Plumbing problems 2,000 miles apart highlight this week

Our first rain in Tucson this winter

Well, for the first time in two months I can report a dip in the weather. At least, we have a prediction of rain, which for the local folks is a very good thing. As I write this Saturday morning we have cloudy skies and a light breeze and it does appear that a little rain must fall into our lives today.

Temperatures are expected to plunge into the 60s for a high so everyone around here was bundled up like it’s winter in Minnesota.

With the outside weather going sour today Joan has decided it is a sign from the Native Americans that we must pay a visit to Casino del Sol to pay our reparations to the Tohono O’odham tribe.

A 3-ton thick door in the Titan II control center

Speaking of the Tohono O’odham tribe, when last we left Grandmas Recess I had just finished Bible study and was headed home to clean up.

The Thursday lecture was a prominent member of the Tohono O’odham tribe – and although the man schooled us on the proper pronunciation of the name there are no letters or comparable syllables in the English language for me to try and write it here. Make a sound like you are clearing your throat and you’ll be close.

Two people always had to be on duty

The speaker, and unfortunately without Internet access I can’t give you his name, was extremely interesting, engaging and humorous. The tribe did not have a written language until 1985 when someone thought it might be a good idea to write down the tribe’s stories before they were lost to Western cultural influences. Before that everything was done orally as far as keeping history, etc.

In the days before America and the Spanish, the Tohono O’odham people ranged all over the Southwest and roamed freely between the mountains in the winter and the deserts in the summer. Seemed backwards to us, but they found food and water more abundant with that particular lifestyle.

Speaking to a room full of snowbirds, the speaker mentioned that his people were nomads – “sort of like you people.”  That brought a big laugh.

The missile launch console - "The Button"

Unfortunately, we had to leave the talk early because Joan had a nail appointment set up so we missed the last 30 minutes of the talk. We are planning a visit to the Tohono O’odham Cultural Center in the near future to do more study on these very interesting people.

In the days before borders his people roamed freely back and forth between what is now Mexico and Arizona, but since 9/11 that has changed although they do have special crossings and papers that allow them quicker passage to and from tribal villages north and south of the American border.

While Joan got her nails done I mailed a package for her and then brought my computer into the salon where they provide free WiFi to folks waiting. A nice perk for husbands.

The missile

We came home and Joan made a great new dinner, which was kind of a Mexican dish of ground beef, salsa and cheese over tortilla chips. It was yummy.

In our three visits here we have not visited the nearby Titan II Missile Museum or the Pima Copper Mine. Both tours have been recommended to us by resort friends and we decided Friday was the day we were going to do both.

The two stops are located about 6 miles apart in Suharita, Arizona, which is near Green Valley, all of which is to say they are about 20 miles south of Tucson on I-19 on the way to Mexico.

We stopped first at the Titan II Missile Museum which turned into a fascinating look back to a time anyone our age can remember.

Of the former 54 Titan II missile sites, the one in Arizona is the only one that was not blown closed and sealed up under a treaty with the Russians. Because we still don’t trust each other, the cover to the missile silo remains permanently locked open with a dummy rocket in place so the Russians can monitor from space that we haven’t somehow reactivated the site.

Artsy photo of Joan looking through the glass

Apparently Russia also maintains one site as a museum.

These sites were the proverbial “finger on the button” sites that promised “Mutually Assured Destruction” should the Russians launch nuclear missiles against us. “Peace Through Deterrence” worked for 21 years from 1961 to 1982 when President Reagan negotiated a partial disarmament treaty with the then Soviet Union.

And this scary sign

During the 21 years of service the missile silos were manned 24/7, 365 days a year with Air Force personnel who worked 24 hours shifts protecting the rest of us. Many of the spaces were marked “No Lone Zone” which meant that two Air Force personnel, usually one officer and one enlisted person had to be eyeball to eyeball at all times. This was part of the security system that didn’t leave the awesome responsibility of launching a nuclear missile to one person.

The equipment, though state-of-the-art at the time, looks pretty out-of-date by today’s standards. A bank of computers could be replaced by microchips that would fit into a device the size of a TV remote today, our docent told us.

To prevent an accidental launch there were plenty of safeguards and the docent showed us how the launch keys were set far apart so that it took two people to turn the keys to perform the launch. Both keys had to be turned at the same time (within three seconds) and held in the launch position for five seconds.

Looking down on the missile from above

As kids Joan and I recalled that we had been through nuclear drills in school. Once the launch was initiated it was not possible to abort the mission and once launched there was no way to call back the missile. Thus the elaborate security measures to prevent a bad launch.

The tour took about an hour and we enjoyed going down the 55 stairs into the control room of the silo.

I wanted to push “the button” but I couldn’t get close enough to the console to do so.

Back above ground they let us roam around the grounds and look down into the silo at the dummy missile. The missile silos were built for a single launch as the fire and explosive forces of the launch would turn the silo into a molten tube of metal if a missile was ever launched from them.

Open pit copper mine

It is a very good thing that none of the missiles ever had to be launched.

After the tour I grabbed our picnic lunch from the car and we used a picnic bench on the grounds to eat our lunch.

Now for the real reason we picked today for our great adventure. My membership to the Pima Air Museum and my two free guest passes to either the Air Museum or the Titan Missile Museum were set to expire on Feb. 28, 2014. That’s why we went to Pima Air Museum yesterday and to the Titan Missile Museum on Friday. 

My admission is covered under my membership and the two free guest passes got Joan in for free.

That was a pretty good deal for $25 last year.

A used $60,000 tire

After lunch we headed to the ASARCO (Pima Copper Mine) where we had 3:30 tour reservations for the mine tour.

