So, I had no idea a word of such diminutive nature could have so powerful
an effect as to rupture the peace of our home.
I mean it’s not a four-letter word, not a word on the ‘Thou Shalt Not Use
This Word in the Belcher Household’ list (yes, there is such a list). (Not that he pays any attention to
it!)
It’s not even such a word as anyone would find offensive in normal
circles, yet I somehow managed to use it at just the right time in just the
right way to create so sudden and catastrophic a riff between Tami and I that
she would hardly speak to me for days. (It was more like an hour.) In
fact, I’ve used the nasty word three times already in this paragraph and I dare
say none of you readers have been offended.
It’s just too fine a line we fellows have to walk. (Oh please, give
me a break!) So what could the vile term be? It happened like this. Right after Tami whined, “It makes me mad
when…” I let it slip, “So?” (If I
was the violent type, Clay would have had a very black eye!!!)
Colorado Springs
has a very nice zoo, and on one of our days off we went with our friends Tom
and Patty Webster to see the animals.
It was a little on the warm side that day, so some of the bigger cats
and bears were hiding in the shade, but we still got to see giraffes and
elephants, hippos and monkeys, lizards and penguins and other assorted
beasts. The zoo is built on the side of
a mountain, and we took the sky ride up to the top. Gave us some great views of Colorado
Springs. We ended the day with a late
lunch at Olive Garden, our favorite restaurant.
Clay feeding a giraffe.
We only have a little over a week left to work here in
Monument. It has been a good summer and we
really appreciate the good environment we have to work in. We’ll leave here and go to my parent’s house
for a few days before heading to Smith Nevada.
We’ll be there for nine days and then it’s up to Fernley Nevada to begin
our three month stint at Amazon.com. Not
much rest between jobs this year, but we’ll still manage to put our feet up for
a bit.
Okay, back by popular demand (not really) here are some trivial facts
that may amuse you. We hit the road in May
2007. In that time we’ve accumulated
63,842 travel miles, 26,756 of which we were pulling the trailer. We’ve burned 5,583 gallons of diesel fuel at
an average of $3.489 per gallon. The
lowest we’ve paid per gallon was $1.893 and the highest was $4.759. Our worst annual miles per gallon average
while towing was 7.6 mpg. Our best
annual average was 8.9 mpg.
As far as major repairs go we had to have the fuel injectors replaced
after only 87,453 miles. Ouch! I apparently whined so effectively Chevy
picked up half the cost. At 94,417 miles
we had to replace the master cylinder and then at 99,201 we had two power
steering hoses replaced. The truck now
has a total of 106,918 miles on it. We just
installed our second full set of truck tires and have replaced all trailer
tires once. Although we’ve only replaced
all trailer tires once we’ve had 6 trailer flats at various times, 3 of which
were failed valve stems. We had 1 valve
stem failure on the truck (on I-10 during heavy traffic with only a narrow
emergency lane. All I’ll say about that
is it was very breezy). We’ve rotated
truck tires 12 times and trailer tires 3 times (Yes, I started rotating trailer
tires a few thousand trailer miles ago.
The MOR/Ryde suspension is independent and we seem to get more even wear
when I rotate them). We’ve changed
oil/filter 8 times, transmission fluid three times and gone through 4 fuel
filters. We’ve replaced truck batteries three
times, once when the original batteries died, once when the Duralasts didn’t
last, and a third when the one year old Interstate’s failed prematurely
(replacement was covered under warranty).
Curious failures…but I had the voltage regulator and charging system checked
out and nothing seemed amiss. Oh
well… We’re on our second set of trailer
batteries and they’re still going strong.
We’ve stayed in RV Resorts on 119 different occasions. Some of those were repeat stays at locations
we’d been to before. Our longest stay in
one place was 169 nights in Burnsville, NC when we worked the summer at the Clear
Creek Guest Ranch. Our shortest stay was
about 8 minutes when we pulled through a place and decided to move on. Our two favorite places have been Hi Valley
RV Park in Boise Idaho and Colorado Heights Campground in Monument
Colorado. Our least favorite stay was in
a park in Golden Colorado (place just felt depressing). We’ve never really had a close call traveling (we have VERY different definitions
or “close call”!!) although the other half of the Belcher family,
the half that never cusses, still refers to our venture around Lake Henry in
Idaho in a snow storm as the trip from hell.
So that's it for now. Hope all is well in your lives and drop us a note some time!
Tami & Clay
