Ouch! and other stories on a Friday

It's been quite a week.  Today's adventures involved almost having my finger eaten by the awning (Ouch! but I think I understand how to avoid that in future),  figuring out how to light the pilot on the oven, and doing my very first trip to a dump station.  I figured it would be better to do that with only water in the tanks, rather than with something more, er, noxious. It turns out there's a little Mom and Pop RV repair place about 10 minutes away from where the Beast is stored,  and they have a public free dump and water station.  It's not in a neighborhood I'd care to frequent at night, but it's not clear why I'd want to do that at night anyway.  I tipped a guy $5 to talk me through the process.  It's pretty simple.

I also looked through the past service records and sorted them in order.

I feel OK with the stove, the refrigerator, the generator,  the electric hookups, the water hookups, the sewage hookups. And I drove the thing through some construction zones and didn't take out any cones.

I filled the gas tank. $88 for about half a tank of gas, filling it up.  26.46 gallons.  At 10 mpg, that's about 250 miles.  Or about the distance to Flagstaff from here. Nice to know I could get to Flag on one tank of gas.  For you non-Tucsonans, it was $3.319 per gallon.

Sanidumps.com
Phoenixgasprices.com

But, it being Friday afternoon and all, let's reflect a little on this enterprise.

I remembered this morning how much I looked down on RV'ers.  I was a backpacker and a wilderness traveler -- yeah, some real wilderness.  I've slept in snow caves and under tarps by the side of rivers.  RV?  Schmar-vee!  And then I was a tent camper, packing the family in the station wagon and throwing a canvas tent in the back, and taking off westward, staying in Canadian provincial parks whenever we could.

And now this?  Yeah, this.  I don't care if I never sleep on the ground again.  I like the idea of having a stove that I don't pump up and a comfortable bed.  The option in case of bugs of sitting at a table inside. I'll see how I like the ambiance of various RV campgrounds.  But I think it'll be just fine.

The people I've met so far are friendly and helpful. I like that.