Tag Archives: FMCA national education committee

2015/02/07-11 (S-W) In and Around Q

2015/02/07 (S) Bouse, AZ

We got up around 8 AM, got cleaned up, and had coffee and granola. Linda then cut my hair, which seems to be a once every 4 to 6 weeks thing when we are traveling. Butch and Fonda went to Yuma to meet up with Bell, Bell’s daughter, and Bell’s three grand-daughters. Bell’s daughter was in Yuma with her Roller Derby team and the family came along. We wanted to get out and do some more sight-seeing and decided to drive to Bouse, Arizona.

Cholla “teddy bear” cacti at Quinn’s Pass on the road to Bouse, AZ.

Bouse is a small town located in the next valley to the east of Quartzsite, which sits in the La Paz valley. It is on AZ-72 at the eastern end of Plomosa Road. The western end of Plomosa Road is at AZ-95 seven miles north of the city limit of Quartzsite. The first three miles of Plomosa Road heading east from AZ-95 runs through the BLM Plomosa Road STVA. The road is paved its entire length and provided a fun and scenic drive out to Bouse and back. We stopped at Quinn Pass to read the historical marker and ended up going on a short hike. We have wanted to do this little trip ever since friends told us about it, but today provided an added incentive to finally go; the Parker 425.

The Parker 425 is an annual off-road race in the desert east of Parker, south of the Buckskin Mountains, and north of Bouse. The course is a little over 140 miles in length and the race consists of three loops for a total of 425 miles. It begins and ends at the Bluewater Resort and Casino in Parker. Last year’s winner completed the race in just over seven hours. That’s an average speed of 60 MPH, and there are plenty of curves and bumpy areas where it is not possible to go that fast, so the vehicles are really moving every place they can.

When we got to AZ-72 we crossed the highway, drove three short blocks, and made a left on Swansea. I could see from the GPS that it was a paved road that continued in a northeasterly direction. I had looked at a map yesterday and had a general sense that one of the spectator areas was out that way. We did not have to drive very far before we saw Jeeps and ATVs parked on top of a big hill all facing the same direction. We drove past the turnoff for that area and just around the hill was a large parking area full of cars and RVs. The dirt road was closed, the Fire Department was set up there, and there was a checkpoint for the race. I found a place to park and we got out to check out the action.

We stayed long enough to see a dozen different vehicles pass through the checkpoint and I shot photos from several different vantage points. There are different classes of vehicles, but the ones we saw were of two types: highly modified small pickup trucks, and custom built off-road racers known as “grasshoppers” because of their long shape and the suspensions allow them to “bounce” over bumps in the road.

View looking NW from the Quinn’s Pass area between Quartzsite and Bouse, AZ.

The air temperature was pleasant but the sun was very hot so we drove the short distance back to Bouse, stopped at AZ-72, and quickly scoped out the town. We spotted the Coachman Restaurant just northwest of the intersection and drove over there to have lunch. We each had a garden salad and iced tea, and I had French fries. We can pretty much count on lettuce and potatoes in any restaurant we visit.

Bouse was founded in 1908 as a mining camp but as a waypoint between Phoenix and Parker it now survives on tourism, agriculture, and retirees. Measuring 10.1 square miles at 947 feet ASL with 996 residents (2010 census) the area enjoys sunny skies year-round. We saw RVs of all types throughout town and in the dessert along Plomosa Road which is all BLM land. There were also quite a few RVs in the Bouse Community Park.

We drove back to Quartzsite the way we came, a distance of 30 miles, because the only other ways back were via Parker (64 miles) and Phoenix (at least 250 miles). Linda wanted to walk through the Tyson Wells market area one more time as this is the last weekend for the Craft Show. We bought a cute hand puppet that we think grand-daughter Madeline will find very interesting. We drove over to Barry’s Breads to get a loaf of his Barry’s Basic Bread but he was not open. In fact, it looked like he was done for the season. Activity really has slowed down here and he is presumably getting ready to move to his next venue.

We stopped at the Road Runner Market and bought a loaf of French bread and some red grapes. We then drove to the Quartzsite Cemetery to take photographs of Hadji Ali’s (Hi Jolly’s) gravesite, which is marked by a small pyramid with a silhouette of a camel on top. As long as we were there we wandered around the rest of the cemetery, which was an interesting and well-kept place.

Once we were back at the coach Linda sat outside and read while I transferred photo files from my camera to my computer and backed them up to our NAS. I then continued selecting and processing images from yesterday’s outing to KOFA NWR Palm Canyon. I was starting to work on the images from today when Linda cane in and started making dinner.

She decided to make “Mustard Greens and Beans” using Great Northern beans. In addition to the usual onion and garlic, it had vinegar, a little sugar, and honey mustard. It was very tasty and we agreed it was a keeper. She served sautéed green beans on the side, cut up some of the French bread, and poured a couple of glasses of Franzia Refreshing White wine. Sliced fresh strawberries and cookies for desert completed the meal.

Butch and Fonda got back from Yuma while Linda was cooking. I gave Butch a call after dinner to discuss our TireTraker systems. He needs to charge their monitor this evening and I asked him to check on the behavior of the LEDS on the 12/24VDC plug.

As we do most evenings, Linda read and played online word games while I worked on this post for a while and then resumed editing photos on my computer. I checked e-mail again and had several regarding the upcoming Freethinkers gathering at the Liar Peg Leg Smith Monument boondocking area near Borrego Springs, California. One of them posited the question of how often Friday the 13th occurs? I did a quick online search and the answer appeared to be 1 to 3 times per year and every 12/7 or 1.714 times per year, on average. That is 171.4 times per century or 1,714 times per millennium. I posted that back to the e-mail reflector and went to bed.

Rocks and flora at Quinn’s Pass, AZ.

2015/02/08 (N) Another Meetup

I was up at 7:30 AM this morning and got the coffee made right away. Linda did not sleep well last night but got up as soon as she smelled the coffee. Breakfast was toast and preserves. I was planning on putting in a long day at my computer and Linda was planning on doing laundry and some work for the bakery but our plans changed before we got started. When I checked my e-mail I had one from Lou and Donna Rice of our FMCA Freethinkers Chapter indicating that they were at Mile Marker 2 on Plomosa Road. We drove right past them twice yesterday on our visit to Bouse but had no idea they were there.

Plomosa Road is about seven miles north of Quartzsite on AZ-95. We left at 10 AM and were parked next to their Jeep before 10:15. We sat and talked for four hours before returning to our coach. As soon as we got back I took our TireTraker monitor and charger over to Butch’s coach. We tried our charger on his monitor and it worked fine. We then tried his charger on our monitor and it did not work. Between our four devices it was clearly our monitor that was defective. I will have to call Darryl Lawrence tomorrow and see what we can figure out.

We each had a pear, some red grapes, and something to drink. Linda gathered up laundry and I got to work editing consolidated blog posts. In between loads she sat outside and read.

Fonda had two Poblano peppers she got at the Farmers Market on Wednesday and gave them to Linda. Linda found a recipe for stuffed grilled poblanos. The stuffing was white rice, scallions, black beans, tomatoes, vegan sour cream and cheddar cheese, and cumin. It resembled Mexican rice but with a creamy/cheesy dimension. She cooked the stuffed peppers on Butch and Fonda’s little grill and cooked the extra stuffing on our cooktop. She served the dish with Clementine orange wedges and a glass of Franzia Refreshing White wine to make an outstanding meal.

After dinner we sat outside Butch and Fonda’s bus enjoying the cool desert night air and watching the lights of airplanes flying overhead. It eventually cooled off enough that we returned to our coach where I continued to work on blog posts and Linda worked on the bakery accounting. She eventually went off to bed and I uploaded survey items to the FMCA Education Committee folder in our Dropbox and sent an e-nail to the committee. We have a committee work session tomorrow at 4 PM EST (2 PM MST).

Vehicles positioned east of Bouse, AZ to watch the Parker 435 off-road race.

2015/02/09 (M) A Bright Idea

Butch called around 8:20 AM to let me know that our light bulb order was at the Post Office awaiting pickup. He and Fonda were headed to the Quartzsite Gem and Mineral Club for a day-long class on faceting, so he gave me the parcel slip so I could go pick up the package.

While we were eating breakfast it suddenly occurred to me that we should visit Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West while we are camped near Tucson next month. Linda went to the website and discovered that it is in Scottsdale which is a northern Suburb of Phoenix and is closer to Quartzsite than it us to Tucson. We selected a couple of possible dates and she went online to get tickets. The “Behind the Scenes” tours are only done on Monday, Thursday, and Saturday. She tried to get tickets for Monday February 16 but they only had one left. She called but they would not sell us two tickets. We waited way too long to think of this and painted ourselves into a corner so it may not happen on this trip to the southwest.

I drove to the Quartzsite Post Office after breakfast and retrieved the package, only my second trip to the Post Office to transact business since we arrived in Q. The first trip was to sign up for the P. O. Box. Linda usually takes care of the mail while she is out walking and Butch usually checks the P. O. Box, which is at a different location that is not quite as convenient a walk from our camp as the main building. We have not used the P. O. Box very much, but it has been invaluable when we have.

I worked most of the day on some of my blog posts for December 2014. I took a break around 12:30 for a bite of lunch and then called Daryl Lawrence and left a message regarding our TireTraker TT-400C monitor which appears to not be recharging.

The Parker 425 checkpoint east of Bouse, AZ. This race is a BIG deal with fire, EMS, and helicopter coverage.

Gaye Young called around 1:30 PM to make sure I was going to participate in the FMCA Education Committee work session at 2 PM. (Gaye is the chairperson of the committee.) There were only two items on the agenda and I had to give the status report on both of them. Our work sessions and meetings are conducted by telephone conference. They usually last an hour and today was not an exception. If committee members provide me with additional input this week regarding an education survey we are developing I will have some work to do the last two weeks of the month in addition to working on articles for Bus Conversion Magazine, completing some minor repairs on the bus, finishing the cleaning/waxing of the exterior of the bus, and cleaning/waxing the car.

I managed to upload consolidated blog posts, including some photographs, for December 5 – 8, 9 – 12, and 13 – 16, 2014. I did not take very many photos while we were traveling but once we got settled in Q I got the camera out and started using it.

I got a call back from Jeff at TireTraker support. I explained what the monitor was (not) doing and he agreed to mail me a new one along with a new charger. We will return the defective one to Daryl at Escapade next month.

Linda cooked up a couple of Tofurkey brand vegan Italian sausages with sweet onions and sweet red bell peppers and served some broccoli as a side dish. After dinner I removed my bulbs from the Bulbtown shipment and checked the quantities and prices against my spreadsheet. I then took the remaining bulbs over to Butch. He had ordered 10 #4003 bulbs to use in his bay fixtures and realized when he saw them that he should have ordered #4004s. Both are 24VDC bulbs but the #4003s have a single contact base whereas #4004s have a double contact base. I think my bay light fixtures may take #4003s. I will check tomorrow and if so I will buy them instead of Butch.

We sat outside with the lights off enjoying a glass of wine while watching the long lingering sunset backlight the mountains to our west. As the sunset faded we looked at the stars and watched aircraft lights moving east and west high over the desert. It still cools off here after the sun sets but not as quickly, nor as dramatically, as it did just a week ago.

I combined the blog posts for December 17 – 20, 2014. I had selected and processed photos for this post earlier so it was ready to upload at 11 PM but I did not want to go through the process at that late hour. I dealt with a couple of e-mails and then went to bed. A short time later Jasper threw up a large quantity of food so I had to get up and deal with that. It looked like it had some hair mixed in with it, but I don’t know if that was the root cause.

2015/02/10 (T) Deionized

We were planning on heading to the Peg Leg Monument boondocking area on Thursday, spending the night in Indio, California and visiting Joshua Tree National Park (JTNP) on Friday before driving home Friday evening. Ken Harrison from the FMCA Freethinkers indicated that he and Linda would not make it to Peg Leg until Friday. That prompted us to consider flipping our plans, doing JTNP on Thursday and Peg leg on Friday. Either way we will stay in Indio as we already have reservations at a motel.

The Polaris RZR (“razer”) was one of the most popular 4-wheel ATVs in and around Q.

We had another stay-at-home day relaxing while getting things done. Linda was going to drive to Blythe for groceries, but decided to go on Sunday as we will be away from camp all of Thursday and Friday and much of Saturday. She is going to see if the Farmers Market is still operating tomorrow morning. If not she will stop by the Road Runner Market.

As has been our pattern recently Linda went for a long walk (5 miles) while I continued to work on blog posts. We had a light lunch when she returned. I then called Teeko’s Coffee and Tea in Howell, Michigan and ordered six pounds of roasted coffee beans to be shipped to us here in Q. We are approaching the midpoint of our snowbird season and are almost out of the five pounds of coffee we started with. Jeff is going to roast two pounds each of Ethiopian Yirgacheffe half-caff, Sweet Seattle Dreams half-calf, and Cafe Europe Blend half-caff. He will let it out-gas for a couple of days and then vacuum seal it in one-pound portions and mail it to us in a USPS flat rate box that will go to our P. O. Box in Q. That should be enough to get us home even if we do not get there until late April.

Butch is always looking out for us and trying to help us spend our retirement dollars so he sent me a link to a portable two-tank water de-ionizing system that is available from RVupgrades.com. The system is intended for washing/finishing cars and RVs as de-ionized water has had all of the dissolved minerals removed and does not leave spots on surfaces when it dries. It is not, however, considered suitable for drinking. The two tanks are plumbed in series and use special resin beds that have to be replaced when exhausted rather than recharged. The first tank removes cations and the second removes anions, leaving the water completely deionized. The cations are the positively charged ones typically “removed” by water “softeners”, such as calcium, iron, and magnesium, through ion exchange with sodium. The anions are the negatively charged ones that water softeners typically do not remove, including fluoride and sodium. The dual tank system is about 33% more expensive than a single tank portable water softener, but given the time, expense, and frustration I am experiencing trying to clean and wax our motorcoach I am seriously considering ordering one tomorrow.

I uploaded two consolidated blog posts yesterday and another one this afternoon. I consolidated the posts for December 21 – 26, 2014, selected and processed the photos, and then took a break to sit outside and just enjoy the weather. No book, no iPad, no computer; just ahhhh. It was 78 degrees F with 19% relative humidity, a steady breeze from the northwest, and a hot sun shining through absolutely clear blue skies. Linda and I agreed that it was the most perfect weather day we have had so far this winter.

Linda had some seitan ‘mock’ beef in the freezer that she heated in a saucepan and served with basmati rice accented with soy sauce. Very simple but very tasty. After dinner I uploaded the December 21 – 26 consolidated blog post along with 12 photos, entered all of the tags, and published it.

I got an e-mail yesterday from Cherie Ve Ard of Technomadia asking if we would be interested in previewing/testing another new website. I said ‘yes’ and she responded with the URL for the development site. When I was done with our website I went to the new one and created an account. I got an activation e-mail, clicked the link, and was able to login. I spent an hour looking around the site and captured my impressions and suggestions in an e-mail back to the development team. I took a few minutes to investigate portable water deionizers but by then it was too late to get involved in any serious research so I went to bed.

2015/02/11 (W) Update This!

Hi Jolly’s (Hadji Ali’s) gravesite in the Quartzsite Cemetary; allegedly the most visited place in Q.

Linda’s cell phone rang just before 8 AM. It was Barb. She and Jim were up, dressed, and had the golf cart out and ready to go to the Farmers Market. When we mentioned it yesterday Barb said she wanted to go and Linda indicated that it was open from 8 AM to noon. Somehow that got translated into leaving at 8 AM to go to the market. Linda, being a good sport, got up, got dressed and walked over about 8:15 and said she was ready to go. No breakfast, no coffee, just the “git er done” spirit of the old west. I stayed behind and got the coffee ready to brew when she returned. I then got to work on computer stuff in the true “git er done” spirit of the new/virtual west.

They returned from the Farmers Market around 9:30 AM. Linda bought another Romanesco brocciflower, some Brussels sprouts, grapefruit, and oranges. To our delight Barry’s Breads was also there and had a few loaves of Barry’s Basic Bread. He told Linda he will be around, at least at the Wednesday Farmers Market, through the end of this month.

As much as I would like to have de-ionized water available for rinsing the coach as I wash it, I decided not to speed hundreds of dollars without first doing deeper research into the available technologies and their life cycle costs. I had enough other stuff to do today that I did not want to make time to dig into this new topic.

Linda saw a photographers vest at the Salvation Army resale store the other day but did not buy it as it was $15, pricey for the SA, and she wasn’t sure it would fit me. We drove over to the store to see if it was still there. It was, and it was too small for me. It also had a defective zipper. For a moment I thought we were going to have to buy it so I could take it home and cut it off. I managed instead to pull it off over my head like a t-shirt and Linda was then able to get the zipper undone and put it back on the rack. This was my first time in the store so while we were there I found two pairs of shorts for $2 each, a third pair for $0.50, and a lightweight, lined, waist-length London Fog jacket for $0.25. Linda found a white hand-held mixer with two beaters for $4. Deal.

When we got back Linda called the Prince of Tucson RV Park and made a reservation for the evening of Thursday, March 5th. Lou and Val Petkus will already be there and this will allow us to caravan into the SKP Escapade at the Pima County Fairgrounds first thing Friday morning. By coming in together we will be able to park together which will make our staff photography work more convenient.

My computer indicated that it had a large number of updates to install; 34, to be exact. It was a 334 MB download so I turned on our Verizon Mi-Fi and switched my computer over to it. The Mi-Fi is much faster than the Wi-Fi and I find that with large downloads the faster I get them done the more likely they are to complete successfully. When those were done downloading and installing I had to restart my computer to finish the installation. I also had an updated driver available for the NVIDIA GeForce graphics processor, so I downloaded and installed that.

I figured that if I had updates for my computer Linda would have them for hers. I switched her computer over to our Mi-Fi and checked for updates. She had 20 recommended and 4 optional. I selected all 24 and the download was 980 MB. That’s a lot of updates so I started it and let it run. As always, finishing the installation required the computer to be rebooted. When it restarted her computer the screen was once again functioning normally. Go figure. She also had an Adobe Creative Cloud update so I started that. It failed at the 29% point so closed it and restarted it. The second time it ran to completion.

Linda needed to work at her computer so we both sat at the dinette table and did our respective computer things. She brought our financial records up-to-date in Quicken and I compiled and then uploaded a consolidated blog post for the last six days of December 2014. I had e-mails going back and forth with some of our fellow FMCA Freethinkers regarding the Peg Leg gathering and ended up joining the Freedom From Religion Foundation. I’ve meant to do that for a while and the electrons finally aligned just right this afternoon.

Hi Jolly’s pyramid gravesite marker is a State Historical Site.

Somewhere during the course of the afternoon we had sandwiches for lunch and snacked on dried fruits and nuts. Kathi Slater called to check on Linda’s travel arrangements, after which I made popcorn. Linda borrowed a small cooler from Butch and Fonda for our 2-day trip to California and back. Fonda came over to go through the chores involved in caring for the cats while we are away and Linda gave her a set of keys to the bus.

I had seen a quick notification from the RV Internet Resource Center (Mobile Internet Aficionados membership website) that WiFiRanger had finally released their new firmware upgrade for the WiFiRanger Mobile. Using my iPad as the control panel I switched our WFR-MT from the Wi-Fi/DSL connection to our Verizon Mi-Fi. Again, I wanted to make sure this upgrade got downloaded as quickly as possible through the most reliable connection we have. The download was reasonably quick but the installation took quite a while. My iPad eventually lost contact with the WFR-MT and I just left it to finish and went over to visit with Butch and Fonda and Linda. We came back to our coach when their dinner was ready and the WFR-MT firmware upgrade had finished installing successfully. I switched the connection back to the Wi-Fi/DSL that we get to use as part of our “rent” while we are here. I switched our laptops back to our internal Wi-Fi network and then shut the Verizon Mi-Fi off to let it recharge.

Neither of us was very hungry after snacking late this afternoon so Linda sliced the remaining tofu and pan-seared it. She caramelized onions, added BBQ sauce, and served it open faced over the tofu. After dinner Linda made a list of things we needed to take tomorrow while I made a final check of e-mail. I e-mailed Lou Petkus to let him know that we were booked into the Prince of Tucson RV Park for March 5th. I sent a message to Curtis Coleman via RVillage to accept his invitation to boondock in his driveway and see if March 3 and 4 would work for him. He phoned back to confirm that it would be OK and then sent his address via TXT message. I also had an e-mail from Kate de Fuccio and replied to that. I checked for updates and my computer had several more to install so I started that process. I checked Linda’s computer but she did not have any updates pending. Although we got a lot of other things done today it felt like I had mostly dealt with computer updates. Update days are often like that and you cannot schedule them because you never know when Microsoft is going to drop a big ‘update bomb’ in your lap.

Linda went to bed around her usual time. I turned in shortly thereafter and much earlier than I have been. We plan to get up at 6 AM tomorrow, have a light breakfast, finish packing for our trip, and be on the road at 7 AM. We will stop at Albertson’s in Blythe, California for some water, ice, and other snack items to get us through the day to dinner at Native Foods in Palm Springs and give us something to eat on Friday while we are at the Peg Leg gathering. Albertson’s opens at 6 AM PST, which corresponds to our 7 AM MST departure time. We should arrive at the south entrance to Joshua Tree National Park around 7:30 AM PST which will give us a good, long day to explore the park.

2015/02/06 (F) KOFA NWR Palm Canyon

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Palm Canyon Road entrance to KOFA NWR.

I slept in until 8 AM, got up, put on my sweats, and made a pot of coffee. While that was brewing I turned the TT-400C TPMS monitor on and then adjusted the pressures in the four car tires and checked the passenger side steer tire on the bus. Based on the temperatures it was reporting the monitor appeared to not be picking up the six rear tires on the bus so I plugged the PressurePro repeater in. It is mounted in the passenger side rear corner bedroom cabinet and Darryl Lawrence said it should work fine with the TT-400C monitor. Consumer TPM Systems all operate on the same frequency of 433.92 MHz and the repeater just receives, amplifies, and retransmits signals on that frequency. The sensors have a unique digital identity and send out an encoded digital signal; that’s how the receiver/monitors know which signals to display and ignore the rest.

