Author Archives: BRF

2015/12/10 (R) Reworking Articles

I got up at 8 AM this morning, fed the cats, and made a pot of coffee. Linda was up by the time the coffee was brewed and we enjoyed our first cup before having breakfast.

Linda has been in holiday shopping mode and ordered a 250 sheet pack of 8.5×14 brochure paper for our holiday letter. The paper is 38# double-sided coated color laser printer. It is made for quad-panel (three folds) brochures and is scored every 3.5 inches so it folds into an 8.5”x3.5” finished size. Using the front and back it has eight panels. The current layout of our letter takes two full 8.5×14 sheets so it should use all eight panels.

At 9:30 AM we had granola with fresh berries for breakfast. Linda opened a new bag, transferred it to the plastic container, and put a piece of Frog a Tape on it so she can tally the servings. She wants to know how many servings we get from each batch so she can better estimate how much to make to take with us next winter. The real limitation is the size of the new freezer.

After breakfast Linda settled in to work on Madeline’s holiday stocking and I walked to the NAPA store to get the E-clips for the window lever pins. The local NAPA store ordered them yesterday from two different places but neither order came in. They reordered them from Jacksonville and said they would be in in the morning.

When I got back to the coach I revisited our holiday letter and adjusted the layout so the photos and captions would fit on the 3.5″ panels and not fall on the folds. I had to shrink the photos slightly to get two of them side by side and I had to shrink the panoramas even more. I also modified the captions to make better use of the space, moving the location to the top line with the date and leaving more room for the description underneath. As a result of those changes the layout only used six of the eight panels so I will have to add photos or figure out how to enlarge some of the existing ones to fill out the space.

Somewhere in the middle of all this we took a lunch break at 1 PM. Linda made vegan grilled cheese sandwiches and sliced an apple in half. Simple but delicious.

I had a call from my sister and spoke with her for a while about our dad. Later I called the social worker at the hospital and she called me back a short time later. I then called our attorney’s office but did not get an answer, so I contacted him by e-mail. I got a call back from him not long after and was able to expand on the reason for my call.

I e-mailed Brenda Phelan about the Arcadia Rally at the end of the month and dealt with e-mail correspondence from Gary at BCM. He wanted to pull Part 1 of my 2-part article on Habitat for Humanity (HFH) up to the January 2016 issue to plug an unexpected hole and needed me to do some urgent last minute work on it to get it ready for Jorge to lay out. This sort of thing happens all too often, but I agreed to work on it this evening. Truth be told it wasn’t as big a request as he thought it was and I don’t mind helping him out if I can.

The temperature got up to 77 degrees F today with partly cloudy skies but by 4 PM the sun was low in the southwest sky and it was starting to cool off. We both needed to get off our butts and move around so we went for a walk through the resort. We ran into John using his electric motor bicycle to escort someone to their site. As he passed by he said we had a package in the office so we altered our walking route to go there and retrieve it.

It was one of several packages we are expecting from Amazon and had supplies Linda needed to continue working on her counted cross-stitch project. We stopped and talked to Jeff and Kathy briefly, dropped the package back at our rig, and walked part of the newer/north end of the resort. It was still pleasant outside when we got back to the rig so we sat outside with our iPads and had a few peanut butter pretzels as a snack.

By 5 PM the sun was below our horizon, which consists of RVs to our southwest. There was still plenty of daylight but by 5:30 it was fading and cooling off fast. I finally went inside and started working on the HFH article for BCM.

For dinner Linda made a nice green salad and reheated the leftover pizza from last night’s dinner. It was just as good as last night, maybe better. I continued working on the article after dinner and watched our Thursday evening TV programs out of the corner of my eye. By 9:30 PM I had spent all the time I cared to in front of my computer but was not done with the article. Moving photos around is time consuming and a bit tedious. I like to stay productive, so I switched to my iPad to work on this post. Yeah, it’s still a screen, but I interact with it differently and have more options as to where and how I sit. We were up until 11 PM but fell asleep quickly once we got to bed.

2015/12/09 (W) Return to Satchel’s

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I was up at 7 AM. It was 66 in the coach; cool but tolerable. I put on my sweats, fed the cats, and cleaned their litter tray, but did not turn on the heaters. Linda was up by 7:15. I made coffee and we delayed breakfast until later. We are going to Satchel’s for dinner with John and Ali this evening so we decided to have brunch instead of breakfast and lunch. Satchel’s has some of the best vegan pizza we have ever had, including a choice of vegan cheeses, so it will be a big meal for us.

Linda used her iPad to do some holiday shopping. I checked my e-mail and was then going to play a few games on my iPad but the iOS 9.2 update was available so I started the installation process and set it aside. Once the updated OS was installed I had five app updates available so I initiated those, one at a time, and started working on this post. The updates downloaded fast enough to be reasonable. Either the Resort has made significant improvements in the Wi-Fi and Internet connection bandwidths or very few people are using the system at the moment, or both.

I got the BCM boxes out from under the bed and integrated in the issues I received on Monday. Everything was there so the three sets of issues are ready to give out as door prizes in at the Arcadia Rally 2016. I worked on the photo tips article for BCM for a while and then decided to do some more work on the BCM page on our website. I had a detailed e-mail from Gary at BCM with suggestions, and I find it easier to use that kind of information when it is printed out, but when I tried to print it my computer said the printer was offline. The printer display said it was “Ready” so I had a problem to investigate and resolve.

This was the first time we tried to use the HP Color LaserJet 3600 printer since we put it on board the bus and it was the first time we had connected it via the Amped|Wireless SR20000G network extender / router. I had expected it to plug-and-play as this trip was also the first time we have used the newer/larger NAS on the bus with this particular router and it worked without me having to do anything to configure it.

I downloaded an updated version of Advanced IP Scanner and ran it. It could not find the printer and claimed that both of our computers and the NAS were “dead” connections, even though they were communicating with each other and the Internet. All of the evidence suggested that the problem was somehow related to network addresses. I went into the printer configuration menu via the front panel and changed two settings, turning on IP Release and IP Renew. I turned the printer off and back on but that did not cause it to connect.

I went in and out of the control panel in my computer looking at the various screens related to devices and drivers, specifically printers. I also went into the web interface for the SR20000G where some settings and context dependent help screens caught my attention. In particular, the SR20000G appeared to be set up as a DHCP client rather than a server and the help screen suggested that it was getting IP addresses from the primary router, i.e., the one connecting our “home” network to the Internet. In our motorcoach, that is our Wi-Fi Ranger, and the Wi-Fi Ranger operates on a different range of locally routed IP addresses (10.139.1.nnn) than most home networks (192.168.17.nnn). I opened the Advanced IP Scanner again and figured out how to get it to scan the local address range served by the Wi-Fi Ranger and voilà, there was the printer, the NAS, our computers, and the SR2000G.

The final step was to revisit something that caught my eye earlier. In the printer driver configuration there is a Port screen and the printer was configured with a Standard TCP/IP Port in the 192.168.1.nnn range. I created one in the 10.139.17.nnn range to match the address that Advanced IP Scanner indicated had been assigned to the printer. I tried printing a printer test page and voilà (again) I heard the familiar sound of the printer indexing a sheet of paper and shortly thereafter had the test page in my hands. I went into my e-mail and printed the one from Gary. This was not what I expected to be doing today but it was satisfying to get it resolved and not have it take any longer than I did to get it done.

One of our tasks for today was reinstalling the awning style window in the living room. I happened to notice this morning that one of the lever pins on the other driver side window was coming out, indicating that the C-clip was missing. Closer examination revealed that the lever pins on the four windows we had repaired in April 2014 were all reinstalled with pins put in backwards.

I took a break from my other work at 1 PM and drove to the local NAPA store to buy new C-clips. The clerk at the store had a kit of clips and a paper template for matching style and sizes. He said our existing clips are actually E-clips, not C-clips, and the size I needed was a 1007. He did not have any in stock but ordered them from another store and said they would be in at 4 PM. We would be on our way to dinner by then so I indicated I would pick them up in the morning.

Back at the motorcoach John stopped by to let us know that he and Ali were going to do some shopping before dinner and to figure out a time to meet us at the restaurant. We agreed on 5 PM. As long as he was here I gave him the bag of Fire Ant Killer I bought for him on Monday.

We decided that we would also do some shopping before dinner. We left at 3:15 PM and headed up FL-121 towards Gainesville. When we got to I-75 we headed north to the next exit at Archer Road (FL-24) and made our way slowly through the traffic, into the outdoor mega-mall, and to Walmart. We needed a small hassock (that would double as a storage cube), a small table (that we could put between the two captains chairs), a non-slip shelf liner (to put under the printer), a seat cushion (for the card table chair at the desk), a small mat (to put on the floor outside the shower to catch cat litter), batteries (for our bathroom scale), and high quality 8.5×14 paper (to print our holiday letter). We found all of those items except the last one, but did not buy the hassock as the store only had them in gray. We then worked our way to the Office Max store at the center of the mall. They only had one (open) ream of 8.5×14 paper and it was regular copy paper. Useless for our needs.

We put the address of Satchel’s pizzeria/restaurant into the GPS and worked our way over to the east side of town through rush hour traffic. We pulled into the restaurant parking lot at 4:41 PM just as John and Ali were stepping out of their Tahoe two spots down. Satchel’s is a very popular place but at quarter to five it was mostly empty. It was a lovely late afternoon but the sun was already setting and the air would being cooling off quickly so we asked for an inside booth, which also happen to have padded seats.

We started with a small salad that was still big enough to share with Ali and John. They had pizza slices but we ordered a medium (13″) pizza with Daiya mozzarella cheese, onions, mushrooms, and sun-dried tomatoes. Soooo good. John and Ali split a bottle of Cabernet, Linda had water, and I had ginger ale. Satchel’s makes their own soda pop and it is very tasty (but contains sugar).

By the time we left the restaurant at 6 PM it was full of people, inside and out, and the noise level had risen to where Linda and Ali were starting to have difficulty with conversation. We settled our bill and went on our way. John and Ali had more shopping to do but we headed straight for Williston. As we were approaching the intersection at I-75 I noticed that I was getting low on fuel. I probably could have made it to Williston, but why chance running out of gas. There are five filling stations near this intersection but the Mobil station was the first one on the right so I pulled in. A few minutes later we were on our way again and we arrived back at our motorcoach at 7 PM.

I put the cushion on the desk chair while Linda put the placemat in the bathroom. We opened the folding table and adjusted the height so the cats’ scratching post just fit under it and put it in place between the two captains chairs. Having a table in that spot has been the plan from the beginning of the remodeling. Although the folding table is temporary, it immediately increased the functionality of the interior. It also allowed us to better visualize how the living room will look/feel when we finally install the permanent table.

Linda spent much of the rest of the evening shopping for holiday gifts and domestic necessities on Amazon. She got presents ordered for everyone except her sister, with all of them being drop shipped directly to the recipients. She also ordered a 15″x15″ brown storage hassock and a pair of washable floor towels (for the bathroom). We definitely get our money’s worth out of Amazon Prime.

2015/12/08 (T) Hudson and Back

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The outside air temperature dropped into the 40’s last night. I closed the roof vents before turning in but we left the windows open a bit. It was 61 degrees F in the kitchen when I got up at 8 AM so I turned on the Aqua-Hot, turned up all three thermostats, and turned on the front electric toekick heater. I fed the cats and then made our morning coffee. Linda got up around 8:20. After our first cup of coffee we had granola for breakfast. When the temperature in the coach reached 70 I turned off the thermostats and the electric heater and shut off the Aqua-Hot diesel burner. (The electric heating element in the Aqua-Hot stays on whenever we are plugged in and living in the coach.)

I called Suncoast Designers and talked to Donna. She talked to the technician and reported back that the bus window would be ready for pickup at 3 PM. The office closes at 3:45 PM, so I would need to be there close to 3 to get it and settle the bill.

I found my water usage spreadsheet, which I last updated on April 19 of this year, and edited it to include the dump and fill activity since then. I had to go back to my blog posts from late April to confirm just what I had done and when I had done it. I checked my most recent post drafts and discovered that I had not made mention of dumping here at WCRVR. Linda and I agreed that it was not the day we got here and not the following day so I recorded it as the 3rd. Since there had been large time gaps in our use of the coach, and I had dumped the fresh water tank and refilled it the day before Thanksgiving, I had to reset the spreadsheet to known starting points.

After entering the missing data I determined that, with two people living in the coach, we continue to use fresh water at the rate of approximately 12 gallons per day and fill the waste tanks at the rate of approximately 12 gallons per day; five for the black tank and seven for the gray tank. With 120 gallons of fresh water that means we can boondock for about 10 days, during which time we would use up the 120 gallons of fresh water and add roughly the same number of gallons to the two waste tanks, 50 to the 80 gallon black tank, and 70 to the 120 gallon gray tank. I also determined that we have used about half the capacity of the water softener.

The numbers for the waste tanks are very rough as our tank level monitors do not work and I cannot see the levels in the tanks, even though they are translucent white plastic, as they are hidden behind “beauty panels.” Still, I think my estimates are reasonable. Given the 3:4 ratio of fresh:waste tank capacity I am inclined to redo the water bay next spring as a 300 gallon, 2-tank, system replacing the current 330 gallons of combined tank capacity (125 fresh, 125 gray, 80 black). I could reuse the current 125 gallon fresh tank but I would probably replace it with one of a different shape to make room for the water softener and filters to be built in and to relocate the fresh water pump to the driver side floor at the level of the bottom of the fresh water tank.

At current usage rates a 125 gallon fresh water tank and a single 175 gallon waste tank would, hypothetically, allow us to boondock for 13 days, running out of fresh water just as our waste tank reached capacity. We might be able to stay out longer if we could reduce fresh water usage and waste generation proportionally. In practice, however, we would probably not go more than 13 to 14 days and only then if the new tank monitors worked accurately. Still, that would allow us to stay out two full weeks before we had to dump and fill, which seems like a good amount of time.

The other benefits of reconfiguring the tanks in the utility bay include slightly different tank shapes that would create some space for the water softener and filters and provide access to the tanks for servicing and monitoring. It would also allow me to install rotating spray heads for the waste tank and drain it through the macerator pump, allowing use to “dump” our tanks at our house or anywhere we could get a garden hose into a waste drain. We might even gain space, or access to space that is already there, to store drain hoses, and other utilities-related things, in the bay. I would, for instance, love to have a shorepower reel but I do not think I can create that kind of space without making the tanks too small.

What we would lose in the redo is a separate gray tank that could, hypothetically, be drained onto the ground in some places. The number of places where that is legal, however, is too small (in my opinion) to justify keeping that capability. The other main argument for keeping separate black and gray waste water tanks is that the contents of the gray tank can be used to flush the drain hose out after first dumping the contents of the black tank. Indeed, some bus converters set up their waste tanks with the gray tank above the black tank and plumb them so that the gray tank can be drained into the black tank to help flush it out, or drained directly (which leaves open the option of draining it in on the ground).

We heard another interesting take on water management for boondocking at a seminar in August 2012 at the FMCA national rally in Madison, WI. The presenter described his system, which involved three tanks, fresh, gray, and black. His twist on this was that he ran the gray water through a filter (or set of filters) and then used it to flush the toilet. The advantage is that all of the fresh water becomes available for gray water use, i.e., cooking and cleaning. As an example, consider a setup (such as we might have in our bus conversion) with a 150 gallon fresh water tank, a 100 gallon gray tank, and a 50 gallon black tank. Since the first 50 gallons that go into the gray tank will potentially end up in the black tank the entire 150 gallons of fresh water can ultimately end up in the 100 gallon gray tank. With careful management of water usage, that could really extend the amount of time the rig can be used without hookups. These tanks could be sized differently, larger waste and smaller fresh, if you had a fresh water bladder that could be used to retrieve additional fresh water and refill the tank without moving the RV. Lot’s of interesting possibilities, all of which involve engineering design tradeoffs.

I opened the box of BCM back issues that arrived yesterday and went through them. There were two of each issue but I won’t know if they are all there until I can integrate them into the partial sets I brought from home. Those sets were under the bed and there was a cat on the bed so retrieving them would have to wait until later. I worked on this post for a while instead and stopped at noon to have lunch. Linda made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and sliced an apple. Simple but delicious.

I looked through the articles in my BCM “in process” folder and opened the one on tips for taking photographs to see how complete it was. While not finished, the article was much more than an outline. I spent about 20 minutes reviewing what I already had and doing some additional editing but did not feel like digging into in it.

I left at 1 PM for Hudson, taking the same route I took yesterday, and arrived at 2:45 PM. I was 15 minutes early but the window was done. There was no charge for the repair, which I appreciated, as the seal failed not long after the window was originally fixed in April 2014. The technician wanted the window to stay horizontal for at least another day, supported by its frame, before being reinstalled in the bus. Because the back of the car was full and could not be rearranged I moved the passenger seat all the way forward and leaned the seat back as far as it would go. I used the blanket to plug the gap between the front edge of the seat and dashboard and set the window in place, outside up, with one short edge on the blanket and the other one on the seatback. It traveled very well that way on the drive home and I decided it was safer to leave it there than setting it out on the picnic table overnight. I got back to the rig around 5 PM even though I stopped twice, once for popcorn at Rural King, and then at McDonald’s for a diet pop.

Linda made seitan vegan stroganoff for dinner which we enjoyed with a glass of Mimbres Red table wine from St. Clair Winery in Deming, New Mexico. In retrospect we should have bought more bottles while we were there. Every wine we bought from them was a red and very much to our liking, especially mine, which is unusual.

We had both spent most of the day sitting on our butts (not our hands) and went for a brisk stroll after dinner. We watched a few TV programs, went to bed at 10:30, and finished watching Rick Steves’ Europe before turning out the lights.

2015/12/07 (M) Not on Vacation

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I set my iPad alarm clock last night for 5:30 AM. As soon as the alarm went off Jasper got up next to me on the outside edge of my side of the bed, snuggled in by chest, and wanted to be petted at great length. I obliged him for as long as I could and was rewarded with his loud, resonant purring, which I could feel as much as hear. I still managed to get out of bed by 5:45, feed the cats, get dressed, and be on my way by 6:08.

It’s only 75 miles from Williston to Suncoast Designers in Hudson, but the first few miles were a slow roll through the RV resort to the front gate followed by the short trip through downtown with a 35 MPH speed limit and several stop lights. After a short distance on US-41 south I picked up FL-115 heading west. A few miles past the airport it made a large sweeping turn to the south and continued on that heading for about 17 miles at 60 MPH until it joined up with to US-19. I continued south on US-19 at 65 MPH for another 20 miles. At that point it felt like I was making good time but I knew what was ahead as I had driven this route several times when we were here in 2014.

US-19 gets closer to the Gulf of Mexico the farther south you go, and with that closeness comes an increasing presence of people. The first population center I came to was the charming little “Suncoast” town of Crystal River, followed by Ingless, Homosassa Springs, Weeki Wachi, and then finally Hudson. These towns all have much lower speed limits and stop lights, and they get larger and closer together the farther south you go. The side of the road changes from forest and farm to intermittent small businesses, then continuous shall businesses, and then suburban commerce that extends back from the main road until you reach Hudson which is a far northern suburb in the greater Tampa / St. Petersburg metropolitan area. From Weeki Wachi on south US-19 is six lanes with a median, is lined with commercial properties, and has lots of traffic.

I arrived at Suncoast Designers a little before 8 AM so the trip took about an hour and 45 minutes. I checked in at the office and they had someone meet me at the factory door to take the window and label it with my name. We had this thermopane window repaired in April 2014 but the new seal did not hold. Getting it repaired was one of our reasons for returning to Florida this winter. Not the main reason, of course, but a factor in our decision. I was back in my car and on the way home by 8:20 AM. I will have to come back tomorrow to pick it up.

On the drive down I spotted a Dunkin Donuts about 10 miles north of Hudson on the west side of US-19 so I stopped there on the way back for a large coffee. I had also seen quite a few filling stations between Crystal River and Hudson, many of them Shell stations, so I picked one that had easy access and regular gasoline (10% Ethanol) for $2.03 per gallon, cash or credit.

I remembered seeing an Office Max and pulled in when I spotted it. By now it was well after 9 AM and businesses were open. They had several different weights of expensive color laser photo paper but nothing like that in 8.5×14 (legal) size. I did not need to have the paper today so I did not buy any. I really do not want to redo our Holiday Letter for 8.5×11 paper so I will check online and see what I can get. There was a Rural King at the same mall complex as the Office Max so I bought two bags of Spectracide Fire Ant Killer. I also got a bag of free popcorn, which is available at all Rural King stores. More places should do that, I think.

It was going on 11 AM by the time I got back to the coach. Linda had been up since 7 AM and was ready to set her cross-stitch project aside and go for a walk. I had been sitting for the better part of five hours so that sounded good to me. We went for a vigorous stroll through the resort and arrived back at our coach ready for lunch. Linda heated up a couple of vegan hot dogs and served them on the large whole wheat buns with mustard and relish.

After lunch I installed updates on the FMCA Freethinkers chapter website, the FMCA GLCC chapter website, and our personal website. I then took snapshots in Adobe Reader CC of the covers of the BCM issues for July through December 2015, post-processed the covers, and uploaded them to the BCM page on our website along with brief descriptions of my articles that appeared in each issue. I finished inserting photos into the OASIS Combi article I’ve been working on for BCM and will upload it to our Dropbox and e-mail Butch this evening.

It was a gorgeous day so we sat outside for a while and I worked on this post. That is one of the things I really like about my iPad. An earlier e-mail from Gary indicated that my package was out for delivery today. I was about to get in my car and drive to the office when Joe and Teresa from Brighton, Michigan stopped in their golf cart to chat. When they went on their way I dropped off the recyclables on my way to the office, picked up the box of magazines (which was heavy), and returned to the coach.

