Working on the Oasis system

I posted a few days ago that Carl tried resetting the Oasis system by pulling the 12V power (https://journeyinamazinggrace.blogspot.com/2026/06/some-work-around-rig.html) -- unfortunately, that didn't fix the electric water heater. We were using the diesel burner for hot water, but it was pretty smelly when it ran. Carl had a replacement burner nozzle and he decided to replace that to see if it may reduce the diesel smell...

Oasis system in the bay

Looking at the burner

Swapping out the burner nozzle

While he was inside the Oasis box, Carl looked at the connections for the electric hot water system. He noticed that wires going into the relay appeared to be melted...

He took a picture of the information about the relay and decided that ordering a new one and replacing it might be a good idea.

So thankful that Amazon has a lot of these parts and that we can get delivery in our campground!

And... the replacement nozzle *has* reduced the diesel smell produced by the burner -- win! 

Line dancing at Venture In

The park where we are staying for two months, Venture In, has line dancing scheduled for two mornings a week. 

The first week when I went on Tuesday, there was a fellow there who indicated that the classes might begin on Thursday. I decided to stay after the others left and play music and dance by myself - a couple of the other residents joined me. On Thursday, once again the instructor wasn't there, so I offered to teach if anyone wanted to stay and dance, so several stayed -- Carl handled queuing up the music for the dances. 

The second week, the primary instructor was still not coming to teach, but the secondary instructor, Pat, taught... 

...there were a few of us dancing to what Pat taught.

The manner of teaching is more like the higher beginner and improver/intermediate lessons at our park in Mesa -- hard for brand new folks to catch on, but folks who know lots of dances prefer it because there is more time spent dancing (and less spent learning). I can pick up a lot of the dances, but I really don't care to learn a lot more different dances.

Show Low Rockin' the Rim

When we arrived at our RV park in Show Low, we saw a flyer on the bulletin board about "Show Low Rockin' the Rim" coming up on Memorial Day weekend. We looked up what things were planned for each day, and decided to go on Saturday. When we first got there, we walked around checking out the various booths -- way in the back we found "Tails of Love Rescue" (https://tailsofloverescue.com/), the local rescue group...

They had a family of 4 kittens that had been found when they were about 2 weeks old on the White Mountain Apache reservation. No mother was found, so they were bottle raised by a local foster. (In the picture, one of the kittens is underneath the one on the left.)

The lady we spoke with indicated that they had had 5 dogs adopted between Friday and Saturday! There were a number of dogs there available for adoption too.

There were a number of food trucks available to supply needs for dinner... 

Our resort has a different food truck come every week, and Moondogs is one of the ones scheduled to come.

We had never seen a Culver's food truck before!

It wasn't quite dinner time for us yet, but definitely something to consider getting!

Looking back up the grounds toward the area where the stage was

Cody Gibson was scheduled to do the Saturday night live music set - the information about the event indicated that he would do a "Saturday-night country set packed with familiar favorites, dance-floor energy, and crowd-pleasing live music."

Behind the band, the backdrop had a seal for the City of Show Low indicating "1953"...

... and in front of the stage, there was a banner indicating "Show Low since 1870".

Show Low has an interesting history - from https://www.kupi.com/en-ae/explore/united-states/show-low/history: 

An Unusual Founding Story

The history of Show Low began around 1870 and is inextricably linked to a unique legend that gave the city its name. According to tradition, the first two settlers, Corydon Cooley and Marion Clark, jointly owned a vast ranch, but over time realized they could not coexist on the same territory. To resolve the dispute over who would remain the owner of the land and who would leave, they agreed to play a game of cards.

The condition of the game was the phrase: "If you can show low, you win." Cooley drew the deuce of clubs — the lowest card, won the dispute, and remained the master of the lands. This story is immortalized not only in the name of the city but also in the name of its main street — "Deuce of Clubs".

Although the park had provided a make-shift dance floor in front of the stage, there were only a few folks who made use of it for dancing, 

The majority of the users of the dance floor were little kiddos playing with hoops and balloons!

It was nice to participate in one of the events in Show Low over the Memorial Day weekend.

Some work around the rig

We moved into Gracie about a week before leaving Mesa so we could make sure systems were working and that we had gotten everything we needed from the house, but when we got to Show Low, we found a few things that weren't working...

One thing that seems to not be working is our Oasis electric hot water and heating system. The diesel burner works (but creates quite a diesel smell in our neighborhood), so we wanted to try to get the electric burner working.

