Jane and John – we travel and we ranch!

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A letter from Vietnam, Tuesday, 23 November 1971

January 21, 2012

I’ve been meaning to transcribe this letter for a couple of months and I’m finally making the time.  This letter was discovered quite by accident while we were digging around in an old folder and quite frankly I don’t even remember writing it or many details of my workaday world while I was stationed in Vietnam (Tan Son Nhut AB, Saigon.)

John in Vietnam - standing in front of my locker

John in Vietnam - standing in front of my locker

While I was trained by the US Air Force to be a telephone technician (and other communications systems), my specialty was being performed by civilian contractors at Tan Son Nhut so I was assigned to the maintenance control center of our communications squadron.  In the letter I describe my job in more detail.  The Dr. and Mrs Nowlin to whom I addressed the letter were my future father and mother-in-law.  Dr. Nowlin was a general practitioner medical doctor in the small Texas panhandle town of Littlefield.  Sadly, both are now deceased.

Take a trip with me now back to Vietnam during the war…

Tuesday 23 November, 1971

Dear Dr. & Mrs. Nowlin,

I am sorry that I have not written sooner, but they keep me pretty busy here.  Thank you very much for the kindness you showed me and thanks for my room at the Cross Country! (they put me up in a motel room before I left for overseas)  That bed was mighty soft!

As I might have guessed, I’m not doing any telephone work here!  It seems that I am destined to do paper-work.  My job will be to monitor radio & weather & special circuits – not monitoring aurally, but going into action if one gets reported out.  Then I have to fill out a card on it and locate the proper person to fix it.  These circuits also include the Tacan, ILS, VOR, marker beacons, Rapcon, control tower, and two computers.  We handle navaids (aircraft navigational aids) for three bases in the area.  As soon as I get trained, they want me to be the day shift supervisor for about five or six people.

Jane might have told you that I don’t expect to be here until August – I have a chance to get discharged in March, but I’m not going to hold my breath.  At any rate, it looks like I should gone (sic) at least by June.  (I did get an early discharge in late February – about six months before my four year enlistment was up)

I bought a movie camera that uses Super 8 cartridges; I have taken 50 feet (1 cartridge)  and sent it to Kodak in Dallas for processing.  I put your address on the mailer – so I hope that it gets to you by Thanksgiving so Jane can see the film also. (Jane was a student at the University of Texas at Austin at the time) One thing I worried about: do they return it processed in the cartridge?  I have never seen a cartridge projector.  I wanted to buy a cartridge projector and send it to Jane; all they have here are the regular projectors.

Enclosed are a few pictures I took recently; the quality isn’t the greatest but I’m learning.  (I developed and printed my own black and white film in the base hobby photo lab and the pictures I sent them were pretty bad and uninteresting!)

Oh, I found out yesterday my schedule for December – it seems that I work Christmas day, New Year’s day & eve, and I forgot to see if I’m working on my birthday – probably so!  It looks like I don’t get many Sundays off, either.  I work three days on (7 am to 7 pm) and one day off.  I don’t feel too bad about that, it could be much worse.

I’d better close and get this in the mail.  Again, thanks for everything, you are like a second family to me!

Love John

 

Little did I realize the job the Air Force trained me for would be the career path that would follow me for all of my employed life.  In fact the job I performed in Vietnam was almost exactly like one job I had at the old Southwestern Bell Telephone Company in downtown Austin.

So I returned home from Vietnam, married Jane, and lived happily ever-after.  May God bless those who have served our country or are now serving in the armed forces.  Freedom has a cost.

 

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Summer 2011 – Update #3 and last one for this summer :-(

August 17, 2011

We left off with us enjoying the beautiful cool weather in the Silverton, Colorado area (San Juan mountains), Jeeping, and lamenting about the drought in Texas (more on the drought later.)

Also, we would like to apologize for steering our readers to RubiconOwnersForum.com to read our posts and look at all of the pictures we posted on a trail-by-trail basis.  Unfortunately this forum will not let you even view this particular board without being a registered user (which you can certainly do if desired.)  When John gets industrious, he’ll copy all of that content over here in a series of blog posts and make a new blog category for off-road, Jeep or something like that.

Moving on…

We had quite a bit of fun running trails in the San Juan mountains with our new Western Slope 4 Wheeler club buddies but it was time to press on and head a little further east in preparation for the All-4-Fun off-road event held in the Salida, Colorado area.  We spent a couple of weeks in Gunnison, Colorado at the very nice Palisades Senior RV Park (it’s an over age 55 park, but we got over that stigma.)  Gunnison must have the very worst WalMart store we have even set foot inside.  It looks like the aftermath of a going-out-of-business sale at a Dollar Store.  For a while we wondered if anybody actually worked there judging by how disheveled almost every merchandise shelf looked, but no – there actually were employees hanging around (“hanging around” is a significantly more descriptive term than “working.”)  Perhaps most of them spend their time outside on smoke breaks.

