Trip update: Rough Rock Part 1

I did make it out finally, late last Thursday. It was 5:30 PM when I pulled away from the house, all loaded down. It almost didn’t feel worth leaving at that point, but I figured even though I’d only get maybe 90 miles before stopping for the night, at least I’d be committed and gone, so go I did.

Getting to Rough Rock was no picnic. I had planned to go out through Yosemite, but neglected to check to see if Tioga Pass was open. I didn’t find out it wasn’t until I got to the park entrance—after following an incredibly slow tour bus for what seemed like hours. I don’t know if the driver was new to mountain driving etiquette, or just rude in general, but he (I of course assume it was a “he”) passed up four turnouts provided just for slow vehicles to allow cars behind them to pass. I am not known for my patience, especially when driving, so I was, ahem, not happy. And then I had to turn around, go all the way back to Merced, and take the southern route through Needles. I made it to somewhat east of Barstow before pulling over and setting up for the night, along a stretch with a wide pullout area intended for truckers.

What with the detour, and slow going uphill due to the load on the car, it was between 9 and 10 Saturday night by the time I got to Rough Rock, and I was exhausted. I just set the trailer up outside Jean’s front yard that night—it was all the coping I had left in me by that point.

Sunday was much better. I woke up rested, and took a much-needed shower, and then took the trailer out to Jean’s family hogan, where Iris and I had pitched our tents two years ago. Vernon, Jean’s younger son, helped me unhitch and get the trailer in place. Here’s where it ended up; I forgot to take pictures until I was almost ready to leave this morning, so what you see here is after the trailer had been all put away again.

Anyway, what we did was park car and trailer in front of the pickup you see on the right and unhitch. Vernon then literally picked up the front end of the trailer and wheeled it into place like it was a wheelbarrow or something. I have baby pictures of this kid, and I’ve been threatening to post one next to a picture of the trailer with a caption something like “This child picked up this trailer and wheeled it around” (I need something catchier), but since his baby pictures are at home, that will have to wait. I just know I was pretty impressed—I can shove the trailer around on level pavement, but pick up the front end? Not even close.

We spent the rest of the afternoon getting ready for a cook-out that evening. I had brought them a round Weber grill, and wanted to show Jean’s kids how to use it to smoke a whole chicken (I had done that at home when Jean and two of her grandkids visited me last summer, and she had really liked it; more on the chicken later), and the family grilled over piñon wood as they usually do. Jean’s daughter-in-law cooked bread over the grill, in addition to steak, hamburgers, hot dogs, and two kinds of peppers. Here’s some video of the bread-making. First, done well:

Hopefully, someday there will be either embedded video, or a youtube link here, once I figure out how to do it. wordpress used to let me upload video for free, but since May 6, they want money, and they insist on PayPal, which I won’t use–I had bad experiences with them–, so. . .

Back when I lived here, all the women used to tease me (not to say “make fun of”) and my attempts to flatten the dough out like that. I reminisced about that, so of course they handed me a chunk of dough, and unbeknownst to me, Vernon grabbed my video camera, so here I am, in all my incompetence:

Video of me with bread here, someday

Back to the chicken: it took forever to cook. If you’ve ever done it yourself, you’ve probably had that happen. In this case, it was the result of a couple of factors (I think): we didn’t set the grill up quite right, and then it got really hot very rapidly, so I damped it down too much and then didn’t check on it soon enough. Once we realized how slowly it was cooking we opened it up again, but by then it was too late—it never really heated up properly after that. I simply had not expected it to be a problem getting the grill hot enough, given how hot the day was, especially in the sun. In any case, it was a good two hours after the rest of the food was ready before we decided the chicken was cooked. Only four of us were still there by then—me, Jean, and Vernon and his wife (who live there, so were kinda stuck until we left anyway). We ate some just to say we did, as much as we had room for by then anyway. It was edible, but definitely not the best I’ve ever done.

Monday I got up before the sun cleared the horizon, and had my tea, and watched horses. A couple of loose band came through and greeted the penned ones ad hung around awhile befoe moving on. Here’s some video of the horses—I apologize for the length, but it was all I could do to figure out how to get it in the right format and get it posted.