Sometimes it seems like actions similar to magic incantations are needed to reset systems -- Carl remembered that, at some time in the past, removing all the electricity to the Oasis system (110V and 12V) caused it to reset and start working again. We could turn off the 110V system by turning off shore power, but 12V requires removing power at the batteries. He did that, but, unfortunately, no success on getting the electric burner working. We had a problem with this in the fall of 2024, and the technician at Freedom RV worked on it; he said that he did not find anything wrong, but found quite a "snakes nest" of wiring that he straightened up, and it magically started working. We're figuring we may need to make another trip to Freedom RV later this year to get it addressed again. We can't exactly remember when the electric burner was last working -- we think maybe when we were in Mexico in November, and we had other electrical problems there, so maybe something got burned out at that time.

We also started having very low water pressure from "city" water -- this started when we were in Mesa, and we supplemented it by using the water pump to supply water from our fresh tank. It took a very long time to fill our fresh water tank -- even though water flow from the spigot was strong, we weren't getting much water into our systems from the hose. At some point in this process (I think when we ended up emptying our fresh tank while in Mesa), the auto shutoff on the water pump stopped working -- we thought it might just be due to air in the line, but usually that will resolve itself. We would like to have a working water pump so we can boondock if necessary. 

We started looking into why the water flow from the "city" water was so slow -- the pressure from the spigot seemed to be fine. We inspected all the connections, looking for a screen that might be clogged, and we found a severely clogged screen right where the water hose goes into the RV system (just above Carl's hand) -- it had so much sediment caught by the screen -- good that it was caught before it got into our water system, but yuck! so much sediment coming into our water systems!

Correcting this, however, did not cause our water pump to auto shutoff, so Carl did additional debugging on that. We replaced the water pump when it was not working well back in the spring of 2023 (https://journeyinamazinggrace.blogspot.com/2023/05/a-stop-in-new-jersey-seeing-cousins.html), and we thought that we had kept the old water pump (it wasn't dead, it just wasn't working as well as it should be). We were thinking that we should have a new water pump on hand...

... and it turned out that both of us had forgotten that we actually got a new water pump to keep in the bay "just in case".

Carl noticed that the new-in-the-box water pump had an inlet strainer that the installed water pump did not have. Because of the screen earlier in the system, there shouldn't be "stuff" making it through to the water pump, but he decided to go ahead and install the inlet strainer on the installed water pump. Between that and disconnecting, re-connecting the water pump, the auto-shutoff was now working -- hurrah! 

He still has a plan to replace the burner nozzle on the Oasis diesel burner to see if that will help minimize the diesel smell when we're heating water, but for now, we just try to minimize when we need hot water!  In Mesa it wasn't so difficult as, with 100F+ temperatures, water coming out of the tap feels pretty warm, but, in Show Low, with temperatures in the 70s, the water coming in is pretty cool.

Heading up in elevation

Long before we knew that fuel prices were going to escalate this summer, we had decided to try staying in Arizona for the summer instead of driving long distances as we have each summer. There are two places that we had heard that friends stayed in the summer -- Show Low, or near Prescott, AZ. So, we booked two months at each location, starting at Show Low.

Since we replaced the Jeep with the Honda CR-V, and since it is not towable, we drove separately -- I was driving the CR-V that is in front of Gracie, and at this point, there was another vehicle between us. We had our Family radios so we could communicate as we drove (there wasn't cell service available for the whole drive). We decided that, for the future, it might be better for Gracie to be in the front and the CR-V following as it is easier to see the motorhome from the car, the motorhome is impacted by climbs in elevation and it was hard for me to gauge how fast to take the hills, and the car has the capability of catching up more easily.

We are staying at a park called Venture In (our winter location is Venture Out -- and the realty company at our winter park is called Venture In -- so we may be a little confused at times!). It is an Encore park, part of the overall Thousand Trails system, though we are not staying under our membership.

Our site at Venture In. We are anticipating that more folks will be coming to the park in the next few weeks as the summer season ramps up.

There are lots of things to do at Venture In (not as many as Venture Out, but we're happy to have a little less scheduled on our calendar). Show Low, AZ is at about 6200', and has temperatures that average about 20F lower than the "valley" around Phoenix.

Trying out Shake Shack

Carl's daughter, Pamela, had shared that her favorite burger place is Shake Shack. When we were out and about one day (picking up new prescription glasses for Carl), we saw one and decided to stop and try it out...

Shake Shack

Ordering area

We both got burgers (me a single, Carl a double) and we shared a chocolate shake.

It was pretty yummy! 

Celebrating with friends

Our friends, Don and Linda, recently celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary. We were glad to be able to go out for dinner with them at Famous Dave's -- and we bought a whole Baker's Square French Silk Pie from the restaurant to take home and share.

We forgot to get pictures at Famous Dave's (and for our continued celebration at their house),

But we got a picture of a slice of the pie before it was all consumed!

Happy anniversary, Don and Linda!