On our way North

We got away from Gold Canyon fairly early (for us anything before 9:00 is early) but not before a couple of hiccups. The first occurred yesterday when I tried to pull in the living room slide to allow us to remove our internet cabling. When I hit the switch absolutely nothing happened. After a few tries at the typical male response, (hitting the switch harder) I determined that I had an electrical issue. The first couple of attempts to fix it, including pulling apart the switch and checking the fuses didn’t solve the issue so I proceeded to crawl under the trailer and look at the motor itself. Last spring we had some work done on the slide as it was binding and screeching all the time. It seems that the repair shop had to cut the wires between the harness and the motor, and instead of using a marrette or some other appropriate electrical connector to splice the wires together they twisted the ends together and wrapped them in a little bit of tape. As the motor is exposed to all road grime you would ever care to see and the heat of Arizona the tape didn’t hold, and the wires had come apart. At least it was an easy fix, and yes I did just twist the ends together and wrap them in tape. I’ll fix it properly when we’re at home.

The second issue occurred at the last minute this morning when I separated the trailer’s electrical cord from the extension cord required to reach the power pedestal at the park. The tangs on the cord deteriorated over the winter, and the pieces fell apart in my hand as I pulled the cords apart. They must have been loose to begin with in order to deteriorate as much as they did in 3 months. It wasn’t a problem as far as leaving was concerned, but the cord would have to be repaired before we stopped and needed to plug into shore power again. This meant that we had to make a pitstop at Camping World  to pick up parts, and I needed to rebuild the cord as soon as we stopped for the night. Neither issue was terribly serious, or difficult to deal with.  Hopefully we’ll make it home without any more trouble.

We decided to head home up Hwy 95 which meant that we got waaaay to close to Las Vegas. As we got slightly lost in Vegas due to driver error (note to self: listen to both the GPS and the underpaid right seat navigator at least some of the time) I ended up driving through downtown Vegas with the trailer again. It’s not that I want to spend a whole lot of time driving down Tropicana Boulevard, but this is the second time I’ve done that while trying to get around Vegas. Not something I would recommend to the faint of heart.

The temperatures today were pretty easy to travel in. It was mid 70’s all through Arizona, 81 by time we got through Vegas, 63 at the summit of a pass in Nevada, and 77 by the time we stopped for the evening. We had the windows open all day enjoying the weather. I don’t know how much longer we’re going to be wearing summer clothes, so we’ll enjoy it while we can. The terrain north of Vegas is pretty and full of Joshua Trees. It was interesting to see the various flowers we were enjoying in Gold Canyon show up again as we go further north. Most of the flowers are finished near Phoenix, but we saw big displays of Lupins, Globe Mallow, Brittle Bush and Desert Poppy. (we have to thank Bob L from the hiking club for allowing us to use proper names and not having to say Purple, Orange, Yellow and the other Orange flowers)

We finally got around to finding Hwy 160 and drove north west towards Pahrump where we’re staying at Terrible’s Lakeside Casino and RV Resort. The Casino is small and doesn’t look like it’s doing very well, as the parking lot was pretty empty, but the RV sites are very nice, and we have a great view of the lake and it’s fountains. It’s nice to see some water and greenery for a change. This is the view from our rear window, and there’s lots of birds resident in the area.

We’re off towards the north again tomorrow morning but I don’t know how far we’ll get or where we’ll stop.