Linda in the parking lot at the mouth of Palm Canyon, KOFA NWR, AZ.

The north wall of Palm Canyon, KOFA NWR, AZ.

After a breakfast of juice and cinnamon raisin oatmeal Linda went for a walk while the air temperature was still cool. I stayed at the coach and dumped the holding tanks, made up our mixture of a bottle of PineSol with an equal amount of water and a cup of Calgon bath beads. Shake until dissolved and add ~60% to the black tank (via the toilet) and the other 40% to the gray tank via the bathroom and kitchen sinks, including the In-Sink-Erator.

The beginnng of the Palm Canyon trail, KOFA NWR, AZ.

With my chores done I recorded the dump in our notebook and then added the information to our Water Usage spreadsheet. According to the spreadsheet and our notebook it had been 19 days since we last emptied the waste tanks. I knew that wasn’t possible as we normally dump every 9 to 10 days when we are in normal water usage mode, and Marilyn was here for the first half of that interval. Clearly we had forgotten to record a dump 9 or 10 days ago.

The north wall farther into Palm Canyon, KOFA NWR, AZ.

I finished working on some additional draft items for the survey the FMCA National Education Committee wants to send out. I sent them to the committee chair (Gaye) and the member whose items I was revising. We have another phone meeting on Monday and I wanted to get these items out to the committee by tomorrow so the members have time to look at them.

I got an e-mail from Gary at BCM last night advising the editor that I was doing an article on Quartzsite for the February 2015 issue and would have it done by the end of next week. I e-mailed him back last night and then wrote it this morning and e-mailed it to him and Mike, the editor, for review. Although I am no longer employed, I sometimes still work better against a deadline.

Deeper into Palm Canyon approaching the 1/2 mile mark. KOFA NWR, AZ.

After cleaning and waxing the bus and spending a lot of time sitting in front of our computers we wanted to get away from camp and do some sight-seeing. The repair we had done yesterday to the passenger side rear tire on our car seemed to be holding so at 2PM we headed for the King OF Arizona (KOFA) National Wildlife Refuge (NWR) Palm Canyon area about 20 miles south of town.

A lone palm backlit high up on the south wall of Palm Canyon, KOFA NWR, AZ.

This seemed like a good spot to stop and let Linda take my picture for a change. Palm Canyon, KOFA NWR, AZ.

Palm Canyon is an enormous slot in the Kofa Mountains. The canyon is aligned ENE to WSW opening to the WSW so we figured the best light would be in the mid-to-late afternoon. To get there we drove south out of Quartzsite on US-95 about 19 miles to Palm Canyon Road and then east for seven miles on a good gravel roadway. Good is relative, of course; it took as long to drive the 7 miles as it did the 19. The trailhead is at the end of the road, which is the beginning of the canyon. There are also several areas just off the parking/turnaround designated for tent camping, and it would be a spectacular place to pitch a tent. The last mile or so of the road climbs more than you realize until you get to the parking area and are treated to a sweeping view of part of the La Paz Valley that stretches for over 100 miles from Parker on the north end to somewhere north of Yuma on the south end.

Looking WSW back out of Palm Canyon at the La Paz Valley. The trail climbs it goes deeper into the canyon. KOFA NWR, AZ.

There they are! The fan palms of Palm Canyon high up in a shaded crevice on the south wall of the canyon. KOFA NWR, AZ.

The trail is a 1/2 mile hike into the canyon near the floor but to the south of, and above, the central drainage wash. The canyon is named for the California Fan Palm trees that grow there; the only naturally occurring Palm trees in Arizona. There is lots of other vegetation in the canyon, however, and the palms are a bit elusive. About a half mile in there is a small wooden sign with an arrow pointing up to the left at a 45 degree angle. All the sign had on it was the word “PALMS.” And there they were, way up in a narrow crevice. Mind you, some of the trees in this main grove have trunks that are 20 inches in diameter, but the canyon is a big place and the trees are far away from where we were standing. The only wildlife we saw up close were small lizards about 3″ long, 6″ with their tails. We heard and then saw a bird soaring high above the southern edge of the canyon but could not tell what it was.

Delicate colors on the north wall of Palm Canyon in the late afternoon sun. KOFA NWR, AZ.

The light was nice hiking in and got better and better as we hiked out. The trail climbs quite a bit from the parking area, but not steeply in any one place. We took our time and I took a lot of photographs. By the time we got back in our car the sun had slipped behind the Dome Rock Mountain Range that defines the western edge of the La Paz Valley. We had nice colors in every direction but without any clouds we did have a particularly photogenic sunset. By the time we got back to US-95 it was approaching 6:20 PM and we needed our headlights even through the glow along the crest of the mountains continued almost all the way back to town.

Looking back into Palm Canyon as we hike out. KOFA NWR, AZ.

Linda made a green salad with fresh tomatoes and blueberries, dried fruit, and nuts and dressed it with Raspberry Walnut Vinaigrette. She heated up a couple of tortillas and used them to make a quesadilla-like thing with Daiya (vegan) cheese, tomato slices, and jalapeño pepper slices. We had a small glass of Franzia Refreshing White wine with dinner and had red grapes for desert.

Before we left for our hike I had unplugged the power supply from my ASUS notebook computer to let it cool off. It seems to me that it runs hot. I plugged it in when we got back and had a notification on the screen that the computer needed to be restarted to complete the installation of updates.

The only wildlife we saw up close in Palm Canyon. KOFA NWR, AZ.

The north wall at the entrance to Palm Canyon in the glow of sunset. KOFA NWR, AZ.

I decided to check my e-mail first and had a couple from Gary, so I called him after we finished dinner and we chatted for about an hour. It sounds like the article I sent him this morning on Quartzsite 2015 won’t run until the March issue, so that will give me a little more time to select and process photos, experience more things here, and possibly extend the article a bit. In the meantime Gary is going to have Stacy proofread all of the articles that are ready plus the one I just sent.

My ASUS laptop keyboard appears to be functioning correctly again so I was reluctant to restart my computer, but the message said it would restart in one day on its own anyway. I guess there’s no time like the present to find out if the machine has a problem. It finished whatever it was it needed to do, powered down, and restarted without a hitch. I then copied all of the photos from our canyon hike to the computer and NAS and started looking at them. I processed a few and then went to bed.

2015/02/01-05 (N-R) Another Month in Q

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2015/02/01 (N) Hola February

Yesterday would have been an excellent day to continue cleaning and waxing the outside of the bus—cool and cloudy without a lot of breeze—but it was also an excellent day for the inside computer work that we both needed/wanted to do. I downloaded the free version of the Simple:Press forum WordPress plug-in the day before yesterday and was going to make a priority of installing it today on the FMCA Freethinkers website I have been developing until the activation of the Jetpack Site Management feature caused the admin panel (app) to crash. We have had a problem for a while with one member who was unable (or unwilling) to interact appropriately online via our e-mail reflector. The reflector does not require a login and does not have any way to moderate discussions or block/remove posts, so our options as a chapter were very limited. A WordPress-based forum would give us all of those features.

I had an e-mail reply from support@ipower.com indicating that the Wordfence plugin had caused the problem. They needed the answer to the security question in order to authenticate my support request and fix the problem. Bob Pelc provided me with that information which I supplied back to ipower.com. Later in the day I got an e-mail indicating that the problem was resolved and I was, in fact, able to log in without any problems. The e-mail said the Wordfence plugin had caused the crash and that they disabled it, but after I logged in it was still activated. I did not, however, take the time to check if it was functioning correctly. I also did not install the Simple:Press forum at this time.

For breakfast Linda improvised a potato tofu scramble with nutritional yeast, garlic, and other seasonings. It was a hearty and flavorful start to the day. After breakfast I called Jim A. back to discuss the FMCA seminar listing categorization document we have been working on.

I settled in to work at my computer on the consolidated blog post for November 10-16 while Linda settled in to work on accounting for the bakery. She is also approaching the time of year when she has to pull tax returns together. She uses Turbo Tax and needs an updated version each year. The products she needed were on sale through Amazon Prime. She purchased and download them, which also placed them in her Amazon software library, and they installed and opened without a hitch.

I got an e-mail from Harvey Carter (AC8NO), president of the South Lyon Area Amateur Radio Club (SLAARC), asking me to update the officer listing on the club website. I took care of that and also changed that contact form (Contact Us page) to e-mail him instead of former president Mike Sharpe (WX8H).

By 2:30 PM I was tired of sitting in front of my computer so I changed into my work clothes and spent an hour trying to clean and wax a couple of windows on the bus. The passenger side, which faces south, was so hot I cloud not touch it for very long, so I worked on the north side in the shade.

Jim/Flo L. and Jim/Barb B. disassembled the Select Comfort air mattress we had put in the park model trailer and divided up the parts. We were going to donate it to the Salvation Army but did not get it done fast enough. Jim B. would like the pump and controllers but Butch and Fonda need them to replace the defective unit on the mattress in their guest bedroom. Since that is where I sleep when I am there, it is in my best interest to give it to them.

We invited all of our neighbors to come over for happy hour at 4 PM. Barb B. came over with a glass of wine at 4:20 PM, so I poured a glass for Linda and me. Jim B. was taking a nap as were Butch and Fonda. (Hey; retirement is hard work!). Butch and Fonda eventually shook the cobwebs out and came over. Jim and Flo L. arrived but busied themselves with dinner preparations. They were joining Jim/Barb B. for a belated Christmas dinner. Jim B. eventually awoke and Barb left to join the other three for dinner. Fonda left just before 6 PM to go to church but returned a few minutes later. Apparently the evening service had been cancelled because of the Super Bowl. She and Butch visited as the sun set and eventually it got chilly enough that we all decided to go inside.

I e-mailed Chuck Spera and my long-time friend John (J. C.) Armbruster earlier in the day but had not gotten responses from either of them by bedtime. During the evening I had e-mails going back and forth with Steve Willey regarding the upcoming informal FMCA Freethinker gathering at the Liar Peg Leg Smith Monument boondocking area in Borrego Springs, California. I also e-mailed Jim Ellmore regarding the same event.

A typical sunset in Quartzsite, Arizona as seen from our campsite on the north end of town.

2015/02/02 (M) Market Day

The last 24 hours have brought into focus why we are here for the winter. It will be sunny and 80 degrees F today. Detroit got 16.7 inches of snow from the storm that hit over the weekend, with 12 inches in Ann Arbor and similar amounts in Dexter, Howell, and Brighton. When we checked this morning it was 7 degrees at home and going up to a high of 14. Yeah, we are not missing that.

Breakfast was the bland store-bought bulk granola we have had to eat since running out of Linda’s homemade granola some weeks ago. I wish we could carry a five-month supply of her granola; it’s that good. Right after breakfast Linda started putting together menu ideas and a shopping list while I reviewed the latest seminar listing from Jim A. and e-mailed it back to him. He called later to discuss it briefly. I started working on yet another consolidated blog post for 17-23 Nov 2014 and did that until I could not stand to sit any longer. The antidote for was go outside and work on cleaning and waxing the rear cap of the bus.

Butch and Fonda left around 9 AM and drove to Parker to go shopping at Wal-Mart. Back home they shop at the Wal-Mart in Logansport and are familiar with the items there. Not long after they left Linda drove to Blythe, California to do our grocery shopping for the week. Of the supermarkets available to us we prefer the Albertson’s in Blythe, followed by the Smart & Final Extra at the same intersection.

Butch and Fonda returned from shopping and so did Jim and Barb. Butch asked if I had ordered the coil for the MAC solenoid air valve that controls the a-c shutters behind the front bumper. I hadn’t, so I took a break from cleaning and waxing the outside of the bus and called MAC Valve to order a replacement coil for the 111B601BAAA solenoid valve. (I still have the old valve but I do not think I have it with us in the bus.)

Jim L. stopped by with some very fresh grapefruit and we got to talking about automotive detailing. He recommended Finesse from 3M for polishing paint without leaving marks. He said it works so well that the paint looks “wet” when you are done. Butch had also suggested that I look at the Cyclo 5 dual head orbiting buffer/polisher. Apparently this machine can finish paint with no swirl marks.

The FMCA Freethinker website /WP-admin/ panel was back up and running. I logged in and checked the plugins. They were all there but they had ALL been deactivated. Tech support at ipower.com had indicated that they were going to disable the Wordfence plugin. I re-activated most of them, but not all, and specifically did not re-activate the Jetpack plugin. It is a large, feature rich plugin and the only thing I use is the Carousel feature to manage native WordPress image galleries. Unfortunately I need that feature and have not found another plugin that does what I need.

I worked for most of the evening on the consolidated blog post. By the time I finished it was too late to start selecting and editing photos, so I will do that tomorrow if I have time.

2015/03/03 (T) Wax On, Wax Off

I knew there was something else I was supposed to do yesterday, but I could not remember what it was. I sometimes put “tasks” on my calendar, but that does not help if do not check it. I remembered this morning what it was; I needed to call Sunset Sportswear in South Lyon, Michigan and follow up on an e-mail I sent last Thursday regarding our order for personalized SLAARC jackets. I made that call and Pam took our credit card information. Barb handles sales but had not made it in yet due to the snow. Sunset Sportswear was closed yesterday because of the storm so if I had remembered to call them it would have been for naught. Things often work out like that.

I also got an e-mail from the Escapees RV Club regarding the upcoming Escapade rally. It indicated we could extend our stay until Sunday noon. I called Lou Petkus, the head staff photographer for the Escapade, to let him know. The rally ends on Thursday with normal departure on Friday and staff departure on Saturday. Lou is trying to arrange a photography field trip for Saturday so the fact that anyone can stay until Sunday should help with participation. I called the SKP headquarters and booked the extra night.

I confirmed which RV Park Lou and Val will be in on March 5th and I think we will try to get in there as well. That location will position us close to the rally venue and allow us to caravan in together and park together. (We have to be in by 11AM on the 6th.) That, in turn, should make our staff photography work more convenient. We plan to hang out (dry camp) with RVillage founder Curtis Coleman for a couple of nights before this at his rental home near Casa Grande, which will put us a lot closer to Tucson than we are here in Quartzsite.

We had also mentioned to Lou and Val at Quartzfest that we were thinking of heading to Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument after the Escapade. They had been discussing it and decided they would like to go there as well so we will probably caravan there with them. After OPCNM we plan to head to Big Bend NP (BBNP) in Texas and Lou and Val would also like to go there. That is a three day drive for us, and we may take six or seven days to get there depending on where we might stop and what there is to see long the way. Whether we travel together or separate will be determined later. Our friend, Mara, and another women from the WINs are also headed to BBNP sometime in March and we have tentatively agreed to meet up with them if we can work out the timing.

I checked my e-mail and had a reply from Jetpack tech support at WordPress.com. “Happiness Engineer” Jeremy said that Wordfence has been known to cause issues with the Jetpack plugin. He acknowledged that Wordfence is a powerful and important plugin but can be very aggressive in protecting websites. Given that Wordfence appears to have caused the crash of the FMCAA Freethinkers WordPress /WP-admin/ Jeremy said I probably did not need to reinstall the Jetpack plugin. I filled out a support ticket yesterday for this issue on the Wordfence website as I have a premium (paid) membership. They acknowledged the support ticket right away but an actual response will likely take longer.

I had all of these communications chores done by 11 AM and decided to continue cleaning and waxing the outside of the bus. I started with the rear, as it was still in the shade, and finished the lower half. It was tedious as that is the engine hatch and it has numerous horizontal indentations that run the full width. These indentations are open on the inside top for airflow and have screens to keep things from getting in (like fingers).

Another view of the sunset from our campsite in Quartzsite, AZ.

I continued on around to the driver side of the bus which faces north. The temperature this afternoon got up to 80 degrees F, and it was very hot in the sun, but it was pleasantly cool in the shade of the bus. It was near perfect conditions for the work I was doing. I worked most of the afternoon and did not quite get the back half of the bus cleaned and waxed. A couple of bay doors and I will be past the half way point on that side.

I am going to try to work on this at least a few hours every day, otherwise it will never get done and this is an ideal place to work on it as long as I am not working in the sun. The south facing passenger side is going to be more of a challenge and I will have to limit my work to the morning before the body panels heat up.

UPS showed up today with my coil for the MAC valve which turned out to be an entire new valve. Rather than try to remove the solenoid coil I may just install the whole valve. UPS also brought Fonda’s new sewing machine. It only weighs 13 pounds.

Butch got back from a rock hunting field trip late in the afternoon and we stood around chatting as an amazing sunset developed around us. As I have mentioned before, sunsets here are often 360 degree events and this one surrounded us with color before finally fading into another starry night.

Linda made a wonderful dish for dinner last night and we had it again this evening. She pan-grilled polenta and served it on a bed of dark leafy greens topped with puttanesca sauce made from scratch.

After dinner I selected photographs for my November 17 – 23, 2014 blog post and processed them. I uploaded the text to our WordPress site and then uploaded, captioned, and integrated each photo in turn. I also had to enter all of the tags, which I figure out as I read through the post. If there is one thing I would like to have at this point it is the ability to highlight key words and phrases in my Word document and have them automatically become tags when the text is uploaded.

By the time I published the post and went to bed to finish this one it was midnight. At eight minutes after midnight MST I was one hour into my 63rd year as I was born on this date at 00:08 in the Central Time Zone, where eight minutes past midnight happened an hour ago.

2015/02/04 (W) 63 and Counting

I finished my blog post for yesterday late last night and e-mailed it to myself at eight minutes after midnight, the hour and minute of my birth, or so I have always been told. Linda and the cats were all asleep and I observed the moment in quiet solitude. As I noted at the end of yesterday’s post I was actually an hour late in my observance as we are currently in the Mountain Time Zone and I was born in the Central Time Zone. But it was the thought that counted.

Sixty-three is not a milestone birthday anniversary, other than making it that far. On my 60th birthday I became eligible to retire, and did so four months later. On my 62nd birthday I became eligible to start drawing social security, but didn’t. On my 65th birthday I will become eligible for Medicare. The year I turn 66 Linda will apply for Social Security benefits and immediately suspend them. I will be eligible for my full Social Security benefit but will not apply for it. I will apply for the spousal benefit instead. Our monthly Social Security benefits continue to increase by 8% per year until age 70, a solid and guaranteed return, so Linda will start taking her benefits then and I will file for, and take, my benefits when I turn 70.

Having thought through the complexities of birthdays, we had breakfast and then I got to work cleaning and waxing the outside of the bus. My plan was to finish the driver side but not spend all day at it. As it turned out, I spent most of the day at it, taking breaks to check e-mail. It is just slow work, especially since so much of it has to be done on a step ladder. I have no idea how many trips I made up and down that ladder, but it was a lot. It is only a seven foot step ladder so I have to stand near the top to reach the top of the sides which are over 12 feet from the ground. I cannot reach very far to the side either, so I work from one side of the ladder then climb down and climb up the other side and work from there. I then climb down and move the ladder about three feet and do it all again; over, and over, and over. But as Long as I keep going it eventually gets done. I am, however, seriously considering getting a Cyclo 5 dual head orbiting buffer/polisher. There is simply too much bus to do this by hand. I am also considering getting a platform to put between two ladders and/or a four-wheel elevated work platform to use in the barn if/when we get it built.

I got a call from our daughter wishing me a happy birthday and had a nice chat with her. I asked if Katie had made a final college selection but she is not done with interviews yet. Perhaps we will know in a few weeks where she is headed in the fall.

Yesterday Linda invited all of our camping neighbors to come over today at 4 PM for happy hour to celebrate my birthday. In preparation she spent part of the day making cupcakes with chocolate frosting. When she wasn’t cooking she did accounting and tax return work for Butch and Fonda. Around 3 PM she prepared bruschetta using what was left of a loaf of Barry’s Basic Bread and the puttanesca sauce she made a couple of nights ago. Larry/Sandy, Jim/Barb, and Butch/Fonda all brought chairs and beverages of their choice. Butch and Fonda brought chips, salsa, and hummus and the peanut and dried fruit mix they make. We sat around talking until the sun set at which point the air temperature cooled off and we all retreated to our rigs.

I got a call from our son during our happy hour and excused myself for a few minutes to chat with him. It was 7:40 PM back in Ann Arbor and Madeline was getting ready for bed. I got to “chat” with her and she wished me a happy birthday. With encouragement from her mom she asked me “How is Arizona?” I told her it was very nice here.

We skipped lunch today and did not have dinner because we filled up on happy hour snacks. Linda played online word games while I started assembling the consolidated blog post for November 24 – 30. She turned on the MiFi and trundled off to bed to watch an episode of Downton Abby on her iPad. I finished editing the post and selected two photos to go with it. When I checked I found that I did not have photos for most of the days covered by the post. I thought about uploading it but decided against it as it still takes time to upload the text, upload and insert the pictures, and create all of the tags and I was too tired to maintain the needed concentration. Somewhere in there I read through a reply from Chuck Spera and sent him the next volley in our e-mail conversation.

Overall it was a good 63rd birthday. Given our winter travel lifestyle I face the interesting prospect of celebrating my birthday somewhere different every year for many years to come.

Our fellow campers gathered by our bus for my 63rd birthday happy hour. L-2-R: Sandy, Larry, Barb, Jim, Butch, Fonda, me. Photo by Linda (not shown).

2015/02/05 (R) A Screwy Tire

The overnight lows are now dropping into the upper 40’s at night and the coach cools off just enough that I turn the heat on in the front of the bus while I make coffee in the morning. Soon enough the sun starts heating up the coach and we are pulling the accordion shades down to keep it out and opening windows and turning on ceiling exhaust fans to draw cool air in. A couple of days ago we finally put the awnings out on the south facing passenger side of the coach. Between the patio awning and the bedroom awning they shade more than half of the upper portion of the coach and help keep the interior temperatures in check. We have not had them out much, however, because of the somewhat persistent winds in the La Paz Valley.

After breakfast I wanted to setup the TireTraker TT-400C TPMS. Once I started I would need to install the sensors on all 13 tires. In order to install the sensor on the spare tire in the car I had to empty out the back so I could get to the tire. Linda was helping me and noticed a screw in the passenger side rear tire. It was right at the edge of the tread but not technically in the side wall. The tire was holding pressure but when I started to back the screw out it started to hiss so I screwed it back in. Nuts.

