Tag Archives: iPad updates

2016/03/18-20 (F-N) Detailing Brakes FGMCR Finale

2016/03/18 (F) R. V. Detailing

I was up at 7:30 AM, fed the cats, and made coffee. Linda got up at 7:45 and got dressed even though she was obviously not feeling well and probably did not get a good night’s sleep. I cleaned the cats’ litter tray and then got dressed. We were expecting Nick’s R.V. Detailing sometime between 8 and 9 AM so we wanted to be up, dressed, and done with breakfast before they arrived. Nick called at 8:20 to let me know he was running late and expected to be here around 10 AM.

We woke to overcast skies but by 8:45 the clouds had thinned considerably and we had direct sunlight on the driver side of our motorcoach. A couple of days ago the forecast was for a 100% chance of rain today, not good for washing and waxing an RV outdoors, but that changed to 0% with overcast skies, which was perfect for the task at hand. Either way, the high temperature was forecast to be 87, which is probably warmer than ideal for Nick, but it will be what it will be.

The delay in Nick’s arrival gave me time to finish my coffee and doodle on my iPad for a while before getting to work. Linda went back to bed while I finished getting the outside of the bus ready for detailing. I was able to unsnap all of the new windshield covers using the Zip Dee Awning rod except for one snap and the entry step stool got me up high enough for that. I needed the 3-step stool, however, to get the covers off of the upper windshield wipers. Linda came out in time to help me roll up the windshield covers, put them in their mesh storage bag, and store them in the front bay. I moved the two Coleman bag chairs and the folding plastic side table to the pad area behind the coach house. We went back inside to await Nick’s arrival and worked at our computers. Linda eventually went back to bed.

Our Verizon billing cycle ends at midnight tomorrow night and as of 8:30 this morning we had 1.7 GB of data remaining out of 12. We have done well managing our limited data plan this winter by taking advantage of free Wi-Fi connections to the Internet at Williston Crossings RV Resort (WCRVR), Big Tree Carefree RV Resort (BTCRVR), and now Florida Grande Motor Coach Resort (FGMCR).

The Internet connection at WCRVR was outstanding; fast and usable from our coach. The Wi-Fi at BTCRVR and FGMCR was only available at the clubhouse buildings, but at least we had that. The speed at BTCRVR was slow but usable while the speed at FGMCR has been pretty very good. (Our Verizon cellular data speed at Florida Grande has also been the best we’ve seen this winter.) We added 2 GB to our data plan in mid-January for three billing cycles by downloading and activating Verizon’s Go90 app. We have not used the app, and don’t intend to, but the extra 2 GB of data certainly has helped and will get us through the remainder of this winter season.

We don’t stream videos so for us the main data management trick has been to defer as many updates as possible for our phones, iPads, and computers until we are connected to the Internet via a park Wi-Fi system. We were forced into this tactic when needed to upgrade our computers to Windows 10 while we were at BTCRVR in January. While that has meant taking our devices to a clubhouse, we have often combined this with doing the laundry. Both BTCRVR and FGMCR also have libraries (FGMCR’s was especially nice) which provided comfortable/quiet places to sit and read or use another device while one updated.

Nick’s Detailing cleaning up our coach at FGMCR in Webster, FL.

Nick and his helper showed up around 10 AM as promised and got to work detailing our bus. The trailer that Nick tows behind his F-250 has a pressure pump, a water heater, a pair of tanks for de-ionizing water, and a large plastic tank for holding the de-ionized water. It also has large reels for long hoses and the various spray wands and other tools needed for their work. They even carry a large rotary brush for cleaning concrete, which is one of their other services.

Linda spent most of the day in bed. She rarely gets sick but this is the second time this winter, and both times it has hit her hard. I took a few pictures of the Nick’s equipment, and of the two of them working, and then retreated inside the bus to work at my computer. Other than an occasional e-mail my focus was on editing and uploading blog posts. I uploaded the ones for December 1 through 6 to our website and edited the ones for the 7th through the 14th.

UPS delivered my Prevost parts order around 2 PM so I took time out to check it. I had four packages with tags whose Prevost part numbers matched the packing slip which matched what I ordered. I did not, however, open the individual boxes. I also took a few minutes to upload the February and March 2016 issues of BCM to our Dropbox and e-mailed the link to Steven Gullette. Steve was out team leader on the July 2016 Habitat For Humanity build in Sheridan, Wyoming and my 2-part article was about that experience. I got a text from Joe letting me know that he was headed our way and found a place to stay. He was going to check in and get a shower and would see us first thing in the morning. I texted back to confirm and let him know that the parts had arrived from Prevost. Linda got up around 4:15 PM and had me send a text message to Mara letting her know that we would not be able to make it to the water skiing show tomorrow in Winter Haven.

Nick and Jesse finished up at 5 PM. They had also pressure washed the car for an extra $10 so the total was $310. That was 12 man hours of work plus equipment and product and seemed fair to me. (I knew the price in advance.) They used Turtle Wax Platinum automotive wax, and it looked good. They applied it with a buffer and rubbed it out by hand. I’ve cleaned and waxed our coach by hand, so I know how much work it is.

I was putting the water softener, pre-filter, and bag chairs away when René and Ruth stopped in their golf cart. They are long-term renters here. This is their 4th season at Florida Grande MCR and they rented a site for an entire year but do not plan to be here all of that time. They noticed that we had a vendor here last week (Bill and Brenda Phelan) making our windshield covers and wanted to know where we got the tire covers. I chatted with René for quite a while before we walked back to the golf cart and included Ruth in the conversation. They have rented a site for a month at one of the luxury motorcoach resorts in Petoskey and wanted to know more about the State of Michigan. I agree to e-mail some information to them later this evening.

Linda was still under the weather and wasn’t hungry but I convinced her that it might be good for her, physically and mentally, to go for a walk around the resort. She agreed and we took a slow stroll around the front/main loop. Back at the rig I had a bowl of granola for dinner and got a call from Pat (& Vickie) Lintner to check on the progress of our brake repair. They also wanted to know if we would be interested in going to Epcot for a flower show sometime while we are at Jetty Park. They would drive as they already have a season parking pass. They also have season passes to the Disney World complex but we would have to buy day passes for $100 each. We said we would consider it when Linda was feeling better, but I doubt that we will shell out $200 just to spend seven hours looking at flowers no matter how spectacular they are.

We have had some expenses this winter that we had not planned on, but we were glad to be able to get tire and windshield covers from Bill and Brenda Phelan while in south-central Florida and consider them a necessary investment. They are well made and they work, and Bill and Brenda are fellow converted bus people running a small business that we wanted to support. We were also glad to be able to get our motorcoach washed on January 1st in Arcadia and then get it washed and waxed today at FGMCR. We have a lot invested in our home on wheels and taking care of the paint is just one of many necessary maintenance expenses.

The problem with the driver side tag axle brake, however, was something we just did not see coming. As of this evening it is not yet resolved and thus the final cost is still unknown and unpredictable. It’s hard to consider spending $200 to look at flowers right now but our view of that may change if/when the brake problem is resolved and the final cost is known. What this brake failure has raised, however, is the necessity of also rebuilding the passenger side tag axle disc brake caliper and both of the steer axle disc brake calipers. The cost just for parts is approximately $500 per hub plus $280 per axle for brake pads, if needed. In round numbers that is $2,500 for the four disc brakes not including labor. I expect Joe will be working on this for 4 to 8 hours tomorrow just to keep us on the road, so that’s more cost.

I don’t begrudge Joe his pay, he earns it and deserves it, and parts cost what they cost; it’s all part of owning a bus. What I don’t like is having this happen on the road where ready solutions might not be at hand or we might be forced into a solution that is more costly than it should be. But most of all I don’t like how it unexpectedly interrupts our winter and planned activities. Perhaps that indicates that I do not have the necessary “roll with the punches” mindset for the converted bus lifestyle, although I think I have handled it reasonably well in the 6-1/2 years we have owned this bus. Linda pointed out that our two prior winters were relatively trouble free but the fact is that we had issues with the bus both seasons. At this point I do not have as much confidence in it as I want and need to have in order to fully enjoy it, but I will keep working towards that goal.

Linda went to bed at 10 PM and I continued to work on this draft blog post. I found a PBS fundraiser concert on WUSF channel 16.1 featuring The Smothers Brothers, the Kingston Trio, and many other folk groups and musicians of the late 50’s and 60’s. When it ended at 11 PM I switched to channel 16.4, which is the Create sub-channel, and watched an episode of GlobeTrekker before going off to what would probably be a less than completely restful sleep.

2016/03/19 (S) Braking News

I was up shortly after 7 AM, anticipating Joe’s arrival at 8 AM, and made coffee. He texted at 7:30 that he would not be here until closer to 9. That gave me time to enjoy my coffee and put the finishing touches on yesterday’s rather lengthy blog post. When I tried to upload the Word file to our Dropbox I discovered that my iPad was not connected to any of our Wi-Fi networks. It asked me for the password for each one I tried, even after restarting it twice, and when I finally entered them it would still not connect. My computer was still online via its usual Wi-Fi connection, so I knew that our network was functioning. I will probably have to shut everything down and restart it, but I wasn’t about to get into that this morning.

Linda got up at 8:30 still looking and feeling like death warmed over. I poured her some coffee and then went out a few minutes later to remove the hub cap and lug nut covers. I noticed that the sky to the north, northwest, and west was a solid mass of very dark clouds so Linda pulled up The Weather Channel radar on her iPad. We knew that the probability of rain at our location today was forecast at 100% with the possibility of thunderstorms, but we were not happy about what we saw in the radar image. There was a large band of rain stretching from north of us southwest into the Gulf of Mexico well south of our latitude. The band included larger clusters with cores of strong rain indicated. Linda put the summary in motion and the entire band was drifting due east with movement along the front from SW to NE. There was no doubt that we would get rained on this morning, it was just a matter of when it would start, how intense it would be, and how long it would last.

At 8:50 I drive up to the trash dumpster and then drove to the clubhouse. There was a car parked by the gatehouse so I walked over there. The gate attendants were there so I gave them my name and site number as well as Joe’s name and explained why he was coming to visit us. Joe arrived at 9:10 AM and a few minutes later drove right past our site. I quickly phoned him and told him to turn around. He did not have his “camper” (bumper-tow trailer) with him so he pulled onto the pad and drove to the very back to get his tools as close as possible to the rear of the bus where he would be working. He had his dog, Gracie, with him. Gracie is at least part Pit Bull Terrier with perhaps some boxer. She has a dark brown, slightly brindled, coat and is a pretty dog. More importantly, she is very sweet, very well-behaved, and very mindful of Joe, who has trained her well and gently. As Joe got ready to work I grabbed my camera.

Joe got right to work on the driver side (LS) tag axle wheel and did not need any power tools. He loosened the lug nuts using a 12x torque multiplier and a standard torque wrench. The torque multiplier is a special tool designed just for this purpose. It has an arm that fits over an adjacent lug nut to keep the tool from turning, thus forcing the torque to be applied to the target lug nut in the socket. We also have one of these tools along with a 3′ long torque wrench, both of which I bought from Butch last year.

Once Joe had the lug nuts broken loose he had me start the bus engine and raise the tag axle. As happened to the other day it did not lift the tires clear of the pad. He had me switch the suspension to Level Low mode and raise the rear end so he could position his chassis stands under it. He then had me lower the rear of the bus until it was resting on the stands. Finally, he had me raise the tag axle and this time the tires lifted clear of the pad.

Joe checked to see if he could turn the tire. He could, although he indicated that it had a lot more drag than it should. I told him that had not been able to turn it at all yesterday. He loosened and then removed all of the lug nuts and then removed the wheel/tire and rolled it behind the bus out of the way. It’s a big thing; 42″ in diameter, 12″ wide, and 100 pounds. Working on buses is not for sissies and weaklings, although as an owner the two most important and powerful tools needed are a cell phone and credit card.

Mobile mechanic Joe Cannarozzi removes the DS tag tire/wheel to get access to the brake.

With the tire/wheel out of the way Joe removed the dynamic wheel balancer and was finally able to access the disc brake assembly. The assembly includes the caliper, the automatic slack adjuster, and the pneumatic brake actuator. The entire assembly is mounted to a bracket (torque plate, or “spider”) that is part of the fixed portion of the axle via two large steel mounting pins that allow the caliper to move (slide) when actuated. When facing the axle hub from the outside end the mounting points are at approximately 9 o’clock and 4 o’clock with the caliper and brake pads to the lower left towards the front of the vehicle. (On the passenger side the caliper is to the lower right, again towards the front of the vehicle.) The only other connection to the disc brake assembly is the air line that attaches to the brake canister. The tag axle brakes are deactivated when the tag axle is raised so there was no air pressure in the line and Joe disconnected it.

The mounting pins are locked in by what Joe calls “wedges” which are metal pins with a partial circular notch machined out at roughly the midpoint. The mounting pins have a slightly reduced diameter at their midpoint. The notch in the locking pin engages the reduced diameter and locks the mounting pin in place. The locking pin, in turn, is pulled up snug by a castle nut which is then secured by a cotter pin so that nothing can vibrate loose. With the locking pins removed Joe was able to tap the mounting pins out and wiggle the assembly to get it loose from the rotor and then lower it to the ground. Easier said than done; the disc brake assembly is very heavy, awkwardly shaped, and not balanced.

The first thing we both noticed was how the brake pads were worn. The front and back faces of each pad were not parallel and the change in thickness was mirrored. That is to say, the thinner end of one pad was opposed by the thicker edge of the other pad. This suggested to us that the entire disc brake assembly was not square to the rotor and that over time the pads had become worn to match this misalignment. That, in turn, suggested that the wear pattern on the pads could be forcing the caliper out of alignment on the slide pins and that this might finally have gotten to the point that that caliper got bound up on the slide pins and could not retract.

The fixed mounting holes have pressed in bushings so Joe inspected those and said they looked and felt OK. We also inspected the mounting/slide pins and said they appeared to be alright. I fetched all of the parts that I ordered from Prevost and opened the box with the new slide pins. Joe compared the fit of the new pins and the old pins in the existing sleeve bearings and said that he could not detect any difference. He had about a dozen replacement sleeves and checked the old and new pins in one of the new sleeves. Again, he could not detect any difference. The sleeve bearings are pressed in and pressed out. Joe did not have the specialized tools needed to do this but also thought it was unnecessary work.

When Joe went to remove the larger inside brake pad he had a very difficult time getting it out. Part of the pad holder is supposed to slide between two machined faces causing it to move straight in and out, but it was wedged tight. Joe thought this was another possible reason why the brakes were dragging. Once he got it out and removed the other (outer/fixed) pad he tried using a hand file to ease the fit. I suggested that we try one of the new brake pads instead and he agreed.

The DS tag axle air disc brake caliper.

Before installing the new brake pads Joe used a wire brush to thoroughly clean the parts of the caliper that involved moving pieces and got a considerable amount of rust, brake dust, and general fine debris to come loose. He also backed off the automatic slack adjuster and was of the opinion that the main actuator mechanism was moving freely and probably not what had cause the brakes to bind. At that point Joe thought that disassembling the caliper and trying to rebuild it on site was a bad idea and I was inclined agreed. The kit has a lot of parts and doing this outside in the rain did not seem like a good idea. The new inner pad was a better fit than the old one so he installed it along with the new outer pad. He then reconnected the air line to the brake canister.

Now came the moment of truth; could the disc brake assembly be reinstalled (at all), and if so, without causing excessive drag on the rotor discs. As I mentioned before, the assembly is bulky and heavy, but the answer to the first part was ‘yes.’ The answer to the second part was ‘sort of’, but ‘sort of’ is a much better answer than ‘no.’ Joe was a able to turn the hub by hand but it was harder to turn than he wanted. He decided to have me start the engine and slowly pump the brakes. Each time I released them I paused while he turned the hub 1/8 to 1/4 turn. What he was trying to do was get the new brake pads to seat and get the caliper to move straight in and out. After several times around he was satisfied with the way the wheel felt as he turned it. It still had a bit more drag than he wanted but he thought it would be OK. Short of driving to a shop like American Frame & Axle in Tampa or Prevost in Jacksonville, this was the best we were going to do as a roadside repair.

