Archive for April, 2008
April 13, 2008 at 1:04 pm · Filed under Places to go
This trip to Big Bend has been the most relaxing and enjoyable trip that I’ve ever had here. So relaxing, in fact, that I have not even attempted to write my usual daily blog entries. It is a small revelation for me, because (I have to admit) this is the first year that I’ve been able to fully enjoy being disconnected from the business of running Airstream Life instead of worrying about it. Finally, the business is reaching a level of maturity where I can go away and not fear a dozen “urgent” phone messages and a flood of bad-news emails upon my return.
On prior trips to Big Bend and other great places, the experience has been tainted by business concerns which have lurked in the back of my mind. It’s a shame to walk through a beautiful place and not see it because of worries about some concern back at home or work, and sadly a large number of our excursions have been afflicted by that. It is one of the risks of traveling while working (as opposed to being retired or on a leave of absence). Since in my case there isn’t any near-term solution to having to work, I resolved last year to resolve the problems that have been the cause of many a blighted trip, and at last I am approaching that goal, which is a great relief.
Of course, not all problems can be resolved simply. I had to choose to not worry about those things that I can’t control ““ something that is easier said than done. While we are out of touch, a thousand awful things could happen and I could come back in touch with the world on Monday to discover them, but of course the trick is to not let those worries invade the mind.
In this, I have been mostly successful. We have hiked at length, eaten heartily, and slept well. We have learned, and taken photos, and laughed and relaxed. In this age of instant communications, the outside world still has trouble penetrating the eastern edge of Big Bend National Park, at Rio Grande Village, where we’ve spent the last four nights.
It was a long scenic drive down TX 118 to Study Butte ( “Stoody Bee-yoot”) and into the western entrance to the park. Along the way, Ft Davis National Historic Site made a good mid-day stop, where we renewed our annual national park pass and Emma earned yet another Junior Ranger badge. I think at this point she has thirty or so, but we’ve lost count. They make a great contribution to home schooling.
The snowbirds have fled the southwest, so we had no trouble showing up at the only full-hookup campsites in Big Bend, at Rio Grande Village, and obtaining two sites for ourselves and our friends. It was 95 scorching degrees at 6 p.m. and the temperature hardly dropped after sunset. But the next day it was cooler and on the second night a cold front came through and dropped the temperatures into the 70s, making for perfect outdoor conditions. Being desert, it hardly ever rains here, and the air is comfortably dry for hiking.
The “trailer village” at Rio Grande Village is not particularly attractive, in that it is a basic asphalt parking lot with close spaces, but it is in the middle of a large green oasis of cottonwood trees and Bermuda grass that is carried over from a pre-existing 1920s ranch. Large natural springs all along the Rio Grande and an extensive irrigation system still serve to flood the grassy areas, and the Park Service has chosen to maintain that historical environment rather than let the area return to native desert. Huge turkey vultures rest in the trees above us, and in the early evening they give us a show by soaring close by.
Adam and Susan have been encouraging hikes and long talks daily. We did not come to Big Bend with any particular agenda, but it has turned into a series of hikes every day, which we all like. Talk goes well with rhythmic hiking over miles of terrain, and so we have managed to cover a lot of ground both philosophically and literally in the past few days.
Our first hike was an easy warm-up to Boquillas Canyon. This is 2.8 miles roundtrip. We went to go see our friend Victor Valdez, who is becoming somewhat famous as the “singing Mexican” and spokesman for the little town of Boquillas del Carmen, across the river in Mexico. (You can see him on YouTube.) On many days, Victor can be found with his friends on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande, waiting for tourists to come by. The town of Boquillas used to sustain itself as a tourist destination, but since 2002 the free access by Americans across the river to Boquillas has been prohibited, with the result that the people of Boquillas have to sustain themselves by selling trinkets to tourists (contrary to US law) by wading across the Rio Grande, and by soliciting donations.
In Boquillas Canyon there is a steep sand hill which everyone except me climbed (I stayed below with the backpacks and to take photos), and Adam had a nice time tumbling down it.
