Benson AZ – Social Time

My goodness, we are becoming very social all of a sudden. Today we went to the  Jil and Tom’s, for happy hour which extended into dinner at Mi Casa, the most highly rated restaurant for miles around. I met Jil online in a forum on RVillage.com and extended the contact to FaceBook. She is from Florida, but we attended the same summer camp, Camp Cherokee, back in the 50’s. Given our ages we were there at the same time and she remembers many of the people I knew who went there. Her husband, Tom, is from Irondequoit just a few years younger than us. They are members of the Saguara SKP Coop where we like to stay. We can’t get in this year, oh well, we are a few miles away at Red Barn RV, a piece of desert with hookups, I 10 and the railroad for borders.

While here we contacted Ellie and Kelly from our SE Asia trip last year. they decided to drive down from north of Tucson on Saturday to visit us on GeeWhiz for lunch. And tomorrow we will drive to Sierra Vista, about 35 miles south of us to have lunch with Cindy and Mike. They were on the site next to us in Livingston and kept an eye on the coach while we were in Israel. We are also working on getting together with other people from Rochester while we are in the neighborhood.

If we have missed anyone in the Phoenix Tucson area and you would like to get together let us know!

I have not been completely social, for that matter I dealt with a very unsocial issue yesterday. I decided the time had come to find out what was wrong with the macerator pump which I had sort of abandoned when it suddenly stopped while pumping out the black tank. I had verified that the fuse had not blown which meant dismantling the pump head to see what had jammed it. I started by pulling off the hose which let me look into the throat of the pump after I flushed it with fresh water. There was a half circle of plastic wedged in the blade. It didn’t look right to me and I could only hope it was something extraneous that had come down from the tank. A pair of needle nose pliers provided the reach I needed and I extracted the plastic chip with ease. This freed the pump which now works just fine. I can only guess that the piece of plastic was construction debris which had fallen in the tank and rattled around in there for a couple of years before finding its way to the exit. The other possibility is too terrible to think about. What if something in the effluent tanks has broken and this is the debris from that failure. This is very unlikely so I will not think about it.

On to the social life.