Fodor's Complete Guide to the Soviet Union - 1988-2025
In 1948, English author George Orwell authored his dystopian novel and cautionary tale, “1984.” Thematically, it focuses on the consequences of totalitarianism, mass surveillance, and repression of people and behaviors within society. Set in the future thirty-six years hence, it presaged conditions in the Soviet Union, which was then only twenty-two years old. In the Stalinist era, which lasted until 1953, every horror of Orwell’s imagination had come true for the citizens of the Soviet Union (USSR).
The Berlin Wall, a symbol of the Cold War, fell in November 1989. By 1991, the old Soviet Union was in complete collapse. The German Democratic Republic, also known as Eastern Germany, also demised. The Federal Republic of Germany then took full control over both West and East Germany. In Russia, there was an incipient spate democracy. An opening to western ideas, institutions and trade gave great hope to the people of the former Soviet republics. There was a rapid rise in health, wealth, and the general standard of living throughout the former Soviet Union.
On December 31, 1999, following the resignation of President Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin became Acting President. He was first elected President of Russia on March 26, 2000, and then re-elected in 2004, 2012, 2018, and 2024. In 2005, Putin told his nation that the collapse of the Soviet empire “was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” Secretly and then more openly as time passed, he sought to reconstitute Russia as a world power. His plan was to regain hegemony over all lands that had ever been under Russian control. Under his direction, Russia conducted warfare in Chechnya, Georgia, and Syria, to name a few.
In February 2014, Russia invaded the Crimean Peninsula, then and now an internationally recognized region of Ukraine. In March 2014, Russia officially annexed Crimea. Eight years later, on February 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, proper, with the goal of reintegrating the entire country as part of Russia. By November of 2024, Russia had gained significant territory, but had lost almost 750,000 men, killed, wounded, or captured. Some analysts put the casualty total closer to one million. The Russian economy was in tatters, with the exchange rate between the Russian ruble and the U.S. dollar falling below one hundred to one. In other words, the Russian ruble was worth less than one U.S. cent.
On June 27, 2024, the U.S. State Department, issued a travel advisory, which said, in part, “Do not travel to Russia due to the consequences of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russian military forces. U.S. citizens may face harassment or detention by Russian security officials, arbitrary enforcement of local laws, limited flights into and out of Russia, and the possibility of terrorism. The U.S. Embassy has limited ability to assist U.S. citizens in Russia.”
Ironically, well before the 1989 fall of the Soviet Union, travel to many parts of the USSR were open to U.S. and European travelers. Although the Beatles never played in the Soviet Union, Elton John received a visa and became the first “out-and-out rock artist” to play there. Sir Elton’s 1985 album, “Ice on Fire” featured the song, Nikita. In the accompanying video, English athlete, actor, and model Anya Major played the role of a beautiful female Russian soldier.
Wearing white tank-top and red shorts it is Major who hammer-throws the sledgehammer into the screen of Big Brother in Apple's famous 1984 Macintosh commercial. The unidentified “Big Brother” in the Ridley Scott directed commercial was not the Soviet Union. Rather, it was tech entrepreneur Bill Gates. His company, Microsoft, then held the dominant operating system in the emerging personal computer field. Steve Jobs of Apple fame had commissioned the television commercial as a rallying cry against the perceived tyranny of Microsoft. Orwell, himself died in 1950, so no one knows what he might have thought about themes in his seminal book appearing as black comedy in a later television commercial. My guess is that he would have appreciated the irony.
The travel guide known as Fodor’s issued its “Fodor’s Soviet Union 1988” in English, targeted toward Western travelers. Among other sections, it featured “Ukraine and Moldova – Breadbasket of the USSR.” and “The Crimea and the Black Sea – From Odessa to Batumi.” One example of travel opportunities available to Westerners in 1988, included Ukraine’s regional capital of Kherson. In 1988, Fodor’s said, “Kherson is your final stop on the Dnieper River. Founded as a fortress in 1788, it is both a river and a seaport. From here you can visit the new town of Novaya Lakovka and see the Kakhovka Dam and its hydraulic power plant. This is where you leave the Dnieper River, but you can take a 300-seat hydrofoil to Odessa, which is only two hours’ ride.”
