Day One in NM

This will be short, both because I’m tired and because I’m trying to save bandwidth.  As planned, I’m at City of Rocks state park near Silver City NM.  Tomorrow I’ll take some pictures and edit some of today’s video.  I'm not boondocking — there’s “shore power and “city water”… and it feels downright sinful to be having all these lights on!  

The Beast is running well: about 9mpg, and so much quieter and smoother than before the differential rebuild. 

It’s even earlier back home, but I’m truly bushed and headed for bed.

Stay tuned!

An unsettling beginning

Not easy to see.  Cut lock cable.

My grandmother called it "journey proud:"  sleeplessness the night before a trip. I woke up at 2-something AM, and as I stumbled around the house, I discovered I'd packed all the coffee. So I walked over to where the rig is parked, and saw this.  The braided cable and lock I'd used as part of the "system" to protect the bike on its traveling rack had been cut.  The cut cable (and lock) were left on the ground beneath the rack.  There was no evidence of tampering with anything else; the rig was untouched.  I'll look more carefully when daylight hits.

And I was concerned about security in Walmart parking lots!

Back to sleep, if I can ... and now I have coffee for when I want to wake up.

It's a process

I'm going to leave this open as the day progresses, to document the final stages of getting ready to hit the road.  This is largely for my benefit, to keep me from having to re-invent the wheel each time I go out.

I filled the gas tank on Friday, at $2.099 per gallon.  Got 8.7mpg last tank full, which includes some road trip and some around town.  I'm hoping the new differential/axle may improve gas mileage.

I filled the propane tank yesterday, at $3.37 per gallon. (At Buck's gas station.  Never again!  The people are great, but getting the rig backed in so the hose would reach the tank was a nightmare. Much more convenient at U Haul just around the corner.) Propane continues to be a giant bargain.  Refill after last trip took 2.3 gallons.  That's hot water, cooking, refrigerator, and some furnace use on a couple of cold mornings.

Took an Uber down to the storage lot and drove the Beast back home; parked in the Church parking lot across the street.  This way I have the little car to run errands, and can leave it here under the carport when I'm gone.   Uber cost: $5.93  Score!

Started the refrigerator.  For a while it wouldn't catch, but then I remembered the trick: I light all the stove burners for a minute to get gas in the line, then push "go" on the fridge.  Works like a champ. By this morning, the freezer was at about 0º and the fridge was in the green zone.  I can start loading perishables into it today.

Made a shopping list and went to Albertson's -- $108 for the better part of two weeks' food.  I'm sure I'll have to re-stock along the way, and I'll surely eat out a little, but that's less than $10 per day.

Checked meds: nothing runs out while I'm gone.  Emma and I will be properly medicated all along.

Fiddled a bit with the dash cam placement, and found an angle which works reasonably well with the camera mounted inside.

9:30:  Took the bike over to the rig and mounted it on the rack.  Took a load of frozen and refrigerated food to the fridge. Checked to see if the indoor/outdoor thermometer would work if I replaced batteries.  Nope.

Noon-ish:  brunch at Denny's.  Mistake.

1:30: Took more stuff to the rig; bike locks, soaps, bike cover, jumpstart cables.    Fussed with cabinets.  Organized hoses etc.  How did I wind up with THREE blue/white drinking water hoses?  Checked fridge temps.  Spot on.

To do at this point: last laundry/clothing organization.  Organize toiletries, meds. Pull kitchen stuff like a saucepan.  Organize cables and connectors and batteries for all the electronics: phone, tablet, GPS for tablet, WiFi hotspot for tablet and laptop.  All the little pieces for the dash cam.  The Jam box for tunes.  Dang!

Maybe it's time for a nap.

---

It wasn't.  Too much on my mental to-do list.  Took a load of various things to the rig, and cleaned its windshield.   Time to consolidate lists.

7:15 -- took Emma to her home away from home, got some dinner.  I'm about ready to roll.

Enough for tonight.

The latest route plan, and other thoughts

Here's the latest.  Subject to change.  Remember that you can zoom and pan in this, to show more or less detail.  It's your copy of the map, for now.  Thank you, Google.



I have very few fixed time points in this.  I'm due to give a presentation in Flagstaff on the 18th.  I have reservations at City of Rocks on the 9th.  I've told my hosts in White Rock when I expect to be there.  Other than that I can pretty much wing it.   For the future,  it seems worth it to try to avoid "appointments" in the middle of routes... it makes it harder to decide to stay a little longer at some unexpectedly interesting place, or to add new destinations.

Cost: 1668 miles as the Google flies.  At 7 mpg (conservative) 238 gallons of gas.  At $2.25  per gallon,  $535.    It looks like this and the costs of food and campground stays will fit into my usual monthly expense budget for home.   We'll see how it turns out, eh?

Why am I sharing all this detail stuff?  Some of the initial readers of this blog were interested in this kind of travel at some point in the future, and this may be useful to them.   It's useful to me to document how my thinking and planning have evolved, so I can get better at this and relax a bit about whether I can do this.  And as it unfolds, I hope to share my adventures and misadventures, to mitigate the solitariness of the enterprise.  And there's simply the original notion of blogs as "web logs:"  These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise.  Captain's log, star date ... 

Now a more mundane matter.  Laundry.

I'm at the point in my list-making where I'm thinking about clothing, and it has slowly dawned on me that this stuff will get dirty and smelly and ... and jeans take forever to dry!  A quick foray into the inter webs gives me food for thought.   Better stock up on quarters, huh?

Dash Cam in RV

I promise.  Pretty soon these posts will be from more interesting places.  Part of my purpose here is to document getting ready for travel, and I'm working on figuring out the best way to show you what I'm seeing as I go down the road.

Here's a short clip taken yesterday (Thursday) as I go to get gas and  groceries for the New Mexico trip next week.

As the initial frame will show you, I've cropped out the distracting elements and left the good stuff.  Well, what will be the good stuff.

D-Day Approaches. Comments.

It's Thursday.  I leave Monday.  Yikes!

By now all the little pieces of equipment  that I've been acquiring for this and future trips has arrived. The Beast is back from Buck's, minus the signature howl of a disintegrating differential.  I'm making lists, with entries like "buy dog food!!!"  The mail has been put on hold.  I have a key-safe so friends can have access to my town home if they need to.

Some decisions:  For this trip, I'm not taking the "big" camcorder and tripod.  The quality of images out of the iPhone 6 and the new little Action Cam is sufficient to document where I go and what I do.

I still have to figure out how to mount the little cam for on-the-road footage.  The trial run I did yesterday in the car shows some of the problems: dirty windshield, reflections.  One answer is to mount the cam outside, and control it from inside via its WiFi connection.  But batteries ... ideally, I'd like to just keep the thing on standby at all times and when I see something I'd like to record, push the big red button.  I could run a cable out the window with power ... but then I couldn't use the weatherproof housing for the camera.

Any ideas?

This is where I'd love to get helpful comments from you folks.  The blog software doesn't make it clear how to do that, so looky here! Actually, looky down there at the end of this entry, and you'll see something like this, minus the red outline:

If you click on (or touch) the text which says "no comments,"  a window opens up and you can enter a comment.  Try it!  Say hello!

It won't look the same if someone else has already left a comment, but you'll figure out how to add yours.

And now back to making lists.

Dash Cam I

Well, here it is!  The long-awaited initial trial of the new little camera in a vehicle:

Many flaws. It's a learning experience.  This was done in my car.  Perhaps later today I'll out it in the RV when I take it out to get gas.   The camera performance is pretty good.  I'm giving it a B+ so far.