I worked some more on this post on my iPad but by 5:30 PM I had been up for 12 hours on too little sleep so I took a nap until 6:15 PM when Linda woke me up to have dinner. For dinner Linda made a green salad with fresh blueberries and strawberries and made black bean smothered sweet potatoes. Besides the black beans, the topping had tomatoes, scallions, cumin, and coriander and was finished off with a dollop of vegan sour cream. Yum, yum, yum.

We watched the PBS NewsHour, another thing we typically never do, but then we do a lot of things differently when we are away from home. We then watched our usual Monday night TV programs on CBS. Even when we are away some things don’t change. We are not “on vacation” after all. We don’t go on vacation to get bus windows repaired. In fact, we no longer go on vacation, we simply blend new experiences into our everyday lives. Such is the nature of retirement as extended-time RVers in a converted bus.

2015/12/06 (N) Multiple Threads

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I got out of bed at 8 AM, fed the cats, refreshed their water, and cleaned their litter tray. I made some hot soapy water for dishes and then measured out and ground our morning coffee beans. Once I had the coffee brewing I cleaned the grinder, which I had not done in a while.

Linda got up around 8:30 and we both sat with our iPads and enjoyed our first cup of coffee. I had a reply to the e-mail I sent our son last night and replied back. I also sent the photo I created on Thursday to him and our daughter. It is a 3-image panorama looking north out of our passenger side living room window of our motorcoach.

At 9:30 Linda started making pancakes, which has become something of a regular treat for our Sunday breakfast. I got a call from my sister at 10 letting me know she was heading to the hospital where our dad is in the ICU. We finished our coffee around 10:30 and got dressed. Linda settled in to work on her counted cross-stitch project and I checked our fresh water tank. The level was finally below 1/3 on the monitor so I decided to test the park water. As I expected, based on our previous time here, the hardness was at the maximum on the test strip so I got the water softener out and connected it to the supply valve. The quick disconnect, while a nice idea, is made of plastic. It was finally worn to the point where it would not seal so I unthreaded it from the pressure regulator and put it back in the fresh water tub where it joined a dozen other components that I should throw away. Someday.

I have read in multiple publications and blogs that the RV sewer hose, and especially the bayonet connectors used on RV sewer hoses, is the weakest component on an RV, both by design and manufacture. While these components may be in contention for that status, I submit that the garden hose fittings that are universally used for the fresh water connections may actually be the worst. My fresh water connections always leak even when I tighten them (gently) with a wrench. My sewer connections do not generally leak.

But I have digressed once again. When I had the softener connected I tested the output and it appeared to be fully charged so I connected it to the inlet of the coach and refilled the fresh water tank. In Quartzsite, Arizona this past winter I kept track of the details of when I dumped and filled tanks, including the hardness was of the water coming out of the softener before and after each fill. This data served two purposes.

One purpose was to compensate for our waste tank level monitors, which do not work. We were trying to determine the rate at which we were filling them so we could calibrate how long we could reasonably boondock before we had to dump them. That turned out to be about nine days, conservatively, which is how long we went before hooked up here and dumped.

Because the water softener can only remove a certain number of grains of hardness before it is exhausted the number of gallons it can soften before it has to be recharged depends on the hardness of the water coming in. At 25 grains of hardness per gallon, which is what we had in Q and what we have here in Williston, the softener, which has a capacity of about 10,000 grains, can process about 400 gallons. If the hardness is higher than 25 gpg we will not be able to process that many gallons. 400 gallons is about four refills if I refill it when the level is down to 1/6 (20 gallons). Our usage data from Q indicated that we used about 9 gallons per person per day on average (18 gallons per day) and that I was filling the tank every 5 to 6 days and recharging it every three weeks.

While setting up the water softener I noticed an active nest of red ants. I saw John drive by and a few minutes later saw him headed back our way and flagged him down. He did not have the ant poison on his cart but offered to get it and come back, which he did. He also brought a rake. It turned out that he buys this product at his own expense and uses it to treat sites before folks check in, so I will buy a bag for ourselves and one to replenish his stock as part of my trip to Hudson tomorrow.

With the refill underway I resumed working on the photos for the BCM article on the International Thermal Research (ITR) OASIS Combi hydronic heating system in Butch and Fonda Willams’ 1987 MCI MC-9 NJT bus conversion. The hospital tried to reach me at 12:14 PM but the call went directly to my voice mail. After a few text messages back and forth with my sister and niece I received a phone number for the doctor and was able to get her on the phone.

Brendan texted me at 1 PM to let me know he was headed to our house. He called when he got there and I called him back on our house phone. He spent about half an hour searching through brief cases looking for certain papers and telling me what he was finding. He found the case I needed and took it back to his house where he can go through it more comfortably and ship it to me if needed.

I had resumed working on the BCM article when John and Ali showed up. We invited them into the coach to see the remodeling work we have done and they stayed long enough to chat awhile and have a small glass of wine. I opened the bottle of Viva La Rojo from the Heart Of The Desert winery in Alamogordo, New Mexico and we all agreed it was very nice. It is at such moments that I am left to wonder why we did not buy more than one bottle.

After they left I continued working on the article until I was too tired to concentrate. It was well into the second half of the afternoon so we both put our projects aside and removed the fogged living room awning style window/frame, wrapped it in a blanket, and put it in the car. I need to leave early in the morning and drive to Suncoast Designers in Hudson to have the window repaired and did not want to be messing around with it at 6 AM in the morning.

Getting the window out required the step ladder and a small screwdriver to remove two C-clips so it was a bit more involved than it sounds. Linda put the screen back in place, covered it with a piece of the silvered bubble insulation, and taped it around the edges. The RV resort is very safe so someone getting into our rig was not our concern. Rather, the low temperature overnight Monday into Tuesday is forecast to be in the 40’s so we really cannot have an uninsulated opening in the side of the coach. The chance for rain is low to zero, and we have the awning out over most of that window, so we are hopeful we will not have to seal the outside with plastic. Our other concern was our cats. The screens do not fit as tight as we would like and if this one fell out the cats could jump to their “freedom” with potentially dire consequences.

Linda made stuffed Poblano peppers for dinner. The preparation took a while so I laid down on the sofa and watched Martha Bakes and Ask This Old House on the Create channel from the University of Florida, Gainesville PBS station. What can I say? I find TV that teaches me things entertaining, even if I can’t eat anything Martha bakes. At home Linda would normally cook the peppers on our outdoor or indoor grill but tonight she pan-seared them. The peppers were stuffed with a mixture of rice, black beans, tomatoes, scallions, vegan cheddar cheese, and vegan sour cream. The peppers brought just enough heat to the dish and we finished the bottle of Viva La Rojo, which smoothed everything out. We had a nice salad with sun-dried tomato vinaigrette as a first course. We had sliced fresh strawberries for dessert. It was a really good meal.

We watched President Obama’s address to the nation from the Oval Office, an interesting episode of 60 Minutes (which I have not seen in years), and the Sinatra 100 Grammy tribute. It was an unusual evening of television for us but very enjoyable and a nice conclusion to a day that was broken up into multiple threads.

2015/12/05 (S) Saturday Night Fire Circle

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I was awake at 6:30 AM and finally got up at 7:15. I fed the cats and cleaned their litter tray, both of which are chores but I don’t mind doing them. I sat on the sofa with the heater pad on my lower right back and finished yesterday’s blog post draft. Linda got up at 8 AM having been awake since I got up. At 8:20 I was going to make coffee but Juniper climbed in my lap so Linda took care of that chore, which is certainly one of our more pleasurable.

Linda worked on her counted cross-stitch project and I worked on our Holiday Letter all morning. I had a finished draft by lunch time and Linda read through it. I have it set up for 8.5×14 inch legal size paper, but printing it that way will depend on whether we can get high quality glossy color laser paper in that size.

Linda reheated the last of the red beans and rice for lunch after which I washed some grapes. After lunch Linda continued to work on her project and I turned my attention to another article for Bus Conversion Magazine.

I had some correspondence with the publisher, Gary, yesterday regarding my article on servicing the Webasto burner bearings and decided to finish my article on Butch Williams’ installation of an International Thermal Research OASIS Combi in their MCI MC-9 NJT bus conversion. The work was done in October and November 2014 and the article was basically written in January 2015 but I had not selected or processed any of the photos.

I read through the article, highlighted several places with missing information, and rewrote some things. I then selected 36 photos and started processing them. The processing involved various adjustments such as alignment, lighting, and color followed by resizing and sharpening in two different sizes. The larger size is typically 1900 x 1272 pixels as that will fill the screen of a 17 inch monitor and I don’t feel a larger size is needed or supported by the level of detail in the images. The smaller size is typically 300×200 pixels. I embed the smaller images at the end of the Word document with the image number and a caption. I used to embed them into the article but the editor and layout person need the ability to fit them into the layout and I ultimately developed enough confidence in them to do that. This is always subject to change, however, as is everything connected with this magazine.

We had dinner at 5 PM, earlier than usual. Linda made a nice green salad, sautéed and lightly glazed some baby carrots, and heated some Amy’s vegan macaroni and cheese. The reason for the early dinner was the holiday parade down Main Street in Williston at 6 PM. We left at 5:30 and walked to the corner of NE 5th Street and Main Street. NE 5^th Street is the street that leads back to the front entrance of the resort and is towards the end of the parade route, which comes down Main Street from west to east. There were already people there, all from the RV Resort as near as we could tell, but we were early enough to get seats on the low brick wall that borders the parking lot for the funeral home.

Main Street is also US-27 but the police closed it down at 5:45 PM. The parade started at the west end of Main Street by the high school so the lead police motorcycles did not reach us until 6:20 and the front of the main parade did not get to us until 6:30. There were cars with beauty queens, simple floats with seasonal themes, Girl Scout and Boy Scout troops, politicians, fire trucks, horses, and an elephant with Santa Claus riding on top. It was a classic small town holiday parade. It was all over by 7 PM and we walked briskly back to the firepit.

The firepit at WCRVR is about eight feet in diameter, surrounded by a concrete floor ring about six feet wide and covered by an inverted conical roof about 24 feet wide at the lower eaves. A massive 8 foot diameter inverted conical hood is suspended over the firepit and the 12″ diameter flue pipe runs out the center top of the roof. The outside perimeter of the floor has large wooden rocking chairs (think Cracker Barrel restaurant), a bench, and a few other chairs and there is a little bit of lighting up in the ceiling. It’s a wonderful place to sit and enjoy the fire, visit, and listen to people play their guitars and sing. The flue does not draft correctly so it tends to be smokey, but that is the only downside. If not for that it would be perfect.

John was there with a couple of other people and had a nice fire going. Even though it was in the mid-to-upper 60s there was a strong north breeze and the fire felt good. Lots of other people eventually showed up and filled almost all of the seats so John got his guitar and started playing and singing. Linda walked back to our rig to fetch our plastic wine glasses and opened a bottle of Egri Merlot. It’s a good life.

I got a call from my sister and stepped away from the firepit. She called to let me know that our dad was back in the hospital. When I returned to the fire circle John was busy playing and singing and some folks had left so I tended the fire. By 9 PM everyone had left except for John, Ali, and us. I continued to tend the fire while the four of us talked. Just before 10 PM I spread out the last embers of the fire and we all returned to our rigs for the night except John, who does the closing rounds on weekends.

Back at our motorcoach Linda put on the Michigan State vs Iowa Big 10 Championship football game. Though not particularly interested in football I was too tired to work so after sending an e-mail to our son I laid down on the sofa; the first time I have done that since we built it into the coach. By the time the game was over it was 11:45 PM. We watched a few minutes of Cook’s Country on Create and went to bed. I turned the TV on in the bedroom then turned it off. I turned down the brightness of my iPad display and with only the dim light of the ceiling vista, and whatever light could get in around the window shades, worked on my blog post until 1 AM.

2015/12/04 (F) The Chores of Life

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The overnight low was forecast to be in the mid-50s so before going to bed I closed the roof vents and we only left the windows open about half an inch. I was up at 7:12 AM this morning and put on my sweats. I fed the cats (they insisted), took out my nighttime bite guard, washed it, and put it away. I then sat on the sofa with the heater pad on my lower right back and Juniper on my lap while I worked on my iPad.

Linda stayed in bed until 9:15 AM. She is having trouble shaking the congestion and cough but the nighttime medication seems to control it and allow her to get plenty of much needed sleep. Once she was up I made a pot of coffee and she fixed bowls of granola for breakfast.

My main focus today was working on our 2015 Year-in-Review Holiday Letter but we had other things to do as well. At the top of my list was mailing the FMCA Freethinkers Chapter certification paperwork to FMCA HQ. I also needed to do a load of laundry, our first since we left home a week ago. Linda planned to work on her counted cross-stitch project but also needed to make a run to the Publix grocery store on the southwest corner of Gainesville.

The word “chore” is often used pejoratively, and that is an appropriate use according to the definition, but the first meaning is “…everyday tasks of running a household or farm.” The definition goes on to include “…. difficult or unpleasant tasks …” and some chores are certainly more (or less) pleasant than others. Linda likes to cook and I don’t mind doing the laundry but neither of us particularly enjoy cleaning. I don’t mind dumping our holding tanks, a chore that many RVers apparently find onerous, but I do not like adjusting the pressure in our tires.

I gathered up the soiled laundry and laundry supplies and loaded them in the car. The north bathroom/laundry building is in plain sight of our coach, and not that far away, but I had more stuff than I could carry in one trip and it was heavier than I cared to schlep around. If we had an appropriate wheeled cart I might have used that, but we don’t. I got two loads started but held off on the third until I had taken a shower. The bathhouses are in the same building as the laundry. I added my towel to the third load and started it.

In the middle of doing the laundry I was back at the coach, got the FMCA chapter certification paperwork in an envelope, addressed it, and added stamps. I was going to walk to the Post Office but in the interest of time I drove to the Resort office instead. That little task had been nagging me for quite a while so I had a sense of relief, as much as accomplishment, when I put the envelope in the outgoing mailbox. Linda walked down and used the shower facility.

As soon as I got back to the coach with the clean laundry/supplies and brought them inside I put the 2m/70cm ham radio antenna back on the roof of the car. Linda then took the car and headed for the Publix supermarket at the southwest corner of Gainesville. I did not want to unload the car, and had work to do at the coach, so Linda went to Publix by herself so there would be room for the groceries. I put the laundry away and then settled in to work at my computer.

I realized this morning that I do not have SPSS installed on my ASUS laptop so I will not be able to analyze the data from the FMCA education surveys myself, at least not until I get home. That is unfortunate as I do not know at this point if HQ has the ability or willingness to do the analysis we need done. I sent an e-mail to the committee chair and executive director to let them know. Mea culpa. I replied to a few e-mails and then resumed working on our Holiday Letter.

I realized last night that some of the images which had already been post-processed had dates in the file names that were different from the dates when they were taken. As I was trying to arrange them in chronological order I went back and found the originals and corrected the dates. I then continued placing and captioning the photos.

When Linda returned with the groceries I helped get them into the coach while she put them away. She finally found the Snyder sourdough pretzel nibblers we like and we finished an open container of hummus and had some fruit for a light lunch.

For dinner Linda made a salad and sautéed mushrooms, onions, and broccoli as a topping for a baked potato, which we split. I had a little vegan sour cream on my half. After dinner we changed into warmer clothes and packed a bottle of wine and our two plastic wine glasses and walked to the firepit.

Friday and Saturday nights during the winter folks at the Resort gather at the firepit to enjoy the warmth of the fire, have a glass of wine, talk to one another, and listen to live music provided by volunteer residents. Our friend, John Smith, is the main entertainer, doing mostly folk/rock/country-crossover. He is also responsible for the fire since Kevin and Sharon sold their park model and moved to The Villages. (We are still having a hard time comprehending that move.) John performed solo in clubs and bars for a living many years ago before he and Ali got married. Jeff sometimes brings his guitar and performs as well, his specialty being old time country music (such as Merle Haggard). Other musicians occasionally show up, or at least they did two years ago.

We were the first to arrive (besides John) and chatted with him for quite a while before anyone else showed up. Other folks drifted in and John eventually fetched his guitar and played. Ali was visiting with Jeff and Kathy and was one of the last to show up. Jeff and Kathy’s dog, Teddy, has lymphoma so they stayed at their 5th wheel with him. We stayed to the end, said “good night” to John and Ali, and walked back to our rig. We watched an hour of Create TV and went to bed.

2015/12/03 (R) 2015 Year in Review

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It cooled off overnight and was 60 degrees F outside when I got up at 8 AM. We left the windows open a bit when we went to bed last night but it only dropped to 71 in the coach. The forecast high for today was only 73 with partly to mostly cloudy skies, so the coach was going to be comfortable all day with just fresh air and perhaps the bathroom exhaust fan running. I made a pot of coffee and then Linda got up and made oatmeal for our breakfast.

Linda’s goal for the next couple of weeks is to finish the counted cross-stitch needlepoint Christmas stocking she is making for grand-daughter Madeline. She has to keep very careful count of her stitches, so I am not allowed to talk to her, or myself, while she is working. It should be a very quiet two weeks.

The new pull-out pantry shown in nice light.

My first goal today was to finish the BCM article on servicing the Webasto WDB2010 burner in our Aqua-Hot diesel-fired hydronic heating system. This was work I did back in January while we were in Quartzsite, AZ. I post-processed the last 10 photos, inserted them into the Word docx, added captions, and then rearranged them according to print edition and digital edition bonus content section.

I had an e-mail back from Chuck about the Prevost Community AITA NAPA discount card. I followed his directions and completed the online application. He called mid-morning and we talked about the chassis batteries.

I finished the Webasto article but did not upload it right away. I had an e-mail from Gaye Young, FMCA National Secretary and chair of the Education Committee, with the preliminary results of the survey that went out this fall. After looking through the data I wrote an e-mail to the committee with some observations.

Today was pretty much a stay-at-home day except for an early afternoon walk. We had black bean soup and vegan grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch and then walked up to the office to make copies of the chapter certification paperwork for our FMCA Freethinkers group. I will mail the forms to FMCA HA in Cincinnati, Ohio tomorrow.

We talked briefly with Janet Rawley in the office and checked out the activities center across the street. They have moved the library and game tables from the office to the AC and are going to redo at least part of the space as offices. Given the number of additional park models and RV sites they should expand the mailboxes as well. There was a basket of tomatoes at the AC, free for the taking, so Linda selected a few. On our way back to our rig we stopped to chat with Jim Rawley (Sonny Fox on XM) at their 5th wheel. Jim and Janet were part of our circle of friends two years ago and their rig is just a few sites down from John and Ali’s. We dropped off the tomatoes and paperwork and continued on our walk around the newer section of the park.

A panoramic view looking north into part of Williston Crossings RV Resort from the passenger side living room window of our motorcoach.

Back at our coach I started working on our 2015 Year-in-Review Holiday Letter. I was working on my ASUS laptop when the file manager suddenly would not respond to mouse clicks or let me close it. I tried clicking a few other things and windows popped open that I could not then close. This was strange behavior indeed, and something I had not seen before. I was able to click the shutdown icon in the tray and forced the machine to close programs and turn off. I restarted my computer and ran a complete scan with the ESET Smart Security program. Complete scans take quite a while so I used my iPad to play a few games and work on this post. When the scan was finally done I reviewed the findings and got back to work.

I uploaded the Webasto service article to Gary at BCM and then got back to work on our 2015 Year-in-Review Holiday Letter. Linda can only count so many cross stitches per day before she gets cross-eyed. She also needs very strong light, so when the sun gets low in the afternoon sky she quits for the day.

Dinner was salad and reheated red beans and rice, a dish that holds up well over multiple servings. After dinner I got back to work on our holiday letter and worked on it until bedtime. I selected about 50 photos and will try to do captioned pictures instead of extensive narrative. The local CBS affiliate had the Lions–Packers game on instead of our usual Thursday evening programs so Linda flipped between the game and whatever was on PBS. My computer worked fine for the rest of the evening.

2015/12/02 (W) Settling In

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I was up at 7 AM, fed the cats, and settled in on the sofa with the heater pad on my lower right back to work on my iPad. I finished my blog post for yesterday and e-mailed the last three days to myself. I updated seven apps and then checked out the latest issue of the SKP Photographers BoF newsletter. Linda finally got up at 9:15 AM. I made a pot of coffee and we had toast for breakfast.

My first priority after breakfast was responding to a half-dozen e-mails from Gary at BCM, one of which required me to proofread an article he had written about a recent rally. Next I selected four photos I took with our new Sony a99v DSLT camera and uploaded them to a Dropbox folder for Lou to see. Somewhere in there I got a call from Joe (our mobile mechanic) about Globus cork flooring products. As long as he was on the line I asked his opinion about the chassis battery / Vanner equalizer issue. He reminded me, as he often does, that I already knew how to check if the Vanners were working. When we concluded the call I went outside and did the checks.

With the Vanners connected to the batteries and working correctly the voltage at the “12V” terminal should be exactly 1/2 the voltage at the “24V” terminal. Equivalently, the voltage from +24 to +12 should be the same as the voltage from +12 to Ground. I unplugged the two maintenance chargers to let the surface charge bleed off and used the time to trace the wiring behind the two battery disconnect switches. As I somewhat expected the two Vanner equalizers, which are wired in parallel, are NOT connected to the batteries when they are disconnected from the coach electrical panels. (The one Vanner whose label I could see is a Voltmaster 60-50M rated at 50 Amps maximum so I presume the other one is the same model.)

With the battery bank connected the relative voltage measurements were as expected, indicating that the Vanners were probably working correctly while the absolute measurements of +25.6 and +12.8 (to the nearest 0.1 VDC) indicated that the batteries were fully charged.

