Driving to Utah and Fixing Electrical Woes

FRIDAY: Our flight was relatively easy going and we didn’t spend nearly as much time as our last flight sitting around the airport. We both got frisked and my bag got searched “randomly” but overall nothing exciting. The flight was 10 hours and after another hour in Phoenix airport we were finally on the way to the truck, to find.. the batteries dead. We waited about another hour before it was up and running thanks to a guy sent by our insurance company to give us a jump – but it was not over, we still had to drive the truck around for another hour to charge the batteries up enough to not be stuck at the hotel in the morning. We finally got to the hotel around dark and really just wanted to sleep but had to stay awake long enough to order and eat some pizza – then, off to sleep dreaming of the long weekend ahead.

SATURDAY: We woke up at about 5:30am because of our new UK schedule, got ready and headed to Flagstaff to pick up the cats and trailer. The cats were so much more excited than I expected . both were purring and rubbing on us like crazy and more than happy to get into the truck and go wherever we would take them.

T he drive to Utah from Phoenix was amazing, visually, which is great because we otherwise had a pretty bad day.
First, while heading the way of Utah (basically the only way) out of Flagstaff we see a detour sign and hope for the best, after a short while we realize the difference in the detour is an additional 50 miles. Whatever they are doing to the highway 89 that goes the way we wanted to, it’s major enough to actually divert traffic deep into Navajo Nation through Tuba City and around to Page from the southeast. Maybe a bridge out perhaps? Something large enough that traffic couldn’t just go around slowly, nope, 50 miles instead. At least the scenery was awesome and by going through Tuba City we actually got to eat lunch since it wasn’t really possible otherwise until we got to Page. We got a couple veggie burgers to go from Denny’s (which I was unaware did takeaway til before) and ate them in the truck in the air conditioning on and the cats napping peacefully.

After we left Tube City we turned back towards Page onto a highway with very few cars on it. It was obvious by the scenery that we were close to Monument Valley, shooting down the highway looking at epic rock formations and desert flowers galore, pointing out one strange rock that looked like the London Pineapple – Then, the awning came unrolled from the side of the trailer. Ross hit the brakes and put on the flashers but it was too late. The awning was shredded. We sat on the side of the highway, struggling to roll the thing back in then somehow strap it closed with gorilla tape (like super duck tape). I took pics, picked an orange desert flower and we left trying to not let it get to us.

SUNDAY: Sunday was a much better day, aside from our air conditioner acting up. We woke up early and drove out of town towards Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park. The scenery was so vivid and amazing it made every other problem or woe disappear, if only for a while. We stopped off wherever we saw a place and wandered around the desert a bit, examining plants and insects, had a picnic at a campsite and drank a huge amount of water as the heat grew hotter and hotter. At one point we wandered into the dunes, the sun bright, the earth in technicolor, and the sand so hot our feet were being boiled. In fact, Ross’s shoes were ruined.

There will be a separate, more upbeat post about Sunday.

MONDAY: Solved 2 potentially expensive problems today to thwart the bad luck we’ve had lately. Our air conditioning had been causing our breaker to flip more and more the hotter it got and in 97 degree heat, that just wasn’t working out so well. We spent half of yesterday researching and trying to keep the cats cool and today found a couple new breakers to replace the main one, the rule out the chance that the problem is the expensive to replace ac unit. So far so good. Second, our stereo which is integrated into the trailer has been acting up since last year and finally stopped working a few months back. It’s just a simple bad connection in a ribbon but not something easily fixable at all. We took it apart as much as we could and shoved some cardboard in to hold the connection tighter. So far its working well and we’re back to satellite radio and much better sound with the integrated speakers, bass and subwoofer. If both the ac and stereo keep working we’ll have saved ourselves up to $1200 not having to replace them!

SO. Maybe our luck will go up from here!

More British Cats, From Sussex to Bath and Beyond

Published on June 5, 2013 by Katya in the category pets and travel | 3 Comments

Since we’ve been here, we’ve been on the lookout for cats, for no other reason than because we love cats. We get to see Bugsy (the scruffy old white fellow a few pics down) on a daily basis and the occasional visitor, Tsotsi, but when we go traveling around the country we can’t help but pay attention whenever we see a big set of eyes watching us from a window, from under a car or up on a rooftop. So, here’s a few more pics of cats from the UK!

Black and White Cat in Bournemouth

Orange Kitty in Bath

Scruffy Old Bugsy, Our Local Cat

Tsotsi in Ditton

Black and White Smee Cat in Ditton

Orange Cat in Rye, Sussex

Rye Black and White Cat in Window

Andre the Giant, the cat we got for our cat

Published on January 18, 2013 by Katya in the category pets and travel | Leave a comment

Susa has been a good sport through our travels. She joined us about 6 months after we started traveling and is now a 3 year old, spoiled, fussy, sassy pants cat. It’s my own fault she’s so spoiled. I always spoil my pets and it’s hard not to when you are literally around them 24/7 365 and have to take them out on a leash if they want to go out. She learned to trust us, depend on us, and other things cat’s usually protest. She liked to pretend she is independent but she is a very needy little cat.

