Wednesday, October 27th we were up at 5:00 a.m. and had the coach on the road by 6:40 a.m. headed to the shop in Tucson. As I said in a previous post, I had discovered that we had an exhaust leak on the coach engine and we needed to get it fixed. Our friend Ray Babcock had recommended a diesel shop in Tucson called W. W. Williams so that’s where we took it. We arrived there about 7:30 a.m. and checked in with our service writer, Saul. I have to say that Ray was correct when he told me that Williams had a very nice, clean shop. It was very big, is part of a national system with shops all over the country, and they were very helpful. He did a quick visual confirmation of my diagnosis of a blown exhaust manifold gasket, contacted our extended warranty company, and got the coach into the shop to start work. By 11:00 a.m. they had the manifold off and determined that the manifold itself was warped and also needed to be replaced. We were worried for a while that we would have to wait for parts and end up in a motel for the night. However, the parts guy was able to locate a manifold locally and Saul said we should still be done by the end of the day. Once we knew the parts were available and the warranty company had authorized the repairs, we headed out to get lunch and do some caching.
We had lunch at a place called My Big Fat Greek Restaurant. We had eaten here the last time we were in Tucson in the Spring and enjoyed it very much. Jackie loves Greek food, especially the lamb dishes like the Gyro. She had a Gyro and I had a steak and cheese wrap that was delicious. We can highly recommend this place, which is located on Broadway and Kolb in Tucson. After lunch we made a quick stop at an upholstery shop to drop off one of our window shade screens from the coach. The sun had deteriorated the stitching holding the border trim on the screen and I wanted to get it fixed. They told us it would be a couple hours, so we went caching. We were able to find five in about an hour and a half. Although it was urban caching, several of the caches were in places where it was hard to park and it took us a while to get from cache to cache. We also made a stop at the Tucson Mall to visit Penny’s just to check the sale racks. I ended up with a couple of real bargains in tee shirts and shorts.
We then picked up our repaired screen, which only cost us $15, and headed back to the shop to check on the coach. We got there at 4:00 p.m., which was when Saul told us to come back, and the coach was finished. The total bill was almost $1,000, but they managed to get it done in one day. Yea! Unfortunately, it was after business hours for the warranty company, so we couldn’t get them to pay their portion of the bill. Williams couldn’t let us leave without payment so we had two choices, we could spend the night in their parking lot, where they did have 50 amp electric, or we could write them a check for the full amount of the bill. Fortunately, Saul worked with us again and told us that he would hold the check and the paperwork until the morning when we could come back (in the car this time) and finish the transaction with the warranty company. We will have to pay our $500 deductible and the warranty company will pay Williams the rest. With that we drove the coach back to the RV park and got set up again, this time for the rest of the week.
Thursday, October 28th we had planned to go to a movie after lunch, but we needed to wait for Saul to call to let us know that Good Sam had paid Williams their portion of the bill. Once they got paid we would run by the shop, take our check back and give them a check for our portion of the total and be done. We still hadn’t heard anything by 1:00 so we decided to get in the car and start driving towards the shop, which was 20 miles away on the other side of Tucson. On the way Saul called and told us that Good Sam had called him and said they were way behind on processing claims and he had no idea when they might get ours done. With that we headed for the mall and just spent a couple hours shopping. Just before 4:00 we ran by Williams to see if they had heard anything and they told us that Saul had left on an emergency, but Sam, the night service advisor, told us that he had talked to Good Sam and they wouldn’t get to us until Friday. Oh well, they were still working with us and holding our check, so nothing lost except our plans for the day. We headed back to the coach for the rest of the day.
Friday, October 29th we left the coach after lunch and headed to Williams to settle up. I had called Sam and learned that he had just got off the phone with Good Sam and they had received their payment. We got to Williams, traded checks and we were finally finished. I will say that W.W. Williams is a great place to get work done if you have a diesel coach and need engine or transmission work done. Highly recommended! After settling up with Sam we went out and did some more geocaching in Northwest Tucson. We found five before we decided it was getting too hot. It was in the high nineties - two days before Halloween. Go figure. After caching we stopped at Walmart for some quick shopping and then headed back to the coach.
