In my last post Friday morning, I said we would make a decision on traveling or waiting out the high wind forecast. Friday the 13th didn’t start out great. I ground coffee beans and filled the coffee maker, but it didn’t turn on. Then I realized the digital clock on it wasn’t displaying. Our new coffee maker was dead.
I think I know what killed it. I’d left it plugged in the whole time we were boondocking. I didn’t give it much thought. I figured it only draws current while brewing and it seemed to be doing that fine until Friday morning. Then I thought about the clock – the coffee maker was drawing a small amount of current whenever it was plugged in. Our inverter is a modified sine wave unit. A pure sine wave has the voltage rising above zero in a smooth curve before it turns down and goes below the zero line. A modified sine is a series of square steps rising above zero then falling below the zero line.
For most applications, this works fine. However, some electronic components don’t get on well with the blocky modified wave. I’m guessing delicate components in the coffee maker controller burned out from the modified sine wave.
By 8:30am, the wind was already blowing out of the northwest. We decided it would be best to stay off the road and spend another day in Alamogordo in our sheltered spot at the abandoned shopping plaza. The wind speed increased throughout the day with several hard gusts shaking the coach. We went over to the Elks Lodge for happy hour in the evening.
On Saturday morning, the wind was much calmer. We headed out of Alamogordo and went north on US54 to Tularosa. We picked up US70 there and headed northeast over the Capitan Mountains. Near the Mescalero Apache Reservation, we topped out on Apache Summit at nearly 7,000 feet above sea level.
US70 merged with US380 and eventually took us to Roswell. We stopped at a Target store there and bought a replacement coffee maker – we have to have our coffee. On Friday morning after I discovered our coffee maker died, we broke out the Keurig – we still had it packed away along with some K-cups. I can hardly believe we were ever happy drinking that stuff – the fresh ground beans brewed in a thermal coffee maker is far superior.
We had lunch at a Subway sandwich shop after parking in a free city parking lot downtown. We were the only vehicle in the lot! Coming into Roswell, Donna saw a sign that proclaimed Roswell, New Mexico as the dairy capital of the southwest. When I think of Roswell, I don’t think about dairy. I think about alien space invaders and a town with a funky artwork and an alien museum.
Mural downtown Roswell – hey, that critter on the left is called Mike!
From Roswell, we took US285 to Carlsbad, New Mexico. We found an Elks Lodge there and dry camped in their RV area. The Elks Lodge is right next to the Pecos River, across the street from a conference center and riverwalk. Donna went for walk along the river – here are a couple of photos she took.
Riverwalk path
A guy fishing from a pavilion on the riverwalk
Later, when we went inside the lodge for a cold one, we met a guy that drove up from Mentone, Texas for dinner. That’s about 88 miles away! He said there isn’t much in Mentone and he’s temporarily based there working as a safety officer in the oil fields.
He asked me where we were heading. I told him I thought we’d go east to Hobbs, New Mexico then turn south to Big Spring as we make our way to Austin, Texas. He said that was a great route and said we’d really like US62/US180. He said it was a divided highway – two lanes in each direction and nice pavement.
We planned to go over to Carlsbad Caverns National Park Sunday. We could stay in a nearby RV park for the night and check out the bats coming out of the cave after sundown. Before we moved, I looked at the Radar Express app and found weather advisories in the area. High wind warning for the area all the way from the Guadalupe Mountains to the west of Carlsbad Caverns to Big Spring, Texas from Monday morning to Tuesday afternoon! Oh no!
We need to be in Austin by Thursday – I’ve paid for tickets and dry camping at the Circuit of the Americas there for the Moto GP race weekend. If we got stuck in Carlsbad because of dangerous wind conditions, we might not make it to Austin. We decided to pass on Carlsbad Caverns this time and hightail it out of the area.
We took US62/US180 east to Hobbs where I topped up our tank with $160 worth of diesel fuel. It was $3.17/gallon – the most we’ve paid in the last year. Our route took us across the Texas border – where we lost another hour as we transitioned to Central Time – through Seminole and Lamesa.
From there we took US87 south and planned to stop in Sterling City and dry camp at a city park there. The park turned out to be a bust – low hanging tree branches prevented us from entering and it didn’t look like a great place for a big rig anyway. We continued south through San Angelo and found a boondocking spot at the Twin Buttes Reservoir. Our plan now is to head down to an RV park at Buchanan Dam, which will bring us within 70 miles of Austin on Monday. We’ll take it easy for a few days with full hook-ups to catch up on laundry, fill the freshwater tank and dump the holding tanks. Then we’re off to the races.
It looks like we’ll have warm weather in Austin – around 80 degrees. I need to figure out why the air conditioners didn’t operate when powered by the generator.