Our afternoon hike, under a hot sun, was the Canyon Rim hike that overlooks the Rio Grande. This one is six miles roundtrip, but at the turnaround point we were able to pause at the riverside hot springs, and to take in the petroglyphs and pictographs nearby.
Hiking for hours in the desert is enough to feel justified that you’ve done enough for one day, so we retired to the Airstreams for the evening and only ventured out again for a brief ukulele lesson. Adam bought Susan a nice concert uke last week in Tucson, and she was eager to pick up a few initial pointers. It’s a lot of fun to be able to share the uke with other people, and Susan is a very quick learner.
Hiking in the desert for hours on a hot day is also enough to drain a Camelbak drinking reservoir, I found. The Camelbak I brought holds a hefty 100 ounces of fluid, and Emma and I drained it completely in the course of our two hikes, plus an additional 20 ounce bottle of water, and then much more once we were back at the Airstream. Out here the general rule of thumb is one gallon of water (128 ounces) per person per day, when hiking, and I can tell you that when the temperatures exceed 90 degrees, that’s no exaggeration.
We did the same the next day, too. A midnight wind rose up and dropped the temperatures by 20 degrees (and forced me up in the middle of the night to take in the awning). This made things very comfortable down in Rio Grande Village, but a bit chilly up in the Chisos Mountains in the middle of the park. Susan, Adam, and I decided to take a hike down “The Window” trail in the Chisos, while Eleanor and Emma hung back to relax and work on Emma’s Junior Ranger program. In the Chisos at 5,400 feet, the temperature was a mere 43 degrees when we started hiking, quite a difference from the 95 degrees we had experienced just 48 hours prior.
That hike added 5.2 miles to our total. The Window is probably the most popular and famous hike in the entire park, because it is relatively easy and the view at the end is spectacular. We finished in time to have lunch at the Chisos Mountain Lodge, which features spectacular views and is (surprisingly) reasonably priced for lunch.
At this point I was thinking we might be done with hiking, but in a place like Big Bend you just have to go for a hike if you want to see the diversity and beauty of the park. So a couple of hours later we re-grouped with E&E and drove out on a rough backcountry road to make the short hike to Ernst Tinaja. This hike is another favorite, with the highlights being a natural watering hole (tinaja) in a dry cascade, and incredible fossils just a short distance further up the wash. It’s a short hike, about two miles roundtrip.
At this point I realized that we weren’t going to be back to Big Bend for a long time, possibly years, and I wanted to get the most out of it, so when Susan suggested a bike ride before dinner, I was ready to go. Less than a mile from the trailer village is the national park service’s campground (a nice spot, no hookups, but with fresh water and a dump station, $14), and “¦ you guessed it, another hike. This time we just hiked a piece of it, to get a look at the beautiful pink limestone cliffs in the late afternoon sun and the little town of Boquillas across the river.
In the evenings we’ve been watching a program on DVD called “Life in the Undergrowth,” which is an educational series about insects and other little critters. It’s fascinating, and the best part is that Emma doesn’t know it’s educational. All day long, on hikes (looking at fossils and geology), doing her Junior Ranger program, and then even watching TV, we are home schooling and it’s completely painless. National parks are a great place to learn about the natural world.
Sunday I was actually a little resistant in the morning, but since everyone else was gung-ho, we launched out to do the second-most popular hike in the park: Lost Mine Trail. This hike, also in the Chisos at high elevation, was probably the most beautiful we’ve done, and that’s saying quite a bit. I can see why it is popular. It’s a moderately steep hike most of the way, 4.8 miles roundtrip, and peaks out close to 7,000 feet. The views along the entire trail are fabulous, and the top view is worth twice the hike.
At this point we are done hiking. Actually, I think we’d all be up for another one but we are having trouble finding more good hikes on this side of the park that are under ten miles. We could move to the other end of the park for a few days, but time is pressing and we need to plan the rest of the trip to Florida.
We did a little of that this evening, after lunch at the Lodge again, and another fun uke lesson at the campground. Our next deadline is May 1 in Orlando, and there is much we want to do before then, so we will launch on Monday morning. Our next stops will be along I-10, then in the Hill Country west of Austin, then in Austin itself, then the New Orleans area.
