On to Buenos Aires

Sunday started with a bang...literally. It might have been a gunshot, but it might have been something else.

We took our time having breakfast, taking showers and getting Speedy packed up before starting down the road to Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge, our home for the next five months...but first a stop for food.

You can't buy everything at Whole Foods. Sometimes a more normal supermarket is needed. We opted for a Fry's market which was quite close to our route. Fry's is a Kroger's market and Kroger sells Boars Head meats in their deli sections. We also needed things like milk, yogurt, paper towels and more vegetables.

After Fry's I called Daniel Peterson, the refuge volunteer coordinator. He asked that we call before we arrived so he could meet us when we did get there. There was no answer on his cell phone but I left a message, thinking that the visitor center must be open and he was busy. We continued on. It was a pretty pleasant hour and a half drive to the refuge, down a pretty quiet two-lane road that goes to Mexico. We only went through one Border Patrol checkpoint and didn't even have to stop. It looks like it is an hour and a half to the nearest supermarket.

When we got to the refuge, the visitor center was closed. Due to lack of staff, it is closed on Sundays. I called Daniel again, once again getting his voicemail. He did call back within a few minutes. He was off for the day, not expecting us quite so soon, and was in Tucson. I wish that I'd called yesterday. We might have stayed up in that area another day. But he gave us the passcode to get into the volunteer compound.

Did we mention that it is surrounded by a fence and kept locked?

Back in the early 2000s, there were a lot of undocumented immigrants flooding through the refuge, sometimes 1500 a day. This was before the border fence was erected. Occasionally, some would wander through the volunteer compound, sometimes getting into things, so the site, called the Sonoran Outpost, which had had unobstructed views across the refuge to the mountains, was fenced in. The border fence has since been built and immigration has virtually stopped, but the Outpost is still surrounded by razor wire-topped chain-link fence.

Now in possession of the gate code, we entered the Sonoran Outpost. It was well that Daniel called back as no one else was there. Two other volunteers had already arrived, David and Norm, but neither were around. There is also a group of student conservation volunteers, but weren't there either. We took an empty RV site and settled in...alone in the desert (It actually doesn't look like desert right now, but a dry grassland).

After finding a level spot and attaching to electricity and water, the first order of business was to try to fix Speedy's waste hose. We put the front wheels up on six inches of blocks to get room underneath to work.

The waste hose is enclosed in a large pipe and is clamped to a dump valve pipe within it. The outer pipe is supposed to be attached with two screws, which, when removed, allow the two pipes to be separated, exposing the interior end of the waste hose. Once again, that is how it is supposed to be.

When we bought Speedy, the hose that was in it ripped the first time we pulled it out, so we brought it back to the dealer and they replaced it with a heavier hose. Instead of just fitting the two pipes together, they caulked the connection before putting in the screws. I took out the screws and nothing moved. No amount of firm tapping would budge the connection (I was afraid that giving it a hard whack might damage something else).

There was no way to get the remaining hose out and get the new hose in. Ellen suggested that maybe I could splice the new hose onto the old one, but we didn't have a fitting and the hose was quite tight fit into the pipe.  A coupler, if we had one, would probably be too thick. Fortunately, there was another alternative. There was enough of the original hose left that I could pull it out of the pipe just far enough to attach the end fitting to it. We can now leave it in place and attach an extension hose we carry (and have never needed) to the fitting and use it to reach the dump station. I was able to attach the fitting and all is in place. It will probably get a test tomorrow.

We then had a wander around the compound, mostly to check out the community building, a trailer. It is not as big as the building a Aransas, but has a full kitchen with refrigerator, chest freezer, stove, oven and microwave. It also has a bathroom with a shower and two washers and dryers. The building does not seem to have been used much lately and is a bit odiferous. I've opened all the windows that are screened and hope that will help, but I don't know. David and Norm each have big fifth-wheel trailers, so don't need to use the community facilities and the temporary conservation volunteers are staying other trailers on the compound which have their own kitchens and baths. Maybe with a good cleaning...

Both David and Norm eventually showed up. They are both older single men who are maintenance volunteers. We already knew Norm as he was at Aransas when we were there. One of the first things they each did when they arrived was to open the hoods on their trucks. Evidently we have pack rats here and they will get into closed engine compartments. Ellen doesn't want to do this with Speedy since it would obscure our view, so we are opting for using Fresh Cab, a Balsam Oil-based rodent repellent. We used it at Aransas, when we got a mouse in Speedy and they use it here in refuge vehicles. We have a couple of packets and I'm pretty sure we passed a Tractor Supply in Tucson and they carry it, so we can get more.

We also met one of the refuge Law Enforcement Officers who stopped by to meet us and pass on a couple of safety hints. We will get a full safety briefing later this week.

It was then time to continue making my new iPad look like my old iPad. There is Wi-Fi available here at the Sonoran Outpost. The router is located in the community building with the antenna in a window. I could get a two megabit/second connection outside Speedy, but only 250 kilobit/second connection inside and had 47 apps to update. Outside it was. The iPad sat on the site picnic table for a couple of hours downloading apps. But I'm not done yet. I still have maps and databases to download. This would have been so much easier if the old one had died before we left. We have a 50 megabit/second connection at home. More work tomorrow.

It was in the 80s most of the afternoon here, dry and partly cloudy. Once the sun set, it  cooled quickly and is now 68°. We turned the new air conditioner on briefly after dinner to cool down the inside of Speedy, but it is off now. We used it through the night over the last two nights in Tucson as the temperatures stayed in the 80s well into the night.

Tonight's sunset was pretty spectacular too, as the sky turned to red behind the mountains, then spread to the clouds and back to a red horizon before getting quite dark. Aside from a few lights under David's fifth-wheel to ward of the critters, it is dark in the compound. Tonight it is offset by a nearly full moon and the coyotes are howling.

The next few months should be interesting.