I put the disconnect switches back in the disconnected position and plugged the maintenance chargers back in. I checked the voltage on the upper and lower battery strands and they were close to the same but not identical. That was reasonable given that the chargers were independent (electrically isolated) and the upper and lower strands were bridged by Vanner equalizers just minutes before. Based on my testing it appeared that everything was OK except that I lacked a plausible explanation for why the engine alternator apparently did not fully charge the batteries yesterday on the drive down from Mayo. I wrote all this up in an e-mail and sent it to Joe, Butch, and Chuck, all of whom have had conversations with me about this over the last few days.

Linda made a humus and onion on rye sandwich and we split it for lunch along with some grapes. It rained hard while we were eating but the rain did not last long. After lunch I completed the certification paperwork for our FMCA Freethinkers Associate Chapter. It was 4:15 PM by the time I was done. I will get copies made tomorrow and get it in the mail to the headquarters in Cincinnati, Ohio.

I logged in to the Prevost Community website to renew our AITA NAPA discount card but wasn’t sure what to do, so I called Chuck. He and Barbara were at a wine and cheese gathering and he said he would call me back when he was free. Linda wanted to go for a walk around the Resort so at 4:30 we headed towards the north end. This part of the Resort has had a lot of development since we were last here and now has a lot of new park models and large pads for RVs.

We looped around to John and Ali’s 5th wheel but did not see any sign of them so we headed down the main road towards Jeff and Kathy’s site. Sure enough, John and Ali were there enjoying a glass of wine with Jeff and Kathy. They offered us some and we accepted and pulled up a couple of open chairs. We sat and visited until 6:30 PM when we started to get some persistent rain drops. John drove us back to our coach in his golf cart.

For dinner Linda made a nice green salad and pan-seared tofu with a balsamic vinegar, soy sauce, and sugar glaze with chives. It was very good and I could easily have eaten twice as much. After dinner I worked on an article about replacing the bearings in our Aqua-Hot Webasto burner this past winter while we were on Quartzsite. I got the text finished and inserted/captioned the photos that had been post-processed. There are more photos to be processed and I plan to finish the article tomorrow and upload it to the Dropbox for proofreading.

I need, and have been looking forward to, a stretch of quiet days with time to work at my computer as I have a lot to do. I need to update our website and blog, which is almost four months behind, and get back to work on the SLAARC, FMCA Freethinkers, and FMCA GLCC websites. I also need to finish some articles for BCM that have been “in process” for quite a while, and I need/want to write some new ones. Along the same lines I need to clean up my BCM folders on my hard drive and in our Dropbox. That is not all going to happen by the time we leave for Arcadia, but I will do as much as I can. Once we get to Arcadia we will be spending more time away from the coach exploring southern Florida and visiting with friends. That means I will be creating lots of new photos and posts but have less time to process them. Ahhhh, retirement.

2015/12/01 (T) Home Again

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I got up at 7:45 AM, got dressed, and fed the cats. The Magnum BMK was showing the house battery pack at 24.2 VDC and 47% SOC with the refrigerator and other significant loads not drawing any power. I worked on my iPad for a while until I heard muffled voices from the compound around 8 AM and saw Pat (John’s son) working on the roof of one of the trailers. Linda got up at 8:30 and we had granola for breakfast and had a leisurely morning.

Check-in time at Williston Crossings RV Resort WCRVR) was noon. We only had 75 miles to travel to get there and did not need to be there right at noon. Around 10:45 we started getting the inside of the coach ready to travel and by 11:15 we were taking care of the outside stuff. Paul and Eugenia were already hooking up their car and obviously preparing to leave as well. We walked around the coach and checked that the bay doors were closed and locked. On the way around we got the tow bar off the ground and secured it. I then switched on the chassis batteries, opened the engine accessories air valve, and returned to the cockpit.

The chassis battery gauges read lower than normal for a fully charged condition but had plenty of energy stored in them to crank the engine quickly. With Linda spotting from outside I did a three point turn to get the bus pointed towards the exit. John came over in his Kubota utility cart and chatted with Linda while I moved the car behind the bus and we continued to chat with John as we hooked up the car. We thanked him for his hospitality and assured him that we would be back; both for a solar system and to just hang out for a longer time in the woods by the Suwannee River. I started the engine and Linda checked the lights. Everything was good and when she was back on board we started the slow roll back to the county road.

We pulled out of John Palmer’s place around 11:30 AM and slowly made our way back to CR-354. I stopped there (to check for traffic, of course) and raised the tag axle to shorten the turning radius. I did not have a sign post at the edge of the road on the left, as I did when turning in, but the ditch on the other side was deeper closer to the road so I did not to get the passenger side steer tire very far off the pavement. I completed the left turn cleanly and put the tag back down before continuing.

It was closer to 11:45 by the time we passed the east boundary of the property and saw the sign for the River Rendezvous RV Park. We took CR-354 to US-27 and headed east to US-129. Just south of Trenton we vectored off onto SE CR-339 and then picked up NE US-27 Alternate which eventually became Main Street in Williston. The trip took about an hour and 40 minutes and we arrived at the main entrance to Williston Crossings around 1:25 PM.

It’s usually nice to return to a place you have been to before and liked. We enjoyed our time here during winter 2013/14 and it felt a little bit like being home again in that the place, and some of the people, were familiar to us and pleasant to be around. One of the most familiar people was John, our next door neighbor of two years ago. He was doing site escort duty and led us to our site after Linda got us registered. We pulled up in front of site #233 and disconnected the car while John read the electric meter. John then helped me back onto the concrete pad. We were in place and level at 2 PM and visited briefly with John, giving him a quick tour of our interior remodel. After John left we hooked up the shorepower cord and put power to the coach.

I checked the chassis battery voltage on the dashboard gauges with the engine off and they were 28+ and 14. We went through our usual arrival routine with the addition of checking the reading on the electric meter. We pay for our electricity here so checking the meter on arrival is prudent. I checked the maintenance chargers and they showed the charge level on the upper and lower 12V portions of the chassis batteries as 75% each. They should have been fully charged after almost two hours of engine operation so something was still not right. The house batteries were down to 24.0 VDC and showing a 43% SOC. The battery charger section of the Magnum 4024 went into Bulk charging mode, charging the house batteries at 107 Amps.

We are parked facing approximately WSW so the front of the coach gets the afternoon sun. It was in the low 80’s, and a bit warmer in the coach, but we turned on the ceiling exhaust fans rather than run the air-conditioning, deployed the window awnings on the driver side, and lowered the day screens on the inside. We used AntennaPoint.com to locate broadcast TV towers. The two we cared about, CBS and PBS, were both north of us. I rotated the front antenna to point in that direction and did a channel scan. They both came in with solid signals so I repeated the set up with the rear antenna and bedroom TV.

Once we were set up we had vegan hot dogs for lunch and then walked to the CVS Pharmacy just outside the front entrance to the resort. We crossed paths with John again and this time he had Ali with him so we had a quick reunion. When we got back to the coach I was tired and with the warm conditions I dozed off. When I woke up I set up the printer, NAS, and Amped Wireless router.

Meanwhile Linda had started preparing red beans and rice for dinner and discovered that she did not have diced tomatoes. I drove to the Grocery Depot, which is also just outside the front entrance to the Resort, and bought a couple of cans that included green chilies. It was 6:30 PM and the Resort gates were already closed so I had to use the code to get back in. The dish was excellent and would not have been the same without the tomatoes.

After dinner I e-mailed Butch, Chuck, and Lou. We are parked close to one of the Resort’s Wi-Fi towers with a strong N signal and reasonable speed, leading me to wonder if the Resort has upgraded their system and Internet connection. Linda made a stovetop apple crisp and finished it just before our Tuesday evening TV programs began at 8 PM. The crisp was different from an oven baked one but still very tasty. We watched a few TV programs on PBS and CBS. Linda has been fighting something and took some OTC Tussin nighttime medicine for her cough, congestion, and itchy throat. She has coughed enough that it now hurts and is very tired from many nights of poor sleep.

2015/11/30 (M) Palmer Energy Systems

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I was up at 6:45 AM and wandered over to John’s trailer compound around 7:10. He was outside talking to someone on his cell phone and we finally left at 7:20 for breakfast in Mayo. We went to a small, unassuming diner and waited in the car until Dale showed up. We ordered at the counter, selected ceramic mugs from a basket, and then took a table in the back. I had a version of my usual breakfast out; dry toast with Smucker’s Strawberry Jam and coffee.

We were done by 8:15 and stopped at the NAPA store headed east out of town on US-27. They had a good supply of Group 31 commercial batteries and gave me a good price based on my AITA/NAPA discount card and waved the core charge if I returned the old batteries.

We returned to John’s and I got busy removing the old batteries, which was a bigger project than it sounds. I had to get all four of my tool boxes out plus our Little Giant ladder, nitrile gloves, and paper towels. I also had to disconnect the car from the bus.

The four batteries were lined up, sitting crosswise, in a tray above the passenger side tag axle. Being that far off the ground I found it easier to work from the Little Giant ladder configured as a short step ladder.

My first step was to make a diagram of the physical location of the batteries with the positive and negative terminals marked and lines for the main cables attached to each one. I assigned the numbers 1 through 8 to the terminals and then used green Frog Tape to label each cable with the number of the terminal it was connected to. At Linda’s suggestion I used my iPad to take a photo of the batteries with the labeled cables.

My next step was to remove all of the cables from the batteries, being careful not to allow the exposed lugs on the ends to come in contact with anything they should not touch. Some of the cables were jumpers, which I removed and set aside, while others were captive and had to hang down next to the forward side of the tray. The cables were secured with a lock washer and nut at each terminal which I set aside as I removed them.

With all of the cables removed I proceeded to remove the large nut that secured the retaining bracket that held the batteries and remove it. I started with the battery farthest to the outside as it was the easiest to lift out from atop the ladder. Paul, one of the owners of the Entegra Aspire motorhome parked behind us, had come over to see what I was doing and offered to help. I gladly accepted his assistance and he helped me lift the old batteries out of the tray and get them on the ground. Each one weighs about 80 pounds.

I emptied out part of the driver’s side rear of our Honda Element, loaded the four used batteries in there, and took off for Mayo. The associate at the NAPA store unloaded the old ones for me and loaded the four new ones, which I appreciated. He pulled eight new lock washers for the terminals and a larger one for the hold down bracket, got a 1/8″ brass pipe thread plug, and helped me select at spray lubricant for the tray slides and a grease to coat the connections after they were made to protect them against corrosion.

As best I recall I was back at camp by 9:30 AM and backed the car into position by the passenger side rear of the bus. I used the silicon spray to lubricate the slide tracks. I then moved each battery in turn from the car to the ladder, setting it up one step at a time until I could lift it into the tray and slide it into position. I was careful to use my legs and protect my back muscles.

With the batteries physically in place and oriented correctly I reinstalled the hold down clamp. I then got Linda to help me reattach the cables. I cleaned the ends to remove previous grease and wrapped several of them in electrical tape to ensure they did not short out to the tie down bracket. I put No-Ox electrical connection anti-oxidant on each terminal. We then put the cables back on using the new lock washers and the old nuts. I torqued the nuts tight and we double checked the connections against the diagram. We finished at 12:30 PM, so I felt we had accomplished the battery replacement in a very good amount of time.

I turned on the generator and then turned on the circuit breaker for the maintenance chargers. As I expected the new batteries were not fully charged but the maintenance chargers indicated at least a 75% SOC and we slid the battery tray back in to its compartment. I repacked the tool boxes and Linda loaded them back into the battery bay. We put the ladder back in the front bay and the things I had removed from the car back in there.

This old building seemed to be full of stuff but no longer actively used. Our bus was parked pointing directly at it.

At 1 PM we decided to go for a walk in the woods. I turned off the genset, put on my hiking boots, and got the Sony a99 camera. It was a lovely day for a walk with the air temperature at 80 degrees F but shaded from direct sunlight by the forest. I took a couple of dozen photos along the way. We were back by 2 PM and decided to drive into Mayo to see it and buy some groceries. When we got back we had vegan cold cut sandwiches for lunch and then sat outside for a while. Paul came over to chat followed by Euginia. Doc (the retired veterinarian who owns the property) stopped by and then John drove up to see if we were interested in a campfire. That sounded great so John said he would start one.

Linda sits in a tree swing in one of the areas that John has “improved” on the property.

We took our chairs over to the fire ring and sat for a long time having a nice conversation. Kathleen arrived in a car and joined the group. We never learned who she was but we did learn that she was there to meet up with folks driving down from Atlanta. On the short walk back to our coach we paused to marvel at the night sky. It is very dark here at night and there were no clouds this evening.

For dinner Linda made linguine with mushrooms, sun-dried tomatoes, garlic, and olive oil. It was very good. She used the induction cooker and we operated off of the batteries/inverter so they got quite a workout. After dinner I used www.antennapoint.com to locate the TV towers around us. I managed to tune in a CBS affiliate so we were able to watch our usual Monday evening TV programs. I worked at my computer off-loading photos from the camera and copying them to the NAS. I e-mailed Butch and texted Chuck regarding the battery replacement.

Our bus boondocked at John Palmer Energy Systems shaded from the late afternoon sun.

John suggested that we operate off of the inverter and batteries and run them down to 24.0 VDC which is approximately a 50% SOC, so I agreed to try it. We had issues with the system during the evening. The power was flickering, causing the APC UPS to switch to batteries briefly and the lights to flicker. The TV even turned off once. This has never happened before and I did not know what was causing it, but suspected that we might be using too little power and/or that the inverter had overheated (although I considered that rather unlikely). I ended up turning off the NAS and the Amped Wireless router, which were plugged in to the UPS, and then shut off and unplugged the UPS. My laptop runs on its own battery, of course, but I had already checked my e-mail, off-loaded photos from the camera, and backed up photo files to the NAS, so I turned it off as well.

I also turned off the Search Watts feature on the inverter, which was set to 5 Watts. My understanding is that this feature turns off the inverter when there is no load and turns it back on when a load of at least 5 Watts tries to draw current. Five Watts on a 120 V AC system is 5/120 = 1/24 Amp or slightly more than 40 mA; not very much. On a 24 V DC battery bank the required draw from the batteries, ignoring inverter inefficiency, would be five times that (120/24 = 5) or 200 mA = 0.2 A. The Magnum remote was showing that we were drawing at least 6 A, so that should not have been a problem, but I did not know what else to do and I certainly was not going to bother John at this late hour.

John also suggested that I equalize the batteries and told me how to activate that function on the Magnum 4024 by holding down the button on the unit for at least 25 seconds. The equalizing charge is a 4 hour cycle and he suggested I run it twice, back-to-back once the batteries were fully recharged and the charger was in float mode showing zero Amps. He told me to run the equalizing charge once every six months. I have always read that you should NOT apply an equalizing charge to AGM batteries but John said that the two guys who own Lifeline Batteries now recommend this.

We went to bed a little after 11 PM. Linda fell asleep almost immediately but I was awake until 1 AM working on this post and listening to the sounds of the coach.

2015/11/29 (N) Cartersville to Mayo

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I got up at 6 AM, fed the cats, turned on the engine block heater and the Aqua-Hot electric heating element, and then sat on the sofa with the heater pad on my back until 7:20 when I got dressed. Linda was awake at 6 but fell back asleep and did not get up until after 7:30 AM. We had toast and bananas for breakfast but no coffee or tea.

We had 342 miles to travel today to get to John Palmer’s place northeast of Mayo, Florida. He operates Palmer Energy Systems (http://palmerenergysystems.com). We had already driven almost 700 miles, not all of it due south, of course, so we estimated that we were at least 600 miles farther south than our house. It may not seem like that much on a planet with a 24,000 mile circumference but it’s enough to make a big difference in the climate and weather. I was going to check/adjust all of the tires before we left this morning but the temperature was only slightly warmer than when we left home. The TireTraker TPMS seemed to indicate that the tires were OK (although I do not trust the readings I am getting) so I just inspected them visually.

Once again we targeted an 8:30 AM departure time and actually pulled out of our site at 8:35. As soon as we pulled onto I-75 southbound we were in heavier traffic than I expected and it only got worse the farther south we went. It was reasonably smooth sailing all things considered, those things being: construction zones, dense traffic, sunshine (we were driving south, more or less), and drivers who didn’t know how to use an entrance ramp to merge onto a freeway. The last one is one of the banes of my bus driving experience.

We only stopped twice. The first stop was around 11 AM at the rest area near MM179 (south of Atlanta) to use the bathroom and give the cats a chance to do the same. The second stop was at the rest area near MM59 around 12:30 PM. We stopped long enough to have a snack of sliced apples, have something to drink, and use the bathroom. It also gave the cats a chance to eat, drink, and use the litter tray. I called John to get final instructions on how to get into his place. That turned out to be a useful call; he confirmed that we would not have any problem with US-129/FL-51 traffic circle in Live Oak, Florida. He also gave a specific tip to “pull off the road into the ditch (on the right) to swing wide enough to make the turn (to the left) onto his street from the county road.”

Because we were stopping for more than a few minutes I shut off the engine. The Battery Balance light came on as I was pulling into the rest stop. This light does not come on very often and usually only stays on for a few seconds and then goes off and stays off. When I first turned the ignition switch on in Berea it came on and stayed on for several minutes but then turned off and stayed off. It did not come on this morning when I first turned the ignition switch on in Cartersville, so I thought we might be OK (although I did not really believe that). With the engine off (alternator not running), but the ignition switch on, the 24V and 12V gauges indicated less than full charge voltages. I did not recall having ever seen that condition before.

We were back on the road by 1 PM with the OTR A-C turned on. As always the A-C Low Pressure warning light came on occasionally but it always went off after a relatively short time. Of more concern was the Battery Balance light, which went on and off for the next 40 miles. Sometimes it would flicker but other times it would stay on for a long time. Not good.

Caution and warning lights always add an element of stress to driving the bus, but Linda experiences it too from the co-pilot/navigator seat. She knows that it stresses me and she can see the lights from her seat, so she knows what is going on at the same time I do. In spite of the warning light the rest of the trip was smooth and uneventful. We had much less traffic as soon as we exited I-75 onto US-129 in Florida. We encountered a bit more traffic and had a slow roll through Live Oak, Florida. Once we were on FL-51 headed south towards Mayo, Florida we had almost no traffic. We crossed the Suwannee River twice, the second time just north of Mayo, and shortly thereafter made our turn onto CR-354 and headed east parallel to the river.

We found John’s street and followed his advice on how to get the bus in. The problem was that the County Road was not that wide and John’s street was even narrower. It also had signs on posts on each side right at the shoulder of the County Road. That geometry meant that a long vehicle could not cut the corners and had to pass fairly straight between the sign posts. The grassy shoulder was wide enough, before dropping off slightly into a drainage ditch, that I was able to get the passenger side tires well off the road and the driver side tires to the edge of the pavement. It was also firm enough that I was not concerned about the passenger side tires getting stuck in soft soil. I stopped and lifted the tag axles, to shorten the turning radius, and then pulled forward until I was looking down the road out my side window. I then turned the front wheels to the left all the way to the stops and slowly made the turn. I judged it just right, something I have gotten better at doing with experience, and we made it in without difficulty. That was good because we had the car in tow behind the bus and could not back up. If I had not made the turn we would have blocked the County Road for at least 10 minutes while we unhooked the car. We slowly worked our way up to the buildings at the end of the road and I left the bus running while I went to find John.

John was in his trailer but heard me calling and came out. He drove me through the parking approach in his Kubota utility cart and dropped me back at the coach. I got it parked in a spot that had afternoon shade, leveled it, and shut the engine off while Linda opened a couple of windows and a roof vent. John wanted to give us a tour of the property so I did not turn off the chassis batteries or close the air valves the way I normally would on arrival, but took care of that when we got back from our tour.

John is the caretaker for 400 acres of plantation pine woodland with a 25 year lease on 70 of the acres. The owners still live on the property but are in their 80’s and one of their three children has a house on some of the acres. John’s son, Pat, also has a trailer here and works with his dad. There is a third guy here named Terry who works with John and also has a trailer.

Besides taking care of the property John has a solar energy business and a canopy business, all operated out of trailers that can be moved if/when needed. He has been here for six years. In that time he has created over six miles of trails through the woods and along the high south bank of the Suwannee River and cleared small areas for tents and a couple larger areas for RVs. He does not run a campground or charge fees; the space is for friends and customers to use while they are here. It’s a pretty neat place, kind of like a private state park, with access to the Suwannee River.

Back at the coach we talked about a solar installation for the bus and then John gave me a tour of his workshop and inventory trailers. We probably won’t do anything relative to solar while we are here but I wanted to get John’s opinion on some things, which I did. John knows what he knows and doesn’t pull any punches. He has lived an off-grid, solar lifestyle for over a quarter century and he thinks solar systems on bus conversions are a waste of money as buses require substantial AC electrical power from a shoreline or Genset to really function fully and properly. I concede that he is basically correct (unless you spend a lot of time in the southwest) but his utilitarian logic does not place any value on the “I want it because it’s cool” factor.

When I was done talking to John about solar stuff I opened the tray with the battery disconnect switches and the Vanner Equalizers (the coach has two of them operating in parallel) and checked to make sure the circuit breakers had not popped. I had no way of knowing if they were operating correctly but I ruled out their shutting off as the cause of the chassis battery balance situation. There was some corrosion on the terminals but not enough to cause a problem. When I finally started the generator at 4:30 PM the maintenance charger for the upper 12V strand of the 24V chassis battery bank showed 25% SOC. That was definitely not good and suggested that one or both of the upper 12V batteries had failed. They are 5-to-6 years old so that would not come as a surprise.

I texted Chuck, described what I had found, and indicated that I planned to go buy four batteries tomorrow. He asked if I still had my American Independent Trucker Association (AITA) NAPA Discount Card that we got through Prevost Community. I did, and it did not expire until the end of the month, so tomorrow I will see if there is a NAPA store nearby with batteries I need in stock.

I set up the Amped Wireless router, the NAS, and my computer AC power adapter and connected the NAS and computer to the router with network cables. I powered all of them up, turned on the Verizon Mi-Fi, and got the WiFiRanger connected to the Mi-Fi. The Amped Wireless router connected to the WiFiRanger and everything worked as intended. We were online so I checked e-mail.

