Completely deflated.....

6:54 am - Thursday - January 24th - Albuquerque, NM - 30º F ('feels like' 24º F), 55% humidity (love it!), wind 6 mph out of the north by northwest.  Crystal clear blue skies today with a forecast high of 48º F.  Sunrise is 7:11 am, and sunset is 5:28 pm.

As you will recall we awoke to a frozen world Wednesday morning.....the 'feels like' temperature was 10º.  At one time we had three electric heaters, plus all 3 gas heaters running full blast to take the chill off the Newell interior.  Sometimes when it is bitter cold we will lose some air from our airbags which we use to level the coach, and this was the case Wednesday morning.  Often it is the right side of the coach that settles, and I simply turn on the leveling system and let a little air out of the driver side airbags to bring it level again, but when I attempted this nothing happened.  I looked at the air pressure gauges (there are two) and saw that the PSI was just above 10 PSI, which essentially means we have no air pressure....

Note the red lines I have drawn on this picture in the upper left of each gauge...that is where the gauges were Wednesday morning

......hmmmm, that is worrying, right?  Of course my mind always goes to the worst case scenario, and that is there are more MAC air valves going bad.  Of course, the worst is rarely ever the case.   We planned to roll our wheels about 9 am, so about 8 am I attempted to fire up the Detroit Diesel, but I was unable to give it any throttle as I had no air pressure, and my throttle, of course, is air activated......air pressure is needed to operate the throttle.  Since I could give it no throttle the engine kept dying.  Okay, I can solve that problem!   I go out side to the passenger side engine bay and set up my pancake compressor to feed air back into my system. It takes about 10 minutes to bring the air pressure to just shy of 110 PSI, and I am then able to start the big DD 6V92.  While it is idling I quickly put away the pancake compressor.  

All the while TLE has been putting the interior into travel order so by the time I get back inside we are ready to roll.....it is just 8:30 am.....a little earlier than we like, but we rolled our wheels anyway.  By the time we merged onto I-40 the PSI was running at 120 PSI, which is where it should be.   As we left frigid Amarillo in our rear view mirror......

.....the views gradually opened up, which we had missed for such a long time.....

.....just shy of noontime we entered New Mexico, and the Mountain Time Zone, so now it was just shy of 11 am.....another hour retrieved on our way back to the Pacific Time Zone.....

.....in Amarillo we were sitting at about 3,600' elevation, but as we put mile after mile behind us we were gaining elevation.....soon we passed 5,000' elevation, and about 50 miles east of Albuquerque we topped out at 7,200' elevation

7,200' elevation....heading downhill into Albuquerque now

......as we passed through Albuquerque about 1:30 pm we were back down to 5,200' elevation, and when we exited I-40 westbound we were at 5,300' elevation.  We had covered some 320 miles, but it did not feel like 320 miles.  The drive Wednesday was such a pleasure we blew right by our originally planned stop about 40 miles east of Albuquerque, and continued on another 60 miles to our present location......Route 66 Casino and RV Resort, about 20 miles west of Albuquerque.....

......there are 100 sites in this pretty new RV park at the Casino, and all the interior roads are paved, with each site having a 45' concrete pad.  There were very few RV's in the park when we arrived at 2 pm, but by nightfall there were probably a dozen.  The views are gigantic, and unspoiled.....we may just be tempted to stay here for more than one night.....suweet.  There was, and is not a breath of wind, and the sun feels so good.  Of course, the low humidity (55%) doesn't hurt even a little.

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