Last Days in Albuquerque

The Sunday before I left ABQ, I marveled at how quickly the time had passed since we first arrived. We had so many adventures and learned so much.

There was still a bit more to learn during our last week. On Tuesday, I was able to get in touch with the Truma/Alde technician who could come out to check and see what was going on with my heater, and I called my extended warranty service to see if they would cover the charges. Unfortunately, because Truma wouldn’t work directly with the extended warranty, the warranty wouldn’t cover the repairs. This was particularly bothersome because the technician said he thought he might need to replace the entire unit.

Because this is the reality of owning a home on wheels, I got over it pretty quickly, but I was glad that I had planned ahead to have an emergency repair fund.

On Wednesday, I woke up to a frozen heated hose again. I applied the same philosophy that from the prior week and just waited it out. By midday, we had running water again. The heated hose and the Freeze Miser have both been very effective tools. I was feeling good that we’d have the heater fixed soon and be in AZ in a warmer location soon.

Then, around 3:30, we lost power. I called the office of the RV park to see if they had an estimated time that power would be restored. They said a few other people had called in as well, and that management had reported it to the power company. I checked the power company’s website, and it wasn’t showing that they were working on our outage. I wasn’t worried about me, but I was worried about the van getting too cold for Arthur.

Thankfully, I still had the rental car, so I went out to see if I could find a portable generator. I did find one at REI that I thought might work, but it wasn’t as powerful as I would need to run the space heater for a long period of time. I thought I should at least give it a try and get Estella warm enough until the heat came back on. By this time (around 7), the electric company was estimating that we’d have power again by 9PM.

When the company ships the generators, they don’t send it charged, with makes sense, so I had to figure out how to charge it. The RV park office still had decided to keep the clubhouse, which still had power, open for people without power, so I was able to charge it there. While I was charging it and eating dinner, I met some nice folks who live in the park full-time and some of the office staff.

Once the generator was charged, I headed back to Arthur and Estella. They were both fine and didn’t seem to notice that it had gotten a bit chillier. I plugged in the space heater and let it run for a bit to see if we could get the space warmed up a bit. I wanted to conserve the power because I didn’t want to have to go back to the clubhouse if I didn’t need to.

The electric company restored our power by 9:45PM, which was a great relief. The generator was ok. It just wasn’t as powerful as what we needed to run the space heater, so I did return it. I think I need to explore gas generators or figure out how to work the generator that’s on the van, which – honestly – I had completely forgotten about during this whole situation.

The rest of the week flew by without any other “adventures”. On Saturday, before I had to return the rental car, I did laundry, spoiled myself with some blueberry, brown sugar oatmeal from Starbucks, ran errands, and double checked my plans to get to Arizona. One of the special parts of Albuquerque was my early Saturday morning trips to the laundromat when I would see hot air balloons heading out against the bluffs to the west of the city.