April 9, 2008 at 7:21 pm · Filed under Maintenance
We made it to Balmorhea State Park in west Texas, and that’s the good news. It’s 80 degrees here at 7:30 pm Central Time, and the trailer is rocking in the extraordinary strong winds.
We combated occasional dust storms from Las Cruces to here. At times, the dust threatened to become a hazard to visibility, but mostly it was just enough to cause us to keep the truck air on “recirculate” and the air conditioning running. However, I’ll be checking the engine’s air filter at the next opportunity.
The real story of the day is not the fiercely blowing dust and flying tumbleweeds we saw, but what I hope to be the final chapter in the ongoing tire saga. I had been watching one of our tires carefully the past couple of trips, thinking that perhaps I was seeing yet another broken belt or separating tread, but not quite sure. The tell-tale sign is a slight bulging, or a roundness to the surface of the tread’s cross-section where it should be flat.
Today at a fuel stop in Van Horn TX I noticed the tire had suddenly gained a distinct bulging spot near the edge, and the tread in that spot was wearing extremely rapidly — noticeably more than it was just a few hours earlier. There was no mistaking it. The tire was a goner.
At 4:30 in the afternoon in a small town in west Texas, I did not have high hopes for a quick resolution, but we were lucky this time. Two miles away was a one-man tire shop, and the amiable owner not only had the proper tire in stock, but he had it at a good price and was able to mount it up in about 15 minutes. He was extremely polite, gave me no argument when I said I wanted to re-install the wheel myself (my usual practice), and charged just $5 for his service.
At this point I had replaced three of the four tires on the Airstream in the past month. So I took a careful look at the remaining tire, and guess what? Yep, a two-foot section of tread was bulging slightly. 3/4 of the tire was properly flat across the surface, and 1/4 was rounded like a turtle shell. So our record was perfect — all four tires. Three belt or tread separations, and one irreparable flat.
Since the price, service, and availability were all ideal, and since we were at the start of a 2,000 mile journey, including several hundred miles of desert running at 70 MPH through lonely parts of Texas, I decided to just get it over with and replace that last tire too.
So why have all these tires been failing? Well, I have been researching that a lot over the past few weeks. Without getting into a lot of detail, I have narrowed the suspects down to one. There’s only one thing that makes trailer tires fail that has happened to all four tires. Last summer our axles were badly out of alignment (as much as 7/8″ of an inch on some measurements). We had this corrected in September at the Airstream factory, but the damage was already done to the tires. It was only a matter of time before they started to show how traumatized they were by being dragged down the road at incorrect angles.
The evidence was on all four tires: “feathered” tread wear. The tread should wear perfectly flat and evenly, but running a hand over these tires last fall felt like a stroking a cheese grater. At the time I didn’t realize what this meant, but in the few months since the effect has been clear enough. The first tread failure happened before the alignment but I didn’t replace it until October when something was obviously wrong. The second tread failure showed up last month, and the third one showed up today.
If my theory is correct, we should experience nice even tire wear on these new tires, and NO more belt/tread failures, since the axles are aligned properly now. I’ll be watching. Incidentally, at this point we have two Power Kings, one Goodyear Marathon, and one Green Ball Trailermaster. Given that the belt failures have happened to three different brands of tires that were on the trailer, I can’t rest the blame on any particular manufacturer. My suspicion is that any trailer tire would have suffered serious damage under the condition of mis-aligned axles.
The last alignment cost over $200 but I am thinking it may become an annual or bi-annual part of our regular maintenance program. It’s certainly cheaper than replacing tires before their time …
Now, you may have noticed that despite several tire failures, we have never had a blowout (knock on wood). I don’t think this is a coincidence. Blowouts are often the result of poor maintenance. Run your tires with less air than they need, fail to check them carefully and regularly, and you will have a blowout sooner or later. When a tire blows, it will often take expensive chunks of your trailer with it.
