And the road goes on forever...

Thursday, August 30, 2012

Going Home

I swear every time we make the trip from Bend to Yuma it gets worse. We have traversed that highway innumerable times and usually there is some sort of catastrophe and this trip was no different. Marc was deliberately using up what little life was left in the trailer tires so right away the first day the first one shed its tread. We hobbled in to Winnemucca on a bad spare and then used it to get down the road another 128 miles to Fallon the next day where we replaced it with a new tire from Les Schwab’s after receiving a credit on the one that threw its tread. The first day’s travel was miserable with smoke the first 100 miles upon leaving Bend, where visibility was a measly three miles or less. It was hot and extremely windy in Winnemucca (one of those hot, dry winds that suck the life right out of you) so we ran our generator all night to allow us air conditioning.
The rest of the trip was just about as tedious, maintaining a slow speed of 55 mph to baby bad tires and finally having to pull (again) in to a tire store in Vegas to replace another one. Our third and final day was long but we arrived in Yuma to the destruction on our lot at around 7 p.m. Apparently, one of the haboobs (desert dust storms) had its way with our tarps and gazebo and decided they had hung around long enough. Since we are on the verge of leaving we won’t replace them this year; it would be costly to do so when we won’t even be here and especially since this has become an annual occurrence. I still have not found some of our chair cushions!
We have about two weeks to get ready for Marc’s next project but that essentially involves moving back into the big RV so is no little feat. We returned to a first day’s heat index of 115 due to high humidity levels and we experienced rain all day today for sauna-like conditions. This is part and parcel of Yuma during the monsoon season and we can hardly wait to get out of here again.