Say what! 13 degrees?

A quick update.  We had a very nice time in Taos with Karen and Tom.  Their house turned out very nice.  We enjoyed many delicious meals and had a great time visiting.  As for mother nature, not so much.  Winter is roaring in this year, the locals in NM and CO are celebrating as they need snow and a ton of it.  But for us, not really.  Snow, wind, and cold were our companions.  I wasn't real happy about it, and with the lower temps, in the low 30's, our auxiliary air pump plagued us yet again by running on and off every couple minutes.

Jan even made snowmen showing my displeasure:-)

It's the oddest thing, we thought we had solved all our air leak issues, but whenever the temp goes down below 30 or so, the air pump cycles and cycles driving us crazy!  So I got to thinking, yeah, I know, a bad thing, but the only thing I could come up with was the air fitting from the air pump to the small leveling tank that was completely blocked this spring. We had it looked at while replacing our air bags.  The tech, instead of replacing the part, drilled it out to clear the obstruction.  So I thought maybe that was the problem, he had damaged it somehow, so when Tom offered to crawl under and replace the fitting I jumped on it.  And for the rest of our time in Taos, all was well.

After the snow melted

So we moved down to Albuquerque and got situated in the campground there, Bernalillo actually, and we have been enjoying the warmer temps.  We had numerous visits with Jan's mom, ran several errands, ate out a bunch, got our fix at Costco, etc.  Karen and Tom came down from Taos on their way to Florida, so we were able to get Viv out for her belated 96th birthday!

Viv, the birthday girl

Another thing we wanted to do was to visit several flooring stores to see if we could figure out what we are going to install on our renovated floor.  We did make a decision and ordered the material, more on this later.

So even with the comparably warmer weather, it is still nippy, and the other night the temps went below freezing and what happened, the stinking air pump began cycling at 0230am!  On, off, on, off!  Now when this happens, the only way to stop it is to go outside, open up the DC electrical compartment and pull a fuse out to disable it.  I don't know about you, but to get up in the middle of the night, in the cold, to go outside with a flashlight and do this doesn't exactly please me.  So I decided to install a switch inside, yes, I should have done this before, but each time we replaced a leaking part I thought we had fixed it.  So our new procedure is this, when we think the temp will be below freezing, and hope that's not too often in the scope of things, we will extend the jacks and turn off the air pump, and hopefully sleep blissfully through the night.

Our new switch

Speaking of cold temps.  We were planning to move on Monday up to Santa Fe for a few days before we start heading east, and have been watching the weather closely.  I should explain the elevation differences out here; Taos 6969', Santa Fe 7199', Bernalillo 5052', and Karen and Tom's house 7665'.  Big differences in temps.  Anyway, we have been watching a storm system expected in Sunday evening and into Monday that is supposed to bring snow and much colder temps, in fact, as low as 13df in Santa Fe Monday night as opposed to 24df here in Bernalillo, so we have decided to extend our stay one day here and move up to Santa Fe Tuesday when they expect much balmier temps of 20df:-)  At these kind of temps the difference of 10df is huge!  Hah, the other thing we keep asking ourselves is why the hell are we here in temps like this????