I’m amazed at how many trailer owners I have met who have blowout after blowout, but still run on old tires, fail to check tire pressure, don’t weigh their trailer, have never gotten an axle alignment, and never look at their tires. Learn proper tire maintenance, and learn the signs of improper wear and you may avoid a dangerous blowout. Equally importantly, when you see the signs of a pending problem like we did today, replace the tires before they fail. It’s just like replacing your brake pads before you can’t stop anymore.
Having bought two new tires, we proceeded to Balmorhea State Park for our overnight stop. We’ve been here before. It’s one of two nice places to stop on the way to Big Bend National Park from the west, the other being Davis Mountains State Park. We chose Balmorhea because we really wanted to go snorkeling and because we can get online with our Verizon card here, albeit slowly.
The water in the spring-fed pool here is always 72-76 degrees, ideal for the air temperatures of about 80-85 this evening. We watched the fat black catfish, turtles, ducks swimming underwater like penguins, and schools of innumerable two-inch fish that followed us around like a cloud of mosquitoes. It was a nice change from the day of dusty, windy driving and tire-changing. For the next few months, I hope I can focus on the fun stuff like that and have no more blog entries about tires…
Our coordinates tonight: 30 °56’39.53″N 103 °47’1.63″W
Tomorrow and the next day I may not be able to blog. We’re going into Big Bend National Park and getting online there is a real challenge. If so, I’ll backdate a few entries once we have connectivity again.
April 8, 2008 at 9:43 pm · Filed under Places to go
The Airstream is back on the road! We’re starting off easy, with a 200 mile drive to Deming NM to visit one of Emma’s favorite parks: Rock Hound State Park. It’s a beautifully scenic hillside park at about 5,400 ft altitude.
We got a short campsite with an overhang, which presented a fine opportunity to inspect the Airstream’s underside belly pan. For once I didn’t have to bend over to get things out of the rear compartment, either. But Emma found the concept of her bed hanging out in space to be disconcerting. Eleanor suggested she could sleep up front in my place, and once that idea was proposed Emma was not interested in explanations about why it made no difference where we were parked. So I get the back bed tonight.
Being a short drive, we had plenty of time in the afternoon to go for a hike and rock-hunting foray. This park is loaded with jasper, which you can find and take home (up to 15 lbs). Even if you aren’t interested in rocks, the views are spectacular in all directions.
The plants here are telling us we are no longer in the Sonoran Desert. We are now in the Chihuahuan Desert, which extends into Texas. No more tall saguaros, but there are lots of nasty sharp lechiguillas to watch out for along the trails.
We’re all tired. The past few days of packing up and finalizing the house have taken a toll on us. We could use a few good nights of sleep. For a couple of days we will take it as easy as possible. I think the Big Bend portion of the trip will rejuvenate us.
Our coordinates tonight: 32 °11’13.76″N 107 °36’47.13″W
April 7, 2008 at 11:05 pm · Filed under FAQs, Home base
We are just about ready to launch, and it feels strange. The house is at last usable, mostly. We finally got running water in the sinks just two days ago. We have window shades, working plumbing, beds, reading lamps, and a couch — things that make a house habitable. We have friendly relationships with our neighbors, paid-up real estate taxes, and flowers on the grapefruit tree. So why are we leaving?
Because life is calling. Because we can. There are things out there that we haven’t seen, people we haven’t met, and experiences we can’t even imagine, if we just break away from the status quo, the comfortable house, and the safe backyard, to find them. At any moment something might change to prevent us from being able to get away (school, health, money). We’ve got this opportunity and who knows how long it will last?
But I have to admit that I am sorry to leave this soon. This is one of the perfect seasons in Tucson, and will continue to be for another couple of weeks, at least. The weather has been spectacular, the hiking is prime, everyone’s in a great mood, and there are dozens of great things to do all over the area. I’d like to stay and enjoy it all, and the house, for just a little longer, but choices had to be made and we have already stayed much longer than we had originally planned.
The delay in departure has meant a few things have fallen off our travel itinerary. Padre Island in Texas got dropped. Our service stop in Weatherford TX at Roger Williams Airstream got dropped. We cut a week out of our Florida stopover, and shortened Big Bend National Park from 7-8 days to just 4-5 days. We’ll probably skip right through GA and SC to get to NC’s Outer Banks. You can never escape the imperative of compromise.