In 1991, Ukraine declared independence from the USSR. Although uncontested at that time, in 1996 Ukraine agreed to return its entire nuclear arsenal to Russia, including an estimated 1,900 strategic warheads, 176 intercontinental ballistic missiles, and forty-four strategic bombers. In exchange for receiving the third most potent nuclear arsenal in the world, Russia offered debt forgiveness, plus economic and security assurances to Ukraine.
In March 2022, early in the invasion of Ukraine, Kherson fell to Russian forces, without a fight. The fall of Kherson was due to treachery on the part of several local officials. On November 11, 2022, the Armed Forces of Ukraine wrested control and liberated the city of Kherson from Russian control.
In the early hours of June 6, 2023, the Kakhovka Dam failed, causing extensive flooding along the lower Dnieper River. At that time, the dam was under the control of the Russian military, which had seized it in the early days of the conflict. Although Russian authorities have denied the accusation, many experts agree that Russian forces blew up a segment of the dam to hinder a planned Ukrainian counter-offensive. What resulted was an environmental and human disaster. Hundreds were killed, along with the flooding of towns and agricultural fields.
Because of its proximity to the active war front, Kherson remains vulnerable to Russian artillery, drone, and missile attacks. For example, on October 1, 2024, Reuters reported that "six people were killed when Russian forces struck the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson. Another six people were wounded in the artillery strike on a central bus stop, prosecutors said in a statement. Governor Oleksandr Prokudin said the strike also hit a central market while residents were shopping." On December 30, 2024, Russian troops shelled thirty settlements in the Kherson region. One person was killed and four were injured, as reported by Prokudin.
In 1988, westerners could travel to the U.S.S.R without fear of harassment or intimidation, and many did. Although the country was not free by Western standards, it was accessible. After 1989, the country was still not a place of free expression, but western tourism and investment were welcome. Western corporations and banking enterprises flocked to Russia and its former vassal states. With a combined total population of 290 million inhabitants, the importation of Western goods and services set off a period of great economic growth.
In 2014, with the invasion of Crimea, the international political and financial climate soured. Several Russian companies and individuals were sanctioned, but there was no military response from the Western powers. Russian natural gas and oil continued to flow unabated to Western Europe. Until April 2023, contracts between Russian oil companies and their U.S. counterparts allowed Russian oil deliveries to California refineries. U.S. producer Phillips 66 plans to idle its 139-Mb/d Los Angeles Refinery in late 2025. Although unstated in official announcements, loss of crude oil supplies from Russia was a major factor in reduced output and profits at the refinery.
In an unexpected diplomatic turnabout, on July 18, 2019, the Donald J. Trump administration withheld $250 million of U.S. military aid to Ukraine. Seven days later, President Trump conducted a phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, during which he asked Zelensky to collaborate with his then lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and U.S. Attorney General William Barr. During the call, Trump pressed Zelensky to investigate Ukrainian business dealings of former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
By December 2019, after a formal House of Representatives inquiry found that he had solicited foreign interference in the 2020 U.S. presidential election, Donald Trump's first of two impeachments took place. He was accused of seeking Russian help in his re-election bid and then obstructing the inquiry itself by telling his administration officials to ignore subpoenas for documents and testimony.
The February 2022 the Russian “Special Military Operation” intended to take all of Ukraine under Russian control launched with a thirty mile traffic jam of Russian military equipment. According to reports at the time, the operation was expected to last between three and ten days. Today, as I author this article, we have passed the 1,000th day of an all out and illegal war against the country and people of Ukraine.
I think back now to how naive many Westerners were and continue to be about the threat that Russia represents to world order. In 1988, I could have booked flights, hotels, and an excursion on a 300-hundred seat hydrofoil in Soviet dominated Ukraine. Today, U.S. travel and commerce within Russia or a simple tourist visa to Ukraine are not an option. For as long as the current Czar of Russia rules, he will continue his illegal war in Ukraine. The only person for which the war remains necessary is Mr. Putin, himself.
From a Flat Tire in Kanab to The Stratosphere in Las Vegas
After an uneventful trip from Page, Arizona to Kanab, Utah, I set up camp at the venerable Kanab RV Corral. By booking early, I was able to enjoy the bucolic charm of old Kanab. Since I first stayed at the RV Corral in 2006, tourist facilities in the City of Kanab have expanded exponentially. New hotels and RV Parks seem to sprout up every year. Even so, the population of Kanab now stands at only 4,636.