A light drizzle had started around 10 AM at which point I put my camera away, got out my raincoat, and got out an umbrella which I held over Joe as best I could while he worked. By the time Joe had the brake assembly reinstalled it was raining harder; not a downpour or thunderstorm, but a steady rain, and I had already put all of the new parts away in the front bay. Joe reinstalled the dynamic wheel balancer and then got the tire/wheel back onto the mounting studs. He put all of the lug nuts back on finger tight and then used the torque wrench to snug them up and pull the wheel flat against the hub. He then had me lower the tag axle, which did not require me to start the engine, and tightened the lug nuts to 650 pound-feet using the 12x torque multiplier with the torque wrench set to 65 lb.-ft. Why 65? There is some loss in the gearing of the torque multiplier and Joe has found that treating it as a 10x device seems to be perfect.

Joe gave me a dollar amount for the service call and Linda wrote him a check. I feel that he has always been fair with us and provided technically competent service with good value, so I have never argued with him about what he charged me or tried to negotiate a slightly better “deal.” That kind of negotiating, over what amounts to pennies in the larger view, just indicates to someone that I don’t value their work or that I think they are trying to take advantage of me or even cheat me. In the end all that does is create ill will, which is ultimately not in my best interest. When Joe, or anyone else, works on our bus I want them to be glad to do the work and happy that we are their customer; there’s too much riding on it to have it any other way.

Joe got all of bus tools packed up and then we chatted for a while before he took off. His timetable from this point on is a little loose but he thinks he is going to be in Williamston, Michigan, sometime in early April. That’s only 30 miles from our house, so we discussed the possibility of him coming to our place at that time to at least service the other three disc brakes. That would require us to get home, of course, but with the mild winter up north that might be possible. We do not have any plans beyond our scheduled departure from Jetty Park on March 29th.

After Joe left I explained to Linda what he found, what he did, and why he thought the brake was fixed and would probably work properly now. I then sent a short text message to Butch Williams, Chuck Spera, Pat Lintner, and Ed Roelle updating them on the status of the situation. These are four of my five “go-to” bus guys, the fifth being Bill Gerrie from Ontario.

Pat called me right away. He and Vickie we’re glad to hear that the problem was probably resolved and we would be arriving at Jetty Park on Monday as scheduled. Linda had looked at the website for the home and garden show at Epcot Center and had me indicate to Pat that we would like to go assuming she is sufficiently recovered from her illness and we can find a nice weather day.

Not long after I got off the phone with Pat I got a call from Chuck. Chuck’s interest in our brake situation is based on more than just the concern of one friend for another. He and Barbara have an H3-40 VIP Liberty Conversion that is only one year newer than ours. That means he likely has the same exact brake components as we do and is potentially facing the same failure/repair/maintenance issues as us.

While I was on the phone with Chuck Linda checked the Livingston County Road Commission website and found that the Spring Seasonal Size and Weight Restrictions had been lifted from all of the roads. That meant we were clear to return home at any time. We have had a good winter in Florida, and are looking forward to our week at Jetty Park, but we are not feeling the need to linger here to avoid freezing temperature back home. Indeed, the last week here has been hot and if that continues we will definitely be ready to leave.

After the phone calls I made vegan cold cut sandwiches for lunch and got out our vitamins. After lunch Linda went back to bed and I started working on the draft of this blog post. Linda got back up around 3 PM. By 5 PM I had finally captured the details of today’s events. Linda spent part of the afternoon researching and purchasing Easter holiday gifts online for our children and grand-daughters. She was out of tissues, so I drove to the Dollar Store in Webster to buy more. When I got back I sat at the desk and edited another week’s worth of blog posts from mid-late December 2015.

As I was wrapping up my work to have dinner Adobe CC notified me that two updates were available. That meant Lightroom and Photoshop, and we have them installed on both of our computers. Our Verizon billing cycle was due to reset at midnight tonight and as of dinnertime we had used 10.927 GB out of 12.0. This a bit of a game with us, and we like to use as much data as we can without exceeding our plan.

Around 6:30 PM Linda started fixing dinner in spite of still feeling pretty lousy. She improvised an Udon noodle dish with broccoli, carrots, onions, and mushrooms and a citrus soy sauce which really gave it a spark. She is taking OTC medications for her “cold” so she had water to drink while I had a glass of Arbor Mist Mango Moscato. It’s growing on me.

I felt the need to get up and move around a bit after dinner while Linda felt the need to rest. I took both of our iPads and my smartphone and walked up to the library in the FGMCR clubhouse to use the resort Wi-Fi to update them. I had 10 app updates on my phone (estimated at 150 MB) and three on my iPad (200+ MB) while Linda had four on her iPad (200+ MB). Rather than compete with myself I updated my phone first and then Linda’s iPad while I worked on this blog post on my iPad. I then updated my iPad. Even though we had 1/12 of our monthly data plan remaining at 7 PM these updates would have used over half of that.

When I was done updating our devices I walked back to our rig. PBS out of Tampa / St. Petersburg was fundraising (again), this time featuring folk/rock/pop musical performances from yesteryear, so we left that on for background entertainment. I uploaded one blog post from December 7, 2015 but was not in the humor to do more this evening. I was monitoring our data usage closely and decided to update Adobe Lightroom on my computer. It was 300 MB so I decided to defer the other three Adobe updates until tomorrow when I can take our computers to the resort library and do them there.

By this point Linda had long since gone to bed so I upgraded her laptop to ESET Smart Security 9 (SS9) which then required activation. That was not the case on my computer and I had to go through a process of converting a username and password to a license activation key and then using that to activate the product. While the upgrade was downloading and installing I installed the My Verizon Mobile app on my iPad. I had to look up our account credentials but it would not let me log in. It was getting close to midnight when our billing cycle would end and was telling me to “try again later.” With that done I started following the procedure on ESET’s support website for updating drivers that Windows 10 is unable, or unwilling, to handle.

The ESET SS9 program was reporting that 16 or 17 driver updates were needed but I had to write them down on a sheet of paper. These are manual, one-at-a-time, updates made by using the Device Manager to select a device, select “update driver,” and then select “search the computer and Internet for a more up-to-date version.” If it finds one it installs it, which might then require a restart of the computer; a tedious and time consuming process for even one update. I did 4 or 5 of these updates successfully but was too tired to do them all. As it approached midnight we had used 11.6 of our 12.0 GB data plan and at the stroke of midnight the usage reset to zero (0). Having successfully managed our meager 12 GB data plan (per monthly billing cycle) for the second month, squeezing out as much data as possible without incurring overage charges, I went to bed.

2016/03/20 (N) FGMCR Finale

Linda got up at 6 AM to take more medication and then went back to sleep on the sofa. I was unaware of that at the time and found out when I got up at 7:45 AM. I sat in one of the captain’s chairs with Juniper on my lap finishing yesterday’s blog post draft and then started today’s. I finally got up at 9 and made coffee.

I worked most of the morning and early afternoon uploading blog posts from December 2015 to our website, taking time out for a few chores, and managed to upload the posts through December 20th. I got a loaf of bread out of the freezer around 10 AM to let it thaw. I made toast at noon for an easy meal. With lots of nice puffy white clouds around, and a forecasted high temp of 79 degrees F, I put out the awnings on the driver (southeast-facing) side of the coach, turned off the residential air-conditioners, opened the windows and roof vents, and turned on the ceiling exhaust fans. I grabbed my Tilley hat and walked the trash down to the dumpster. I love my Tilley hat.

At 1:30 PM I powered down my computer and took it to the library at the resort clubhouse along with my iPad. The music jam was taking place in the main room at 2 PM so I closed the connecting door. That made the volume just about right and I enjoyed the background entertainment while I updated and blogged. The musical genre was “country and gospel” (of course). Not my kind of music, but the musicianship was high enough to be pleasant and the participants were obviously enjoying themselves.

When I first powered up my computer the disk drive light sputtered for a long time and the screen remained blank as though it was having trouble starting. I powered it off, let it sit a minute, and then powered it back on. This time the HDD light came on and stayed on, flickering slightly, which is what it normally does on startup. It took a long time for the startup screen to appear, but it eventually did. This behavior is, unfortunately, not unusual following updates, but the failure to start up could indicate a developing problem with the HDD. I installed a number of updates last night, but had restarted the computer several times without difficulty. Adobe Creative Cloud (CC) notified me that there was an update available for Photoshop CC (2015) but I already knew that; it was my main reason for going to the library to use the resort Wi-Fi connection to the Internet.

With Photoshop updated I turned my attention to updating device drivers. As I described yesterday, this is a manual, one-at-time, process. I got five drivers updated without needing to reboot the computer but the 6th one required a restart. This time the start screen came up fairly quickly and I was able to connect to the resort Wi-Fi and log in without difficulty. I then continued updating drivers. There were two drivers for printers that we do not own, and a driver for the Intel WatchDog Timer (Intel WDT). Try as I might, I could not locate the Intel WDT within the device manager and thus could not update it.

It’s possible the WDT is not enabled in the BIOS of my computer; from what I saw on the web not all manufacturers utilize it. I restarted the computer to make sure things were fully installed and configured, and just to make sure it would (start up). When the HDD light finally went out I checked for Windows 10 updates. It reported that my device was up-to-date but ESET SS9 was still indicating an update to a driver I updated last night. I updated it again and then restarted the machine once again. I let it start up fully and then powered it down and went back to our coach. I will go back later and update Linda’s computer. I will also try to update our Rand-McNally RVND 7710 GPS navigation system, and perhaps our Garmin 465T GPS navigation system as well. There’s a Wi-Fi Room at the west end of the clubhouse and I think I will try working there.

Back at our coach the bed was clear so I got out the computer cases. I also needed the USB tether cables for the two GPS navigation systems. I thought the cables were stored inside the sofa so we had to remove all of the cushions to get access to them. As long as they were off, we rotated them. The cables were not there so I looked in several other places before finally looking under the bed and finding one there. Fortunately it fit both GPS units. I packed up both of our computers, including the power supplies, my iPad, and put the two GPS units in my computer case. I piled everything in the front seat of the car and drove back to the clubhouse, but this time I went to the Wi-Fi room.

The Wi-Fi room has four small desk tables set against the walls and a slightly larger round table in the center of the room. Each desk table has a comfortable office type chair on casters and an outlet strip to supply AC power to portable devices. I was the only person there and picked the desk table in the darkest corner to set up my equipment. I got both computers plugged in to AC power and started them up. There was a wireless access point visible in the room, so I connected to it instead of the SSID I normally use at the other end of the building. I figured the stronger signal would provide a more reliable, and perhaps faster, connection. I then connected the Rand-McNally TripMaker RVND 7710 GPS navigation unit to my computer with an appropriate USB cable and turned it on. Once it connected with my laptop the Rand-McNally Dock software opened automatically and informed me that there was an OS/firmware update available for the device and also a map update.

I did the device update first and it took about 10 seconds. I then started the map update. At one point it told me the download would take 13 hours to complete, and that was after it had been downloading for an hour. The R-M map update process is almost 4 GB of data and often does not complete successful. When that happens everything is lost and you have to start over. Basically, you can’t do the update on a limited/metered data plan, which is why I was sitting in the FGMCR Wi-Fi room trying to do it using the resort’s Internet connection.

With the map download under way I opened ESET SS9 on Linda’s computer to see what updates it thought were available. I tried yet again to install the update for the Microsoft Visual C++ 2012 Redistributable, and once again it did if not seem to work correctly. Windows 10 Update said it was available, said it downloaded it, and flashed the screen about six times that it was installing, before finally indicating that everything was up-to-date. I tried to repeat what the ESET technician did on my machine by locating and repairing the update, but unlike my computer it did not appear in the list. It really looks like I will have to get online with ESET again and gave them work some more of their remote magic.

Next I decided to update some of the indicated drivers on Linda’s computer. I opened ESET SS9 again, went to available OS updates screen, and wrote them down. I was able to update four of the 11 but could not find the other devices in Device Manager. On my computer there was only one driver of any importance that I could not locate, but Samsung and ASUS obviously do not do things the same way. What was surprising is that ESET SS9 is identifying updates for device drivers that do not appear to exist. I restarted Linda’s machine to make are sure everything was OK and it appeared to be.

Two other people showed up (a couple) and were web-surfing and streaming some videos on separate devices. All of which was fine; they had as much right to do that as I had to do what I was doing, perhaps more if they are owners, but I doubt that any of us were getting great data speed. I started the update for Adobe Lightroom CC (2105) on Linda’s computer anyway, knowing that it was approximately 300 MB and would likely take a while. Linda has lost her voice so I texted her the status of my work and suggested that she get out a folding chair and sit outside for a while in the lovely fresh spring air and sunshine.

Another couple came in to Skype with someone but decided to set up their tablet in the Billiards Room so as not to disturb the rest of us (or keep their conversation private, or both). A short time later the first couple left and my map download, coincidentally, speeded up quite a bit. I initiated the update of Adobe Photoshop CC (2015) on Linda’s computer and the map download on my machine, not coincidentally, slowed way down.

I had a brief chat with Butch Williams between 8 and 9 PM EDT. He and Fonda were also preparing to move on tomorrow from their RV Park in Huahauca, Arizona. Their next waypoint was Deming, New Mexico but he did not know if they would make it in one day. I was finally finished with my computer and GPS unit updates by 9 PM (except for our Garmin 465T) and returned to the coach. Linda had held dinner, which I appreciated. We did not have to be up at the crack of dawn so we stayed up a while and watched TV before turning in for the night

2016/03/12-14 (S-M) Middle of Nowhere Close to Everywhere

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2016/03/12 (S) J.A.P.

The temperature had only dropped into the mid-60’s last night and it was foggy when we got up this morning, but we knew the humidity was up because we could feel the dampness. Speaking of dampness, the sprinklers came on last night around 3 AM. We must have both been partly awake as we both heard the sound, which was unusual enough to get our attention. The cats heard it too and were at the driver side bedroom window to check it out. It got my attention because it sounded like rain and we had all three roof vents open, along with most of the windows. Anything that sounds like water will wake me up.

Webster Flea Market and Sumter Co, Florida Farmers Market.

There was a breakfast in the clubhouse at 8 AM this morning, with food being served at 9, but we did not go. It was $5 per person, but that’s a lot to pay for coffee. Speaking of which, I opened new packs of our four coffee beans this morning, transferred them to the metal storage containers, and then brewed a pot of Sweet Seattle Dreams.

We talked over coffee about what to do today while we doodled on our iPads. Linda had a list of six things we could do in Clermont and noted that there was a Farmers’ Market in Webster from 8 AM to 3 PM today. We also had updates pending for our iPads and smartphones so she checked our Verizon data usage. We had used 8 of our 12 GB with eight days left in our billing cycle, so we were on track to stay within our data plan as long as we used the resort Wi-Fi system to do our updates.

Linda served homemade granola with fresh blueberries for breakfast. After breakfast she went for her morning walk and I dealt with a few e-mails. When she returned from her walk we drove to the Walmart in/near Bushnell for a few things. We were going to stop at the Farmers Market in Webster on the way back but there was only one small vendor there. A little farther north on CR-471 we passed the Sumter County Fairgrounds. None of the rides were operating, so we did not know if the fair was open. We were thinking about driving over this evening to see everything lit up at night.

Back at FGMCR Linda made very nice salads for lunch which included asparagus and Cremini mushroom pieces that she cooked briefly. Very tasty. After lunch we packed up our technology and went to the library in the clubhouse to download/install updates.

We each had four phone app updates, four iPad app updates, and one Windows 10 update. I also had an update for the NVIDIA GPU in my computer so that made a total of 19 updates. That was actually a small number compared to the 60+ we installed the other day. Even so, at an average file size of 30 MB that was over 500 MB of data, so I figured we were over 0.5 GB but probably under 1.0 GB. After the updates were done we spent a little time trying to configure our Windows 10 Start Menus. We were annoyed to find that the Start menu configuration tab is missing from the “Task Bar and Start Menu Properties” dialog screen on both of our computers. Arrrrgh. I did, however, get a couple of icons to show up where I wanted them and we learned how to “turn off” the “live tiles” in the metro interface. We wrapped up around 2:45 PM and went back to our rig.

After getting our tech tools peered up and connected to our network I took a nap while Linda stayed up and read. Jasper (the cat) curled up with me on the bed and took a cat nap. I got up at 4:30 PM and joined Linda outside where another beautiful day was in progress with cool breezes and perfect temperatures (in the shade).

For dinner, Linda made a salad with an arugula base, vegan Italian sausage, sun-dried tomatoes, garbanzo beans, onions, and yellow peppers. After dinner we went for our evening stroll around the resort. When we got back to our coach we each had a small glass of Moscato (Barefoot) and fresh strawberries for dessert.

