According to Google Maps my spot at Pilot Knob LTVA is 1.78 miles from the border with Mexico. There’s a well maintained dirt road used by the Border Patrol, Bureau of Land Management, and the Imperial Irrigation District. So I took a walk.
Happy New Year, everyone!
My feet are always cold. In winter not even heavy wool socks and a down quilt bunched up a few layers thick will help. Because insulation can only hold in the heat our bodies generate. My feet don’t make heat. Back when the first hints of coldish weather started, my feet told me it was time to work on another solution.
Okay, how about a 12 Volt heat pad? I found one for about seventeen bucks.
Because Nature likes to mess with my plans, it sent me several surprisingly not-cold nights. The heat pad was unnecessary. It put cold-hating me in the weird position of wanting colder weather. It finally came. Time for a test.
Power consumption is my primary concern with using electrical devices to produce heat. After sunset my little Volt meter (which I can see while in bed) usually shows 13V. With the pad heating up it dropped to 12V, which is lower than I like. But once temperature was reached and the pad cycled off, the reading jumped back to 13V. Then, as it cycled on and off to maintain temperature, it would drop to 12V for about two seconds, then back up to 13V again for 15 to 20 seconds. That wasn’t as bad as I feared. When I bumped the temperature up to 100° it behaved the same way.
My feet reported they were happier.
I didn’t want to keep watching the meter all night, so I put the heat pad away. I repeated the test the next night.
The third night I decided I was satisfied with my testing and went to bed with the intention of leaving the pad on all night. I woke up after a couple of hours and watched the Volt meter from the comfort of bed. It read 13V. I counted 15… 20… 30… 60 seconds. The two-second dip to 12V never came. And the pad didn’t feel warm. Had it gone bad?
The control was off. I pushed the on button and it came on. The pad started warming. Hmmm. The same thing happened about an hour later. Double hmmm. Some kind of fault in the control? A short in the heating wires? To be safe I unplugged it and put it away, much to the disappointment of my feet.
But in the morning, when I wasn’t half asleep, I noticed the small type on the control: 45’ Heat Timer. Oh. So it was working properly. But that wouldn’t serve my need.
So the search for a solution continues.
I watched one of those tool tips videos the other day. The guy said you could make it easier to find the wrench you want if you used a paint marker to color in the size stamped on the tool. He also suggested color coding to differentiate SAE and metric sizes. That wouldn’t be necessary in my case since my metric and SAE sets are from different manufacturers and look nothing alike.
We’re all familiar with Westphalia campers. But they weren’t the only company converting VW buses. Way down in South Africa a company by the name of Jergens was doing its own thing. And doing it rather well.
Here’s a link to the whole story and more photos.
Uuuummmmm, okay. What’s Plan B?
How about spending forty bucks and getting a short-term pass for the Pilot Knob Long-Term Visitor Area? Short-term at the long-term.
I had avoided the place the past eight years because it’s right by the Interstate, a CHP office, the agricultural inspection station, a casino, a gas station, and the railroad. And The Center of The World/Museum of History in Granite/Maze of Honor/Chapel on the Hill/section of original spiral staircase from the Eiffel Tower.
Eh, sure. Why not? At least the ground is higher, so if it rains more I won’t have to worry about flooding. And it’s closer to Yuma. And the border crossing. Aaaahh, fish tacos!
The pass is good at any of the LTVAs around here, so if I don’t like it here I can try others, like Holtville with its hot spring. And freeway noise.
Besides the usual self-serve car wash amenities, it has large-vehicle-friendly bays with raised areas that allow you to clean your roof. Rather than the metal catwalks found in some car washes, these are built into the dividing walls. The steps are narrow and steep, but they work.
One thing that would make this car wash perfect would be machines that accept cards. Luckily, the change machine actually works, though there’s enough of a pause between it eating your bill and the quarters falling to make you wonder whether you just lost a buck.