To the east of the city, the Grand Plateau RV Resort features eighty RV spaces and fifteen cabins. Nearby, Red Canyon Cabins features approximately fifty-five individual cabins, which wrap around the Kanab Quality Inn. Upon my arrival at the Kanab RV Corral, I learned that there was not a single unreserved RV space in Kanab that night. Not ironically, the Kanab Creek aquifer draws on the same watershed that feed the Colorado River and Lake Mead downstream. As the eastern gateway to Zion National Park and Bryce Canyon National Park, Kanab now appears dominated by developers and hoteliers. Each new facility uses untold amounts of water.
While in Kanab, I visited the historic Parry Lodge, first built as a private home in 1892. In 1930, the Parry brothers, converted the large property into a Hollywood movie support destination, complete with motel and luxury hotel accommodations. In 2021, with decreased revenue and an increased cost of operation, the property closed during the depths of the health crisis. As of August 2021, the historic lodge is again open for business.
Although tourists could not enter during my visit, I could peer down the driveway and see “Randolph Scott’s Room”, which was the first door along an otherwise deserted driveway. John Wayne’s room was farther down the driveway. Out front, there were memorial plaques honoring various Western movie heroes of the 20th century, including Ronald Reagan and Joel McCrea. On August 14, 2003, the complex became a listing on the National Register of Historic Places. While I was strolling the grounds, a woman told me about a nearby historical movie site.
Intrigued, I drove up along Kanab Creek to the Best Friends Animal Sanctuary. Remembering it as a small outpost of animal care in 2006, I was amazed to see a huge ranch and campus designed to care for everything from horses to raptors. Since I did not have a tour reservation, I stuck to the dirt road and went up canyon. Near the upper reaches of the facility, I discovered an historical red barn. Other than a new roof, the barn looked just as it did for over a century. During that time, the wooden structure had served as both a horse barn and a Hollywood Western movie location. From the woman in town, I had learned that none other than the late, great George “Gabby” Hayes had filmed there.
On the morning of May 26, I prepared for the 207-mile trip from Kanab to Las Vegas, Nevada. While checking my RV tires, I realized that my left-rear tire was woefully low on pressure. Although I could not see it then, a steel screw had punctured the tread. After a failed attempt to pump up the tire, I decided to roll my rig slowly to the Ramsay Towing & Service Center, just up the highway. There, the nice woman behind the counter said it would be a minimum two hour wait for service. I decided to roll slowly down the back streets of Kanab to the nearby Best Tire and Wheel Shop. There, a tired voice from the back of the shop told me that he had appointments stacked up and more customers expected soon. He suggested that I try Hatch Automotive, just across the highway.
At the rustic Hatch Automotive garage, an older gentleman (Dr. Livingston, I presume) stood inside, wearing a sparkling clean set of clothes. As I waited for him to finish a conversation, I noticed a tire-busting machine in the corner of the garage. It looked like it had last seen service twenty years prior. When the gentleman turned to me, he almost chuckled at my request for assistance. He pointed to the depths of the garage and said that a young man who was up to his elbows in grease was the only person who did any work around there. It was then that I realized that Hatch Automotive was probably a hobby for that retired gentleman. “I guess I’ll just fix it myself”, I said. “That would be a good idea”, the gentleman replied.
From there, I slowly rolled my rig to a wide street behind the nearby La Quinta Inn. I remember what a mobile tire-buster once told me near the Arizona border. "You can do it yourself. Just roll one axle up high enough that the second axle lifts its tire off the ground. Then it is as easy as changing a tire on your car". Utilizing various pieces of lumber that I normally use to level my rig, I managed to pull forward on to my makeshift wooden ramp. With the rear axle suspended in the air, I used my trusty lug wrench to remove the offending wheel. Way back in Needles, on the first day of my trip, I had checked my spare tire for proper inflation. Confident that it could do the job, I rolled my spare tire and rearward and then mounted it on the rear axle. Within twenty minutes, I finished by using my trusty torque wrench to cinch down the lug nuts to a proper level. After rolling off my makeshift lumberyard, I was ready to roll. Soon, the stress of looking for nonexistent tire-service in Kanab disappeared. Happy to be moving again, I looked at my watch. My entire tire escapade in Kanab had taken just over one hour. It felt like instant manifestation all over again.
