In between Winslow and Red Rocks camping, we made a little detour off I-40 to see the Petrified Forest National Park (still in AZ), which includes a larger painted desert than the one we'd just seen back in Winslow. We were able to use our "America the Beautiful Pass" for admission for the RV and ourselves, though we had to pay extra for the second vehicle (which would have been free, if we had been pulling it... rats.).
We parked at the main visitor center and did the little loop hike to look at some petrified wood.
Some of the petrified wood is absolutely gorgeous:
The big painted desert, before (top) and after (bottom) sunset.
And one more gratuitous sunset pic (just because):
Back into NM, we drove, past an area called Malpais (which means "bad country" in Spanish and is used specifically to describe the basaltic lava flows found in areas of the southwestern US). Piles of the black basalt were strewn all over the land, making it bad country indeed: it gave the whole region a bleak, hopeless sort of feeling.
[In literature, this would be known as dramatic foreshadowing...]
We drove straight on through the day, right back to the exact same Walmart in Santa Fe that we had provisioned at, in those lovely days of heady optimism before our arrival at the Solar Ark, over two months earlier.
The drive was not without problems: Baba G had been having intermittent power issues since we left Winslow and her exhaust seemed even gassier (literally) than usual. :( She was even worse on the hills than she'd been before Nate did the tune-up on her! We just couldn't figure out what could be wrong, though we'd known (since talking to Martin, the mechanic in La Cueva) that her carburetor couldn't be rejetted and she'd be prone to power loss at altitude. The only possible improvement we could make was to either adjust the timing (fairly cheap) or replace the carburetor with a fuel-injection system (not cheap!). Guess what we decided to try? ;)
On the upside of being back in Santa Fe (civilization!), we had a free parking lot to stay in at Walmart (more on that in a minute), plus a Trader Joe's grocery store (if you don't know how wonderful that is, you are missing out!) for me, a Harbor Freight for Nate, roughly six different auto parts stores for Baba G, and even an authentic Vietnamese restaurant where we went for fabulous Pho (beef noodle soup, properly pronounced phuh-- like a sound one would make if punched in the stomach). Here's Nate, enjoying his Pho:
Despite our enjoyment of being back in the civilized world again, the three days and nights we ended up spending in the Walmart parking lot just plain sucked. As it turned out, when I had let the O'Reilly's auto parts guy talk me into buying the pricier platinum plugs, rather than the OEM nickel-chrome (I think) plugs, because they'd "run so much cooler".. well, I had set us up for failure. :(
The platinum plugs actually run much hotter: so hot, in fact, that they had melted the boots on the brand-new wires. That probably happened as soon as we'd gotten Baba G up to operating temperature out of the campground in Winslow. So we'd been running on less than eight cylinders (we guessed maybe just six) all the way from Winslow to Santa Fe. We had actually tried to manually adjust the timing on the carb at the Red Rocks campground (yeah, the one with locked restrooms), but didn't produce much (any?) noticeable improvement.
On the road, Nate decided something beyond the timing was wrong, so he pulled one and discovered the melt issue. We basically decided to just hobble into Santa Fe and then deal with it.
So, off to the O'Reilly's we went, with the melted wires and bad (for us) plugs, to make what we assumed would be an easy exchange. I mean, O'Reilly's people had talked us into the wrong equipment and caused the whole issue, not to mention cost Nate all that time and effort. So, were they immediately sympathetic and accomodating?
Not so much.
Nate went in to make the exchange. (I was in the car googling something or another...) When he still hadn't come out-- a LONG while later-- I went in, only to find him at the end of an unsuccessful transaction. The store manager had flat-out refused to do the exchange, on the grounds that we had somehow sabotaged the three-day-old wires ourselves. Sabotage! [Interestingly, this term is French and means to "clatter around loudly in wooden shoes (sabots)" and, though the etymology is unclear, seems to derive from the practice of workers deliberately screwing up the manufacturing process.]
I would have liked to have hit the manager with a wooden shoe, but having none, I decided the pragmatic approach was to call corporate... which totally worked (eventually, but we'll spare you the details).
Good lesson for all you fine readers out there: when front-end customer service fails you (and it will), CALL CORPORATE! If that fails, have some wooden shoes on hand. ;)
Anyway, three painful days and nights later, after Nate replaced the plugs and wires (again), ALL the vacuum lines (see the two images below for a little taste of the snarl of spaghetti that project entailed), distributor cap and rotor, and added heat shields to the wire boots...
[What fun!]
... we pulled out of Walmart and vowed to never, ever return there again.
At long last, we get to say "Good bye, and good riddance, Walmart parking lot!"
But, before we end here, let's just let you all in on the reality of the Walmart camping experience. Here is what it is: free overnight parking (not at every Walmart, apparently, but at most of them), with access to all the provisions and (perhaps most importantly, to us) clean restrooms inside the store.
Here is what it is not: a quiet place where one can actually sleep past about 4am, any given night. Why? Because some evil parking-lot-sweeping-machine comes to life at that terrible hour and, with a screaming Doppler-enhanced vacuuming noise (but seemingly no actual cleaning effect), awakens you and your terrified pets. The possibly artificially amplified noise continues for at least an hour and makes MANY MANY MANY passes by your RV.
In the end, we decided Walmart is not actually happily hosting all these freeloading RVers: they like the PR value of that image, so they feign tolerance, but in actuality send out their sadistic vacuum-sweeper to try to drive them all from the parking lot before the paying-not-staying customers start rolling in.
Anyway... neither of us have ever been so happy to pull out of a parking lot before. And this time, we were headed to a destination we hoped would be longer-term and more of a sure thing than anywhere we'd stayed in three months!
Check out those gorgeous autumn cottonwoods!
Up Next: Driving into Winter!
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