Linda got online to look for tire repair shops in Quartzsite. The first three numbers we tried were out of service and the Love’s Truck Stop only repaired big tires, not small ones, so I called Jim Liebherr to see if he knew of some place in town. Flo answered the phone and could not locate Jim so I asked for a return phone call. Butch then offered to drive me downtown where he thought he remembered seeing a tire shop. As we were pulling out of our camp it occurred to Butch that the RV Pit Stop, just south of us on Central Avenue, might do tire repairs. Before we even got that far we saw the sign for Best Auto and Tires. We have walked or driven past this place dozens of times but never paid any attention to the fact they sold and serviced tires. At the time we did not care.

They said they would have to see the tire so we drove back to camp and I drove back in the car. They said they could repair it properly with an internal patch and they would get right on it if I wanted to wait for it. $14. Deal. I could easily have walked back to camp from there but I was back with the car within an hour. If the tire had not been repairable we would have had to take it off the car and use Butch’s Chevy Suburban to drive it to Yuma or Lake Havasu City where there are Discount Tire Locations.

Jim L. returned my earlier phone call while I was waiting for the tire. He and Flo use a dentist in Los Algodones, Mexico and are very satisfied with the service and price. I have a tooth that is bothering me just a bit and was giving some serious consideration to making an appointment with someone in Los Algodones.

I installed the batteries in our new TT-400C sensors and programmed the baseline pressures into the monitor (receiver). I then installed the sensors on the bus and car tires, linking each one to the monitor as I went. Programming the baseline pressures first is the easier way to install the system. In setup mode the monitor displays each tire position in turn. While the position is displayed a sensor is screwed onto the valve stem. The application of pressure to the sensor “wakes it up.” When the sensor starts transmitting the monitor associates it with the displayed tire position. After exiting setup mode only the programmed tire positions display on the monitor.

In addition to the overall setup procedure there are several things I like better about the TT-400C system compared to the PressurePro system we have had since the 2008 FMCA national rally in St. Paul, Minnesota. A major one is that the baseline pressures are programmed into the monitor. On the PP-TPMS the baseline pressures are determined by the pressure in the tire at the time the sensor is put on. Another thing I like is that the TT-TPMS monitor is powered by rechargeable batteries and is not plugged in when in use. That makes it much more convenient to move it between the bus and the car, but especially to carry it around while installing and associating the sensors to wheel positions. Finally, I like the sensors, which are much smaller and only weigh 0.4 ounces each.

Linda helped me reload the back of the Element and sort through all of the “stuff” that was “stuffed” in the glove box and the passenger side dashboard trays. (When was the last time someone actually stored gloves in an automotive glove box?). With everything sorted out and repackaged in ZipLock bags I stored it back in the glove box and locked up the car.

Linda spent part the morning working on accounting and tax returns for Butch and Fonda and talking on the phone to Dave, the controller at Metropolitan Baking. I got a call later from Jim Ammenheiser and then did a final proofreading of our Education Committee recommendation to FMCA staff for how to restructure the categorization and listing of seminars and activities in the national rally programs.

We took a break and had the last two cupcakes from yesterday with some vegan Mocha Almond Fudge coconut “ice cream.” We were supposed to have these last night for my birthday but we were not hungry after snacking at the happy hour birthday gathering. Linda then went for a walk. Linda got me a birthday card and a towel with an elastic edged hole for my head. I tend to get food on my shirts when I eat and the towel is basically an adult bib that can be easily laundered.

Our fresh water tank was a bottle cap shy of empty so I filled it. It usually takes about 50 minutes to fill the tank starting from empty so I set the timer on my smartphone for 40 minutes. When it signaled me to check on the progress the tank was already overflowing. (It has a vent tube on top of the tank that runs through the floor of the bay.) I don’t think I wasted more than a few gallons of soft water so it should not throw my water usage and softening calculations off by much. The good news was that the post-fill hardness test showed the water coming out of the softener at 0.0 to 0.5 gpg total hardness (0 to 10 ppm.) That was better than the reading I got right after I recharged the softener, so perhaps it still had some residual salt in it initially.

At 4 PM I was getting ready to upload a blog post when the UPS truck showed up and dropped off two boxes for me. It was the Chemical Guys microfiber products I had ordered recently, including two microfiber auto detailing aprons. Butch returned a few minutes later with a small package for me. It was the lens hood I had ordered for my Sony zoom lens and it had been mailed USPS. He also had eight (8) Full River 6V L16 AGM batteries. I helped him unload them from the Suburban onto the concrete pad on the driver side of their bus. Fonda emptied out the driver’s side of their battery bay and she and I then moved the batteries to the bay where Butch positioned them. He left them in their boxes and will install them when they get back to Twelve Mile.

At 5:15 PM I finally got around to uploading the consolidated blog post for the last week of November (2014). I then started thinking about what to do with my December 2014 posts. As of today I am still 67 posts behind and putting up daily posts is not realistic. In looking through my photos I was surprised to find that I took very few from the time we left the house until we arrived in Quartzsite. I decided to do consolidated posts for Dec 1 – 4 (Twelve Mike, IN to Alvarado, TX), 5 – 8 (visit with Donn Barnes), and 9 – 12 (travel from Alvarado to Quartzsite, AZ). I have more pictures for the rest of the month, so I will have to figure out what makes sense. I compiled the posts for December 1 – 4, selected and processed one photo, uploaded it, selected the categories, and entered all of the tags. I posted it and then realized I wanted to edit the URLs slightly so I logged back in and found that I was unable to type anything.

It took me a while to figure out that the problem was the built-in keyboard on my ASUS G750JM ROG notebook computer. I got it at the end of April last year, so I have only had it for eight months. I decided to run a full scan using ESET Smart Security since I could do that with just a mouse and the Bluetooth mouse was working just fine. It found 18 threats and dealt with 16 of them. I then ran CCleaner, after which I enabled the onscreen keyboard. Although intended for use on touchscreen computers, at least I could type things into a search box using my mouse.

I found some references to similar problems on answers.microsoft.com with the suggestion to examine the keyboard device properties. If it indicated the device was installed and working correctly it was probably not a Windows 8.1 problem. The other suggestion was to try an external keyboard. If that worked it would confirm a keyboard hardware problem. I had already gotten my Gigaware wireless keyboard out so I plugged in the USB dongle, turned on the keyboard, and voilà, I could type again!

Another post on the Windows forum listed website links for ASUS support so I started following those. One ASUS website wanted the serial number of my computer, which I had to get off of a tag on the bottom of the case with really small type. Once I had that entered correctly I was able to go to a download page with 81 files available, including bios and chipset code. There were two files that seemed to have something to do with the keyboard. By 1:15 AM I had a half dozen tabs open in two different browsers with no definitive understanding of what had happened or what to do to fix it. I then realized that the Shift Lock key on the keyboard was illuminated and I could toggle it on and off. I could also toggle the Number Lock, so I tried typing and the keyboard was working once again. That, however, did not give me any confidence that it would continue to do so. I decided I was not going to shut the computer down for fear of not being able to log back in on startup. I was not about to start downloading and installing anything at that hour so I went to bed tired, annoyed, and, frankly, a bit discouraged by this unwelcomed turn of events.

2015/01/22-26 (R-M) Q 2015 W4

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2015/01/22 (R) Sister Marilyn

Marilyn & Linda in front of Beer Belly’s “adult day care” outdoor bar.

The temperature dropped into the low 40’s last night in the wake of the cold front that brought strong winds to Quartzsite yesterday. We were up at 6:30 AM to give us time to eat breakfast and enjoy our coffee before Linda left at 8 AM for the Phoenix airport to pick up her sister. Marilyn was scheduled to arrive at 11 AM MST and the airport is a 2 to 2-1/2 hour drive from Quartzsite but Linda wanted to take her time getting there and be in the cell phone lot before the flight got in. The plan was to go to lunch and then drive back to Q so she was going to be gone most of the day.

I had turned off the diesel burner on the Aqua-Hot last night so this morning I turned on the three electric toe-kick heaters and the Broan cube heater to take the chill off of the interior. With the coffee pot also turned on we were drawing 26 A at 115 VAC on leg 1 and 15 A at 118 VAC on leg 2. That was more current than we were able to draw before Jim L. changed the shorepower connection from 30 A (120VAC) to 50 A (240VAC) and the first time we have had reasonable voltage levels since we arrived here.

I rode over to the RV show with Butch at 9 AM to look at tire pressure monitoring systems and we both ended up buying TireTraker TPM Systems from Darryl Lawrence. We have both done business with Darryl in the past and trust him as a vendor. I also bought three products from the Carnu-B booth.

Back at the coach I checked the coolant level in the Aqua-Hot expansion reservoir. It was right at the maximum cold level so there was nothing else to do for the moment. I needed to redo the overflow hose, but not today. I then used two of the Carnu-B products on the driver-side side window and surrounding painted body surfaces. It removed the hard water stains and polished everything up very nicely. I then did a test patch on the front of Butch and Fonda’s bus and it appeared to clean the stainless steel nicely. They later cleaned an adjacent patch with straight food-grade vinegar and it seemed to work just as well although it did not provide a wax finish.

While I was fiddling with the Aqua-Hot and the cleaning/waxing process Butch started reading the manual for the TT-TPMS and found information that indicated the system did not work the way we thought it did and needed it to. The manual more than implied that the sensors were activated by motion and stated that readings would appear “… within 20 minutes of starting to drive.” Say what?! We both want to use the system to check our tire pressures BEFORE we start to drive, as would most RVers.

Although there are things we do not like about our current Pressure Pro TPM systems they certainly give us the current pressure in the tires without having to drive the vehicle. They also allow us to monitor just the bus, just the car, or both. Most systems do this, including the TireTraker, but the Truck Systems Technology (TST) does not. That was Butch’s first choice system until he found that out.

At 12:45 PM I rode over to the Quartzsite Senior Center with Butch and Fonda for a 1 PM meet and greet with Chuck Woodbury of RV Travel and the Geeks On Tour. It ran until 4 PM but we were anxious to get back to the RV Show tent and talk to Darryl. We took our TT-TPMS units with us with the intent of returning them but Darryl assured us that they do work the way we need them to so we decided to keep them for another day or so to test them.

Fonda had not been to the RV Show yet so we walked the entire tent. I spent a little time talking to the guy at John Carrillo Hydronic Heating. He had a brand new, never been fired, Webasto DBW2010 burner (with the controller) for $1,800 (cash). I have seen them online for $3,300, so I knew that was a good price. I wish I needed one, but we already have a spare. He also had a new combustion chamber for $200 and I may go back and get one of those. They wanted $450 for an ignition coil, which I also need, but I can get one from Sure Marine Service for $303. We spent a long time looking at flag poles at the Flag Pole Buddy booth and Butch bought a 22′ model with an extra set of mounts.

Linda was texting me her status on a regular basis and by the time we got back to camp she and Marilyn were already there and relaxing on the porch of Joe and Connie’s park model trailer. We sat outside until the sun kissed the tops of the southwestern mountains and then moved inside to escape the chill. While we were sitting in the coach visiting and cooking Butch installed one of the TT-TPMS sensors on the driver-side front tire of their Suburban, programmed it into the monitor, noted the readings, and went for a test drive. He noted the readings when they got back and plans to check it again in the morning before moving the car. That will be the real test.

For dinner Linda made a nice green salad and a lovely mushroom kale risotto with Arborio rice. We then went to the apartment so I could light the pilot flame on the wall-mounted propane heater. I visited for a bit and then went back to the coach and Linda followed a bit later. We were both tired and turned in early.

240 degree panorama from atop 'Q' Mountain, Quartzsite, AZ.

200 degree panorama from atop ‘Q’ Mountain, Quartzsite, AZ. Left edge is N, right edge is SSW.

2015/01/23 (F) Q Mountain

We were up by 7:30 AM and Marilyn eventually arose and joined us for coffee and toast. The only bread we had was a package of whole wheat pitas, but they toasted just fine and were very good with orange marmalade. I am not, however, thrilled with the Soy Delicious Almond milk coffee creamer. It is not as ‘creamy’ as Silk soy creamer and it tends to separate into tiny bubbles in the coffee. I do, however, like the Almond milk that we sometimes buy, especially on granola type cereals.

Butch called just after breakfast to let me know that the TireTraker TPMS works the way Darryl said it does. That was welcome news as we both like the system, including the small sensors and the rechargeable monitor, and we both like Darryl. He and Fonda had things to do today so I borrowed his hose crimper pliers before they left.

Linda and Marilyn left shortly after Butch and Fonda and drove to Blythe, California to do some grocery shopping and sight-seeing. That left me with some alone time to concentrate on getting some things done that I have needed to work on for a week, such as categorizing FMCA seminars, and have just not found (made) the time. I value and enjoy my work with the FMCA National Education Committee but we have a significant personal investment in our presence here in Quartzsite, and although we will likely return here again in the years to come that is not guaranteed, and this could turn out to be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. The FMCA work took about an hour to complete and e-mail too Jim A., with who has been the lead person on this.

I also needed to make a minor change to the Aqua-Hot expansion tank plumbing and turn the burner back on. I removed the overflow hose, shortened it, re-routed it, and re-connected it to the drain tube on the tank. I also tried to tighten the clamp on the middle zone pump hose. I noted that the coolant level was at the ‘minimum cold’ mark on the expansion tank. I will check everything again tomorrow.

With the Aqua-Hot project done I decided to replace the old Sentry turbo boost gauge with the new VDO gauge. I removed the dashboard cover, disconnected the lightbulb connectors, removed the retaining bracket, and pulled the gauge out the front of the dashboard. I removed the lightbulb socket to give me better access to the main air fitting and undid that, completely freeing the unit from the dashboard. I pulled the light socket out of the new gauge to give me more room to put the air fitting on and to check the bulb type. It was a miniature glass wedge base 12VDC 3W and will need to be replaced with a 24V, 3W bulb. I then slipped the gauge into the dashboard from the front and secured it with the supplied bracket on the back side. Linda and Marilyn returned at this point so I quit working on the gauge, put the cover back on the dashboard, and helped bring in the groceries. I will have to get the 24V bulb and also rewire the leads to match the harness connectors.

We had a light lunch and then drove down to the market area and wandered through the big tent RV show. We got new Ballisti-Tech screen protectors for our Samsung Galaxy S III smartphones. We also strolled through a small part of the Tyson Wells and Prospectors Panorama areas. When we left the RV show we headed south on US-95 to the BLM Roadrunner STVA so Marilyn could see the Quartzfest RVs in the desert. We found Lou and Val Petkus at their 5th wheel and visited briefly before heading back to town. The light was good and the sun was still high enough that I made an impromptu decision to climb Q Mountain and try to get pictures of the RVs spread across the desert around Quartzsite.

I got my pictures, and got off the mountain before it got dark, but missed the best color, which we saw while driving back to camp to close up the rig before going to dinner. The Geeks were out viewing and photographing the sunset before walking to the Grubstake restaurant for dinner so and we chatted with them briefly and then drove to Crazy Jerry’s for our evening meal. The very thin crust mushroom, onion, and tomato no-cheese pizza was excellent and the French fries were also good. When we got back to our coach Linda prepared some fresh strawberries for desert.

After visiting with Jim and Chris on Wednesday we decided that we would join the Quartzsite Yacht Club, which claims to have the largest membership of any yacht club in the country (world?, universe?) at over 7,500., although we later heard that it was more than 9,000. Membership is $30 which gets you a hat, T-shirt, membership card and certificate. Apparently the membership is good at other (real) yacht clubs that honor reciprocal arrangements. We had planned to join today but did not fit it in. It may be Sunday or even a day next week at this point.

I spent some time transferring photos from my camera to my laptop computer and our NAS unit. I processed three panoramas and three individual images taken on Q Mountain, checked my e-mail, and went to bed.

Sunset glow looking NE from ‘Q’ Mountain.

2015/01/24 (S) Lake Havasu City

We were up at 7:15 AM and I brewed a pot of coffee while Linda showered. I took my turn and also trimmed up my beard a bit. Marilyn came over around 8:25 AM and we all had coffee followed by breakfast. Linda and I had granola while Marilyn had toast and jam. She is not that found of breakfast and does not care for milk or milk substitutes.

I removed some of the parts boxes from the back of the Element to eliminate the rattling just in case we decided to drive in to the Desert Bar on the way back from Lake Havasu City (LHC). We left around 9:15 AM and headed up AZ-95 towards Parker. It was a cool morning with clear skies and the sun lit up the mountains to the west and north. When we got to Parker we decided to cross the Colorado River into California and take the Parker Dam Road 17 miles up to Parker Dam, drive across back into Arizona, re-connect with AZ-95, and continue north to LHC.

We knew that the stretch of the River from the dam downstream to Parker had quite a few RV Parks, campgrounds, and mobile home communities because we caught glimpses of some of them from AZ-95, or saw signs for them, the last time we were in LHC. The drive from Parker to LHC is very scenic but you do not have a view of the river most of the time. Much of the drive from Parker to the dam on the California side, however, was close to water level so we were able to see the resorts on both sides of the river. We had also heard that there were wild burros along the California route and indeed there were. We saw five total, two of them just before the dam. They appear to be docile animals, but they are wild, and you are not allowed to feed or harass them.

Once we got to LHC we followed the signs for the London Bridge and found the parking lot and visitor center. We watched a video on the history of the London Bridge, which was actually the second most recent in a long succession of bridges across the River Thames dating back before Roman Times. The Bridge was purchased, disassembled, moved, and reconstructed in LHC. It was placed at the entrance to a peninsula and then a channel was dug out under it and connected to the Colorado River on either end, turning the peninsula into an island. There is an “English Village” at the base of the bridge on the mainland side, which was not very special, but a wonderful pedestrian path winds along the channel all the way down to Rotary Park. The air was cool and the wind was very strong, but the sun was very warm and we had a lovely stroll.

After walking the path we drove over the bridge and around the island, stopping at one of the reproduction 1/8 scale lighthouses. The LHC Lighthouse Association has erected some two dozen scale replicas of U. S. Lighthouses. The ones on the island are all replicas of lighthouses from the Great Lakes while the ones on the Arizona shore are east coast replicas and the ones on the California shore are west coast replicas. While we were driving Linda researched places we might be able to eat lunch and settled on The Black Bear Diner. She and Marilyn had garden burgers with French fries and I had the Sweet Garden Harvest Salad. All of the food was very good, and I was particularly pleased with the salad, which had raisins, dried cranberries, nuts, fresh strawberries, and shredded coconut with a honey Dijon dressing.

The restaurant was in a corner of the parking lot for the Albertson’s grocery store so we went in looking for regular Silk soy creamer. They did not have any so we started back to Quartzsite and stopped at the Basha’s market on the south end of town. They had the Silk Vanilla Soy Creamer, not the regular, but I got some anyway. They also had a nice selection of Daiya cheeses and vegan sausages. We picked up some sourdough bread and preserves on our way to the checkout. Of all the food stores we have been in Basha’s was the nicest so far.

By the time we got to Parker I was getting tired so I pulled into the casino parking lot. I switched places with Linda and she drove the rest of the way to Q. Back at camp she and Marilyn went to the apartment and started assembling a 500 piece puzzle on the dining table. As I do on any day that I have taken a lot of pictures I transferred them from my camera to my computer and backed them up to the NAS unit. I used the Microsoft Image Composite Editor to create two panoramic images of the California mountains just south of LHC.

None of us were hungry enough to warrant fixing dinner so we snacked on hummus and chips (vegan junk food). Marilyn went back to the apartment at 9 PM and we went to bed shortly thereafter. A long day of fresh air and sunshine had once again worn us out.

2025/01/25 (N) Visitors

Linda& Marilyn at the London Bridge English village. It’s a real London phone booth, but no phone.

Today was basically a stay at home day. Marilyn is officially “on retreat” and spent part of the day by herself reading and contemplating. I made coffee for breakfast, as usual, and Linda made her amazing vegan cinnamon rolls for brunch. They were brunch because they take hours to make and she did not feel like getting up early enough to have them ready by breakfast and we did not expect her to.

Butch dropped Fonda at church and then came back to get me on his way to the Big Tent RV Show. Today was the last day of the show so I bought a 2″ wide roll of rescue tape and got three smaller rolls in the deal. I bought more of the Carnu-B wax but the vendor was out of the Metal Shine cleaner. That’s the risk one takes waiting until the end of a rally or show. I also bought two small LEDs that looked like the might work in our spotter/downlights. We then stopped by Mac McCoy’s booth to chat. He was busy with customers but Charles Martin was there so we chatted with him instead.

We got back to camp just after 11 AM as Linda was putting the finishing touches on the cinnamon rolls and Marilyn joined us for brunch. I tried one of the new LED bulbs but it would not fit in our fixtures. I dealt with some e-mail and thought about spending the rest of the day writing but decided to work outside instead. My outside task today was cleaning some of the bus windows using the Carnu-B Metal Shine to remove hard water stains.

Chris and Jim of Geeks On Tour did their weekly live broadcast from their rig and then started making preparations to leave. We had two cinnamon rolls left so Linda took them over as a going away gift. Charles and Connie Martin dropped in and a short time later Mara and her friend Michael arrived. Marilyn came over followed by Butch and Fonda so we circled the chairs and had quite a gabfest.

Eventually everyone left and I returned to my window cleaning while Linda and her sister started preparing dinner. Linda made her wonderful warm Farro dish with kale and dried cranberries while Marilyn made a shredded Brussels sprout dish with pistachios and dried cranberries. Both dishes were excellent and the use of dried cranberries in each one tied them together nicely.

Linda and Marilyn went to the apartment to watch Downton Abbey but the satellite receiver was not activated so they worked on the jigsaw puzzle instead. I stayed in the coach and took a call from Lou Petkus who had questions about RVillage. I then consolidated my blog posts from the first seven days of October (2014) into a single post, selected five photos to go with it, and uploaded it to our WordPress site, the first post I have done since September 30, 2014. If I do one consolidated post each evening I should be caught up to our arrival in Quartzite on December 12, 2014 in about two weeks. After that I may go back to daily posts or continue to consolidate three or four days at a time. I would like to be caught up and making current/daily posts by the time we pull out of here on March 1st.

