Arrived at the sunshine destination of Arizona, Yuma and pulled into a very nice RV park, right beside our friends from Brighton, Janet and Doug. The park is really nice and we booked for a week to give us a chance to relax after 2 weeks of traveling. We have done just over 5000kms since leaving home. This may not sound like much for a 2 week trip, but when you're pulling 7 tons behind you, you gotta pay attention. Normally I can drive for 10 hours or more in a car without too much problem. But, I'm guessing that the attention and energy level is way up when driving this rig and 6 hours is about as much as I want to do in a day.

Our resort has large sites, 2 pools, 2 hot tubs, a gym, party room, library, dog runs and paved roads. Sam has been catching the fitness and line dancing classes and we both agree that it's the nicest place we've been to on this trip so far. Finn likes it too as he's getting used to knowing where "home" is when we go for a walk. After spending a morning checking out other parks in The area, we decided to extend our stay here until the beginning of February. Yuma has the warmest climate in Arizona so figured we should just stay put for January as anywhere else would be cooler. The daytime temperatures have been in the 20C range but it drops down to single digits at night.

Our weeklong reservation included hydro, we were using our electric fireplace and 2 portable heaters each night to keep the chill off. In spite of our rig being built to "full time" it doesn't take long for it to cool down with all of the single pane windows we have. Changing our reservation to a month long stay means they charge for hydro, so it was time for our propane furnace to become our heat source of choice. Sounds good in theory, but it wouldn't fire up! It had worked the night we tired it in Mississippi a couple of weeks prior, so I'm guessing some of our rough touchdowns on the extended Louisiana roller coaster highway system had jarred something. So, out come the instructions and tools and within an hour we had a full blown burnerectomy underway.

I don't really like messing with propane so I was careful not to disturb any of the hard connections in the system. The furnace was a pain to get out but I managed to get it apart, clean some debris from the burner jet, repair the burner and get it all back together. Hit the thermostat and viola.... a perfect chance to use Tom Hanks' line from castaway "I have made fire"! I put it all back together, cracked a celebratory beer and waited for the temperature to drop. About 9 pm it was getting cool so I hit the thermostat and......no heat, just fan!

The next day I re-operated on the patient as I wasn't willing to accept a LPG malpractice suit but I could not save The patient. So got the name of a guy from the park office who came over a hour after I called him and he gave it the once over. I didn't feel too bad because it ended up being a combination of a restricted flow regulator, which he replaced, and more debris in the gas system, which he could remove because he had the tools to take it all apart and reassemble. In fact, he took the gas valve off and blew into it and the stuff blocking the pipe hit me in the face! Anyway, he got it all reassembled and it works like new now!

So, I'm not going to make the same mistake twice by saying all of our mechanical troubles seem to be behind us now......