We got on the road again Saturday around 8:15 AM, and arrived in Marfa in time for the 10 AM art tour. Marfa looks like a nice town, with some old buildings in excellent condition, and others empty. The County courthouse is very well restored, built in 1886.
The Chinati Foundation is devoted to large art installations. The facility is an abandoned army base. Some of the installations are outside, some are inside. In several cases, one building is devoted to a single art installation. Our tour included some of David Judd's aluminum boxes, John Chamberlain's art made from old car sheet metal, as well as Ilya Kabokov's art installation made to look like an abandoned Lenin-era Russian schoolhouse. The foundation runs two tours a day, 10 AM and 2 PM. The two tours visit different parts of the Chinati collection. Unfortunately, due to mechanical problems, we were not able to stay for the 2 PM tour.
As we were leaving Balmorhea state park in the morning, we stopped to dump the waste water out of our RV tanks. Unfortunately, when I pulled the handle to dump the sewage, it appeared that nothing happened. There was no sound of water running. The handle moved very freely, so I assumed the cable had become disconnected between the handle and the valve, which are separated by several feet of cable. Not a good way to start the day. Waste water is not one of the nicer parts of owning an RV, and less so when you have problems with it.
Also, when we stopped the RV in Marfa, the vacuum cleaner had fallen out of the closet. When I put it back in, I heard the crack of plastic. Broken in two. My bad.
So we headed to Alpine Texas, a larger town, with better hardware stores, and checked into the Pecan Grove RV Park. I then started removing the bottom panels from the RV to access the valve. I had not removed the bottom panels before, and it was a nasty job. I was crawling on my back under the RV, fighting gooey tar, no power screwdriver, no fun. When I pulled off the first panel, I saw that I needed to take off the large front panel. When I finally got access to the valve, I had my spouse pull the handle, and it looked like it was working OK. We put a bunch of water down the toilet, pulled the handle, and you could hear the water running. Everything seemed to work. So did I jump to conclusions? Probably. I sure am not going to pull off the bottom of the RV again without exhausting all possible testing first. I hope that I don't really have an intermittent problem, rather than just making a mistake.
Anyway, a frustrating day in terms of interactions with equipment. Between breaking the vacuum cleaner and tearing my RV apart to find a problem that probably did not exist, I feel a bit of a mechanical klutz, not a feeling that is normal for me.
Here is to a better day tomorrow. We head for Big Bend National Park, and expect to be out of internet access for several days.
Richard and Marianne
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