London Bridge in Lake Havasu City (LHC), AZ.

2015/01/26 (M) A Plethora of Jims

We had toast and jam (strawberry preserves and orange marmalade) for breakfast along with our usual coffee and juice. Jim A. called just after breakfast to update me on work we are doing for FMCA HQ. Jim G. (& Chris) pulled out yesterday. Jim B. (& Barb) are here for the winter. Jim L. (The brother of owner Joe L.) manages this place and stops by almost every day. I think we have met several other Jims along the way. When we meet someone new I just assume their name is Jim until I learn otherwise. This winter has truly seen a plethora of Jims.

Jim and Barb let me know they were headed to Blythe, California to go grocery shopping and offered to pick up anything we might need. Butch and Fonda also left but Larry and Sandy did not, which was unusual for them. Linda and Marilyn wanted to walk around Tyson Wells so I drove them down to Kuehn Street and Central Avenue, stopping at the Post Office on the way. I stopped on the way back at Herb’s Hardware store to get some 000 steel wool and then topped off my fuel tank at the Union 76 station.

Connie Martin visiting us at the Camp Liebherrvile / Brocker.

Back at our coach I started assembling my blog posts from October 8 through 15 into a single post and selecting photos to go with it. I do not like to sit and do this kind of work for long stretches of time so I got out my cleaning supplies and worked on the outside of some of the bus windows. I tried using straight vinegar to clean them followed by rubbing with the steel wool, and tried it in the opposite order. I decided to stick with steel wool first figuring the vinegar would help clean it off. I did not apply wax to the outsides of the windows as I want them as clean as possible before I wax them. Rain was forecast for today and it eventually started so I moved indoors and cleaned the insides of several windows on the passenger side of the coach. These were clean enough that I used the Carnu-B spay wax that I bought yesterday on them. The rain let up so I moved back outside and worked on the upper windshields. I got both of them steel wooled and wiped down with vinegar and got a coat of wax on the driver side glass before it started drizzling again. I put my supplies away again and headed back inside. Linda called and asked to be retrieved so I drove back down to Kuehn and Central to pick them up.

Linda put out some hummus, chips, and grapes for lunch and we heated up the leftover Farro dish and divided it up between us. Marilyn went back to the apartment to take a nap and Linda laid down to read and snooze while I continued working on e-mails and blog posts. Gary Hatt, publisher of Bus Conversion Magazine, sent me several photos of himself standing in front of his Eagle. I selected the one I thought would work best to go with his “Publisher’s Letter” in the January 2015 issue, post-processed it several different ways, and sent it back with an explanation of what did and why. I also got the blog post for the second seven days of October completed and uploaded before dinner.

Mara Culp and Charles Martin visiting us at Camp Liebherrville / Brockner.

As the afternoon progressed the rain settled in. Although not heavy, like a thunderstorm, it was steady well into the evening. Jim and Barb returned and Marilyn eventually came back over to the coach. That got Linda out of bed and working on dinner. She made a dish that has become a standard; pasta with onions, garlic, mushrooms, and sun-dried tomatoes lightly sautéed in olive oil. Instead of wheat noodles, however, she used “zoodles.” Zoodles are long slender pieces of zucchini made with a hand operated SpiraLife spiral slicer. They get added to the sauté just before serving and are simply heated rather than cooked. We had a green salad with Ken’s Steak House Asian Sesame dressing, dried cranberries and pistachios. We had slices of a sourdough baguette with pepper spiced olive oil for dipping and Linda and I had a glass of Franzia sangria. Fresh strawberries for desert completed a nice meal.

Marilyn helped with the dishes after which she and Linda checked on the developing storm out east and then played Scrabble and other games while I stayed out of their way and worked on this post. Hey, it’s a small kitchen.

The rain stopped at 7:38 PM but started again in earnest around 8:30 PM. It was still raining at 9:15 PM when Marilyn went back to the apartment and the forecast said we could have rain overnight until 5 AM tomorrow. We have had very little rain here this winter so I am sure this is welcomed. It will be interesting to see if the precipitation triggers any sort of desert bloom tomorrow on our drive to Yuma or perhaps the following day.

Linda’s iPad battery was down to about 10% at 9:45 PM so she retired to the bedroom, where the charger is located, and continued to read for a bit longer. I am usually very sleepy an hour after dinner but get my second wind a couple of hours after that. I had an e-mail from Gary at Bus Conversion Magazine regarding the use of soft water in the Webasto-based Aqua-Hot in his Eagle and sent him a reply. I then went through the article on Butch’s main engine air-compressor failure, finalized all of the changes, and uploaded it to our Dropbox along with the photo files. I updated my BCM Article Status Sheet and uploaded it to the BCM folder in our Dropbox. I then e-mailed Gary and editor Mike Sullivan to let them know that the new material was ready and available. By the time I finished it was going on midnight.

2015/01/8-14 (R-W) Q 2015 W2

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2015/01/08 (R) Up On The Rooftop

A panorama from the roof of our bus. Left edge is NE, center is S, right edge is NW.

As forecast, we woke up to cloudy skies and milder temperatures. The clouds to the southwest looked like they might produce rain but the winds were blowing gently from the southeast so the rain would not be for us. This was the day we’ve been waiting for, the perfect kind of weather for washing a bus. But not first thing in the morning. Coffee and breakfast come first while we wait for slightly warmer temperatures.

The waste water tank level sensors are not accurate but our fresh water tank sensors are OK. The fresh water level gauge was showing less than 1/3 tank and the grey water tank gauge was showing full so it was probably time to dump and fill. When I checked the fresh water level visually we were at 1/6th tank. I dumped the black water tank and then the grey water tank, both of which were fairly full, and then filled the fresh water tank. I have the city water regulated to ~50 PSI (static) which drops to ~30 PSI when the fill valve is fully opened. At that pressure it takes about 40 minutes to fill the tank.

I last dumped the waste tanks on December 30th and added 25 gallons of (hard) fresh water. On December 31st I added another 30 gallons of (hard) fresh water. On January 2nd I recharged our water softener, drained about 1/6 tank (~20 gallons) of (hard) fresh water and filled the tank with 120 gallons of soft water. I checked the hardness of the water coming out of the softener after that fill and it was 1.5 grains/gallon (25 ppm). I checked it again after today’s fill and it was still 1.5 gpg. Since we are keeping a log of the dumps and fills I plan to check the hardness after each fill so can regenerate the water softener before it gets depleted and we end up with really hard water in our tank and system.

Butch happened to be at the Post Office Annex today checking the P. O. Box at exactly the same moment a postal worker was about to put something in the box and then stopped because of the forwarding tag. The “something” was our package of water hardness test strips from Bristol, Indiana and the worker was kind enough to give it to Butch to give to us. He also learned that they still have P. O. Boxes available so he went to the main post office to find out more about that. He came back with a form to fill out and it had room for all of our names so the six of us are going to share the box and the cost, which is $56 for six months, or just under $20 per couple.

While the fresh water tank was filling I started getting ready to clean the roof by getting out our Little Giant step/extension ladder and various cleaning supplies. The dump and fill was done by 11 AM and it was warm enough by then to start working. Swim trunks, a white T-shirt, and Kean sandals was the uniform of the day. I carried the hose sprayer up the ladder with me and then lowered it down to use as a hook and lift wash water bucket, scrub brush, and other paraphernalia up to the roof.

It turned out to be sunnier than I had hoped but I worked for about four hours, not including a lunch break, and scrubbed the entire roof. I used McGuire’s red automotive soap and rinsed thoroughly. I had already washed the roof once using Dawn dish soap (a big ‘no no’, apparently) and a long-handle soft brush. That washing had removed surface dirt and revealed the full extent of the dark “spotting” that gave the entire roof a mottled appearance. The roof looked a lot better after I scrubbed it but a lot of the spotting remained.

We are anxious to clean the sides of the bus but there is no point doing that until we are done with the roof. We want the roof “like new” clean so dirt doesn’t run off it onto the sides, but we also want it clean because we are seriously considering having Discount Solar (here in Quartzsite) install solar panels and a charge controller and do all the wiring. As long as we had the hose, brushes, and soap out we decided to wash the car. It was even filthier than the bus, if that’s possible, and it was nice to finally have it clean.

After cleaning up our equipment I got cleaned up and then sat and visited with Butch for a while. Linda came over and announced that she wanted me to take her to dinner. Butch and Fonda decided to go too so we went to Crazy Jerry’s, which is not to be confused with Silly Al’s. Silly Al’s is supposedly the #1 eatery in Q, at least for pizza, but they have karaoke every night starting at 7 PM. Thank you, no. Crazy Jerry’s also has pizza and we tried the vegetarian, hold the cheese. Very thin crust (the way we like it) and lots of topping. A couple of side salads and a side order of French fries. FWIW, we did not eat the entire pizza and brought home the leftovers.

Linda split a pair of Scrabble games with her brother, the first one he has won in quite some time. She had an e-mail reply from Mara. She is camped about 70 miles south of Q and is headed here in the near future and is going to camp with the WINs (Wandering Individuals Network). I checked e-mail, updated my BCM article spreadsheet with two more story ideas, played a few games, and worked on this post before turning in for the night. We will have been here a month as of Sunday.

The Hi Jolly Daze Parade. Quartzsite, AZ

2015/01/09 (F) The P. O. Box

I left the ladder setup yesterday so I could check the roof again this morning and determine what additional cleaning measures, if any, I might want to take. I also wanted to get back up on the roof and measure the space we have available for solar panels. I was expecting two packages via UPS; one from B&H Photo (Manfrotto nodal panoramic tripod head) and one from Sure Marine Service (Webasto repair parts). I had a nice view of the mountains surrounding Quartzsite from the roof of our bus and wanted to shoot some panoramas with the new head when it arrived.

Butch, Fonda, Jim, Barb, Linda, and I all went to the U. S. Post Office in Quartzsite this morning to sign up for our very own P. O. Box which means we finally have a way to receive USPS mail while we are here. Just in time, too, as Q has really filled up in the past week and there is more to come. I have an FMCA national education committee meeting on Monday and need to write a few items for a member survey and review other materials. Gary (from BCM) is also due to arrive on Monday, and both Curtis (from RVillage) and Mara Culp (HFH build acquaintance) may be headed this way as well. I believe Chris Dunphy and Cherie Ve Ard of Technomadia are already in the area. The big RV tent is up and those vendors are arriving and setting up.

Once we were done at the post office I went to Discount Solar to discuss a possible installation on our coach. The Kyocera panels are 26.5″ W x 59.0″ L. They are “12 V panels” but are rated at 140 Watts putting out 7.9 Amps. They cost $350 each. Those numbers compute to an output voltage of 17.5 VDC and $2.50/W. (If a 140 Watt panel was operating at 13.8 Volts it would produce just over 10 Amps.) Because we have a 24V battery system we would need to install the panels in series-connected pairs. The preferred installation for the rectangular panels is to have the long dimension lined up fore-n-aft to either side of the centerline of the roof. Tilt mounts are available ($45/panel) but we would probably not install them due to the difficulty of getting onto our roof to use them.

“12 volt” batteries typically charge at around 13.8 to 14.1 volts. Our “24V” system charges at 27.6 to 28.2 volts and a series-connected pair of panels produces 7.9 A at 35V (full sun) for 276.5 volt-amps, which is essentially “watts.” Two pairs would produce 15.8 A (553 V-A), and three pairs would produce 23.7 A (829.5 V-A). The higher voltage output of the panels is reduced and regulated by a solar charge controller before getting to the batteries. Discount Solar carries Blue Sky and Trimetric maximum power point tracking (MPPT) controllers and the Blue Sky Solar Boost 50 would handle three series-connected pairs for about $550. The MPPT controllers are DC-to-DC converters so they convert the excess voltage into additional current. With full sun this six panel system could supply up to 30 A of charging current at the proper voltage, which is why we would need an MPPT controller that can handle more than 30 A of charging current. We would also want room for expansion or replacement with higher wattage panels if they were available at some point in the future. One of the nice things about the solar system is that it would always be on and would “play nice” with our other charging systems. Another nice feature is that they are silent when operating. Ahhhh.

Because of the size of our house battery bank (400 A-Hr at 24 VDC) and the fact that we have a residential refrigerator, auxiliary air-compressor, and other AC loads, we would need/want at least six panels. (I have not included the four Group 31 wet cell batteries that are used to start the engine and power the chassis as part of the solar system.) If the batteries were discharged 50% (200A-Hr) it appears that it would take just under seven hours to bring them back to full charge based on the 30A charging current. In actuality it would take longer in a boondocking situation as the sky is not always clear, the sun is rarely directly overhead (perpendicular to the panels), there would be devices using some of the energy, and the amount of current the batteries can accept falls off as they get closer to being fully charged.

Installation is $90/hour plus mounts ($15/panel), wire, connecting blocks, and other parts, and would take 4 – 5 hours to complete. The owner assured me they would have it in and out in one day so we could be back in our parking spot before dark. The last three weeks of January are the busiest time of year for Discount Solar and since we are plugged-in to shorepower we do not need the solar system right away. If we have it installed in early February we would have a month to make sure it works and resolve any problems. The system would cost about $3,300 installed. We have at least a month to think about it.

When I returned to our coach Linda was out walking. When she got back I went up on the roof with a tape measure to see if/how the solar panels might fit. With a four-n-aft orientation we could put two towards the front outside edges, one just aft of the kitchen skylights on the driver side, and one aft of the hall skylight on the passenger side. We could put two more somewhere in the rear. The options for the rear appeared to be inline (almost touching) on the driver side starting just behind the bathroom skylight or putting one there and the other one sideways across the back just ahead of the dropped portion of the roof and aft of the bedroom vent fan. Placing the panels in these locations would leave the center of the roof open so I could climb up on the driver side front and walk all the way to the back.

Barb stopped by to let us know there was a mattress in the house (park model trailer) if we wanted to try it out. It had been in their rig for about two years until they removed it yesterday and replaced it with a thicker one they got from Connie. It is a regular queen size mattress about 6″ thick, so not one of the oversized behemoths that have become the norm. They also had a 1.5″ thick memory foam pad to go on top of it. We took a look at it and decided to give it a try.

We have been using our old Select Comfort adjustable air mattress in the RV since summer 2013. One side (mine) has a slow leak so I have to adjust it every other night. I could live with that indefinitely but what we really dislike about it, and have for a long time, is that we tend to roll into the center or off the edge. It also takes up valuable storage space under the bed for the pump, has wires and hoses to deal with, and has a controller for each side. We were definitely ready to try something else so we stripped the bed, disconnected the two air hoses, and carried the mattress out of the bus. It was surprisingly heavy and bulky for an air mattress and lacking in self-supporting structure, but that also made it easier to bend it around the front passenger seat, down the entry stairs, and out the door. We stored it in the bedroom of the house trailer pending a final decision about the replacement mattress.

We carried the new mattress in, which was definitely easier than getting the old one out, and got it positioned on the plywood bed platform. We put the memory foam pad on top and put our mattress topper over that which added another inch. We put our electric heating pad on and then the sheets and the blanket. We will try it out for a while and if we like it we will see if the Salvation Army wants the old one. If not, it may end up at the Quartzsite dump as we really do not have any way to get it home or a reason to do so. We will leave the pump, hoses, and controllers under the bed until we decide on its final disposition.

The suspension on the bus had settled slightly in the driver side rear since we parked and leveled it almost a month ago. It would not have been enough to require an adjustment except that our bed sits crosswise with the head on that side and I find that sleeping with my head even slightly downhill is not comfortable. Rather than start up the main engine we got the Dewalt portable air-compressor out of the car and connected it into the brake system fill port in the passenger side engine bay. I had to connect the chassis batteries and turn the ignition on (without starting the engine) in order to activate the leveling controls, but that allowed me to raise that corner up and get the coach level side-to-side. At some point we will re-position the bus, but not until I have completed some work on the turbo boost sensor mounting plate and hose and the level low system components for the front end.

We put the air-compressor back in its special storage divider in the car and decided to rearrange a few things so we could put the rear seat down. Starting next week we will need to be able to carry a passenger. We thought about heading down to the market area but remembered that we were expecting UPS deliveries. I started working on two more articles for BCM instead while Linda went for a walk. It was warmer today and so it was warmer in the coach and I ended up taking a nap.

Our UPS and FedEx shipments usually arrive late in the afternoon or early evening but had not shown up by dinner time. I had planned to disassemble the Aqua-Hot burner and replace the bearings, nozzle, and perhaps a few other small parts tomorrow but it now appears that will have to wait until Tuesday, assuming our shipments arrive on Monday. I will likely need to clean the unit as well, given that it has been running so rich, and that may include pulling the combustion chamber.

Linda made two cold salads for dinner; chickpea and wild rice Waldorf. Both are favorites of ours, especially in warmer weather. We had some Barry’s Basic Bread with our meal and another glass of Lamb’s Valley organic sweet white wine was a most agreeable accompaniment.

Yup, that’s a real, live camel in the Hi Jolly Daze Parade. These animals are strongly linked to the 19th century history of Quartzsite, AZ.

2015/01/10 (S) Hi Jolly Daze Parade

Today was the annual Hi Jolly Daze Parade. As first time winter visitors to Quartzsite there was no way we were going to miss this event. I was up at 7 AM to make coffee and we were done with breakfast by 8 AM. We checked the parade route online and figured we would go to the Quartzsite Improvement Association grounds as the parade ended in the parking lot there. It was scheduled to start at 10 AM so we snagged Fonda about 9:40 and headed that way in the car.

When we got to Central Avenue and Main Street the police had Main Street closed so we could not turn left to get to the QIA. I stayed on Central down to Kuehn Street and took it east over to the exit 19 overpass and back to Main Street. On the way we saw Lloyd DeGerald’s motorhome parked along Kuehn with a big banner advertising his Aqua-Hot technician services. I am hopeful that I will be able to repair both of our burners myself but if not Lloyd is the guy I would call, so I was glad to see that he is in town. But back to the parade.

The police had Main Street closed on that end too. We knew the parade started at Plymouth Avenue and Quail Trail so we headed in that direction and parked at the Quartzsite Library. We were surprised that no one else was parked there as it was a short walk from there to the start of the parade route which turned out to be an excellent spot from which to view the parade. What we realized after we got there was that the west side of Plymouth Avenue was lined with cars from the starting point all the way to Main Street. I suspect that Main Street was similarly lined with people, most likely in cars, but we were not able to observe that directly.

We had a few drops of rain leading up to the start of the parade. There were plenty of grey clouds around, but the sun was also shining and the parade did not get rained out. In fact, a full 160 degree rainbow formed behind the parade and lingered until most of the participants had passed us. The highlight of the parade was a live camel.

“Hi Jolly” was the Americanized pronunciation given to Hadji Ali, who came here in 1856 as part of an experiment by the U. S. Army in the use of camels. There are conflicting accounts of his exact place of origin but it seems clear that he came to the U. S. from the Middle East as one of the first, and the lead, camel driver. For a more complete account check the entry in Wikipedia for “Hi Jolly.”

The experiment did not work out as the Army’s horses, mules, and burrows were apparently terrified of the giant animals and would panic in their presence, but Hadji Ali remained in the U. S. and eventually ended up in Quartzsite where he died in 1902 and was buried in the local cemetery. We got the impression that he was something of a living legend in his own time and in the 1930’s the governor of Arizona had a monument erected at Hi Jolly’s gravesite. It is a small pyramid made of local stone with a metal plaque on one side and a metal profile of a camel on top. According to Wikipedia the monument is allegedly the most visited location in Q.

When the parade was over we returned to our coaches. Linda went for a walk and I wrote another article for Bus Conversion Magazine. This was another short one, less than two pages and only 11 photos, on the installation of the new speedometer in our bus. When Linda returned from her walk she made a broccoli-potato mash. In addition to the broccoli and the potato it had soy milk, vegan butter, salt, and pepper. The potatoes were not completely mashed and the dish was both tasty and had a nice mouth feel.

After lunch Linda made a shopping list. We headed to the Kuehn Street market area and stopped at Barry’s Breads but our timing was bad, again. We drove south on Central and found the entrance to the parking lot for “the big tent.” This is where the RV vendors will be in another week or so, but nothing was open yet, so we went over to the Tyson Wells area west of Central Avenue and found some miscellaneous items and a pair of Crocs for me. For all the shoes I brought I did not have something that was easy on, easy off. We are parked on gravel and I needed something I could slip on quickly and easily to step outside the coach.

Most of Linda’s list was groceries so we drove to Blythe, California to do our shopping. To vary our trip and see some new sights we stayed on Kuehn Street heading west past the edge of town where it became West Dome Rock Road. The road parallels I-10 on the south side for a long way through BLM land and eventually ends at an interchange with the Interstate. We saw lots of RVs, and a few tents, spread out on either side of the road, but not nearly as many as we thought we would. There are probably a lot more RVs here than we realize, but the desert is a vast place.

When we got to Blythe we took a few minutes to drive through town and get a feel for the place. It had a more developed, modern, and prosperous business district than Quartzsite and more houses, as opposed to park model trailers and mobile homes. The houses were not fancy but they were in decent condition. Schools and municipal buildings were also nice, and there is nothing in Q to compare to the two supermarkets and name brand stores like Auto Zone, NAPA Auto Parts, and K-Mart. We started at Albertson’s and got most of the items on our list. We then went across the street to Smart and Final Express and picked up a few things there. Once again we were not able to find the Silk brand Soy Coffee Creamer, which has us wondering if we last bought it at Wal-Mart in Parker.

When we got back to camp I unloaded the car and Linda put the food away. I wandered over to say high to Butch and Fonda and play with their dogs, Daffy and Rascal, for a few minutes. I then went over to say high to Jim and Barb’s dog, Roho, which brought them out of their motorhome and got me invited in. Linda eventually wandered over looking for me and the four of us had a nice chat. It was the first time since they got here that I had been inside their rig, a Country Coach Intrigue, and it was very nice. It has one slide on the front half of the driver’s side, and there is no doubt that it really opens up the interior. Before we bought our bus we were looking seriously at Country Coach motorhomes (but not their Prevost bus conversions) and the Tiffin Allegro Bus (which is a purpose-built motorhome, not a true bus). But in the end we were bitten by bus fever and we still have it.