After we got the groceries put away we decided to go out to dinner. We have seen a place called Chuy’s at several locations around Tucson over the last couple of days and there was one just a couple of miles from the RV park. We decided to give them a try. It was an interesting place, sort of taqueria meets Mexican beach bar. Lots of wild paint and doodads hanging around. It was like a taqueria in that you had to go up the counter to place your order, but then they brought the food to your table. The food was OK, but not fantastic. We were not completely disappointed, but I don’t’ think we would go back again. The place was a big empty space, so it was noisy and with the ala carte menu it was a pain to order. We’ll stick to conventional Mexican restaurants.
Saturday, October 30th we finally got to go to the movies. We wanted to go in St. David, but there were no theaters. We wanted to go up here in Tucson, but the repair issue was holding us up. After lunch we went out to see “Hereafter”, a film directed by Clint Eastwood. The basic premise of the film was that there really is a hereafter, or heaven, or afterlife or whatever you want to call it, and the proof is that everyone who has a near death experience “sees” the same thing. The bright light, the peace, etc. etc. The movie has three distinct plot threads, a woman who has a near death experience in the Malaysian tsunami, a young boy who loses his brother in an auto accident, and a psychic who can talk with the dead. The movie alternates between these three plots until the last 20 minutes, when they all come together. (No further spoilers) I think the movie was elegantly filmed and it was a good character film, even if you don’t fully accept the premise. Jackie loved the film. I thought it was good, but not the best Eastwood has done. As a character film I liked “Grand Torino” much better. In my opinion Eastwood spent a little too much time on the details of the three plot lines, almost to the point of becoming tedious, and when the ending finally came is was abrupt and, to me, unsatisfying and incomplete. This is an excellent film to see if you have a strong belief in life after death and the ability to contact the dead.
After the movie we spent a little time shopping at the mall where the theater was located. We were going to walk the mall for a while, however, they had opened it to trick or treating kids and there were hundreds of little kids and their parents walking around the mall in costume, going from store to store. A cute idea and there were some very cute kids, but it made walking around the mall a little hard. After shopping we just went home for the rest of the day.
Sunday, October 31st - Happy Halloween! We left right after lunch and headed South of Tucson about 18 miles on Interstate 19 towards the retirement community of Green
Valley. What we were headed for was certainly old and retired, but not a person, a place - the Titan Missile Museum. The museum is located just about a mile West of the freeway, near exit 69, and is a deactivated ICBM silo that has been turned into a museum. The site was once known as Titan II ICBM Site 571-7, and was one of eighteen such silos ringing the Tucson metropolitan area. There was an additional eighteen silos near Wichita, Kansas, and another eighteen near Little Rock, Arkansas. Each site housed a single Titan II missile, armed with a single 9 megaton W-53 hydrogen bomb warhead.
The W-53 warhead, in addition to being the first nuclear weapon to be “mass produced”, was the largest-yield nuclear weapon ever fitted to an ICBM. The W-53 was a city destroyer class weapon which produced a fireball 2.5 to 3 miles in
diameter, producing radiant heat capable of causing fatal burns up to 18 miles from ground zero, irrespective of attendant blast damage. The blast effects would totally destroy any above ground structure in a nine mile radius. One of the maps on the wall of the visitor’s center showed the blast radius of the warhead superimposed over a map of Tucson, with ground zero at downtown, and the blast radius covered the entire city.
The tour of the site started with a short film and then a tour guide took us outside for a tour around the exterior of the site. Display items included an old Security Police Jeep, a number of equipment trailers, and the fueling trailers. Although the
Titan II was a liquid fuel rocket, the standard for the day, it used extremely stable fuel and oxidizer compounds which allowed the missile to be fueled upon installation in the silo and then left fueled. Other liquid fuel rockets had to be fueled just before launch, which meant that it could take up to four hours to launch a missile. The Titan II could be launched in less than one minute from receiving a launch order.
The cover for the silo is locked half open and the open half is covered with clear windows. This is to enable Russian spy satellites to see that the silo remains inactive. Although there is a real (unfueled) Titan II missile in the silo, there is a large hole cut in the nose cone, where the nuclear device would reside, to enable a satellite to see that there is nothing inside. This site was built in 1963 and decommissioned in 1982 as part of the START treaty. All of the other sites in the country were decommissioned and blown up, however, this one was saved as a museum.
