We Made It!

It's been 10 days and nearly 600 miles since our last post. And, we have just one thing to say.

We made it!

We made it across Kansas to our home park near Kansas City, with an overnight stop at the coolest campground ever in Ellis, Kansas and a couple of nights visiting family in Salina. We're oh so happy to be here in our old stomping grounds to celebrate the holiday weekend.

Now that we've been here in our home park for a night and a bit we can say we've made it in another way. We survived the mid-80s in Colorado Springs, the high-90s in Ellis and temperatures well over the century mark in Salina. Our first day here in Kansas City the temperatures topped out near 100 degrees. Today, thank God, the cooler weather came. With temperatures rapidly climbing past 90 degrees this morning, the skies clouded and the rains came. By 4:00 pm, the temperature outside was down into the mid-70s. And, the moose wasn't too far behind. Our boy only has half an air conditioner, but he was quick to recover and adapt to the new and improved temperatures here in Kansas City.

It's not quite Gunnison, but it'll definitely do.

Yes, we've made it. We've made it across Kansas and into temperatures that are tolerable. We can't ask for more than that. Come Wednesday we'll take our moose in for service to repair its faulty compressor and prepare it for heating and cooling in the extremes.

Meanwhile, we'll enjoy the company of family over a holiday weekend in temperatures that we can definitely tolerate, even with half a heat pump.

We definitely made it!

Bubble or Bungle?

After a completely uneventful travel day (Yeah!), we are settled in our shady site near Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs.

The most anticipated part of our day was climbing Monarch Pass. At an altitude of 11,312 feet, this summit would take Bullwinkle to his highest point ever. During our six weeks in Gunnison, we asked for and received lots of advice on how to tackle the pass. It all came down to two things we already knew. First, keep your RPMs up. And, second, take your time. Paul did both and our moose made the 7-mile climb with the temperature of our great big Cummins engine staying rock steady at normal. Once over the top, Paul carefully guided Bullwinkle down the 10-mile grade with the assistance of our kick-ass engine brake. (We LOVE that thing!) Before we knew it, we were on gently rolling hills heading toward the Springs. It felt great to have Monarch Mountain in our side view mirrors. If we could give Bullwinkle a treat, we would. He definitely earned it!

The biggest surprise of our day was our refrigerator. In the middle of the night, I got up and grabbed a bottle of water, which was the only thing left in our tepid Norcold. I took a sip that jolted me from my slumber. The water was ICE COLD! Magically, our fridge had healed itself overnight. By the time we got up, the temperature in the freezer was in the single digits. Paul was all smiles as he unloaded the contents of the coolers into the now cold Norcold.

Of course, the mystery remained. So, when we arrived in the Springs, we called the local mobile tech and he came right out. His first assessment was a possible “air bubble” in the cooling line. If that was the culprit, it worked its way out during the night and resumed normal operations. Wanting to make the most of our investment in the service call, the tech offered to do a thorough check of the fridge. He quickly discovered that the work we had done for our Norcold recall last November was incorrect. He showed us the manufacturer’s instructions, which showed even us non-techs the error. Two wires that were supposed to be removed had not been, which essentially left the refrigerator just as prone to a fire as before. (Isn’t that comforting?) He quickly righted the wrong and our refrigerator checked out just fine. He placed a quick call to the service company owner to let him know what was up. Then, he told us we still had time on the clock, so was there anything else? We took advantage of his offer and had him replace a squealing check valve on our water heater. Bonus!

Moments later, the boss returned the tech’s call. In his opinion, the cause of refrigerator problems may have been a bubble. But, after hearing about the screwed up recall fix, he was convinced it had caused our very uncool problem.

Whether it was a bubble or a bungle, we’ll never know. What we do know is we made it safely over a great big mountain, we have cold adult beverages in the fridge and our water heater is quiet.

That’s all we need to make it one great day!

Done Chillin'

Well, it looks like we’re double done chillin’ in Gunnison!