We stopped to visit briefly with Butch and Fonda on the way back to our rig. Butch has always had an interest in metal detecting and has developed an interest in rocks since arriving in Quartzsite. If you had the slightest inclination towards rocks, gems, and minerals then being in Quartzsite during the winter would likely push you over the edge into a full-blown hobbyist. Sometime in the last couple of days Butch bought a used contraption that consists of a table saw, two grinding wheels with a water delivery system, and an electric motor. He and Fonda acquired a bucket of rocks, including a piece of petrified wood, and they are setting up an area outside their bus to work on their new hobby.

For dinner Linda made pan-grilled tofu slices with caramelized onions and bar-b-cue sauce, but with a twist. Instead of hamburger buns or slices of bread she heated 12″ tortillas and made wraps. Of the various ways she has served this simple, but delicious, dish this was definitely my favorite so far. As much as I like a nice, fresh bun the tortilla wrap kept all of the ingredients contained so that I got onion and BBQ sauce with each bite, and they did not end up all over my plate and all over me.

As we do most evenings, we relaxed, played games, worked puzzles, read, and wrote. We are always a bit surprised at how tired we are after dinner, but we are up and about during the day and the fresh air and sunshine just seem to wear us out.

The roof of our bus after cleaning looking SW as viewed from the driver side front corner. Quartzsite, AZ.

2015/01/11 (N) Swimsuit In January

I turned the lights off last night at 11 AM and was up at 7 AM this morning which seems to have become my current routine. Because of the new (to us) mattress I was able to get up without waking Linda up. I turned up the heat in the front of the coach but not the back as Linda does not sleep well in a warm room. I started getting the coffee ready but did not grind the beans because of the noise it makes. I worked at my computer on organizational tasks such as copying files to the NAS, copying blog posts from e-mail to Word, and backing up website and photo files to the NAS.

Linda got up around 8:30 AM and set the microwave convection oven to preheat in convection only mode. When it was ready she heated up the leftover cinnamon raisin rolls she took out of the freezer yesterday and put in the refrigerator. While the rolls were heating I finished making the coffee. Although they are not gigantic, one of these rolls would probably be plenty of calories for breakfast. Two rolls, however, made for a very satisfying meal. Still, they take about four hours to make fresh and about 25 minutes to reheat. She makes a batch of eight, so if we each had one for breakfast her efforts would cover four meals instead of two.

Today was another bus cleaning day, but first Linda went for her morning walk while I continued to organize photo files on our network attached storage device. It was forecast to be a cloudy but mild day and by late morning the clouds had moved in, so when Linda got back we got busy. Even with the cloud cover it was warm enough that I was able to wear my swimsuit and a T-shirt, my preferred outfit for working with water. We bought some CLR Mold & Mildew remover yesterday and I tried using it on the lower rear roof. It did not appear to have any effect so I abandoned any further roof cleaning and we got started on the sides.

The upper sides of our bus are not easy to clean. Even with our Little Giant extension/step ladder set up as a step ladder at its maximum height I cannot quite reach the top curve of the side walls. Knowing that was the case I cleaned all the way around the edge of the roof, where it meets the side walls and the front and rear caps, from the roof. Once I was done with that we took the Little Giant extension/step ladder and converted it from extension configuration to step ladder configuration.

We worked all afternoon until after 5 PM and managed to clean the front and the passenger side. We wanted to get the passenger side done because it faces south and we wanted to do this on a cloudy day. Working a section at a time we used McGuire’s red automotive soap, scrubbed with an automotive microfiber sponge, rinsed thoroughly (with Q’s incredibly hard water), and dried with microfiber clothes. We could not get all of the hard water stains off but it was a lot cleaner, and looked a lot better, than when we started.

The weather forecast for tonight was for heavy rain sometime between 9 and 11 PM with accumulations of up to 1/2″. For a place that typically only gets 4″ of rain a year that would be a lot of rain for one storm. We put our lawn chairs, mats, and other outdoor items in the carport for the night just to be safe. Shortly after 6 PM we had our first sprinkles.

For dinner we had chickpea salad and wild rice vegan Waldorf salad with strawberries and peach slices and some Barry’s Basic Bread with a small glass of Franzia Fruity Red Sangria. I responded to some e-mails after dinner and deferred work on possible survey questions for the FMCA national education committee until tomorrow.

Linda makes her selections at the Quartzsite Farmers Market.

2015/01/12 (M) E-mail Groups

It has stayed warm enough the last few nights that I have not needed the electric heating pad and we have been able to leave windows slightly open. We both sleep better in a cool room with fresh air. The deluge of rain that was forecast for last night did not develop but it was still mostly cloudy when we got up this morning. After breakfast, coffee, morning puzzles, and checking in with the world we got on with our chores.

My major tasks for the day revolved around preparations for, and participation in, a 2 PM FMCA National Education Committee work session. While I worked on that stuff Linda went for her morning walk, made an appointment to get her hair cut tomorrow, and made garlic naan (Indian bread) from scratch. When the phone meeting was over I transferred photographs from my camera to my computer and then joined Linda over at Butch and Fonda’s coach for a late afternoon visit.

Jim L. showed up while we were chatting, read the electric sub-meters, and figured out our bills. Linda had to write four separate checks to cover our site fee, electricity usage, laundry, and the rental for the apartment, which Jim gave to Barb to cover the cleaning before and after Marilyn’s upcoming visit. Butch placed an order with PartDeal.com for a VDO speedometer so I had him order a VDO Cockpit Series 0-30 PSI Boost Gauge for me. The UPS truck also showed up and had the two packages I have been waiting for. All too soon the sun dropped below the western mountains and it turned chilly so we retreated to our coach.

Linda made curried red lentils for dinner and served it along with the garlic naan bread she made earlier in the day. Warmed and energized by this fabulous meal I launched into my second major task of the day; the creation of an e-mail group in Microsoft Outlook for our FMCA Great Lakes Converted Coaches chapter. I got the latest roster from Linda, who is the treasurer, and was able to rearrange it, save it as a CSV file, import it into Outlook, and map it to the standard contact fields. It was then easy to create a Contact Group and select all of my new entries to go in it. Once I got the group set up I wrote an e-mail to the members, my first since being elected President of the chapter back in October. I was up much later than usual, but I got it done.

Escapees RV Club happy hour SE of Q in one of the BLM STVAs.

2015/01/13 (T) Geekiness

Today was a day for Geeks and geekiness. Chris and Jim Guld, AKA The Geeks On Tour, arrived in Quartzsite yesterday and are staying at an RV Park not far from our encampment. Butch knew they were headed this way and after he and I were unable to get EchoLink working on his computer yesterday he contacted Jim to see if he would be willing to stop by and take a look. Jim is a former network administrator and knows a lot more about stuff like networking, protocols, ports, port forwarding, and proxy servers than we do. But before he came over Linda and I had breakfast after which she walked over to the beauty parlor and got her hair cut while I worked on a seminar classification task for the FMCA National Education a Committee.

Jim G. arrived on his bicycle around 10:30 AM and stayed for a couple of hours. He re-checked the things Butch and I had already tried and tried some things we had not, but we could not get Butch’s system to let the EchoLink program connect successfully to the EchoLink servers. For the record, Butch’s system consists of a Windows Vista laptop that connects to the Internet one of two ways: 1) through a Verizon MiFi or, 2) through a WiFiRanger Go2 into a WiFiRanger Mobile into a DSL WiFi gateway of unknown make and model. Jim also tried connecting through the WiFi hotspot on his Android-based smartphone. Same result. Mixed in with work we had a great visit with Jim and hope to meet up with he and Chris at least once while they are in Q.

After Jim left Linda and I were headed in to have a bite of lunch when an unfamiliar car pulled into the lot. Barb was by the road and pointed the driver in our direction. We quickly realized that it was Mara. She had called Linda first but Linda did not hear the phone ring so it was a wonderful surprise when she showed up. We visited for a couple of hours while we snacked on hummus, pretzels, and red grapes.

Mara is camped on BLM land north of town with the WINs (Wandering Individuals Network) and has been traveling off and on with groups of WINs since we last saw her in Gillette, Wyoming in July 2013. Since that time she has also gotten a different motorhome, a 35′ Fleetwood Bounder, with which she is very pleased. She invited us to join a group of WINs on Sunday to go to The Desert Bar and I think we will. Linda checked it out online and it is a completely solar-powered, off-the-grid, place. You have to take dirt roads or ATVs to get there.

It appears that things are finally going to get busy for us. Gary, from BCM, is supposed to arrive tomorrow and Curtis, from RVillage, is supposed to arrive on Saturday. Forrest and Mary are already here as are Chris and Cherie of Technomadia. The Escapees RV Club has happy hours scheduled tomorrow and Thursday at one of the BLM areas east of town. Blythe, California has a bluegrass festival starting Friday and running through Sunday. We will probably go on Friday as there is also a Balloon Festival in Lake Havasu the same three days which we will probably attend on Saturday. Somewhere in there I need to repair our Aqua-Hot and I am thinking that it will probably be Thursday. The “Big Tent” Sports, Vacation, and RV Show starts on Saturday (17th) and runs through the Sunday the 25th. Marilyn arrives on the Thursday the 22nd and leaves on the Thursday the 29th. The last full week of January really is the peak of the winter season in Q.

After Mara left I used my macro lens to photograph the front and back of both of our amateur radio operator licenses. I post-processed the images to improve the readability and reduce the file size. Once I had the photos ready I downloaded and installed the EchoLink software on my Asus laptop. I went through the initial configuration for my license and tried the server connection test. As with Butch’s installation, two of the four UDP port tests failed. I ignored that for the moment and went ahead with the validation procedure for my ham license.

Anyone can download and install the EchoLink software but only licensed hams can legally use it. That is because it can, and often does, connect a computer to a ham radio repeater that is “on the air” and only licensed hams are allowed to transmit on those frequencies. Validation was a multi-step process. When first starting EchoLink I had to supply my FCC callsign, name, and (base station) location. That information was transmitted to a database on the EchoLink servers but the EchoLink organization needed to validate that I was actually the person to whom that callsign was issued. Through a separate process on the EchoLink.org website I had to upload JPEG image files of the front and back of my wallet license. Once someone examined the images and made sure the call was active in the FCC database they “flipped the switch” on the server side and I was finally able to connect to stations if I wanted to. I repeated the process later for Linda’s license.

While I was waiting to have my license validated I started trying to figure out how to get the EchoLink program to connect successfully to the EchoLink servers. When the communications test with the servers runs it identifies the IP address assigned to the computer. I went into the WiFiRanger Mobile and enabled UDB port forwarding for ports 5198 and 5199. The TCP test was successful so I did not set up TCP port forwarding for port 5200. Enabling port forwarding, however, was necessary but not sufficient.

What I ended up doing was switching the operating mode on the ESET Smart Security program from “Automatic” to “Interactive.” With that change, the program would pop up a message box every time another program had outbound or inbound traffic through a port and ask if I wanted to allow the communication and optionally create a rule for it. Several of those messages had to do with EchoLink and after clicking “Allow” to all of them the server/router tests were finally all successful and the program was fully functional except for the license validation.

Sometime in the late afternoon another motorhome showed up and backed in to the property with Jim L.’s help. It was Larry and Sandy, who normally stay at Jim L.’s RV Park near the QIA. Jim’s park is full so he put them over here in the spot by the laundry where Jack and Maria parked for a couple of nights a week or so ago.

We had leftover red lentil potato curry (thick soup) for dinner with the rest of the garlic naan and a glass of sangria and it was very good, again. I finished up my FMCA education committee task and e-mailed it off. I received an e-mail that my ham license had been validated so we played with the EchoLink program and User’s Guide for a while but did not try to connect to any stations.

While I was working on all of this I noticed that nine updates were pending for Windows 8.1 and there were four optional ones as well. Installing updates is often an iterative process and so it was again this evening. One of the optional updates was a roll up from November 2014 that was 723.9 MB. That’s a big update. I started downloading it at 23:52 MST and then went to bed. My hope was that fewer people would be trying to use the local DSL system to get online at that hour and the update might actually load and install successfully. But I would have to wait until tomorrow morning to find out.

L-to-R: Travis & Melanie Carr from the Escapees RV Club and Cherie Ve Ard & Chris Dunphy of Technomadia.

2015/01/14 (W) SKP Happy Hour

As soon as I got up this morning I checked the huge Windows 8.1 optional rollup update that I started last night. It had completed successfully except for restarting the computer, so that’s what I did. While the update finished installing I made coffee and got the juice ready and Linda prepared our cereal.

Once the update finished I checked e-mail and websites. Linda made white bean hummus to take to the SKP Happy Hour later today. She then remembered that the Farmers Market at Desert Gardens was this morning from 8 AM to noon so we drove over there. There was only one stand selling produce, but they were from Blythe, California only (20 miles away) so the produce was very local and very fresh. Linda bought an assortment of veggies and a grapefruit.

We had parked at the south end of the western parking area and from there we could see a road going back towards “Q” Mountain and a well-defined trail going up the western side. We drove back there and determined that we could park there when we decide to climb the mountain and do some panoramic photography.

We drove to Barry’s Breads and bought a loaf of Barry’s Basic Bread and then continued east on Kuehn Street to confirm Lloyd DeGerald’s location. We took Riggles Avenue back over I-10 to Main Street and headed back towards Central Avenue, stopping at the Road Runner Market for a few things. When we got back Jim and Barb were aggressively trimming the Palo Verde trees in the cactus garden.

As we often do most mornings, Linda went for a walk and I worked at my computer, installing three more optional updates and taking care of some e-mail. We gathered up chairs, food, and beverages at 12:45 PM and drove over to the SKP Happy Hour on East Dome Rock Road. There was already quite a crowd when we arrived and everyone was in a good mood. And why not. The sun was shining, the air temperature was pleasant, there were tables arrayed with food, people had beverages of their choice, Johnny Cockrum was performing, and lots of folks were meeting old and new friends. We had a thoroughly pleasant time, but we always do when we are with groups of Escapees.

On the way back to camp we spotted Lloyd DeGerald and his wife out walking their dog and stopped briefly to chat about our Aqua-Hot. We then stopped at the trailer for the Two Crazy Ladies and ordered engraved hang tags with our call signs and a sign asking emergency responders to rescue our cats.

When we got back to camp Linda went for another (short) walk and I sat down to work at my computer. We lost our Internet connection while we were away and the DSL gateway would not re-associate with our WiFiRanger Mobile so I had Barb open the house and I power cycled the gateway. I was then able reestablish the connection to our WFR-M. That is the second time this has happened since we arrived here but so far has not caused us any real difficulty.

Butch has been having problems with their Progressive Industries EMS cutting off their shorepower due to high voltage. We noticed during dinner that our PI-EMS was also showing a PE-3 (previous error – high voltage). I do not know if our Magnum inverter switches on “instantly” when outside power is lost or if there is a delay but I am now wondering if we lost our Internet connection due to loss of power to the WiFi Ranger Mobile after which it was not able to reconnect with the gateway. The next time this happens I may try powering the WFR-M off for 60 seconds and restarting it. It’s also possible that the high voltage is wreaking havoc on the DSL gateway.

After dinner I sent a TXT message to Gary at BCM inquiring if he had arrived in Q as planned. He called back and said they had just cleared Indio, California. I suggested they find someplace to stop and rest and finish the trip tomorrow morning in the daylight. They are headed to the Quartzsite Market Place dry camp area for the Eagles International bus gathering. I spent the rest of the evening working on five different articles for Bus Conversion Magazine before finally turning in around midnight.

2014/12/05-08 (F-M) On To Texas

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2014/12/05 (F) Parting Company (for now)

A set of standing jokes with us involves our answers to the question “what time is it?” The most common response is the day of the week, such as “Friday” (if we know what day it is) or perhaps “I think it’s Friday” (if we are less sure). Variations include “daytime” or “nighttime” both of which only restate the obvious but at least we are usually correct, or perhaps “morning,” “afternoon,” or “evening” if we are trying to be more precise. More globally we might answer “eastern” or “central” referencing the time zone we (think) we are in.

I was awake and ready to get up at 5:30 AM (technically the morning but still dark as night). I checked the house batteries and they were down to 66% SOC (State Of Charge). The coach had been running on the batteries/inverter since 9 PM last night, so 8.5 hours. At 3.6 percentage points per hour I expected a 31 percentage point drop to around 60% SOC, so this charge level seemed reasonable, except that we had very few things running last night. The refrigerator and auxiliary air-compressor were on, of course, although the air-compressor only runs for a few minutes every couple of hours and the fridge runs around 20-24 minutes per hour. The Aqua-Hot was turned on but I did not hear the fans come. I had the thermostats set to 15 (Celsius, 59 Fahrenheit) before we went to bed and the temperature in the coach this morning was in the upper 60s, so I don’t think any of the zone pumps or heat exchanger fans came on overnight. In other words, it seemed to me that we had used more charge from the batteries than we should have. Although I installed the 24 VDC battery bank and the new Magnum inverter/charger two years ago, we have not done very much boondocking (dry camping, no hookups) so we are still figuring out the finer points of this system.

I started the GenSet and the charger came on in bulk charge mode delivering 89 Amps to the battery bank at 29.1 VDC. It switched to absorption mode fairly quickly and by 7:30 AM it was delivering 34 Amps at 28.3 VDC and the SOC was up to 86%. The battery bank has a 400 A-Hr capacity (at “24” VDC, which is actually 25.4 VDC when fully charged) so 10% of that is 40 A-Hr and the generator had returned approximately 80 A-Hrs of charge at 24VDC to the battery bank. (“A-Hr” stands for Ampere-Hours and is actually a measure of energy, specifically electrical charge, which technically should be stated in Coulombs.) “40 A-Hr” means a steady flow of current at a 40 Amp rate for one hour. Note, however, that this also depends on the voltage. 40 A-Hr for a nominal 24 VDC system is twice the energy of 40 A-Hr for a nominal 12 VDC system. Most RVs are set up with a nominal 12 VDC house battery system. Our house battery bank is thus equivalent to an 800 A-Hr, 12 VDC system.)

The downside to all of this is that conventional lead-acid batteries, including our AGM batteries, do not tolerate very well being repeatedly discharged below 50% SOC, so the effective/useable capacity is about 1/2 of the stated capacity. The more deeply the batteries are drained the fewer times they can be brought back up to full charge. Whereas shallow discharging allows for more cycles, and more total energy in and out, but requires a larger battery system to provide power for a reasonable amount of time. Batteries are heavy and bulky, so you cannot just take as many as you would like. For lead-acid batteries 50% discharge seems to be the optimal compromise for battery life, useful run time, and size/weight.

We were up early enough to have a light breakfast and a cup of coffee and have time to digest our meal before we started driving. I powered on our Verizon MiFi and my computer and downloaded e-mails while Linda used her iPad to preview the truck stop options at the interchange just this side of Little a Rock, Arkansas. She also pulled up the satellite image of the Wal-Mart in Texarkana, Texas where we planned to spend the night. Cellular access to the Internet, mapping programs, and satellite imagery, along with GPS receivers have changed the nature of motor vehicle travel in general and RVing in particular. There are certain things where the element of surprise associated with discovery is a good thing, such as an unexpected view when hiking, but when it comes to maneuvering a 40 foot motorcoach with a 20 foot car/towbar attached to its rear end surprises are usually not a good thing.

Around 8 AM we stepped outside and saw Fonda outside with their two dogs (Rascal and Daffy) so we walked back to their bus. Butch was on the phone with U. S. Coach in New Jersey discussing the main engine air-compressor situation. They confirmed that the unloader valve(s) are a common failure point and that the replacement parts were inexpensive and available. He ordered four sets for delivery to Amarillo, Texas where they will be visiting someone while we are in Alvarado, Texas. Two sets are for them and two sets are for us. The parts may not make it to Amarillo until Wednesday, so we will be as flexible in our travel planning as we can. If Donn will let us stay at his place in Alvarado, Texas we may just sit there, unhook the car, and go explore the area.

By 8:30 AM the house battery charger was showing zero (0) Amps at 25.3 VDC, indicating that the batteries were fully charged. The Magnum Battery Monitor Kit (BMK), however, was showing the SOC as 88%. I am inclined to believe that in this case the BMK is not showing the correct SOC, but I will keep a close eye on this. When we get to Donn’s place we will be plugged into a “50 Amp” RV electrical service for at least 40 hours and see what that does to the readings.

While Butch and Fonda had breakfast we went for a stroll around the Wal-Mart parking lot to stretch our legs and scoped out the best egress route. Around 9 AM we started preparing the interior for travel and by 9:45 I had the car prepared for towing and the main engine running. We pulled out at just before 10 AM and took the lead. I drove the first 80 miles at 55 MPH due to light to moderate rain and greatly reduced visibilities. We took exit 161 just east of Little Rock, Arkansas and pulled into a Love’s Truck Stop. Butch picked a better lane than I did and we ended up leaving and driving to the Pilot Truck Stop on the other side of the highway. But before we left Linda walked over to let them know what we were doing and say “so long, see you down the road.” Two miles after we got back on the highway we stayed left for I-430 around the south side of Little Rock while Butch and Fonda stayed on I-40 around the north side of the city. We were headed to I-30 and then southwest towards Dallas while they were headed west towards Amarillo. We will meet up with them next week, perhaps in Midland, Texas or on down the road in New Mexico.

Most of the rest of our drive was through rain but otherwise uneventful. In spite of the weather the drive was very pretty. I-30 west of Little Rock climbs through rolling hills with extensive woodlands on both sides of the highway. We finally drove out from under the rain about 30 miles from Texarkana and finished the trip with bright sun and an ambient temperature of 74 degrees F.

