As I recently explained, driving an RV is only part of the fun of RV life. You also are in charge of a bunch of systems that are sucking up finite resources. Well I believe Lydia may have turned on the water heater and neglected to turn it back off and it kept our water toasty warm for us all night. Unfortunately it also slurped up like all of our remaining propane. This was a problem. I consider us lucky that we had this problem on the day before Thanksgiving as opposed to Thanksgiving proper, because it was very difficult finding someone who could help us.
I learned a lot more about propane than I ever needed to know. For one thing it seems that you have to have some sort of certification to fill propane tanks. I suppose this makes sense as we don't want people exploding themselves and those around them. Apparently there's a different certification or something for an onboard tank like the one featured in our RV. So even the few people we could get ahold of who could have filled a tank did not want to fill our tank in particular. Luckily the good people at the Big R in Cortez, Colorado either had said certification or were cool with risking all of our lives to fill it up without one.
At one point after filling up the... seal on the tank wouldn't engage and so it was hissing out all of our precious propane. This thing was just trying to blow up. No thank you. Farm supply store explosion is not how I'm going out.
There was a grizzled old dude employee and a teenager. The teenager took the opportunity to talk to me in excruciating detail about how he was going to work on like a natural gas rig around here somewhere... and maybe he knew people who quit high school to get into the business? He was using a lot of technical jargon and I was super amused that he assumed I knew what he was talking about.
I've been pretty excited about the prospect of hitting some national parks on this trip. Mesa Verde National Park was our first trophy. My buddy Wikipedia can help out now:
"Established by Congress and President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, the park occupies 52,485 acres (21,240 ha) near the Four Corners region of the American Southwest. With more than 5,000 sites, including 600 cliff dwellings, it is the largest archaeological preserve in the United States."
"Starting c. 7500 BC Mesa Verde was seasonally inhabited by a group of nomadic Paleo-Indians known as the Foothills Mountain Complex."
I thought it was kind of cool that people lived here for so long that you could follow along with their building technology progress.
Luckily I've been driving a refrigerator around so I was able to have a quick brewsky break in between pueblo open house tours.
Cliff Palace
It looked like there'd been a fire or two in the area.
We found a place selling tamales that had a drive thru big enough for my giant ride.
We did a fantastic hike at Hawkins Preserve near Cortez.
The landscape got very lunar in places.
Plus the moon was visible in the daylight which added to the spacewalk.
We heated up some of our tamales from the drive through.
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