Postcard from Arizona- 5

Benson, AZ

Mike & Susan

A dance at the Saguaro SKP park club house

Life in the slow lane of southeast Arizona kept us busy with tacos on Monday night, fish fry on Friday nights, dances most Saturday nites and Celia's line dance classes 3 mornings each week. And there was a pet show as part of the park's Spring Fling. The competition was fierce with awards for tallest dog, shortest dog, oldest dog, youngest dog and the dog that came the greatest distance. Annie lost out on the tallest dog award by a hair, but she took losing very well and didn't pout at all. Mike and I, however, think she was cheated. And we're pouting!


We made a trip to Sierra Vista with Mike & Susan plus 4 of their visiting relatives. We went to the Golden Corral for the buffet dinner. I'm not a fan of buffets but the mountain of food for $10 was actually very good. We did nearly get trampled: we learned it's not a good idea to get in the way of hungry Minnesotans when it's feeding time! :)

The fire pit... a recycled washing machine tub!

And Mike organized a campfire to celebrate Susan's birthday. It wasn't too cold initially, but by 8:30 everyone was ready to go stand in front of a heater! The SKP park has a group area for these events which includes a fire ring made of an old washing machine tub. Worked great to cook hot dogs and roast some marshmallows. Celia put together a S'more for me which I mostly ended up wearing so I stuck with just marshmallows.

Broken water filter (new bowl in place)

We've made a couple trips to Santa Fe, NM since we first arrived in AZ. I had to have follow-up visits with the ophthalmologist. Each of those trips involved yet another semi-emergency with the water system. What a money pit the house has become! Day-to-day living on the premises would probably have prevented the problems becoming big as they would have been spotted early. But we like RV-living too much for that silliness, so we pay the piper. For instance I think I whined about the $1,700 water bill last entry. Since I posted that whine we were granted some relief by the water company and we now have a $1,300 credit on our account.

Which is a good thing since, just prior to our most recent visit, we learned there was yet another water leak. Again we don't know how long the leak was there but there it was anyway. We called Chris Blea immediately and he had it resolved the same day. It was a bad solder joint that started to leak for whatever reason. No broken copper pipes this time. At least we would have water when we arrived. Yeah, sure...

We had water alright, but there was no heat. We got to the house at about 11:00 pm on a Sunday and wondered why we didn't hear the boiler fire up when we turned up thermostats. I could make out the sound of what I thought might be water in the boiler turning to steam, so I assumed we had air in the lines associated with the water leak. Time to call Chris again. We were (again!) very thankful for our fireplace insert in the living room. Did a great job taking the chill off as the temps dropped in the evening.

Chris is now working for the golf course during the day so we had to wait till he was off. He bled the system several times but couldn't get rid of the problem. Eventually he found the circulation pump had failed and oh-by-the-way 2 of the several ball valves were leaking and needed replacement. He was back the next day with a new pump and 2 new ball valves. He had everything back in order quick enough. So now the heating system is working again and we'll not have that to deal with that when we return to Santa Fe in early April. But I can't help but wonder what other problem awaits our discovery!

So from the preceding you can anticipate we're getting ready to move the rig. Finally. We'll head back to Santa Fe and get busy getting the house on the market. We have a lot of stuff to find a home for (anybody need want a 60" loom?) and even more to just dump. We'll be keeping the truck busy hauling 'stuff'!

If my eye issues continue on the current track (things look decent at this point) we should be able to head for the northeast in July.