Across the U.S. there is a shortage of labor, especially in the smaller towns. For the available wages, young people do not want to bust tires or learn automotive repair. If he was paid a fair wage, the 1980's Chevy Dinosaur that the young mechanic was digging into at Hatch Automotive would not be worth the time it took to repair. With a college or a trade school degree, a young person could escape the grease and grime associated with being an underpaid mechanic in Kanab, Utah. A young auto mechanic would be better off taking an unpaid apprenticeship at a Tesla Service Center. At least there is a future in working on electric vehicles. With over 570,000 RVs sold in the past year, there are now tens of thousands more travelers on the road. The lesson I learned on this trip was to depend on myself for minor repairs. If you need a flat tire fixed in Kanab, be prepared to wait most of a day for service. If you need after-hours roadside RV service near Aztec, New Mexico, be prepared for a $500 service call, plus time and one half for any actual repairs. With that, the price to change and fix a flat tire on the road could easily approach $1,000. My new motto is, “Be Prepared. Have a spare.”
From the snow of Southwestern Colorado to the heat of Las Vegas, my arrival in Nevada was a shock. My fifth wheel has a single air conditioning unit aboard. Until arriving in Las Vegas in late May 2021, I never imagined that I might need a second A/C unit. After a relatively cool first night, I spoke with my neighbor at the Las Vegas RV Resort. He was a specialist in industrial plumbing design and installation. He and his wife had recently arrived in Las Vegas from his Florida home. His main task in Las Vegas was to design and oversee the installation of industrial piping at the former Molycorp Mine (Now called the Mountain Pass Mine), south of Primm, Nevada. Mountain Pass Mine is not an historical mine tucked into a romantic mountain pass. It is a strip mine, pure and simple.
When he arrived in Las Vegas, my RV neighbor found inadequate Wi-Fi and scorching desert heat. With plans to spend fourteen months in Las Vegas, he needed quick relief. By the time I departed, two days later, he had shade cloth installed on all his exterior windows and a microwave Wi-Fi disk installed atop his access ladder. With high-speed internet, he could view and revise the water, chemical and steam pipes required to restart one of the few rare-earth mineral mines in the United States. Although the Department of Defense had partnered with the mine’s new owners in 2019, decades of neglect and intermittent closures at the mine had left its infrastructure inoperable. Apparently, it was in worse shape than any highway I had recently driven in the Four Corners Region. In essence, the entire mineral processing system at the mine would require a redesign and replacement.
When I asked how long that would take, he sighed and said, “They think the mine can be operational in twelve to fourteen months”. After a long pause, he said, “I’m not sure I can get enough skilled pipe-fitters to complete that task in the 120-degree heat of the Mojave Desert”. The former owner of the Mountain Pass Mine was Molycorp, which went bankrupt in 2014. The mine had suffered the same fate as many “green energy” technologies, such as solar panels and lithium-ion batteries. For decades, China had undercut U.S. domestic prices and, in this case, had driven the only major rare-earth minerals mine in America out of business.
In 2019, the U.S. Department of Defense awoke from its slumber and agreed to partially fund the reopening of the Mountain Pass Mine. As we know, if China were to curtail the supply of rare-earth minerals to the U.S., the emerging electrical vehicle (EV) industry would fail almost immediately. The Mountain Pass Mine is located just across the Nevada border, in San Bernardino County, California. As such, every part of the refurbishment project will be subject to review by California state agencies. When he had retrofitted paper mills throughout the Southern U.S., my neighbor told me, the state of jurisdiction would issue one permit for an entire project. California, he said, requires a separate permit for each aspect of design and construction. With California environmental rules and bureaucracy in mind, the reopening of the Mountain Pass Mine in late 2022 sounded like a “pipe dream” to me.
On my layover day in Las Vegas, the air temperature rose to about 105-degrees. On the asphalt pads of the RV Park, the temperature was ten or fifteen degrees higher. The intense heat and my under-powered air conditioner reminded me about a story from Yuma, Arizona. For decades, Yuma was renowned as the hottest city in America. Tired of constantly being the butt of “hot city” jokes, Yuma relocated its official weather station to the center of a well-watered citrus orchard. Almost instantly, Phoenix, Arizona became the hottest city in America, with 169 days each year at 90F degrees or more. As the Colorado River wanes to a trickle, there will be insufficient imported water for cotton farming and cattle ranching in Southern Arizona. Soon after that, we can expect outlawing of the outdoor water-mister systems that make dining or relaxing outdoors in Phoenix possible.
