Potholes and Cadillacs.

March 3, Las Cruces.
There never seems to be enough time to do anything. I don't know whether this is a function of being constantly on the move or caring for a household (albeit a 300-square-foot one) and a small baby while working part-time, or both.
There hasn't been a connection to the internet in more than a week, so I'm not even putting in all the hours I should work-wise (this blog should get renamed "Oblog" for Offline Web Log,), and yet days go by and the To Do list never gets done. And then there is the trailer, a never-ending source of problems. Main headache: the broken front stabilizers, which make unhitching the trailer a one-hour operation at best, and a real pain in the butt.
Sister Ann Beth remarked the other day that circus employees are the only people who use RV trailers so intensively. Most full-timers, as people living in RVs all year are called, spend very little time actually traveling: they tend to stay in one park or another for extended periods of time, recreating in four corners of the country the community they left behind. Their RVs are like a house except for the occasional trip. The circus people's RV, on the other hand, is truly a house-on-wheels. Its features are really put to task, as every day or so we hitch and unhitch, hook and unhook, open and close every slide, connect and disconnect the water line, and secure all loose items inside so they don't end up in a hundred pieces after too many a potholes along the way.
It is the definite way to test the quality of a trailer, and ours has failed to rise up to the reputation of its supposedly high-end name brand, Avion. "The Cadillac of trailers," as one lady told me over the phone when we were shopping for a trailer. Ours, a 35-feet fifth-wheel with two slides, has turned out to be just that: all show. As always the devil is in the details: wooden blinds that look pretty (although I never liked them) but are too heavy and end up breaking (there is a reason blinds are almost universally made of light material,) wooden shelves made out of cheap plywood that broke after the first trip under minimal weight, a slide-out that is much too wide and threatens to come apart at each opening (there is a reason they now make them only small,) and then the stabilizers, front and back, twice broken and repaired now. Not to mention the usual wear and tear, which is all happening at once now, of course: generator in need of an oil change, battery in need of being replaced, toilet leaking, etc.
Lesson learned; next time we'll know exactly where to start: not with an Avion.
In the end I left my heart in Hugo, Oklahoma. The first "home" I bought, three years ago for barely over $4,000, "the fifties diner," as my friends and fellow Press-Enterprise photojournalists Carrie and Silvia dubbed it: a 1987 Coachmen Coventry 29-feet fifth-wheel. There can't be another one like that; I swore I would never do a trailer paint job again. The front end of it was wrecked in the accident Marcos and Patti had when they drove it to Savannah for me in September; Fridman welded it back together, and it is now sitting on the Circus Chimera lot in Hugo, reduced to storage status. And screen saver. Home is where the heart is, right there in front of me on the dusty roads of Gringolandia.

Photo 1
TV crew shadows on the circus curtain.

Photo 2
Dylan in the arms of the Russians (Genia at right, Olga at left.)