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Tuesday, June 1, 2010

In Albuquerque but not without breakdown drama

We left an adorable little ski mountain town called Ruidoso yesterday on our way to Albuquerque. We sure wish we could have stayed longer than two nights but it was one of those pricier tourist areas. Although our rv park wasn't much to brag about, our kind neighbor showed us a great trail from the back of the park to midtown. It meandered through those lovely vacation cabins you see in the mountains and followed a bubbling river. Then all of a sudden you found yourself in the middle of this quaint downtown strip with shops, places to eat, and my favorite part...an outdoor patio place with live music and local brew! We had a great time and sometimes after doing the whole rustic away from town thing for a couple of weeks it is nice to do a little shopping, eating out, and being around civilization for awhile.

When we left in the afternoon we drove through another smaller mountain town, Capitan which I would have liked to stop and check out. I love places like this. They have all this beautiful landscape and yet you can easily walk/bike to kitschy places to eat or shop. It's like the best of both worlds without being too citified.

Then our day went downhill. We encountered our first "warning, dust storms and high winds ahead" sign. That made me nervous enough and then when the wind starting rocking the rv from the west side I was petrified, gripping my chair for dear life. I'm sure some are laughing but we have zero experience with this. I cannot imagine what our ancestors did in those covered wagons. I think I would just feel better with two feet on the ground in a high wind instead of up in a top heavy rv.

Then about 50 miles from Albuquerque we blew a tire. Yep. This shouldn't have been such a big ordeal but oh boy...it was memorial day. AAA said they didn't have anybody to come change the tire and Riki couldn't change it because it was one of the inside tires and he couldn't get to it....so they sent us a tow truck about two hours later. It took an hour to get the rv up on the flatbed because of the tire while the kids and I sat in the car. They towed us to a Walmart where they said the tire center could fix it in the morning. By the time we got here it was 11 p.m and we all went to sleep. This morning Riki goes to the tire center and they tell him that no, they don't do rv tires after all so we're stuck again. We call AAA again, they say they will send another tow truck out in 30 minutes to take us to Camping World where we already have an 8:30 appt for other maintenance. We wait another hour, then call AAA back to find out there were computer glitches and they never got our order out for the tow truck. We ended up finding a mobile tire place to just come out and replace several tires, which they are doing as we speak.  Whew. What a mess. Let's just say this is our second time dealing with AAA and we aren't very impressed with their rv roadside assistance. I think they are great for cars but we are going to change to somebody like Good Sam that specializes in rvs next time around.

We'll all be glad to finally get to our campground sometime this afternoon outside of Albuquerque. I'm hoping this isn't another Austin scenario all over again, lol. Riki and I agree that we end up not having a very good time when we go through big cities. We need to stay a couple weeks though to catch up on way behind mail and things that need to be ordered.

We are all looking forward to a restful night with hookups, lol. It was no fun sitting for hours in that 95 degree heat yesterday afternoon...oh, and today too.

Amy

2 comments:

The Valentines said...

Hoping your night and the coming weeks will be more relaxing!
Need to look into our roadside coverage, probably not so good either....
ali

Unknown said...

UGH! Sometimes the Camper gods are just not looking out for you. I hope you are enjoying Albuquerque. Have some salsa and chips and get into the Southwestern swing of things. And all this will blow away with the dust storm.

BIG HUG