Oh, as an extra bonus, there are several good Mexican restaurants along 8th Street. I recommend Los Manjares de Pepe between Dora and Almond, a little over a block from Speedway, on the other side of the street, behind a huge tree.
A few months back Lou asked if I wanted a package of dehydrated hash browns. I hadn’t known there was such a thing. So yeah.
Just soak them a few minutes, blot them dry, then fry ‘em up, add salt and pepper and whatever else. Really good.
So I bought some more, and enjoyed them, too.
But when I went to replenish my supply, there were none available. Not in Walmart, Albertson’s or Food Basket. And none the next week. Or the next week. Or the next week. Or the next week. Or the next week. Or the next week. Or the next week. Rats.
I tried making some from scratch. They were a disaster.
I looked for them online. I could get them by the case. Nah. Or as a grossly overpriced two-pack. Double nah.
I thought maybe they just weren’t popular enough in the greater Silver City market for the stores to stock them. So I continued my quest when I hit the road. I didn’t find them in Tucson, Buckeye, Blythe or Indio. I didn’t find them at two Fry’s in Yuma or in two of the three-and-a-half Walmarts. Maybe they had stopped making them.
But then today, when I wasn’t really looking for them, because I didn’t think I’d ever see them again, there they were, in the third Yuma Walmart. (Sort of like those stories of finding love when you stop chasing after it.) I grabbed enough to hold me for a while. (Dehydrated hash browns, not love.)
Right now I’m camped in a place that looks like the middle of nowhere. Yet there’s a paved road about three-quarters of a mile away, and that road leads to a freeway a little over five miles away, which can take me to a good sized city about fifteen miles away. Rather than the middle of nowhere, I’m on the edge of somewhere.
Fog is a rarity in the desert. It’s so arid. But, surprise, we had some this morning. This photo doesn’t show it very well, because the fog wasn’t very dense, but you can see it along the base of the mountain.
I was soaking some lentils and barley and needed something to cover the bowl. Ah-ha! The pot lid was just right.
I was headed east, back to the desert on I-10 (or, as Southern Californians call it, the 10). The weather was great and I was driving with the window open. And traffic was cruising along.
Some road construction and a closed lane put me next to the barrier wall to my left. A combination of my tire tread pattern and the rain grooves in the pavement created an eerie hum-whistle-wail-howl that changed pitch with the direction of the grooves and echoed off the barrier. It was like a cross between banshees, howler monkeys and Yoko Ono.
Traffic spread out after the construction zone. The lane ahead of me was clear for about a quarter mile. There was a semi in the lane to my right and about three lengths ahead. And traffic was zipping past on my left.
Suddenly the semi moved into my lane. Why? There was no traffic in front of him. Then he swerved back into the right lane. That’s when I saw the reason for his maneuver. There was what looked like the plastic grill from some vehicle sliding across the highway. Just then, air turbulence from the semi lifted the grill from the road, about hood high, right in front of me! I couldn’t dodge right because the semi was now next to me, and there was close traffic to the left. So…
WHAM!
The grill skidded up the hood, nearly ripped off the wipers, slammed into the windshield, hit either the roof vent or front edge of the rack or both and…!
I don’t know what happened to the flying body part after that. I was too stunned to check behind me and too concerned about the fate of my windshield.
There were dark streaks on the glass, but none of the existing rock chips had expanded. Nothing was broken. But were those streaks also scratches? Was it time for another windshield replacement?
When I finally stopped to check things out (half expecting to see the grill caught in my roof rack) I saw there were also black streaks on the hood. They and the streaks on the windshield wiped off. The only new damage was a crack in the bug deflector. Okay, nothing serious.
Anyway, my friends, periodically check that your vehicle parts are well attached.
In August of 2019 a group of former coworkers gathered to celebrate my successful cancer treatment, to reminisce, and to catch up on life. Our beloved boss, Richard, who was struggling with his own illness, was there. We suspected it would be the last time we’d see him.
He passed away eight months later.