We’re leaving here tomorrow for Colorado Springs. It’s forecasted to be warmer than we like, being as how we have half a heat pump and all. But, we need to get moving toward Kansas where we’re planning to get it fixed after Labor Day. Besides, we need to get out of here and find a place to fix something else as soon as we can. You see, our refrigerator has stopped chillin’.

Ugh!

The refrigerator section is empty. It’s too warm to cool anything in there. The freezer section is sitting at something like 40 degrees, so it’s keeping a few things chilled, which saves us having to buy another cooler. Thankfully, we don’t have any signs of ammonia leaking anywhere and our cooling unit seems to be heating up quite nicely. The thing just isn’t cooling.

Paul made several attempts to call a mobile tech here in Gunnison, but the guy hasn’t called back. So, we’re bagging any hopes of having the fridge checked out here. We called the park in Colorado Springs and asked for a recommendation for a mobile tech and if it would be OK to come in a day early. They helped us out with both. Paul called the recommended tech and they’ll be waiting for us tomorrow afternoon.

Hopefully, it’s something simple. We’re not scheduled to leave the Springs until Tuesday, so that gives us some time if parts need to be ordered. And, if we needed to, we could probably stick around until Wednesday. And, if worst comes to worst, we can live without a refrigerator. For awhile, anyway. We can have it fixed with the heat pump. Why not?

We’re trying to keep our spirits up. After all, even with no fridge and half an air conditioner, we’re not working! And, we’re in the Colorado mountains, where it’s beautiful and, relatively speaking, cool and comfortable. Really, we know we can’t complain.

But, we can whine, a little. Can’t we?

More soon from Colorado Springs.

License to Chill

Let the rat race run, roll around in the sun until

Trouble turns funny, songs get sung

A little bit of money, the night's still young

Leave me alone I've got a license,

A license to chill

Those popular lyrics by Jimmy Buffett and Kenny Chesney have been rolling around in my head today. Finally, after more than two years of roaming around this country, we feel like we’re passing our final tests for our license. Our license to chill.

You see, we’ve been hanging here in beautiful Gunnison for more than a month. We’ve hung out with friends, made a few new ones and entertained family for awhile. We’ve made the scenic drives, seen the national park and taken more pictures than we imagined we could. (However, one of us just hasn't seemed to muster up enough strength to craft a travel blog post!) These days, we’re hanging out and acting like a couple of locals.

We ride our bikes to breakfast. After we’ve had our fill, we head out on one of the many trails in this very two-wheel-friendly town for some exercise with sweeping mountain views.

Back at home, we read. We write. We nap. We knit. We soak up the pleasant sun-kissed days. Basically, we chill.

Actually, we’re getting pretty darn good at it.

As the resident travel planner, I’ve been trying to plot out travels from here to points east. The major influence in our planning is the weather. We won’t be heading into Kansas when the daytime temps are in the 90s. After all, we have just half an air conditioner! The days are just gonna have to cool off before we head into that part of the country. Until then, we’ll just chill.

We have tentative plans and even a reservation here or there. But, truth be told, we don’t have to be anywhere until mid-September in Southwest Missouri. Reservations can be cancelled. Plans can be changed.

So, what to we do in the meantime?

We just chill!

We’ve been at this fulltiming gig for a bit over two years. So, you’d think we’d be pretty good at this. But, when it comes to chillin’, we’re the first to confess we’re really newbies.

You see, we feel better when we have a plan. But, as we’re learning, sometimes we need to just chill.

Like right now. The 80-degree temperatures around here are just getting better and better. We like this town. We feel really comfortable here. We know that Monday night is $5 burgers at the Gunnisack. Tuesday night is Sushi night at the Brick Cellar. And, Wednesday is the night for cheap wings at 5b’s BBQ.

That’s right. We’re eating our way around this town!

There are a couple of great biking events coming to town. How often do you get to see three of the top five finishers in the Tour de France? They’ll be here in Gunnison next week, with tens of thousands of their friends. It sounds like a real party.

