Monday, May 9, 2011 - Clarinda IA
< previous day | archives | next day >

Power & Light, Hastings NE, May 8, 2011
Oh shit...
This has been an interesting day. Clarinda IA and Nodaway Valley Park is not where I expected to be spending the night. Some days even the vaguest of plans go awry.
Some time early in the sweltering hot humid afternoon I pulled off the road for a pee break and to refill my water cup. Funny smell in the bathroom - guess the airflow has reversed for some reason. It happens. Ah well.
I pull back onto the road and hear a funny scraping noise, look in the mirror and see a scrape in the dirt and a small dust cloud where I left the verge.
Back to the verge I go.
Yikes! - the leading edge of the black water tank dropped and is dragging on the ground. This ain't gonna be fun - as luck would have it that black tank is darned near full. That's about 20 gallons and a hundred and fifty pounds of stuff now vastly complicating this little problem.
Stay tuned
I have long had an uncanny way of getting out of tight spots on the road - I have many many such stories from my long distance motorcycling days - now there's another to add to the growing list of RVing tight spot stories.
Night camp
Site 9 - Nodaway Valley Park, Clarinda IA
- Verizon cell phone and EVDO service - slow extended service
- Locate Nodaway Valley Park on my Night Camps map
- Check the weather here
A Call to Nature
"About as far as from here to the station," went on Mr. Baca, "was a graveyard where the gang was supposed to camp out. I rode over to it and found where they had lunched the day before. There were {Begin deleted text}sardin{End deleted text} {Begin inserted text}{Begin handwritten}sardine{End handwritten}{End inserted text} cans and cracker boxes and one thing and another. Then I found where one of them had had a call to nature. I told one of my men to put it in a can. Saiz didn't know about this, and in a little while he went over behind some mesquite {Begin page no. 4}bushes and had a call to nature. After he came back I sent my man over, and by God it was the same stuff -- the same beans and red chili seeds! So I put Saiz under arrest and sent him back to the jail at Socorro with one of my deputies, although he kept saying he couldn't see what I was arresting him for."