Kevin's musings

The Night of October 24th had me packing and trying to get everything loaded into the trailer and truck. I really should have done more packing in advance, but oh well. I ended up doing some more packing/loading Wed morning before I left, and finally hit the road at about 9am. The weather forecast had some wind in store and I did in fact hit that between raton and las vegas. Pulling the trailer in a 30+mph headwind wasn’t much fun, and boy did it kill my already abysmal gas millage, but I made it down to Las Cruces just fine around 9pm (a 12 hour drive).

$1.999 gas when I fueled up before leaving town!

Amusingly, the pump was also running IE, and it’s DNS was borked.

A picture from a rest area on the way down.

Got the trailer all parked in front of Nukestock HQ and setup. Got power hooked up and called it a pretty early night. Thursday we did a bunch of walks in the park for the dogs, a trip over to my friend V’s place to let the dogs run around in his gigantic back yard, and some assorted errands and setup of decorations. Thursday night was the beer tasting event. We had a pretty gigantic pile of beers to try. There wasn’t much of a crowd for most of the event, but people came and tried a few beers and wandered on. There were some real nice beers and some really yucky ones.

Kurt wasted no time in V’s yard finding a pool to lay in.

My friend K and a few more pups.

Here’s the bar before we went and stocked it up for the weekend.

A few of the decorations.

A view out to the trailer.

Friday was more setup and mexican food. Go-Burger has delightfull breakfast Borittos. The party went into full swing friday night. Lots of folks and drinking and having a good time. There were people I haven’t seen in years there, and it was nice to catch up with them and also the folks I hadn’t seen since last years party. There was a friday night trivia game this year at around 11pm. There was one group of questions that was “what’s in this disgusting drink”. Some of those were real stomach turners.

Saturday started out with more mexican food and a trip by V’s to let the pups run in the big yard and also to pick up more firewood. Then, it was time for the road rally. It was really pretty fun this year. I like the way V had it setup. You get a photo of a place somewhere in Las Cruces. You can try and find it based on just the picture, or you can open up to 3 clues. The first 2 clues are more pictures with more clues in them, and the last one is a GPS coordinate. Once you find a site there is a bag with some tokens in it, the first team to a site gets the token worth the most points, etc. It was nice. We took a long detour at one point because I am an idiot and missed a turn, but otherwise we did well. We only had to open one second clue. I really liked the format this year.

Saturday night was the full on party. Lots more drinking and K was grilling things for dinner. Lots of food, lots of drink. Big trivia game was as silly as it ever is.
There was a obnoxious neighbor that stopped by, but my friend B manning the bar just gave him lots of booze and finally he wandered off to pass out.
Things finally winded down around 4 or 5 am.

Sunday was the after party brunch. It was nice to not have to look forward to the long drive home after the brunch this year, since I was going to stay and work from the trailer parked in front of K’s house monday, tuesday and wed. Got back after brunch and helped clean things up. Lots of trash was generated this year. I guess it’s not too surprising.

Trash pile was most impressive.

The trailer worked wonderfully. The pups got pretty used to hanging out in it and having the a/c and such was handy.
The bed was pretty comfy. Parking and driving and backing were all pretty easy too.

All in all another excellent nukestock.

… to be continued in park 2: hunting in the Gila soon.

I got home this morning around 5-6am. I had a wonderfull time, and the trailer worked great!

It’s nice to be home too however… especially for the yard. I have new respect for people with greyhounds/puppies that always leash walk them.

I’ll try and write up some more detailed posts about the travel, but in a nutshell: Nukestock was great. Working from the trailer in cruces worked fine. Hunting in the Gila was excellent, even tho we didn’t spot anything we could legally hunt.

Slowly digging through the 250+ emails, mailing lists, journal posts and other fun that happened since I had net on thursday…

So far I have:

• gotten gas at $1.999
• Voted (love that early voting
• got worm meds for all the dogs and got merlin home to recover from his teeth cleaning
• purchased some beer and other booze to take down to NM
• Went to the store for a few things
• picked up my Satan suit from the cleaners
• cleaned out the litterboxes, and had the garbage bag break open on me. YUCK!

Now Ijust need to pack all the stuff I am taking tomorrow and get all ready to go.
Hopefully I can get everything ready except for hiching up the trailer, and then leave somewhere around 7amish.
It’s supposed to be windy and rainy, which is not going to be fun towing a trailer.

Well, looks like Nash has some roundworms going on, so I get to pick up some de-wormer for all the pups. Hopefully they will handle that ok while on our travels.

Also this morning I noticed Merlin had a loose tooth when I was brushing his teeth. So, he’s scheduled now to go in for a dental tomorrow.
I always hate to have them put under, and I have been putting off a cleaning for Merlin for quite a while now. I sure hope it all goes ok, and that he’s ok with travel the very next day. I suspect he will just sleep in the car anyhow though.

