Checking in

I have not felt much like posting the past few days. It's been pretty hot and uncomfortable, so the days have been spent more or less sitting in front of the cooling fan and trying not to move around too much. Today is cooler and with the cooler temperatures comes a bit more activity, but it is still too hot for my taste. Tomorrow is supposed to be even cooler...

We can go for 4-5 days before we have to dump our waste water tanks and refill with fresh water. Today we had to dump the tanks... It only takes us about 15-20 minutes to secure everything for travel, so it's not really a big deal to move the trailer. Emily has been very interested in the whole supply and waste water systems of the trailer. Despite the nasty smell, she hangs out with me when it is time to deal with the tanks and seems to have a very good understanding of how it all works now. Becky and Emily took care of filling our fresh water tank while I carried our garbage over to the dumpsters. Here in the long term BLM area the dump station and fresh water are free if you have a BLM permit. Alan bought us a 14 day permit when we arrived, so we've had the luxury of staying here for free.

I managed to get our water fixed today. Ever since LA we've had a problem with water coming out at a slow rate and our brand new water pump had been getting louder and louder. I took the pump out of the system and tested it. The pump is fine as I expected. I think the pump supply line from the water tank was clogged. I blew back through the system until there was no resistance and then put the water pump back in the line. Sure enough, lots of water now. I moved the pump to a new location to minimize noise while I was at it, so now we have lots of water and you can hardly hear the pump at all. Much nicer for the kids since their bed is directly over the water pump and the noise had been waking them up at night sometimes.

Alan and I took an afternoon hike up the mountain. The air was a lot clearer because we had a very brief rain (like 15 minutes) that took a lot of the dust out of the air. We could see several mountain ridges off in the distance from the top of Quartzsite mountain. We also went walking down the wash in search of a nice walking stick for me. We found lots of potentially good sticks, but I didn't see one that I really liked.

Becky and I have been checking for our packages on a daily basis. I expect that we will see at least the larger one tomorrow. The smaller one may take a couple of days longer. Once the packages arrive we will decide if we want to move over to the BLM area by Yuma or head Southeast toward our next long term stop in Texas.