Another Bounder Tale.

Everyone who has ever had an RV has several of these tales.. Here's the worst one I ever took the time to actually chronicle.

Well, the trip to Quartzsite was an adventure. It was a lot of stress that took a few days to recover from ( where is a screaming room when you need one?). I've learned that it is NOT TOO LOUD here at home with the new traffic noise from the freeway. I now know what loud is... LOUD is your mufflers blown out and going south because of bad repairs to the carburator. LOUD is being parked for two whole days between the railroad tracks with freight trains rumbling by every hour of the day and night, and a busy commercial highway with huge trucks, replete with Jake brakes, in the traffic mix. I'm sure that my husband is mad enough now to retaliate and he will. I leave it to him, as he can do it so much better than the screaming hizzy fit I could lay on them. At one point, I told him I felt that I we were being tortured to death by mechanics. This has been going on since before Thanksgiving, as you know. It only got slightly better out in Indio.

Anyway, the trip out started with a rush because we got the Bounder out of bondage at 4pm, and we were leaving the next day. They said it was fixed. We thought since they had replaced the coil, distributor,and completely rebuilt the carburator TWICE, and thoroughly detailed the interior after trashing it, we could trust that the problems were solved. Hubby and the mechanic drove it all over the half acre, and it worked just fine. Not to be...

We were meeting friends out at Buckman springs in the mountains near here to caravan with them as we didn't have time to take the rig on a real test trip; Quartzite it was. We got about 6 or 7 miles from there, and it started the same old thing..starving for gas,bucking, wrapping pipes, etc... We limped into Buckman, turned off the engine and Hubby ran to phone the garage. "Bring it back!"...so HE talked me into leaving with our friends and he would come out later when they solved this problem. He didn't make it that day... after replacing the plugs, wires, fuel pump, fuel filters and a coil, it ran like a champ and he started out the next day, arriving to applause from the camp at around 3:45. We had been able to keep in touch with each other via two other rockhound friends' cell phones. The Bounder was now "running well all the way out", he said.

It was a terrible thing to sleep on the hard couch of MJ and J's Bounder, but now I don't want that couch so much either! That ain't no bed! Anyway, Bob found one forlorn couch pillow here, at home, to rest his head because ALL the rest were in our Bounder. I take them all..hee hee. Here's a woman who loves her comfort.

We had fun at the big Q cluck cluck for the next week, til we left to go home...

As I was saying, we had loads of fun, at least until we left to go home...I found three Indian broomstick skirts that match the "reformed 60's jewelry seller's" shirts Bob bought me for Christmas. (The ones that just scream," Counter-Culture!") They were $15 Dollars each, and I think it was because they have to be hand washed. Snowbirds should dig "hand wash" but anyway, they are so pretty. You can never tell what a snowbird will buy.. One is dark rust, one is eggplant purple, and one is cranberry.

We visited with the publisher of Wired Magazine, who happened to be in one of the tents. She had a young woman who made chains in there with her, and I've never seen more perfect handmade chains. That kid has a future! This tent is the one in the pictures, where the Brazilians were; the brazilians had absolutely enormous specimens of quartz crystal and some other strange baubles that were actually selling. Anyway, you never know what a snow bird will buy....

It was a United Nations at Cloud's this year. I think the jewelry industry comes the closest to being the informal arm of that agency of any other industry save one-- telecommunications. Nearly every culture and ethnic group was there including Zimbabwe. Absulutely fabulous! I'm looking for Tibet and other Mongolian Plains people next year....

Anyway, though it's a buyingfest, I didn't do too much damage to the family budget with beads buying, we didn't find the sorts I really wanted. The prices are better at Tucson, but we never go there. Judy, didn't find anything suitable for making supported spindles. Wahh! I was hoping to send you little surprises!

We drove out of Quartzite on Tuesday morning and expected no trouble. Were we ever wrong. What is normally a 5 hour drive home turned into 59 hours. ( A lot of that time was spent parked in Hell on Earth, otherwise known as the commercial district of Indio.)

Tuesday night we knew we'd never make it over the mountains, so we stopped in a desert town where we had a friend with a really big driveway and stayed there. The next morning both mechanics he knew were too busy to see it that day, so we decided to try to limp home going North to go around the mountains. We broke down once for two hours along a highway, with huge double eighteen wheelers trying to punish us for parking on their shoulder.

We finally got it started again..actually we found out later that it cooled down long enough. We limped into Indio and we just had to eat and so shut it off. Of course it wouldn't start again, though we waited 3 and a half hours. We called emergency road service and the nice tow truck driver was there in 15 minutes. As an after thought, Bob turned the key....rhnnnnnnnn! So, we jumped back out of the Bounder, and I told the driver that I'd bet he never thought he was that scarey before! He had us follow him to the mechanic anyway....

Now Indio is a very pretty little desert town, but we weren't in the pretty part. There WERE lots of palm trees across the noisy highway...a bit of beauty, I suppose, but the railroad nearly came through the middle of the house, as the song of the same name says. This was something we didn't find out about until dinner time when the first freight rumbled through and the soup nearly jumped out of the bowls. We thought we'd been thumped by a 5.1 until the tell tale clickity clack reached our ears and the obligatory tooting of the train whistle at the crossing. By this time our hearts were in our mouths and our knees were quaking right along with the Bounder floor. I knew it was an Ambien night, otherwise I would never get to sleep. I was beginning to wish for some Prozac.

Poor Jazzie's first encounter with the two vicious sounding pit bulls right on the inside of the fence we were jammed against convinced him that absolutely nowhere on this side of the highway was suitable for the deposition of his urine or his poo. 3 am in an incredibly strange town found DH leading him a quarter mile each way and then ACROSS the highway to go pee!

The next day, two separate garages sent the identical wrong part and neither one before noon. With the prospect of staying another night there and with a very sick little red dog on my hands I'd decided to rent a car and come home when the right part finally arrived. The mechanic, who was practically falling down dead with some omminous virus and whom we felt both compassion and aversion for, hammered a coil out and a new one in, put everything back on and off we went on a semi-successful test drive. It was running, starting again when turned off, and there was no way this side of Hades we were staying there any longer!

We drove gingerly home with the deafening roar of a really BIG hot rod ( 28 feet, slightly dago'ed) in our long suffering ears. The mufflers are nearly gone, Sisters, but our ears have recovered. I tried to protect Jasper's ears but you know dogs just don't stand for any of that.

PS. Jazzie seems to be OK now, but if stress could kick him over into a disease, he'd have it. This little doggie and the two of us have been to hell and back.