Today I completed 90% of my departure checklist and found a little time to do some trip planning. I use Mapquest to rough out the route, then pick out spots we want to visit and people we want to see. I was surprised that I had the temptation to make reservations at various state parks along the way. In the south, it is still high season at many places (through mid-April or even mid-May depending on location), and so reservations aren’t a bad idea. But as I’ve written before, we find that reservations tend to force into an overly-rigid schedule. So I didn’t make any reservations at all.
I think my temptation stemmed from having been off the road so long. Sitting still for a long time, confidence begins to erode and the creeping demon of “What If” begins to invade my brain. What if we get somewhere and the campground is full? What if we are 80 miles from the next decent spot (a distinct possibility in west Texas)? Then I remember, we’ve dealt with those things many times in the past. No matter where we go, we’ll still have our home and everything we need right behind us. We don’t need a campground, we just need somewhere to park. Everything else just adds to the adventure …
… although I wouldn’t mind if our next few adventures involved cool stuff, rather than mechanical problems. I am really hoping for a few months of no tire problems, and no expensive failures. To that end, one of my tasks in the morning will be a very careful undercarriage, tire, and hitch check.
Since I’m on the subject of maintenance, I will toss in an update on our tow vehicle. I get a lot of questions about it from blog readers, and I don’t mention it much because there’s little to say. The Nissan Armada has been highly reliable. We have 63,000 miles on it, of which I estimate about 55,000 miles are towing, and it is still happy. We had the in-depth 60K service done last December and it got a clean bill of health from the dealership. I wish it got better fuel economy (9-10 MPG towing, 15 MPG not towing), but in all other respects it has proven to be a reliable and competent tow vehicle.
However, I should say that for a longer trailer like ours, I think the Hensley Arrow hitch is essential because of the short wheelbase of the Armada (23″ shorter than the similar Nissan Titan pickup). Without the Hensley the handling of the 30-foot trailer was not nearly as secure at highway speeds. I mention this because I also get a lot of queries about our hitch. It has definitely saved us from a few “adventures” of the negative kind over the past couple of years.
Interestingly, Ron Estrada of Hensley Manufacturing told me last December that 14% of Hensley owners had Airstreams. Considering that Airstream is only about 2% of the overall travel trailer market, that’s a pretty heavy endorsement by Airstream owners. Maybe we just like to spend money, but I think it’s because people who appreciate Airstreams also appreciate good design in other things.
If you want one but don’t like the new price, check the bulletin board at a major regional or national Airstream rally and you may find a used one cheap. In Perry GA at the WBCCI International Rally last summer I spotted two with asking prices around $500. That’s a steal for a Hensley. Of course, at that price I’d expect it to need refurbishing, which I believe the factory will do.
If all goes well in the morning, we will be off around 10 or 11 a.m. Our plan is to keep our drive under 250 miles on travel days, so it will take us two and a half days just to get to Big Bend National Park in Texas. I’ll start providing coordinates of our camping locations again starting tomorrow. Wish us luck.
April 6, 2008 at 9:45 pm · Filed under Home base
Today I am feeling like taking a vacation from blogging, and it just happens that I have a houseful of guests here right now. We invited a few people over for pizza from Magpies, which is incidentally the best pizza we have found in Tucson (so far). So combining my disinclination to blog with the guests, I have come up with an idea: a group blog. Everyone here is being asked to contribute just a sentence or two (or a paragraph). As they say, “many hands makes light work.” So let’s see what my friends have to say.
First up is Susan, because she’s the bravest:
It was a beautiful day for a hike and Rich and Emma took Adam and I to Tanque Verde for a hike and look at the waterfalls. Along the way we saw every kind of cactus imaginable, frogs, a swarm of bees, and a bunch of college geology students who told us about the local formations. Beautiful!
