Tuesday - Where's my shower?Tuesday saw us run out of fresh water. I hadn’t filled up at Mormon Lake because the gauge showed ¾ - it was clearly lying. To make matters worse the water wasn’t emptying from the shower tray. I remove the access panel outside and the waste trap to find the whole drain line full of water – it soon became clear the problem was just one of angle – we were parked nose down very slightly and the very flat waste pipe was not draining into the grey tank at that angle.
Despite turning off the water pump as soon as Sally said the water had stopped coming out, the next time I tried to have a shower I found this last running dry had clearly sealed the fate of the pump, which had been struggling increasingly during the trip - it was no longer man enough to power the shower, so we would be returning to washing from a bowl of water for the rest of the trip.
After leaving the campground the tyre pressure warning light came on. The right rear was definitely down a little and inspection showed a screw stuck in the treads. We passed several garages where the air hose end had been cut off (someone clearly has a nice collection of stolen tyre inflators hanging on their living room wall); it was 80 miles before we found a working one. We had some assistance inflating the tyre too:
The tyre hadn’t gone down much more so I pumped it back to full pressure to see how fast or slow the leak was. The light went out and stayed out all day – it could have been leaking slowly since I picked up the van. Note that I could have used road service, but I don’t want to waste hours waiting by the road in a Navajo reservation, and no, I wasn't tempted to use the tyre repair skills learnt at Expo. In the end the warning light didn't come on for the rest of the journey - so at that rate of air loss the screw was probably in the tyre when I picked up the camper in Denver. I reckon the screw was dropped on the floor of the Apollo workshop in Denver and accidentally driven over there.
From several places we kept seeing Ship Rock sailing away in the distance - or maybe it was just keeping pace with us, sailing its way through the deserts:
Sally asked if we could visit Utah this trip - I said "no problem, I'll take you there today":
And so on to Mesa Verde, which was lovely. We took the guided tours of the Balcony house, then the Palace. Very nice, especially because again we were there late in the day and most tourists had gone home already.
The fire observation post on the way out of the park:
We stayed at the campground in the park. Not cheap at $28, but convenient and with a good store.
Stay tuned for the lumpier bits...
