Our Tiny Winter Abode in South Fork

At last!  We've brought you all to South Fork, Colorado, where we've been living since November 2nd.  :)  Welcome!

We rented this little cabin, which we found on craigslist, for the winter:

Also on the property are two trailers, two sheds (you can see one in the background above), and a greenhouse frame.  We decided to park Baba G between the greenhouse and the cabin, to block the neighbors' dogs' view of the front door: let's just say they are a bit... barky.

 Dog shield and fabulous free woodpile!  (Yes, yes, safety googles during all chopping!)

You also noticed, no doubt, the lumber sticking out of the Civic: we had a few critical carpentry projects to do to make the place liveable.  And when I say "we," you know that means Nate... right?  ;)

Project #1 -- Staircase to loft, so we could use it as our bedroom.  Nate had hoped he could use the stringers we found lying around from some previous staircase that had been torn out of the place, but no luck there as there were about three zillion nails sticking out of the them, plus one had been cut in half (boo).

So, he started from scratch, taking measurements... not much run to work with there, so these were going to be some pretty steep stairs!

... but he fit in the newly made stringers...

... and voila-- an accessible loft!  This man is a force to be reckoned with!

 

Nate says it's more of a ship's ladder than a staircase... but it is functional and sturdy.

Project #2, 3 & 4 -- Cat door plus inside and outside platforms to reach the door (especially for my two fat boys: Fink and Pete).  Nate was so clever, he made a boot rack for
the inside platform, so it's doing double-duty.

Wow!  It is BRIGHT through that window: hopefully, you can make out the little square of cat door in the left lower end of the overexposed area.  ;)  Isn't that boot rack awesome!

Can you believe that fat cat (Pete) fits through that little door?  He does!

Project #5 -- Snow rake!  [Pics to come...]  It was fortunate Nate built this handy thing, for pulling snow accumulations down off Baba G's roof (Ace & Kathie had warned us about the possibility of collapse... and there was no way we were going to risk that, after our Eterna-Bond project-from-hell back before we hit the road!): we got a massive snowstorm about a week after we moved in!

Baba G says "Yay!  They got me parked and winterized... just in time!"

Finally, we put up several shelves, including one in the living room (just for candles and such), one in the office (for the modem), another in the office (with a hanging closet rack mounted to it, for clothes), and one in the bathroom for laundry detergent and stuff.

And I picked up four identical bookshelves at Walmart for $5 each (!!): one is a bathroom shelf, two are for clothes, and one is for office stuff and holds up the printer.  

I also hung (inexpensive, but really nice deep red) curtains in all the windows and a makeshift curtain rod in the shower (with two plastic caps screwed into the walls and an old broom handle we found in the cabin).  

You can see the hammock we had temporarily installed (before we got a love seat in December)-- hanging off to the right, but let's just say it's way more interesting to look out the windows than at them.  ;)

As you are likely gathering by now, the place was pretty bare when we got here!  And kind of a weird interior: the walls are oriented strand board (OSB), which is normally only used on exterior walls.   You can see it behind our favorite fixture (the wood stove) here: [And yeah, that's unfinished sheetrock on the side wall... bleh.]

This was taken before the loft was accessible, so we were still sleeping downstairs.

We brought in our red rug, the two bookshelves from the RV and our whole library.  In came the mattress too, backed with a headboard we found in one of the sheds!  Last but not least, we put up our USA map (for planning our next destination and appreciating just how crazy and long the trip here was), our photo-poster from our trip to the Pacific Northwest in 2012, and hung Nate's dartboard on the last remaining office wall.

Oh, right: one last thing: we found out just a few days before arriving here, that there was no fridge.  There was no way we were going to continue "cooler madness" through the entire winter, so we were tossing around the idea of buying a dorm fridge.  But-- lo and behold!-- there was a full-sized refrigerator/freezer in the back of the shed you saw way back up there in the first pic.  We pulled that sucker out and plugged it in on the concrete slab that runs along one side of the cabin, crossed our fingers, and... it worked!

Thus began a momentous, three-day cleaning blitz during which I had to (a) evict three mice, (b) clean out their food stash (which I relocated to a nice, cozy spot under the back of the wood pile... c'mon, people, I am not a heartless monster!), (c) remove all the-- let's just call it "rodent-sullied"-- insulation (No pictures: you're welcome.), (d) scrub and bleach everything, and (e) install new insulation, cut to fit.  The end result: no more cooler!