We did have somebody tell us that the city of Gunnison did not approve the building of a super sized WallyWorld store, so maybe this is WalMart’s way of punishing the locals.  Whatever.  John hates to set foot inside of any WalMart.  We weren’t real thrilled with the Gunnison area but there was a shining jewel there – the Pioneer Museum.  Six acres of a trip back in time.

Our Horizon coach at the All-4-Fun

Boondocking at the All-4-Fun off-road event

After our stopover in Gunnison, it was time to proceed to the campground on a private ranch for the All-4-Fun where we will be boondocking (i.e., no electric, no water, no sewer hookups) for a full week in the coach.  We left Gunnison with a full tank of water (about 80 gallons) and topped off the diesel tank (we hold 100 gallons) so we would be in fine shape to be completely self-contained for the entire week.

Even though the trip from Gunnison to Salida wasn’t very long in miles, we had to cross the Continental Divide at Monarch Pass (a little over 11,000′) with a full water tank, a full diesel tank and towing the Jeep.  We probably weighed in at 37,000 pounds between the coach and Jeep but we made the climb with no difficulty thanks to our large Cummins engine (8.9 liters and 1200 ft. lbs. of torque), but oh how we suck the fuel down.  On a long climb like that we are only getting 2.5 to 3.5 MPG and the turbo is at full boost (32 PSI.)

While at the campground in Salida, we would run the generator about 8-10 hours each day (so we could have air conditioning), and we had plenty of water for each of us to take a quick shower every day (and we had satellite TV and satellite Internet) so we certainly didn’t suffer any!  Speaking of the generator, that Onan diesel generator is a wonderful little gem.  It’s very quiet and we only burn less than a half a gallon an hour under our typical load.  We ran the generator for about 75 hours that week and we figured that was only about 25 gallons or so of fuel used.

 

Rock crawling at Chinaman Gulch trail near Salida, Colorado

Rock crawling at Chinaman Gulch trail near Salida, Colorado

We spent several days running trails with anywhere from about eight vehicles to almost 20.  We did a couple of hard-rated trails and we (and the Rubicon) did just great.  John did some optional hard obstacles on one of the trails, and again we had no issues thanks to increasing driver skill and a nicely built up Rubicon.  By the end of the week we were tired since most trail runs were an all-day event and we were thinking about our next stop which was going to be Grand Lake, Colorado for more sightseeing and trail running.  That didn’t quite work out as we will soon discover.

Thanks to all of the webcams John installed at our little ranch, we can easily keep a close eye on things and one day John noticed the water level in the animal stock tanks a little low.  That wasn’t a great cause for alarm since our neighbors sometimes would clean out the tanks and then it would take them a while to refill.  After going back several days (you can see that particular webcam here) and reviewing the images, it was clear the water level was slowly going down.  Oops, not good!  John called our wonderful neighbors who were looking after the place to see if there was any water in the storage tank that gravity feeds the stock troughs, and no – the tank was dry.  OH NO!

The neighbor said the primary 2500 gallon storage tank was almost full, so something was going on that could not be explained.  John was worried there might be a well issue – maybe even our well was going dry.  It was time to be very concerned about water issues thanks to the extreme drought we were experiencing.  Our neighbor said his well had a reduced flow and there were reports of wells a few miles away actually drying up.

The decision was made to cancel the rest of our summer plans (we were slowly headed to Dalton, Wyoming for another Jeep event) and immediately return home to deal with the water situation.  At least we were able to finish the All-4-Fun event, so this was a good point to break things off and head south.  It took two long days on the road (we covered about 900 miles in those two days) to return home and guess what we found?  We don’t know either.

Our neighbor transferred about 800 gallons of water from the large storage tank to the smaller tank (it holds about 1,000 gallons) to fill the animal troughs and when John looked inside both tanks, they were both almost full.  What the…?  Here we were having visions of having to spend about $25,000 for a new deep well (800′ deep!) and everything looked okay.  We are keeping a close eye on the well’s performance and it seems normal (in the best of times we only get about 2-3 GPM from it) at least so far.

This is the first time since we have owned our place here that we have experienced these hot temperatures and I can tell you that WE DON’T LIKE IT!  However, we are very thankful that we are blessed with a still functioning well – things could always be worse.  Please join us in praying for abundant rain for all of Texas – we do this before every meal .  It is a very serious situation here for everybody, especially farmers and ranchers.  It is still costing us a small fortune to feed the blackbuck antelope and we’re having thoughts about selling the entire herd (lots of ranchers are selling off their livestock.)  We are so down in the hole money-wise with the herd, there is no hope of making a little return on them for a few years at this rate (and that’s assuming we get rain and have some grass growing at some point.)