A mobile ATM machine at the famous Webster Flea Market. Webster, FL.

The title of today’s post is not an ethnic slur or reference, it’s just an acknowledgment of our status here at Florida Grande Motor Coach Resort (FGMCR); “Just Another Prevost.” Unlike our minor celebrity status at Big Tree Carefree RV Resort in Arcadia, where we were T.O.P. (“The Only Prevost”), there are quite a few Prevost motorcoach conversions at FGMCR, and most of them are newer, bigger, and nicer than ours. And that is fine with us.

TV stations continued to be a challenge. I moved the antennas to position 16, which is approximately the 8 o’clock position relative to the nose of the bus, and rescanned. The front TV found over 70 signals and the rear TV found 56. As with previous experiments, however, many of the signals were unusable and others were for stations from other directions that we should not even have been detecting.

What we need to do is to move both antennas to each of their 16 positions, rescan, and then check to see which channels are usable and write them down. Signal patterns can be different at night than during the day, so we should repeat this procedure in the evening. That would be 64 separate scans, but in an area such as where we are now, with stations in multiple, opposing directions, it would be the only sure fire way to know what stations are available and where point the antennas to tune them in.

2016/03/13 (N) Saving Daylight

We were being lazier than usual this morning and did get up until 8 o’clock. During the overnight hours the nation switched from ‘standard’ to ‘daylight’ (savings) time. There are a few places, most notably the State of Arizona, that do not change their clocks, but for the rest of us it was an hour later when we got up this morning than our clocks indicated. Unless, of course, they happened to adjust automatically, like our smartphones, iPads, computers, Linda’s FitBit, or our GPS navigation devices. These devices adjust the time based on an internal program, Internet connection, or GPS signal.

As much as I wanted to reset the other clocks in the rig (we have six that do not adjust automatically) Linda insisted that I make the coffee first. I enjoyed most of my first cup while finishing yesterday’s blog post and then reset the manual clocks. We have an analog RV clock (with hour, minute, and second hands) in the living room, the clock in the microwave oven, a digital alarm click in the house systems panel by the refrigerator, and an identical one in the systems panel on my side of the bed. The Magnum 4024 ME-ARC remote has a clock in it, and there is a small digital clock/thermometer stuck on the dashboard. (Which reminds me that I would like to install a round, gauge-style clock in the dashboard someday.)

Linda made a tofu scramble for breakfast with onions, mushrooms, garlic, sun-dried tomatoes, asparagus pieces, and turmeric. She does not make this dish very often but it always a treat when she does.

Linda went for a walk after breakfast while I checked our driver side tag axle hub. I called our mobile mechanic, Joe Cannarozzi, this past Thursday to discuss the high temperature alarm we got on the bus’s driver side tag tire while driving to Florida Grande Motor Coach Resort (FGMCR) from Big Tree Carefree RV Resort (BTCRVR) on Monday. He suggested I check the back side of the wheel for oil leaks and pull the hub cap off to check the oil level of the axle hub. I checked the back of the wheel the other night after it got dark but did not see any oil residue. Pulling the hub cap was a daytime job, so I finally did that today. What I found was that the oil level was just below the bottom of the fill hole, so the hub was properly lubricated and almost certainly not leaking.

As long as I was at it, I removed the TireTracker temperature/pressure sensor and checked the pressure in the tire with my gauge. It was 85.0 PSI, which was reasonable, given that it was sitting in the sun (with the tire cover on) and I had set it a week ago to 82.5 PSI while it was cooler and in the shade. It’s possible that the battery is almost depleted or that the sensor has malfunctioned, but I doubt it. Since it is easier and cheaper to replace the battery we bought a couple of CR1632 3V batteries at Walmart the other day. I unscrewed the cover, slid the old battery out, slid the new one in, and replaced the cover. I put the sensor back on the valve stem and turned on the receiver but it did not pick up the sensor right away. I will have to check the manual to see if I have to re-associate the sensor with the receiver. I put the tire cover back on, put my tool boxes away, closed up the bays, and went inside to upload posts to the blog.

This guy was actually making ice cream with this old John Deere contraption. Webster Flea Market. Webster, FL.

While I was working, Linda returned part way through her walk to let me know that Nick’s R.V. Detailing & Pressure Washing was in the resort cleaning someone’s rig. We agreed that we should hire them and she continued her walk in that direction. When she returned she said that Nick had us on his schedule for Friday, March 18. He has a regular job on Mondays through Thursdays and only works on RVs on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. We got a business card from him yesterday so I sent him an e-mail confirming the date and giving him our site number and my cell phone number.

Rather than rearrange our shower we went to the clubhouse and used the shower facilities there. A music jam session was scheduled to start at 2 PM but there was also rain in the forecast for that same time. We did not want to close up the coach so we decided to pass on the music jam for this week.

Back at our coach we had some orange and grapefruit segments, a few nuts, and a few pretzels with hummus for a lunch snack. I was checking RVillage and saw that Curtis had posted several items to the RVillage Ambassadors group. I commented on a couple of them and then private messaged him. He and the team are very busy so I try not to bother him, but as often happens my message prompted a phone call. Strangely, my phone did not ring and went straight to voice mail. Perhaps it was because I had the Wi-Fi turned on, but I’m not sure. I called him back and put the call on speaker so Linda could also participate. There are a lot of interesting and exciting things happening with RVillage and we had a nice, long chat.

I had a text message back from Joe with instructions on how to check the driver side tag wheel for a dragging brake. The procedure was simple and easily carried out because the tag axle is: a) free wheeling, and b) can be lifted clear of the ground. That means that all I have to do is start the engine, lift the tag axle, spin the wheels, and compared the drag on the two sides. If the driver side does not spin as freely it means the brakes are rubbing more than they should. (The disc brake pads are always lightly in touch with the surface of the brake rotor which keeps detritus from getting between the rotor and the pads, preheats the pads/rotor for more effective breaking, and shortens the reaction time before braking takes place once it is requested.)

The possibility of rain started rising at 1 PM as the clouds thickened and darkened. It spritzed occasionally throughout the afternoon and into the early evening but never really rained. I managed to upload blog posts for November 18 through 22.

For dinner, Linda made brown rice and broccoli with Dijon mustard. It was simple but slightly creamy, which gave it a subtle quality. It was very yummy. After dinner we went for a walk around the resort. The weather continued overcast with dramatic clouds to the north but all we got was a few raindrops and the temperature was very pleasant if a bit humid. I suggested that we sit outside and have a small glass of wine but Linda informed me that the only wine we had onboard was a bottle of ice wine that we brought along for a special occasion. Ice wines are very sweet and usually served as a dessert wine. Every day is special for us, but this did not seem like the occasion to open a bottle of ice wine. We doodled on our iPads while we watched reruns of a couple of TV programs and then went to bed. There was a small chance of scattered rain showers overnight, but we left the roof vents open and two of the exhaust fans running.

2016/03/14 (M) Webster Flea & Farmers Markets

Linda was up early this morning (6AM) and decided to go for a walk at 7. I got up closer to 8 AM and got dressed. I did not make coffee and we did not eat breakfast. On Friday Linda was reading about the Webster Flea Market and Sumter County Farmers’ Market. The Flea Market is the oldest and largest in Florida which, along with the Farmers Market, occupies a 40 acre site on the west side of CR-471 in downtown Webster. The website said it was one of the “top 10 attractions” in Florida. They are only open on Mondays and they draw a large number of vendors and a very large number of shoppers. Florida Grande Motor Coach Resort (FGMCR) is only a few miles from downtown Webster, and today was the only Monday we would be in the area, so of course we went to check out.

When we arrived at the market site around 8:30 AM there were already a lot of cars and people there. We drove past numerous places selling parking space but we were able to find free parking on the flea market grounds not far from where the food vendors were set up at the Sumter County Farmers Market. I strapped on my camera harness and Linda carried the small camera bag as we ventured forth into the crowd.

The sites on our side of the street looking south from our site at Florida Grande Motor Coach Resort near Webster, FL.

We walked through the Farmers Market area first so Linda could get a sense of what was there. The markets open at 5 AM and close at 3 PM so we were surprised that a lot of vendors were just setting up as we walked through. I took a few pictures, but really interesting photos were few and far between. We wandered through the grounds trying to get a sense of the layout of the place, the stuff for sale, and the people selling/buying it. The Farmers Market was in the northeast corner. Just south of that was a fenced area with vendors under long, open-sided pavilions. Just south of that were long concrete block buildings with stalls secured by overhead garage doors. A sign indicated that this was the area with stores selling antiques, and that there were 66 stalls.

To the west of all of this was the West Webster Market area on the other side of a fence with open gates. This area had a few open-sided pavilions but it was mostly “trunk sales”, at least that’s what we call it at ham radio swap meets. Vendors had a designated area in which to park their vehicle and sell their stuff, some of which was still in the trunk of a car or side door of a van. Some was displayed on tables that the vendors brought, and some was laid out on the ground. Throughout the venue there were lots of food vendors and occasional live music performers.

We are not flea market people and we did not see anything that we had to have. We found a piece of Pyrex that we thought Meghan would like and Linda sent her a picture. It was a 1959 Golden Branch Promotional Hospitality Round Casserole. We did not hear back right away and decided to go ahead and buy it for $20. We found out later that she thought it was worth $5. That is just one of the many reasons we do not shop at flea markets.

We returned to the Farmers Market where Linda bought 1/2 flat of strawberries for $5 along with kale, Swiss chard, green beans, onions, mushrooms, and scallions, all for very good prices. We like farmers markets. We remembered how bad the traffic heading south out of Webster was last Monday at 2 PM as we were coming north so we returned to the car and left the grounds a little before noon.

We took one of the streets through town to have a look at the place. Webster is a small, impoverished town where people appear to live with little or no self-respect or consideration for their neighbors. It is one of the saddest looking places we have ever seen. FGMCR is not actually in the city limits of Webster but has a Webster mailing address. It is far enough away from the actual town, and surrounded by cattle fields, to be a quiet, peaceful place isolated from the poverty of Webster. What makes it an acceptable location for an RV resort is that it is only 10 miles from the Walmart at I-75 in Bushnell, 17 miles to the Publix supermarket in Groveland, 23 miles to Clermont (lots of shopping and a few attractions), 25 miles to The Villages (lots of shopping, restaurants, and medical services), and 50 miles to Brooksville, Ocala, and Orlando. A 90 to 100 mile radius takes in everyplace from Arcadia to Tampa St. Petersburg, up the “Sun Coast” through Weeki Wachi, Homosassa, and Crystal River, and then inland to Gainesville (including Williston) and over to Daytona, Cape Canaveral, and on down the Atlantic coast. FGMCR’s motto is “…in the middle of nowhere, but close to everywhere” and it is a fitting one.

The forecast for the rest of the week is for daily high temperatures in the mid-to-upper 80’s with party cloudy skies and some humidity. A good breeze was blowing from the south today but we judged it to be mild enough that we could deploy our awnings. Linda closed all of the windows and I closed the roof vents and turned on the air-conditioners. Linda got the three silver bubble wrap insulating panels out from under the bed and I installed them in the skylights.

Linda prepared some oranges and strawberries for lunch after which she settled in to work on taxes while I worked on this post. The wind intensified, and less than hour after we put out the awnings we put them back in. I spent the rest of the afternoon uploading the posts for November 23 through 30 (2015) to our blog. That meant I was caught up to the point in time when we left Michigan and arrived in Florida for the winter and was now only 3-1/2 months behind on uploading my posts.

Linda took a short nap from 4:45 to 5 PM, and then started preparing dinner. She made a nice collard greens salad with homemade croutons, homemade vegan “Parmesan” cheese, and a homemade lemon-juice dressing. It was crisp, light, delicious, and ample along with a side of sautéed green beans and carrot rounds. A glass of white wine would have been a nice accompaniment, but we still do not have any on board.

We ate dinner a little earlier than normal and, with the change to daylight savings time, there was still a couple of hours of daylight left before subset. Large, puffy clouds, in shades from bright white to dark gray, dominated the sky and the low angle, early evening sunlight was brilliant, dramatic, and colorful. We went for a walk around the resort and I took the camera along. I paused often to capture images and we stopped occasionally to chat briefly with folks. We were almost back to our coach when we stopped to talk to Dennis.

Dennis and his wife are part of the group of 59 property owners who have a free and clear title to their lot. He knew quite a bit about the history, current status, and future development of the resort. We had heard bits and pieces, so he filled in a few details and clarified a few others.

The hedges that separate and define the lots were all planted as part of the original development, as were the flower beds. Each site has palm trees and they are planted in the very the same locations on each site except at corners and curves in the road where adjustments had to be made. Owners have personalized their choice of flowers over time but the locations of the beds are tightly regulated by the deed restrictions and controlled by the POA architectural review board.

The villas are all identical on the outside and have to stay that way. They are constructed in a large building at the back of the property, trucked to the site on a flatbed trailer, and set in place on their pad with a crane. Once they are strapped down (hurricane code) and the utilities are connected the owners can finish the interiors however they want.

Linda sitting in the corner of the library in the clubhouse at Florida Grande Motor Coach Resort near Webster, FL.

Only recently have owners been allowed to add a pergola at the rear of their villa to shade the portion of the parking pad that wraps around behind the building. The addition of the low stone border walls around the hedges and planting beds is also a recent change. Each layout is unique but must use the same exact stones and the layout must be submitted to the POA architectural committee for approval. Personally, I like the uniformity of materials but appreciate the uniqueness of each design. There are only nine pergolas at this point (according to Dennis) and I estimate no more three dozen sites with stone walls (out of 249 sites) but they look very nice and the resort will look more and more “finished” and interesting as more owners add these personal touches.

As for future development, Dennis said that all of the problems from the past have been taken care of and the current developer (Mr. Smith) has told property owners that he has brought the park out of bankruptcy. The reason that the “group of 99” property owners are going to have to pay $22K (each) to get their free/clear deeds is that they had liens on their lots when the project went into bankruptcy and Mr. Smith had to buy the liens as part of resolving the bankruptcy. He has also told the current owners that he expects fully developing the resort to take 10 more years and that he plans to finish Phase 2 in sections rather than all at once. Dennis seemed to think that was prudent and that Mr. Smith was both an honest and competent businessman.

The water and sewage systems are part of the 400 acre resort property and are sized to handle the eventual 499 sites. Most of the infrastructure is in place for Phase 2 but not the sewage lift pumps or paved roads. He will have the road paved, and the pumps installed and made operational, as he opens each section. The water system is also sized to handle the irrigation and fire suppression needs of the park. Every site has in-ground sprinklers that are activated on a rotating basis over the course of a week. Indeed, all of the grounds maintenance is handled by the resort as part of the currently very modest $500/quarter POA fee, including grass mowing and hedge trimming. The infrastructure here is very impressive.

Dennis was of the opinion that the risks of investing in this park, going forward, were minimal. He also clarified that Mr. Smith’s stated plan is to commence with work on Phase 2 when 90% of the lots in Phase 1 are sold and that the resort is close to that point now. He wasn’t trying to sell us anything, but thought that a few bargains remained if someone wanted to buy out one of the 99 properties, many of which have been for sale. That group of (would be) owners apparently got hurt financially. He also told us the same thing we have heard from others, that they like the quiet and solitude that comes with the resort’s relatively isolated location but access to a great deal within a one hour drive, and access to almost everything within a two hour driving radius. (What he did not say, and no one else has either, is that this would not be a good location in which to have a serious medical emergency.)

Back at our rig we turned off the air-conditioners, opened up the coach, and settled in to watch our Monday evening TV programs on CBS. I off-loaded the photos I took today to my computer and backed them up to the NAS. Linda headed off to bed at 11 PM. I stayed up to watch the news and weather and caught part of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert before turning in.

2016/03/04-06 (F–N) BTCRVR Conclusion

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2016/03/04 (F) Pre-departure Prep

I was up much later than normal last night trying to write my blog post for yesterday, get our network back online, and get my computer usable again. I managed to do all of that, and was finally able to check my e-mail and off-load the photos I took earlier in the day to my computer and back them up to our NAS. I saw some late night TV programs along the way and it was 2 AM when I finally got to bed. On the plus side, I was tired, fell asleep right away, and slept well until 6 AM when the rain and the cats woke me up. I got up, closed the roof vents, put a scoop of food in their bowls, and went back to bed.