So, we think we’re gonna stick around for awhile. After all, we really like it here.

After more than two years on the road, we think we might - finally - just be earning our license to chill.

And I believe I will.

Dial Up

One of the reasons we’re moving across town tomorrow is this park’s wifi, or lack thereof. To say it’s “hit or miss” would be kind. It’s actually more “miss” than “hit”. A lot more. With no AT&T 3G service in Gunnison, our aircard is useless. So, we’ve not stayed particularly well connected this month.

Yesterday afternoon found me wandering across the park, with laptop in hand, searching for a signal. As I sat on a picnic table in the shade, I watched our cute little four-year-old neighbor Jonathan pedal by on his bike. His young mother was walking not too far behind. We exchanged pleasantries and she asked if I had found a “hotspot”. I replied that I was lucky enough to be connected, but the speed was far from hot.

“I grew up with dial-up,” she smiled with an eye roll that implied that was a long time ago. “Once you have high-speed internet, it’s tough to go back.”

“Sure is,” I replied, suddenly feeling quite old.

You see, I didn’t grow up with dial-up. I was an early adopter at 30! Even as an “old fart”, it’s still tough to tolerate slower than snot, miss and hit internet service in the 21st Century.

I shared the story with Paul, who offered a quick quip that was supposed to make me feel better...I think.

“You didn’t grow up with dial-up,” he said. “But, when you were growing up phones actually had dials!”

True. True.

Speaking of dial ups, Paul’s phone rang just after 7:00 this morning. It was Forest City calling. We recently returned a customer satisfaction survey sent to us by Winnebago. The survey asks new Winnie owners to report on areas where their new motorhome has required service, their satisfaction with that service and the motorhome overall.

As we went through the survey, we realized we’ve had more than our fair share of service issues with our new Winnie. Most have been mentioned here, but we’ve spared you the details of a few others. By the time we completed the survey we were feeling pretty darn unsatisfied! There was a space at the bottom of the form that asked if we’d like to talk to someone about our responses. Paul said yes. This morning, somebody at Winnebago called.

Receiving that phone call impressed us. It would have been easy not to make the call, and we probably would have eventually forgotten we’d made the request. The call lasted about an hour.

We’ll spare you the details of that conversation. We’re not exactly sure how things are going to work out. But, suffice it to say that Winnebago has the opportunity to delight these less-than-satisfied two-time purchasers of their product. We’ll see if they do. We’re waiting for them to dial us up again and let us know.

We’ll keep you posted.

Rug Doctor

We’re down to our last few days in Gunnison...in this park, anyway. We’ve decided to bag our plans in Littleton as it’s just too hot there and we’re having too much fun here! So, we’re going to hang out in Gunnison for another week or two. But, we’re not going to stay here. Any additional days at our friendly park would be charged a hefty day rate, so we’ll take advantage of the weekly rate at a nice park across the highway. Besides, we’re ready for a slight change of scenery.

We had a fabulous long weekend with Paul’s sister and brother-in-law. This is the second time they’ve met up with us on our travels. They seem to like doing that and we very much enjoy their visits. We made a day trip to surprisingly magnificent Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, and a return trip to super scenic Crested Butte. Between our adventures we managed to eat our way across tasty Gunnison. One of these days, I’ll pull together a write up of our fun on Bullwinkle’s Travels.

Of course, not all of our days here have been about fun and adventure. Some have been quite mundane. Yesterday was one of those days.

In preparation of our oh-so-short travel day later this week, Paul spent some time yesterday morning checking tires and batteries and such. While he was hanging around the moose, our neighbor explained that he was about to clean his carpets and inquired if we would like to use the rented machine after his job was done. We passed on the offer, as carpet cleaning is on our growing list of things to do during our two months in Kansas City this Fall. With our daily chores complete, we soon found ourselves twiddling our thumbs. Suddenly the idea of tackling the carpets sounded like a good idea. Why not knock out a “Kansas City to do” before we get there? Besides, with less than 200 square feet of carpet, how big could this small job be?