Pray for rain!

As always, thanks for riding along with Jane and John and blessings to all of our friends and loved ones!

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Summer 2011 – Update #2

July 6, 2011

We’ve added a few email addresses to the blog notification, so if you don’t wish to be notified about updates, you can easily unsubscribe yourself.

Summer update #1  left off with us hanging out in Moab, Utah and running 4×4 trails, a lot of trails.  We did about six hard rated trails and two moderate rated trails.  The hard trails require modified 4×4 vehicles – large tires (at least 33 inches tall), locking differentials, excellent suspension articulation, very high ground clearance, and good driver skill.  Fortunately after a winter of hard work (and quite a few dollars spent on upgrades), our Jeep Wrangler Rubicon proved to be well up to the task and John was quickly acquiring and enhancing his off-road driving skills.

The original plan was to spend two weeks in Moab, travel around Utah for the rest of June, then make our way to Silverton Colorado on July 1 where we had reservations for a couple of weeks.  Good thing we are flexible since the Jeep started acting up while we were in Moab.  The transmission would go into limp mode – it wouldn’t shift out of second gear.  This situation got progressively worse to the point that we could never depend on the Jeep to work properly.

After quite a bit of investigation, John thought the problem was the Powertrain Control Module (aka PCM, the “brain” or computer) which was something only a Chrysler dealer could address.  Here’s the fun part of the story:  there is no Chrysler dealer in Moab, Utah.  Moab is the Mecca for Jeeps that like to off-road and there are literally hundreds of Jeeps in Moab (at least when the weather is mild.)

So, what to do?  The closest dealers were in Salt Lake City, Grand Junction Colorado, or Montrose Colorado.  Since we were headed to Colorado anyway, we decided to come to Montrose since we had a good service experience there last year when the Jeep Liberty needed maintenance.  We made a service appointment for a Monday, took the Jeep in and about two hours later they diagnosed the problem as a bad  PCM AND it was covered under warranty!  Not sure how it came to be under warranty since the Jeep is an ’06 with over 50k miles on the clock, but there was no argument from John (a new PCM would have cost hundreds of dollars!)

Since we saved so much money on the repair, John took the opportunity to spend more money on the Jeep at an off-road shop in Montrose (Rockworx.)  We had them do a repair (not essential, but desirable), relocate/weld the tow bar brackets to the front bumper (so we wouldn’t bang them on the rocks), and install a Currie Antirock front replacement sway bar.

Lots of snow still on the trails

Lots of snow still on the trails

We got so settled in, we spent the entire month (at a delightful RV park south of Montrose – Centennial RV Park) and made several friends.  There are many people that spend the entire summer at Centennial and of that group many are into off-roading in the nearby San Juan Mountains.  We wound up joining the Montrose 4×4 club – the Western Slope 4-Wheelers and participated in two club runs.

July 1 we moved to a very small RV park in Silverton Colorado (A&B) which is a very short walk from downtown.  Silverton is a wonderful little town in the San Juan mountains with quite the feel for the old west with most of the buildings being well over 100 years old.  Every day two or three steam powered narrow gauge trains (the Durango & Silverton) bring up a load of tourists from Durango to spend a couple of hours in town sightseeing and shopping.

The plan was to be in Silverton for the July 4th celebration which we heard was quite the fête and we certainly weren’t disappointed.  There was a parade (here’s a video John shot), military jet

July4 fete - eating cherry rhubarb pie with new friends

July4 fête - eating homemade cherry rhubarb pie with new friends

flyover, homemade rhubarb pie sales, a duck “race”, and one of the most amazing fireworks displays we have ever witnessed.  Wow, what a great time we had!

We will be running more trails in the San Juan mountains and enjoying the cool mountain weather (Silverton is at 9,300 feet altitude) until July 18 when we leave for Gunnison Colorado for a couple of weeks, then we move on to Salida Colorado to participate in a week-long 4×4 event (the All-4-Fun.)   You are probably picking up on a trend that we enjoy 4-wheeling!  After Salida we head to Wyoming for sightseeing and more off-roading.

If you want to see a bunch of pictures of us on the trails with a commentary, John has made many posts on a trail by trail basis in the Rubicon Owner’s Forum.  Click here and look for the posts by johncanfield.

The news isn’t all fun and good however due to the extreme drought that most of Texas is experiencing (which is ironic since the mountains of Colorado have had record snowfalls and the rivers were/are in flood stage from the snow melt.)  Our ranch has only had about four inches of rain since the first of the year and there is still no grass for our animals to eat.  Everything is brown and dead-looking and there seems to be no relief in sight.  We continue to pray at every meal for rain to be sent and we know that God will work in His time to send the rain we so desperately need.

As always, thanks for riding along with us and many blessings.

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