Travel Update 23

We ended the last travel update when we arrived in Tucson. The main reason we were in Tucson was because of Saguaro National Park, which actually has two regions: the Rincon Mountain District and the Tucson Mountain District.

Of course, we visited both districts. We also had a surprising number of friends in Tucson. On our second day there, we met up with Kathleen's cousin, Christine and her partner, Adam. We had a great time catching up over dinner while watching the women's basketball team win the Pac-12 tournament in convincing fashion.

The next morning, we met up with a friend from Kathleen's undergrad days for breakfast. After that, we spent the most of the day at a library, followed by some time at a dog park.

Aiden mastering the "through" command

For dinner that night we met up with the parents of one of Kathleen's best friends from grad school (and the officiant at our wedding), who snowbird down to Tucson in the winters. They were kind enough to feed us dinner, let us shower and do laundry at their rental, which had a beautiful view of the city and surrounding landscape.

After Tucson, we headed towards Joshua Tree National Park with a short stop at the Casa Grande National Monument. As we were getting to Joshua Tree, news about the coronavirus outbreak started to sound worse and worse. We decided it would be best to take a bit of a break from our travels and head home. So, we wrapped up Joshua Tree and drove north.

 

We stayed at some beautiful bureau of land management campgrounds in southern Arizona and California on the way to and from Joshua Tree. Before getting back to Oregon, we spent one night in Redding with Kathleen's aunt and uncle who had just moved up from SoCal.

 

Now we're sitting in Eugene, socially distancing ourselves from people, waiting for this epidemic to slow down. We're not sure yet when we will continue. We're a bit disappointed that we had to stop right as we were getting into the part of the country we were most excited for, but we know that we made the right decision.

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!