Sorta anyway.
I went to Phoenix this last Thursday. A buddy of mine, Bob, bought a CNC mill from a place out there, and was wrestling with how to move 3300 pounds of steel. He mentioned this to me a couple of times, not realizing I had a truck. I finally mentioned to him, ‘hey, pay my gas, and I’ll go with you to get it’. And as such, we went and got it.
First stop was to take Danny’s bike down to Socorro, since it was on the way and we had the trailer anyway. Danny’s bike was not liking the cold. I had to jump start it with my bike twice to get it from his house to mine, and then get it loaded up. I’m glad my bike has hand guards; his was far too cold to ride for extended periods of time with my current gloves.
We got the bike to Socorro, and tooled around town somewhat waiting for him to call me when he got out of class. We ended up meeting up with Lewis at the brew pub for some dinner, and then unloading the bike. It was about 8pm before we got out of town. We headed out down highway 60 from Socorro. Kind of funny, Mariel called me to tell me about her recent internet credit card fraud thingy. My phone worked pretty well on the backside of the mountain until I was almost to Magdelena, and while I still still connected and had signal, her voice started cutting out pretty bad, but I don’t think she noticed. I ended up hanging up after a minute or so. Sorry!
We encountered a lot of elk and deer in the mountains in Arizona. Very exciting. We ended up staying over in Payson for the night. It was 2am and Bob was dead and I was close behind.
The next day we headed out. I needed to be at Motorola before 10am to drop off some equipment. I was worried we would not make it, but that was not the case, we arrived with plenty of time. Always ‘interesting’ out there.
We left Motorola and headed over to where the mill was. We called in for the forklift rental, and got that puppy loaded in record time. I took a bunch of pictures of loading it here: Loading the CNC. It turned out to ‘feel’ lighter than I thought it might be in terms of pulling it, so that was a bit of a relief.
We headed back to Socorro for the night with no incidents. That next morning we got up to head back, and discovered two tires low on the pickup and trailer. No biggie, aired up, and headed out. We got north of Albuquerque and needed gas, so I got off at the Casino Hollywood exit. Turns out the whole thing was blocked off and we couldn’t get fuel. Have no idea what was going on. We turned around and headed back to Albuquerque, hoping that I still had a gallon or two of fuel left. Now, I usually get 20-21 miles to the gallon, but 3300 pounds of CNC and 1500 pounds of trailer equate to something like 9-10 miles to the gallon (and that’s if yer not dealing with hills). We made it to gas, but the needle was buried on empty.
Make it to Los Alamos, and went to unload the beastie. Luckily for us, about 6 type A personalities showed up and damn if they all didn’t know just what we needed to do to get it unloaded. I’m the first to admit, I am a type A. Plus, I have this complex about getting a job done, and considering it was my ‘job’ to get this sucker to Los Alamos, I was probably pushing a tad more hard against these folks than I normally would. Danny came by, and we had a lot of smiles listening to everyone shouting orders. We got it unloaded just fine though.
Next step was to run down to the valley to pickup a band saw at a machine shop and bring it back up the hill. This didn’t take too terribly long, and the type A’s were not around when we got back, so the unload went pretty quick and easy.
Anyway, now I’m tired. I gotta get up in the morning, get a big rack from a guy here, and go back to Albuquerque to do some work with Mike. Yummy.
Next weekend: annual bat count trip! I’m looking forward to it.
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