Four Corners Part One - Ice Cream Melts in the Desert
On Saturday May 15, 2021 – I traveled 358-miles from Simi Valley, California to the Fort Beale RV Park in Kingman, Arizona. Towing our fifth wheel trailer across the Mojave Desert
took longer than the expected six hours. Once I was set up for the
night, I opened the refrigerator in my coach, seeking a cold drink. To
my surprise, the refrigerator was dark inside, indicating some form of
power failure.
I
checked the fuses, circuit breakers and switches in the coach, but the
control panel for the fridge remained dark. Since I had packed the
unit with two weeks’ worth of frozen and fresh foods, I knew I had a
problem. Not wanting to scuttle my trip on the first day, I walked to a
nearby Chevron Station and purchased three disposable foam coolers,
plus 30-pounds of ice. Back at the coach, I packed ten pounds of ice
into the freezer and transferred as much of the fresh food into my
coolers as possible. Then it was time to eat some melting ice cream and
throw the remainder away.
In the morning, I called a local RV repairman,
but he was out of town on another call. He suggested that the printed
circuit board (PCB), which is the electronic brains of the unit may
have failed. Since I had a non-refundable reservation that night in
Flagstaff, Arizona, I could not afford to stay another day in Kingman.
On the way out of town, I stopped at 
the
local Wal-Mart, where I purchased two 48-quart red, white and blue
Igloo brand ice chests. In the Wal-Mart parking lot, I transferred my
fresh food from the leaky foam coolers to my bright new All-American
coolers. At $14.85 each, they would do a more efficient job of keeping
my food chilled. I put a fresh bag of ice in the non-working freezer
and used the previous night’s ice to flood the ice chests.
With nothing more to do in Kingman, I headed 150-miles east on Interstate I-40. My destination was the Kit Carson RV Park
in Flagstaff, Arizona. The Kit Carson RV Park declares itself to be
the second oldest continuously operating RV Park in the nation. At 6,900
feet elevation, it is always a rustic and cool stopping point during
my regional travel. As with most RV Parks, it is best to make your
reservations well in advance. 
Many, including Kit Carson now accept reservations only on a prepaid and non-refundable basis.
Still determined to get my refrigerator operating, I called Buddy’s Welding & RV,
which happened to be along my route north the following morning. After
looking up my Dometic refrigerator model and serial number, the nice
person there said that she had the appropriate PCB to complete my
repair. On my way to Monument Valley, Arizona, I stopped at Buddy’s and
paid $168 for the Dinosaur Electronics brand aftermarket PCB that was
to replace my supposedly defunct OEM model.
After traveling 175-miles to Goulding’s RV Park in Monument Valley,
Arizona, I quickly set up for a two-night stay. I then opened the
refrigerator access panel on the outside of the coach. Soon, I had the
replacement board installed and ready for the final electrical
connections. Having carefully marked each wire-lead with a black
marking pen, I soon noticed an extra connection wire, without a
corresponding terminal on the PCB. It was approaching 4 PM PDT when I
called customer service at Dinosaur Electronics Inc. in Lincoln City, Oregon.
After describing my issue to Joe at Dinosaur
Electronics, he quickly determined that I had the wrong board. He said
it was an easy mistake for the person at Buddy’s to make. In the process
of agglomerating Dometic model and serial numbers, a third-party
database could not be 
relied
upon for reliable information. There were simply too many combinations
of refrigerator models and PCB numbers for the database to handle.
Once it was corrupted, there was no way to straighten the database out.
Live and learn, I thought. By then, the last of my ice was melting in
my coolers. My freezer would soon thaw completely. Standing there in
the hot sun, I felt the pangs of bad luck returning.
It was then that Joe said, “Let us see what we
can do. Do you have a multi-meter?” “At home, but not here”, I said.
“Wait, Joe, my neighbor here had earlier offered to help”. “OK,
reinstall your old board, get the multi-meter and call me back”, said
Joe. My RV neighbor at Goulding’s was a veteran of the Alcan Highway to
Alaska, so of course he had a multi-meter buried somewhere in his huge
Class-A motorhome. Once I had the old board reinstalled and the
multi-meter in hand, I called Joe back and said I was ready. First, he
asked what make and model number multi-meter I had. He then looked up
that information on the internet and said, “That is an old analog
meter”.
