Mesa musings

Saturday, March 26, 2011

PHOENIX, AZ – Today was one of those get-things-in-order days, starting with Val heading for a nearby Ford dealership for an oil change and me changing sheets and towels and getting laundry done. Those are chores you usually save for a rainy day, except we aren’t having any of those around here! It was also a day for some relaxing – always nice when on holiday.

We took a little jaunt over to Camping World in Mesa – one of those huge specialty places devoted entirely to RV and camping activities, where you can find little gizmos for your trailer, camping cookbooks, travel games for the kids, or even a $250,000 motor home if the fancy strikes you.

We were looking for something a bit more mundane: trailer anti-freeze, a vivid pink liquid that you pump throughout the trailer’s plumbing system in winter to prevent the pipes from freezing. Not exactly what you’d think of when we’re basking in 80-degree sunshine in Arizona, but only three days ago, the coldest temperature of the day in continental USA was recorded in this very state, according to our USA Today newspaper’s weather map.

We’ve been watching that map closely, because we are working our way northward, and there have been plenty of below-freezing temperatures in high-altitude locations such as Flagstaff and the Grand Canyon. We have to figure out how to see those places without having our pipes freeze in the trailer overnight. We’re not too worried about ourselves freezing, because we have a wonderful down-filled duvet plus a propane furnace (plus each other!), but the plumbing is something else.

A strategy that we applied in Santa Fe, when we did experience freezing temperatures, was simply not to use the water system at all. We have two water jugs, which we filled during the day when it was warm, and for dish-washing and the like, we just heated water in our kettle. We also have a plastic basin, and we send all the grey water down the toilet where it stays in the black water tank till we dump it. There’s no worry about cracked pipes in the tanks, so that works fine. Not the most convenient set-up, but it works!

Still, to avoid this problem in the coming days, we’ve picked a lower-altitude destination where weather records show overnight temperatures above freezing, but which is still close enough to the sights we want to visit.

Another tool we have just acquired to enhance our trailer life is a special adapter for the laptop that boosts its sensitivity to the internet signal from the wi-fi system at the trailer park. There have been some internet sessions in our travels this time that have been totally frustrating because the connection is constantly being broken or lacks the strength to allow the uploading of photos for our blog, or the opening of attachments in incoming e-mails.

So far, and it has only been 24 hours since we started using it, the difference is fantastic. We had thought that in the four years since our trip to Alaska, when we first ran into this problem, RV parks might have improved their wi-fi amenities, but that is not the case. The (self-described) geek at Best Buy told us that more often than not, RV park owners will expect a router intended for home use to provide adequate signal to dozens of guests across acres of property! Happily, our new accessory seems to be compensating for this very nicely.