RR horses video here, someday. Meanwhile, here’s a photo:

Then I putzed around while Jean was at work. Mostly I wanted to see if the AC would work properly. The bad news is it didn’t. That is, it did for awhile, once I got a few things figured out. It took a long time for the condenser to kick on, but it did eventually, and was cooling the trailer. After about 30 minutes, it was just under 80º F in the trailer and about 89º outside, which was OK because it of the cool breeze wafting over my body, and I was feeling OK about it. So I decided to leave it going while I went back to the compound. I put the generator on Economy (which may have been a mistake) and the AC on energy saver, and took off. Went in to the elementary school, to visit Jean in her classroom. She took me around and introduced me to people, and I went online and did some email, and what with one thing and another, it was about two and a half hours later when I got back to the trailer to check on things. By that time it was about 92ºF or so out—and 99º in the trailer. The generator was still going, and the AC was pushing air, but I couldn’t get the condenser to kick in for love or money. It eventually got tired of my ministrations, and just went off, and I couldn’t get it to come back on at all. It was way too hot to mess with it any more, so I pretty much just walked away and went back to the compound. Which turned out to be a mistake.

Not much to way about the rest of the afternoon. I began messing with video so I could post the above (fat lot of good it did me), and that evening we had Navajo tacos courtesy of Jean’s daughter. A storm seemed to be blowing in by that time, and “blowing” is the operative word. Lovely dark clouds all around, cool wind, fresh smell in the air—we were hoping for rain. I headed back to the trailer with enough daylight left to take care of things, and it was a good thing I did. That’s when I realized I REALLY shouldn’t have left the outside AC compartment open, because now there’s all this fine red dust in the storage compartment and probably in the AC unit also. I figure I need a dustbuster now—I see a visit to Target or (God forbid, but more likely around these parts) Walmart in my future. I closed things up, and began looking around for my all-important bucket, which I had left airing out and which had blown away. 15 minutes later, I found it and breeathed a big sigh of relief. I like my comforts.

It was very windy most of the night last night, but I slept quite well in spite of it—I already knew the trailer could handle a pretty good wind from my nights at San Luis reservoir back in CA.

Since I’ve been planning to leave Wed morning, and I wanted to make sure I could get the trailer out, I decided to try to take it down and move it back to the compound this morning, so that in case I couldn’t, I could get Vernon to work his magic again after he got home from work tonight. However, I wanted to see if I could handle it myself, because I’ll be in other places where I won’t have help at hand. I had already figured out I could drive through between the front of the hogan and the pillars—the car isn’t really much if any wider than the trailer, and so I had driven the car up next to the trailer last night (it’s handier having the two close together.)

There were two challenges involved—getting the trailer hitched to the car, and getting a straight enough shot at the passageway to get through withough scraping anything. The first was the major problem. The car is so loaded down that the hitch ball is lower than the hitch on the trailer even when the trailer is lowered all the way down. I first tried poising the hitch over the ball and flipping the front tire thingie up so the trialer would essentially fall onto the ball. Which it did—but the hitch didn’t catch, so I had to flip the tire thingie back down, which I just managed to do. Eventually I put the car’s back tires up on leveler thingies sold for RVs, and that raised the car up just enough. Here’s a picture:

Then I had to get the trailer over it, lowered, and get the hitch fastened. And it worked! Here’s the “after”picture.

I needed a bit more room to get a good shot at the passageway, so I needed to back the rig up. Which I don’t do well—I haven’t figured out how to realibly back the trailer up yet, though I’ve done it a few times. But I got just enough room to get through. Here’s the proof. You can see the tire tracks where we went through.

Man, this whole blogging things takes for-ev-er. That’s enough for now. It looks like I’m going to stay an extra day—tomorrow are all the end-of-school ceremonies, and it seems silly to miss those, and Jean thinks if I’m not leaving til afternoon, I may as well stay tomorrow night too, so I probably will. Given that I feel like I’ve done nothing today but get this thing posted (not quite true, but almost—I did shower, which felt really good. I was very dusty after last night’s windstorm. BTW, it never did rain, but it did cool things down for today) I don’t know when I’ll post again, but look for RR kid pictures when I do,

Oh yeah. One of the horses had a foal last night. Here’s some video.

RR foal video here, someday. Meanwhile, here’s a photo:

And another:

I thought it looked like a boy—I could have sworn I saw relevant appendages hanging down—but they say it’s a girl, and they should know, they were there when it was born. They didn’t come get me because they assumed I was asleep—and I probably was.