Town Run

Not every day is an adventure to beautiful, exciting, or historic places. Sometimes, you just have to do your laundry. This was one such day.

Since I have to partly break down camp and make preparations for warp speed (well, more like one-half impulse power) to take the van into town, I try to combine all my errands into one trip. The van was at just under half a tank of gas when I rolled into Pahrump. It’s easier to drive the van, by itself, through the gas station instead of the van and trailer, so I started with filling up the tank. Naturally, prices have gone up 25¢ a gallon since I got here, because they always go up these days.

I rolled through the same parking lot to Albertson’s and stocked up on groceries, a run I’d been procrastinating on. I could’ve done most of it on the bike, but I also needed kitty litter, which is too big to carry comfortably on two wheels. Now that I had the van in town, I got it all. The best part about taking the van to the grocery store is that I can wheel all my food out of the store and immediately put it away in my kitchen, particularly frozen stuff. There’s no mad dash home to get it in the freezer before it melts.

Then it was on to the laundromat a mile down the road. I’ve used this one before and know the machines are good. The place was surprisingly mobbed for a Thursday afternoon, but I only had one load to run, and there were enough washers and dryers for that. One guy even complimented me on the Doctor Who t-shirt I was wearing. To avoid the crowd, though, I retreated to my van while the machines did their thing. It’s almost as good as having laundry facilities at home, except I still have to drive to it and pay for it. Sometimes I’ll get some work done while laundry runs, especially if there’s good Wi-Fi, which many laundromats have. Today, the place was so busy I had to park on the opposite end of the lot, so no Wi-Fi for me. I had other ways to get online, but I’d already done my work for the day.

When I returned to camp, it was too windy to put my shade cloth back up by myself. Fortunately, I’d parked in such a way that the van itself casts a good shadow across my camp in the afternoon, so I could still sit outside in the shade. This was the last day temperatures were supposed to touch 90º for a while. It’s cooling off over the weekend (I’m pondering a bike ride through nearby Death Valley while it’s less hot), then warming up again during the middle of next week, which is when I’m already planning to move on anyway.

I did miss desert sunsets. I think Arizona’s are even better, but Nevada’s are quite good as well.