Next up … Judy:
This was an almost perfect Tucson day-blue skies, 80 degrees and 8% humidity with an occasional cool breeze-ahhhhhh. (but don’t move here, THERE IS NO WATER!) This is the weather that brings out the gardening bug in Tucsonians so we walked to the nursery and bought plants, three Blackfoot Daisies which are the native daisy for this part of the southwest.
And now her husband Rick:
I could go on about how nice a day it was in Arizona, so I will. It’s the reason many or most of us are here. Generally, Sundays can be uneventful but this evening finds my family with friends, some new some not so new and it certainly made this Sunday special.
Now, let’s see what their son Sam has to say:
Well, hello all. Today’s been a lovely day, absolutely gorgeous Arizona weather. My day began as any other day and has come to a close with an amazingly stimulating philosophical conversation that spanned everything from human nature to James Bond novels. It’s such a nice experience to be able to hold an intelligent conversation with such intelligent people, at least every once in awhile; as well as it is heartening to realize that there are, indeed, other intelligent people in the world who have the mental capacity with which to hold these conversations. It’s one of those lovely little moments that recharge your faith in humanity; which is very refreshing in these days of uncertainty”¦ when it can, at times, feel like you’re the only one who thinks this way; or, to be brutally honest, even thinks at all. I must thank everyone here for the opportunity to expand my mind, and maybe even expand someone else’s.
Adam here:
Today’s hike was wonder full as Susan says. Tonight we got to see Carol’s beautiful book on the Birds of Sonora and I gained great insight and hope from our new friends Sam and Joe who re-enforce our belief that the next generation can teach us a lot and will continue to change our world for the better.
It’s Joe at the deck:
Hobbes, Locke, Descartes””We’ve been over them all, over a 30-something minute conversation with Adam, it’s amazing at how three people from different backgrounds have their paths crossed in a intermingling dialogue, from the internet (a series of tubes cleaned out by the powerball) to Alexander the Great to Bernard of Clairvaux. The morality of human nature, the motivations behind political careers, the fallibility of mankind, the power of advertising. And the amazing thing we all found, the conversation came full circle””back to communication and upbringing. Ah, but to have more chances to experience this caliber of conversation, dust off your ideals and bring your views out into the light, so as you read this, make a decision, the next time someone approaches you with an idea or an opinion of this nature indulge them and yourself.
[By the way, Joe is 15 years old. Both sons, Sam and Joe, have been homeschooled all their lives. You can see the results. — RL]
Carol here,
The desert bloom is ending, it was a spectacular wildflower show in SE Arizona. I enjoyed the evening with Rich, Eleanor, Emma and their friends. Pizza was great.
And thus concludes our group blog this evening. Our guests are on their way home, the pizza leftovers are in the refrigerator, the dischwascher is quietly dealing with its inaugural load of plates and glasses, and we are settling in for the night. Thanks to all our guest bloggers this evening.
36 hours until we head out!
April 5, 2008 at 10:23 pm · Filed under Maintenance
There is something about our trailer tires that seems to attract sharp metal objects. Over the past couple of years we have had four or five tires damaged by nails, screws, and other miscellany. Most of the time, the tires have been punctured near the sidewall, which is a “no patch zone” and so the tires have had to be replaced.
This seems to defy logic. We have four tires on the trailer and four on the truck, yet we’ve never had a flat on the truck. In fact, I’ve never had a flat on any vehicle I’ve driven since 1983. So why do the trailer tires seem to pick up damage so regularly? At $150 a pop, I’d like to know.
Tire damage — click for larger
The two pictures above show the souvenirs we picked up in Mexico yesterday. The big one at left is part of a deadbolt. It caused the loud hiss that alerted us to the problem, but when I inspected the tire today I found that a nail was already in the center of the tread (right photo). Who knows how long that had been in there? The nail was holding air quite nicely.
In a way we were lucky, because without some outward sign like a leak, I might never have spotted that nail until the problem became critical — meaning possibly the disintegration of the tire on the highway. This has made me slightly paranoid, so I’ll be inspecting the other three tires very carefully before we head out again. The parking lots and pulloffs everywhere we went this week were littered with debris, so much that I’ll be pleasantly surprised if the other tires are all undamaged.