It was easy enough getting off I-30 onto the southbound connector but a bit trickier getting over to make a right turn in the short distance we had. But we did, and turned onto the road that runs in front of the Walmart and down to the far entrance, as planned. I started my left turn into the parking lot road when a guy pulled up to make a left turn coming out of the parking lot. I had tried to swing wide but he realized he needed to back up or risk damage to his truck, so he did. I could not make the first left into the actual parking lot so I went down to the next entrance by the store.

I barely made a 180 degree turn into the first row, causing a women sitting in her car to just stare at us as I missed her by inches (apparently it did not occur to her to back up). I had to straighten out before completing the turn to prevent scraping the driver’s side of the car on a huge boulder at the inside corner of the turn that I somehow did not see before I started the turn but caught sight of in my rearview mirror. Considering that I just completed a drive through less than ideal conditions, which was probably more stressful than I acknowledged, this was not the way I wanted to end our driving for the day. Like with airplanes, however, the takeoffs and landings are usually the trickiest parts.

We pulled into our selected parking spot at the back (east) end of the parking lot, in parallel with several tractor-trailer rigs, at 2:40 PM. I went through our arrival procedure with one glitch; I could not raise or lower the front end of the coach using the Level Low system. It worked fine yesterday so something had obviously changed. I leveled the coach by adjusting the rear tires instead. Once the coach was set I checked the house battery bank SOC. It was 71% but the inverter/charger readout said the battery bank was at 25.0 VDC and the charger was delivering zero (0) Amps. Since no loads were being powered I presumed the voltage was probably a good indication of the battery state. A “12 volt” battery is fully charged at a resting (no load) voltage of 12.6 volts (2.1 volts per cell times six cells). Double that for a “24 volt” battery bank and the full charge resting voltage is 25.2 volts, so our batteries being at 25.0 volts indicated they were probably near full charge.

I decided to wait and turn the generator on later when it was time to cook dinner and let it bring the batteries up to full charge. At this point, however, I am suspicious of the reading I am getting from the Magnum BMK. The data suggests that I do not have the ZENA power generating system tied in to the battery/charger/inverter system in such a way that the BMK can correctly account for the charge the ZENA is providing, but that seems unlikely. Still, I will have to check when we get settled in Quartzsite (or back home in the spring) and/or see if there is a way to reset the 100% SOC level on the BMK. We will be plugged in to a 50 Amp RV service tomorrow at Donn’s so I will see if the SOC rises to that level after being on shorepower for almost 48 hours.

Linda opened a few windows so the cats could have some fresh air. We then walked over to the store for some exercise and fresh air ourselves. I found a case for my Samsung Galaxy S III phone as a tab on my old holder has broken and it no longer holds the phone securely. When we got back a pickup truck towing a 5th wheel trailer had pulled up next to us on the driver’s side. It was parked such that our generator exhaust would blow in their entrance door. I introduced myself to Gary and explained that we would be starting the GenSet in a little while. He appreciated the heads up and elected to back up to where he was clear of our exhaust.

By the time I got back inside Linda was on the phone with Butch. They were at a Wal-Mart in Checotah, Oklahoma just off I-40 about 60 miles west of the Arkansas border. They also ran through rain the rest of the day and it was still raining there when he called. The temporary air-pressure solution had continued to work well all day.

We ran on batteries/inverter until 5:30 PM and then started the generator so Linda could prepare dinner. She needed to cook two baking potatoes in the microwave and sauté some onions, mushrooms, and broccoli using the induction cooker. The microwave kept clicking and I noticed the current drop on that leg each time. The other leg wasn’t drawing much current so I had her keep using the induction cooker and turned on the Aqua-Hot electric heating element. That brought the current draw on each leg roughly into balance and the microwave behaved fine after that. The charger was also drawing a few amps but not the much.

The microwave is wired through the inverter sub-panel. With the generator running, each leg of the AC power is simply passed through the inverter to the sub-panel along with the neutral. I recall that the inverter relays are designed to carry 30 Amps on each leg, but we were only drawing about 20 Amps when the problem occurred so that should not be the source of the problem. It appears that the genset may not tolerate 20 Amps on one leg and zero on the other, or perhaps a differential current draw of 20 Amps. If that’s the case it is either an unfortunate design limitation or an indication that the generator is developing a problem.

In discussing this with Butch he said that gensets wired to produce 240VAC are usually set up to regulated that voltage but the 120VAC from L1 and L2 to Neutral can vary widely. If the voltage on the microwave leg is dropping too low it will cause problems for the unit. It is possible to rewire the genset to produce 120VAC and regulate that voltage, although it might require a new voltage regulator. We would lose the use of our Gaggenau 2-burner cooktop but could live with that limitation. Of more concern to me is the currents from L1 and L2 would now add in the Neutral wire rather than cancel, meaning the current in the Neutral conductor(s) could exceed their design specifications.

I got a TXT message from Chuck inquiring about our trip so I provided a few details. I decided to check the bay under the driver’s seat to see if there was anything obviously wrong with the pneumatic solenoid valves that control the Level Low system. There are red plastic fittings that screw into each solenoid and the fitting on the top one was unscrewed quite a bit. The others were in tight so I screwed the top one back in. I won’t know until tomorrow if that made a difference, but I decided to call Chuck and consult with him as I recalled him mentioning having had problems with these pilot valves on his H3-40.

Chuck did not think the plastic fittings were the problem but offered other salient advice about coils, ‘C’ clips, valves, and rubber ‘O’ rings. If Donn will let us hang around for an extra day I will probably unhook the car and drive to the Prevost service facility near the Dallas Ft. Worth airport and pick up some new solenoid valves and perhaps a couple of Norgren valves and a windshield wiper motor.

We ended up with tractor-trailers pulling in and out around us well into the evening. One in particular parked one spot over from us on the passenger side and let his engine idle for hours. It felt like we were in a truck stop instead of a Wal-Mart parking lot, but given the price we had no basis to complain. Still, if we wanted to stay at a truck stop we would have stayed at a truck stop. Hopefully we can get a decent night’s sleep as I would like to be on the road at sunrise, which is 7:15 AM.

At 8 PM we went for a stroll around the store and the parking lot. Wal-Mart parking lots are well lit as a rule and being 24/7/52 stores, there are always lots of people around making it a comfortable enough environment for an evening walk. As we were getting ready to go to sleep I got a TXT message from Donn, with turn-by-turn directions for getting to his house and a couple of questions, which turned into a short TXT message conversation. While I was texting with Donn our male cat, Jasper, came up by our pillows to look out the window and have a long back-stroking and chin-scratching session with Linda. Traveling is stressful for the cats, especially at first, and they seek the comfort of our attention quite a bit (when they are not sleeping). Squared away on tomorrow’s travel arrangements we drifted off to sleep to the gentle hum (rattle?) of large diesel engines.

Donn Barnes’ place in Alvarado, Texas. Yee Haw!

2014/12/06 (S) Alvarado, Texas

I was awake at 5 AM and got up shortly thereafter. The house batteries were showing 58% SOC and 24.3 volts with no current draw. I thought about not recharging the batteries and seeing how the ZENA system did on the drive today, but decided I did not want to risk depleting them below 50% SOC. I turned on the generator and the Aqua-Hot electric heating element to balance the load and make hot water for our use this morning. The charger went into Bulk Charging mode putting 88 Amps into the battery bank at 27.4 volts, so the batteries definitely needed recharging after running the coach for 8 hours.

We have and older, 22 cubic foot, residential (AC compressor) refrigerator that I presume accounts for most of the battery use overnight. For each Ampere of current the inverter produces at 120 VAC it would draw 5 Amps from the “24 volt” batteries if it was 100% efficient, which it is not. If I assume the SOC actually dropped from 88% last night at 9 PM (when I shut the generator off) to 58% at 5 AM this morning, the 30 percentage point drop would represent 120 A-Hrs of charge removed from the batteries (30% of 400) which equates to an average continuous draw of 15 Amps per hour at “24” volts. Divide that by 6 (to account for inverter inefficiency) and you get 2.5 Amps per hour at 120 VAC, not that much, really.

It’s a bit more complicated than that, of course, as the refrigerator draws more current when it starts and has an electric heating element around the edge of the doors as well as an automatic defrost feature. Those last two features are nice when connected to shorepower, but are not battery friendly, and I need to rig up a switch that allows me to turn these “features” off when we are dry-camping. We also have an auxiliary air-compressor that supplies pressurized air to operate the toilet and other air-powered accessories. It doesn’t run often but it draws a fair amount of current (at 120 VAC) when it does. We also have small miscellaneous AC and DC loads that are on all the time, but collectively they add up.

By 6:30 AM the charger had shifted to Absorb Mode at 27.9 VDC and was putting 63 Amps into the batteries. Between the charger, the refrigerator, and the electric heating element we were drawing 14 Amps on both legs. I was hoping to be on the road this morning by 7:30 AM. The batteries will not be fully charged by then, so this may be the first real test of the ZENA systems ability to maintain and recharge them while we drive. My ultimate goal is to adjust the ZENA system so it can power the Magnum inverter/charger while we are driving at a level that is sufficient to run the refrigerator and fully, or almost fully, recharge the house battery bank. That will apparently require some tweaking and additional testing which I am not going to do while parked at a Wal-Mart or other dry-camping location.

As we were getting ready to pull out I noted that the batteries were at 83% SOC and shut off the generator. The drive from Texarkana to Alvarado was easy with dry conditions and sunny skies. Traffic was mostly light and we enjoyed the east-central Texas countryside. Traffic got a lot denser as we neared Dallas but once we exited I-30 onto I-635 south it thinned out again. It thickened again as we approached the exit for US-67 south and then thinned out and stayed that way for the rest of the trip to Alvarado. We turned back north on I-35W and pulled in to Donn’s place a few miles north of Alvarado proper around 11:30. I stopped in his driveway, exited the coach, was met by Donn, and we discussed where he wanted me to park.

The desired parking arrangement required us to unhook our car so we did that. With Linda’s assistance I made a four-point turn to get the bus parked. I pulled it up somewhat parallel to Donn’s Bluebird, backed up between the end of a building and a tree, swung forward into the driveway, and then backed around close to, and parallel to, the building. I leveled the coach and this time the front adjustment of the Level Low system worked just fine.

Donn had a 50 Amp RV extension cord available to plug into conveniently located near our utilities bay. By the time I got our coach plugged in it was noon. I checked the meters for the house batteries and they indicated 76% SOC with the charger in Absorb Mode putting 56 Amps into the batteries. For the 4.5 hours we were operating on batteries the expected drop would have been 13.5 to 16.2 percentage points at 3.0 to 3.6 percentage points per hour for a SOC of approximately 70 to 67, so 76 seemed OK, suggesting that the Zena system was doing something.

Linda got things squared away inside the coach and then we sat outside and chatted with Donn for a while. He suggested we get lunch at Spiral, a vegan restaurant in the Ft. Worth medical district. He drove since this is his home turf and he knows his way around. Donn had quesadillas, Linda had a Philly cheesesteak, and I had a patty melt. The food was very, very good.

After lunch Donn took us to Central Market. The Market was not as refined as Whole Foods but had an amazing selection of fresh organic produce and specialty items, such as the tahini Linda needed to make her mock beef stroganoff tomorrow. Our shopping done, Donn took us to meet his friend Jeanine, whose age (85) and health (not the best) prevent her from getting out much. In spite of her issues we had a thoroughly delightful visit, after which we worked our way back to Donn’s place.

Linda checked on the cats and then drew three glasses of Shiner Bock draft beer. Yes, Donn has beer on tap at all times; two taps, actually, but both had Shiner Bock. We sat inside and had a long chat while enjoying our brews. Neither of us had ever heard of bock style beer or the Shiner Company but it was good. Donn was involved in raising mules, building wagons, and participated in a wagon trip around the state of Texas in 1986. At 7 PM Donn started assembling a vegan pasta salad using quinoa pasta, bell pepper, and grape tomatoes. Donn is an excellent cook but was very gracious about accommodating our vegan dietary preferences.

By 8:45 PM we were tired so we said “good night” and returned to our coach for the evening. We read and wrote for a little while. Butch called t let us know they had made it all the way to Amarillo in one day and were safely in the mobile home park where their friend lives. The earliest they will be leaving is Tuesday morning, which may coincide with our travel plans.

Linda coming back from Donn’s laundry room. Elvis is following her and Lucy is farther back to the right.

2014/12/07 (N) A Day Of Rest

We slept in this morning, which meant I was awake at 6:30 AM, were up/dressed by 7:30, and enjoying our morning coffee (yeah) by 8:00. It was in the mid-40s outside with dense fog, and 62 in the coach; perfect conditions for sleeping but a bit cool for sitting around. The toilet would not flush and I suspected immediately that I had shut the wrong air valve last night. In the excitement of our arrival yesterday, and finally being able to plug in to shore power for the first time since we left Indiana, I had forgotten to switch off the chassis batteries and close the unneeded air valves. I did all of that using a flashlight right before going to bed and once again closed the wrong valve (I have made this mistake before). Opening it this morning fixed the problem, so at least it was an easily corrected operator error and not something that was actually broken and needed to be repaired.

Donn, who is part Comanche, leant us a book by historian T. R. Fehrenback on their history and Linda started reading it this morning. I scanned for WiFi networks with our WiFi Ranger (WFR) and found eight, including two that were “open.” Open networks are not encrypted, so we prefer not to use them, but they may still require a password to gain access. As a general rule we do not “borrow” open WiFi connections from unknown sources. Our Verizon cellular signal here is a very strong 4G/LTE with five bars, but we prefer to use WiFi when available and save our limited cellular data for situations where it’s our only way to get online. I suspected that one of the WiFi signals was Donn’s but could not tell which one it was.

We had oatmeal for breakfast, a nice treat on a cool morning. Linda usually makes oatmeal from scratch these days, but she brought Quaker Instant Raisins, Dates, and Walnuts, which is my favorite. It’s creamy without being mushy, and I just like the way it tastes.

We finally met up with Donn after breakfast and asked him about the available WiFi. He was kind enough to give us the password to his wireless network. He also gave us some Green Tomato Relish he had made and it was spectacular. I mean, this guy can cook. He put on some more coffee and we got back into a long morning discussion on a wide range of topics, so playing with our communications technology had to wait until later.

By 12:30 PM we were all getting hungry and Donn suggested the Mellow Mushroom in the TCU (Texas Christian University?) district of Ft. Worth. We took the long way to get there so we could see the route we would follow when leaving the area and continuing our westward journey on I-20. Our route took us down Camp Bowie Road, past the zoo, and a lovely adjacent neighborhood. While not a vegan restaurant like Spiral, Mellow Mushroom had good vegan pizza options including Daiya non-dairy (non-animal) cheese. We had a thin crust pizza with an olive oil and garlic base, with cheese, mushrooms, onions, and sun-dried tomatoes. Yum.

After lunch we headed back to Alvarado but stopped first at Donn’s next door neighbor’s house so he could get his hair cut. Back at his place we continued our conversation. When it became clear that we were all a bit tired we went back to our coach to give Donn some personal space and downtime. We agreed to meet back in his house between 7:00 and 7:30 PM for dinner. Donn is slightly allergic to cats, so we did not visit or dine in our coach.

With the WiFi network key Donn had provided earlier I was able to connect our WFR to one of the available WiFi signals and upgrade its firmware. I was then able to connect our Amped Wireless Access Point (AWAP) to the WFR, and connect our devices, including the NAS device, to the AWAP. This was our standard setup this past winter in Florida. We used this setup again at the Escapade in May and the GLAMARAMA in June but had not set it up yet on this trip. The advantage of this setup is that the AWAP creates a secure wired/wireless network to which we connect all of our devices and can share data between them. When we cannot connect the WFR to an external WiFi network we turn our Verizon MiFi on and connect the WFR to its WiFi signal instead while all of our devices remain connected to the AWAP. It’s a pretty slick setup that has worked well for us and I was glad it was still working as we appeared to have issues with the WFR while in Twelve Mile, Indiana.

Linda checked online and most of the museums we thought about visiting tomorrow turned out to be closed on Mondays. I was checking e-mail and had a announcement/confirmation for the FMCA National Education Committee worksession tomorrow at 3:00 PM CST. If we do not leave until Wednesday morning we may try to go to a couple museums in Ft. worth on Tuesday while Donn is at work.

A little after 6 PM Linda started preparing her Seitan Mushroom Stroganoff. This is a dish she has made and served at home to our non-vegan friends with great success. Although Donn is a dedicated omnivore, he has other friends who are vegans and has been very thoughtful in the foods he has prepared for us and his selection of restaurants.

Linda used our Gaggenau electric cooktop to cook the dish. She finished it at 7:25 PM and we took it over to the house. We would normally have wine with this dish, but Donn has Shiner Bock beer on tap at the moment and, although I am not a big fan of beer, I found this one to be very much to my taste. It also went well with the dish. We talked for a while after dinner and retired to our coach at 10:45 PM as Donn had to be up early to drive into the office in Dallas.

Our male cat, Jasper, resting on the front couch. He’s fine as long as the bus isn’t moving.

2014/12/08 (M) Lucy, I’m Home!

Donn left for his office in Dallas long before we got up at 7:30 AM. Granola with fresh bananas, grapefruit juice, and coffee made for a fine breakfast. Donn left us access to the house so we could use the bathroom, which we greatly appreciated. Yes, we have a bathroom onboard, but the less of our stored fresh water we use, and the less we put into our holding tanks, the longer we can go without stopping at a full-hookup RV park. We left home on Sunday, November 30, so this is our 9th day on the road, and we are still above 2/3rds on our fresh-water tank, and probably below 1/3rd on each of our two holding tanks (black- and gray-water). I say “probably” because the level sensors for those two tanks are not very accurate.

We left in our car at 9:30 AM and drove to the Fort Worth Prevost Car Inc. Parts and Service Center just south of the Dallas Fort Worth (DFW) airport in search of some spare parts for our Level Low system and lower windshield wipers. The CatView program on my laptop showed a “641055 Manifold Valve / w/4 Solenoid” on drawing “H4-1640-00 Level-Low – Control Panel & Valves” but I knew I did not want this entire assembly. Art, in the parts department, helped figure out the parts I was looking for, which turned out to be a “641928” for $41.28 and a “641929” for $35.60. One is the solenoid coil and the other is the pneumatic valve, but I’m not sure which is which.

I was also looking for an “800304 Motor Wiper Assembly / 24V / Nidec” as shown on the “H4-2305-05 Lower Windshield Wiper – Installation” drawing. CatView indicated that it had been superseded by “Kit #300506.” That was correct and the cost was $200.03, but they saved me from spending the money as they did not have one in stock. I was also thinking about getting a “641057 Valve, 5 Ways, 3 Positions” (Norgren K41EA00) and a “641056 Valve, 3 Ways, 2 Positions” (Norgren K910058). They were $150.91 and $143.80 respectively so I did not even ask if they were in stock. My diagram also showed a “562353 Diode / 1 Amp” but I decided not to ask about it at this time. I can get most parts delivered in 2 – 3 days via UPS by ordering through their Elgin, Illinois center, but I am trying to stock a set of replacement parts that might be needed for a roadside repair.

Parts in hand we headed back south on TX-360 towards Six Flags to see if we could find the home stadiums of the Dallas Cowboys (AT&T Stadium) and Texas Rangers (Globe Life Park). They were located just west of Six Flags and south of I-30, part of an amazing sports/entertainment complex euphemistically known as “Jerry World” after the owner of the Cowboys.

We got on I-30 westbound, exiting some 14 miles later at Montgomery Street, and followed the signs to the Fort Worth Cultural District. We knew that most of the museums were closed today but we still wanted to see them from the outside. Even if they had been open we did not have time today to go in as I had an FMCA National Education Committee meeting (telephone conference call) at 3 PM CST. We did, however, have time to find Central Market again.

We walked up and down every isle and realized we had seen less than half of the store when we were here on Saturday. Central Market may be the most amazing market we have ever been in. As much as we like Whole Foods, it simply does not rise to the level of Central Market when it comes to fresh/organic items. We picked up some additional fresh and packaged items, including a mix for white bean chili with jalapeños to make for dinner.

When we got back to our coach Linda started the chili. We then took advantage of Donn’s hospitality to do a load of laundry only to discover his dryer was out of commission. No problem; we just hung the laundry outside to dry in the late afternoon Texas sun and let it dry the old fashioned way.

Shortly before 3 PM CST I dialed in to the FMCA National Education Committee meeting and participated in the hour long work session. There were good ideas put forward and it looks like I will have some specific things to do over the next several months.

While the chili cooked we both took a shower, again avoiding using our onboard water and waste tanks. Donn is in the process of getting rid of lots of books and invited us to peruse them and take anything that looked interesting. Linda found a half dozen titles, mostly paperback mysteries, that she will enjoy reading and then leaving in an RV park “library” someone down the road. For never having met prior to noon on Saturday, Donn has treated us like old friends; a most considerate host.

Donn got home from work at 6:15 PM and I let him know that Linda had prepared the chili for dinner. We waited 15 minutes for him to change clothes and tend to his dogs (Elvis and Lucy) and then brought the chili and some crackers to the house. He provided the bowls, spoons, glasses, and draft beer. I don’t think I will give up wine in favor of beer but the Shiner Bock that Donn keeps on draft was easy to drink and very tasty. I detected a subtle hint of sweet citrus in the finish, but no one else did.

Butch called as I was finishing my first bowl of chili. He reminded me that the SKP Dreamcatcher RV park is in Deming, NM just a few miles farther on past Las Cruces, NM and we discussed possibly meeting up there and staying the night. He indicated that he had looked at the unloader valves on their main engine air-compressor and they may not be the problem. Since the parts won’t make it to Amarillo until Wednesday or Thursday they are not going to stick around and planned to head out in the morning. Linda got online to check distances and potential stopping points and found that it was 720 miles from here to Deming, NM and 313 miles to a convenient Wal-Mart in Midland, TX. We let Donn know that we would probably leave in the morning and said our “farewells until next time” and thanked him for his generous hospitality. If our future travels take us anywhere near Dallas Ft. Worth we will definitely stop and spend time with Donn. Heck, we would travel here just to visit with him.