We probably shouldn’t admit this, but we’d yet to clean the carpet in our soon-to-be two-year-old moose. We’re fanatical with our vacuum cleaner, so the carpet looks practically as good as new. That said, we both knew it was overdue for a good cleaning.

Convinced that we could complete this job in an hour or less, we nabbed the Rug Doctor. As soon as we rolled it into our rolling home the task became more complicated. Suddenly, that little red machine didn’t look so little. Actually, it was huge! There was no way we were going to be able to maneuver that thing around most of our house without bumping into doors, walls or cabinets. We ended up doing about two-thirds of the job on our hands and knees using the upholstery tool. There were just a couple of spots where we could actually make a pass of the big red machine. After a couple of hours of crawling around and wrestling with a long hose, the carpet was clean and damp. Our table, chairs, recliner and other things that normally sit on the carpet filled nearly every inch of our tiled floor. Moving around our home was like mastering an obstacle course. The place was a wreck!

Thankfully, humidity is practically non-existent here in the high country. So, everything dried fairly quickly. It was half-past happy hour before we had nearly everything back in place and returned the machine. By the time we eased our sore bodies into bed, our rolling home was back to normal.

Today, we’re feeling better and our carpet is clean, fresh and fluffy. With one big “to do” done, we’re ready to get back to the business of having lots of fun in Gunnison.

Next time we make a date with the Rug Doctor we’ll know: Cleaning a little bit of carpet is a really big job!

North Texas

It's another beauuuuuutiful day here in Gunnison, where the expected high is a very pleasant 76 degrees. Who cares if our heat pump isn't quite up to par? We don't need it here!

Merikay asked a great question. She was wondering if this was a place where we could settle down and hang out all year, especially since we seem to like it so. I did a bit of research on this morning.

The short answer is, "No!"

One of the hazards of exploring the country fulltime is falling in love with a place while it's having it's absolutely best weather. These days, Gunnison is in its glory. Summer here means comfortable days and cool nights. You just can't beat it.

Of course, we know it gets cold here. After all, we're sitting at 7700 feet. And, there are mountains all around us. And, when winter comes to the Rockies, it gets cold.

But, my morning research revealed that when winter comes to Gunnison it can get really cold. With overnight lows that consistently have a minus sign in front of them, January and February can be brutal. Temperatures of -30 are not uncommon. And, that doesn't include any wind chill!

And, yes, it does snow here. But, really, it's not that much. But, honestly, if the temperature is -30 how much difference does a few inches - or feet - of snow make?

When we find the next place we call home, it'll be in a place that we can hang out all year if we choose. As much as we love Gunnison, this won't be it.

We've come to discover that we aren't the only folks who feel this way. As we've made our way around town and the surrounding areas, we've noticed that most of the license plates aren't from Colorado. They're from California, New Mexico and Oklahoma, among others. Many are from our native Kansas. Most are from our adopted Texas.

On our drive to Lake City the other day, we noticed a steady stream of Texas plates heading our way. When we arrived in the tiny town of 300 or so, the Texas cars far outnumbered those from Colorado or any other state. When we found Roxa and Hutch, the folks we met last winter in Kerrville, at their very fun and funky gas station and BBQ joint we asked them if Lake City was actually a suburb of Amarillo. They assured us it wasn't, but understood why we might think so.

"Some folks call this part of the state North Texas," they explained. "Seems like everybody escapes the Texas heat and comes here."

Good idea. Today's high in Austin is supposed to be 104. We'd make that escape, too. Our friends, quite wisely, serve up some mighty tasty Texas BBQ that gives these cool Texans a taste of home cookin'.

We didn't need another reason to love Gunnison, but it looks like we have one. While we're cruising around town sporting our Texas plates, we look like locals.

For the Summer, anyway.