Leaving the dust behind

After Church Sunday, we hitched the trailer to the truck and headed north.  We are both super sneezy from consuming too much dust these past days.  Memories of south west Colorado are acting like a magnet, so off we went, leaving behind beautiful stands of ponderosa pine and Arizona mountains.  We drove to Gallup, NM, about 20 miles from the NM/AZ border and spent the night at a commercial campground.  This gave us the opportunity to take showers, the first in 10 days.  Gallup was dusty, but less so than we had been experiencing.  BNSF trains, more than 100 per day, gave us background sounds all through out the night.  Proximity to I40, and traffic sounds added to the ambiance.  Suffice to say, we pulled up anchor after breakfast and showering.

What a difference 150 miles can make.  That's the distance we drove today to arrive at Mesa Verde RV Resort.  We are parked in a spacious (for a commercial campground) site, with a view of mountains out our back window.  We actually have green grass under our picnic table, and we seem to have left the dust behind.  Hooray!!

I had a bit of anxiety, when several days ago, I checked the wheel nuts on our trailer tires.  For the first time, I realized I didn't have a lug wrench that would fit the wheel nuts!  We were contemplating driving on a highway that bisected the Navajo Nation Reservation, where I expected little or no cell service, so I wanted to be prepared to change a flat if I couldn't contact triple A.  The reason the lug wrench wouldn't fit is due to extra long lugs or maybe more properly called threaded studs.  I happened to have an old spark plug socket, which was deep enough and I thought it would hold, but I didn't have enough leverage to actually loosen a nut.

I called Danny Lange, our dealer, to share my problem, and Danny suggested the obvious, get a half inch deep socket and a breaker bar.  This we did do, so I was able to drive the road through the Reservation with no qualms about tire trouble.

Later this afternoon, we drove over to Dolores, Co to a Forest Service Headquarters and got some info on hiking trails.  I also bought a Forest Map, now $10, for what used to be free.

There appears to be lots to do here, and we are looking forward to having fun.

No photos today