Over
the next twenty minutes, we checked all the 12-volt and 120-volt
connections that converge inside the refrigerator access panel. After
all that, Joe said, “It sounds like you have a bad thermo fuse”. Again,
my heart sank at the same rate that my remaining ice was melting. “Do
you have wire?”, Joe asked. “I just bought 30-feet of it in Kingman”, I
said. “Good. Cut a length of wire and strip it at both ends. Then, get
out your electrical kit, find a spade-connector and crimp it on to one
end of your wire”. By some good fortune, I had an automotive style
electrical kit, complete with spare spade-connectors.
“OK, done”, I said. Luckily, I had a wireless
headset for my mobile phone, or I never could have balanced the phone,
multi-meter and replacement 
parts
outside of my RV. “Alright, attach the spade connector to the F-5
terminal on the PCB and crimp the other end into the 12-volt terminal
block.” After a few more minutes sweating in the afternoon sun, I had
the repair completed. “Go inside and see if it lights up”, said Joe.
After sprinting inside my rig for the fifth or sixth time, “Still
dead”, I reported. “You blew a fuse”, he said. Go to the 12-volt panel
in your coach and replace the blown 15-amp fuse”. Luckily, I still had
several spare fuses in my kit.
When I plugged the spare fuse into the
receptacle, the orange LED on the refrigerator control panel lit up.
“You are good to go, for now. The jumper wire is for test purposes only.
You need to get it diagnosed and repaired as soon as possible”, said
Joe. He had already offered to replace my erroneous Dinosaur Board with
the correct model number, so I had 
him ship that to my next stop, in Durango, Colorado.
The replacement cost another $34, but at least I would have the
correct spare board. Thanking Joe for his amazing service, I signed off
and enjoyed the hum of my refrigerator, as it slowly chilled my frozen
food. Above air conditioning and running water, refrigeration in the
desert is what makes RVing possible.
After two nights in bucolic Monument Valley,
I hooked up and headed northeast to Durango, Colorado, 165-miles away.
To me, the refrigerator still seemed like a ticking time-bomb, waiting
to go off at any moment. Somehow, the jumper-wire repair held, and my
fresh and frozen foods were all chilling in the Dometic unit. Although
the frozen meats and fish came close to melting, only one hamburger
patty melted a bit and then refroze solid to the bottom of the freezer.
Arriving at United Campgrounds, Durango
in the late afternoon I unhooked for three nights in the picturesque
Upper Animas River Valley. Almost a decade prior, I had installed a primitive webcam
at the RV Park, but it had failed during the recent health crisis. In
October 2020, I was so concerned with health protection that I forgot
to bring a $25 replacement webcam to Durango. The old Dell computer
system whirred away each day, but no images made their way to the
internet. Determined to get the webcam operating, I had planned my
entire 1,800-mile round-trip with the focus of replacing that webcam.
For those who do not know, the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad
first operated in 1882. With a few minor alterations and with some new
locomotives from the 1930’s, it still operates today. It is an
international tourist attraction that I first rode with my father in
1965. As 
it
was in the 1880s, the railroad is still the economic lifeblood of
Durango, Colorado. The webcam is located adjacent to the tracks, within
the United Campgrounds RV Park. For years, people from all over the
world have relied on the webcam for a glimpse of the trains running
through the RV Park. Unless I could repair the system, all that
visitors would see was a frozen image from summer 2020.
Borrowing a stepladder from Tim and Sheri
Holt, the owners of the iconic RV Park, I swapped out the old Microsoft
webcam for an equally old spare that I had brought from home. When I
restarted the 20-year-old Dell tower computer, the system booted up and
began firing images to the internet ever six seconds. With all the
refrigerator electronics issues I had recently experienced, you can
imagine how happy I was to see this old electronic marvel spring back
to life.
On my second day in Durango, a cold rainstorm, including some hail in the evening, swept through the Upper Animas Valley. Even though it was May 20,
the surroundings mountains received fresh snow. I was content to go
shopping in Durango for fresh food and to avoid highway traffic. One
woman at the City Market declared, “So many people have moved here in
the past few years, they don’t even know it can rain here”.
For almost twenty years, the entire Four Corners Region has been in the grip of a long-term drought. It is of a magnitude not seen since the Anasazi, or Pre-Puebloan Indians vacated the region in about 1,200 CE.
This concludes Part One of a Five-Part Article. To read Part Two, click HERE.
By James McGillis at 05:02 PM | Travel | Comments (0) | Link
