Tuesday April 4th 2017

I moved to Gila Bend today. It is a little over 80 miles from my last stop. I chose the short travel day because I couldn’t get a reservation for tonight at the state park I’m staying at tomorrow and Thursday night. I’ll have between l75 and 200 miles to go tomorrow depending on the route I select.

Site 114 at the Gila Bend KOA.

Gila Bend is southwest of Phoenix. Interstate 8 brought me here from the southeast of Phoenix. The road is labeled as the Phoenix bypass. I’m all for it. The days I drove into the Phoenix suburbs for the Spring Training Games were not fun driving. There was no traffic at all on I-8, but there was a steady head wind. That may have been why I felt like I was climbing in altitude the whole way. I wasn’t gaining altitude, I lost 1000 feet.

Probably because of the change in altitude, the desert in this area is different. There are very few saguaro cactus. The plants seem to be much lower to the ground and there are more desert plants in bloom. I passed through areas of bright yellow on both sides of the road. It was a very pretty drive. I imagine it would be pretty bleak at other times of the year.

The trip was not particularly bumpy, but it took its toll on the motorhome. I currently can’t receive any Over the Air or Cable TV on any of my three TVs. I can still watch Directv satellite so I’m not desperate. My guess is that a cable has vibrated loose. The first access panel I checked behind was a mass of cables, but they all seemed to be OK. I don’t have a wiring diagram for the TV cables, but I think the OTA and Cable lines come together into a single line in a device that also provides power to the antenna. Then the single line is split into a line for each TV. I’ve found the splitter, just not the combiner. I’ll dig into the problem some more in the next few days. It is always something.