Took a long time to get out of Santa Rosa this morning...not the campground so much as the town. Stopped in a convenient gas station that had diesel...though the pump with diesel took a couple of minutes to dispense each gallon. Multiply this by fifty gallons...and you can see this was significantly impacting our progress. We thought of shutting off the pump and moving to a truck stop, though we'd lose time driving over there and sitting in a line of trucks for a while before pumping.
After a couple of hours of driving, we stopped in a rest stop, and noticed a truck off to one side with its crew working on a repair. We decided we could do some repairs too, and resolved to give up the road time to try again to change the gray water drain valve again (we'd bought some more wrenches by then,) and clean up the connections for the battery that starts the generator - which we knew was one of the problems with the generator. Removing the drain valve bolts and nuts was slow, exacting work, though we finally got them all out - one bolt simply broke in half as we tried to remove it. We found the rubber seals in the old valve were completely shot - rotted and broken into fragments. The new valve went right in; the leak stopped immediately. For the first time since we'd seen the bus, the drain valve was not leaking! We'll go ahead and replace the black water drain valve in the near future.
We cleaned up all the generator battery connections, redid the connections nice and tight, and checked and topped off all the cells with distilled water. We still want to change the oil in the generator before we try to start it again.
We stopped for lunch at a WalMart in Amarillo Texas. Since the day is at least half through when we stop for lunch, while we eat we usually assess our progress, forecast how far we'll get that day, pick a campground in that area, and call to make a reservation.
Things started to go bad immediately, when the first campground on our list was full. Everything snowballed from there: as we worked our way back towards Amarillo, calling campground after campground, they were all full. We found a few campgrounds in Amarillo that didn't take reservations, though they did take people first come, first serve. We thought we might have a chance at one of these if we went right over...we were a little bit ahead of the time most people start getting off the highway to look for a campground. The WalMart parking lot we were in was pretty sketchy and we definitely did not want to try to spend the night there. The ones we drove to were full...and we were out ofideas as to what to do. Then, a Good Sam park - The Overnite RV Park - that had not been answering finally picked up when we called, and had several spaces for campers that weren't towing anything. We reserved one, and went right over there and got a great space - a pull-through even! Full hookups in a treed space, too. Beautiful campground, big private spaces, clean restrooms and a large laundry. This ended up being my favorite campground of the trip.
Though we had stopped much earlier than planned, we finally had a nice, relaxed night and even had time to finally post some pictures to Lone's Facebook page.
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