Linda walks a lot but finds it difficult to just stand, and we did a lot of standing yesterday, both at the Edison Ford Estates and on the drive through the Wildlife Refuge on Sanibel Island, so she was a bit sore and tired from yesterday’s outing. She got up around 7 AM this morning and I got up to stay an hour later. I made coffee and she toasted bagels, which we enjoyed with some of the vegan cream cheese she picked up the other day at Publix.

We only have three nights left for this winter season at Big Tree Carefree RV Resort (BTCRVR) and we have been trying to prepare for our departure on Monday in small increments. Chores that we accomplished before lunch included:

(B) Checking the bus tire pressures. I had to add 2.5 PSI to the passenger side steer tire. That required me to get the air compressor out, along with the hose and air-chuck, and then put it all away; a lot of work for 2.5 PSI, but it had to be done. It reminded me, however, of how much I would like to have a built-in high pressure air-compressor and tank with distribution lines running to the four corners of the bus and terminating in air hose fittings. That would allow me to just use a short (curly) air-hose that is easily moved to each position and takes very little space to store.
(B) Checking the windshield caulk. It was a mess and had water behind it that apparently kept it from setting up (curing) correctly. I tried to fix it by pressing the water out but that just made a bigger mess. I was going to test it for leaks with a hose but changed my mind after seeing the mess that was already there.
(B) E-mailing Pat and Vickie about the March 11 rocket launch at Cape Canaveral.
(L) Vacuuming the interior of the bus and mopping the floor.
(L) Cutting my hair.
(B) Calling Butch. He and Fonda were still in Quartzsite but planned to leave tomorrow or Sunday and take 3 to 4 weeks to get home. Butch was actually in Phoenix with a ham radio buddy on their way to the Ham Radio Outlet (HRO) store when I called but was able to chat for a while.

Lunch was vegan hot dogs and sliced apples. After lunch Linda got a text from her sister, Sr. Marilyn, informing us that her 50th Jubilee is scheduled for August 6 (this year). That immediately changed our plans for the second half of this coming summer and the first half of the fall. Our plan was to attend two RV rallies in the northeast U.S. and then visit the Prevost Car Inc. factory in Quebec enroute to the Canadian Maritimes, from which we would work our way back through New England in the early fall, arriving home by mid-October in time for Nickolas Guy-Erickson’s wedding on the 21st. I was going to call FMCA today and register for the national rally in Springfield, Massachusetts, but the dates are August 3 – 6, so that clearly was not going to work.

We are committed to attending the Escapees RV Club 56th Escapade in Essex Junction, Vermont, which starts Sunday, July 24th, as we are both working the event as staff. We will have to be there sooner, but do not know the exact date yet. Departure will be on Friday the 29th, which gives us plenty of time to make it to St. Louis, Missouri before the Jubilee. Still, the news suddenly left us with a whole lot of new decisions to make. It will also allow us to attend the August CCO/GLCC Back-to-the-Bricks Rally in Clio, Michigan, and the September GLCC Surplus & Salvage Rally in Elkhart, Indiana. Indeed, it opens up the possibility of building the barn this summer and/or having Daryl Mech, from DCM Heating and Cooling, install a new air-conditioning system for the house. The one thing we knew for sure was that we were not going to travel from Vermont all the way to Missouri and then turn around and head to Quebec or the Maritimes. That will have to wait for some other year.

Our afternoon chores included doing the laundry and updating my iPad, which I did while waiting for the laundry. But first I loaded up a few additional recyclables and drove over to the Turner Center to drop them off. There was some sort of problem at the NW corner of FL-70 and Turner Avenue that involved police, fire, and EMS vehicles and personnel, and had traffic tied up in every direction. I managed to make the turn from westbound FL-70 onto Turner (which only goes north from there) but decided not to return by that route. I headed east from the Turner Center but was not able to cut through Arcadia Village as the north (rear) entrance is gated. The first available north-south road that went through to FL-70 was many miles farther east, but it made for a nice drive in the country. I stopped at Walmart for grapes and bananas before returning to our RV resort.

We had planned to go swimming in the late afternoon and then take showers but it did not work out that way. I would normally dump the two holding tanks before we travel, but I did not want to this time as I want to slosh the ingredients around on the drive from Arcadia to Webster. As such, I am trying to get them reasonably full, but not so full that I have to dump them.

For dinner Linda made nice, large salads. After dinner Linda went down to Mara’s motorhome to take care of her cats. I called Chuck but he did not pick up so I left him a message. Friday night TV is a bit of a wasteland so I edited the last few blog posts for November 2015. I then selected a photo that Linda took of me standing in front of a Mysore Fig tree at the Edison Ford Estates to use in her next PhotoPostCard for Madeline. She also made a post card for our grandniece, Lilly, using the photo of the baby alligators from Everglades National Park. I found a photo of Lilly that her mom, my niece Amanda, had taken and set that to Linda to use to make a “sticker” to put on the photo post card. I decided to purchase a license (lifetime) for the Faststone Image Viewer software and took care of that.

When Linda returned from her cat sitting duties we made the bed, had a few grapes and a small glass of wine (Barefoot Riesling), and turned in for the night.

2016/03/05 (S) Mara & Michael Return

It was pleasantly cool last night, with temperatures in the 60’s at bedtime and headed towards an overnight low in the upper 50’s; in other words, perfect sleeping weather. And sleep we did. Linda got a text message from Mara letting us know that she and Michael were waiting to disembark from the cruise ship and indicating that they had a wonderful time. They were planning on stopping at a Whole Foods Market and wanted to know if Linda needed anything. Linda requested plum vinegar, seitan, and vegan ricotta cheese, items we cannot find in Arcadia.

Linda got up around 8:15 AM and showered. I got up at 8:30 AM, made our coffee, and then took my shower. As a result of these showers, which we were going to take at the shower house, I am going to have to make some decisions today or tomorrow relative to dumping our holding tanks and adding fresh water. We don’t need very much fresh water in the on-board tank for the trip to Florida Grande Motor Coach Resort in Webster on Monday and I would like to dispense with that weight in favor of keeping the black- and gray-water tanks mostly full. The idea is that the motion of the coach will create an agitation effect which will help clean the tanks. (I don’t really expect that it to happen, but it’s worth a shot.)

We had a slow leisurely morning as we lingered over our coffee and had granola with blueberries and bananas for breakfast. Linda and Mara arranged for the four of us to have dinner together this evening so she made a grocery list. I downloaded a new game named Wood Puzzle and tried it. It’s a little bit like Tetris, but without constantly moving pieces, so it was somewhat fun. I was never a big fan of Tetris.

Linda left at 10:30 AM to tend to Mara’s cats and then walk to the Winn-Dixie supermarket. I got dressed, checked my e-mail, got the registration code for Faststone Image Viewer, and entered it into the software. I checked the notifications in RVillage and visited the RVillage Stakeholders Group. Curtis had posted a link to an “explainer video” so I e-mailed the link to our iPads. I then gathered up the bedspread and large bath towels and headed to the laundry room.

While I was waiting for the laundry I finished yesterday’s blog post, uploaded it to our Dropbox, started today’s post, and played a few games. The laundry was finally dry at 1:30 PM and I returned to our coach. Linda had already returned, done some prep work for dinner, and was out walking around the resort when I returned. She wanted to shop at Joshua Citrus one more time before we left so she drove there while I settled in to work on uploading blog posts! My goal was to upload the remaining posts for October 2015, starting with the one for the 21st. I accomplished that goal just before 6 PM.

Mara and Michael got back to Big Tree Carefree RV Resort mid-late afternoon and arrived at our coach for dinner at 6:30 PM. Linda found a recipe for vegan Parmesan cheese and made some earlier in the day. She used it to make a kale salad with almonds and a lemon dressing. It was outstanding. The main course was a quinoa and black beans dish that she has made before. It was served hot and was a good choice for a cool evening. She bought an Alamos Malbec wine (Argentina) and a bottle of Barefoot Moscato, but I was the only one drinking white wine so I finished the Barefoot Riesling we opened earlier this week. Dessert was non-dairy chocolate ice cream with fresh sliced strawberries.

We had a good chat about Mara and Michael’s experience on the Holistic Holiday at Sea cruise. There were a few speakers that we heard on the two cruises we went on, but an equal number of new speakers that we have not had the opportunity to hear in person. Mara bought four cookbooks and left them for Linda to peruse. It was very satisfying for us that that they had such a good experience since we were the ones that got Mara interested in the cruise and she got Michael to come along.

They left a little before 9 PM and walked back to Mara’s rig. We watched an episode of Lucifer and then parts of two different fundraiser concerts on PBS; Brit Floyd and The BeeGees One Night Only.

2016/03/06 (N) Last Day Here

The cats were prowling by 6 AM so I got up, added food to their bowls, plugged in the charging cable for our Verizon Mi-Fi, and went back to bed. It was already getting light and the birds were starting to chirp as if their calls were somehow responsible for the rising of the sun. Squirrels and rabbits were, no doubt, scurrying about on the ground around our rig, as Juniper was taking it all in with her usual morning intensity. Juniper got under the covers between us for a while and we drifted in and out of sleep in rhythm with the cats activities until 7:30 AM when we finally got out of bed to stay.

It was a bit chilly in our motorcoach, so I put on my sweats and slippers. I made our morning coffee and then settled in on the sofa with my iPad and monogrammed throw. I was joined by Jasper and later by Juniper as we listened to the Mockingbirds and Crows and watched the Vultures soar just above the trees as they headed out on their daily search for food. Linda perused the cookbooks that Mara left, looking for recipes, while I put the finishing touches on yesterday’s blog post and started on today’s.

Today was our last full day at Big Tree Carefree RV Resort (BTCRVR) in Arcadia, Florida and we did not have any big plans other than a trip to one of the local supermarkets and dinner with our friends, Mara and Michael. Mara and Linda definitely wanted to use the swimming pool one last time. We leave tomorrow morning and Mara and Michael are pulling out on Tuesday. We are headed north about 100 miles to Florida Grande Motor Coach Resort near Webster, Florida. Mara and Michael are headed north a much shorter distance to the Thousand Trails Preserve in Wauchula on the Peace River. We plan to meet up with them again in Winter Haven for a quintessentially “old Florida” water skiing show. They might also drive over to Jetty Park while we are there to see a rocket launch, assuming it actually lifts off as scheduled on the 22nd. It is an Atlas 5 resupply mission for the International Space Station, so it would be quite an experience.

BTCRVR has been a nice, comfortable place to spend a couple of months this winter and has provided the base of operations we hoped it would for exploring south and southwest Florida. The resort is a bit older with approximately 80% park model trailers, and I estimate that more than 90% of the units here never move. It is a 55+ community, but most of the residents are quite a bit older than that. It is a clean, well-kept, and attractive park, however, with nice facilities and very friendly people.

Big Tree is also an active park, with regularly scheduled events every day (morning, afternoon, and evening) as well as special events like concerts, dinners, and dances. These activities are well attended from what we saw, and lots of folks walk, ride their bicycles (and tricycles) every day, and use the swimming pool. Many permanent residents have their own washer and dryer so I never had a problem getting our laundry done in the laundry room. Although the park did not have a distributed Wi-Fi system, it did have free Wi-Fi available at the office/activity building and we made use of it for downloading updates for our smartphones, iPads, and notebook computers. Given that we updated both of our computers from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10 while we were here, the Wi-Fi was very much appreciated, allowing us to use our 12 GB Verizon data plan for routine tasks such as e-mail, banking, visiting websites, browsing for information, and transferring files, all of which we prefer to do in the comfort of our coach.

I took care of sending an e-mail to a dozen friends and family members and then settled in to upload blog posts starting with November 1, 2015. Linda went to the swimming pool at 12:30 PM and I joined her there at 3 PM. Mara and Linda were sun bathing when I arrived but joined me in the shallow end of the pool where we sloshed around and chatted about the whole-food plant-based approach to human nutrition and our travel plans for the next year or so. We were soaking in the hot tub / whirlpool when Michael arrived and pulled up a chair. We all chatted briefly and then Linda and I took showers and returned to our coach. We called our son-in-law, Chris, to wish him a happy birthday. I then resumed uploading blog posts. By 5:30 PM I had uploaded the posts through November 12, 2105 and stopped. We were due at Mara’s rig at 6:30 PM for dinner so I took a short nap.

Linda gathered up Mara’s WFPB cookbooks and we walked over to her rig at 6:25 PM. Michael served the wine and we chatted for an hour while Mara pulled dinner together. She made a salad of julienned vegetables with a sesame seed dressing. The main dish was quinoa, lentils, sweet potatoes, and broccoli. Dessert was a chocolate mousse made with avocado, banana, and cocoa and served with fresh raspberries and a piece of dark chocolate. Seriously, with food like that why wouldn’t you be a vegan?

It was going on 9 PM by the time we finished dinner so we stayed and watched the final episode of Downton Abbey. All’s well that ends well, I suppose, and the final two hours of the series did, indeed, end well. It was one of the most popular (most viewed?) programs ever to air on PBS, and deservedly so. Fortunately there is a lot of quality programming available on the PBS channels and Masterpiece Theatre, along with Masterpiece Mysteries, will no doubt continue to draw large numbers of viewers in the years to come.

When we walked back to our motorcoach at 10:50 PM the night air was very crisp, the sky dark and clear, and the stars very bright. Orion hung high in the southwest sky and the Big Dipper claimed the northeast quadrant. If not for the light pollution of the RV resort it was the kind of night where we might have seen the Milky Way. Back at the coach we put on a PBS program about the WW II WASPs (Women’s Airforce Service Pilots) and one women in particular who went on to continue flying into her late 80’s and logged over 40,000 hours of flight time before she stopped recording it. We are moving to a new RV resort tomorrow so I had the lights out before midnight and quickly drifted off to sleep.

2016/03/01–02 (T–W) Politics and Nutpods

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2016/03/01 (T) Super Tuesday Nutpods

Today was officially our fifth month away from home this winter; not full months, of course, but the fifth month by name nonetheless. I got up briefly at 6:45 AM to add food to the cats’ bowls and went back to bed. With less pestering from the cats we slept in longer than usual and did not get up until just before 8 AM.

The shelf-stable Nutpods non-dairy coffee creamer that we ordered online. We had high hopes for this product based on the reviews, but it disappointed us.

I made coffee and tried the new Nutpods non-dairy coffee creamer that arrived yesterday. To our mutual disappointment, it separated almost immediately. I was able to blend it back in by stirring, but it would just separate again if I let it sit. We were both disappointed. The reviews of this product sang its praises and made special note of it not separating like other non-dairy creamers. We bought four containers of it for $3.50 each, so I will use them up, but we won’t be buying any more of them. What we both find odd is that we do not recall having this problem at home where I have used unflavored soy-based creamers for a long time. The only obvious difference between the bus and the house is that we have a dishwasher (machine) at home, but neither of us think this is related to the mugs not being clean on the bus as they are washed in soapy hot water.

Breakfast was granola with fresh blueberries and a small glass of juice to wash down our vitamins. After breakfast Linda went to Mara’s motorhome to take care of the morning cat chores and I settled in to work at my computer. I dealt with BCM- and SLAARC-related e-mails and investigated why the ES|ET Smart Security 8 software on my ASUS notebook computer was apparently not synchronizing with the Windows 10 update function. I discovered in the process that there was a Smart Security 9 upgrade available so before requesting technical support I installed the upgrade.

While the upgrade was downloading and installing I called Ed and Betty Burns and arranged to meet them for linner at Sweet Tomatoes on University Parkway in Sarasota at 3 PM. We needed to drive to Petco for cat food anyway and the restaurant is just across the street. Since they now live in Florida, no longer work at the Middleton’s berry farm north of Detroit during the summer, and have given up RVing (at least for now), we probably will not see them again any time soon and wanted to visit with them one more time before we left south(west) Florida for the season.

When Linda got back I turned off the outside water and tested the fresh water pump. It appeared to be working normally, so I left the outside water off and we resumed using the pump.

I proofread yet another draft of the April issue of Bus Conversion Magazine and marked up a few final corrections to my featured bus article on Ronnie and Diann Mewbourn’s 1969 Model 07 Eagle conversion. Soon enough it was 1 PM and time to leave.

We stopped at the Shell station on FL-70 in Lakewood Ranch and filled up the tank. Regular gasoline (10% Ethanol) was $1.79 per gallon. A week ago I bought fuel at this same station for $1.56 per gallon. We arrived at the Petco, in the massive University Town Center shopping district, at 2:20 PM. They were out of the exact food we needed (Royal Canin Sensitive Digest Thin Slices) but had the loaf form of the same food so we bought all nine cans of that. That will be enough to get us past Mara and Michael’s return from the Holistic Holiday at Sea cruise.

