Moochdocking

If you are looking for pictures. You are not going to find any in this post. This post is about life on the road. And it’s a boring read.

Holidays are the bane of roving travelers. You need reservations, blind luck or a hidden place to hole up in for holidays. We found a place, a friends driveway. We wanted to stay in Utah, but it got warm and the wind was going to blow for another three days. No electricity, so the windows have to be open and a 25mph gust carries fine red sand into the rig. You can not sit out as the dust gets in your whisky.

The upshot is we are killing time. We got to Utah on the cusp of seasonal weather change and we are too early for Colorado – there is snow in even the lower mountains. It snowed in Denver two weeks back.

We saw on Wheeling It that they are parked in friends yard and they used the term Moochdocking. We like it. We are also parked in friends driveway with W&E and there is free dump two miles away. Good thing too as we did not plan for Memorial Day. I know Congress changed the day a long time ago, but in my mind it’s still a week later.

Here in Grand Junction, roads can be named as being so many miles distant from the Utah border. We are close to 24 Road and 24 1/2 Road. How about G 1/2? Well each letter represents one mile from the county line. So G 1/2 is 7.5 miles from the county line. On a drive in more a rural area, we saw signs for 13 3/8 Road. That creates some interesting pronunciations for the GPS.

We had the front end aligned the year we bought KoKo. The chassis comes from Ford with a ball park alignment as they have no idea how the chassis will be used or how much the weight will be. We followed directions and had it done. No problems for four years. Then it started eating tires. So we bought tires twice and had it aligned three times. Turns out that not a one of the alignment shops replaced what are called blanks that Ford puts on to hold the ball joints with adjustable thingies called eccentrics so that alignment on all axis can be done. Eccentrics tune both the camber and caster, but more of the former. The Bottom line even highly recommended alignment shops can screw you. All they know to do is what the machine tells them.

Next rant. The last set of tires we put on were 14 months old when “new”. I specified that I did not want tires older then six months, but I did not check them. So they replaced tires made in June of 2010 with tires made in November of 2010 in January of 2012. Tire checking was called to my attention when the front end alignment was made. So the tire dealer in Montgomery screwed us with dated tires and charged for an alignment that could not be made as the Ford blank thingies had never been replaced with adjustable ones.

No sense in stopping my rant now. When we retired we had everything we needed. Since then we have replaced everything with a electric cord to it. It continues. The GPS I bought just before this trip to replace the one dying, died today. A week outside of Amazon 30 day return policy, but they were kind enough to do a refund anyway. We decided to replace it with one from Wal*Mart to avoid trying to be someplace when Amazon could ship a replacement. Where are those drones? Finally got the device recognized so I could download some POI files. Of course, the replacement unit has an older version of software, so just as I was getting accustomed to the new, I now have to revert to the older version. It cost $20 more than the one from Amazon. Life is not easy for an old man.

Made a batch of spaghetti today and noted the skillet was flaking Teflon. A new one was $30. And so it goes.

The ratchet gizmo that holds up the window shade in the rear window broke into pieces. I guess after over 1,200 times of it being put up and down it reached it’s MTBF. I rigged a cleat to hold the shade where we want it. $2 fix. And I will not have to listen to the DW fuss about the infernal ratchet again.

We have enjoyed our sojourn in Grand Junction. Big city shopping with a small town atmosphere.

Next week the really big city – Denver. If we get back over the pass. A little ice on I70 near Vail today.