5 May 2024 – Trip day 35 – by Alan
We drove from Carlsbad, New Mexico to Alamogordo, NM for the next stop on our journey, White Sands National Park.
As we prepared to depart, I noticed that one of the rear jacks had a small puddle of hydraulic fluid. The fix for this is to replace the jack, so that will be fun. We’ll address that in Tucson. The annoying part is that the replacement jacks are just under $700 each.
We took US 285 north to Roswell, then turned left on US 385, which turned into US 70. This took us over Apache Pass at over 7,500 feet in elevation.
We stopped at a little rest area before Roswell which was the site of the Blackdom Townsite.
One of the annoying things about the drive was the GoPro recording the drive lost its mind. It started randomly rotating the video and locking on sideways. Of course, it was mounted perfectly fine and stable the whole ride, so I’m not sure what happened with that.
I’m making a trip video where I cut out the sideways parts. It is rather unfortunate that this happened, as it was a nice drive through the mountains.
It was a bit windy and gusty, and as we came through the mountain pass, we could see the white sands ahead of us were being blown into a large white hazy cloud.
There were a few good gusts that tried to push the trailer around on the highway. One in particular was a good hit as we came around a bend and lost the shielding of the mountain side.
The driving video will be available here later today.
One of the other fix it things I had to take care of was our griddle.
In Florida, everything worked fine. When we got on the road, in San Antonio we went to cook dinner on it, but it barely worked. And by barely worked I could get one burner to work at about half power. If I turned the other burner on, both would go out.
I suspected that the regulator had gotten some sand or other dust in it when I packed it up. I took apart the regulator and blew it out, and put it back together. There was a little improvement, but not much.
I ordered a new regulator and it arrived while we were in Carlsbad. I put it on, and the problem persisted. Somewhat at a loss, I tried a different propane tank from the RV, and that did not fix it. At this point, the only thing left was to try a different hose. I ran down to the local Walmart and picked up a new hose, and like magic, we were back in business! I don’t think I’ve ever had a hose fail like that before on me.