Travel Update 22

We started out this week in southeastern New Mexico after having just visited Guadalupe Mountains and Carlsbad Caverns. From there, our next stop was White Sands National Park. We spent most of a day in Alamogordo, getting Aiden some exercise after a long day and a half of driving.

We decided to only stay in White Sands for one day since it started raining. That night it rained a lot and it started leaking in through the front window of the sleeping area. The bottom of the mattress was soaked that morning. Luckily the next few days would be pretty dry and warm. We stopped at a campground in the Gila National Forest where we decided to do some early spring cleaning. We took a full day to get all the bedding out, clean the dried over-the-cab area, reorganize some cupboards, sweep the whole RV, and most importantly caulk around the front window where we thought the water was most likely getting in.

The drive, both to and from the the campground, was the most picturesque we've seen since leaving Idaho back in October. It felt so good to be in actual mountains again. We even saw some old snow on the side of the road.

As we descended to the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument, we started noticing a funny smell and shortly after saw some smoke coming up from the front tires. Turns out we had been going downhill for quite some time and Andreas had been on the breaks for most of it. The breaks were overheating. We were able to pull off the road and let the breaks cool down a bit before deciding it was best to get to the monument, where they would at least have a phone if we needed to call Good Sam (our roadside assistance). We drove there incredibly slowly, using our breaks as infrequently as possible, shifting gears to slow down, which we should have done from the start and a good lesson for our upcoming mountain driving.



Luckily there was no noise or grinding when the breaks were smoking, so we are very sure they just overheated and needed a break. The next morning the smell was pretty much all gone, only noticeable on the sweatshirt Andreas wore to get the video. We still took it slow, but the breaks worked fine while driving the next day with no issues. We'll get them looked at the next time we find a place that will do a free break inspection on our vehicle, but we're confident in their functionality.

We ended the week by driving Tucson, AZ. Here we'll be heading to Saguaro National Park and catching up with some friends and family in the area!