She’s also very disruptive during the day when we’re trying to work. I have spent the last couple years standing up to play with her, entertain her or take her outside for a walk every 20-40 minutes, unless we are somewhere where we can tie her outside with us.

She really enjoyed the cabin last winter in Colorado though she still didn’t get as much freedom as she wanted till the spring before we left. We literally had foxes in the yard and coyotes surrounding us every night. I wasn’t about to take the chance that her “sheltered cat ignorance” would backfire. We let her outside under supervision or, usually, it was too cold to go outside anyway.

This summer was hard on her, especially with my broken ankle. While Ross was working I couldn’t exactly get up and take her outside. In Libby we let her run around outside a bit, though after the RV park owner’s rottweiler chased her up a tree, she was cautious to wander too far.

Now we are at another cabin outside of flagstaff. It’s nowhere near as secluded as the last cabin, on a street with only a couple other occupied houses, and it’s also nowhere near as nice, drafty and neglected, but Susa has a lot more freedom to roam outside. There are still coyotes nearby and I once saw an eagle about 200 yards away checking out our yard, but I’ve let her fly the coop a bit, as it were. When it’s cold though she either doesn’t want to go out or not for very long and she still ends up driving us nuts yowling with frustrations and boredom. The only solution we could come up with was to get her a friend.

It took us a long time to decide because we still don’t know if or when we’re leaving the country, when we will stop traveling around in the trailer and what we would do with one, let alone 2 cats if we went to the UK for a while to visit Ross’s family, but we ended up deciding that we would just deal with those things when they came up. Susa needed something she wasn’t getting and it seemed that a friend might fix her feline dilemmas.

Andre the Giant – first day home

We went to get groceries and cat food in town last Friday and wandered into the Pet Smart next to our Safeway for some Fancy Feast. We have never been able to resist looking at the cats up for adoption so we wandered over, knowing we would probably leave with someone this time. Every cage was filled, mostly with younger cats, but at least 3 cages had adult cats that seemed rather mellow. One of them was a giant tiger tabby with super seduction skills and after looking at a could of the younger cats, that we suspected would be just as crazy as Susa was to raise (destroy, climb, yowl etc.), we gave into the seduction and picked out “Tiger Toes” – who we promptly decided needed a new name.

Andre first day home on his new bed

We brought him home and put him in the space/office bedroom with everything he needed, including a new bed large enough for him to spread out on. Susa figured out pretty quickly that he was in there and began hissing and raging around the house like a spoiled single child. We had read that keeping a new cat in a room for 2 weeks, then introducing the cats through the door was the “way to do it” but you try and say “no” to an adorable cat who doesn’t understand why he’s being locked in a room and not allowed to join everyone. It wasn’t fair and Susa wasn’t going to be the reason our new cat hated us, and her. We managed to keep him separate for 2 days before we let him poke around the house while Susa safely watched from her cat tower, hissing and growling pointlessly. ”Tiger Toes” who we had by then renamed “Andre the Giant” cautiously nosed around the house, although seeming disappointed that it wasn’t larger.

He stayed that night in the spare bedroom again, Susa satisfied that things were going to stay mostly normal, then let him out again in the morning. Repeating again till we finally left the door open all night and he sneaked himself onto the other side of our bed, to Susa’s annoyance but eventual compromise.

Andre the Giant

After days of Susa yowling with annoyance and hissing whenever Andre was in the same room, they actually smelled eachother’s faces today with little to no hissing. And since Susa HATED other cats previously, she is basically the worst case scenario for a “new cat introduction” and it still seems to be working out. Maybe it’s the fact that she is so spoiled and somewhat trusts us more than the average cat would trust their owner. I tell her constantly that “it’s ok” whenever he’s around and I think she’s starting to believe me.

They will be friends and Susa will be more a normal cat than she ever has before, rather than a maladjusted, spoiled, attention seeking, ”single child” cat. Maybe the more she feels like a cat, the less she’ll act out.

With the adoption we got a free vet visit. Andre the Giant is prone to pee crystals so he’s on a special diet but seemed otherwise to be the healthiest cat ever. One of the first things I asked at Pet Smart was whether or not he has his Leukemia shot, since it’s pretty transmittable and horrible, and I’m not worried about rabies as much. The manager told us he did have it but in fact the vet could find no evidence of that in his records (grrr) so we got a blood test done for Leukemia and FIV. While waiting for the test, the vet came back in and did a short check up on him, saying how healthy he looked and talking about his prescription food. She picked up the test that was finally done, a little white piece of plastic with color coded death sentences on it, and uncomfortably told us that he tested positive (for I believe Leukemia but either way, aghhh!!!). She flustered a bit and walked out of the room to double check something. It was an excruciating 3 minutes, thinking we had just got a new cat that we liked a lot, who would soon get very, very sick – not to mention that Susa was as risk. The vet came back in and proclaimed her misreading of the test – perhaps a new product, something about “if it shows positive then you have to compare two other colors match on the device” – however it worked, she said he was OK and gave him his Leukemia vaccine.