It was the beginning of the pandemic, with lockdowns and self-isolation, so the memorial service was put on hold—until yesterday.
The same coworkers were there, plus some extras. Family, of course, and non-work friends.
I thought about my experiences with Richard as the others spoke. He was truly a benevolent, empathetic, fair-minded man. A great boss in a world of odious employers, and a model for those who went on to become bosses themselves. That’s a wonderful legacy.
I pulled into Quartzsite on Thursday with the intent of staying at least through the weekend. I needed to pick up a package at my mail forwarder, and I wanted to stock up on some discount foodstuffs from a couple of vendors. I even posted on social media that I was interested in meeting up with any online friends who happened to be in the area.
But then I got a message Friday morning from a friend and former coworker stating the long awaited memorial service for our former boss—a wonderful man, a true mensch—was Saturday. In Burbank. He had passed away months ago, but the memorial service had been on hold because of the pandemic.
Ah. That changes my plans.
I got my Quartzsite errands done and hit the highway. I decided to break the four-hour schlep to Burbank into two segments. So I’m currently camped outside the south entrance to Joshua Tree National Park. I was surprised there were spots available, it being a holiday weekend and all. I’ll drive the final leg tomorrow, arriving shortly before the service. Then… well, I’d be almost at the beach. It would be stupid to immediately return to the desert. I’d just need to figure out where to stay. Perhaps with the friend who notified me of the service?
I’ve stayed at The Slabs a few times, although all the actual slabs were already taken and I had to settle for dirt.
I’ve stayed a couple of times at The Pads, outside Death Valley. Once when there was only one other person there, and once when it seemed everyone was there.
Now I’m camped on the back side of the old open pit mine in Ajo, Arizona. I’ve been here, oh, at least a half dozen times before, but this is the first time I approached the area from the city instead of via Darby Well Road just south of town. This route gave me a wide view of the boondocking areas as I came down the hill. I could easily see which spots were vacant. And I saw something I had missed before: the slab of a long-gone building atop a rise. Someplace smooth and level with far less dirt? Yeah, I could go for that.
I knew I had camped at Ironwood Forest National Monument last year, for several days, but I thought I had also been there two or three years before, pre-cancer. There was a really nice campsite I wanted to return to.
I checked the Google maps I keep of my camping locations. 2019? No, nothing there. 2018? No. 2017? Nowhere even in the Tucson area.
So I went back through the blog posts, searching for Ironwood. Yeah, a couple of posts from 2020, but none about the particular site I was looking for.
Okay, let’s look at my 2020 map. There it was. March of last year. Why did it seem so much longer ago? And now that I’m at the spot, why does it still seem like it has been years since I was here? What new old man brain weirdness is going on?
It all started with Lou being dissatisfied with the free phone he got with his Visible account. After careful shopping he ordered a better one.
I had been skeptical of Visible ever since I’d heard of it. Unlimited data, with no throttling, for as little as $25 a month? Lou assured me that was true. Hmmmm… It got me rethinking my mobile communications setup.
BEGINNING
The past year my mobile stuff has looked like this:
I had been with Verizon for a few years, mostly because of the availability of their signal out in the boonies. I had a phone and a hot spot, both with unlimited data, but both throttled after 22GB. So two devices allowed twice as much data use before throttling.
When my phone was paid off I thought about the trouble I had getting a Verizon signal in some places (like a friend’s place near Taos and at Lou’s place). Maybe I should get a phone from a different carrier so I’d have two options.
Just then, as if specifically to answer my question, the newly-merged T-Mobile and Sprint introduced a hot spot plan with 100GB of data per month. Ah-ha. I could dump the phone from Verizon, get a cheap prepaid phone for actual phoning, add the T-Mobile hot spot, and be paying less each month. So that’s what I did. I sold my iPhone and got a $40 LG phone from StraightTalk, with 5GB of data.