On Friday May 28, I bid my Las Vegas RV Resort neighbor adieu and drove the final 305-miles home to Simi Valley, California. While in Las Vegas, I had spent under $20 to get my Kanab flat tire repaired and ready for redeployment. As luck would have it, my final dash through the Mojave Desert was uneventful. The following week, I visited Simi RV. The parts specialist there had a Dometic refrigerator thermo fuse replacement kit hanging on the rack. The RV refrigerator failure at the beginning of my trip had been an inconvenience, but not a full-scale disaster. Looking back, I had spent $24 for three temporary foam coolers, $30 for two Igloo permanent coolers and $15 for ice, just to keep my food from rotting. Then I spent $168 for the unneeded printed circuit board (PCB), $34 to exchange the PCB for a proper spare. I paid another $212 for a technician in Aztec, New Mexico to fully diagnose the thermo fuse issue. Adding $65 for my new thermo fuse replacement kit brought the grand total for RV refrigerator repairs to over $550.
While purchasing my new thermo fuse replacement kit, I told the owner of Simi RV about my refrigerator issue. He said that other owners of some Cougar and Montana model RVs had experienced similar thermo fuse failures. With a lot of research and testing, he had determined that wind created a low-pressure area along the side of the RV. Wind entering the upper vent was making the propane flame burn too hot, thus burning out the thermo fuse. The remedy was to put an aluminum wing or baffle at the leading edge of the refrigerator vent. That would deflect the passing air around the refrigerator unit and keep the flame operating at the proper temperature.
Since my RV is beyond its warranty period, he could fix the problem, but Simi RV had almost a three month wait for service. Instead, we agreed that I would complete my own repair. He gave me an unfinished, bent piece of aluminum, which I customized to my satisfaction, including a black paint job. I installed long screws, which passed through my new creation and into the structure of the upper RV vent. Soon, I shall take another RV trip, which will include a live test of my new baffle.
On the bright side, for $550 I got my RV refrigerator working. For that amount, I also now have the equivalent of an associate degree in RV refrigerator repair. Since I was able to avoid scuttling my annual, two-week visit to the Four Corners Region, I believe it was all well worth the price. After a subsequent RV trip to Morro Bay, California, I am happy to report that my refrigeration issue appears to be solved.
This concludes Part Five of a Five-Part Article. To return to Part One, click HERE.
On Saturday May 22, 2021, it was time for me to start the long trek home to Simi Valley, California. Since the beginning of the health crisis in 2020, this was the first day of full operations on the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad. By now, the 2018 coal-cinder sparked “416 Fire” was a fading memory. Up the Animas River Canyon, crews had replaced a 2020 washout of the tracks north of Cascade Station. As I watched, the venerable Engine 493 steamed on by. As with their other locomotives, the railroad had used downtime during the health crisis to convert that locomotive from coal fire to fuel oil.
Watch the Action - The Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad 2021
The little helper engine had already chugged up alone. The two locomotives would connect 26-miles up the tracks at Cascade Station. From there to Silverton, the helper engine would then lead the way, adding traction on the long, steep grades. This type of “double header” may have coincided with the baseball term. For me, it was exciting to see rolling history making its way past our newly installed webcam.
Tearing myself away from the railroad activities, I connected my fifth wheel to my truck and proceeded forty miles south to Aztec, New Mexico. There, I had a loose appointment with Anthony, a certified RV refrigerator technician at Pop’s Truck and RV Center. Since they close as early as Noon on Saturdays, I planned to get there early. Once and for all, I hoped to have a live, qualified technician diagnose and fix my errant Dometic RV refrigerator. So far, my emergency repair had held, but I was still nervous about a possible second failure. Since it was Saturday, I had to pay time and one-half for the diagnosis and repair. About an hour after arrival, I departed Pop’s, but still sporting the temporary jumper-wire on my refrigerator. Anthony had diagnosed the blown thermo-fuse for me, but he did not have a spare in stock. That bit of education cost me $212.50.
As I departed for Goulding’s RV Park in Monument Valley, I looked back to the San Juan National Forest near Durango. The slopes glistened with snow from the recent storm, making the scene look more like winter than late May. When I reached Farmington, New Mexico, wind gusts and blowing sand buffeted my rig. As I passed west of Shiprock, New Mexico, a sand and dust storm was growing. Being unfamiliar with that particular route to Kayenta, Arizona I had to trust my GPS to guide me. Luckily, the delineated route was the correct one. With the gathering storm, it became difficult to see any landmarks or even road signs.