Linda heated up a can of Amy’s chili for dinner, which we had with Saltine crackers and a little vegan “butter.” I sliced up an apple later for dessert.

I tried calling Butch but did not reach him so I tuned in a TV station and worked on this post. I tried Butch again later and finally got through to him. We had not talked in several weeks so we had a nice chat. Butch thought our batteries should have lasted seven years, given the way I use and maintain them, but conceded that five years is a typical lifespan. He also mentioned that Nick Russell had used the picture I sent of our bus covered in snow in his blog. I have not had a chance to check Nick’s blog in a while so I found the post when I was done talking to Butch.

By now it was 10:30 PM and I needed to get to bed. John was leaving for breakfast at 7:15 AM and I had indicated that I would go with him so I did not want to be up too late and risk oversleeping.

2015/11/28 (S) Berea to Cartersville

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I did not take any Ibuprofen before I went to bed last night as I felt OK. I was also very tired and fell asleep without difficulty around 9:30 PM. Under the best of circumstances I was going to be awake between 4:30 and 5:30 AM and that was the case this morning. During that hour the cats prowled around the bed, got some attention from me, and looked out the windows. What they really wanted, however, was food.

The pickup truck / 5th wheel combination that pulled in on our passenger side last night well after sunset was making departure preparations this morning at 5:30. The strained muscle(s) in my lower right back were nagging at me and, unable to find a comfortable position, I finally got up at 6 AM as the neighbors were pulling out. I sat on the sofa with the heater pad on my back and worked on my iPad.

The cats still had food and water but wanted fresh kibble, as they do every morning and evening. It was in the bathroom closet, where it always is, but took me a while to find as it was hiding in plain sight behind the lower rack of hanging clothes. Linda finally got up at 6:30 AM. She rarely sleeps 10 or more hours but she was very tired when she went to bed at 8 PM last night and immediately fell asleep. She also appears to be coming down with yet another cold. For someone who rarely gets sick she has suffered with colds this fall.

We only had 300 miles to travel today, all on I-75, between Berea, Kentucky and Cartersville, Georgia. With a fuel stop somewhere along the way it should only be a six hour day. We got online and checked the weather. Rain was forecast to start in Berea around 10 AM so we targeted 8:30 to 9 AM as our departure window and decided to have coffee and breakfast. The cold front was sitting to our west running from southwest to northeast. It was moving slowly southeast but the precipitation (mostly rain but with some ice and snow) was along the front and sliding northeast. Based on how it was moving we figured we would probably have rain between Berea and Knoxville and then dry conditions from there to Cartersville where the chance of rain for today was 0%.

I had the engine running at 8:30 AM. The battery balance light came on and stayed on for quite a while but eventually turned off and did not come back on. That may just mean the Vanner equalizer was just doing its job. However, with the upper and lower banks of the chassis batteries on maintenance chargers since we got here yesterday that just begs the question why they were out of balance. We may be replacing the batteries and/or the Vanner equalizer this winter.

We pulled out of our site at 8:3 AM. I-75 through southern Kentucky and northern Tennessee was very hilly but the highway was in excellent condition and it was a scenic and pleasurable drive. Traffic started to get heavy as we approached Knoxville, Tennessee where there was apparently a college football game being played today. Traffic remained heavy from there to our destination, which made the driving a little more work and a little less fun, but it was still OK.

The bus ran strong all day and I was able to climb the grade at Jellico, Tennessee in 4th gear without dropping below 50 MPH or getting the engine temperature above 200 degrees F (as best I could tell from the gauge) and the exhaust manifold pyrometers not exceeding 800 degrees F. That was a big improvement over two years ago when I recall climbing up the mountain in the right lane behind slow trucks in a lower gear and worrying about the engine temperature.

Even though I had the cruise control on for most of the drive I did well using downhill speed to go up the other side and getting on the accelerator early to get the RPMs and turbo boost up and keep them there. I typically saw 15 PSI boost at 2000 RPM but occasionally 16 or 17 PSI. We really need a 0-20 boost gauge for this engine but I could not find one and doubt that they exist. Besides, the new 0-30 gauge is working for me and I have other things that need to be fixed/replaced, such as the twin pyrometer gauge. The left needle used to stick at the bottom of the scale but now the right needle is doing that. Tapping on the face of the gauge usually frees it up, but not always. When the needles are both working, however, they are showing the same temperature within 50 degrees F, which is comforting. I used to think the bus (and me) liked to run at 62 MPH but I have come to the conclusion that it likes to run 65 to 68 MPH, and I am comfortable with that.

We stopped at the rest area about 41 miles north of the Georgia border where I replied to a text from Kristine and then called John Palmer. He answered this time, said he was glad to have us visit, and gave me the address. He said he will have customers there but there was plenty of room and we would not have a problem getting our bus in and out. (Note: We are also customers, albeit from a few years ago, but this is primarily a social visit and a place to stop for two nights.) Rather than take time to eat while sitting still we had some pretzel and peanut snacks as we finished our drive to our destination for the day.

We arrived at exit 296 in Georgia around 1:45 PM and pulled into the Pilot Travel Center just southeast of the exit with the fuel gauge sitting at 1/4. We picked this place to refuel because it is just on the other side of I-75 from our campground for tonight and I wanted to use as much of the fuel in the tank as I could without risking sucking dirt off the bottom or running out.

I figured we would take on 150 gallons of diesel fuel so I added 2 ounces of Racor Biocide, three 16 ounce bottles of Stanadyne Performance Formula diesel fuel treatment, and three 16 ounce bottles of Stanadyne Lubricity Formula. The PF additive treats 60 gallons of fuel per bottle and I add it to the tank before each fill up in proportion to the amount of fuel I think I will add. The directions for the LF additive say to “use it 4 to 6 times per year” but that is presumably based on an engine operating in a tractor-trailer or other commercial / industrial use. Still, I only added one bottle last time when I should have added three, so I added three this time. We ended up only adding 142 gallons but the extra additive won’t hurt anything.

I reset the trip odometer before we pulled out, which I forgot to do when I filled up at home. We used to record our mileage and fuel purchases to get an idea of our fuel efficiency in miles per gallon but have never really had an accurate figure for a couple of reasons. One was that the speedometer/odometer was not working correctly, or at all, and only got replaced in fall 2014. The other is that the Aqua-Hot and auxiliary power plant both burn fuel from the same tank as the main engine. Consequently, we can get an approximate idea of fuel consumption if we fill up at the beginning of a long day’s drive and then fill up again at the end before parking for the night, or if we know for sure that we are not going to use the Aqua-Hot or Genset prior to refueling. Since we will be boondocking from tomorrow afternoon until Tuesday morning we will definitely be running the Genset and probably using the Aqua-Hot.

Our next fill up will probably be on the drive from Williston to Arcadia in late December and the only reason for topping up then is to make sure we pull into Big Tree RV Resort in Arcadia with a nearly full tank to minimize condensation while the bus sits there until early March. This is one of the reasons I wanted to get all of the additives in the tank today. We will have full hookups at Big Tree and do not expect to have to run the Aqua-Hot for space heating. Even though we will have metered electric, we will use the electric heating element in the Aqua-Hot for domestic hot water except possibly for showering. If the resort has a bath/shower house we might use it if convenient.

From the Pilot station I drove to the KOA about 3/10ths of a mile on the other side of I-75 and pulled up to the office at 2:10 PM. The KOA is near Cartersville, Georgia. It is a nice enough place with easy access but the facilities are not as extensive (read that as kid/family magnet) as some KOAs. Linda got us registered and the woman in the office used a golf cart to lead us to our site. We got a very convenient 50A FHU pull through site so getting in was easy and getting out tomorrow morning should be equally easy.

We leveled the coach and went through our arrival routine, minus the water and sewer connections. It was 71 degrees F outside with low afternoon sun was just warm enough in the coach that Linda opened several windows and I put the screen in the door window. We then went for a walk around the campground. The place was almost full and seemed to have a lot of rigs that appeared to be set up for long-term stays. The woman in the office confirmed later that they were fully booked for this evening and that 2/3rds of the campground was in use by extended stay visitors, many of whom were doing work in the area for Georgia Power. That was certainly not the case when we were here two years ago on December 22nd, so that may have just been a matter of timing.

Back at the coach it was warm enough that we opened two of the ceiling vents and turned the fans on to exhaust air from the coach. I went to put on a pair of shorts and discovered that we had failed to pack any. I did bring my two pairs of convertible hiking slacks so I unzipped the lower portion of the legs on one pair and made them into shorts. Much more comfortable. I will be doing some shopping once we get settled.

I sent a slightly more detailed text message to Kristine and a daily update text message to Chuck which drew a reply and another text from me. Linda got our WiFiRanger connected to the KOA Wi-Fi and then logged-in to RVillage. She changed our location for last night to the Oh Kentucky Campground in Berea, KY and then changed it again for today to the Cartersville KOA. We were apparently the only RVillage members at either campground.

We were a little hungry so Linda walked to the office to see if they had any hotdog buns, as we left ours behind along with a loaf of raisin bread. They did not have hotdog buns so she cooked a couple of vegan hotdogs and served them on bread. We also forgot to unplug the Insta-Hot in the kitchen so she texted the kids and asked them to unplug it and remove the bread products when they were next at the house.

We will be boondocking Sunday and Monday nights so Linda availed herself of the showers at the campground. I worked for a while on this post and then went over to get a shower. Linda warned me that it took a while to get hot water so I let the hot water run for at least five minutes but it never got warm enough to shower comfortably. The men’s bath/shower room was also quite chilly so I took a really quick shower, dried off, and got dressed. The office had free coffee available so I had some to warm up and mentioned the lack of usable hot water to the woman at the desk. She seemed surprised but then asked if I let it run a long time, so they know there is an issue. She said she would mention it to the manager.

Around 6 PM Linda heated up a couple of Amy’s brand Vegetable Korma meals. As with all Amy’s products they were vegan and tasty, as well as quick and easy, so the quality to efficiency ratio was fairly high.

The antennapoint.com website indicated that we should be able to pick up a few OTA TV stations. We managed to tune in the ION and PBS affiliates whose towers were NNE of our location and watched a few shows. Linda read for a while and I checked e-mail and played games on my iPad, which is what I do to relax and/or fill time when

I don’t feel like doing anything else. Linda was going to make an Apple crisp but did not have enough cinnamon so she added that to her grocery list and cut up an apple to eat. Around 8 PM she popped the last of the popcorn and added that to her grocery list too.

Around 9:30 PM I closed the ceiling vents in the bedroom and bathroom and took the screen out of the entry door window and closed it. Linda has had a cough for a few days and has been a bit congested so she went to bed at 10 PM. I called Butch at 10:15 PM (8:15 MST) but he did not answer. He does not have a voice mailbox and does not respond to text messages on his phone, so I went to bed.

2015/11/27 (F) On The Road Again

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We slept on the bus last night but did not sleep well, probably due to a combination of factors. We had too much to eat for dinner, too much to do when we got home from dinner, too much anticipation of our early departure, too much anxiety about the weather, and too much awareness of it and other sounds. The motorcoach seems, at times, like a living thing. It makes its own unique set of sounds and motions, even when parked, and it always takes a few days and nights to get reacquainted with it after a period non-use. It is well enough insulated but we are still in much more intimate contact with the weather when living in the coach than we are in the house. It rained most of the night; hard at times, and woke us up when it did. We would normally sleep through the rain if we were not thinking about oversleeping or having to get up and complete out travel preparations in the dim light of a rainy sunrise.

Sunrise was at 7:39 AM. Normally it would be light enough to work outside 30 minutes before that but densely overcast skies and rain kept the light level very low. I had been awake at the bottom of each hour from 4:30 on and we finally got up at 6:45 AM. We did not have breakfast or hot beverages but did have a small glass of orange/grapefruit juice with our vitamins. We (mostly Linda) straightened up the interior and secured the pantry and refrigerator for travel. There was a lull in the rain at 7:30 and we used that opportunity to make our final departure preparations.

Linda shut off the circuit breaker for the engine block heater and I shut off the Aqua-Hot burner and engine pre-heat pump. Linda got her BAHA and calendar from the house and shut off the circuit breaker that feeds power to the RV outlet while I put on my rain pants and coat and took care of the outside stuff. I disconnected and stored the shore power cord. I got the car ready to tow, opened the air supply valves for the various air-powered accessories, and switched on the chassis batteries. When Linda was back on board she arranged towels around the base of her seat for the cats. I started the main engine, let the oil pressure come up, switched it to high idle, and switched the suspension to drive mode. After the chassis was fully aired up I did one last walk-around to check the clearance above each tire, got back on board, secured the entry door, and got out of my rain gear.

Juniper used to get behind the old passenger seat and Jasper used to get under the edge of it by the center aisle. Juniper can still get behind the new seat but it is narrower and Jasper cannot get under it. With the engine running he was looking for a place to hide so Linda set his carrier on the platform next to the seat, arranged the blanket inside it, and put Jasper in but did not zip it closed. We weren’t sure he would stay in it but it apparently provided the sense of shelter and security he was seeking and he settled in. We buckled ourselves in, I raised the rag axle, let the suspension adjust, dropped the idle to low, put the transmission in first gear, released the parking brakes, and pulled forward. It was 8 AM and raining lightly so our local dirt roads were muddy. We had almost 400 miles to travel today, but only the first 2.5 miles were on dirt roads.

We worked our way very slowly down the pothole riddled ribbon of dirt that serves as an excuse for the road we live on. North Hacker Road was in somewhat better shape, but not great. Traffic was almost nonexistent, being the Friday of the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, so I kept our speed between 10 and 15 miles per hour and got passed by two cars. Question: How long does it take to go 2.5 miles at 10 MPH? Answer: One quarter (1/4, 0.25, 25%) of an hour, i.e., 15 minutes! We did not have any trouble turning right onto eastbound M-59 where, again, there was almost no traffic. A couple of miles later we got on southbound US-23 and I got the coach up to 65 MPH. Except for construction zones, 55 MPH urban speed limits, interchanges, and one rest stop, I kept the bus at 65 MPH +/- 3 MPH most of the day. I think the rest stop was near Piqua, Ohio but we honestly do not recall where we stopped as we did not leave the coach to use the rest stop facilities.

We had persistent light rain as far south as Findlay, Ohio and intermittent light rain until somewhere between Dayton and Cincinnati, Ohio. The drive through Cincinnati and over the bridge into Kentucky is always interesting. The road twists and turns with frequent entrances and exits and occasional interchanges but I stayed in the center lane and it was fine. As soon as you cross the Ohio River and enter Kentucky there is a long, steep uphill grade, but I handled it a lot better than I did two years ago. That was partly because of lighter holiday traffic and not getting stuck behind a maximum weight semi in the right lane. I stayed in the second lane from the right, dropped the tranny into 4th gear, kept the RPMs and turbo boost up, and did not drop below 50 MPH while keeping the engine temperature from exceeding 200 degrees F. My technique was definitely better, but perhaps having a clean air filter and having fixed a faulty turbo boost pressure sensor line last December also had something to do with how the bus performed.

The drive through Kentucky was dry with high clouds to mute the sun a bit. There was a stiff wind of around 15 MPH all day out of the south to southwest so that undoubtedly hurt our fuel mileage a bit. We took Exit 76 onto KY-21, went west about 0.4 miles, and turned into the Oh Kentucky Campground RV Park at 2:30 PM.

Linda got us checked in and a few minutes later we pulled into our nice 50 Amp full-hookup site. It was a straight pull into the site and will be an easy left pulling out. We agreed that it was the same site we were in two years ago when we stopped here on our way to Florida for the first time. We got the coach leveled and then I connected the shorepower cord, switched off the chassis batteries, and shut off the unneeded air valves. I started the car, ran it through its gears, shut it off, removed the key, and locked it. As I was doing all of this I observed that the coach was very dirty.

The temperature was in the lower-mid 60s and we were both feeling the need to do something besides sit. Linda read the campground rules and they stipulated a $10 charge for washing a rig, payable in advance. We decided to pay it and take advantage of the near ideal weather conditions: high overcast, light breezes, temperature in the low 60s.

Linda went to the office and paid the $10 cleaning fee while I got out the cleaning supplies and the hose and nozzle. We mixed four capfuls of McGuire’s automotive soap with a couple of gallons of water. Linda handled the hose and I handled the soapy long-handled brush. We washed the bus and the car, including the tires and wheels, in about 75 minutes. Either my wax job had held up very well since I applied it in Quartzsite, Arizona last February, the water was extremely good, or the McGuire’s soap was the right thing to use, but whatever the reason some combination of the three cleaned up the bus nicely with no hard water spots.

The site in front of ours had a small 5th wheel on it and a couple about our age (or a bit older) was installing foam insulation skirting around the space under it. We went over and chatted with them for a while and then retired to our coach for the evening. The Wi-Fi at the RV Park was a bit flaky so I turned on our Verizon MiFi and got our Wi-Fi Ranger connected to it. Linda connected with some of her online word game opponents and I played some of my solitaire games. For dinner we had leftovers from yesterday’s fabulous meal. Afterwards I exchanged text messages with Chuck and then worked on this post.

2015/11/26 (R) Thanksgiving (T-1 Days)

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I got up before 7:30 AM, took some Ibuprofen, and sat on the sofa with the heater pad on my back. Linda got up at 7:45, took a shower, and made tea for us. She checked the weather forecasts and it looked like it would start to rain around 9 AM, and become steady by 10, so she decided to load the food bags and other things onto the bus that she had ready. The Ibuprofen and heat were doing their job so I put on some work clothes and helped load things.

We had a lot of stuff on board by 9:30 so we took a break. Linda cut my hair and beard after which I shaved and took a shower. I got dressed for Thanksgiving and then gathered up the towels and last few laundry items and loaded them into the washer. I then selected all of the clothes I wanted and Linda picked out a couple more items. We moved them to the bus and got them put away in closets and drawers. We then stored magazines and camera gear under the bed. Finally we decided what coats to take. Except for shoes, manuals, music CDs, computing equipment, and a few miscellaneous things we were done loading the bus. It felt good to be at this point but we vowed to plan better and allow a little more time next time.

The laundry took longer than the initial 42 minutes on the display so we used the time to load the Thanksgiving stuff into the car and check e-mail. I finally transferred the laundry to the dryer at 11:20 AM and we were on our way to our daughter and son-in-law’s house at 11:28. We had planned to be there at noon but generally allow an hour to get there. We pulled up to the house at 12:10 PM, so apparently it’s a 45 minute trip.

Like mother, like daughter; Shawna takes care of some work tasks on her laptop while Madeline shows equal attention to detail on the iPad.

Our son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter showed up around 1 PM and our step-granddaughter showed up around 2 PM. Our daughter’s house has a wonderful open floor plan with a large central island in the kitchen that allows many people to stand or sit and be part of a conversation while food is being prepared.

We ate at 4:30 PM and it was quite a meal. Everything was vegan except for a real turkey with gravy (we had Tofurkey) and the dinner rolls, which had an egg wash. Everything was made from scratch and all of it was good. We had a nice long visit and everyone left at 7 PM. We stopped to top of the tank in Linda’s car and got home around 8:15.

Thanksgiving dinner at Chris and Meghan’s house. L-to-R: Katie, Meghan, Brendan, Chris, Linda, and Madeline in Shawna’s arms.

When we got home I made sure some of the (important?) files on my laptop were backed up to the old NAS unit. Rather than take the time to transfer those files to the newer NAS unit I decided to bring the newer one with us. I then shut down all of the computers in my office and brought the NAS device and my computer upstairs. We put them onboard along with Linda’s computer, our iPads, and the cameras. I selected the bus manuals I wanted to take, moved them to the bus, and put them under the bed. We decided what music CDs we wanted to take and put those on board as well.

Our final preparation tasks were to shut off the well, close the main water valve, unplug the water softener and sanitizer, and remove the batteries. We added potable antifreeze to all of the waste traps and opened all of the cabinets that had plumbing in them, including the sump pump closet. I shut off the natural gas to all of the appliances except the furnace and Linda drew all of the vertical blinds and checked the light timers.

When we were finally done loading things on board and buttoning up the house we put the cats in their carriers, put them on the bus, and locked up the house. It was 10 PM. I tried to tune in a couple of TV stations, one from Detroit and one from Lansing, but could not hold the digital signals. Our Wi-Fi Ranger was connected to our AT&T gateway so we used our iPads for a while and I put the finishing touches on this post. I had to make a few quick trips back inside for last minute things we forgot.

The forecast for overnight is for a low of 51 degrees F with steady rain moving into the area by early tomorrow. The probability of rain in Berea, Kentucky, however, is only 10%. We hope to be on the road sometime between first light and sunrise, which is 7:39 AM, and get ahead of the rain. We also do not expect to see freezing temperatures again this winter.

2015/11/25 (W) T Minus 2 Days

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We both got up at 7:45 AM. My back felt OK when I went to sleep last night but it was not good by morning. I don’t know if that is a result of being immobile and supine or just the Ibuprofen wearing off. As painful as it is to get up it feels better once I do. We both got dressed to work. Linda prepared raisin toast and tea for breakfast while I positioned myself on the heater pad. Linda was busy by a little after 9 AM and I was up and about by 9:30.

The first thing Linda did was take out the trash. She called yesterday and stopped our pickups starting next week. It took me an hour to finish organizing tools and supplies in the garage. At that point I turned off the garage furnace and opened the overhead doors. I started my car and turned it around with the back end facing the garage. We moved all of the things that were going in the bus outside the larger door. We then loaded a lot of the stuff into the car. This is not a permanent arrangement but was merely for the convenience of getting packed for traveling.

