were never able to put out the slides so we were pretty cramped. We were so tired when we stopped that we didn’t get much put away and were still crawling around things. Tomorrow we hit our first stay for a week place. We are ready. We will be in Redlands, California. That is near Los Angeles. Of course lots of things are near Los Angeles. We will go to Ashton’s graduation in Pasadena from there and fill our time with other things around LA.

Today was pretty neat. We rolled out of Winslow, AZ at some undetermined time. We were somewhat confused about the time. Clocks that we had adjusted were not the same and we were not sure which one was right. We did check the cell phone and assumed that it was correct since we were not close enough to CA to be picking up a CA tower.

It was in the high 90s when we pulled off the road last night. By dark, the temperature had dropped significantly and in the middle of the night we were scrambling for light blankets. It was about 80 when we pulled out. The scenery had been changing from the range through New Mexico with cattle spread all over. The land got poorer and poorer until we no longer saw any cattle at all. The terrain consisted of rocks and gravel with sagebrush. There was nothing for the cattle to eat here although we would occasionally (very) see a cattle pen area for loading them into trucks.

We saw small mountains that got bigger as we proceeded west. We seemed to be always climbing. The truck worked real hard to keep 50 mph and you would wonder why. They I would look in the mirror and it would be obvious that we had been climbing for at least 5 miles. Eventually, we saw a sign that said 5,000 ft and still we climbed. We stopped at a rest area to make breakfast/lunch and I was having trouble breathing. I realized that this happened in the Canadian Rockies when we were above 7500 feet. We even saw a mountain with snow on it. Not a lot but enough to leave white sections. I don’t think they will last the summer but for now they looked nice.

We drove through Flagstaff and stopped at Kirkland to fill up with the last non-california gas for a while. The price was $3.99 a gallon. I talked to the woman in the store and told her about my $4.93 gas at the Winslow Flying J. She was horrified. She said there must be something drastically wrong. Gas should never have been that much?????

The temperature continued to rise. It was 104 at the FJ. Coast to Coast has a resort right at the California border so we called them and decided to get off the road. We had extra miles in hand and could stop early so we opted for a real campground. By the time we stopped on the shore of the Colorado, it was 118. We made all the jokes about it being a dry heat and all but by the time we were out of the office, Cheryl was having real problems with the heat. The people here are real nice. They said we could use 2 or 3 sites to keep from having to take our trailer off but any configuration with the trailer didn’t allow us to use any of the hook-ups. We took off the trailer and set up. Cheryl got sick from the heat so the A/C was the first thing we hooked up. After a while, she was on the road to recovery. We are going to have to watch that sort of thing until we all get acclimated to the heat.

When we asked about swimming in the river, the manager told us it was ok but the water was cold. Yea, like he has been to York Beach or Bar Harbor in the summer for their warm water. Well, time to go see the place.

Clayton & Cheryl (for real this time)