2014/09/08 (M) No More Leaks

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I was up at 6:30 AM, having fallen asleep before 10:30 PM last night. I rarely sleep more than eight hours. Linda was up shortly thereafter. We had breakfast a little after 7 AM and drank our coffee in the living room while we checked in on the world with our iPads. It was a perfect morning to fire up the gas logs in the fireplace, but we did not. The propane logs require the flue vent to be open and most of the heat they produce goes up the chimney, not into the room. We will definitely replace these with 99.8% efficient vent-free natural gas logs that operate with the flue damper closed once we have natural gas to the house.

Linda went for a long walk, about 5.5 miles. I was catching up on blogs I follow on Feedly when Darryll and Alec arrived around 10 AM. With Alec along Darryll did not need my help fixing the leaks in the black iron pipe fittings. To repair the leak behind the garage he decided to install a union in the 1″ pipe coming out of the T-fitting that will feed gas to the garage. They still had to disassemble all of the fittings from there to end of the run and then reassemble them. Ditto for the leak at the elbow in the 1/2″ line coming out of the utility closet to feed the garage furnace.

I had Darryll look at our old propane fireplace logs to see what would be required to replace them with high efficiency natural gas logs and add a shutoff valve. Based on how the pipes are run the shutoff valve will have to be in the outside pipe just before it enters the side of the chimney. That will place it at a comfortable height and keep it out even deep snow.

While Darryll and Alec worked on the black iron pipe I unloaded more stuff from the storage container. I was dressed to work and with Linda away from the house I did not want to sequester myself in my basement office. Besides, I am not very productive at desk work when contractors are here.

As they were finishing up Darryll turned the new air-conditioner on and let it run to check the air temperature it could produce. It got the temp down to 58 degrees F in the main plenum. He said anything below 60 is considered proper operation so he did not need to adjust the refrigerant charge. They pressurized the pipes and checked every junction twice and did not find any leaks. He said a lot of guys, including the gas company, attach a gauge and if it holds pressure for an hour they call it good. Darryll wants to see it hold pressure a lot longer than that, which I appreciate. They finished up around 1:30 PM. After they left I set the pressure in the pipe as close to 15 PSI as I could. I noted that most of the pipe was in the shade and the air temperature was 76 degrees F.

For lunch we had hummus with pita chips and sourdough pretzel nibblers, fresh apple slices, and leftover kale salad. After lunch we worked in the garage for about 90 minutes and managed to get the storage container emptied out and all of the contents stored somewhere. We still can’t get a car in the garage, but we have time to work on that. What we need now is a dumpster, but I think that will have to wait until next spring.

I was supposed to have a FMCA Education Committee telephone meeting today at 4 PM but it was postponed yet again. I did, however, get two phone calls today from the folks at AT&T who are following up on our MPSC complaint. The phone was actually quiet enough today that I could carry on a normal phone conversation with them.

We had several other calls today that were also OK. One of them was from Norma, a woman from New York City that we met last year on our second Holistic Holiday at Sea cruise. Norma stopped by to visit us at Williston Crossings earlier this year along with her daughter and grandchildren. Norma is the person who told us about the Vegetarian Summerfest that is held each July in Pennsylvania. She is eager for us to go, and we are eager to attend; this summer just did not afford the opportunity. Although we will likely be building a barn next year, we would like to take a week and go to this event.

Chuck called in the afternoon to let me know he had picked up his old tachometer from Matt at Bob’s Speedometer and after replacing a few simple parts (capacitors or diodes) it worked fine on the bench. Chuck brought his “new” tachometer along and Matt tested it as well and it also worked, but not with the adaptor cable provided by Prevost. It turned out that the cable was wired to provide DC power to the tachometer from the wire that supplies power to the dashboard lights. Chuck doesn’t drive much at night, so the dash lights were rarely on. Another factor is that the dash lights are on a dimmer (rheostat) that reduces the voltage in order to dim the lights. The tachometer is not designed to work on that reduced voltage.

Once we were done working in the garage for the day I concentrated on deleting or filing old e-mails. I also discovered that we had become the target of a (so far) unsuccessful brute force login attack. I received about 360 system generated e-mails between 10 PM last night and 11 AM this morning notifying me of failed login attempts. I notified Scott at QTH.com and then decided to upgrade the Wordfence plug-in from free to paid/premium on all four of the websites I support.

After purchasing the upgrades I installed one of the API Keys in each site and then activated several premium features including “country blocking.” Wordfence claims to have access to several databases that allow them to identify the country associated with an IP address with 99.5% accuracy. I chose to block China, Europe, Indonesia, and the Russian Federation. If necessary I can “select all” and then deselect the United States and Canada. If the problem stops I could then unblock other countries, such as Australia and New Zealand. Not that I think anyone from there ever visits any of these websites, but with the web you never really know.

2014/08/04 (M) Phone Problems

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My first task this morning was to sand all of the drywall compound and apply a second/finish coat to the walls I have been building/repairing in the garage. Simple enough to describe but it took some time to do. While the compound was drying I resumed working on electrical wiring.

Our phone went dead yesterday, or at least that’s when we noticed it was not working (no dial tone, no incoming or outgoing calls). I got a call (on my Verizon cell phone) from Ken, the AT&T service technician, around 9 AM indicating that the phone was fixed but he was on his way to our house to verify service at the network interface box. The phone was indeed working, but now the DSL was not. 🙁

Ken told me that he did not have a dial tone back at the distribution box and rather than diagnose why, they usually switch the customer to another wire pair. He spent the entire morning working on the problem, making several trips between our house and the distribution box. By the time he was done we were on different wires from our house all the way back to the switching station. He was now getting a dial tone and an active DSL signal at our network interface box but we did not have a DSL connection at our AT&T gateway.

Ken had mentioned earlier that the phone signal requires two good wires but the DSL will run on just one. That had raised a flag in my mind and I asked Ken if reversing the two wires might cause the problem we were seeing? He said he had never heard of the DSL signal being polarity sensitive, but it wouldn’t affect the phone operation so he switched the wires and … it worked! We got a momentary false alarm until we discovered that the phone cable from the DSL splitter/filter to the phone had a broken tab and would not stay plugged in. I replaced the cable and everything was OK.

Linda was going to help me but she was on her feet a lot the last three days and her right knee was expressing its displeasure so she decided to take it easy today. Brendan and Shawna needed to borrow the pressure washer and Linda needed a few ingredients from Whole Foods for her granola recipe, so she drove to Ann Arbor to accomplish those chores. She stopped at Lowe’s on the way back and picked up a 50′ role of 14-2+g NM electrical cable. Ken left around 1 PM and we had a light lunch of chickpea salad and fresh nectarines.

There are too many cables going through the wall top plate above the sub-panel in the garage for me to comfortably drill new holes to run more. I was puzzled for a while as to what I would do, and then realized I could create openings in the ceiling (drywall) directly above the sub-panel for new wires as this area will ultimately be boxed in. I used the Porter-Cable oscillating saw I bought a couple of weeks ago to cut a long slot for new wires. It was the right tool for the job. The NM cables should have fed up into the attic easily, but they didn’t. A peak in the attic confirmed that they were running into plywood on the original garage roof. The plywood was cut back for access purposes where the breezeway (library) roof ties in, but no more than necessary. The sub-panel is towards the northeast corner of the garage and the original garage rafters/plywood are only about eight inches above the drywall. I had planned to run four cables today but needed Linda’s help. I got two of them started and then turned my attention to other things.

I had a work session of the FMCA education committee at 4 PM so I wrapped up my construction work an hour prior to that to give me time to switch gears and get somewhat organized. The work session was via teleconference and lasted about an hour.

We got a call around 8 PM from Darryll. He planned to order the garage furnace, the library HVAC unit, and the 2″ iron pipe tomorrow for delivery on Wednesday and wanted to make sure that was OK. He planned to start work on Thursday assuming the materials got delivered on Wednesday.

2014/07/28 (M) Reprieve

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I was awake early, fell back asleep, and finally got up at 7:30 AM. By the time I had the coffee made Linda was showered, dressed, and starting to assemble breakfast. We had barely finished eating when we heard the happy sound of landscape workers. Steve had five young men on site to do the hand work and was here most of the morning and part of the afternoon running the excavator. By the time they all left for the day a little before 5 PM they had made a lot of progress with the retaining wall project behind the house in spite of the muddy conditions from yesterday’s rains. It’s amazing what can be accomplished when people and equipment show up and work all day. If that happens the rest of the week they might actually get done by Friday. Linda and I figure it will be Labor Day.

As planned, I resumed work on the utility closet in the garage after breakfast and a brief chat with Steve. I cut a 48″x48″ piece of 3/4″ plywood down to 46″x40″ and did some minor trimming to get a clean fit on the base we built yesterday. I then cut the top and bottom plates and the end studs for the west wall from 8′ long 2″x4″s. I ran out of the 3.5″, 16d nails I needed so I drove to Lowe’s to get a 5 pound box of them. While I was there I also picked up some primer and paintable caulk. I assembled the outer pieces of the wall and added an additional stud to the free (south) end but did not cut/install the other three intermediate studs.

The wall is taller at the north end than the south end because the concrete garage floor drops slightly towards the north wall of the garage. I stood the wall up to make sure it fit snugly (it did) and to force the top plate into alignment. I was pleased to see that the free end will plumb quite well in both directions. I will measure the other three studs tomorrow, lower the wall down to install them, and then stand the wall back up, plumb it, and secure it to the north wall, the platform base, and the ceiling. Once that is done I will secure the plywood platform to the base using screws and caulk the edges along the north and east walls. When the caulk has cured, hopefully later in the day, I will prime the plywood and the exposed 2″x12″ base board.

I quit working on the construction around noon, got cleaned up, put a load of laundry in the washing machine, had a bite of lunch, and withdrew to my office. I searched through my Outlook inboxes for all of the e-mails related to today’s FMCA Education Committee meeting only to discover that the meeting was scheduled for next Monday and would be an informal work session rather than a formal meeting. That was a lucky reprieve for me and allowed me to catch up on other e-mail and work on the roster and financial records for our FMCA Freethinkers chapter.

I had hoped to spend the evening selecting and processing a few photos and uploading a few blog posts but I ran out of time and did not get to these tasks. We streamed last week’s episode of Endeavor on our Apple TV device and then turned in for the night.

2014/07/24 (R) Back To Work

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We were up earlier than normal. Linda went into the bakery today and likes to be on the road ahead of the worst of the morning traffic rush. Since she was working I figured it was a good day for me to also do some paid work (plus a couple of loads of laundry). Earlier in the summer I agreed to write assessment items for some of the modules in the Michigan Assessment Consortium professional development series on Common Assessment Development. The items are needed for use with the Lectora platform, which Bill Heldmyer at Wayne RESA is using to re-package the modules. These are modules that other team members developed, so I have to spend some time with the content before I can write the items.

I did some work on this in June and then got busy with contractors and out-of-town trips. I am still tied up with construction, contractors, and other projects but a timely completion for this work would be early August so I spent much of today working on it. I already had one module done and hoped to finish the other six but only managed to complete three of them. I am anxious to get back to work on the HVAC prep in the garage but I plan to continue working on the assessment items tomorrow as I would like to e-mail them to the team for feedback before the end of the day.

I have a lot going on at the moment. I like being busy, but this is starting to feel like “work.” I have a growing list of “must do” bus projects that I have yet to start: 1) fogged window replacement; 2) auxiliary air filter / water separator replacement; 3) Aqua-Hot expansion reservoir replacement; 4) Aqua-Hot exhaust leak repair; 5) motorized windshield shade repair; 6) finishing the installation of the ZENA power generator (for charging the house battery bank while driving), and; 7) redoing the water bay (that’s a big one). I have an optional project to replace the rear view camera system.

Butch is building new ride height linkages for his bus and wants to build some for me as well, so that makes nine “bus projects” I would like to accomplish before the weather turns too cold to work outside. Some of these are projects I can do with the bus in front of the house once I can move it back into its normal parking spot. The rest are things I will work on once I get it down to Butch and Fonda’s place in Twelve Mile, Indiana, probably this September.

The FMCA education committee work is ramping up and I have three websites I am trying to launch, one of which has an August 11 target date, plus our own website/blog to maintain (as of this writing I am over two weeks behind on blog posts). I am also supposed to be writing a “featured bus” article for Bus Conversion Magazine on Marty and Pat Caverly’s MCI MC-5B conversion “Scooby Doo & Bookworm.” It’s a great conversion that has taken 20 + years to build and will be the cover/centerfold story when it is published. I have 1,500 photos from Marty and the only way I will make sense of the project is to sit down with Marty, select images, and make notes. Once I have a sense of the chronology of the work, and the images to illustrate it, I can weave the words together to tell the story.

Kyle and Spencer were here working on the landscaping for most of the day. Steve stopped by in the morning to go over the work from yesterday and outline the work for today. It’s coming along, albeit much more slowly than I think it should. For a job that requires a lot of manual labor we normally only have two guys on site, sometimes three and sometimes only one. And, sad to say, they simply do not work as hard and as persistently when Steve is not here.

Linda got home ahead of the afternoon traffic. We had leftover potato and lentil curry and naan for dinner and both the dish and the bread were still excellent. A few black grapes and dark, sweet cherries for desert and we were off to bed early.

2014/07/16 (W) Rat Packing

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Today was not a trip down memory lane, although some good Rat Pack music would have been a nice accompaniment while working. Tim called around 8:30 AM to verify the delivery details for our 16-foot Pack-Rat storage container and confirm that we would be home around 10 AM.

We wanted to get the container as close as possible to the garage while still being able to open the doors. In that location it would also be out of the way of the pull-through driveway in case we wanted/needed to get the bus out. The potential problem with this location was that the container had to be unloaded underneath and then behind the main phone line that hangs across our driveway. The vertical clearance from the driveway to the phone line is just under 12′ 6″. I was told when I ordered the container that they needed 13′ 6″, minimum.

We had not seen any landscapers by 9:00 AM so I called Steve at VLD and left a message. The previous owners of the house left a large (bulky) projection TV which we had the movers bring up from the basement and put in garage when we moved in last year. Linda called Alchin’s, our trash collection company, to see if they would pick it up. They said they would so we rolled it out to the curb with the rest of the trash. I called Steve (VLD) on his cell phone and found out he was in our backyard. Apparently he arrived just as we finished putting out the trash and went back in the house. The landscape crew was supposed to have been there at 9:00 AM. He called them and then left. A Two-man crew showed up a little while later.

I placed our 8′ fiberglass (non-metallic, non-conducting) stepladder under the phone line and used an 8′ 2×4 and some short pieces (as blocking) to temporarily raise the line to 13′ 7″. Tim showed up right on time and, after taking care of the paperwork, surveyed the situation. He said it would not be a problem placing the container where we wanted it and it turned out that lifting the phone line was not necessary. Here’s why…

The truck that delivers these containers is very specialized. It has a built in crane with two long arms, kind of like a forklift, that extend down the sides of the truck and then make a 90 degree bend and connect to the main telescoping mast. The mast is normally just behind the cab when the container is loaded and ready for transport. To unload the container the arms are swung out away from the sides of the truck a couple of feet and then raised. Four lifting bars are inserted into the base of the container, two on each side, and attached to the arms with chains. The arms are then raised, lifting the container free from the truck bed (after it is un-strapped). The entire crane assembly then slides backwards until the container is clear of the rear bumper, allowing it to be lowered. Before final placement, however, the truck can still be moved back and forth. (This is only true if the container is empty. If it is loaded, the rear stabilizing jacks on the truck have to be lowered, preventing the truck from moving.)

I helped Tim position the truck so the crane mast was just in front of the phone line and the front of the container was just behind it. We are only using the container for on-site storage so it will be empty when we finally have them come back and pick it up. Positioned where it is they can retrieve it without raising the phone line so we won’t necessarily have be here at the time. We will be, but it will still be less work for us.

With the container in place we started moving things out of the garage. Some went into the container, some went into Linda’s car to go to the recycling center, some got set aside for donation or sale on Craig’s List, and some got designated to go in next week’s trash pickup. I really hate throwing anything away that might be useful, but our limited experience with things like Freecycle have not been good, and selling things on eBay or Craigslist has never seemed worth the effort the small monetary return.

Around noon the landscapers wanted to know if we knew of an urgent care facility nearby. That’s not a question you want to be asked on a construction site. One of the guys was bitten by a spider and thought it might have been a Brown Recluse. When they first started working on the retaining walls in the back they identified what they thought was a Brown Recluse (fiddleback) spider. Although Michigan is farther north than their normal range they do occur here, so it was possible that’s what bit him. The nearest medical facility we knew about was a hospital about five miles away, but Steve wanted them to go to an urgent care facility because he through they would get quicker service. (They had called Steve before even asking us for assistance.) Linda got on her computer and located one in the same area as the hospital. They left to seek treatment and did return.

We did a little online research and found that there are a lot of spiders that resemble the Brown Recluse, which can range from gray to almost black and from the size of a penny to slightly larger than a quarter. The name “fiddleback” comes from a pattern on the dorsal (upper) side of the spider, but is not a definitive identifier. The most definitive characteristic is the six eyes; most spiders have eight. Unfortunately they crew did not have the spider, so a positive ID was not possible.

After lunch Linda went to the recycling center and did some grocery shopping while I continued to work in the garage. We had cleared out the east wall and the northeast corner which allowed me to remove wire shelving that was installed there. I also had clear access to the electrical sub-panel so I removed the cover to have a look inside. There were 11 load wires connected, nine to single-pole 120 VAC breakers and two to a double-poll 240 VAC breaker. The power feed from the main panel in the basement was three-wire (2 hot, 1 neutral) not four like it should be, and all of the branch circuit ground wires were bonded to the neutral conductors. This may have been OK at one time but is absolutely not current national electrical code (NEC). Grounds and neutrals in an electrical system should only be bonded (connected together) at one point, usually in the main panel or at the service entrance. For remote sub-panels, such as in a separate building, the ground wires can be connected to a pair of ground rods at least 8 feet long driven into the earth, but this is not an ideal arrangement. If the resistance is not low enough it will limit the current flow through the ground wire to something less than required to trip the circuit breaker.

After dinner I got a phone call from Gaye, the chair of the FMCA Education Committee. We talked for quite a while about the committee and RVing in general. The whole committee has never met for a face-to-face meeting and many of us do not really know each other, so this was a chance to get better acquainted.

2014/07/14 (M) Education

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Linda was up at 6 AM and was out the door and on her way to Twelve Mile, Indiana at 6:30 AM. She decided last night not to have breakfast at home in favor of getting on the road. I slept in and got up at 7:30 AM. Lind’s homemade granola made for an easy, tasty breakfast.

Two landscapers showed up a little before 9:00 AM as I was getting ready to leave to run some errands and said Steve was on his way, so I stuck around until he got there. We looked at a few things together and then I left.

On the way home from running my errands I got a call from TOMTEK reminding me that we have an annual service contract with them for the main house furnace (hot-water base-board heat) and air-conditioner. I agreed to have them come on Thursday to service the A-C. Perhaps while they are here they can figure out why it makes a noise that sounds like the thump, thump, thump of a helicopter blade.

About a mile from the house I spotted a small Painted Turtle trying to cross Hacker Rd. A truck going the other way spotted it at the same time. We both turned around and came back. I got there first and put it on the front passenger floor mat after assuring the other driver that I was going to take it to our property and release it near the (neighbor’s) pond. Turtles have very little chance of successfully crossing a road most places, including around here.

The two landscapers worked into the afternoon. They could only go so far before needing Steve to inspect and approve their work. He did not make it back today and I think they quit working around 3 PM.

Education is what I did professionally for the last 21 years before I retired, and I am still doing it to some small extent. Back in the late winter I agreed to serve on a newly reconstituted FMCA national education committee. There are 6 – 10 people on the committee, depending on how you count, and except for a couple of staff at FMCA headquarters in Cincinnati, Ohio we are spread out all over the U. S. Our meetings are, therefore, conducted by telephone conference with ideas and information shared via e-mail in-between. I also set up a folder in our personal Dropbox as a place to put documents so the committee can retrieve them.

We had our third meeting today from 4:00 to 5:30 PM EDT. I spent the rest of the evening creating an outline of a possible RV curriculum and dealing with e-mail related to our meeting. Linda got home at 8:00 PM and we had leftovers for dinner, after which I returned to my work and she headed to bed.

I have one, maybe two, days to concentrate on desk tasks. Once the Pack-Rat storage container arrives on Wednesday I will be tied up with house-related chores through the 19th and then company through the 23rd. I expect delivery of some HVAC equipment and materials during that window. With any luck Darryll will be here starting on the 24th and I will be tied up working with him through the end of the month. I’m hopeful, if not optimistic, that the landscapers will also be done with their two projects by the end of the month.

2014/06/23 (M) Monsoon Season

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The morning was cool with temperatures just above 60 degrees F and a thin layer of high clouds. I was tempted to work in the yard trimming low branches off a few more trees but today was supposed to be lawn care day and it did not make sense to create a mess. That was Linda’s argument, anyway, and it sounded right to me. Besides, the chance of rain was 0% until noon but then jumped to 60%, and the radar showed a band of storms moving out of Wisconsin over Lake Michigan and in our general direction. Keith always mows our neighbor’s yard first, starting around 9 AM. The first raindrops fell around 11AM. He got part of our yard mowed but by 1 PM there was a light, steady rain, causing the grass clippings to clump and making him less than comfortable, so he called it quits for the day. While not the steady, heavy rains of a true monsoon, late spring this year has been persistently wet.

I chatted briefly with Steve from Village Landscape Development this morning. They have continued to be delayed in finishing projects by the recurring rain. His newest ETA for our job was Wednesday (this week) but he was not aware of the rain that was expected for today and tomorrow. I figure Wednesday next week; maybe.

We were sitting on the back deck enjoying our morning coffee and decided to look for some information on our Mugo Pine. It turns out that our Mugo pine isn’t a Mugo pine after all; it’s a dwarf weeping Norway spruce. I trimmed off a dead branch yesterday and this morning discovered that it was the right thing to do, so no harm done. In the future I should probably follow the corollary of the carpenter’s rule: research twice, cut once.