I helped get the recycling tubs into Linda’s car. Late morning she took them to the recycling center and stopped at two different banks to make club deposits. I took care of some computer-based tasks while she was gone. I finally got a reply from DataViz regarding a sync problem with Passwords Plus and sent the tech support person (Colin) a copy of the sync log from my computer. I also managed to register the Sony flash and accessories I bought a month ago. When Linda got back she made grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch and served them with fresh apple slices. The cheese was Tomato Cayenne from Field Roast and it made for a tasty sandwich on rye bread from Metropolitan Baking Company. I had a couple of Ibuprofen for dessert.

We disassembled the temporary work table in the garage and stored the sawhorses out of the way. We shook out the floor mats (as best we could) and Linda used the ShopVac to vacuum the floor of the larger bay. We finally had enough room to store her Honda Civic inside for the winter. That will be the first time it has been stored inside since she bought it in 2007.

[ Photo 1 of 1 – HC – The large bay of garage ready to accept our Honda Civic for the winter. This is the first time we have been able to put a car in the garage since we moved in to this house. ]

The large bay of garage ready to accept our Honda Civic for the winter. This is the first time we have been able to put a car in the garage since we moved in to this house.

We rearranged some things in the front of the smaller garage bay to make room for the large trash container, the wheelbarrow, several 10′ lengths of 1-1/4″ plastic conduit, 10 large paver blocks, and the mower deck for the Cub Cadet lawn tractor. With those things stowed inside the concrete driveway was now free of objects that Kerry could have hit with his snowplow.

The tractor and 18 cubic foot trailer will remain in the yard alongside the driveway where we park the bus. The tractor won’t start and we had no interest in pushing it uphill through snow. We found our large plastic tarp the other day so we unrolled it, covered the tractor and trailer, folded the edges under, and weighed the edges down with landscape blocks. Hopefully it will stay put through the winter.

With sunny skies and the temperature hovering around 50 degrees F I opened the house electrical bay on the bus. We loaded the four toolboxes onto a hand truck, two at a time, and rolled them over to the bay where Linda got them stacked and pushed in. We then loaded the two drill cases in front of the toolboxes and I closed up the bay.

Next we opened the passenger side engine bay door and replaced the main engine air filter. It did not look that dirty but the new one was obviously very clean by comparison. This air filter is a bit pricey at $130 plus tax but it is so critical to good engine performance that it does not make sense to try and save a few cents by not replacing it or trying to clean a used one and reuse it.

With the air filter changed we then pulled out the chassis battery tray. It holds four Group 31 lead acid batteries and is very heavy. It has a very heavy duty slide out tray but the tray is worn and lets the leading edge drop a little bit as it comes out. That means we had to lift it as well as push it to get it back in.

We applied a 14″ strip of black Gorilla Tape to the horizontal frame member at the top of the compartment opening to prevent metal tools from coming in contact with the chassis, which is tied to the battery ground. I got this idea from Chuck when I saw that he had done this to their coach. There was some fine rust on top of the batteries but the connections were all tight and did not show signs of corrosion. I should probably have cleaned them anyway but we had too much else to do. I did notice, however, that one of the batteries was from 2009 and the other three were from 2010 so they may be due to replaced.

I opened the doors on both sides of the front bus bay and climbed in. Linda carried stuff over from the driveway and the living room (of the house) and I figured out how to fit them into the space. We have less stuff in the front bay then the last two winters but more stuff in the car. The problem for the bay is that we have things in open topped cardboard boxes so I could not stack things the way I have in the past.

We were done with this phase of the loading process by 3 PM. I had turned on the main engine block heater and the Aqua-Hot engine preheat loop at 1 PM. I started the main engine to air up the suspension, leveled the coach, and then turned on the auxiliary air compressor to maintain it at level. I was getting ready to pull my car around behind the bus so we could hook it up when I realized I should probably move the bus a little bit first to make sure the brakes were not locked up. I backed it up a few feet and turn pulled it forward a little farther than where it started. Linda checked the floor and it was level so I switched the suspension back to Level Low to help minimize leaks and hold the pressure.

I continued to let the bus run on high idle while we hooked up the car. With all of the connections made I opened the air valve that supplies air to the auxiliary braking system in the car and went to the cockpit to activate the various lights while Linda checked them. Everything checked out as OK.

With the bus still idling we carried the HP Color LaserJet network printer from my office in the basement upstairs and into the bus. It was heavy and awkward but we got in into the bus. I had to remove the center cover from between the desk pedestals and we had to get it into its alcove in the left pedestal from the knee space between the pedestals. I was pleased, however, that it fit very comfortably in that space as the space was designed to hold this particular printer.

Once the printer was in we found the replacement black toner cartridge and put it on board. Linda also carried the smaller APC UPS up from the rec room to the bus and I put it on the connector cover shelf. I think there will also be room on the shelf for one of the NAS units. The newer one is physically smaller but has more storage capacity and is faster but my plan us to take the larger/older/slower one.

We were done with this phase of the loading process at 4 PM. Our next task was to replace the screen insert from the front door of the house with the storm door insert. Linda turned her attention to preparing food for our family gathering tomorrow and I stripped the bed, took all of the laundry to the laundry room, and started a load of whites.

My back was making me aware that I had worked it harder today than it would have liked so I took a few more Ibuprofen and settled in on the sofa with the heater pad. Juniper found my lap almost immediately and stayed there until just before 6:30 PM when I had to get up for dinner.

Linda heated up a couple of Amy’s curry and rice frozen dinners and served them with the remaining kale/almond/raisin salad. After dinner Linda started packing non-refrigerated food items in paper grocery bags for moving to the bus. I brought all of my photography equipment upstairs to repack but left that for later. I went downstairs and pulled two additional sets of BCM issues plus extra copies of some of the issues in which I have had articles. I boxed the sets, labeled them, and brought them upstairs.

By the time I replied to a few e-mails it was after 9 PM. We could have worked until midnight but we had both had enough for the day. I settled in on the living room sofa with the heater pad on my back. In spite of wearing a knee brace Linda’s right knee was bothering her all day so she took some Ibuprofen and we both went to bed. We watched Weather Nation for a while and then went to sleep.

Tomorrow will be a long day but of a different sort. In the morning we will finish loading the bus and I will check/adjust the pressures in all of the bus and car tires. We are due at our daughter’s house at noon for Thanksgiving dinner and will probably stay until 7 PM. That evening, after we get home, we will winterize the plumbing in the house and spend the night on the bus in final preparation for our departure for Florida the following morning.

2015/11/24 (T) T Minus 3 (days)

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My back was feeling much better last night when I went to bed but I still took two 200 mg Ibuprofen at 11 PM. By morning, however, it was bothering me again. I finally got up at 6:45 AM, put on my robe, and took three more pills. I will take two more every four hours throughout the day. I turned on the natural gas fireplace and settled in on the living room sofa with the electric heating pad on my lower right back.

Linda got up at 7:15 and made tea for us. We sat in the living room doodling on our iPads and talked about what we needed to get done today and tomorrow. Jasper sat next to me on the couch and Juniper climbed in to a large cardboard box. We like having cats as pets.

We had granola for breakfast at 8:30 AM and then got busy. We both worked all day and got a lot done. Linda got more things loaded into the house portion of the bus including food and her clothes. She also made reservations for Friday and Saturday nights and I e-mailed John Palmer to get his address for Sunday night. I got through all of the stuff in the library and repacked the things that will go in the front bay. I did not quite finish repacking the tool boxes but I should be able to do that first thing tomorrow. I also got two loads of laundry done.

I got most of the things in the garage that need to be loaded onto the bus moved near the door. I moved three trash cans full of long handle garden and yard tools to the other side of the garage (by the small door) and slid the box with the windshields into the space where the trash cans had been. I measured with my tape and once we get everything loaded in the bus and the Element and take the sawhorses apart there will be plenty of room for the Civic in the large garage bay.

In the process of going through tubs and deciding what to take and what to leave I found the SILVERLEAF Interface. I need to drill/cut a hole through the lower left console into the compartment with the diagnostic connector, but that will not happen before we leave.

Linda left at 5 PM for a 5:45 PM appointment with Renee at the J. C. Penney’s salon at Twelve Oaks Mall in Novi. It’s a long way to go for a haircut but Linda has been going to her for 24 years and has always liked the outcome. After her appointment she went to the Whole Foods Market in West Bloomfield to pick up some items that she cannot find at our local Meijer’s, Kroger, or Wal*Mart stores. For dinner she picked up a kale salad with almonds and dried cranberries and a basmati and wild rice dish which also had dried cranberries.

We watched our Tuesday evening TV shows and then went to bed. Tomorrow will be a long day but we should have the bus fully loaded by dinner time. I intend to replace the main engine air filter and check the chassis battery connections. I will also start the engine, air up the suspension, and turn on the auxiliary air compressor to maintain it at level. On Thursday morning we will connect the car to the back of the bus and I will check and adjust the pressures in all of the bus and car tires. That evening, after we get back from Thanksgiving Dinner at our daughter’s house, we will winterize the plumbing in the house and spend the night on the bus.

2015/11/23 (M) Elemental Errand Run

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I got up a little after 7 AM. Juniper was prowling around the bed which is her way of letting us know she wants to be fed. If one of us does not get up and put food in their dishes Juniper starts chewing on the charger cords on our night stands and/or pushing things off onto the floor. I needed to get up anyway. The Tylenol PM had worn off and I was having difficulty finding a comfortable position. To my surprise and consternation, my back was much worse than when I went to bed. I could not find a comfortable standing position and was barely able to walk. I managed to get my robe and slippers on and make it to the bathroom to get my bite guard out, clean it, and put it back in its case. I made my way to the kitchen where I took three Ibuprofen with some orange juice and had a couple of cherry strudel bites (vegan). I then sat in the living room with the heater pad against my lower right back and set on high.

Linda got up at 8:15 AM. At 9 we had fresh grapefruit and cherry mini-strudels (vegan) for breakfast with orange juice and the last of the Ethiopian Yiracheffe coffee. We drank most of the coffee in the living room where I lingered until 10 with the heater pad on my right lower back.

I called Brighton Honda and the service department confirmed that they rotated my tires at my last service visit so they did not need to be rotated today. I called Discount Tire in Howell and cancelled my 10 appointment. That took some pressure off of our morning.

A clean bus is a happy bus, or at least makes for a happy bus owner. Although we have kept it vacuumed as we worked it needed a good interior cleaning. The insides of the cabinets needed to be vacuumed, the wood work need to be dusted, and the counters and mirrors needed to be cleaned. Linda did most of that yesterday. We also wanted to wash the floor but decided to do that after everything was loaded on board.

I did not get all of the tool boxes repacked last night so I continued working on that today as best I could. I also needed to go through all of the tubs that we keep in the front bay, decide what really needed to travel with us, and repack the tubs. The situation with my back, however, made for slow and uncomfortable work.

We took a break at 12:30 PM to have lunch. Linda has been using up frozen food to clear out the refrigerator so she made vegan “hamburgers.” The packing and loading work was further interrupted by several things we had to do away from the house and bus.

I dropped off my Honda Element at Brighton Honda for a 1:30 PM oil change appointment. Linda followed me in her car and picked me up. We went to Staples in Brighton and bought a pack of 9x12x4 inch boxes. I needed three of them to hold the complete sets of BCM issues (37 magazines each) that will be given away as door prizes at the Arcadia Bus Rally. I called Teeko’s to see if our coffee order was ready to pick up. It was. I called Brighton Ford’s NAPA parts department to see if the air filter had arrived. It had, but the parts guy wasn’t sure where it was and thought it might take a little while to find. No problem.

We drove to Teeko’s first to pick up our coffee and visited for a while with Mary. We then drove to Brighton Ford, which is next door to Brighton Honda, to pick up the air filter. The Honda dealership called to let me know my car was ready to pick up, so the timing was really good. Linda dropped me off at the Honda dealer and went on to Meijer’s. I got my car and headed home. In total the errand run took about two hours.

There was a USPS Priority Mail package waiting for me on the porch when I got home. It was a set of the BCM issues I need to make a complete set to use as a door prize at the Arcadia Bus Rally at the end of December. In my correspondence with Gary (owner/publisher) he agreed to send three sets and to ship them next week to the RV resort in Williston, Florida. Sometimes I wonder why I bother spending time and effort communicating carefully and in detail.

I continued working in the garage and Linda started cleaning the house. We worked until 6 PM and called it a day. We did not accomplish as much today as we wanted to but we got a lot done and felt good about that. Our original plan was to have the bus loaded by the end of the day tomorrow. As things stand we plan to finish loading it on Wednesday. As of now we are still committed to leaving Friday morning and should be able to do that.

Linda picked up a couple of Amy’s frozen enchilada dinners which, along with some fresh black grapes, made for an easy but tasty meal. After dinner I integrated the magazines I received today with the issues I already had to make one compete set which I boxed up and labeled. At 8 PM we settled in to watch our Monday night TV shows before taking some more Tylenol PM and going to bed.

2015/11/22 (N) Repackaging

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My lower back bothered me all night, so I did not sleep well, but we both got up at 8:15 AM, took showers, and got dressed. My right lower back seemed to have gotten worse overnight. I pulled a muscle yesterday and they tend to take quite a while to heal. Not good.

The view of our rear deck from our dining room the morning after our major snowstorm. It’s pretty if you don’t have to go outside to pack a bus or drive in it.

According to the National Weather Service newsfeed on The Weather Channel iPad app Howell, Michigan got 16.5 inches of snow from yesterday’s winter storm, the highest in Michigan. The highest accumulation in the country was 18 inches somewhere in South Dakota, so we were very close to that. The official amount was no doubt recorded at the Livingston County Airport about 11 miles west of us on the west side of Howell, but based on what we see on our deck we got at least a foot of snow here at the house. It was sunny but only 25 degrees F when we got up. The high temperature was forecast to only reach 30 and the low tonight is forecast to be 18.

Linda made vegan pancakes for breakfast. She cooked blueberries into hers but I had mine on the side. I think the blueberries add additional liquid to the batter and keep the pancakes from cooking properly, but Linda likes the way they turn out. I made a pot of coffee with the last of our Ethiopian Yirgacheffe beans. I took some Ibuprofen along with my usual morning pills. Linda got the heating pad out and I sat with it against my lower right back on the living room sofa while we drank our coffee. In spite of having a lot to do between now and Thanksgiving Day, we got a slow start to our day.

Linda cleared our front sidewalk so she could get to the front door of the bus. She also shoveled a path to my car, which I parked behind the bus yesterday, and cleared the snow off of it. She checked the snow depth with a ruler at several places on our rear deck. It was 13 inches. Not 16.5 inches, but it’s still a lot of snow, and it could certainly have been deeper out in the yard.

Her agenda for the day was to vacuum the inside of all the cabinets in the bus, dust the woodwork, and clean the counters and mirrors. I exchanged some text messages with Chuck including a couple of photos. I sent one of our bus buried in snow and he sent one of the palm trees and lush vegetation on the unoccupied lot next to theirs at Pelican Lake Motorcoach Resort. Chuck said it has been too warm to play golf. I did not know that was even possible but I did not feel too sorry for him. I sent an e-mail to Butch to let him know I had delivered the antique SUN Electric distributor tester to Bill a week ago Friday.

I resumed working in the garage and spent most of the day repacking my tool boxes. My objective was to reduce the number of boxes from five to four while maintaining some sort of reasonable logic to how they were organized. I took short breaks throughout the day to get off my feet and had a few pretzels with hummus for lunch.

Sometime during the afternoon Kerry showed up and plowed as much of the concrete driveway as he could. Linda must have been vacuuming in the back of the bus and I was working in the garage (with doors closed) so neither of us realized he was there until after he was gone.

I decided that I needed some additional storage boxes for organizing small parts so I drove to Lowe’s hoping to find the Stanley boxes I already have. They had similar boxes from a different manufacturer but not the exact ones. I tried The Home Depot but liked the boxes at Lowe’s better so I went back there and bought six, three with 10 deep bins and three with 17 medium bins. I stopped at Meijer’s for orange juice and picked up a few other things.

When Linda was done cleaning the bus she started loading the things onboard that she had ready. She got almost everything on board that was staged in the middle bedroom and the kitchen. She then made three more batches of granola. That made nine batches since Friday evening, eight of which are in the freezer. Linda thinks a batch will last at least two weeks if have granola every other day. If that proves to be true we should have enough granola with us in the bus to get through the end of March.

By 5:30 PM we were both ready to stop for the day. I changed into my robe and sat on the living room sofa with the heating pad on my lower right back. We spent 45 minutes considering possible waypoints between here and Williston, Florida. We did not come a decision but it is very likely we will stop at two of the same places we used two years ago, the Oh Kentucky campground in Berea, Kentucky and the KOA near Cartersville, Georgia.

The Oh Kentucky RV Park in Berea is just west of I-75 at an interchange. It wasn’t fancy but provided easy in/out access and would allow us to plug in for the night. Just east of the Interstate at the same exit is a Walmart where our friends, Chuck and Barbara, stayed on their way south a few weeks ago. The RV park options north of Atlanta, Georgia are surprisingly limited. The Cartersville Castle-White KOA is convenient to an exit off of I-75 and also provided easy in/out access. Staying there Saturday night means we can drive around Atlanta on I-285 on Sunday morning, our favorite time to bypass major cities.

Our final waypoint before going into Williston Crossings on Tuesday, December 1st will probably be Mayo, Florida where we can boondocks for two nights at John Palmer’s place. This itinerary would have us traveling about 400 miles on Friday, 300 miles on Saturday, 340 miles on Sunday, and 75 miles on Tuesday. Friday would be a longer drive by about 2 hours than we normally plan, but very doable. Also, this time of year we like to get as far south as quickly as possible.

Linda opened a bottle of Leelanau Cellars Mixed Berry Winter White wine to have before, during, and after dinner. For dinner Linda cooked a squash and heated up some frozen corn and mock chicken tenders (vegan). After dinner I tried to check my e-mail but our Internet connection had slowed to an unusably slow speed. At 8 PM I participated in the SLAARC Information Net and then came back upstairs and went to bed. We both took some Tylenol PM at 11:30 and then turned out the lights.

2015/11/21 (S) Not Quite As Planned

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The weather forecast for today had snow moving into the area starting at 4 AM, increasing in intensity by 8 AM, and continuing through the day and into the evening. The initial forecast was that we would get 4 – 6 inches of accumulation with temperatures hovering just below freezing. We overslept this morning and did not get up until 7:30 AM but decided to go to our weekly ham radio club breakfast in South Lyon anyway. I have had Mike’s (W8XH) climbing harness for a while and wanted to return it before we left for the winter.

There was already some accumulation on grassy areas when we left at 7:45 AM but the drive was not a problem and we arrived at 8:10. We were the last ones there, of course, but someone had to be. We had a nice chat with Harvey (AC8NO) and Diane, who are usually close to the last to arrive. I called Mike, who did not make it to breakfast, and let him know I was transferring the harness to Harvey.

On the drive home we stopped at Meijer’s in Brighton so Linda could get some additional ingredients to make more granola. By the time we got home at 10:30 the snow was starting to pile up. I had four text messages from Kristine Gullen in quick succession which turned out to be four parts of one message. She wanted to pin down our dinner plans for this evening. I texted her back once I got home and after a couple of exchanges we came to the mutual conclusion that the weather was going to interfere with our get-together. Sadly, that meant we would not see her and Jim again until May 2016 as they were probably headed to Frankenmuth for the Fall MERA conference and then on north to their cottage at Crystal Mountain for the Thanksgiving holiday.

Snow piling up around the bus less than a week before our planned departure for Florida.

Our original plan for today was to clean the inside of the motorcoach and then start cleaning up the garage/shop. With the snow piling up we decided to defer cleaning the rig and concentrate on cleaning up the garage and staging things that we will eventually load on board. I worked in the garage most of the day although that included moving things into the library and house. Linda concentrated on making granola, preparing a billing statement for the bakery, and organizing/staging kitchen-related things for the bus. She also came out and helped me when I needed assistance.

My objective for today was to get one of the temporary workbenches cleared off and disassembled. I also wanted to get all of unused plywood stored flat. By 5:30 PM we had accomplished those two goals, gotten most of the power tools put away, moved quite a few things to the library, and stored or thrown away quite a few other things. I had also managed to strain my lower right back. That is never a good thing, but it was especially bad given what we have to accomplish in the next three to four days. We will continue the process tomorrow and I will try to get my tool boxes reorganized before I quit working for the day. A critical piece of the cleanup will be getting everything that should be protected from freezing out of the garage and into the library as we do not heat the garage while we are away even though it has a furnace. From there some of it may get moved to the laundry room in the basement, or not; it just depends on time and energy.

We need to clean up the garage enough to get the Honda Civic inside and also the (non-functioning) lawn tractor. Optionally we can leave the tractor where it is and put a tarp over it or I can borrow Mike’s trailer and take it to Sloan’s in Linden to have it repaired and stored for the winter. I like the last option best but I doubt that I will have the time to take it there before we leave. It would have to be on Wednesday, assuming they are even open the day before Thanksgiving.

Snowstorm in progress. Lots of snow on the rear deck and still coming down.

For dinner, Linda sautéed an onion with some mushrooms and heated some frozen broccoli and peas. She used all of that as toppings for two baked potatoes. We watched the snow fall as we ate and estimated the accumulation on the railing of our rear deck to be at least a foot.

By 7 PM Howell had officially recorded 14.5 inches of snow and it was still coming down. I decided to text Kerry Fear, who does our snowplowing, to let him know that I staked the driveway yesterday but we still have a mower deck, wheelbarrow, paving blocks, and plastic conduit in the northwest corner of the drive that we have not yet had a chance to remove. He texted back that he was “up north” and would be back Sunday afternoon.

We went to bed before 9 PM, watched a few minutes of weather on TV, and caught a bit of a Cirque du Soleil holiday show on Detroit PBS. I was going to call Butch and text Chuck but it was after 10 PM so I went to sleep instead.