We were at Sweet Tomatoes by 2:50 PM and had just started to go for a walk when Ed and Betty drove by, so we turned around and met them at the front door. We were at the restaurant for almost two hours and had a good meal and a nice chat. We talked about our upcoming travel plans and Ed and Betty, who have taken care of some important medical issues, indicated that they are thinking about getting a Class B or B+ motorhome or possibly a pull-behind RV. There is an outside possibility that we might cross paths with them in the Canadian Maritime provinces over the summer. Towards the end of our meal Ed and Janet Roelle showed up with Nathan. We chatted briefly with them, said “fair well for now” to everyone, and headed back to Arcadia.

We stopped at the Publix supermarket on FL-70 in Lakewood Ranch for a few grocery items we cannot get in Arcadia. (It should be noted, however, that Publix is building a supermarket in Arcadia.) We got back to our coach just before 6 PM and spent a few minutes with our cats, both of whom were very glad to see us and wanted our attention. At 6:20 Linda walked down to take care of Mara’s cats and I walked down about 30 minutes later. Linda had the TV on and “Super Tuesday,” with 11 states holding presidential primary elections, dominated the news cycle. We walked back to our rig at 7:45 PM under dark, clear skies and bright stars.

We watched NCIS and NCISNOLA but Limitless was preempted by Super Tuesday election coverage so we found a documentary on PBS about the Statue of Liberty and watched that. Linda fell asleep before it was over but it was followed by an equally interesting documentary on the public health hospital on Ellis Island that operated for nearly 30 years in the early 20th Century.

2016/03/02 (W) Windshield Caulk

Our day started, as it usually does, with coffee, breakfast, and iPads. While Linda tended to Mara’s cats I made a few changes to the ES|ET Smart Security 9 settings on my computer. I then selected and processed three possible post card photos from last week and e-mailed them to Linda’s iPad.

When Linda got back from tending to Mara’s cats and motorhome she worked on creating this week’s photo post card for Madeline and uploaded it to the PhotoCardApp service in San Diego, California. She then got to work on tax returns. I finalized the bonus photo captions for the BCM featured bus article on Dave Aungier’s 1977 MCI MC-5C bus conversion, uploaded everything to my Dropbox, and e-mailed the magazine staff to let them know it was there.

The motorhome that was next to us on the passenger side for most of the winter pulled out on Sunday. On Monday the resort put another rig in that site. It stayed for two nights and pulled out this morning. We never even met the people. Early this afternoon the resort brought in another rig, a 42 foot 5th-wheel being pulled by a suitably large pickup truck. Phil, from the resort office, was the escort and parking attendant. I popped out to see if I should move my car and Phil said it would help, so I backed deeper into our site and well out of the way. It took some doing but Phil managed to get the rig backed into the site.

As long as I was outside I had several chores to take care of before we pull out of here on Monday and today seemed like a good day to take care of a couple of them. I found some silicon spray lubricant and managed to pull the emergency breakaway key out of the lock on the front bumper of the car just far enough to spray some in. I let it sit a minute and then wrapped what was left of the tethered cable around my hands and pulled hard enough to finally get it to come out. With the key out I sprayed the inside of the lock and on the key and then inserted and removed the key several times. I sprayed a bit more, put the key back in, and let it sit.

Our new neighbor was outside setting up their rig so we got to meet him. His name was also Phil and his wife’s name was Marylou. Phil was retired from the U. S. Army and they recently became full-time RVers. We chatted briefly and met their two adorable Dachshunds. We let them get back to the task of setting up camp and moved on to my second chore, which required Linda’s assistance.

The other day I pulled the caulking out from between the new passenger side lower windshield and the new windshield gasket. I let it sit a couple days to see if the gasket would reform to the glass as a result of warm temperatures and hot sunshine. It didn’t, so I got the tube of black caulk I found the other day and got it ready to use. I used the small 3-step stool to get high enough to work and Linda prepared several wet paper shop towels. I applied the caulk, which is designed for window trimming and should work with glass, to the gap between the windshield and the gasket. Linda held the windshield wiper out of the way while I worked and handed me the wet paper towels as needed. I did not do a very good job but hopefully it was good enough to keep the windshield from leaking water and prevent wind noise. The caulk was water cleanup, so that made it easy to take care of putting everything away.

By 4 PM the outside air temperature was about 80 degrees F with a nice breeze, scattered clouds, and a hot sun. That made for very pleasant conditions outside in the shade, but inside it was 85 in spite of having the windows open and the exhaust fans running. Linda went outside to read and I was having a problem getting my laptop to connect to the NAS so I shut off my computer and the NAS and went outside to join her.

As we move towards spring we have the sun on our windshields for more of the day and are now getting the late afternoon sun on the passenger side of our motorcoach. Linda commented that if we ever buy an RV lot somewhere she wants it oriented and/or landscaped so the passenger side of the coach is always in shade. Duly noted and agreed.

I worked on this blog post for a while using the new MobiSystems OfficeSuites app. Now that I have figured out how to use it with Dropbox, and have learned how to create folders and move files, I am satisfied with how it works and might go ahead and spend the $19.99 for the full-featured “Premium” version. Not that I am using most of the features of the free version, but why limit myself.

We skipped lunch today and by 4:30 PM Linda was hungry so she went inside to prepare our dinner. I played a few games on my iPad and when the sun dropped below our patio awning and obscured my screen I went inside. Linda had just set our salads on the table so it was good timing. She made large salads with a kale and spinach base and lots of yummy toppings including sliced fresh apples. She put our monthly dose of four Brazil Nuts on the side and served still water with half of a Meyer lemon squeezed into each glass. I eat faster than Linda does so I packed up our computers and iPads and loaded them in the car while she finished her dinner.

When Linda was done eating we grabbed our smartphones and drove over to the activity building. Dominoes and pinochle are scheduled on Wednesdays at 6:30 PM in the main room, but the library was not scheduled for use so we set up our technology in there. We got both computers, both iPads, and both smartphones connected to the resort Wi-Fi system and then connected through to the Internet. I had ~300 MB of app updates for my iPad and Linda had ~425 MB of app updates for hers. I had six app updates on my phone and Linda had three. Those tend to be smaller than the iPad updates but probably totaled another 200 MB combined. We both had critical updates for Windows 10 and have no idea how many MB they were since Windows 10 does not think that is information the end user needs to know. People using limited data plans, however, probably differ with Microsoft on this point.

Folks started showing up for the games at 6 PM and they were underway by 6:30. Linda’s devices were all up-to-date by then so she walked over to Mara’s motorhome for her evening cat chores. I finished up with my updates by 6:45, packed up our tech toys (tools), and drove back to our rig.

Wednesday night is PBS nature and science night for us and the theme this evening was space exploration. But first we had to get tuned in to the results of yesterday’s Super Tuesday primary elections. After three hours of space exploration documentaries Linda went to bed while I watched Charlie Rose. He had four guests, two from each end of the political spectrum, and they provided their analysis of the current presidential candidate race, to the extent that anyone understands what is going on. Reassured that the world really is in chaos, and that the American electorate has crossed the boundary into collective insanity, I went to sleep.

2016/02/25-29 (R – M) Sand Castle Stallions Port

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2016/02/25 (R) Siesta Key

We were up at 6:30 AM this morning and did not have coffee or breakfast. We picked up Mara and Michael at 7 AM and headed west on FL-70 towards Bradenton. Our destination was an endodontic office in Lakewood Ranch were Mara had an 8 AM appointment for a root canal procedure. As we were coming into town Michael spotted a Dunkin Donuts. Location duly noted. I pulled up to the office building at 7:55 and we all went in.

The endodontist said the procedure would take about an hour. Michael stayed to wait for Mara while Linda and I drove back to the DD for coffee and something to eat. The DD was in a small shopping plaza next to a Shell station so I topped off the car’s fuel tank before we topped off ours’. I bought regular gasoline (10% Ethanol) for $1.56 per gallon. We were getting ready to leave DD when Mara texted Linda that she would be longer than originally thought. The tooth needed a filling and the dental practice next door just had a cancellation and could take her right away. That was fortunate for Mara as she and Michael are leaving on Saturday for a week long cruise. She also wasn’t sure she could get in to see her dentist before July, which was much too long of a time to rely on the temporary filling the endodontist had put in place.

With Mara’s dental needs taken care of we headed west on FL-70 to I-75 south to Exit 207 and then west to US-41. A short jog to the right (north) and back to the left and we were on Siesta Key Drive headed west to the island of Siesta Key. We drove through the town, which was very quaint (upscale trendy, actually) and found a place to park with public access to the beach. The Siesta Key beach is very fine white sands, reputed to be the finest and whitest of any beach in Florida. We walked quite a ways south from our entry point past the main public entrance and numerous lifeguard stands, all of which were staffed. The wind was strong and the waves were high and I took a few photos.

A group of Royal Terns face into the wind on Siesta Key Beach. Siesta Key, FL.

When we got back to the car we exited the island via the southern bridge and drove down US-41 to Venice. We found a parking spot, which is not easy in Venice, and walked around the historic downtown area, which is now a mix of quaint and upscale shopping and lots of places to eat. It is a very attractive area but there were a lot of people there.

We were just window shopping when we walked past the TableTop store. As the name suggests, they sell a wide variety of products used to set a dining table. We looked around to see if they had plastic wine glasses but did not see any. We were just about to leave when we spotted one. It was smaller than we wanted so we asked if they had others. They did, we just did not see them! They were not plastic, however, but were made of polycarbonate. That’s the same material used for contact lens blanks and motorcycle visors. It felt heavy duty and had a slight bluish cast. The sales associate assured us that they could be cleaned in a dishwasher and would not discolor, craze, or crack, and will not break even if dropped on concrete (although we do not intend to test that claim). We bought four of them at $15 each.

Mara and Linda play in the fountain in Venice, FL.

When we had seen enough of Venice we returned to the car and drove a short distance to Cafe Evergreen in Nokomis for linner. I had the veggie (vegan) burger and Linda had the vegan beet Rueben. Mara had the stir-fry noodle dish, which both of us have had before, and Michael had the Chana Masala. Our waiter, by his own admission, was having an off day but the food was good and we took our time enjoying it.

When we were done with our meal we were also done exploring for the day and I drove us back to Arcadia. On the drive back we discussed plans for tomorrow, which included Solomon’s Castle in the late morning, Hermann’s Royal Lipizzaner Stallions in the mid-afternoon, some before and after errands, and a picnic lunch. Back at the RV Resort we dropped Michael and Mara at her RV and then returned to ours. We watched our Thursday night CBS TV programs and had some popcorn later in the evening. We headed to bed at 11 PM, watched a few minutes of Charlie Rose, and then went to sleep.

2016/02/26 (F) Castle Stallions

Our two main attractions today were Solomon’s Castle, near Ono, Florida and Hermann’s Royal Lipizzaner Stallions near Myakka City, Florida. Both locations were within 25 miles of Arcadia and each other, so we did not have to endure an excessive amount of car travel.

We picked up Mara and Michael at 10:15 AM, stopped at the local Wells Fargo bank branch, and then headed west out of town. At the edge of town we headed north on FL-661 towards Ono. We turned onto CR-665 and five miles later turned off onto Salomon Road to the parking lot of Solomon’s Castle. We had the address in the GPS, but there were occasional old hand-painted signs confirming the route. We arrived just before 11 AM, when the “castle” opens for tours, but the parking lot was already crowded. We bought our tickets for the 11:30 tour and then strolled around the part of the grounds between the parking lot and the castle while we waited. Horse Creek runs through the property, much of which was wet.

Michael and Mara by the horse statute near the entrance to Solomon’s Castle. Ono, FL.

Solomon’s Castle was built by, and is still the home of, Henry Solomon and his wife. Henry, who is about to turn 81, is an artist who has been creating art objects for 76 years. Much of the main floor of the castle is an art museum, although the walking tour includes the living room and kitchen. Other living spaces are on the second floor and were not part of the tour. There is also a guest bedroom available to rent for $125 per night but I do not recall if an overnight stay included breakfast. There is, however, a scale “replica” of the Santa Maria that houses part of the onsite cafe and is run by Solomon’s daughter and her husband, who live in a separate house on the property.

Solomon’s Castle and his art are quirky. Although we did not get to meet him, we came away with an image of his sense of humor, and caught a glimpse of him in his workshop while we were walking the grounds after the tour. Solomon works in a variety of materials but mostly metal and wood, and mostly with discarded scrap materials including food cans, beer cans, and parts/pieces of automobiles. I took quite a few photos while we were there. I don’t know what our son’s professional opinion of Solomon’s corpus would be, but some of his pieces were interesting and we had to respect the sheer quantity of work he has produced. He seemed to have a particular interest in Picasso, copying several of the master’s works in wood montage.

Mara, Michael, and Linda on the grounds of Solomon’s Castle. Ono, FL.

From the castle we continued north on CR-665 up to FL-64, the Florida Cracker Trail, and then west about five miles to Wauchula Road where we headed south to Myakka City. At FL-70 in Myakka City we headed east about 1/2 mile and pulled in to a local park on the north side of the road that affronted the west bank of the Myakka River. The picnic tables were all bolted to the concrete slabs that served as the floors of the open-sided shelters so we ate our lunch in the shade. The air temperature was in the mid-60’s, and there was a breeze, so we ate with our jackets on.

After lunch we headed west on FL-70 to the other side of Myakka City were we turned south on Singletary Road. About seven miles down we found the entrance to the Hermann’s Royal Lipizzaner Stallions and Spanish American Riding School complex. Hermann’s is the home of a group of Lipizzaner horses that tour North America. The original horses were part of the 500 Austrian Royal Lipizzaner horses rescued by General George Patton at the end of World War II. Gabby Hermann is the matriarch of the current operation and the original horses were brought to the USA by her father. The Lipizzaner horse was first bred in Austria in 1565 from Arabian and Andalusian stock. Six lines were produced and new Arabian and Andalusian stock have been included in the breeding since that time to avoid the negative effects of inbreeding.

Gabby Herman exercises one of the Royal Lipizzaner Stallions in training. Myakka City, FL.

Hermann’s has open rehearsals (performances) every Thursday and Friday at 3 PM and Saturday at 10 AM when they are not touring, weather permitting. These are not “dress rehearsals” as the houses and riders are not fully costumed the way they would be for a show while on tour. They do, however, put the horses through all of their maneuvers. The rehearsals take place in an open air arena connected to the nearby stables with a pair of gated fences. There are bleachers on the two long sides of the arena and visitors also bring lawn chairs and set them up on three sides of the arena. We arrived around 2:15 PM and there were already people there. Admission was a $5 “donation” per person, but it was not optional. It was well worth the price, however, and we made an extra contribution at the end of the show.

We secured good seats in the last row of the one of the bleachers at the top of the stairs with our backs to the sun. That allowed us an unobstructed view for photography with light from a good direction. It was a good thing we got there early. Six fully-loaded tour buses showed up after we got there along with lots of passenger cars. The bleachers were packed and the lawn chairs were at least two deep around the fence. After the show we walked over to see the 17 day old colt and walk through the stables. I took photos and also snapped a few shots of the tour buses after chatting with the driver of a 2016 Prevost H3-45 with a beautiful deep purple paint scheme. I would sure like to have one of those to convert.

Five stallions work in formation at Hermann’s Royal Lipizzaner Stallions and Spanish American Riding School. Myakka City, FL.

When we were done at Hermann’s we drove back to Arcadia and stopped at Walgreens before returning to Big Tree Carefree RV Resort. We spent a little time at Mara’s motorhome so she could walk Linda through the various cat and RV chores that needed to be taken care off during the next week. With that done we stopped at the mail room. We had a slip in our mail slot that there was a package for us in the office but it was after 5 PM and the office was closed. We figured it was the shipment of Nutpods vegan coffee creamer but we would not be able to pick it up until Monday as we would not be around during office hours on Saturday and the office is closed on Sundays.

For dinner Linda made lentil potato burritos using various leftover ingredients that we wanted/needed to use up. I opened the bottle of Barefoot Moscato wine, using the cork puller that Mara gave us the other night, and we had some for dessert. We were both tired so we watched some TV, including the first of three episodes of a new Masterpiece Mystery series named Silk about barristers in England. We did not watch the second episode as we had to be up early in the morning and it was going to end too late.

