Spa day for the trailer valet......

7:35 am - Thursday - December 16th - Anza Borrego Desert, CA - 33° F (got down to 48° F in the bedroom last night!), 59% humidity, wind - CALM.....mostly clear, blue skies today with a forecast high of 61° F.   

For the first time since I installed the Trailer Valet on the tongue of my trailer 6 years ago I removed it in preparation for repainting the trailer tongue.  After years of being in the elements, and then a sixth year spent on the Oregon Coast she looked pretty sad.....paint peeling, rust everywhere, and the drive chains all gunked up.  I knew, right then, I would have to disassemble her, scrape off all the loose paint, deal with the rust, and clean the chains and gears, and Wednesday morning I began that task.  Here she is still all together.....

......here she is in pieces, and pretty much ready to apply the primer after 2 hours of cleaning, scraping, and de-gunkifying......

.....I first applied some gray Rustoleum primer to everything.....

....after a suitable drying period I then began to apply the gloss black Rustoleum.....

....by the time I finished with the last coat of gloss black it was after 2 pm, and I knew I would not get her reassembled, so I let everything sit in the sun to get maximum drying time before I took the parts inside the trailer to spend the night.  I carefully bagged up all the bolts and screws separating them by type into ziplock baggies.  Thursday morning I will focus on reassembling her, and hope every works as it should.  I'm pretty good as assembling mechanical things, so I don't expect the 'Hockwald Way' to rear its ugly head.

I was pretty dirty from all the scraping, wire wheeling, sanding, and spray painting so once all my tools were accounted for, and put back where they belong I headed directly for the shower.  Normally I would have enjoyed a 20-25 minute HOT shower, but since we are boondocking I was in and out in 5 minutes.  Long, hot showers are probably the biggest sacrifice we make when boondocking, but all the other benefits of boondocking more than make up for that one sacrifice.

Since we are within a week now of the winter solstice, and the shortest daylight of the year the days are getting quite short.  Within a couple of hours of exiting the shower the sunset show had begun in earnest around 4:20 pm.....

Mr. Moon is certainly getting quite full of himself

.....and over the next 60 minutes we were treated to an amazing sunset that just kept getting better and better.....

Of course, there was a 'sunset fire'.....

......even the eastern sky had a nice afterglow.....

.....our accent lights of choice on this evening were the red rope lights....

 ......the sunset slowly hit its zenith around 5:20 pm, just as our fire burned down to glowing, red coals once again.

Wednesday night was also the finale of Season 41 of Survivor....can't believe the first season was in 2000....amazing.

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