Linda had an appointment with the dentist this morning to have her broken molar prepared for a crown. She left mid-morning for the 50+ mile drive to Dearborn and stopped at the mall on her way back. Between the time needed to make the crown and her upcoming jury duty she won’t be able to go back until late July to have the crown installed and all of the other work done that was postponed so the broken tooth could be dealt with last week.

Several weeks ago I bought a replacement handle and lock set for the front storm door but did not get it installed right away. It was not a perfect fit so installation required modification of the door frame. I’ve been putting it off but today was finally the day to get it done. I had to drill new holes and enlarge existing ones, which never works well. I did not get the holes in exactly the right spot the first time, which required even more drilling and enlarging. I stayed with it and eventually got the hardware installed and working the way it is supposed to. The trim pieces cover all of the holes, so none of my modifications are visible and the door looks fine.

I spent the afternoon at my desk catching up on posting entries to our blog and working on tasks related to several RV clubs we belong to. I also downloaded documents and videos related to our role as RVillage Ambassadors. The second teleconference meeting of the FMCA Education Committee today was at 4 PM, and I sent a short e-mail summary of my findings regarding the RV Trip Wizard website in advance of the meeting. The meeting lasted 80 minutes and we had a good discussion.

We rarely go out to dinner anymore. Besides avoiding the expense, eating at home affords us a much greater variety of ingredients prepared as healthier dishes with appropriate portions. Tonight was an exception, though not for any exceptional reason. Linda looked a little tired and I figured she didn’t feel like cooking, so we went to the La Marsa restaurant in Brighton. We split an order of Koshary, a wonderful Egyptian dish with rice, macaroni, spaghetti, lentils, fried onions, and a spicy tomato sauce. We also split the green salad that came with it, and each had a cup of crushed lentil soup. The pocket bread was hot from the oven and the garlic spread was delicious, and it was all vegan. Yum.

By the time we got home from the restaurant we were done working for the day. We relaxed for a while and then turned in to watch another episode of Doc Martin.

2014/06/22 (N) Outside Inside

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We split our time today between outside work and inside work. The temperature was 60 degrees F when we got up so after a light breakfast of homemade granola with fresh fruit and some coffee we resumed our tree trimming work from yesterday. While Linda gathered up branches from yesterday’s trimming, I worked on our Norway Crimson King Maple. This is a magnificent tree, one of the nicest on our property, but it is close to our rear deck at one end and has grown out over the deck such that low branches are at or below eye level and block access to part of the deck as well as the stairs that lead down into the northeast yard.

In the same general area as the maple tree are several large White Pine trees. The lower limbs had grown out and down to reach sunlight, placing their extremities at or below eye level. We want to be able to walk under these trees without getting poked in the eye and we want Keith, who cuts our grass, to be able to drive his zero-turn riding mower under these trees without getting poked or knocked out of the seat.

While I was trimming the maple and pines for clearance I also removed as many dead branches and limbs as I could reach with the pole saw. I had noticed yesterday that our pear tree and our apple tree also had quite a bit of deadwood so I turned the pole saw on them next. Linda continued to gather the smaller branches and pile them in manageable size bundles around the outside of the fire pit. She also dragged the larger limbs over near the fire pit. Once I was done pruning I used our bow saw to remove the smaller branches from these larger limbs and then cut the limbs into 3-to-4 foot lengths.

Linda was going to shovel the ash from yesterday’s fire into a plastic bag but discovered that it was still quite hot. We stirred up the ash cone, made a big pile of small branches on top of it, and then stacked the larger pieces of wood on top of that, teepee style. It took a while but the amount of smoke steadily increased until we finally had a small flame. It did not take long from that point for it to develop into a good size fire. We also recalled that ash from a burn pile is good to add to the soil for some flowering plants and decided we would use it rather than dispose of it in the trash.

We needed to work at our desks today and did not want to exhaust ourselves doing outdoor work so we quit at 1 PM and put our tools away. We had lunch at 2 PM and then spent the rest of the afternoon and early evening doing various tasks at our desks. Part of that time I investigated a web-based RV trip planning tool called RV Trip Wizard. Making recommendations relative to this program is one of the things the FMCA education committee has been asked to do. The website had a demo available, as well as a tutorial and a user’s guide, so I was able to get a good feel for what it does and its ease of use. The Geeks On Tour also had a review available which filled in some details and highlighted a few deficiencies.

Overall I found the website well conceived and nicely implemented, having most of the features needed to plan an RV trip without a lot of unnecessary clutter. Features included routing with: turn-by-turn directions, mileage, overnight stops (17,000 in the database and growing), points of interest, and estimated expenses. Trips can be exported as Excel spreadsheets and as files that can be imported into a GPS. The trip preferences section allows you to specify key parameters about our RV, travel “style”, and estimated costs. Missing from the parameters, however, was weight and propane. It also allows you to indicate a prioritized order for RV parks and campgrounds when looking for places to stay overnight. When planning a trip it will alert you if your rig is incompatible with part of your route, but does not automatically route you around it. That would be unacceptable in a GPS, but is probably OK in this case as you can drag the route around on the map or add waypoints to change it. Finally, you can save an unlimited number of trips indefinitely, recall one, do a “save as,” and then modify it if you want to repeat a previous trip with modifications. RV Trip Wizard is a web-based subscription service and you must have an Internet connection to use it. You cannot save your trips to your local device, and if you do not renew your subscription all of your saved trips are gone forever.

We had fresh fruit at 7 PM (bananas, blueberries, and strawberries) and a glass of wine, after which I worked for a couple of more hours before turning in to watch season 3 episode 2 of Doc Martin.

2014/06/09 (M) Mobile Service

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One of the interesting things about RVing is the availability of mobile service providers. The mechanic who maintains our bus chassis, Joe Cannarozzi, travels all over the U. S. from his base in Chicago, Illinois. Other vendors, many full time RVers themselves, travel the RV rally circuit providing on-site service. We stopped by Phoenix Paint late in the morning to visit with Michele Henry, who painted our motorcoach in 2011/12, and met Darin Hathaway there. Darin is an independent Elkhart-based factory trained/authorized Aqua-Hot service technician. Our Aqua-Hot has not been running well the last few of times we have tried to use it, even failing to ignite once and producing copious amounts of white smoke for as long as five minutes if/when it did. I described the symptoms we’ve experienced and what we have done to try and diagnose the situation. Darin had time in his afternoon schedule to service our unit so we arranged to have him come over to Elkhart Campground to do the work there.

Darin arrived around 2:15 PM and performed the standard annual maintenance / tune up. He let me watch and ask questions and I learned a bit more about the unit and how it functions. He removed the burner and then removed the swirl chamber which had a buildup of carbon soot. He removed the nozzle, flame sensor (photo eye), igniter electrodes, and the photo (mounting) disk. He also noticed a small inline final fuel filter that needed to be replaced. He clamped off the lines, removed it, and installed a new one. I wanted a spare, but he only had the one with him so he said he would order one for me.

He disconnected the two main electrical harnesses, plugged in his service control box, and then installed a pressure gauge into the nozzle port. He activated the fuel pump and the fuel pressure was just over 160 PSI. It was supposed to be 145 PSI so he showed me the adjustment screw and backed it down to the proper level.

The photo disk was slightly wrapped which is not unusual, but could prevent it from sealing the combustion chamber, so he installed a new one showing me how to make sure it was loose enough that it could position itself correctly when the main blower/pump housing was re-installed. I got a second disk to keep as a spare. He installed a new nozzle and then reinstalled the two igniter electrodes and showed me how to set the spark gap. He also pointed out that the cable clamp on top of the main blower/pump housing is the spark gap tool. Nice touch. He said the old nozzle was a bit loose which might have allowed a little fuel to get into the combustion chamber without going through the nozzle. His tips for nozzle installation were to always use two wrenches and to tighten the nozzle, back it off, and tighten it a second time. Apparently this helps the threads seat and seal.

He checked the four rubber grommets around the housing and said they were still in good shape and probably relatively new. I got four for spares, two lefts and two rights. I might as well get parts while I can. He cleaned up the swirl chamber and re-installed it, seam side up. Very important. He checked the spark igniter and it worked and then failed. He spent some extra time that was not part of the routine service diagnosing and fixing this issue. He thought it might be a marginal or failed coil, but after tightening the wire connections and flexing the wires a bit, it seemed to work fine with repeated testing. The coils are relatively expensive and decided not order one as a spare at this time. Hopefully I don’t regret that decision somewhere done the road.

With critical components replaced, and everything cleaned and adjusted, Darin inspected the main combustion chamber for signs of fuel or coolant leakage but did not see anything out of the ordinary. He secured the main blower/pump housing to the combustion chamber / “boiler” assembly using a short quarter-inch socket ratchet with a 12″ extension and suggested that I do the same. Apparently it is very easy to over-torque these bolts and break the mounting tabs, which is a very bad thing to do. A final test resulted in the unit starting up immediately with clean exhaust; no smoke, black or white.

We spent a few more minutes trying to determine which thermostats in the house (there are three) controlled which of the three circulating pumps, but did not figure it out. The is important because the radiator for the water bay (where the Aqua-Hot is installed) is clearly part of one of the coolant circulation loops controlled by one of the thermostats in the house (the leftmost of the three at the top). The radiator for the front bay is also part of one of the house loops but I do not know if it is tied in with the water bay radiator or with a different zone. Darin said there was usually a separate thermostatically controlled zone for the bays, but I assured him that our coach was not configured that way. Our unit does have a forth circulation pump that is tied in with the main engine coolant. It can be used to pre-heat the engine or to provide heat from the engine to the coach. Darin indicated that anytime the burner is lit one of the circulation pumps will be running, usually the middle one. In our unit it seemed to be the engine pre-heat pump, but I later discovered that I had the pump turned on.

It was after 3:30 PM by the time Darin was finished and I had a 4:00 PM conference call meeting of the FMCA national education committee. We turned the diesel burner on from its normal control switch and let it run for one complete cycle while he finished up the paperwork. As the cycle finished I saw a little white smoke in the bay, which was still open. I opened the door to the small compartment underneath the Aqua-Hot and it was full of white smoke. I have the battery for the fuel polishing module installed in there but the compartment us otherwise empty save for a large diameter tube (5″?) that runs from the bottom of the Aqua-Hot through the compartment, and out the floor. This tube provides fresh air to the combustion chamber and also provides a conduit for the exhaust pipe. There was obviously a double problem: 1) exhaust gas was leaking from the exhaust pipe somewhere, and 2) the large outer tube was not sealed. Add that to the project list.

I called in to the FMCA national education committee meeting at 4:00 PM and by 4:10 PM (EDT) we had enough members for a quorum. Committee chair Gaye Young worked us through the agenda and we were done with our first meeting an hour after we started. The committee is charged with looking at four topics, one of which is RVillage.

We had a quiet evening and had pan-grilled tofu with caramelized onions and bar-b-que sauce for dinner, followed by a final stroll around the campground. We got online with the campground WiFi via our WiFi Ranger and took care of e-mail, RVillage, and WordPress tasks before turning in for the evening.

2014/04/22(T) Mockingbird

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Cave Country RV Campground has northern Mockingbirds. Similar In size to Robins, they are grey and white, and masters of song. We had at least one, maybe more, hanging around our rig early this morning and they started vocalizing at the first hint of daylight, long before sunrise which comes early on the eastern edge of the Central Time Zone. And they sang, and sang, and sang, almost nonstop for more than three hours, and often in plain view of our coach windows where we could watch them. There are other birds here as well, but the Mockingbirds were a real treat as I do not recall ever hearing them around either of our houses in Michigan even though their year-round range covers all of the lower 48 states. The cats are also enjoying this spot, having a good view of all the birds on the ground and in nearby small trees.

We had some rain overnight and woke to completely overcast skies and a temperature of 62 degrees F with 100% humidity. Perhaps a bit surprisingly it was very comfortable inside the rig. We had a leisurely morning and Linda made her wonderful blueberry vegan pancakes served with real organic maple syrup. We don’t have these very often and they are a real treat when we do.

We called the Livingston County Road Commission this morning to see when the seasonal load restrictions would be lifted and found out that they “hoped” to check conditions again tomorrow or Thursday. Counties south of us (Wayne and Washtenaw) were planning to lift the restrictions late this week and the county to the west (Ingham) was planning to lift them next Monday. In a “normal” season these restrictions would have been lifted on April 16th. So as of this morning it appears that we will be delaying our return beyond this Thursday when we had planned to pull in to our driveway around mid-day. Full- and extended-time RVers are fond of saying their plans are “written in Jell-O” and this is just another example of what that means. (Linda checked the LCRC website later in the day and it had been updated to indicate that the restrictions would be lifted at 6 AM on Monday, April 28.)

Late morning I returned a phone call from Gaye Young. She chairs the FMCA’s (national) Education Committee, to which I have recently been appointed. It was our first conversation. Among other things the committee will be studying RVillage and developing recommendations for FMCA’s involvement.

At noon we headed over to the Mammoth Cave National Park Visitor Center. We were here seven or eight years ago, but it did not look familiar. Once inside we learned why; the building had been constructed in 2010 on the site of the former visitor center. The former adjacent administration building was now a fabulous museum connected to the new visitor center.

Admission to MCNP is free but entrance to the cave is not. There are now over 400 miles of known/mapped passageways in Mammoth Cave making it the longest cave in the world by a big margin. Unexplored parts exist for sure and the total extent of the cave is unknown. We did a cave tour the last time we were here. Today we were more interested in hiking and photography so we got a trail map and some recommendations from one of the rangers.

From the Visitor Center we took the foot bridge that goes over the ravine, with the trail down to the Historic Entrance to the cave, to the hotel/restaurant building. We picked up the Heritage Trail and followed it past the hotel rooms and Sunset Terrace rooms to the “Old Guide’s Cemetery” and then to Sunset Point. From Sunset Point we took a steep switchback trail down to the Echo River Spring Trail and followed it a short distance to its northern terminus where the River Styx emerges from the cave and flows to the Green River not far away. From here we picked up the Green River Bluffs Trail which eventually returned us to the Visitor Center parking lot. It was a good hike through the forest with wild flowers and occasional distant views. I got a few nice photos along the way and will put them in a separate gallery post.

After our hike we had lunch at the hotel coffee shop and recalled having eaten there before. We ordered a veggie wrap with potato chips and a black bean burger with fries. Not a completely healthy meal, but still vegan. We split everything and had a nice variety of food for our late lunch, all of which was very good.

MCNP is large at 53,000+ acres and has extensive “back country” with 70+ miles of trails. Development, however, is mostly confined to a small area around the Visitor Center, which includes the modern campground, and two additional cave entrance sites. The campground has an entrance station, so we were not able to drive through and have a look. We both recalled driving through the campground the last time we were here but could recall camping here. And yet we must have, as we were traveling to Bowling Green, Kentucky in our Itasca Sunrise motorhome to attend the Life On Wheels program. To paraphrase Wallace Stegner (1983), the National Parks really are “America’s Best Idea.”

We returned to our campground in Cave City and walked around a bit more, taking photos in the late afternoon light. I spent a little time at the east end of the campground by the train tracks trying to get some photos of a passing train, but I could not get a good vantage point. Later we had leftovers for dinner, turned on the TV for a while, responded to a volunteer questionnaire for the GLAMARAMA in June, responded to e-mails and RVillage posts, and worked on processing the photos from today.

2014/04/18 (F) Our Last Full Day

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Today was our last full day in Florida, probably for quite some time. We arrived on December 22, 2013 and the bus and I have not been out of the state since then. Linda flew back to Michigan in late February, to take care of year-end bakery business and family tax returns, and returned to Florida three weeks later.

Our motorcoach on its last evening in Florida for a while.

We have thoroughly enjoyed our time here and will certainly return someday. Florida is a large/diverse state and we did not get to visit and explore all of it during our first snowbird experience. But we do not live here and the time has finally come to head home. It won’t be a mad dash, however, as we plan stop three times and stay two nights at each of the first two stops. Our final stop will only be a few hours from home. This will allow us to dump our waste tanks before we leave and arrive home around mid-day with them empty, ready for our next trip on May 10th to the SKP Escapade in Goshen, IN.

Linda did a little more research on possible overnight stops and we settled on Northgate RV Travel Park. The first night we were at Live Oak Landing our neighbor recommended Northgate as a great stopover spot for one or two nights. It is right off exit 354 on I-65 near Athens in northern Alabama and is a good day’s driving distance from our RV park in Florida. It is not far from the Tennessee border and is convenient to Huntsville, Alabama which has several interesting things to do if we so choose. $25/night. Linda called and made the reservation.

The rain finally quit around mid-afternoon so we grabbed the dirty clothes and did a load of laundry. There is only one washer and dryer for the 72 RV sites here at Live Oak Landing, a much smaller ratio than we had at Williston Crossings, so it is literally first come, first served. As it turned out no one else seemed interested in using the machines. A number of rigs pulled in yesterday while were in Pensacola, and quite a few more pulled in today. By dinner time the park was almost full and we suspect it will be completely full tomorrow night. This is Easter weekend, and many schools are out if session for the week following, so families have their first chance of the year to go camping. Many of the new arrivals had fishing boats in tow. This was a “fish camp” before RVC Outdoor Destinations bought it and fixed it up. It has great access to the Choctawhatchee River and Bay, so you can get to fresh water and salt water fishing from here.

I decided it was time to change the way membership was controlled in three RVillage groups I created: FMCA FTH (Freethinkers), FMCA GLCC (Great Lakes Converted Coaches), and Converted Coach Owners (CCO). My intent was for these groups to be “private” in the sense that RVillage group membership would be restricted to RVillage members who were already members of the corresponding outside groups, respectively. My limited understanding of RVillage at the time led me to set up these groups so they were not visible in the main GROUPS tab and could not be searched. My logic was that you could not join what you did know existed, but that led to unanticipated complications.

Because the groups were not visible I had to “invite” RVillage members to join. That’s when I discovered that I could only send invitations to RVillage members with whom I had a “friend connection.” Hummm. I figured the most practical way to make this work was to provide directions to the members of each of these groups telling them to: 1) join RVillage; 2) find our profile; 3) send us a friend request; 4) I would accept their friend request; 5) I would send them an invitation to join the group, and finally; 6) they would accept the invitation and be members of the group.

It seemed easy enough at the time but was complicated and awkward from the beginning. Very few people were willing/able to follow the required steps, but I was unaware of any other way to accomplish my aim. I think the “friend” thing probably put some of them off (a bit too much like FB perhaps). Then two things happened: 1) someone joined one of the groups without me sending them an invitation, and; 2) I asked to join a group and got back a reply asking for my last name and SKP number before we would be “approved.” Double hummm.

The way I had these groups configured there was no approval process when joining; if you could somehow find the group then you could click “join” and you were in, just like that. It turned out that if you went to our profile page all of the groups we belonged to were listed, including these supposedly “private” ones. (They had to be listed somewhere or we would not be able to get to them ourselves.) The person who managed to join without an invitation had stumbled upon this “back door.” It was someone that I was trying to help join the group, so it was OK and I learned a lot about RVillage in the process. Thanks Donn.

In the case of the group we were trying to join it was immediately obvious that: a) there was some sort of “approval” mechanism available for RVillage groups, and; b) the owner/leader of this group was verifying membership in both the Escapees RV Club, and in the BOF which this RVillage group was set up to serve, before approving the request to join. This was both easier and more secure than what I was doing, and was the mechanism I needed. Today I finally made it a priority to change the configuration of the three groups. It took a few tries to realize how two of the parameters were interacting, but I finally got it to work the way I wanted. Now I had to let everyone know.

Late last month I wrote customized versions of an article for the GLCC and CCO newsletters on how to join RVillage and then join the corresponding group. Those articles had not yet appeared in a newsletter, so I revised them to indicate the new procedure and sent them off to the editors. I customized a version for the FTH group and sent it to our e-mail list. Within the hour a member followed the directions and was able to join. Success! Thanks Steve.

I also sent the GLCC version of the article to the National Senior VP of FMCA, who happens to be a member of GLCC and has already joined RVillage and the GLCC group. He called a short time later to ask if I would be willing to serve on a relatively new national Education Committee that was tasked, among other things, with pursuing the mutual benefit of FMCA’s involvement with RVillage. So, as of that phone call I have been “appointed” to the committee and the committee chair is being notified. I am reminded at this juncture of the expression “be careful what you wish for because you may get it.”

With all of the RVillage stuff handled for the moment I was able to turn my time and attention to finishing my WordPress post for yesterday and photo gallery posts for the last two days. The photos are a lot of work, but I am getting faster with practice and, hopefully, better. Photography has been important to me since I was 16, even to the point of having tried doing it professionally for a while. But what it comes down to is that I enjoy nature and landscape photography from a fine art perspective and I like making images of things that interest me, such as converted buses, the people who build and use them, the places we go in ours, and the people we meet along the way. So the work isn’t really work; it’s a hobby for which I have a long-standing passion.

The Choctawhatchee River at Live Oak Landing.

The rain had stopped some time ago and the sun came finally came out. I took that as an opportunity to disconnect and stow the fresh water hoses, water softener, and waste water hoses. The sun dropped lower and cast a beautiful low angle, warm light on wet foliage set against distant gray skies and passing white clouds. Landscape photographers live for such moments and hope they are in the right place when they occur. It was the kind of light that photographers try to create in studios. I waited for passing clouds to briefly reveal the light and clicked away until it faded again.

For dinner Linda made her whole wheat Angel hair pasta with mushrooms, onions, garlic, and sun-dried tomatoes sautéed in a small amount of olive oil. A simple green salad, a couple small pieces of a multigrain baguette, and a glass of Franzia Sangria completed the meal. The Publix in South Walton is the first store where we have seen this particular Franzia wine. It was red, but it was fruity, and I liked it. Linda, maybe not as much, at least not with the pasta.

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Tag Archives: FMCA national education committee

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2015/02/01-05 (N-R) Another Month in Q

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2014/12/05-08 (F-M) On To Texas

2014/08/04 (M) Phone Problems

2014/07/28 (M) Reprieve

2014/07/24 (R) Back To Work

2014/07/16 (W) Rat Packing

2014/07/14 (M) Education

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2014/06/22 (N) Outside Inside

2014/06/09 (M) Mobile Service

2014/04/22(T) Mockingbird