The next morning, I called an RV repair place in Alamosa, the nearest town of any size. They said that they could work on it in 2 weeks! That sent a chill down my spine since I also had to wait 2 weeks in Colorado Springs to have my black tank leak fixed. They gave me some numbers of mobile RV repair services in the area. The first guy I called said that he was not doing RVs any more, but only residential. I had to leave a message for the second guy. At that point, we thought we’d have to trash our plans and drive 100s of miles to Albuquerque to get it fixed. That got me to thinking…. Maybe it was the propane after all. Even though the stove worked, maybe there was not enough gas pressure to get the furnace and the Generator to run. We decided to go into Alamosa that morning and get the tanks filled. We drove into town, parked in a shopping center parking lot and walked over to the nearest gas station to ask the attendant where we could get propane. He didn’t know, but a guy waiting in line said that the “Big R” store right there in the shopping center had propane at a cheap price. The “Big R” store, as we found out, is the Wal-Mart of the rancher and farmer, selling everything from water troughs to saddles. Each tank took 6 ½ gallons. They both were empty! After learning this lesson, we now weigh the tanks on the bathroom scale in the morning to find out how much is left. We headed on back to the Great Sand Dunes using a different route and noted the best place to get gas as we were going to leave going that way again. I had noticed that the rig was very hard to stop; so on the way down a very straight and deserted road, I played with the trailer break adjuster to find that the poor truck was doing most of the stopping. After the adjustment, the trailer was stopping the trailer and the truck was stopping only the truck, so it felt pretty good.
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| Our rig with the sand dunes in the background |
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| Jan out on the sand dunes |
We parked at the visitor’s center where Jan got her passport book stamped and we bought some postcards and our usual magnet. The ranger told us to drive to a parking lot at the base of the sand dunes where we could hike up to the top. That seemed a little ambitious, so we decided to hike up a little way to see what it was like. It was a quite windy and when the blowing sand hit your skin, it really hurt. These are the highest sand dunes in the country, so it was like climbing a small mountain of several hundred feet. Trudging through the sand was very slow going as it was like walking on a sandy beach, only uphill! Once we had climbed part way up, there was only sand everywhere. Some of the sand dunes were very steep, so I decided to climb one and try to slide down. I didn’t slide down very fast at all and kept stopping. If I had had a snow saucer or even a piece of cardboard, I think it would have been a blast. We walked back to the parking lot and crossed a shallow dry riverbed where in the rainy season kids and grownups have fun playing in the sand and water.
We drove back to our “free” spot to watch the sunset over the high desert. It was spectacular because we had a 360 degree view of the desert that was empty for miles in all directions and magnificent snow capped mountains beyond that. The other trailer was gone, so we had the whole place to ourselves.
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