I left the pups in the trailer for about an hour today (with the a/c on). They seemed to do just fine hanging out in there while I was gone, although when I got back Nash started barking lots. He does that when I get back to the house too, so hopefully thats normal.

Still have a ton of things to do before hitting the road Wed morning. Hope I can get most of it done…

Yesterday I managed to get a bit of cleaning done and go up to the CGC dinner/meetup. It was fun to catch up with some folks that I don’t see very often and hear all the fun hound stories. A good time was had by all.

Today I started getting the trailer a bit more ready for my upcoming trip. I am heading out Wednesday to go down to the annual halloween party and then the following week I will be heading up into the Gila Wilderness to go deer hunting with a good friend of mine. Should be a fun time all around. I will of course be taking the pups along. I am pretty sure kurt and merlin will be perfectly happy if they have a soft place to hang out that they know somewhat (the trailer). Nash I am a little worried about, since he’s never spent too much time away from a yard to run around in and burn off some energy in. Hopefully he will do ok with some long walks.

Today I: Emptied out the grey/black tanks. Filled the fresh water tank and got all my filter and hoses all fixed up and spooled up. Reorganized stuff in the outside storage, checked to see which folding crate I could easily get in there for Nash (the x-large one will fit, but makes it very hard to access anything while it’s up. The small one fits on the ‘couch’ in the back of the trailer. It’s a bit cramped for Nash, but I think it will work for this trip at any rate), got oil and gas into the portable honda generator I got a while ago and tested it (At least here it has enough power to run the a/c, which is good), Checked on the small heater I have been using in the trailer to keep the water lines from freezing (it’s doing great).

Upcoming tomorrow: work, need to pick up some beers for the beer tasting thursday night, some dog food and a new tag for Nash, find a cat sitter, and then the weekly GURPs game.

Hopefully I can get everything ready to be gone for 2 weeks by Wed.

Just weighed Nash a while ago…

49lbs.

He’s going to be a big boy.

I’ve been remiss in posting pictures of Mr Nash, so here’s a few from the last few days…

We went to petsmart the other day and Nash wanted to play with one of the kittens in the kitten enclosure.
The kitten really wanted to play with him too.

The other day my cable was down, and when I went out to the store I saw why.
They had em working in shifts!

Look how big nash is next to kurt now.

Look at the happy nash tounge.

Two happy dogs.

Well, headed out today for a shakedown cruise with the new trailer.
I decided to just go to the castle rock campground, since they had hookups, a dog park, and were only an hour away.

I had a bit of annoyance getting hiched.. had to move small amounts back and forth until I got it right. Then, I managed to scrape
the awning a bit on my gate getting out of the side yard. ;( Oh well. It’s very small damage.

Once I hit the road things were smooth. There was a bit of wind, but the trailer had no problems. I did get going about 70mph at some points (didn’t want to get too close to the other traffic witch was kinda heavy) and there were no issues.

The campground people were nice and friendly. I pulled into my spot and looked at hooking everything up:

Power: no problem. Just a plug. Worked great.
Water: Hooked up my pressure control value, hose, filter, to my “shore water” plug, and got nothing. Not sure right now if thats due to the pressure value messing up somehow, or if there is something broken with their water pump. ;( Perhaps I will look more in the morning.
Sewer: no luck. I got a 10′ sewer hose and a fitting from the dealer, and another bit mail order, but there are several issues here: The sewer connector is more than 10′ away. The fittings are not compatible. Oh well.
Wireless: works fine, although I had to monkey with things to register on the stupid click thru page.

Nash was kinda a pest at first, but finally relaxed after a few walks.

I think things are going to work out nicely with it. With any luck I would be in this very campground next year for faire.

Man did I get a pile of packages today. Most everything I ordered via mail order in the last few weeks picked today to arrive on.
Trailer Dolly, microwave, hitch lock, coffee pot, etc. Tomorrow the generator shows up.
The one thing I am lacking is a folding crate for nash to use in the trailer. I looked at petsmart today, but they are more the 2X what they would
cost on-line. ;( Guess I will order one and see how he does without this weekend.

The boys, just hanging out in the doggie bunker after a walk.

Here you can see how over large the x-pens I got are. They are the 48″ ones, when I should have probibly gotten the 36″ ones.
(This is 2 of the 8panel ones hooked together. You can hook them easily, but you have to disconnect them to transport them).

The A/C unit of DOOM. I did figure out that I wasn’t adjusting it right, so I can now get it to now totally freeze everything solid in a few minutes.

I’m going to go down to the castle rock camground this weekend (unless they are already full). Probibly head down saturday afternoon and back home sunday afternoon. Should be a good place for a shakedown voyage of the doggie bunker. It’s about an hour from here, has wireless and all the hookups. They also have a (small) dog park too.

Anyone reading this is welcome to come on down and tent camp or whatever. Drop me an email if interested.