The 165-mile trip from Aztec, New Mexico to Monument Valley, Arizona was difficult. Lofted by strong winds, the entire desert landscape appeared to be moving to a new location. Most of my four-hour trip consisted of driving on a highway obscured by blowing sand and dust. Of all my Four Corners Region visits in the past twenty years, I had never seen or felt a dust storm of such size and intensity. Somehow, I made it with only some paint chipped off the hood of my truck. “Nothing that a little touch-up paint won’t fix”, I said to myself. Setting up my campsite at Goulding’s involved ingesting a lot of blowing dust, sand and dirt. By the time I finished and retreated inside, dust was in my eyes, nose, mouth and even my ears. It took hours to wash the fine grit from my mouth.
Looking down the canyon toward Monument Valley itself, I pitied the poor souls staying at the Monument Valley KOA Journey RV Park. All of Monument Valley became enveloped in a dust cloud that extended from ground level to atop the famed Mitten Buttes. The next day, the wind abated, and everything at Goulding’s looked normal again. The only evidence of the great dust storm was one worker who was patiently using a blower to remove dust and dirt off the walkways and building entrances. For campers arriving from the south, there was no sign of the intense storm I had endured less than a day before.
With a juxtaposition of such different realities in so short a time, I felt a kinship with the Spirit of the Ancients, who inhabit that sacred land.
This concludes Part Two of a Five-Part Article. To read Part Three, click HERE. To return to Part One, click HERE
Four Corners Part One - Ice Cream Melts in the Desert
On Saturday May 15, 2021 – I traveled 358-miles from Simi Valley, California to the Fort Beale RV Park in Kingman, Arizona. Towing our fifth wheel trailer across the Mojave Desert took longer than the expected six hours. Once I was set up for the night, I opened the refrigerator in my coach, seeking a cold drink. To my surprise, the refrigerator was dark inside, indicating some form of power failure.
I checked the fuses, circuit breakers and switches in the coach, but the control panel for the fridge remained dark. Since I had packed the unit with two weeks’ worth of frozen and fresh foods, I knew I had a problem. Not wanting to scuttle my trip on the first day, I walked to a nearby Chevron Station and purchased three disposable foam coolers, plus 30-pounds of ice. Back at the coach, I packed ten pounds of ice into the freezer and transferred as much of the fresh food into my coolers as possible. Then it was time to eat some melting ice cream and throw the remainder away.
In the morning, I called a local RV repairman, but he was out of town on another call. He suggested that the printed circuit board (PCB), which is the electronic brains of the unit may have failed. Since I had a non-refundable reservation that night in Flagstaff, Arizona, I could not afford to stay another day in Kingman. On the way out of town, I stopped at the local Wal-Mart, where I purchased two 48-quart red, white and blue Igloo brand ice chests. In the Wal-Mart parking lot, I transferred my fresh food from the leaky foam coolers to my bright new All-American coolers. At $14.85 each, they would do a more efficient job of keeping my food chilled. I put a fresh bag of ice in the non-working freezer and used the previous night’s ice to flood the ice chests.
With nothing more to do in Kingman, I headed 150-miles east on Interstate I-40. My destination was the Kit Carson RV Park in Flagstaff, Arizona. The Kit Carson RV Park declares itself to be the second oldest continuously operating RV Park in the nation. At 6,900 feet elevation, it is always a rustic and cool stopping point during my regional travel. As with most RV Parks, it is best to make your reservations well in advance. Many, including Kit Carson now accept reservations only on a prepaid and non-refundable basis.
Still determined to get my refrigerator operating, I called Buddy’s Welding & RV, which happened to be along my route north the following morning. After looking up my Dometic refrigerator model and serial number, the nice person there said that she had the appropriate PCB to complete my repair. On my way to Monument Valley, Arizona, I stopped at Buddy’s and paid $168 for the Dinosaur Electronics brand aftermarket PCB that was to replace my supposedly defunct OEM model.
After traveling 175-miles to Goulding’s RV Park in Monument Valley, Arizona, I quickly set up for a two-night stay. I then opened the refrigerator access panel on the outside of the coach. Soon, I had the replacement board installed and ready for the final electrical connections. Having carefully marked each wire-lead with a black marking pen, I soon noticed an extra connection wire, without a corresponding terminal on the PCB. It was approaching 4 PM PDT when I called customer service at Dinosaur Electronics Inc. in Lincoln City, Oregon.