This is a pit copper mine that has been in operation since 1959. They have dug enough dirt from the ground in this area to create several Panama Canals over the years. Employees work 12-hour shifts and the mine operates 24/7, 365 days a year. Workers work 7 days on and 7 days off.

With the cost of copper on the rise there is a lot of controversy in Arizona right now about the reopening of several copper mines. This particular mine is the only one you can really visit and there are no restrictions on photos or anything else on the tour.

You can see the trucks from a distance

Our tour guide – Ed – was very entertaining and took us to a couple of stops where we could look down in the mine and see digging and then into a building where the copper is separated from the rock through the use of pine oil bubbles.

Through some magic of science the copper sticks to the pine oil bubbles while the rest of the dirt falls to the bottom, separated and trucked to the desert.

Some of the cost of retrieving the copper is astronomical. The large trucks used to move the earth have tires that are more than 12-feet in diameter. Each tire (there are six on each truck) cost $60,000 each and have to be replaced twice a year.

The vat of "bubbles" collecting copper

The electric bill for the mine is $20 million a year, but the mine recovers enough gold from the mine to pay the electric bill each year, the docent told us.

Earlier on Friday I asked Joan what she was making for dinner. Her answer: “Reservations.” So we ended up at the resort restaurant for a fish and chips dinner which really hit the spot.

The predicted bad weather – our first in two months – arrived on schedule about 10 a.m. Saturday and we got some more bad news about the same time.

As readers of this blog know, I am not a big fan of plumbing. So we have been dealing with a lack of hot water in the trailer almost since we got here, so I contacted an RV repairman who lives in the park and he stopped by Saturday morning.

A rare crested Saguaro cactus

This is the same repairman who I called because our heater wasn’t working when we first arrived here and when he checked the problem was not with the furnace but with two empty propane bottles. I wrote that check with a sense of shame for not having checked the obvious before calling for help.

Well the water heater was just about as stupid.

The trailer is equipped with an outdoor shower which is a simple set up with a hot and cold water faucet and a flexible spray nozzle to be used as an outdoor shower. After exhausting the water heater potential problems, the repairman asked if we had an outdoor shower.

“Yes, we do,” I said. He unlocked the outside shower door and discovered that the faucets had been left on and the water shut off at the spray nozzle head. What that meant was that the cold water was mixing with the hot leaving us with just slightly warm water.

My completed wood carving

I’m sure my picture is featured prominently in the Plumbing Hall of Shame. That little problem cost just $10. To make me feel better the repairman, who splits his time between Arizona and Colorado said he was called on a similar problem said he learned of the outdoor shower problem from a couple in Colorado.

They had the same issue that we have had and they had the repairman drive 60 miles to their park to determine what went wrong. After exhausting ever other potential problem he made the discovery of the open faucet issue.

“They had to pay me for my mileage for driving 120 miles round trips.”

At the same time in Michigan we were getting calls from a neighbor that our front yard seemed to have sprung a leak. Where snow had been piled up there was now a pool of water bubbling from the ground. That almost always means a well problem.

Being 2,000 miles from home with a serious issue like that going on can be a little unnerving but we soon lined up the well guy who will replace a broken pipe on Monday. He will likely also tear up the front yard to a farethewell.

Two of seven Blackhawks in formation over the park

Ah, the joys of home ownership. People have told us we are lucky to have free water. Believe me when I say that when you have a well, you do not have free water. Quite the opposite.

So here we are with plumbing problems 2,000 miles apart. Now that’s a first. And may I say, I hope the last time that happens.

With plumbing issues sort of in hand, we headed out to the Casino del Sol on the Pascua Yaqui Tribal Reservation so Joan could continue her efforts to keep every Native American rich.

Unfortunately for me this casino does not have a simple game of Keno or something I can just sit and watch while Joan plays so I actually plugged a few bucks into the slot machines. By the middle of the afternoon I was down about $80. Then I hit a machine for a $205 jackpot and I called it quits and we left the casino a few bucks to the good.

Julian Wash hike sign

We stopped and picked up a Little Caesar’s pizza on the way home and headed to a resort production (all local talent) of Gilbert and Sullivans’ “Pirates of Penzance.

The folks worked very hard on the light opera and we thoroughly enjoyed the 90-minute play.

On a more positive note, I finally finished my "eagle" wood carving and a photo is posted above.

Another tourist sight we have been wanting to visit for several visits is Biosphere 2. (Biosphere 1, by the way, is Earth). This was an experiment that received a lot of publicity back in the early 1990s as a group of 8 earthonauts, or whatever they called them, were locked inside the large glass building with a plan to keep them there for three years surviving on whatever they could grow.

The original colony included goats, chickens (for meat and eggs) and pigs for the occasional ham sandwich. Unfortunately for the first group of volunteers there was simply not enough calories produced to sustain them and the experiment ended after two years and 20 minutes.

Biosphere postcard photo

A second group of folks were locked inside after some modifications from lessons learned from the first mission, but that experiment was aborted after six months due to a change in ownership and direction for the $150 million facility.

It is an impressive greenhouse of epic proportions. There are five separate biomes under the dome and we visited all five during our tour.

Now this is the spot where I would normally post a lot of great pictures of our visit, but it pains me to tell you that I forgot the camera back home so the only photos I have are the ones here that were taken of two postcards I purchased in the gift store.

The world's biggest greenhouses

I’m enclosing a link to more information on the Biosphere here so you can see more photos of the place. And here are a few more good pictures.

The tour took about three hours and we enjoyed it greatly. On the way home we made a quick stop at Trader Joe’s for some dinner.

Monday I went on my easy hike, which was the Julian Wash hike which is not my favorite hike. Actually it’s not even on my top 50 hikes, but it was a good 5.8 mile walk and so the exercise was good. Tonight we are going again to “Meet Me At Maynard’s” in downtown Tucson, but we’ll cover that one in the next post.