2016/02/27 (S) Port Miami

We were up at 6:30 AM and left at 7 AM for Dunkin Donuts where we got something to eat and a couple of large half-caffe coffees. As planned, we were back at Mara’s motorhome at 7:30 AM. By 7:45 we had Michael, Mara, and their luggage onboard and were on our way to the cruise ship terminals at the Port of Miami some three plus hours distant.

The GPS wanted us to go south on FL-31 but we had already decided we would take FL-70 east to US-27 and then take that south/southeast as far as I-75. We stopped at a Marathon station in South Bay to use the restrooms and let Mara and Michael get some coffee. We headed east on I-75 to its end point at MM 0 and then followed whatever roads the GPS told us to use to get to Port Miami. When we were almost to the Port we deviated from the GPS and took the tunnel under the water to get to the cruise ship terminals rather than exit the highway and use the bridge. There was some temporary confusion, and minor tension, surrounding this but soon enough we ended up at Terminal F where the MSC Divina was docked.

Traffic was heavy and chaotic, but we found a spot at the curb and got them unloaded. A quick handshake and a hug and we were on our way. I never cease to be appalled at the incredibly pour traffic engineering we encounter at major transportation terminals. We did get a stunning view of the skyscrapers that dominate the downtown Miami skyline, but after a bit of driving around we managed to escape the island via the bridge and I was glad to be clear of the area.

Linda had researched vegan friendly eateries last night and selected one called The Kitchen. It was near Miami International Airport, not too far from Port Miami, and basically in the direction we needed to travel to return to Arcadia. She put the address in the GPS and we enjoyed a slow, late Saturday morning, drive through downtown Miami. We arrived around 11:30 and there were only a couple of other diners there. As is often the case, it was a slightly funky little place, but it had an entirely vegan menu with lots of interesting options.

The Kitchen is, in fact, the prep facility for a chain of local eateries, and plenty of other customers showed up while we were there. We had the tacos, which included plantains, and the nachos. The tacos were good, especially the plantains, but the nachos were outstanding. Both were made with vegan chorizo sausage. The nachos had a base of blue corn chips with beans, tomatoes, salsa, and cashew cream. It was also a big serving. For dessert we each had a coconut date ball and a gobi berry chocolate brownie. Yum. The Kitchen was a bit pricey but most of the ingredients were organic and the food was fresh and very tasty so we felt it was good value for the money.

We left at 12:30 PM and I turned the wrong way leaving the parking lot. It turned out we were on US-27 headed north so we stayed with that choice. The GPS wanted to put us on the Interstate/Tollroads but we knew that eventually it would put us back on US-27. There was a lot of traffic and frequent traffic signals, but we eventually got clear of the developed urban area. Not too far out we stopped at a roadside park with an airboat operation and switched drivers. Linda told me later that I napped for about an hour but my experience of the situation was that I nodded off and woke up repeatedly because of neck discomfort.

We got back to our RV resort around 3:45 PM and stopped at the mail room on the way in where I retrieved a box of magazines from BCM. The 3 PM Mardi Gras parade had just ended but some of the decorated golf carts and masked participants were still hanging around the activity building. I made a mental note that the Mardi Gras dinner started at 7:30 PM and we returned to our rig.

We turned on our Verizon Mi-Fi and got our local network online. I opened the box of magazines to see what was inside and e-mailed Gary to let him know what I received. Linda needed to attend to Mara’s cats, Maui and Sabra, and we both had several updates pending on our iPads and smartphones. We packed up the iPads and walked to the activity building where I set up our technology in the library while Linda went on to Mara’s Bounder to tend to her cats.

I got both iPads and both smartphones connected to the Internet via the resort Wi-Fi system, which can only be picked up at/near the activity building (which includes the office, lanai, library, dining room/kitchen, card room, and laundry room). The best reception is outside in front of the building, as the antenna is on the peak of the roof ridge at the front gable, but the reception in the lanai and library is very usable. There was one other person there using the Wi-Fi but she left shortly after I arrived.

The updates for our iPads took 500 MB and the smartphone updates took at least another 250 MB, so it was at least a 0.75 GB update session. Our 12 GB monthly Verizon data plan works out to about 0.4 GB per day, on average, so we are trying to do our updates using the park Wi-Fi and save our data plan for web searches, document/photo uploads/downloads, and other work we want and/or need to do from our motorcoach.

While I was updating our devices Linda got a text message from Mara and I was able to watch the latest OK Go video and play a few games. Kate sent me the link a week ago and I was waiting for a chance to use the resort Wi-Fi when there were few, if any, other users. I also downloaded the latest issue of The Gypsy Journal digital edition.

When I was done I packed up and walked over to Mara’s rig. Linda exchanged text messages with Mara. She and Michael are on the Holistic Holiday at Sea cruise for the first time. They had finished the opening session with Jessica Porter and Neal Barnhard, M.D. and enjoyed it very much. They had just sat down to dinner and we’re excited about that too. We enjoyed their enthusiasm and recalled what it was like for us the first time we went on this cruise. Linda packed up a few things to bring back to our coach. Mara made Broccoli salad last night and there was a lot left over that she wanted us to eat.

It cooled off quickly after the sun set and the overnight low was forecast to be 42 degrees F. We closed up the coach and then had some of Mara’s broccoli salad along with vegan Italian “sausage” for dinner. We finished the Barefoot Moscato wine, had a few grapes for dessert, and settled in to watch some TV programs on the local PBS channels before going to bed. We had spent 7 hours driving/riding in the car today and we were tired.

2016/02/28 (N) Cat Care

It was cool in the coach this morning and I stayed in bed, under the covers, with the electric heating pad on, until after 7:30 AM. The cats were persistent, however, and I finally got up and took care of their needs. I turned on the Aqua-Hot diesel burner and the zone control thermostats for the bathroom and the kitchen/living area and the electric toe-kick heater for the front of the bus. Linda got up at 8 AM as I was making coffee.

We had granola for breakfast, after which Linda packed up her laptop computer and gathered up papers related to work she needed to do. She took the car and drove to Mara’s motorhome to tend to the cats and then work there. She did not need to be online and figured the cats would appreciate the company, or at least get more accepting her presence and attention if she spent some quiet, extended time there. I stayed at our rig to catch up on draft blog posts and attend to our cats.

Last week I downloaded the free version of an app called “OfficeSuite (Free) Mobile + PDF” and have been using it to write the drafts of my recent blog posts. It works at least as well as the native iPad Notes app, better in my opinion (so far), and creates a native docx format Word document. It also works with various cloud services. Hypothetically that should save me the steps of e-mailing it to myself, selecting/copying the text from the e-mail, pasting it into a blank Word doc, and then cleaning up all of the junk caused by the Note app, which is considerable (numerous calendar hyperlinks). I say hypothetically because I have not yet set up or tested the cloud sync feature. That was on my “to do” list for today.

Around 11:30 AM it was getting warm in the coach under mostly sunny skies. I opened windows and roof vents and then put out all of the awnings. I continued working on my blog posts from the last four days and was finally ready to upload one of them via a cloud service. We have a Dropbox account but we also have OneDrive accounts as part of the Windows 10 OS on our notebook computers. I don’t normally use OneDrive but I thought this would be a good opportunity to try it.

I set up the credentials to allow the app to connect to the OneDrive account attached to my OS login. I then tried to move or copy the Word docx file for Wednesday’s blog post from “current files” to the OneDrive under Network locations but the OfficeSuites app would not give me the OneDrive account as an option. I checked the Help screens for information to assist me but could not find anything pertaining to this specific problem. The app has Pro and Premium upgrades available ($ and $$) but the feature chart indicated that interfacing to all five of the different cloud services was included in the Free version. Rather than waste time on this I called David Aungier to let him know there was an updated version of his featured bus article in a folder in my Dropbox and then kept working on draft blog posts.

At 1 PM I was getting ready to walk over to Mara’s rig to get the shower supplies from Linda when she returned in the car. We have been able to avoid removing the cats’ litter box from our shower by using the showers at the building by the swimming pool. That also keeps the shower water out of our grey water tank, allowing us to go more days between dumps. I got my towel and the soap from Linda and walked over to the shower house.

When I got back from my shower I trimmed my beard and shaved. It had probably been at least a month since my last beard trim and I was starting to look a bit scruffy. All cleaned up and feeling refreshed I dealt with a couple of e-mails and then returned to the issue of getting the OfficeSuites app to sync with one of my cloud services. It appeared that Dropbox might be the best choice so I established the connection to that account. Voilà! I was finally able to copy a local Word file to the folder I had previously set up in my Dropbox for blog post documents.

I proceeded to finish each post in turn and copied it to the Dropbox folder which immediately uploaded it to the cloud server. I checked my ASUS notebook computer to make sure the document had made it to the local hard drive. It had, which meant I could move it to where I keep the draft posts and start editing it directly. This was a big deal for me as I expect it to streamline the blogging process.

As I was working on all of this I realized that I had told Gary at BCM that I would review and comment on an article he had received from Lloyd DeGerald and would try to get it back to him by Sunday evening. Lloyd is a highly experienced, factory-trained, Webasto / Aqua-Hot service and repair technician and has worked on our Aqua-Hot in the past. His article was basically a terse service procedure consisting of a numbered list of steps. There were some things that I was not clear about so I added comments and highlighted them in yellow. I got the document e-mailed back to Gary, with answers to several questions he had asked, just as Linda was putting dinner on the table.

Dinner was an improvised dish of red beans and rice with onions, garlic, tomatoes, turmeric, and kale. I added a little extra Tabasco hot sauce to mine and it was a very good dish. After dinner Linda did the dishes and then we walked over to Mara’s motorhome, by way of the garbage trailer, to tend to the evening cat and rig chores. Maui stayed out long enough to get up on the hassock and show some interest in me. I let her smell my hand but when I tried to pet her head she swatted at me. Too much, too soon. She played with a cat toy that Linda shook around, ate her dinner, and disappeared into the bedroom. Sabra stayed out the whole time we were there, ate her dinner, and chased feathers that Linda moved around.

We walked back to our rig before 8 PM and watched a special about the Manners of Downton Abby on PBS. The overnight low was forecast at 54 degrees F so we closed the roof vents but did not close the coach windows all the way before turning in for the night.

2016/02/29 (M) Bonus Day

Last night was the Academy Awards but we did not watch the show. We had not seen any of the films and were more interested in a pair of specials on the Manners of Downton Abby about the role of the show’s historical consultant whose job it has been to make sure all of the actors were as authentic as possible in their speech and mannerisms.

We got up this morning between 7:30 and 8 AM, which seems to have become our norm of late unless we have an outing planned that requires an early departure. We had our usual coffee followed by granola with blueberries for breakfast. We doodled on our iPads for a bit and I finished my blog post for yesterday and uploaded it to our Dropbox. Linda noted that today was February 29th. In a month that is usually two to three days shorter than all the others it was like having a bonus day. I also enjoy the relative rarity of the event.

At 9:30 AM Linda packed up her computer and papers and walked over to Mara’s motorhome to tend to the cats. She planned to stay and work a while and was expecting a call from Dave at the bakery around 10 AM. I finished my coffee, got dressed, and settled in to work at my computer.

When Linda returned we walked to Walmart for a few grocery items before it got too warm outside. When we got back and had the groceries put away, we reconfigured the back of the car. After Mara’s arrival, but prior Michael’s arrival, we had reconfigured the back of the car. We had removed one of the rear seats and put the other rear seat down so Mara could go places with us. Most of the stuff went back in the car but in order to store the removed seat in the front bay of the bus and make room for some of the stuff from the car we had moved the air compressor and two of the four chassis stands to the passenger side engine bay.

Just prior to Michael’s arrival we reconfigured the back of the car again as we now needed four seats. To keep our stuff out of sight and protect it from the weather we bought a small tent, set it up behind the bus, and put everything in it.

When Mara and Michael return from the Holistic Holiday at Sea Cruise on Saturday Michael is going to rent a car to and get them back to Arcadia from Miami. He will be sticking around for another four weeks and they will need a car for most of that time as we are leaving Big Tree Carefree RV Resort a week from today. So today we put both rear seats back up, emptied out the storage tent, reloaded the car, and repacked the front bay of the bus.

As long as we were working outside I stripped out the bad silicone caulk between the new passenger side lower windshield and the gasket. I found a different product in one of our parts and supplies tubs and got it out. I did not apply it, however, as I wanted to let the rubber gasket relax and hopefully reform to the glass. In retrospect, it is painfully obvious that the Safelite installers did not know what they were doing.

It was a sunny day and by early afternoon the air temperature was 80 degrees F, so we put on our swimming suits and walked over to the pool. We stopped at the office to retrieve our package of Nutpods non-dairy coffee creamer and put it in the mail room until later. After a nice soak and vitamin D treatment we showered, changed into dry clothes, and walked back to the mail room to retrieve our Nutpods package and other mail. Being the last day of the month our electric bill was there along with an invitation to the Michigan reunion lunch scheduled for July 14 in Concord, Michigan. The Resort does have a strong sense of community, and people take that back to their home states/provinces when the leave.

I had a text message from Kerry Fear requesting payment for snowplowing services for February. Linda wrote a check and got it ready to mail.

For dinner Linda made stuffed poblano peppers and pan-grilled them. (We do not travel with an outdoor grill, either propane or charcoal.) The stuffing was rice, black beans, tomatoes, scallions, vegan sour cream, cumin seeds, and Daiya vegan cheddar cheese. So good. We had some Barefoot Riesling wine after dinner and fresh mixed fruit salad (bananas, strawberries, and blueberries) for dessert. I really like the way we eat.

After dinner we watched our usual PBS news programs followed by our usual CBS entertainment shows. I stayed up to watch Charlie Rose’s interview with Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, Inc. I was getting ready for bed and turned on the fresh water pump. It normally runs briefly to build up pressure and then shuts off. This time it just kept running. That meant one of two things: either there was an opening in the system (faucet or leak), or the demand pressure sensor was not working. I shut it off, put my sweats and Crocs back on, grabbed a flashlight, and went outside to investigate.

It was almost midnight but there was plenty of light from the resort street lamps. I checked both sides of the utility bay and did not see any sign of a leak other than the small drip from the fill valve packing nut. I turned on the shore water supply and opened the valves to allow it to flow through the softener to the coach. Once the lines and softener were filled and pressurized I did not hear any further water flow, so I was somewhat confident that we did not have a leak in the system. I left the outside water turned on so we could flush the toilet and run water to wash our hands.

Back inside I wrote a sticky note not to turn on the water pump and stuck it on the toilet seat. Linda woke up right after I finally got to bed so I was able to tell her in person, but the note was still a good reminder. I watched Tavis Smiley’s interview with Tom Waters of Pink Floyd and then went to sleep. February 2016 had been a very busy, but very satisfying month for us.

2016/02/22-24 (M–W) 1 SP, 2 S-A-H

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2016/02/22 (M) Myakka River State Park

Our destination today was Myakka River State Park (MRSP). We agreed yesterday to pick up Mara and Michael at 10 AM. That allowed us to sleep until 8 AM, have coffee and breakfast at our rig, and take showers before leaving for the day.

MRSP is only 25 miles from Arcadia so we did not stop for fuel or coffee. We stopped at the visitor center near the main entrance to study the maps and displays before heading deeper into the park. As on previous visits, our first stop was the bridge over the stretch of the Myakka River that runs south from Upper Myakka Lake to Lower Myakka Lake. We hiked south along the east edge of the river for quite some distance. Unlike previous visits we did not see the quantity or diversity of wildlife that we expected. Absent from our visit today were Wood Storks and Roseate Spoonbills. We saw alligators, but only one somewhat up close.

We stopped at the Forest Canopy towers and suspension bridge which is one of the special treats of this park. After that stop we drove to the vendor area on the southeast shore of the Upper Lake to have our picnic lunch. The parking lot was full but our timing was lucky and we waited as someone backed out and then took that spot. This area has a boat launch, restaurant, pontoon boat tour, wheeled vehicle train, gift shop, and restrooms. After lunch we walked out to the weir across the outflow of the Upper Lake, which maintains it at a slightly higher level. We saw a few more alligators and birds there.

We drove to the end of the road at the north gate and checked out the other picnic area that someone at lunch told us was there. On the way back we stopped at the Birdwalk, a boardwalk that goes out through a marsh to a point near the eastern edge of the Upper Lake. We saw a few more alligators from a distance and got a close up view of a couple of birds.