After describing my issue to Joe at Dinosaur Electronics, he quickly determined that I had the wrong board. He said it was an easy mistake for the person at Buddy’s to make. In the process of agglomerating Dometic model and serial numbers, a third-party database could not be relied upon for reliable information. There were simply too many combinations of refrigerator models and PCB numbers for the database to handle. Once it was corrupted, there was no way to straighten the database out. Live and learn, I thought. By then, the last of my ice was melting in my coolers. My freezer would soon thaw completely. Standing there in the hot sun, I felt the pangs of bad luck returning.
It was then that Joe said, “Let us see what we can do. Do you have a multi-meter?” “At home, but not here”, I said. “Wait, Joe, my neighbor here had earlier offered to help”. “OK, reinstall your old board, get the multi-meter and call me back”, said Joe. My RV neighbor at Goulding’s was a veteran of the Alcan Highway to Alaska, so of course he had a multi-meter buried somewhere in his huge Class-A motorhome. Once I had the old board reinstalled and the multi-meter in hand, I called Joe back and said I was ready. First, he asked what make and model number multi-meter I had. He then looked up that information on the internet and said, “That is an old analog meter”.
Over the next twenty minutes, we checked all the 12-volt and 120-volt connections that converge inside the refrigerator access panel. After all that, Joe said, “It sounds like you have a bad thermo fuse”. Again, my heart sank at the same rate that my remaining ice was melting. “Do you have wire?”, Joe asked. “I just bought 30-feet of it in Kingman”, I said. “Good. Cut a length of wire and strip it at both ends. Then, get out your electrical kit, find a spade-connector and crimp it on to one end of your wire”. By some good fortune, I had an automotive style electrical kit, complete with spare spade-connectors.
“OK, done”, I said. Luckily, I had a wireless headset for my mobile phone, or I never could have balanced the phone, multi-meter and replacement parts outside of my RV. “Alright, attach the spade connector to the F-5 terminal on the PCB and crimp the other end into the 12-volt terminal block.” After a few more minutes sweating in the afternoon sun, I had the repair completed. “Go inside and see if it lights up”, said Joe. After sprinting inside my rig for the fifth or sixth time, “Still dead”, I reported. “You blew a fuse”, he said. Go to the 12-volt panel in your coach and replace the blown 15-amp fuse”. Luckily, I still had several spare fuses in my kit.
When I plugged the spare fuse into the receptacle, the orange LED on the refrigerator control panel lit up. “You are good to go, for now. The jumper wire is for test purposes only. You need to get it diagnosed and repaired as soon as possible”, said Joe. He had already offered to replace my erroneous Dinosaur Board with the correct model number, so I had him ship that to my next stop, in Durango, Colorado. The replacement cost another $34, but at least I would have the correct spare board. Thanking Joe for his amazing service, I signed off and enjoyed the hum of my refrigerator, as it slowly chilled my frozen food. Above air conditioning and running water, refrigeration in the desert is what makes RVing possible.
After two nights in bucolic Monument Valley, I hooked up and headed northeast to Durango, Colorado, 165-miles away. To me, the refrigerator still seemed like a ticking time-bomb, waiting to go off at any moment. Somehow, the jumper-wire repair held, and my fresh and frozen foods were all chilling in the Dometic unit. Although the frozen meats and fish came close to melting, only one hamburger patty melted a bit and then refroze solid to the bottom of the freezer.
Arriving at United Campgrounds, Durango in the late afternoon I unhooked for three nights in the picturesque Upper Animas River Valley. Almost a decade prior, I had installed a primitive webcam at the RV Park, but it had failed during the recent health crisis. In October 2020, I was so concerned with health protection that I forgot to bring a $25 replacement webcam to Durango. The old Dell computer system whirred away each day, but no images made their way to the internet. Determined to get the webcam operating, I had planned my entire 1,800-mile round-trip with the focus of replacing that webcam.
For those who do not know, the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad first operated in 1882. With a few minor alterations and with some new locomotives from the 1930’s, it still operates today. It is an international tourist attraction that I first rode with my father in 1965. As it was in the 1880s, the railroad is still the economic lifeblood of Durango, Colorado. The webcam is located adjacent to the tracks, within the United Campgrounds RV Park. For years, people from all over the world have relied on the webcam for a glimpse of the trains running through the RV Park. Unless I could repair the system, all that visitors would see was a frozen image from summer 2020.