2015/11/20 (F) The End of Projects (for now)

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Linda was up at 5:45 AM again and off to the bakery at 6:15 but this was the last time until spring 2016. There is still more to do on both the software project and year-end accounting but she will do it remotely. We need the weekend and the first three days of next week to get the motorcoach, the house, and us ready to travel and prepare for our Thanksgiving Day family gathering. Also, unlike the last two winters, Linda does not plan to fly home in late February to take care of year-end accounting and tax work. She will handle all of that from Florida instead, so she has to make sure she has everything she needs with her in the bus when we leave.

This was likewise the last day for me to work on bus projects. The things I needed to do in the bus included:

Install metal edging to protect exposed tile edges.
Grease the steering column.
Install filter material over the HVAC holes under the bed.
Mount the West Mountain Radio RigRunner on the dashboard.
Pull the chassis battery tray out and check/clean/tighten the connections.

But I had a few other things to attend to first.

I was up and dressed at 7:45 and had an alarm set on my iPad for 8 AM to remind me to pick up our coffee bean order from Teeko’s. I had a bowl of granola for breakfast and then called Brighton Honda. My last oil change was at 99,280 miles and I now have over 105,000 on the odometer so I made an appointment for Monday afternoon to have the oil changed. I had a cup of tea in the living room where I spent some time with our cats. I then went to my office and replied to an e-mail from Gary at BCM. I called Teeko’s to make sure our coffee was ready to pick up. Mary did not have it packaged yet but said she would have it ready in an hour. I indicated that it would be longer than that before I got there. I called Discount Tire in Howell to see about having the tires on the Element rotated. They were running 2 – 3 hours so I made an appointment for Monday morning. I called Brighton Ford/NAPA to order an air filter for the bus.

I moved the brass colored stair edging into the bus and checked the temperature. It was 64 degrees F so I bumped the thermostats up just a bit. I also switched the remote temperature sensors so that #1 was in the freezer (top) and #2 was in the fresh food compartment (bottom). I removed the ham radio antenna from its magnetic mount and put it in the car. I finally left at 11:45 AM on my errand run.

My first stop was Wendy’s where I had an order of French fries for lunch. I then went to Lowe’s, which was just across the street, for carpet stain remover and looked at tarps while I was there but did not buy one. I don’t think we will be able to create enough space in the garage for the lawn tractor so I want to cover it for the winter. From there it was less than a mile east on Grand River Avenue to the car wash. I had taken the ham radio antenna off before I left the house but the car wash knocked the magnetic mount cellular booster antenna loose. I pulled into a parking spot, put the cellular antenna back in position, and reattached the ham radio antenna.

I backtracked that same mile and stopped at Teeko’s to pick up our coffee order. It seemed light but Mary already had it bagged and I was anxious to move along so I did not check it. I continued west on GRA to the Bank of America branch near The Home Depot (which I should have done after stopping at Wendy’s). With colder temperatures coming the next few days I decided to drive to the Shell station in Brighton and top off the tank. The sign said regular was $2.05⁹/gallon but the pump I used was set to $1.95⁹. Deal.

When I got home I checked the coffee order and realized something was not right. There were supposed to be 16 vacuum sealed 1/2 lb. bags, four each for four different coffees, for a total of eight pounds of beans, but there were only 10 bags. Some of them were definitely much less than a half pound but I did not have a scale and so I had no way to know for sure what the total weight was. Three bags were also unsealed and some of the beans had spilled into the larger bag. Two of those bags were the same bean but unfortunately the third one was different so I had no way of knowing which bag, or bags, the loose beans came out of. I dumped the loose beans into the bag that was the most open as that was the easiest one to get them in. I closed the three unsealed bags with spring clips, put everything back in the carry bag, and drove back to the coffee shop.

I was not pleased with the situation, especially the fact that I had to make this extra trip, but I worked through my frustration while driving and was friendly and courteous while I was there. Being upset and nasty to people never accomplishes anything good. Roger was there in addition to Mary and once I explained what we had ordered on Monday evening from Jeff it was obvious that something got lost in translation. They will make it right and we will pick it up late in the afternoon on Monday.

For some time now we have felt that we do not always have Jeff’s full attention when he is waiting on us. Teeko’s has had its challenges over the last couple of years, first with road construction making access to the strip mall more difficult, and now with the opening of a Panera on the opposite corner of the intersection. My sense is that they have struggled financially as evidenced by the fact that they never spent the money for a proper neon sign. As a result the shop is not as visible as it should be even though it is located at a major intersection. Jeff got married last year and they just had their first child in September. With those added responsibilities he went back to work driving a delivery truck for PepsiCo, which has a major plant on the south central side of Howell. His parents, Roger and Mary, have been left to run the coffee shop during the day, which I suspect is not what they intended to be doing in their retirement. Still, they are always very pleasant to deal with and I feel for their situation.

As much as we like Panera, when we still lived in Farmington Hills we tried to patronize a series of small, independent coffee shops but they all failed in the end. Some failed because of mis-management, but ultimately they could not compete with the Starbucks, Panera, and Einstein Brothers stores in the area. Sadly, I suspect this will also be the fate of Teeko’s even though it is a nicer coffee shop than the Biggby’s just down the street. And it’s too bad (for us at least) as we really enjoy being able to purchase a variety of green beans and have them roasted to order.

Back home I finally got to work on the bus around 3 PM. I got all of the old silver colored metal stair edging from the garage and determined where each piece had been installed. I realized that I did not have a good way to cut the new edging nor did I have the time to measure, cut, and install it before it got dark. I really wanted/needed the exposed edges of the tile protected so I decided to reinstall the old edging. Although it had obviously seen heavy use over the years it was still serviceable. Of equal importance was that it was already cut to approximately the correct length and angles. I checked that the holes on the new edging would fall in different places than holes in the old edging. That was the case, so I held each piece in place and drilled a small pilot hole at every third hole. I changed to a different bit to drill through the metal that secures the edge of the plywood bus floor and then screwed each strip of metal edging in place. The new edging will cover the holes from mounting the old edging.

This was the only work I was going to get done on/in/around the coach today. Linda had called by this point to let me know she was heading home and was going to stop at Meijer’s along the way. As soon as she got home she started making three batches of granola. She is going to make and freeze as many batches as she can fit in the freezer so we can enjoy this fabulous granola well into winter.

While Linda made granola I worked at my computer cleaning up old e-mail. Dinner was vegan Pad Thai; not like the real thing, of course, but it was easy, hot, and tasty enough. We had some small oranges for dessert. I worked at my desk for a while after dinner deleting old e-mails. I quit at 8 PM to watch a few TV shows and work on this post.

2015/11/19 (R) FTH Annual Meeting

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I was up at 7:45 AM and got dressed right away to work. I folded the towels and blankets I laundered yesterday and then made coffee and had a bowl of granola for breakfast. I sat in the living room for most of the morning finishing my blog post about yesterday, having decided that I would probably not work in the bus today. The only thing I really have left to do is install the metal edging where the floor tiles meet the top of the wall tiles in the front passenger platform and secure the old step on the platform.

I finally inventoried my issues of BCM and sent the list to Gary of the ones I need to make three complete sets for door prizes for the Arcadia Rally. We had some additional e-mails back and forth regarding the rally.

Part of getting ready to leave is getting the house ready for us to be gone. I shut the off the water to the three outside spigots and then opened them to let them drain. I added insulation around the top of the foundation in the sump pump closet and put the piece of insulation back in the window. I topped off the battery for the backup sump pump with distilled water. I left the light on to act as a heater and put a note on the outside of the door to that effect. I also noted the date the battery had been topped off. Once the cats are on board the bus we will leave the sump pump closet door open to let heat get in there.

At 3:15 PM I printed off the documents for the FMCA Freethinkers meeting. I got a bowl of nuts and made a cup of hot tea. Linda texted me at 3:30 that she was leaving the office. At 3:55 PM I dialed into the meeting. Bob, the chapter president and organizer of the teleconference, was already checked in. By 4:05 we had 11 F#’s represented, exceeding the eight we needed for a quorum, and he called the meeting to order.

The meeting was routine but necessary. I edited the minutes from last year as the meeting progressed. We approved the minutes of last year’s annual meeting, presented the financial statements, received the report of the nominating committee, and elected people to the offices of president, vice-president, and Treasurer. We also elected five members to serve on the nominations committee for the coming year. The meeting concluded with a discussion about how to let FMCA members know about our chapter, which resulted in a member volunteering to set up a public Facebook page for our chapter. Linda got home as the meeting was concluding.

We both got comfy in our robes and spent 45 minutes relaxing in the living room. For dinner Linda made green salads with dried cranberries and slivered almonds and heated up some mock (vegan) riblets in barbecue sauce and some vegan baked beans. We finished off the bottle of Barefoot Moscato wine for dessert.

I finished editing the minutes of this year’s meeting, converted them to a PDF, uploaded them to our Dropbox, and e-mailed the members. I got that done before 8 PM so I could relax and watch a few Thursday evening TV programs with Linda.

2015/11/18 (W) Fuel Run

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Linda was up at 5:45 AM and off to the bakery at 6:15. I was up at 7:45 AM and skipped breakfast and coffee. I put on Weather Nation and took stock of the forecast while I folded the clean laundry. I took a shower, got dressed, made a cup of tea, and had a small glass of orange juice to wash down my pills.

My main objective for today was to get the bus fueled which would also serve as a test run. The forecast had the chance of rain increasing through the morning and heading towards certainty by early afternoon, albeit intermittent and not very intense. I wanted to take care of the fueling before the rain settled in but wanted to wait long enough for the temperature to rise so I set 11 AM as my target departure time. Before I moved the bus, however, several things had to be done.

First on the list was turning on the electric block heater for the main engine. It wasn’t cold enough for this to be necessary but having the oil warmed up a bit never hurts, especially with the straight 40 weight oil. It helps the engine crank over and get oil to the bearings more quickly.

The living room and kitchen in the bus looking aft from the cockpit. New flooring, new seating, new desk, new refrigerator, new slide-out pantry, and new window shades (rolled up).

Next was simply cleaning up the interior so the coach could be safely moved and nothing would get broken. I gathered up all of the tools and materials that I no longer needed and moved them into the house and garage. I then installed the solid brass door stop on the bottom of the pull-out pantry. Finally I mounted the two aluminum angles to the inside of the refrigerator alcove, one by the freezer door and the other by the fresh food door.

The angles were 1/2″x3/4″ with holes drilled in the 3/4″ flange for #6 SR self-drilling wood screws. I had carefully countersunk (chamfered) each hole so the screw head would be close to flush with the surface of the flange. The aluminum was only 1/16″ thick so I had to be careful not to overdo it. With the freezer door open I set the 1/2″ flange against the face of the refrigerator case (on the side opposite the hinges) and held the 3/4″ flange square to the side of the alcove. I used a #5-6 self-centering VIX drill bit to drill three holes about 3/8″ deep and installed the 5/8″ #6 screws with a manual screwdriver so as not to over torque them. I repeated the procedure for the second angle which was longer and had five mounting holes.

The new floor in the cockpit of the bus.

I had a little spare time so I drove my car up and down the new driveway to compact the gravel. I won’t drive the bus on this new driveway until next year but it already supports the cars very nicely and the weight of the Honda Element was sufficient to knock down some of ridges and compact the surface.

I checked all of the tire pressures and they were OK so I did not have to get out an air compressor and adjust them. I will have to do this next week before we leave, however, as the temperatures will have cooled off significantly by then.

Around 11 AM I turned on the coach batteries and opened the auxiliary air supply valve for the engine accessories. I turned off all of the electric heating elements and made sure the inverter was turned on and then started the main engine. I let it run for one minute and then switched it go high idle. While the engine was warming up and the air pressure was building I shut off the shorepower, disconnected the power cord, and stowed it.

I pulled out at 11:15 AM and headed for the Mobile Truck Stop at exit 122 on I-96, approximately 22 miles from the house. While there are a couple of closer places I could get fuel this truck stop has very good egress and is fairly busy, which means the fuel is being turned over frequently and is thus relatively fresh. The drive is a mix of Interstate and Michigan Highways with a few stoplights and a couple of miles of dirt road, so the bus has to run up and down through its gears. It is also a long enough round trip to get the engine up to normal operating temperature under load.

I estimated that the tank would take on about 120 gallons of diesel fuel so I added two bottles of Stanadyne Performance Formula and one bottle of Stanadyne Lubricity Formula. The tank started whistling at 112 gallons, which meant it was getting full. I added the last few gallons by controlling the flow manually and stopped at 119.990 gallons, so my 120 gallon estimate was pretty good. I paid for the fuel and got a free beverage to go with it.

I had some occasional light rain on the drive out and on the drive back but the trip was otherwise uneventful. I was back at 12:45 PM, parked the coach, and started the auxiliary generator, which I had not done for several months. To load the generator I turned on all three electric toe-kick heaters, the engine block heater, the Aqua-Hot electric heating element, and front bay electric heater. I let it run for 90 minutes with an average current draw of 25 Amperes on each leg, which is about 35% of its full load capability.

I got the shorepower cord out and connected it but did not turn it on. As long as I had water and air pressure I flushed the toilet and then ran a little water through the various faucets in the coach. I set a rubber door mat under the drain for the fresh water tank to keep the water from drilling a hole in the driveway and then let the tank drain slowly. While it was draining I got the long fresh water hose out and connected it to the spigot on the front of the house and the water port for the coach. With the fresh water tank empty I checked that the outside water spigot was configured to provide filtered/softened water. I closed the drain valve, opened the fill valve, and opened the valve at the house. I then went in the house, set a timer, and had a bite of lunch.

I had a phone call while I was driving back from the truck stop but did not answer it. The caller left a message so I listened to it and then called him back. Kevin Stufflebeam, from the southwest part of Michigan, had a 1995 Marathon Prevost conversion with a non-functioning Webasto system. It turned out that he had the system worked on by a company in that area and the guy from the company had called me during the summer. They got my name and contact information from Josh Leach at Coach Supply Direct, with my permission.

The fresh water tank has an overflow tube so that is how I knew it was full. I closed the fill valve on the bus, closed the spigot valve at the house, and then opened the fill valve to relieve the pressure in the hose. Sure, it was a lot of back-n-forth, but it eliminated the spray that occurs when unscrewing a fitting on a pressurized hose. It also makes the fitting easier to unscrew. I removed the hose from the coach and then from the house. The spigot is about four feet higher than the driveway so I pulled the hose up towards the spigot, allowing it to drain as I coiled it up. Once it was coiled I connected the two ends together, put it back in its storage tub, and put the tub back in the front bay.

Linda called at 4:30 PM to say she was on her way home. It had been raining, off and on, all afternoon so I took about 45 minutes to drive on the new driveway with my Honda Element and compact it even more. But first I got the metal toothed rake and evened out the few remaining ridges and valleys. Besides going up and down the driveway I drove across it at various angles at both ends. Most of the driveway has fresh topsoil along both edges, which is soft and has grass seed and straw on top of it, so I stayed off of those areas as they definitely should not be compacted. The end of the new driveway by the house ties into our concrete driveway and some solid, undisturbed lawn with a flare. The far end, which ties into the street at our third culvert, is much wider (to allow the bus to make the turn), relatively flat, and ties in to solid, undisturbed lawn. The concrete, road, and undisturbed lawn allowed me to drive beyond the edges of the driveway in these areas and go across them at various angles.

Any kind of weather always slows commuter traffic and Linda did not get home until 6 PM. It had been a long day for both of us and she just wanted to relax for a while. She opened a bottle of Barefoot Moscato and poured each of us a glass. For dinner we had mock oriental orange chicken with reheated frozen broccoli and white rice with soy sauce. It was an easy but very tasty meal.

After dinner I finally settled in at my desk to finish updating the FMCA Freethinkers Chapter roster, financial statements, and minutes from the 2014 annual meeting. Linda reviewed the financial statements and helped me reconcile them to the bank statements. Once we were satisfied they were accurate I saved everything as PDFs, uploaded them to our Dropbox, and sent the folder link to the members via e-mail. We then headed to bed and watched the last episode of The Brain on Detroit PBS. Linda went to sleep and I wrote for a while, finally turning the light out at 11:30 PM.

2015/11/17 (T) Drivable Again

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Linda set her iPad alarm for 5:45 AM. I heard it go off and got up shortly thereafter even though I did not turn out my light last night until 12:30 AM. She got up at 6 AM and was showered, dressed, and out the door by 6:20.

I tuned in Weather Nation on WILX TV out of Lansing while I folded the clean laundry. Of all the stations we can pick up this is the only one with a dedicated weather sub-channel. The current forecast was for two more days with high temperatures near 60 degrees F but high humidity and rain as moisture races north from the Gulf in advance of a cold front. By the weekend we are looking at highs at or barely above freezing and lows in the low 20’s. The 10-day forecast has us back in the 40’s by Tuesday so we should not have any weather difficulties for Thanksgiving and the following day when we head south.

We planned to re-install the two front seats in the bus late this afternoon and I plan to take it on a fueling run tomorrow so I can run the Aqua-Hot diesel-fired hydronic heating system instead of running electric heaters. I will also drain and refill the fresh water tank, but those are tomorrow’s tasks. I had other things to do today, starting with the laundry.

I needed to wait until late morning to do the final cleaning of the tile in the cockpit and had several things to do that had to wait for the cleaning to be done first. To make good use of my time I decided to measure, cut, drill, and paint the 1/2″x3/4″ aluminum angle that will serve as a retaining bracket for the refrigerator. I will install it tomorrow after the front seats are re-installed and out of the way.

With that done I got the 3/4″ piece of walnut that Jarel cut and shaped for me to cover the front edges of the plywood under the refrigerator. The piece sticks up a little above the top of the top layer of plywood so I wanted to install it in a way that will allow it to be easily removed. That precluded the use of nails, even small ones. I did not want the appearance of screw heads and wasn’t interested in drilling deep countersunk holes and using plugs. (The woodwork in the bus was essentially assembled this way and most of the plugs have come out. We will probably put them all back in once we are done reconditioning the wood even though I would rather not.) That left Velcro as the only reasonable option, so I started a shopping list.

My next mini-project was to attach the 1/4″ walnut veneer plywood to the face of the pull-out pantry. Jarel had ripped two pieces to the proper width for me but neither one was quite long enough to fully cover the front of the pull-out pantry. Step 1 was figuring out where to have the two pieces meet and then determine how long each piece needed to be. The next problem to solve was how to attach them. I decided to use glue, clamp the walnut panels to the front of the pantry, and then secure them using screws from behind. I looked for my large wood clamps but could not find them so I added face clamps to my shopping list.

The front structure of the pantry is 1/2″ thick ash and I planned to drill countersunk holes from the inside so the screw heads would be flush. That meant I needed #6 5/8″ screws, which I did not have, as 3/4″ screws would probably puncture the veneer. I added the screws to my shopping list. I selected a small drill bit and drilled holes from the inside just below the top board and just below each shelf plus one just above the bottom shelf. Because of the metal side plates these locations were easier to reach on the inside. I then switched to my countersink bit and drilled the holes out from the inside.

Back in the garage I sprayed a second coat of black paint on the aluminum angles for the refrigerator retaining bracket, moved a load of laundry to the dryer and put another load in the washer, and then took my shopping list and went to Lowe’s. Lowe’s had a very clever Automax self-adjusting face clamp with a 6″ reach. It was a little pricier than the 3″ version which was a little pricier than the 3″ manual adjust version, but the size and auto adjustment feature swayed my decision.

On the drive back to house I had a nice QSO with Steve (N8AR) on the South Lyon 2m repeater. When I got home I had some wasabi/soy almonds and sourdough pretzel nibblers with hummus for lunch.

Returning to the bus work I cleaned the tile in the cockpit using Armstrong Once ‘n Done and rinsed it with a clean sponge and warm water. I then returned to working on attaching the walnut veneered plywood to the face of the pantry. I decided which piece to use for the longer bottom section and which portion of the other piece to use for the top section. In the shop I clamped each piece in turn to a 2×4, set the Boca saw guide, and trimmed them to length.

The 1/4″ walnut veneered plywood clamped to the front of the pull-out pantry.

Back in the bus I applied the bottom piece first. It was slightly curled, lengthwise, so after applying Titebond II glue to the back I positioned it using the two Automax face clamps and then used C-clamps with scrap pieces of underlayment to hold it flat while protecting the veneer. I then installed #6 5/8″ SR screws from the back to secure the face plywood. I installed the upper panel using the same procedure.

We are using the same handle for the pantry that we have used throughout the bus. Jarel made a 4-1/2″ by 8″ piece of 3/4″ walnut with coved edges to serve as a decorative base for the handle and to cover the joint between the upper and lower pieces of veneered plywood. I marked the vertical centerline on the back and then marked two holes on 3″ centers, centered vertically. I selected a 1/8″ drill bit, which was slightly larger in diameter than the #8-32 machine screws used to secure the handle, and drilled the holes from the back side using a block of 2×4 as a drill guide to make sure I went straight through the board. (A drill press would obviously have been the correct way to drill these holes, and I have one, but it is buried behind other things where I cannot get to it.)

I clamped the decorative base to the front of the pantry centered horizontally and vertically on the joint between the two veneered panels. Using the handle mounting holes I drilled all the way through the front of the pantry. I bought special handle mounting screws the other night that are 2″ long but can be broken off at 1/4″ intervals. I needed a 1-3/4″ length, so I inserted the screws through the holes from the back and broke off the first section with a pair of pliers. I screwed them into the handle, temporarily securing the block. I then drilled four countersunk holes from the inside of the pantry into the back of the decorative block and secured it with 1-1/4″ self-drilling screws. I left all of the other clamps in place while the glue dried.

The only thing I did not get done on the pull-out pantry was attaching the door stop to the bottom of the face. I will take care of that tomorrow.