We are all recovering from our trip in different ways. Eleanor has been busy gearing up for the next phase, I’ve been catching up (and trying to get ahead) on work, and Adam & Susan are decompressing back at their Airstream. We took a little time out in the afternoon to visit the Tucson Botanical Garden, but other than that it has been a day of just ordinary stuff, like getting the tire replaced.
Hummingbird and chuparosa at Tucson Botanical Garden
We have made some progress on the house. Handy Jerry came over today and hooked up our plumbing, so we now have working sinks in the bathrooms and kitchen, plus the Bosch “dischwascher”. He didn’t get to the stove or vent hood, but this leaves us very close to complete, and we have a reasonably useful house now — just in time to leave it behind.
One final note: you’ll see that on the right sidebar of the blog I’ve put Google Adwords back in. We had suspended them about a year ago, but with the expenses of traveling rising lately, I’m hoping they’ll generate a little revenue. Daddy needs new tires!
April 4, 2008 at 9:36 pm · Filed under Roadtrips
In the history of our travels, today will be recorded as one of those days that hopefully makes us stronger. Adversity is good for that, if nothing else.
When planning the return trip, I carefully considered the amount of pesos I had left. Everything in Mexico seems to require cash (in the entire trip I never saw an opportunity to use a credit card), and so I was careful to ensure that we had enough pesos for a full tank of fuel, plus the tollbooths on Rt 15, plus a little extra.
This would have worked out well if we hadn’t run into a speedtrap near the airport in Hermosillo. We were in the lead, with Adam & Susan following, and so intent on finding the first turn of the detour that we apparently coasted through a speed zone at perhaps 35-40 MPH. I saw a guy in a white shirt waving me to the left turn lane, who turned out to be a Hermosillo police officer.
He spoke no English and we speak virtually no Spanish. This was a worst-case scenario, because (as best we could determine), he felt we were facing a fine of 650 pesos (about $65) and, after confiscating my driver’s license, explained with much sign language that we were expected to drive to the central police station, pay the fine, and return to the scene of the crime with the receipt to retrieve my driver’s license.
Now, I can’t blame the guy for the communication problem, because we were in his country and hadn’t bothered to learn enough of the local language to make this process easier. He was being very friendly about the whole thing, and even started off the conversation with a handshake. But we could not conceive of how we were going to negotiate Hermosillo traffic to the police station, find parking for a 53-foot combination, and return to the side of the road, in anything less than a day or two. We also didn’t have an adequately detailed map of Hermosillo on us, since we only planned to pass through, and the GPS doesn’t contain city maps in Mexico. So it looked like a no-win situation.
We tried to call friends in the US for translation assistance, but of course Telmex did not remove the international call block on my phone as they had promised to do, so the phone was utterly useless in this instance. Fortunately, the police officer realized his compadre did speak some English, and the second officer was more sympathetic to our plight. He accepted 500 pesos, and gave us a receipt and my license back. We chatted a bit about his three kids, his trip to Disneyland, shook hands, and very carefully began to flee Hermosillo. At least the ticket is unlikely to be reported to my insurance company, so my rates won’t go up.
This episode wiped out most of the cash I had set aside for fuel, creating a new problem. We stopped at a Pemex station on the north side of Hermosillo, and I waved my only remaining peso bills at the attendant, a 100 and a 50. I made it clear that was the amount of fuel I wanted, verified he had zero’d out the pump, and stood by to make sure.
Then Eleanor called out, “We have a flat!” Sure enough, the rear curbside tire had a huge screw-like object embedded in the edge of the tread, and air was loudly hissing out of the tire at an alarming rate. OK, one problem at a time. I went back to the pump and found that the attendant had put in 200 pesos worth of fuel. I had a brief argument with him and once again waved my 150 pesos at him, and he just shrugged (not understanding a word of what I had said, I am sure) and waited.
I decided I had bigger fish to fry, so we dug up another 50 pesos in change, paid for the 28 liters of fuel with a scowl, and quickly backed the trailer into a quiet spot away from the pumps to change the tire.