Somehow, we managed to get all this stuff done by the time the snow storm hit, so we were able to just hunker down in our cozy cabin, with a roaring wood fire, food chilled down to safe temperatures, self-sufficient in-and-out cats, and the knowledge that Baba G that was safely parked and winterized right outside the front door.  Yippee!

Up Next:  Holidays in the Valley

Driving into Winter!

On the road again... northward bound from Santa Fe... we found ourselves driving out of autumn and into winter, in a single day.  

Here we are somewhere north of Espanola, NM on Halloween Day:

And here we are in our cute little free campsite that same afternoon: 

Tigger's first encounter with snow, ever!

And here's what Nate does with the first snow of the season:

 Yeah, you all know how he wrote that, right?  Gross.

Anyway, we spent two nights boondocking (no hook-ups for electricity, water, or sewer) in Tres Piedras, NM in the Carson National Forest.  [Tres Piedras = Three Rocks/Stones]  We were the only people in the campground!  We had provisioned up quite thoroughly in Santa Fe, so we had gin, pomegranates, and ice for "fall shots:"

And we had some great local microbrew beers (sorry, Mike... hehe) and a nice big pumpkin to carve into a jack-o-lantern.  I picked up some orange candles and drew faces on them, too:

Here's jack again, in his proper place on the front steps:

We had a lovely evening celebrating Halloween, ending with a great big campfire:

And here is how we rounded up that nice big pile of firewood, earlier in the day:

The next day, we went back into Tres Piedras to have lunch at the cute little country store (The Chili Line Depot) we'd found the night before.  And, as luck would have it, we met one of the owners, Debbie, with whom we ended up talking about our goal of starting a sustainability/natural building school.  She asked if we'd already been to the famous (or in some circles, infamous) Earthship community outside Taos.  We said we had not, and that we had to be in South Fork, Colorado the next day, so we didn't think we'd have time.

Well, Debbie was not about to stand for our nonsense.  She informed us the Earthship community was just down the road-- less than a half an hour's drive away!-- and she was going to take us to see them.  Hop in, she said.  We did.  Without a camera or cell phone.  :(

Earthships are buildings made from waste materials (such as bottles, aluminum cans, and tires) that would usually be headed for the dump.  In the USA, Michael Reynolds has been the earthship pioneer, starting an intentional community outside Taos, NM in the 1970s.  Here is one example of an earthship (pic from Mother Nature News):

Gorgeous, aren't they?

And if you want to learn more about earthships and Michael Reynolds, check out the documentary "Garbage Warrior" here.

While I love earthships in principle and definitely intend to include bottle-and-can walls in our eventual curriculum and campus buildings, 

[especially bottle walls... ooh, aah...]

{Image from inspirationgreen.com}

I would not use old tires in an enclosed living space of any kind.  Having taken a good measure of chemistry, and worked as an analytical chemist my first year out of college, I have not been convinced by the claims that there is no dangerous off-gassing from the tires both into, and out of, the structure.

If I ever meet Michael Reynolds, I will try to steer the conversation away from this topic.  ;)

So, Debbie brought us back to the Chili Line and said we should come back around later that afternoon for their friends-and-family-only Happy Hour!  We went back to the RV, fed the kitties and let them roam around outside for a bit, grabbed some cold beer to contribute to the happy hour, and were back by 5 or so.  Tables had been pushed together and the kitchen crew was bringing out a steady stream of fabulous appetizers (though whole pizzas start to just sound like dinner, don't they?).

What we thought was to be a literal happy hour turned into a whole evening of good conversation, great stories, and lots of laughs.  Debbie's husband, Gil, is a true-to-life cowboy, from his soft-spoken demeanor right down to his cowboy boots.  The two of them have had tons of adventures together, both work and play, and we really enjoyed spending time with them.  We realized it had been a really long time since we'd hung out with anyone besides... each other.  Yikes!

The next morning (November 2nd), after leaving Jack under a piñon (or pinyon, 'fer you yankees) tree to cheer passersby, 

 we stopped in for breakfast again at Chili Line and ended up eating with Gil.  More good conversation, and exchange of contact info, and we were on the road again, headed north to finally make our way across the NM-CO border!

After all Nate's work on Baba G, she was running great, and the whole drive from Tres Piedras to South Fork was flat or nice, gentle sloping hills.  Nothing crazy, like we would have experienced, had we tried (yeah, we considered it) to take the western approach and cross Wolf Creek Pass.  There is even, we were informed, an eponymous hilarious country song about how treacherous it is.  

 [As an aside, to anyone raised on Harry Chapin, such as myself, the Wolf Creek Pass song brings up another classic trucker-on-a-hill tune: yes, you know it: 30,000 Pounds of Bananas!]