Linda called at 3:30 PM to let me know she was on her way home. I started working on remounting the accelerator pedal. I got the pieces of old tile that were installed in that area and used them as templates to mark the location of the mounting holes.

Yesterday I discovered a grease fitting on the steering column. It is located towards the center front of the bus about 8″ up from the floor. Joe has never put grease in this fitting when he has serviced the chassis and for all I know it may not have been greased since it left the factory. I wanted to get some grease into this fitting before I remounted the steering column shroud but I did not have a grease gun so I put that on my next shopping list.

Linda got home a little quicker than usual due to lighter than normal traffic. After changing into her work clothes and grabbing some pretzels for a snack she came out to the bus to help. I set the accelerator pedal upside down on top of the brake pedal to get it out of the way and drilled holes at the three points I had marked. Linda handled the vacuum cleaner as we are trying to keep the coach clean. I set the accelerator pedal where it belonged and started the three lag screws by hand. Linda then held the pedal up while I tightened the three screws with a socket and ratchet. I also drilled a small hole for a screw to secure the cable clamp on the accelerator wiring harness and installed that by hand as there was no room for the Rigid drill/driver.

I did not want to install the steering column shroud until I had greased the fitting but I went ahead and installed the base bracket. Again using an old tile as a template I lightly marked two of the five holes. I removed the old tile, set the bracket in place, and lined it up with the two marks. I then marked the other three holes. I selected a suitable drill bit, smaller than the diameter of the screws, and drilled through the tile and a little ways into the plywood below. The screws were 5/8″ pan head Philips so I installed them by hand.

It was finally time to install the two front seats. We got the base/pedestals from the library and checked to make sure the paint was dry. It was, so we moved them to the bus. I was going to install the driver’s seat first but the 3/4″ holes I had drilled in the tile when I installed it were not big enough. Actually, they were exactly the right size if they had been in exactly the right place. I needed to enlarge them to 1″ but did not have a 1″ drill bit. I added that to my shopping list and we proceeded to install the passenger seat.

I set the base over the four captive mounting bolts and put a large/thick washer over each one followed by a substantial lock washer and finally a nut. I ran the nuts down by hand as far as I could and then used a socket and ratchet to snug them down.

By now it was half past dark. We needed dinner and stuff for the bus so we headed to Lowe’s where I bought a 1″ twist drill with a 1/2″ shank. We then went to the new Panera, on the same property as Lowe’s and Walmart, for dinner. This Panera had a different look and feel than the older ones, which a much smaller bakery section, but the food and coffee were the same and were good. After dinner I drove across the street to O’Reilly’s Auto Parts and bought a grease gun.

On the drive home I decided to defer greasing the steering column until tomorrow. Our priority was getting the driver’s seat installed. I used the 1″ twist drill bit in our 1/2″ Craftsman drill to enlarge the four holes. The base/pedestal has 1″ long alignment tubes on the underside so the holes in the tile and underlying plywood had to be big enough to allow for less than perfect positioning. With the holes enlarged I dropped the base in place, set a large washer over each hole, and threaded the new bolts into holes in the structure of the bus. That was the end of the bus work for today. We retired to the basement recreation room and watched NCIS and NCISNOLA before going to bed.

2015/11/16 (M) Tiling the Cockpit, #3

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Linda planned to go to the bakery today but decided yesterday to stay home and help me instead. Based on the 10-day forecast this looks like our last decent weather day to work on the bus and we wanted/needed to make the most of it.

We had breakfast at 8 AM (granola with blueberries and a banana) and had a cup of Stash China Black tea. I had a text message from Kristine Gullen regarding getting together with her and Jim on Saturday and replied in the affirmative. We finished our tea by 8:30 and got to work.

I really wanted to finish tiling the cockpit of the bus, or at least as much of it as we could. That meant cutting and fitting tiles for the stair treads and risers and the two side walls of the entry steps, gluing them in place, and then grouting all of them. We needed to mount the table if possible and I also needed to build a new step for the platform. That was a lot to get done in one day and even before we started I doubted that we would get it all done.

When we opened the bus we were surprised to find that the tiles on the walls of the platform had slipped all the way down to the floor tiles. Obviously I should not have removed the spacers right after installing the tiles and should have to left them in place for any horizontal grout spaces on vertical surfaces. Oh well, not much to do about it now.

Keith called to see if he should come and mulch the leaves one last time. The weather the last few days had been very nice, unseasonably warm and dry. Today was also a beautiful day but the forecast going forward was for much cooler and wetter conditions, so this was an ideal day for our last lawn mowing of the 2015 season.

We measured and cut the tiles for the face of the platform and out to the door. At that point I evaluated what I needed to do to complete the job. Basically, I needed to cut all of the tiles for the entry steps and walls and then install them from the bottom up. Every piece of tile was going to be smaller than a full 16″x 16″ tile and custom cut so even though the square footage was not that much there would be more pieces than usual and it was obviously going to take quite a bit of time to get all of the pieces ready to install. I thought we could be ready for adhesive in two hours but Linda figured it would be at least three. It also meant working with the door open which would make it difficult to keep the interior as warm as we needed.

Phil showed up with his excavator and a dozen bales of straw. I knew the excavator was for a different job as he did not have anything left to do at our place that required it. He was here to finish covering the topsoil and grass seed with the straw. We took a break to go talk to him and confirmed that he was done with the driveway and French drain projects except for the straw. He staged the bales where he needed them but said he had to leave to dig a perk test hole at 1:30 PM and would be back mid-afternoon to finish spreading the straw around.

Linda suggested that we go ahead a grout all of the tile we had already installed. I was more emotionally invested in completing the tile work than Linda but had to agree that this was the prudent thing to do. Until the tile was grouted we could not reinstall the accelerator, the steering column shroud, the seat bases, and the seats, so grouting the tile was clearly a critical path item and that is what we did. It was after noon by the time we finished so we took a break for lunch. Phil had taken off by this time to go dig the test pit.

Lunch was grilled vegan Italian sausage on a bun with mustard and relish and black grapes on the side. Keith finished up mowing the yard while we were enjoying a cup of Rooibos tea. We paid him and chatted about next year. I gave him our approximate timeframe for returning home from Florida and asked him to go ahead and start mowing next spring whether or not we were here. We have had Keith take care of our lawn since we bought our house in the country and he has been very good about doing that when we are away and allowing us to catch up with him when we get back.

By the time we got back to work on the bus it was after 1 PM and I had to concede that we were done working on the tile until next spring except for cleaning them, which had to wait until tomorrow as the grout has to cure for 24 hours before final cleaning. With that decision made we considered what else needed to be done and in what order.

The first order of business was painting the two front seat bases black. We spread out painter’s plastic on the driveway and taped it down. We set the bases there and then masked off the top portion with the swivel bearings and mounting bolt. We wire brushed the bases to remove rust and then went over them with a sanding sponge. I used a cleaner/degreaser and water to clean them and then gave them a coat of black rubberized undercoating paint.

The next order of business was getting all of the tools and materials that we no longer needed out of the bus to give us room to work on other things. On Saturday I re-installed the bump out on the walnut cover for the passenger side HVAC duct. The duct needed to have two 4″ holes drilled in it to match the holes in the metal duct, so that was the next task. I measured very carefully and transferred the measurements to the face of the cover with equal care. Even so, I was off slightly and had to use the sheet metal nibbler to enlarge the bottom of each hole. At least I had a relatively straightforward way to fix this problem; I am not always so lucky.

With the holes enlarged we put the cover in place. The 4″ round plastic registers fit through the wood into the duct but not all the way due to two tabs. I trimmed the tabs off using the Porter-Cable oscillating saw and trimmed a little bit off of one of the outer mounting flanges to make it fit flush. I drilled holes through the two mounting holes on each register using the #5-6 self-centering drill bit and secured them with #6-5/8″ SR screws. We then removed the two temporary black plastic registers from the front of the built in sofa. I trimmed the tabs off of two new brown ones and installed them using the same procedure as the first two.

In the grand scheme of things getting the cover in place and the four registers installed was a small task but it needed to be done and stood in the way of other things. The cover has been stored on top of the two front seats, which have been lying on their backs on the kitchen floor of the bus for weeks. We plan to re-install the seats late tomorrow afternoon.

Two more small, but critical, tasks were securing the pull-out pantry and the refrigerator. I have assumed for quite a while that we would secure the pantry for travel with some form of sliding latch but had not thought about it in any detail. We also needed to secure the refrigerator but I had not thought about this in any detail either. As we pondered the pantry latch it slowly became obvious that we did not have enough wood for a strike plate to receive a pin and we did not have two unobstructed surfaces that were in the same plane, which would be required for the kind of latch I had been thinking about.

As for the refrigerator, one of our bus nut friends secured their unit by running mounting bolts (machine screws) through the floor of the cabinet above the fridge and threading them into the unused tapped holes provided for the upper door hinge (if it was reversed) . After looking at it for a while we realized that we could attach a section of small angle to the inside of the right alcove wall with the other side just against the face of the fridge case but not over so far as to interfere with the door gasket. My measurements indicated that a 1/2″x3/4″ angle would be just right. It looked to me like two 12″ pieces, one by the freezer door and one by the bottom of the fresh food compartment door, would be more than adequate to keep the refrigerator from rolling out as it cannot shift sideways or twist due to the aluminum angle on the left/hinge side at the floor.

About this time Phil returned in a red pickup truck. He finished distributing the straw and loaded three unused bales into the back of his truck. He pulled up in the main drive and we invited him into the bus to see what we had been working on all summer. It is always a pleasure working with Phil. If/when we build a barn we will have him do all of the site prep and finish grading. He will figure out the final cost for the driveway extension and French drain and send us an invoice.

Linda prepared an easy but tasty dinner consisting of a nice green salad, mixed frozen vegetables (corn, peas, and carrots) suitably reheated, and mac-n-cheese that was both dairy-free and gluten-free. After dinner we went to Lowe’s and The Home Depot. At Lowe’s we bought a 1/16″ thick 1/2″x 3/4″ aluminum angle and three 8 foot lengths of brass colored nose edging but did not find a latch that we liked. At The Home Depot we bought some screws for securing the handle on the front of the pull-out pantry and a solid brass door stop to keep the pantry in place. The door stop folds up when not in use and should work to keep the pantry closed while traveling.

Although the new Panera on the southwest corner of Grand River Avenue and Latson Road was finally open for business we stopped at Teeko’s Coffee and Tea on the northeast corner of that intersection. Jeff was there and took our order for eight pounds of coffee beans. We got two pounds each of Ethiopian Yirgacheffe, regular and decaffeinated, the Seattle Blend (regular), and the Sweet Dreams blend (decaffeinated). They will roast the beans and then let them outgas for a few days before vacuum sealing them in half-pound portions. This allows us to take them with us in the bus and keep them very fresh until we are ready to use them and to change what we are drinking more often.

We got home just after 8 PM and took our iPads downstairs to use while we watched our Monday evening CBS TV programs. We caught the weather forecast and then headed to bed. It looks like we will have two more days with unseasonably high temperatures near 60 degrees F but with intermittent rain and then a serious cooling trend with highs this weekend barely above freezing. Our time for working on the bus and being in Michigan is definitely running out.

2015/11/15 (N) Tiling the Cockpit, #2

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Having had a larger than normal meal later than usual last night, and gotten to bed later than usual, we did not get up this morning until a little after 8 AM. I made coffee but we were not hungry. By the time we finished our coffee it was approaching 10 AM but once we got to work in the bus we were on task until 7:30 PM with only a short lunch break at 1:15 PM.

Bruce dry fits floor tiles on the navigator seat platform. (Photo by Linda.)

We cut and dry fit the tiles for the platform floor and walls. We had to take time out to use the oscillating saw to undercut the bottom edge of the face board on the passenger side front vertical wiring chase. With all the tile cut and fitted we determined the order in which we would install them. We started with the platform floor and the first six tiles of the landing. I also had to fashion some shims to make sure the tile in the driver-side rear corner of the platform would be installed in exactly the right location. This would be the first tile installed and if it was even slightly misaligned it would throw all of the other tiles off.

Bruce spreads Armstrong vinyl adhesive on the navigator platform. (Photo by Linda.)

I marked the edges of all the tiles on the underlayment and then we pulled them up in the reverse order of installation. Linda prepared some soapy water to use for cleanup of the tools and tiles. I spread the Armstrong vinyl adhesive and Linda cleaned the trowels when I was done. We waited for it to cure to the point where we could set the tiles. Even with two heaters going in the front of the bus the adhesive took about 50 minutes to cure to where it would not transfer when touched. Once it reached that point we had roughly an hour to set the tiles but it only took about 20 minutes to install them. I used a large rubber mallet to help set them, pulled the spacers, wiped the edges with a wet paper towel, and then walked on them in lieu of using a 100 pound floor roller which would have been awkward at best to use on such a small area and not worth the time and expense to rent from The Home Depot in Howell.

Bruce installs intricately cut floor tiles in the cramped front of the driver’s area. (Photo by Linda.)

As soon as the first group of tiles was installed we pulled up the remainder of the floor tiles from the landing and driver area. Linda got some paper grocery bags and painter’s tape and masked off the platform floor along the back and side wall. I spread adhesive on all of those areas and then Linda once again cleaned the tools. Approximately 50 minutes from when I started spreading adhesive l started setting the tiles and about 20 minutes after that they were all installed. Once again I used a large rubber mallet to help set them, pulled the spacers, and wiped the edges with a wet paper towel. I walked on the floor tiles but had no way to further set the wall tiles.

We were done by 7:30 PM. Linda cleaned up the tools and water bucket while I closed up the bus. She started fixing diner and I got out of my work clothes and put on my robe. Dinner was a nice salad and an Amy’s Roasted Vegetable Pizza; vegan, of course. We finished the Organic Natural White wine from Frey, but we did not necessarily enjoy it.

Following dinner we relaxed in the living room for a while and I responded to a series of text messages from Kristine Gullen. I missed the SLAARC information net at 8 PM because it just slipped my mind. We were in bed by 10 PM and I watched Part 1 of the 2-part PBS American Experience program on Walt Disney while I finished this post.

2015/11/14 (S) Tiling the Cockpit, #1

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I was up at 6:30 AM and got a shower. Linda got up closer to 7 and we were on our way to our ham radio club breakfast by 7:20; but not before I released two more mice. Either we have a significant colony living nearby or the same few animals are finding their way back into the house. We find it hard to believe, however, that if they are returning they would re-enter the trap.

We had a good showing for breakfast, minus a few regulars due to the ham fest in Ft. Wayne, Indiana today and tomorrow. We were the second two people to arrive so we got to sit across from the other Bruce and Linda. They are leaving for their new place in Florida before the next breakfast so the next time we see them will be in the Sunshine State. We had a lot of work to do on the bus this weekend so we did not linger over breakfast and were on our way home by 9:15 AM.

The seat cushions and spacer cushion for the built-in sofa in the bus.

By 10 AM we were working on the floor tile for the front of our motorcoach, which I often refer to here as the “cockpit” as a convenient shorthand. In a sense the cockpit consists of several sub-areas. I think of the “entry” as consisting of the stairs and the first landing. At the same level as the landing is the “driver’s area.” I sometimes refer to this as the pilot’s seat as most of the controls for operating the bus when it is in motion are located here. The dashboard, however, extends into the landing area and contains controls for some of the house systems.

One step up from the landing level is the “front passenger seat platform” which I often refer to as “the platform” as a convenient shorthand. The portion of the platform closest to the entry door side of the bus is where the front passenger seat is located, which I sometimes refer to as the co-pilot and/or navigator seat. It’s really not a co-pilot seat as you cannot operate the bus from there, so navigator is really the more appropriate term. In the center of the platform, and extending towards the driver’s side of the bus, is a step which gets you up to the main floor level.

Because the pilot and navigator seats are on different levels from the main floor those seats are not usable as part of the living room, making the front portion of the interior a distinct and dedicated space with its own character, much like a cockpit in an airplane or ship. Nonetheless, we used the same fabric on the these two seats as we did on all of the other living room furniture and we are using the same tile on the floors and walls as we used on the main floor.

Bruce uses the heat gun to soften a piece of the floor tile so he can cut it. (Photo by Linda. )

We worked from 10 AM until almost 4 PM measuring, cutting, and dry fitting the tiles for the landing and driver’s area. The driver’s area in particular took a lot of time as every tile had to have something special done to it. Intricate curves had to be cut to fit around the steering column, brake pedal, and the perimeter of the area and holes had to be drilled for the seat base bolts. All of this intricate trimming was done by heating the back side of the tiles with a heat gun (much hotter than a hair dryer) and cutting the softened tile with a razor knife.

We quit working for the day at 3:45 PM and changed clothes. By 4:15 we were on our way to meet John and Diane Rauch at the Livonia 20 Cineplex on Seven Mile Road just west of I-275 for a 5 PM movie. Ever since Daniel Craig started playing the role of James Bond in the 007 movies we have gone to see them with John and Diane not long after opening day. After the movie we went to the Macaroni Grill, which is walking distance from the theater on the northeast corner of the intersection of Seven Mile Road and Haggerty Road.

We had to wait awhile for a table but we had plenty to talk about and the time passed quickly enough. We were seated by 8:20 PM and finally left our table at 10:20. We started with bread, olive oil, and wine. We split a two liter bottle of the Chianti house red wine. It was priced the same as five glasses, but we each had more than two glasses, so it was a good deal. All four of us had a “make your own pasta” dish with a salad, and each one of us chose a different pasta and add-ins. I had linguine with a garlic olive oil sauce, mushrooms, tomatoes, and fresh spinach. Linda had farfalle (bow tie) pasta with arrabiata (spicy tomato) sauce, garlic, mushrooms, and spinach. Both dishes were well prepared and tasty, and they were vegan!

I stopped at our local Shell station to fill the fuel tank in Linda’s car and it was a little after 11 PM when we got home. We had another mouse in the trap so I took the trap to woods on the southwest part of our property and released it. Back inside I went straight to bed. It had been a long but productive and enjoyable day that ended with too much food and too much wine too late in the evening but we were glad to have had a wonderful conversation with our longest standing Michigan friends.

2015/11/13 (F) Road Trip

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I set my alarm for 5:30 AM and got up when it went off. I got dressed quietly, fed the cats, refilled their water fountain, and took my allergy pill and B-12 vitamin. I used a plastic bag to pack a change of underwear and socks, a basic oral hygiene kit, my iPad, my checkbook, and my phone charger cable. I loaded my travel bag and walnut pieces into the car and then checked the mousetraps in the pantry. One of them had two mice in it. It was still pitch dark outside so I drove to the end of the new driveway, parked with my headlights pointing across the road, took the trap to other side of the road, and released them. They went scurrying off into the thick undergrowth of the woods and I drove back to the house. I left the trap on the front porch and went inside to wash my hands.

I finally left on my road trip to Indiana at 6:20 AM. I needed fuel so I headed south on Hacker Road and stopped at the Shell Station on Grand River Avenue at I-96. There is a Dunkin Donuts co-located with the station so I got an extra-large coffee and was on my way. I decided to head east a couple of miles on I-96 and then south on US-23 to Ann Arbor where I picked up I-94 west. I took I-94 as far as I-69 and then headed south. Somewhere along this segment I realized I had forgotten the box with the two swivel ring bearings. That meant I would not be stopping at Coach Supply Direct in Edwardsburg, Michigan to return them, which would save me time but necessitate getting them back to Josh another time and/or another way.

The change in plans would loosen up my schedule a bit but I still had four stops to make and was anxious to make time. I stayed on I-69 south into Indiana and then took the Indiana Toll Road (I-80/90) west. Traveling west there is one travel plaza between I-69 and the SR-19 exit. I stopped there to use the restroom and get another cup of coffee. Back in my car I called Josh to let him know I would not be stopping by his shop today in Edwardsburg. I then called Linda to update her on my whereabouts and change in plans. She said she would take care of getting the box with the swivel ring bearings ready to mail.

The weather was overcast, drizzly, cool, and windy when I left this morning. The winds were out of the west so I had a crosswind or a headwind for the entire trip down. By the time I reached Indiana I had driven out from under the cloud cover. The temperature remained very cool but the sunshine was refreshing.

My first stop was A-1 Upholstery in Elkhart, Indiana. Much to my surprise Terry had used the exact same fabric for the filler cushion that we had her use for all of the other ones, so it was a perfect match! I got a call from Josh while I was there and called him back as soon as I left, but got his voice mail.

My next stop was at Pat and Vickie Lintners’ house, about three miles from A-1 Upholstery, to pick up a critical accessory piece for the built-in Nutone multi-function kitchen appliance. We have a functional power base built in to our kitchen counter in the bus but only had the blender attachment. Vickie gave us a number of other attachments at a rally back in September but many of them required a right angle tower adapter. She had found the adapter a few weeks after the rally.

From Pat and Vickie’s I backtracked to the main north-south road, went south back over the St. Joseph River, and headed west on Old US-33 (Lincolnway). I got a call back from Josh and he said to stay on my current road all the way to the Mishawaka bypass and then head south to US-20. From there I was on familiar road as I headed west to US-31 south. Michele Henry from Phoenix Paint had called while I was at Pat and Vickie’s and I let it go to voice mail. I called her back when I was done talking to Josh. They had both called me with some recent scuttlebutt about a service facility in Elkhart where friends of ours had some major remodeling work done on their vintage bus, but it was also a chance to catch up on things in general and helped pass the time as I drove.

I stopped in Argos for fuel and called Bill Tharpe with an ETA of 12:30 PM. I then called Jarel to let him know I would be there by 1:30 PM. Butch had driven me past Bill’s place once some time ago so I had a fairly good understanding of where it was and what it looked like; not that I needed it. Given the address my Garmin 465T GPS unit took me right to Bill’s place on Mexico Road south of Mexico and north of Peru. Sounds like I was in Central America.

