A week ago Wednesday, I drove Donna to the Cortez Munipal Airport as planned. She was flying out to San Diego for a long weekend with her sisters to attend her nephew’s high school graduation commencement. Her flight out of Cortez was on a regional airline, Boutique Air, in a Pilatus PC12 aircraft. These are small, single-engine turbo-prop planes built in Switzerland. They have an excellent reputation and safety record. Boutique Air configures the planes to carry eight passengers and two crew – pilot and co-pilot. The co-pilot doubles as a flight attendant.
They have two filghts between Cortez and Phoenix daily as well as four flights between Cortez and Denver.
In the photo above, the plane arrived from Phoenix and is being made ready for the flight back to Phoenix. The Cortez Municipal Airport has one runway (3/21) that’s oriented roughly northeast/southwest – 30 degrees northeast and 210 degrees southwest. The prevailing winds are from the southwest so most takeoffs and landings are on the 210 degree heading.
The airport was made famous in 1959 when a USAF Lockheed U2 reconnaissance plane made a forced landing there after its engine flamed out at an altitude of 70,000 feet above sea level. The pilot was a Chinese (ROC Taiwan) Air Force Major on a night training flight from Laughlin AFB in Texas. He flew to Salt Lake City and turned back on a secret flight path. The U2 was a highly classified secret aircraft at the time. When his engine quit, he didn’t have much of a plan.
He glided to a lower alitude and attempted to restart, unsucessfully. It was dark and he didn’t know his precise location, just a general idea. He knew the area was mountainous and didn’t know of any airports in the area. By a stroke of luck or the grace of God, he ended up gliding between mountains in the high desert valley and spotted runway lights. His glide path and speed coordinated perfectly to line up a landing at the Cortez airport! If he had been a few miles east or west of the valley he would have slammed into a mountain in the dark night. It’s quite a story.
I had an uneventful four nights as a bachelor while Donna was away. I played pickleball, read books and took care of Ozark the cat. Donna had a nice time with her sisters – she hadn’t spent time with the three of them together in years.
Sunday afternoon Donna flew back to Cortez, backtracking her flights to San Diego. The Boutique Air flight from Phoenix landed at 3:36pm. She said she enjoyed the small aircraft – she hadn’t flown in a Pilatus before.
In the photo above you can see Donna in the doorway exiting the aircraft and get a sense of scale for the small airplane.
Sunday evening we went to J Fargo’s Family Dining and Micro-Brewery on Main Street. We had dinner and a couple of brews and discussed our future plans. The water leak situation is only a minor leak, but fixing it is problematic. Our friend and fellow Alpine Coach owner Lynda Campbell told me she found an access panel in the back of the cabinet in the kitchen behind the shower wall.
I hadn’t seen this panel because it’s behind a wire rack where we store canned goods. I emptied the cabinet and removed four screws and pulled the panel out. This wasn’t going to help much. First of all, the guys that built this coach covered half of the access point with lauan plywood. This could be cut away without too much trouble, but there were still two concerns. It wouldn’t access the shower valve if that’s where the leak is. If the leak is at the shower head, I would need arms about a foot longer than I have to reach through the cabinet to fix it.
The leak is really small, but over time it will create water damage. Water damage is an RVer’s worst fear. We’ve been minimizing the leakage by only using the onboard water supply and turning on the water pump as needed. When we turn the pump off, we leave a tap open to relieve the water pressure and stop any subsequent leakage. This had been a tedious process and uses a lot more water than we normally use.
We need to get the coach into a shop where they can create a better way to access the shower plumbing. If we continued on to New Mexico as planned, we could probably find a competent shop. But we would need to have an open-ended stay at a motel while the work was being done and would have to bring Ozark into a motel room. Been there, done that and it wasn’t good.
We decided to leave Cortez a week ahead of schedule and go back to Mesa, Arizona. Here we have our own home and I can research repair shops to see who would be the best fit for this work.
At that point we agreed that moving forward, once repaired, we would sell the motorhome. Donna always said we would know when our time on the road was done. We’re done. Our future travel plans will probably involve B&B stays around the country in the summer months and we’ll stay in our park model home at Viewpoint Golf and RV Resort the rest of the year.
When I started this blog nine years ago, the stated purpose was to keep my family and friends informed of our whereabouts and our activities. With the RV lifestyle in the rearview mirror, this may be the last installment of this blog.