Daily Didactic The day began uneventfully in the high desert of Mesa Verde. We broke down Camp Roadtrip and headed up to the trailhead of Knife's Edge for a short hike. The trail takes you out to the edge of the Mesa Verde plateau, to a grand view of the Montezuma Valley below. It was a very pleasant walk and the weather was just about right. We found our way back to the bus and reversed our direction back to the town of Durango, where Brian has coordinated some alternator repair work on Wednesday. We drove the 35 miles back to Durango, headed back to the Durango East KOA and reserved a spot for the night. Lodging secured, we headed to "historic downtown" Durango to do some touristing and maybe find some lunch. We called and got some pricing from our new repair shop and decided to bite the bullet and get both the alternator and the brakes done at once. About the time we found a parking place, the darkening sky opened up with some serious hail and heavy rain. This probably should have been a sign...After a couple of hours of wandering up and down Main Street, mostly admiring the nicely maintained historic buildings, we climbed back in the bus to head back to our campsite. Brian pushed the clutch to the floor, turned the key and started the bus, but couldn't seem to get it into gear. It wasn't until he finally took his foot off of the clutch that he realized the underlying issue was that the clutch pedal just remained on the floor. It was rapidly becoming a very long day. We called AAA for our first tow of the trip, undid our camping reservations at KOA, and called our new mechanic to let him know we were going to be towed in a day early for our appointment. Shortly after that we met, as we so often have, a real local in the form of our tow truck driver. In our last trip, over the course of our four or five tows, we learned that you can really cut through the layers of tourist buffer in a town by going straight to a tow truck driver. Brian liked him, Theresa thought he was pretty odd. Next we met our new mechanic, Wayne, a very nice guy with a long pony tail and a half a dozen old buses in the back lot of his shop. When on the road with an antique VW, you really can't hope for more. Wayne made a call for us to the Super Eight across the alley from his shop and got us a price on a room only slightly higher than what we would have paid for a camping cabin at a KOA, so we buckled and checked into our first motel of the trip. After walking to a grocery store to grab something for dinner, we settled in for a few hours of HGTV in the relative luxury of our room.