By the time we were done at the Birdwalk it was approaching 4 PM. We drove slowly back to the Visitor Center to use the restrooms and then exited the park and headed back to Arcadia. On the way back Linda and Mara decided that, in spite of a nice weather forecast, we would stick around the RV Resort tomorrow and have dinner together. Not only will that give them time to plan/prepare the meal, it will give us time to do laundry and relax at the swimming pool. It will also allow me to finish proofreading and correcting articles for BCM. The forecast for Wednesday has an 80% chance of rain so that was already planned as a stay-at-home day. My hope is that I will be able to upload the rest of my blog posts for October 2015. I do not like being this far behind.

For dinner Linda made a dish with vegan Italian sausage on a bed of angel hair pasta with onion, garlic, and broccoli sautéed in EVOO. Yum, yum. After dinner I off-loaded the photos I took today. We then watched the Nightly Business Report and NewsHour on PBS followed by the X-Files and Lucifer on FOX, NCIS Los Angeles on CBS, a few minutes of news and weather, and then Charlie Rose’s interview with Bill Gates on PBS.

So many shades of green. A view to the south from the observation platform atop the north tower of the Forest Canopy Skywalk. Myakka River SP, FL.

2016/02/23 (T) Green Taco Wraps

It rained briefly last evening and more rain was forecast starting later this afternoon and extending through-tomorrow. Today and-tomorrow were planned as stay-at-home (S-A-H) days so we got up just before 8-AM and had coffee, juice, and granola with bananas. My plan was to take care of our fresh- and waste-water tanks and do the laundry before settling in to work on computer-based tasks. Linda received a package yesterday of year-end accounting documents from the bakery and planned to work on those today.

The skies had clouded up late yesterday and gotten darker and thicker by sunset. We had dark clouds to our west this morning and had just finished breakfast (granola, bananas, fruit juice) when it started to rain lightly. I had no sooner closed the bathroom vent/fan when the rain came down hard. I closed down the awning style windows until they were only open about an inch at the bottom. We planned to roll up the patio awning before the rain came today but now had to wait for it to dry off, assuming the rains let up and the sun came out for a while.

We dropped below 1/3rd tank of fresh water yesterday. When the rain stopped I went out to check the level visually. It was barely below the 1/3rd sensor so I decided to forego dumping and filling for a couple of more days. I might even run off the city water for a day or so to push the whole dump/fill/recharge routine off until the weekend.

I moved my laptop computer to the dining table so Linda could on work at hers on the desk. The accounting work she had to do for the bakery required space to spread out the paperwork she got from Dave (the controller) yesterday. I decided to just keep editing blog posts from November 2015 in preparation for eventually uploading them.

At 12:45 PM I started sorting the soiled clothes and linens. Linda quite working on the accounting and made sandwiches for our lunch. She made a grocery list and then walked to the supermarket. At 1:30 I loaded the laundry and my iPad into the car and drove over to the laundry room. By 1:45 I had four washing machines in operation.

I connected my iPad to the Resort’s public Wi-Fi signal at the activity building and connected through to the Internet, which always takes some doing. The problem is that the various browsers load cached versions of the tabs that are open and I have to go to a new webpage in other to trigger the filter and connect to the Internet. Until I have done that successfully I cannot check e-mail or update apps.

By 2:25 I had transferred all of the wash to three dryers and started them. I had six apps with updates available totaling just over 400 MB (0.4 GB) and initiated those. On our 12 GB Verizon data plan that is more than a whole day’s average data usage for a typical month (0.4 x 30 = 12.0). I also noticed that I had two new updates for apps on my phone but when I looked more carefully I discovered that I had 22 app updates pending. I had been deferring them until I could use the resort (or other) free Wi-Fi. When the last iPad app update downloaded and installed I connected my phone to the Resort Wi-Fi and initiated the app updates.

I worked on the draft of today’s blog post and played a few games until the laundry was dry and then folded it and put it in the car. It was 4 PM at that point and only 10 of the 22 apps had updated, so I pulled the car around in front of the activity building with a clear, short path to the antenna on the roof. I had a much stronger signal in that location and the updates progressed much more quickly. 23 apps were updated and the process finished at 4:18 PM. I noticed that my phone had somehow gotten set to show Homestead, Florida as my “home” location so I enabled Location Services, changed it to Arcadia, Florida, and then disabled Location Services. I checked to see if we had any snail mail and then drove back to our coach and put the clean laundry away.

When I got back to our coach Linda was cooking her part of this evening’s meal. We would be dining with Mara and Michael at Mara’s rig having “green taco wraps.” Linda made a crumbled meat substitute from brown lentils, walnuts, sautéed onions, and peppers. She also supplied the tortillas, lettuce, and vegan sour cream. Mara made salsa and avocado cream and a side salad with cauliflower, tomatoes, and lemon juice. We brought a bottle of Chardonnay and Mara had a bottle of Spanish Rioja, a very dry red wine.

We walked over with our contributions just before 6 PM and were greeted by Michael. Mara had walked to Walmart for some tomatoes and other last minute items and returned not long after we arrived. Good wine, good food, and good friends made for a great meal. We were still there at 8 PM and it turned out that we like to watch the same TV programs, so we all watched NCIS. Linda and I walked back to our coach when the show ended and watched NCISNOLA and Limitless before going to bed. I watched most of Charlie Rose before falling asleep.

An Egret tries to swallow a fish that it caught near the Myakka River. Myakka River SP, FL.

2016/02/24 (W) Another Tornado Warning

Today was planned as a stay-at-home day. The forecast was for wind and rain with a marginal risk of severe weather. I was up a little before 7:30 AM and thought about going to the Wednesday coffee “social” but decided against it. I began preparing our morning coffee but waited until Linda was awake to grind the beans and finish the process. Linda got our Verizon Mi-Fi and Wi-Fi Ranger online and checked the current weather, which we compared to what was being reported on the local TV news. Wind and rain were expected in our part of southwest Florida by 10 AM and the Wundermap app radar showed a large storm front drooped from southwest to northeast in advance of a cold front and moving our way.

I finished my first cup of coffee and then went outside and put up the two window awnings on the driver side of our coach. While I was out there I drained the auxiliary air filter / water separator and stored the two folding bag chairs in the front bay.

We had granola and blueberries for breakfast and it started raining while we finished our coffee. We both had computer-based work to do today but Linda needed to update some things first. The rain stopped, at least temporarily, so we packed up our mobile technology and drove over to the activity building to use the RV resort’s public Wi-Fi system.

We set up our tech toys in the library and connected them to the resort’s public Wi-Fi system; two laptop computers, two iPads, and two smartphones. I had three app updates on my phone and Linda had 14. She had eight app updates on her iPad and I had one OS-related update on my computer. Linda downloaded a new audio book. I downloaded/installed the OfficeSuites Free – Mobile + PDF app on my iPad and the 2016 U. S. RVers Edition (PDF) of The Mobile Internet Handbook by Chris Dunphy and Cherie Ve Ard from the Mobile Internet Aficionados membership website. We also checked our e-mail while we were there. Between our six devices we greatly exceeded our average daily data allocation of 0.4 GB that our 10+2 GB Verizon data plan provides. Our normal 10 GB plan averages out to about 0.3 GB per day, and it is not sufficient for our needs when traveling in the motorcoach.

As we were packing up at 1:30 PM to return to our coach the skies opened up and heavy rains poured forth. Moments later both of our phones notified us that a tornado warning was in effect for our location until 2 PM. Our car was parked near the front door of the activity building so we decided not to wait for a lull in the rain. It was raining even harder by the time we got back to our coach but we had our technology in ballistic nylon travel bags and got them inside without getting them wet.

Linda set up her computer on the desk and I set up mine on the dining room table. We did not need to be online so we left the Verizon Mi-Fi turned off. Linda worked on accounting for the bakery while I proofread and annotated corrections for two BCM articles. When she was done for today I moved my computer to the desk, plugged in the power supply, and spent some time reading and responding to e-mails.

By 3 PM the severe weather threat had passed but densely overcast skies continued with occasional lighter rain. All of this was, once again, in advance of a cold front that will bring high temperatures only in the upper 60’s for the next four to five days.

For dinner Linda improvised a sauté of onion, garlic, kale, and turmeric with boiled red potatoes. It was a hardy dish; perfect for a cool, dreary evening. We watched a PBS Nature episode on Emperor Penguins, a Nova episode on rescue robots, and another program on Big Data. We then went to bed as we had to be up early in the morning.

2016/02/16–20 (T–S) Friends, Food, and Good Times

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[ Note: There are no photos as part of this post. ]

2016/03/16 (T) Girls Day Out

Mara needed to get to a medical appointment in the Miami area today and stop at the veterinary clinic where Maui was being treated a few weeks ago. We were going to let her borrow our car but Linda offered to accompany her on the rather long round trip and Mara gladly accepted. She was not going to ask us to go along and thereby possibly inconvenience us, but she was glad to not have to make the trip by herself. They worked out the arrangements yesterday and Linda was up, dressed, and gone this morning before I got up at 7:45 AM.

I made a smaller pot of coffee, had a glass of orange juice to wash down my vitamins, and had toast with apricot preserves for breakfast. I turned on our Verizon Mi-Fi and e-mailed the postcard photo to Linda’s Gmail account and responded to an e-mail from Butch. I also had a couple of e-mails back from Scott Neader at QTH.com in response to my support requests yesterday for the SLAARC account and WordPress website. I then turned off the Mi-Fi.

Having to manage a limited data plan is a pain but the overage charges are worse. The upside is that it allows (forces) me to do something else. In this instance, I worked the rest of the morning on my iPad catching up on blog posts. Linda texted me relative to the timing of their travels and asked me to send the postcard photo. I already had, but it had obviously not gotten to her yet. She expected to be back around 6 PM and we agreed to go out to dinner once she returned.

I had some hummus, sourdough pretzel nibblers, and grapes around 1:30 PM and then settled in to edit blog posts from the end of October and started working on the ones for November. Linda texted me around 2 PM to let me know they were leaving and would be home around 5 PM. I turned the Mi-Fi on and checked e-mail. Mara had sent me a photo of Linda sitting in front of a very tasty looking plate of food but did not mention what restaurant they were at.

I continued editing blog posts and got a couple days into November (2015) by 4 PM. I quit working and walked over to the swimming pool to use the showers. There are only two stalls and they were both occupied so I had to wait. Even so, I was done, back at the coach, and changed into nicer dinner clothes before Linda arrived. We waited until 5:30 PM to drive to the Magnolia Street Seafood and Grill restaurant in downtown Arcadia.

We arrived at the restaurant early enough to get a good parking place and not have to wait for a table but late enough to be hungry. We both had a large salad, minus the blue cheese crumbles, and shared a basket of French fries. On the way back to our coach we stopped at the mail room and Linda connected her iPad to the resort Wi-Fi system to download e-mail. The e-mail I sent her at 9 this morning had still not arrived.

We were back at our coach by 7 PM and turned on the PBS NewsHour. I sent the post card photo again and it still did not arrive in her inbox. We knew that both e-mails were sent because I cc:d one of our other accounts and received them there. Linda finally checked her Junk folder and found it; twice. She then created a post card for Madeline using the PostCardApp on her iPad.

We watched our usual Tuesday evening CBS TV programs while working puzzles on our iPads. Linda had a long day of driving and riding in the car and was tired. With overnight lows forecast for the mid-50s and no rain (but some early morning fog) we left the windows and bathroom roof vent open. We watched Limitless in bed, caught a little local news and weather, and then went to sleep.

2016/02/17 (W) FMCA NEC Meeting

We did not get up until 8 AM this morning so, once again, we did not go to the weekly coffee/donut meeting at the activity building; not that we usually go anyway. I made coffee and we wiled away the morning playing games and solving puzzles on our iPads. I turned on the Verizon Mi-Fi long enough to check e-mail and send a few replies. We eventually had toast and preserves for breakfast.

Bill and Brenda Phelan’s availability did not coincide with ours so I e-mailed her our shipping address here at Big Tree Carefree RV Resort and then called her with our credit card number. I also arranged for us to meet Ed and Janet Roelle tomorrow afternoon at their winter home in Sarasota and then go to Sweet Tomatoes for dinner.

The weather pattern for the next week was forecast to be dry and sunny with overnight lows in the mid-to-upper 50s and highs in the mid-to-upper 70s F. That’s what I’m talking about! and that is why snowbirds come here in the winter.

Linda went for a morning walk and dropped off the trash. She returned in time for lunch and made vegan grilled cheese sandwiches. We also had some orange juice to wash down our vitamins, which we had not taken at breakfast.

Linda made arrangements to meet Mara at the pool today at 1 PM and then spend time with her afterwards showing her how to set up and use Quicken for her personal financial records. I spent the first half of the afternoon editing blog posts from early November (2015). Just before 3:30 PM I dialed in to the meeting of the FMCA National Education Committee. I was still engaged in that when Linda returned around 4:15 PM. My meeting wrapped up around 4:45 after which Linda and I went for a walk.

We stopped by the activity building where Mara was in the library trying to get her computer online via the resort Wi-Fi and we were able to get her connected. Linda and Mara had agreed to meet at 5:30 PM for a power walk but it was already 5:25 so they pushed the time out to 5:45 and we finished our stroll.

Dinner was an improvisation based on ingredients Linda had on hand. Basically it was a sauté of onions, garlic, mushrooms, bell pepper, and kale, salt, pepper, thyme, and oregano in EVOO and finished with some Egri Merlot. Dessert was fresh strawberries and blueberries. We drank the rest of the bottle of wine before/during/after dinner. Yummy.

Wednesday evening is PBS nature/science night, after which we were quickly to sleep.

2016/02/18 (R) Ed, Janet, & Nathan

We left the coach windows open last night and slept well until around 5:30 AM. By then it was cool enough to need the extra blanket and the cats were fully awake and engaged in their usual morning routine dividing their attention between the sights, sounds, and smells of the outside world and their persistent attempts to get us out of bed to feed them. Our neighbors were also up early to take Ron’s mom to the airport for her flight back to Portage, Indiana. Since the head of our bed is on their side of our coach we were aware of their departure conversation and preparations. Even so, Linda was asleep last night before 11 PM and I was asleep by 11:15 so we got plenty of sleep.

I made our morning coffee while Linda turned on our Verizon Mi-Fi and got us connected. We had used 11.2 GB of our 12.0 GB data plan with two days to go in our billing cycle. We will get through the end of the cycle tomorrow at midnight without any overage charges, but the monitoring/management of our data usage for the last couple of weeks has been an unwelcome limitation and nuisance. In particular I have been editing blog posts but not uploading them, which I very much need to do.

I did check my e-mail and respond to ones from Brenda Phelan and Ed Roelle. We are going to Ed and Janet’s winter home in Sarasota this afternoon. It turns out they are just down the road from our friends, Ed and Betty Burns. Brenda had e-mailed us the UPS tracking number for our tire cover shipment. She indicated that they could make/install our windshield covers the morning of March 8th at Florida Grande Motor Coach Resort in Webster and we accepted the appointment.

I had an automated e-mail indicating that one of the websites I manage had been updated to WordPress version 4.4.2. That meant all four websites had been updated and probably had plug-in updates available that needed to be processed. As long as we were online I logged in to each site and initiated the updates. The actual update process occurs between the web server and the WordPress server, so the only data usage for me is sending the update request and receiving back the status messages.

We eventually had our standard breakfast of granola with fresh blueberries and orange/grapefruit juice to wash down our vitamins. I have been having problems with my coffee “creamer.” I know this is not a really big problem in the context of larger world events, but it is a problem nonetheless that is impacting my quality of life. The problem is that my soy creamer has been curdling, and that just does not make for good eats. To make matters worse, it does not happen all the time nor does it happen in a consistent way, at least not that I have been able to figure out.

For my first cup of the day I always add the creamer to the cup first and then swirl in the coffee as I pour. This almost always results in the creamer blending smoothly with the coffee; almost, but not always. Adding more coffee to the cup before it is empty, however, often produces the curdling; often, but not always. Sometimes I can get the creamer to re-blend by adding a little more; sometimes, but not always.