MIDDLE
With Lou convincing me Visible was a solid choice, I got thinking some more. I could get unlimited data with Visible (which is a subsidiary of Verizon and uses their signal) with one of their phones and end up with Verizon and T-Mobile. And I could let go of the Verizon hot spot and shut down that account. Then my setup would look like this, and cost a lot less:
But before I finally made up my mind, the Pixel 6 was released, and Visible stopped offering the 4a. Well damn.
Ah, but I could bring my own phone. I found a lightly used Pixel 4a 5G for a reasonable price, from a well-reviewed vendor, on eBay. It arrived, looking good and functioning well.
I ran the IMEI number through Visible’s compatibility checker and… Not compatible. What? I entered the number again. Still not compatible. I got on a chat with Visible’s notoriously bad customer support. “Yeah, we stopped supporting the Pixel 5 and 4 when the 6 came out. Sorry.” Well damn again.
My options would be to resell the Pixel 4a and get a phone Visible still supported, or add the Pixel to my Verizon account. Ummmmm…
I decided to go with the easier but less economical second choice. I fed the Pixel’s code number into the Verizon compatibility checker and got an okay. Then I went to the Verizon store in Silver City where William helped me out.
Transferring a phone number from one carrier to another is usually a simple thing. Usually. Looking at his screen, William said, “It says here it might be up to 48 hours before the phone can be activated, but it should take way less than that.”
Forty hours later, with the phone still refusing to activate, I returned to William. He checked his computer, made a calls to both Straight Talk and Verizon, got transferred and put on hold several times (all while trying to handle other customers in the shop) and finally learned Straight Talk had an incorrect ZIP Code on the account. With that fixed, and the number released to Verizon, we should be able to activate the phone within three hours.
That didn’t happen, so back to William the next day. More calls, more time on hold, more lack of answers, more having calls dropped, more recalling, more transfers to more people who didn’t have a clue, more customers to handle in the store… And through it all, William remained determined. All too often, people in his position would’ve just told me within the first few minutes something like, “Well, sorry, but we don’t know. Guess you’re screwed.” But William kept plugging along, being assertive with the people on the other end of the line. “As far as we can tell,” he told me, “Straight Talk released the number to Verizon and it fell into a crack somewhere in the system. I’ve got my manager and the regional manager working on it at their level. Thank you for your patience.”
At this point I was willing to just get a new number, but William said he didn’t think that was possible without opening another can of worms, since things had already been entered into my account. We both sighed. I thanked him for his dedication and determination and went to get some lunch. (Carne asada burrito from Fidencio’s)
Shortly after I returned, the manager stepped from her office, giving me a thumbs up. She fiddled with my phone as she approached. William’s phone rang. She confirmed the number. We were activated! Hallelujah! Finally! I thanked William again for his great attitude and said to his boss, “He deserves a raise. Hell, he deserves a part of the business!”
In small towns it’s hard to find anyone to fill jobs, much less competent and dedicated ones who are good with customers. So despite all the trouble, I lucked out.
END
So, I’ve ended up not saving as much as originally planned, but I have a more livable communications system. And a story to tell.
I was convinced it was National Oversized Load Day on I-10 today. Or something like that. But I arrived in Tucson with no problems, stopped in at Lowe’s for a new floor mat, picked up a few items across the street at Fry’s, then continued on to Ironwood Forest National Monument. I found a campsite next to a saguaro, propped up the solar panel, and enjoyed the perfect 80° weather. Break out the shorts!
Lou has been holding steady the past few months. On his oncologist’s advice, he has expanded his diet and put on a few needed pounds. He’s still weak and tires easily, but he doesn’t seem to be in decline.
So I’ve decided to move to my winter habitat near Yuma. I told Lou before leaving that if he needs me I come back from wherever I am.
My first stop is just 25 miles down the road at City of Rocks State Park where I’ll poke my head in on Debra Dickinson’s KOKO Fest, see what’s up and who’s there. Then most likely on to Ironwood Forest National Monument near Tucson, then probably Ajo after that.
Here are some shots from City of Rocks.