Borrowing a stepladder from Tim and Sheri Holt, the owners of the iconic RV Park, I swapped out the old Microsoft webcam for an equally old spare that I had brought from home. When I restarted the 20-year-old Dell tower computer, the system booted up and began firing images to the internet ever six seconds. With all the refrigerator electronics issues I had recently experienced, you can imagine how happy I was to see this old electronic marvel spring back to life.
On my second day in Durango, a cold rainstorm, including some hail in the evening, swept through the Upper Animas Valley. Even though it was May 20, the surroundings mountains received fresh snow. I was content to go shopping in Durango for fresh food and to avoid highway traffic. One woman at the City Market declared, “So many people have moved here in the past few years, they don’t even know it can rain here”.
For almost twenty years, the entire Four Corners Region has been in the grip of a long-term drought. It is of a magnitude not seen since the Anasazi, or Pre-Puebloan Indians vacated the region in about 1,200 CE.
This concludes Part One of a Five-Part Article. To read Part Two, click HERE.
On December 31, 1999, following the resignation of President Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin became Acting President. He was first elected President of Russia on March 26, 2000, and then re-elected in 2004, 2012, 2018, and 2024. In 2005, Putin told his nation that the collapse of the Soviet empire “was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” Secretly and then more openly as time passed, he sought to reconstitute Russia as a world power. His plan was to regain hegemony over all lands that had ever been under Russian control. Under his direction, Russia conducted warfare in Chechnya, Georgia, and Syria, to name a few.
On June 27, 2024, the U.S. State Department, issued a travel advisory, which said, in part, “Do not travel to Russia due to the consequences of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russian military forces. U.S. citizens may face harassment or detention by Russian security officials, arbitrary enforcement of local laws, limited flights into and out of Russia, and the possibility of terrorism. The U.S. Embassy has limited ability to assist U.S. citizens in Russia.”
Wearing white tank-top and red shorts it is Major who hammer-throws the sledgehammer into the screen of Big Brother in Apple's famous 1984 Macintosh commercial. The unidentified “Big Brother” in the Ridley Scott directed commercial was not the Soviet Union. Rather, it was tech entrepreneur Bill Gates. His company, Microsoft, then held the dominant operating system in the emerging personal computer field. Steve Jobs of Apple fame had commissioned the television commercial as a rallying cry against the perceived tyranny of Microsoft. Orwell, himself died in 1950, so no one knows what he might have thought about themes in his seminal book appearing as black comedy in a later television commercial. My guess is that he would have appreciated the irony.
In 1991, Ukraine declared independence from the USSR. Although uncontested at that time, in 1996 Ukraine agreed to return its entire nuclear arsenal to Russia, including an estimated 1,900 strategic warheads, 176 intercontinental ballistic missiles, and forty-four strategic bombers. In exchange for receiving the third most potent nuclear arsenal in the world, Russia offered debt forgiveness, plus economic and security assurances to Ukraine.
Because of its proximity to the active war front, Kherson remains vulnerable to Russian artillery, drone, and missile attacks. For example, on October 1, 2024, Reuters reported that "six people were killed when Russian forces struck the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson. Another six people were wounded in the artillery strike on a central bus stop, prosecutors said in a statement. Governor Oleksandr Prokudin said the strike also hit a central market while residents were shopping." On December 30, 2024, Russian troops shelled thirty settlements in the Kherson region. One person was killed and four were injured, as reported by Prokudin.
In 2014, with the invasion of Crimea, the international political and financial climate soured. Several Russian companies and individuals were sanctioned, but there was no military response from the Western powers. Russian natural gas and oil continued to flow unabated to Western Europe. Until April 2023, contracts between Russian oil companies and their U.S. counterparts allowed Russian oil deliveries to California refineries. U.S. producer Phillips 66 plans to idle its 139-Mb/d Los Angeles Refinery in late 2025. Although unstated in official announcements, loss of crude oil supplies from Russia was a major factor in reduced output and profits at the refinery.
By December 2019, after a formal House of Representatives inquiry found that he had solicited foreign interference in the 2020 U.S. presidential election, Donald Trump's first of two impeachments took place. He was accused of seeking Russian help in his re-election bid and then obstructing the inquiry itself by telling his administration officials to ignore subpoenas for documents and testimony.