My tire-changing skills have had a lot of practice lately. I can change an Airstream tire in less than 10 minutes working alone. With Adam’s help it was probably even less this time. The tire, however, was a total loss, so that was an expensive flat. I tossed it in the spare holder and made a note to get a new tire in Tucson.
At this point you can imagine that I was not especially cheery. Between the ticket and the tire our tab for driving through Hermosillo was about $180. Moreover, we were almost completely out of cash, our credit cards were just bits of plastic that nobody seemed to respect, and we were facing 180 miles of road and three tollbooths with no spare tire or money.
I considered stopping for the night at the same campground where we stayed on the way in, so that we could replace the wounded tire and perhaps find some money, but an overwhelming desire to get away from Hermosillo suddenly came over me.
The drive up Rt 15 is supposed to be pretty good. It is, after all, a toll road, and the fee for us to drive it was 156 pesos. For that you might expect a smooth road, but Rt 15 has been neglected too long and long stretches of it are riddled with bumps and potholes, and the parts that are not afflicted are covered in orange cones for the reconstruction work. The speed limit periodically dropped from 100 kph to 40 kph (about 25 MPH) for miles, and this drastically extended the trip. In all, our drive from Bahia Kino to Tucson took over nine hours, including stops for fuel, flats, bathroom stops, lug nut checks, and border delays.
This time, to avoid the nerve-wracking downtown Nogales roads that make you feel like you are a rock in an avalanche, we took the commercial truck route through Mariposa. The roads are better, but a few miles before the border we ran into a typically Mexican traffic situation. We found ourselves in a line of tractor-trailers parked in the travel lanes, waiting for … something … We could not tell what, and there were no signs to suggest what we were doing there.
After a few minutes, a man came by and gestured adamantly that we were to go into the left lane and bypass the trucks. We did so, very reluctantly, because the left lane turned out to be the median strip and it was barricaded by large concrete planters. We zig-zagged around these obstacles until we came face-to-face with a fence.
We sat there for a minute or two, absolutely bewildered, and finally observed a black SUV passing us driving in the oncoming traffic lane. It waited until there was no traffic coming, then scooted about 300 yards on the wrong side of the road and disappeared to the right behind a barricade. We realized we were expected to do the same.
So we did, and after the strange detour found ourselves in front of the immobile line of trucks. We waved to a guy with a big gun in an army uniform, who apparently had no interest in us, and continued on, wondering what the heck had just happened. Only a few hours earlier we had been fined $50 for driving too fast past the airport, and now here we were not only allowed to drive on the wrong side of the road against oncoming traffic, but actually encouraged to.
But at this point we were getting used to strange checkpoints and frequent contacts with officialdom. In all, we were stopped nine times by officials, once by the Hermosillo Police, twice at tollbooths on Rt 15, once at a military checkpoint, once at the commercial truck station, again at a third toll booth, twice at US customs (first at the entry point, then again for agricultural inspection), and finally by the US Border Patrol along I-19 in Arizona. We must be pretty clean by now, because everyone has had a good look at us.
Beside the speeding fine, we lost 231 pesos to the tollbooths, 20 pesos in tips to the guys at the gas station who washed our windows without being asked, and four raw eggs to the Agricultural Inspector. By the end, we were completely tapped out of cash and dipping into emergency dollars. My advice to those who would drive into Sonora: bring lots of folding money and don’t expect an ATM around the corner.
Thus it was a great relief to pull into the Shell station on the US side of the border and swipe the old credit card again. It’s always a sensation to come back into the USA from Mexico, because you are struck by the absence of trash by the roadsides, and the sudden disappearance of shacks and tortilla sellers along the roads. The lack of killer speedbumps (“topes”) is nice too. I liked Mexico but life is pretty convenient here in el norte.
We are home again in Tucson, for four nights. We need to move a few more things into the trailer for extended travel, clean the house, get a new spare tire, and finalize details with our house-sitters.
I’ll post pictures of the brutal huge screw-thing in our tire tomorrow when I get it fixed, and if we are lucky we’ll go on a nice hike up in the Rincons this weekend too.
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