My Life and Travels
I think the blog is caught up from the time we did not have internet.
Wednesday September 11, 2019 to Wednesday September 25, 2019 our time fishing the San Juan River. The fishing summary is on September 25.
9/27 added driving pictures, 9/28, 9/29, 9/30
Today was “Balloons Aloft” in Albuquerque. Pilots go out to many of area schools and set up balloons to show the kids how a hot air balloon works.
We didn’t get to put up our balloon, balloons do not like thunderstorms.
We are here for the fourth year.
Today’s drive was 68 miles.
We are parked in a different area and much worst then last year. We started out of level from side to side by 6 inches. With blocks we get from the parking volunteers we got to level. One of the parking volunteers gave me a ride back to the front registration area where they had the blocks. They said one block was $1.00 if I took 15 ( half of what they had) they were free. Sooner they were gone the less they had to deal with.
Here is where we are this year.
The red dot is about where we were last year.
Last week on the local news the mayor was talking about what a great thing he had done by adding more parking at the launch field.
This is the additional launch field parking. The city took this level area and made it car parking.
Oh well.
On to the generator problem. The Cummins guy got here at 12:30 and explained what he believed happened. Bottom line he thinks the generator is just fine.
Here is what he said happened. The error code is #14, OVERFREQUENCY FAULT. When the generator was running and I shut off both A/C units at the same time while operating at 60Hz the generator can spike to over 90Hz. Any time the generator goes over the 60Hz (said what the exact tolerance is but I forgot) for 6 seconds the generator will shuts down. He said to shut down one A/C at a time to help the generator stay stable at 60Hz. He also said it is best to let the generator run for for 20-30 minutes after running it under a load to let it cool down. We had a group of 8 guys setting around waiting for the technician to arrive and hung around and answered every bodies questions. Cummins is here for the fiesta to do service and answer questions.
We are on our way to Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta. A long way today 310 miles of wind
We are at this RV Park so we can dump and fill with water. In site 25.
It was a struggle to find propane today. First place was an RV Park where nobody would come to the office, next place the kid could not figure out how to hook up the propane hose to our tank. A lot of places had locations we could not get into. The next place Amerigas in Grants, NM did not exist. Made some wrong turns drove out of town looking for a place to turn around ended up back in town and drove by a propane place. Why filled us up and now we are ready for Fiesta. Leave early in the morning, get gas at Flying J on west side of Albuquerque. Then on to the South RV lot at Balloon Fiesta and our 12:00 appointment for Cummins to scan the generator and hopefully find what is wrong with an easy fix.
Going to try a video page rather than having large files on the daily blog pages.
Monday October 7, 2019
Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta, today I did low resolution video to control file size.
10:35 10/07/2019 was only able to get two videos to upload, will try more later. Update 10/10/2019 able to upload individual files at Starbucks but not the videos combined into one movie, file to large.
Drove back to Monument Valley to look around the gift shop at the valley edge and to take the 16 mile drive out into the valley. We had taken guided jeep tour back in 2007 and this time we have a vehicle we can take ourselves.
Also on Monday night the weather (no wind) and the people (no one running around with flashlights or driving in or out of the park) combined so I could take some night time pictures.
The wind blew hard all day in the 20 to 30 mph range but up to 50 mph gusts. We stayed inside the coach all day.
We drove over to Monument Valley this morning and did a little shopping. Didn’t find very much most of the individual stands at the entrance to Monument Valley were closed/empty. A lady at one of the shops said the vendors and the management who is running the building are not getting along and the management company has locked out most of the venders. We didn’t stay at Monument Valley very long, the wind was coming up and I did not close the slides on the coach before we left.
Here are some Gooseneck State Park pictures:
Fishing:
While we were in Montana this Spring my wading boots were wet the whole month and a half we were there. When we got to the big house I made some 12 volt boot driers.
This is where I put them when I wanted to dry them.
Today’s drive:
We drove the longer way to Gooseneck because I wanted to check on a gas station we saw a couple of weeks ago to get propane. Good thing we stopped today because the station has propane but not the adapter to fit our coach, we need propane before Albuquerque.
Campsite view
Parked right on the edge for 4 nights.
Do have some weak internet here.
Here are some pictures from today’s drive:
After two great weeks of fishing on the San Juan River at Navajo Dam we have internet again. We are at the San Juan County Fair grounds because as we were leaving town we developed generator problems again. A last week we had a new carburetor put on the generator. This week I was running the generator so we could have some air conditioning, when I turn the A/C off the generator quit running. We went back to Cummins where the new carburetor was installed and asked them to look at the generator again. Their generator person is in Durango, CO until the end of next week. The service guy gave me the name and number of two other local guys who are good at generators. Neither one of these people called me back. One I left a message the other one had a really nice lady who said they would call me but they didn’t.
At 5 o’clock we decided to give up on getting help and spend the night here at the fair grounds and move on to Gooseneck State Park, Utah tomorrow. We may be able to live without a generator for a while. The biggest challenge will be the week and a half at the Balloon Fiesta. We are there from October 2 – 14. Weather will drive how this works out. With sunny weather the solar panel and watching our electricity usage we may be able to make it through. If not we may have to buy a portable generator. We will see what happens.
I will be going back and updating the blog for our time at Cottonwood Campground, Navajo Dam, New Mexico September 11 – 26.
Today’s travels
Campsite photos
This picture has a fair ground special feature. The fair ground has 574 sites.
Moved to site 6 across the street, our reservations were for 14 nights and our time in site 5 is up. Somebody else has site 5 starting tonight. New Mexico parks have about 1/3 of their sites on no reservation status. Last week I asked the campground host if it would be alright if we stayed one additional night. She said it would be ok to stay another night.
This last picture is looking back at site 5.
If you have something that is messy or you don’t want water all over your site just go across the street and use the open site after people leave and before the next person gets there.
27 fish today
Got a fish on the first and second cast of the day
Fished from11:30 to 4:30
First half of the day was 10-12 inch trout mostly toward the 12 inch size, than got 4 small fish, than nothing.
I was using Zebra Midge size 18, went to a smaller 20 and 22 and started catching fish again, they are tough to hook with such a small fly and equally difficult to get all the way to the net.
Here is the summary of my epic fishing this year on the San Juan River.
9/12. Thursday: 25
9/13 Friday: morning 17 – afternoon 2
9/14 Saturday: 23
9/15 Sunday: morning 6 – afternoon 5
9/16 Monday: no fishing, new carburetor for the coach
9/17 Tuesday: 10
9/18 Wednesday: morning 13 – afternoon up stream to “Qualify Water” 1 to net and nice fish on
9/19 Thursday: morning 9
9/20 Friday: 19
9/21 Saturday: 33
9/22 Sunday: morning 35 – afternoon 26
9/23 Monday: morning 21 245 to date
9/24Tuesday: morning 13 – afternoon 16 in 10+ to 12 inch arrange, one 16 inch brown, 2 casts after this one a 14 inch brown
9/25 Wednesday: 27 on our last day
Total 301