Bill was outside waiting for me and we unloaded the antique SUN Electric Distributor Tester from my car and into Butch’s truck, which Bill had for the winter. He was headed to his building in Wabash, where he has a paint booth, to repaint the truck so we did not chat for very long. Besides, I still had one more stop and it would take at least a couple of hours.

A couple of miles on down Mexico Road I headed west on US-24 towards Logansport and arrived at Jarel Beatty’s cabinet shop at 1 PM. Jarel was not expecting me until 1:30 so he was in the middle of cutting dados in side panels for a tall cabinet. When he finished that task he switched to a regular blade in his table saw to work on my pieces.

We selected the most suitable pieces of walnut from among the ones I brought. He ripped two pieces, one 2″ wide and the other 2-1/16″ wide, and crosscut them to 19-11/16″ long. He then ran them through his shaper to round off the edges. He changed the blade on his table saw, reset the depth of cut, and set the fence to cut off the amount of material I had marked with blue painter’s tape on the bump out for the passenger side HVAC duct cover. With the sawing done he sanded the two new pieces and then sprayed them with a Sherwin-Williams pre-catalyzed lacquer. He let the first coat dry for 15 minutes and then lightly sanded it with 220 grit paper to knock down tiny bubbles and splatters. He then applied a second coat. It was remarkable to see how it changed the appearance of the wood. Jarel described it as being like “putting water on a rock” and I thought that was an apt description.

After another 15 minutes the pieces were dry enough to be transported without damaging them. I wrapped things up with Jarel, including finally remembering to get all of my drawings back, and was ready to leave at 3 PM. The GPS said I would be home by 7 PM, quite a bit earlier than I expected when I left this morning.

I had smooth sailing until I encountered a major traffic jam on I-96 eastbound just east of US-127 on the southeast corner of Lansing, Michigan. It took 45 minutes to go three miles and I was sitting at about 1/8 tank of fuel. Ugh. There turned out to be multi-car accidents in two separate locations about a mile apart plus a car stopped in the right lane that appeared to have run out of fuel. What a mess.

Once I was clear of the accident area it was clear sailing once again. I stopped at the Marathon station at the Fowlerville exit (#127) for fuel and checked out the truck pumps. Although there were lots of semi’s parked there for the night I was disappointed to find that the back lot was in as bad a shape as the Mobil Truck Stop at exit 117. Still, the round trip from our house would be 20 minutes shorter and it was an alternative place to get fuel. The closest place to our house where we can fuel the bus is actually the Marathon station on Grand River Avenue at I-96 in Brighton, which has truck pumps around back, but we have some low branches in the southbound lane of Hacker Road just before we get to Grand River Avenue, so we tend to avoid that route and that stretch of Grand River Avenue is often very busy and not someplace I want to be with the bus unless it is later at night.

I checked the mousetrap in the pantry when I got home and we had caught yet another mouse. I unloaded the car and then took the mouse trap to the end of the new driveway and released it across the road as I had done with the previous four. As I walked down the driveway it was obvious that Phil had been here with his bulldozer, which Linda confirmed over dinner.

The “parking pad” area is now presumably level but it was definitely not flat as it had deep marks from the bulldozer treads and ridges where the gravel had not been completely smoothed out. The top inch or so also seemed very loose. I don’t think Phil is done working on the project as he still needs to spread straw over all of the topsoil that he placed, graded, and seeded the other day. I suspect that he still needs to compact the gravel one last time with his track loader but I won’t know for sure until I can talk to him.

Dinner was chili and crackers; simple but delicious. It had been a long day but I had taken care of four things in one trip, three of which were directly related to the bus and two of those of a somewhat critical nature. We were both off to bed not long after dinner. Tomorrow was our weekly ham radio breakfast so we would have to be up early to get there on time.

2015/11/12 (R) Unforced Solutions

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When I got up at 7 AM Linda had already left for the bakery. I had granola for breakfast and made a cup of Stash China Black hot tea. I went to my office and processed the photo that Byron sent me of him and Betty and e-mailed it to Gary and Jorge at Bus Conversion Magazine. I then replied to an e-mail from Nancy (& Big Bill). We met them at Suncoast Designers in Hudson, Florida in April 2014. They are from Ontario but have a place near Ocala, Florida where they spend at least part of the winter. I also replied to an e-mail from the Mitch in Florida regarding good places for bus service and forwarded my reply to Chuck. I cleaned the kitty litter tray and finally got to work on the bus.

A piece of scrap SurePly underlayment used as a spacer/guide for the Porter-Cable oscillating saw to undercut he bottom edge of the side wall panel so it can be removed above the floor tile.

First up was to finish screwing the down the SurePly underlayment on the floor of the passenger seat platform. With that done I turned my attention to trimming the switch panel next to the passenger seat. This panel is just 1/4″ walnut veneered plywood but has both AC and DC switches mounted in a row across the entire top portion. The added thickness of the underlayment and tile on the floor and back wall of the platform required the bottom and back edges of the panel to be trimmed so it could be installed and removed in case I need to get to the wiring behind it. I used pieces of underlayment as spacers/guides and trimmed off the edges using the Porter-Cable oscillating saw. This was the perfect tool for this situation where I could not remove the panel and take it to the shop.

With the panel trimmed and the sawdust vacuumed up I turned my attention to the tile. After test fitting some pieces to see where the edges would land I decided to tidy up the front of the bus so it would be easier to work. While that was certainly true it was also a tactic of stepping away from the work and letting solutions float into consciousness rather than trying to force them out. After several trips to bring things inside the house and garage it was noon and time for lunch, which meant more time to relax and let my subconscious work on the tile layout. Hummus and sourdough pretzel nibblers made a quick, easy, tasty meal and a cup of Constant Comment decaffeinated tea helped wash it down and warm me up while I worked on this post.

Two scrap pieces of the Armstrong Alterna Luxury Vinyl tile used as feeler gauges to make sure the side wall switch panel will clear the floor and rear wall tiles.

As long as I was taking a break I called Pat/Vickie Lintner to let them know I would be coming through Elkhart tomorrow (Friday) and verify that they would be home in the morning. That sounded fine to Pat. I will be picking up an accessory for a Nutone power base unit from them. We have one of the power bases installed in the kitchen counter of the bus but the blender was the only accessory that came with the bus when we bought it. Pat and Vickie had a power base in their bus but it broke years ago. They never replaced it, and don’t plan to, so they no longer needed the accessories and were willing to give them to us. We got most of the pieces from them at the GLCC Surplus and Salvage Rally back in September but we were missing a critical piece which Vickie thought she still had and eventually found.

After my break I reinstalled the large front trim board on the driver side vertical wiring/plumbing chase that is located on the outside wall next to the back of the driver’s chair. I don’t recall how I got it out but I could not get it back in. I ended up trimming off a small protrusion on the lower end and then it went into position without any further difficulty. It was a small thing, but it needed to be done and it was good to get it checked off my (mental) “to do” list. When I cannot solve the problem I am trying to solve (tile layout) I try to keep moving and get other small tasks completed.

I took a few more minutes to carefully measure the adjustment needed to the bump out on the passenger side HVAC duct cover and the dimensions for the two new pieces of walnut that will go on either side of the sofa seat. I brought the old pieces in the house and found the leftover walnut in the garage as I have to take some of it with me tomorrow to Jarel’s cabinet shop in Logansport, Indiana. I think an hour of my day disappeared between these small, simple tasks.

I continued to ponder the tile layout for quite some time, taking and retaking measurements as I tried to figure out an arrangement that would allow the joints to fall in reasonable places while making sure I could notch around things that go through the floor and avoid having any small pieces. That is a lot of constraints. The arrangement I finally came up with had three full 16×16 tiles centered on the landing and into the driver area. There will be pieces about six inches wide along the fore and aft edges, and the first full tile will also be about six inches back from the edge of the landing (by the entry stairs). The joints (grout lines) resulting from this placement will continue up the front of the passenger seat platform and result in tile placements on the platform that should work out well.

Linda called at 4:15 PM to let me know she was on her way home from the bakery and was stopping at Kathi’s on the way. I was done working in the bus for the day so I adjusted the thermostats on the heaters and checked the house battery bank status. The battery bank voltage was at 25.0 VDC, just slightly down from the 25.2 V level of a fully charged and rested “24 V” lead acid battery (2.1 V per cell x 12 cells in series). The State Of Charge (SOC) was at 84% and I decided to leave the charger off until Saturday morning after breakfast. I did have the shorepower turned off for a few hours Wednesday so the refrigerator was running on the inverter for a while but there are no DC loads operating in the coach at the moment and the Magnum remote is showing zero current coming out of the battery bank. There must be some loads, however, as the battery SOC wound not drop that much that quickly due to self-discharge. I locked up the bus, went in the house for the evening, and turned on the outside lights for Linda. Given when she left the office I knew it would be dark by the time she got home.

I took a few pictures throughout the day so I went to my office and off-loaded them onto my computer. I had an e-mail from Gary at BCM with the latest markup of the PDF for the December 2015 issue. I proofread my article and highlighted a half dozen things that needed to be changed, using the sticky note feature for the first time to indicate the corrections, and e-mailed it back to Gary and Jorge.

Linda got home about the time I clicked ‘send’ so I wrapped up my desk work and went upstairs. She had not been grocery shopping this week and wasn’t sure what to fix for dinner so I suggested vegan pancakes. Fifteen minutes later we were enjoying flapjacks with real maple syrup and cups of hot tea. Breakfast for dinner is always a treat. We spent a little time in the living room by the fireplace and then went to the rec room to watch a few TV programs while we doodled on our iPads. We have been trying to break the habit of watching TV in bed but we finished watching the last show in bed and then turned out the lights. In a reversal of our recent usual morning routine I have to be up early and Linda does not, but she still fell asleep before I did.

2015/11/11 (W) Two for One

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We had late morning dentist/hygiene appointments today so Linda did not get up early to go to the bakery and we slept in and got up at 8:30 AM. We showered and dressed and finally had granola for breakfast at 9:15. She made this batch of granola yesterday and it was very yummy.

Since the mice have recently been defeating our simple live traps I cleaned our more complicated one yesterday and set it up last night with a broken open peanut butter pretzel for bait. When I checked the trap this morning it had two brown field mice inside. They were anxious to get out and I was glad to oblige. I set them free in the southwest part of our property on the other side of the road. The last I saw of them they were headed south into dense cover and away from the house.

Our appointments were at 11 AM in Dearborn. Linda left at 9:45 and I followed about five minutes later. We took separate cars since she had to go to the bakery following her appointment. Before I left I checked on the state of charge of the house batteries in the bus. There were at 95% SOC. I turned the charger off last night to let the battery bank drain down a little. I turned off the Broan cube heater and the three toe-kick heaters and then shutoff the AC power coming into the coach. I checked that the inverter was working, which it was, and left for my appointment.

We both had good checkups but Linda will need a crown in the spring. A tooth with an old filling had weakened and needs to be capped. The dental assistants/hygienists have started taking blood pressure readings as part of modern dentistry’s role in monitoring and promoting overall health. I don’t know how accurate the wrist cuff machines are but my blood pressure was 121/59 and Linda’s was 128/67, which are excellent readings if they are even close to being correct.

On the way home I stopped at the new Menard’s on Wixom Road just north of I-96. I was looking for 1/2×2″ fine thread carriage bolts but all they had were coarse thread in longer lengths. As long as I was there I picked up a 6-pack of work socks and two more of the good live traps like the one we already have.

Back at the house I called Terry at A-1 Upholstery to confirm that our spacer cushion for the bus sofa was ready and that she would be there Friday morning. Her response was affirmative on both counts. I then called Josh to verify that he would be at his shop on Friday morning and he said he would. I need to stop there on the way to A-1 Upholstery and return two swivel seat ring bearings.

The new gravel driveway extension and RV parking pad. Phil, on the left side of the driveway by the nearer utility pole, rakes out the topsoil he placed along both sides of the driveway.

Philip Jarrell from Precision Grading was here working on the driveway extension when I got home. After my phone calls I changed into my work clothes and went out to chat with him for a few minutes. Phil had brought another load of screened topsoil and was using his track loader to place it along the sides of the driveway extension and at the west end of the property where the French drain begins. He rough graded it with the track loader and then raked it out by hand and spread grass seed. He will bring straw bales with him on a subsequent trip to cover the soil/seed but he wanted to get the seed down before he left as we have rain and wind forecast starting late this evening and through tomorrow into Friday.

I finally got to work in the bus at 2 PM. My objective was to get the SurePly underlayment installed on the passenger seat platform floor. I lightly sanded the floor patch compound I spread around last night and vacuumed up the particles. I then mounted the head of each of the new carriage bolts to a thick plastic washer using 3M Heavy Duty (double-sided) Mounting Tape. I slid the heads into the two mounting channels with the washers under them so the washers held the bolts up off of the bottom of the channel and forced the square collars up in the open slot of the channel where they could not turn when a nut was tightened on them. This was a critical step because once the underlayment and tile are down I will not be able to get to the heads of these bolts.

With the bolts in position I got the piece of SurePly from the garage. I was starting to slip it into position when I remembered that I installed an angle bracket yesterday but had not cut out a small piece of the underlayment to fit around it. So I took the piece back to the garage, cut out the necessary space, and took it back to the coach. I am starting to wonder how many hours I would have saved by having a proper shop set up right outside the front door of the bus.

[ Photo 2 of 2 – HR – The SurePly underlayment on the co-pilot/navigator platform floor showing how it fits under the outside wall panel and over the four mounting bolts for the seat. ]

The SurePly underlayment on the co-pilot/navigator platform floor showing how it fits under the outside wall panel and over the four mounting bolts for the seat.

The underlayment slipped under the switch panel by the outside wall and dropped over the four mounting bolts just like I planned it, so taking most of yesterday to carefully cut and drill the piece paid off in the end. That felt good, especially in comparison to how yesterday felt.

The weather today was lovely, reaching a high of 58 degrees F with sunny skies and I am sure that added to by general sense of well-being. Our part of Michigan is under a high wind warning starting this evening, however, with maximum gusts of 55 to 60 MPH possible. It’s a good thing we have a whole house generator because those kinds of winds cause power outages.

I decided to screw the underlayment to the bus floor rather than use staples. Again, I did not want to get the big air-compressor and staple gun out, but I also wanted to use the screws to pull the underlayment down tight to the bus sub-floor. I was about 50% done when I saw that Phil was putting his track loader back on the trailer. I thought he was packing up to leave so I went out to talk to him briefly. I went back to the bus and got another 25% of the piece screwed down before I ran out of screws. I was using primarily 1″ #6-SR self-drilling screws with some 1-1/4″ of the same kind. Once again my work was halted short of completion by the lack of some small part.

Phil was finished and on his way at 4:15 PM and by 4:30 I was headed to Lowe’s. Linda texted me that she was leaving the bakery and I had a nice QSO with Tom (K8TAF) while running my errand. Lowe’s only had one pack of the 1″ screws, quantity 100, but I thought that might be enough to get me through tomorrow. I also bought a pack of 100 1-1/4″ screws.

For dinner Linda cooked a couple of yams, heated up a couple of vegan sausages with sautéed onions and red peppers, and steamed some fresh green beans. Yum, yum, yum. After dinner we sat in the living room for a while using our iPads. At 8 PM we watched a few nature and science programs on PBS. Jarel called to confirm when I was coming down to Logansport, Indiana and said that Friday would work. Linda is headed back to the bakery in the morning so she went right to sleep after we were done watching TV.

2015/11/10 (T) A Rainy Day

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I checked the TV weather station before I turned off the lights last night. Rain covered most of Indiana and Ohio and was moving northeast. We were going to get clipped by the western edge of the moisture but the heaviest rain was forecast to pass to our south and east.

Linda planned to go into the bakery today and had her alarm set for 5:45 AM. It went off and I woke her up enough to shut it off and go back to sleep. Around 6 AM we both received e-mails on our iPads and phones, a sure sign that we had lost power to the house. I was awake at this point but stayed in bed until 6:45. I was not falling back asleep, so I put on my robe and made coffee. I finished up the Kenya AA, which is not decaffeinated, figuring we could both use the boost this morning.

While the coffee was brewing I cleaned the cats’ litter tray and checked my e-mail. I had a reply from Bill Tharpe which decided for me that I would be going to Indiana on Friday. I also had replies from the two Mitch’s who had contacted me as about articles I wrote in Bus Conversion Magazine and replied to both of those. I edited the e-mail with the minutes of Sunday’s SLAARC meeting and forwarded it on to the club officers. An e-mail from Gary at BCM indicated that they still needed a photo of Byron and Betty Pigg for the December featured bus article, so I replied and cc:d Byron. Writing for BCM is sometimes a lot of work, but it’s a hobby for and I enjoy it so I do not mind.

It was wet outside and still raining lightly, a perfect day to sit by the fireplace in a robe and drink hot coffee. Phil was hoping to return today with a load of screened topsoil and get it placed and graded along the edges of the driveway but said it would depend on the weather. Once the topsoil is taken care of he will grade the driveway with his bulldozer and make sure the 40 foot long parking area is as flat and level as possible.

Linda finally got up at 8:30 and was starting to get dressed to go to the bakery when I suggested she stay home, rest, and get well. She was immediately OK with that idea, put on her robe, and took her iPad to the living room to enjoy the warmth of the fireplace and some hot coffee. I finished up my draft blog post for yesterday, e-mailed it to myself, and started this one. I really cannot afford to lose a whole day of work on the bus but this is the kind of day where we like to just sit and do quiet things, or even nothing at all. We finally finished our coffee, got dressed, and had a light breakfast at 10 AM.

Taking care of Madeline for three days and nights took a lot of Linda’s mental and physical energy and her cold took what was left. She headed back to bed and I got my thoughts organized relative to working in the bus. I talked to Jarel yesterday and found out that it would cost $50 to have a sheet of 1/4″ Baltic Birch plywood delivered to his shop because he did not have a regular delivery scheduled and the $50 cost of the 60″x 60″ sheet would not meet the minimum cost for free delivery. I did not need the piece of plywood badly enough to pay a 100% surcharge to get it so that idea was off the table until next year.

My goal for today was to get a piece of SurePly underlayment cut and installed on the passenger seat platform. Before I even started on the piece I had to resolve what to do about the four carriage bolts that are used to mount the base. One of the four bolts has some messed up threads but I have a tap and die set and might be able to clean them up. However, I am adding the thickness of the underlayment and floor tile plus a washer to what was there before so I wanted to use a longer bolt. I already knew that Lowe’s and O’Reilly’s did not have what I needed and I presumed that The Home Depot did not either.

I finally went to Howell Hardware and had a good QSO with Steve (N8AR) on the drive there. As I had been told they had a very good selection of hardware, by the piece, but they did not have fine thread carriage bolts in the 1/2″ size I needed. I bought four of the 2″ long coarse thread bolts, four flat washers, four lock washers, and four nuts. I also picked up a large washer to match the other three I already had for securing the central mounting stud along with two nylon washers. That trip took over an hour out of my day before I even got started on my main task.

It took me several hours and many trips back and forth between the bus and the shop (in the garage) to get the piece of underlayment to fit just right. I made one small mistake but the piece was large enough and complicated enough that I did not want to take the time or material to remake it. Before I could install it I needed to get the outside end of the floor patch secured. Yesterday I tried to screw that end to the material underneath it but the screw would not penetrate. I scratched my head for quite a while until it occurred to me that I could use a small angle bracket attached to the vertical wood wiring chase in the forward outside corner. I had limited access to that area, and it took me multiple attempts before I finally got the screw in, but I did. Securing the bracket to the floor patch was a lot easier.

After securing the end of the patch I realized that the area between the front mounting channel and vertical front of the platform was slightly concave. It was not a big dip but it was big enough that it needed to be patched. Floor patching compound was the last thing I wanted to deal with today but it turned out to be just that, because once I applied it it had to dry for hours. It was heavily overcast all day and my mood was correspondingly suppressed so I felt like I was doing everything in slow motion. Based on the fact that I did not even get the piece of underlayment installed perhaps I was.

I try to keep an eye on the “house” batteries in the bus. When I checked them this afternoon the reported voltage was higher than normal so I turned off the charger function on the Magnum 4024 to let the batteries rest and see where the voltage really was. The DC draws on the battery bank were minimal.

I am finishing this post a couple of days later and no longer recall what Linda fixed for dinner but whatever it was I’m sure it was good. After dinner we relaxed in the living room for a while, watched our Tuesday evening TV programs on the larger TV set in the basement recreation room, and then went to bed.

The Phase Place

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Author Archives: BRF

2015/12/10 (R) Reworking Articles

2015/12/09 (W) Return to Satchel’s

2015/12/08 (T) Hudson and Back

2015/12/07 (M) Not on Vacation

2015/12/06 (N) Multiple Threads

2015/12/05 (S) Saturday Night Fire Circle

2015/12/04 (F) The Chores of Life

2015/12/03 (R) 2015 Year in Review

2015/12/02 (W) Settling In

2015/12/01 (T) Home Again

2015/11/29 (N) Cartersville to Mayo

2015/11/28 (S) Berea to Cartersville

2015/11/27 (F) On The Road Again

2015/11/26 (R) Thanksgiving (T-1 Days)

2015/11/25 (W) T Minus 2 Days

2015/11/24 (T) T Minus 3 (days)

2015/11/23 (M) Elemental Errand Run

2015/11/22 (N) Repackaging

2015/11/21 (S) Not Quite As Planned

2015/11/20 (F) The End of Projects (for now)

2015/11/19 (R) FTH Annual Meeting

2015/11/18 (W) Fuel Run

2015/11/17 (T) Drivable Again

2015/11/16 (M) Tiling the Cockpit, #3

2015/11/15 (N) Tiling the Cockpit, #2

2015/11/14 (S) Tiling the Cockpit, #1

2015/11/13 (F) Road Trip

2015/11/12 (R) Unforced Solutions

2015/11/11 (W) Two for One

2015/11/10 (T) A Rainy Day