After touring the outside we were led into the entrance hatch and went down about 100 feet to the launch facilities. The control center has two three ton blast doors and eight foot thick concrete and steel walls. The entire center is mounted on huge
springs to protect it from the shock of any nearby explosions. The entire launch room is smaller than the average hotel room and is very clearly vintage technology. The tour guide points out the various work stations and equipment and then conducts a mock launch sequence to demonstrate just how quickly the crews could have gotten their missile in the air. After the tour of the control room we were taken down a
long steel tunnel, also mounted on springs, to the other end of the complex where the silo is. There are windows cut in the silo so you can see the missile sitting in there. We then went back to the surface. The whole tour took about an hour and is very interesting. The cost of the museum is very reasonable, and I think anyone who lived through the cold war should visit if in the area.
We also learned that the same Titan II missiles used at these ICBM sites were used in the Gemini space program to launch our astronauts into space. After the ICBM sites were decommissioned in the 1980's, a lot of the missiles taken out of the ICBM sites were later used to launch satellites for the Air Force and for NASA. About half of the missiles that sat for years with huge nuclear weapons in their noses were later shot into space with satellites and other payloads. Talk about recycling!
After leaving the missile museum we headed North on Interstate 19 and stopped at the St. Xavier Mission. St. Xavier was founded in 1692 by the Spanish missionary Father Kino. The current structure was completed in 1797 and has been in continuous use since. It is still an active Catholic church. Its actual name is Mission San
Xavier Del Bac, but its nickname among Arizonans is “The White Dove of the Desert.” This mission was the northern-most mission in what is now Arizona, however, the Spanish missionaries had dozens of missions in Mexico and along the coast of California. The interior of the sanctuary is breathtaking with intricate
sculptured walls and frescos on the ceilings. The actual sanctuary is very long and narrow with the standard short naves on the alter end. This makes the floor plan of the sanctuary the shape of a cross with the alter area at the top. We also walked around the museum which had a lot of artifacts from the friars that have run the compound for the last 200 plus years.
After visiting the mission we headed home for the rest of the day. We got home just as the sun was going down and there were a few kids going through the RV park doing trick or treat. The park management had given out black and orange streamers for people to hang outside their RV or park model to designate who was giving out candy. We were not sure we were going to be home, so we didn’t put out any streamers. We also didn’t have any candy to give out. I did try to fix a leaking drain plug on our water heater and ended up breaking it off. I couldn’t get it fixed because the local Camping World RV store closed at 5:00 on Sunday. Had to shut the water heater off for the night.
Monday, November 1st, I was up early out getting parts at Camping World and Home Depot to fix the water heater. Took me a couple of hours to get the thing fixed, but now all is well. No more leak and we have hot water again. Yea! After lunch we went out and did some geocaching on the East end of Tucson. We were able to find fourteen caches during the afternoon, and one of them put us over the 1,900 finds
mark! Yea us! A number of the caches were along the edges of the Davis Monthan Air Force Base 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group, the real long name for what is generally called the “Bone Yard”. The history of the Bone Yard starts immediately after World War II, when what was then the Army Air Corps established a storage facility for B-29 and C-47 aircraft at Davis-Monthan AFB. Today, the Bone Yard has grown to include more than 4,400 aircraft and 13 aerospace vehicles (missiles) from the all branches of the armed forces, the Coast Guard, and several federal agencies including NASA. Some of the aircraft are kept in a mothballed state for possible use if necessary. Most are kept for spare parts or eventually broken up for scrap.
Two years ago the portion of the base visible from Kolb Avenue contained hundreds of Navy and Marine Corps F-14 “Tomcats” which were taken out of service. Today that same area is home to dozens of old C-130 “Hercules” cargo aircraft. I don’t know where they moved the F-14's to since the base is huge. Davis Monthan AFB is also
the home base for the last squadron of the infamous A-10 “Warthog” tank killer. These are attack aircraft famous for their “low and slow” abilities and their deadly 30 mm cannon in the nose. During the first Gulf War the A-10 was responsible for eliminating entire divisions of Iraqi tanks. Our RV park is right under the flight path for the main runway at Davis Monthan, so we watch A-10's and C-130's flying around all day and night. After our caching we settled in for the night, getting ready for our move in the morning from Tucson to Casa Grande.
Tuesday, October 2nd, we packed up the coach and hit the road about 10:00 a.m., headed for Casa Grande, about 90 Miles North on Interstate 10. After a quick stop for fuel in Coolidge, we arrived at the Western Horizon resort about noon. We got checked in and set up for a nice two week stay here in Casa Grande.
With our arrival here in Casa Grande I will close this chapter of our travel blog. I will post again when we leave here in two weeks. Until then, be happy, be alive, be safe!