We were saved (this time) from ourselves by a friendly, eavesdropping trucker way back at our favorite little coffee shop (Mojo Cafe... with wi-fi... and amazing chili... and lovely owners!) in Winslow, 

 

who heard us saying something like "RV....Wolf Creek... Maybe?"  That was all he needed to hear.  He stepped up to our table, asked if we were thinking about doing what he thought we were thinking about doing.  We sheepishly admitted it, and he just flat out said, "Do not even think about it."  So we stopped, and almost-certain disaster was averted.  Thanks, nameless trucker!

Anyway, we thoroughly enjoyed our nice, relaxing last day of driving to South Fork, but as we neared our only-seen-on-Craigslist destination, a nagging worry began to grow in me.  Would the place suck?  Would it be in the middle of the desert and totally depressing (as the scenery going by outside the window seemed to suggest)?  Would we have to keep-- gulp!-- driving?  Find something else?  There was already snow on the ground: Baba G didn't have much more "driving season" left in her.  She certainly wouldn't do well in snow or ice.  What was I getting us into?

Up Next: Our Tiny Winter Abode in South Fork

[Yeah, so it was OK after all...]

The Many Trials of Nathan: "Walmart Parking Lot" Edition

Oops: forgot to tell you about this stop!  Let's go there before we get to the terrible Walmart parking lot...

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!

Standin' on the Corner in Winslow, Arizona...

... such a fine place to stay!  For free!  In the center of town, there is a statue of a man (that's him with Nate, below) who we assumed was Glenn Frey... or Don Henley... but, no.  Just some dude.

There's, of course, a flatbed Ford too!

And (no kidding) Eagles music is played from loud speakers in the intersection during daylight hours,

all day, every day.

So, how did we end up in Winslow, AZ?  While Nate was spending some quality time under Baba G (oh yes, his favorite spot), I googled us up a free little city park just south of Winslow.  We thought it was really strange for a city to have an RV campground and were fairly sure it would turn out to be a bust.  To our great surprise, the park was really nice, almost empty, and... (we thought it was a mirage)... on the water!  In the middle of dry deserty AZ!  The only downside was the restrooms in the RV part of the park were out of order, so twice a day, we'd drive all the way out to the main entrance and back into the day use part of the park.  I know, I know.  We have a perfectly functional toilet in the RV.  We just still didn't want to deal with blackwater.  Or maybe blech-water is more apt.    Anyway... check out our gorgeous little waterfront spot:

And here was the view out the front door:

Two of the other people staying in the park (separately) were kayakers, who were kind enough to let us borrow their gear to take a three hour snorkel down the flooded canyon (yes, it was dammed... or perhaps the spelling should be "damned," given what dams actually do to rivers).  :(  Despite how the water got there, kayaking was lovely, especially after being on the road and away from water for so long!

The local grebes were also happy about having a waterway in the middle of the desert (and the cats were pretty thrilled about the grebes too).  Fortunately, there were no casualties.  ;)

The scenery in the canyon (once we got past the graffiti zone nearest the road) was breathtaking:

After our kayak tour, with our spaghetti arms, we returned to Baba G and cooked dinner for our generous equipment providers.  :)

(clam linguine with a pink sauce, if you must know...)

We ended up staying at our cool little spot in Winslow for an entire week, so we had a chance to do some tourist stuff around the area.  One night, we had dinner at an odd little place in town with severed heads all over the place, and one right over our table:

We also found Baba G's doppelganger!-- except that her paint job was in better shape and her butt didn't sag quite as low as ours...

There were also some really cool old cars parked in various spots around town:

And we visited the nearby Little Painted Desert (we visited the big one too... later...), which is already spectacular in full sun...

but gets really gorgeous, with the colors becoming even more saturated as the sun sets: 

Winslow was great, but after a week, we decided it was time to move on again.  Nate had done a tune-up on Baba G and we were really excited to see how she'd run with some new plugs and wires. [Cue the dramatic music... yeah, the ominous kind...]

So, back onto I-40 we went, driving to another park that we had high hopes for, but ended up being just sort of dusty, windy, and kinda creepy.  Also: all the restrooms in the park were LOCKED!  So, what we intended to be a two night stay turned into just one.  But, we got to see some more cool red rocks (which was the name of the park) and we left without anyone asking us to pay for our stay (weird, but we'll take what we can get... hmm, maybe paying is how you get the bathroom door code...):

Up Next: The Many Trials of Nathan: "Walmart Parking Lot" Edition