Linda did some quick online research and found information suggesting that I am not the only person suffering this situation and that it might be related to some combination of acidity, temperature (of the creamer and coffee), and procedure. We have two different coffee blends that I alternate between. The one I made this morning, Ethiopian Yirgacheffe half-caffe, is the one that is generally less inclined to curdle and is a slightly “smoother” single bean coffee compared to the Sweet Seattle Dreams half-caffe blend. She suggested I try a different creamer that is not soy-based. I will probably do that, but I have used other creamers in the past and they had a more distinct taste that I did not care for (in my coffee), such as almond or coconut.

We finally got dressed around 10 AM. Linda bundled up the daily bag of kitchen trash and took it with her on her morning walk. I had six iPad apps with updates available so I walked over to the activity building and downloaded/installed them. That took quite a while, but I got to sit outside on the dock in clear view of the Wi-Fi antenna and soak up some rays before returning to our coach.

When Linda returned from her walk we gathered up the plastic recyclables, added them to the ones already in the car, and drove to the Turner Agri-Civic Center to drop them off. As long as we were out, and in that part of town, we drove west on E. Gibson Street to check out the Shell Station on northbound US-17. As Jack Conrad had told us the station has one diesel pump, with a large nozzle, positioned so that a large vehicle can get into position to use it without pulling under the canopy. We will need fuel for the bus when we leave here on March 7 and this is where we will get it. We will then hook up the car here before heading north on US-17.

We stopped at Walmart on our way back to the RV resort to buy a tarp and a few grocery items. We ended up buying a small, inexpensive tent instead of a tarp. The tent has a floor and will provide a rainproof enclosure where we can store all of the stuff that is currently in the car. That will allow us to lower the 4th seat and have room for luggage and other stuff.

Since we would be having dinner earlier than usual today we had a light lunch of hummus, pretzels, and grapes. It was a beautiful day so Linda went outside to read while I worked at my computer editing blog ousts from mid-November (2016).

We picked Mara up at 2:15 PM and headed for Sarasota. The route to Ed and Janet’s place was familiar as it was the same route we take to get to Ed and Betty’s place; FL-70 west past I-75 to Lockwood Ridge Road and then south (which is the only direction Lockwood Ridge goes from there). Ed and Betty live just south of FL-70 while Ed and Janet are about five miles on down the road. We arrived right on time at 3:30 PM.

Ed and Janet bought a house that needed a lot of work but is located on an acre of Iand in a very nice subdivision. They are repairing and remodeling it extensively, both inside and outside, and we got the grand tour. I love seeing projects that are in-process as they are so full of possibilities. Ed and Janet are both very handy, have done this kind of work before, and enjoy it, so the work is both an investment in their future and a labor of love. Janet is also very artistic, so the design and choice of materials and color pallet will be very nice.

At 4:15 PM they got Nathan up and into his wheelchair, out to their car, and strapped in. Nathan is the last of 11 children that Ed and Janet have adopted over the years, all with serious disabilities, in addition to rearing three boys of their own. Their Prevost XL Royale Coach bus conversion is specially modified to accommodate Nathan’s wheelchair and bed and he goes where they go. Although I had seen the modifications to their bus at GLCC rallies we had somehow never met Nathan. He is a sweet young man who was severely brain damaged at birth so he does not really interact with strangers in a meaningful way, but he is clearly responsive to Ed and Janet’s presence and care. They adopted him when he was 3 months old and he is now 14 years of age.

At 4:30 PM we drove to Sweet Tomatoes restaurant for dinner. Sweet Tomatoes is a chain, but we do not have one anywhere near our house back in Michigan. Janet also follows a mostly vegan diet and they selected this restaurant because of its convenient location, excellent salad bar, and ability to accommodate Nathan in his wheelchair. It’s a buffet style (all you can eat) restaurant and the price for seniors, including beverages, was only $8. We were able to stick to vegan choices and still eat too much. We had never really spent any time with Janet prior to today and had a long, wonderful visit. It was after 6:30 PM by the time we left the restaurant.

We headed east on University Boulevard a short distance to one of the countless mega shopping complexes that stretch from St. Petersburg to Naples and found a Petco. Mara needed some special cat food and the Petco had it so she stocked up. We then headed back to Arcadia by way of I-75 north and FL-70 east, stopping at the Publix supermarket in Lakewood Ranch to do some more grocery shopping. We finally arrived back at Big Tree Carefree RV Resort just before 9 PM.

When we opened the door to our coach Juniper was waiting for us on the entry steps. Instead of turning around and moving back into the coach, like she has always done, she made a break for it and got out. Fortunately she did not run off and eventually crawled under the back of the bus on the driver side. Linda was able to coax her out far enough to get hold of her and return her to the bus but it took at least half an hour from the time she escaped to get her safely back inside and she gave us quite a scare. Having your black inside cat escape at night in a strange place is not something you want to have happen.

We missed most of our usual Thursday evening CBS comedy programs but settled in watch Elementary before going to bed.

2016/02/19 (W) Michael Arrives

We got up sometime between 7 and 8 AM. I made coffee and used the Silk brand Almond/Vanilla non-dairy coffee creamer we bought last night at the Publix supermarket in Lakewood Ranch. It did not separate (curdle), like the soy creamer has been doing, but I did not care for the way it tastes. Besides a strong, but very artificial, vanilla flavor I think it may contain sweetener, which I do not care for in my coffee.

I bought a couple of apricot filled bear claw pastry treats at Publix last night and had them for breakfast. They are not necessarily the healthiest treat, but they are vegan. After breakfast I finished up yesterday’s blog post while Linda dealt with some bakery related business. With our inside tasks finished we got dressed and went outside. I drove to the office to get our package with our tire and windshield covers and Linda started unpacking the small tent we bought yesterday at Walmart. Once we had the tent set up behind the motorhome we unloaded all of the stuff from the car and stored it in the tent.

The tent will keep our stuff dry and out of sight for the next week while we use the car to shuttle four people around. With the car emptied out we reinstalled the fourth seat, which has been in the front bay of the bus, and latched both rear seats in the up position. I removed the ham radio antenna from the roof and stored it in the front bay of the bus. We drove to the Turner Agri-Civic Center to drop off some recyclables and stopped at the self-serve car wash on the way back. We washed the outside of the car and then vacuumed out the inside, a task that was long overdue.

Before returning to our RV resort we stopped at the Shell station to top off the tank and then at Dunkin Donuts next door for some frozen coffee. Back at our coach we scrubbed the floor of the car, wiped out and dusted the interior, and cleaned all of the glass. We then returned the seats to their normal “full upright and locked” passenger position. It was nice to finally have the car clean on the inside.

With the car taken care of we brushed off the six tires on the bus that are exposed to direct sunlight and put the new tire covers on. They are very nice; a milk chocolate brown nylon mesh that is similar in color to the brown paint on the upper portion of our coach. They will block a lot of sunlight, reducing UV degradation of the rubber while parked, but will breath, preventing condensation. We also got four windshield wiper covers. I was able to put on the two for the bottom windshield wipers from the ground, or using the small step ladder, but the upper two will require the big ladder and I did feel like getting it out.

With our outside tasks completed I went back inside and updated our passwords program with some information for the SLAARC website. I e-mailed Scott at QTH with an additional support question and then settled in to edit blog posts from mid-late November (2016).

We knew today would be a long day that would extend late into the evening so Linda suggested that we take naps. I set the alarm on my iPad for 4:30 PM and finally laid down on the sofa around 3:30 PM. We were both up by 4:30 and got ready to leave. We picked Mara up at 4:45 and headed for Tampa International Airport to pick up Mara’s friend, Michael Crowley, who was flying in from Phoenix, Arizona by way of Houston, Texas.

Our GPS unit routed us west on FL-70 to I-75 where we went north as far as I-275. The GPS wanted us to stay on I-75 but we chose to take I-275 over Tampa Bay and through St. Petersburg. This stretch of I-275 is part of the Florida Tollroad system but our SunPass let us fly right through the toll plazas. The GPS took us off the Interstate highway before it should have and we had to find our way back on.

We eventually arrived at the airport and found our way to the cell phone parking lot. It was perhaps the nicest cell phone lot any of us had ever seen. It was spacious, with lots of parking spaces, had actual restrooms (not porta-potties), and had two large electronic display boards announcing all of the arriving flights. It was a bit like being at a drive-in movie theater, which all of us were old enough to remember.

About the time the board announced the arrival of Michael’s flight at 6:56 PM he called Mara to let her know they were on the ground and taxiing. He called again 15 minutes later to let us know he was ready to be picked up and a short time later we retrieved him from the arriving flights section of the Blue Terminal.

Linda had researched possible vegan-friendly places to eat near the airport and we collectively settled on an Indian restaurant named Curry Leaves. Linda had me put the address in the GPS and I tried to follow the directions while also watching the road signs but missed the last exit and had to make a short detour to get back to where we needed to be. In my own defense it was dark and the road systems leading in and out of major airports are the most complex ever built and, in my opinion, not always well designed. The road system for Tampa International was as bad as any I had ever encountered.

We found ourselves driving through a district of very upscale hotels and restaurants and finally found the one we were looking for right where the GPS said it should be. We were surprised to find that it was co-located in a building with a BP filling station but on entering the restaurant portion of the building it looked and smelled very nice. We also noticed that the staff was Indian and so were many of the patrons. That has generally been a good sign in our experience where ethnic dining is concerned.

We were seated in a corner booth and the waitstaff was charming and attentive. There was a bit of a language barrier but our waiter understood that Linda was trying to find out which dishes were vegan (no dairy, no meat) and pointed them out. We ordered Samosas and spring rolls as appetizers and two dishes to start for the main course. Mara and Michael had a frozen mango dessert while Linda and I had flour balls in honey sauce. The food was very good and the meal was wonderful in the company of our friends.

We were back in the car with the GPS set for home by about 8:30 PM. We took I-275 to I-4 east to I-275 south to FL-70 and headed east to Arcadia. We dropped Michael and Mara at her motorhome sometime after 10 PM. Back at our coach we stayed up for awhile and interacted with our kitties. We went to bed at 11 PM and turned on the TV to watch Charlie Rose on PBS. It had been a long day with the round trip to/from the airport being almost 200 miles.

2016/02/20 (S) Peace River Woodcarvers

Linda got up first today and I slept in until 8:20 AM. I had used up all but a few scoops of our current batch of coffee beans so I had to wipe out the storage containers, open new bags, and refill them. It was after 9 AM by the time I got the coffee brewed. I definitely do not like the Silk brand Almond/Vanilla coffee creamer but I have a large container of it, as that was all that Publix had, and I will finish it, because I do not like to throw things out that are usable.

Our Verizon billing cycle ended at midnight which meant our data plan had reset. Linda already had our Mi-Fi online and our local network connected. I reattached my computer to our network, updated my ES|ET Smart Security anti-virus software, and downloaded my e-mail. My Dropbox app also started syncing with the cloud server. It was dinging every time a notification popped up, which was bugging Linda, so I turned off the sound.

The tiny ants that have recently appeared in the kitchen had found their way into my last package of apricot-filled bear claw pastries (vegan). I got rid of them and ate the pastries for breakfast. Linda went for a walk but returned more quickly than usual. Mike (W8XH) from our SLAARC ham radio group had called and needed some information. I finished up yesterday’s blog post and e-mailed it to myself. I had an e-mail from Kate with links to YouTube videos of the group “OK Go.” I replied to that and bcc:d our iPads so we could watch them using the Wi-Fi at the resort office.

Linda vacuumed and mopped the floor in the rig. She does not do this very often as it scares the cats, but it has to be done occasionally. It scares the cats at the house, too, but they have a much larger space in which to escape the dreaded mop menace and find a safe place to hide. Juniper hunkered down on the bottom step of the entry, no doubt with thoughts of escape on her mind, while Jasper headed to the bedroom and tried to find a corner to hide in. Both cats like to get in the rear closet so I opened one of the doors and Jasper accepted the invitation.

I logged in to my computer and tried to check for updates but the Windows 10 Updates & Security function was completely non-functional. I fussed with it a bit but to no avail, and decided to deal with it later as everything else appeared to be working. I have had more issues with the Windows 10 upgrade on my ASUS laptop computer than Linda has had on her Samsung computer, but we have no idea why.

Today was the Peace River Woodcarvers show at the Turner Agri-Civic Center. We picked up Mara and Michael at 12:15 PM and drove over. Like the woodcarvers expo we attended in Punta Gorda early last month it was a mix of woodworkers and vendors. The vendors did not interest us as we are not involved in woodcarving or woodburning. Some of the work on display, however, was outstanding.

Our two favorite pieces were on the same table but the artist was not around. One was a knarly, twisted piece of wood that rose up vertically and became a beautifully carved head of a Great Blue Heron. The other piece was a Little Blue Heron carving that was so exquisitely done it looked real. We would have been glad to have either or both in our house, but they did not have price tags and the carver was not around to ask. There were undoubtedly going to be very expensive anyway which would have precluded us buying them.

As we were leaving the show a man was carving a bear out of a large tree trunk using chain saws. We watched him for a while and then left. We stopped at Winn-Dixie for a few grocery items and then drove to Joshua Citrus Company for some oranges, tangelos, and grapefruit. When we got back to the RV Resort we gave Michael a driving tour to orient him to the place and then dropped him and Mara at her motorhome.

I returned to the problem of the non-functional Windows 10 Updates & Security components on my laptop computer. I found a troubleshooter specifically for this problem and ran it. It said it found and repaired problems so I tried checking for Windows Updates but it still did not work. The more I fussed with it the more things seemed to quit working. I restarted it and things got even worse to the point where I could not even shut it down and had to power it off. I then powered it back on and was letting it do its thing when Butch called. We had not talked in a while so I left the computer for later and talked to him. Sometimes it’s better to just step away from a problem, so this was a welcome diversion.

He and Fonda have had a wonderful winter in Quartzsite, Arizona. Besides the rock club (Quartzsite Gem and Mineral Club) they discovered that there is a very active group of amateur radio operators who spend extended winters in Q and the surrounding area. The local hams are involved in a county wide “ham radio for kids” project. Other than Parker, Quartzsite, and Yuma, the population here is sparse and widely spaced. Homes do not have landline telephones and cell service can be spotty depending on where you are relative to the cell towers, which tend to be on top of mountains. The local hams are teaching technician license classes to school age children so they can get their FCC ARO Technician licenses. They are also supply radios that the kids can use to contact their friends and help each other with homework.

Butch and Fonda had also had a job interview for positions as BLM LTVA hosts. Butch said that work on their new house was coming along in their absence, at least that’s what the contractor was telling him. He had to finish rebuilding a Crosley engine when they get home and still had work to do on the interior of their bus. Etc. We may stop at their house on the way home to have Butch look at our house air conditioners, especially the center one, which was not cooling well last month when we used it.

Once we wrapped up our conversation at 5:15 PM I logged in to my computer. It seemed to start up correctly and I opened Outlook 2013 to check my e-mail. It opened correctly and downloaded my e-mails so I closed it. Mara and Bill were due at our coach at 5:30 PM so I did not have the time to check anything else.

Linda was just finishing the main dinner dish, Farro with almonds and dried cranberries, when Bill and Mara arrived. Mara made a kale salad with a soy sauce based dressing and a variety of interesting spices. I put the plastic table cloth on the picnic table and we set the table for dinner. We opened a bottle of the 2013 Egri Merlot and had a wonderful early evening dinner accompanied by a beautiful sunset in the company of good friends.

After dinner we cleared the table and took everything back inside. Mara brought the seminar schedule from the upcoming Holistic Holiday at Sea cruise and went over it with Linda. We finalized plans for visiting Punta Gorda tomorrow and visited until 9 PM when Bill and Mara took their leave and walked back to her rig. After they left Linda put on a 2-part Masterpiece Mystery program and we watched that and then went to bed.

2016/02/12-15 (F–M) Everglades Update

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2016/02/12 (F) Full Circle

We got up, showered, got dressed, and went down to breakfast around 8 AM. We were packed, checked out, and had the car loaded by 9 AM. We headed north on the Ronald Reagan Turnpike, exited at some miles later, and headed west. FL-94 ended at FL-997 where we headed north. In looking at a map later, we would probably have been better off to get on FL-997 right from the hotel. There was major road construction on FL-997 all the way to US-41, but traffic moved along at the 50 MPH posted speed limit.

At US-41 we headed west. This is Miccosukee Indian territory, as indicated by the Miccosukee Resort and Gaming facility (Casino) at the NW corner of Fl-997 and US-41. A short way to the west this stretch of US-41 (the Tamiami Highway between Tampa and Miami) is bordered by Everglades National Park on the south and the Francis S. Taylor Wildlife Management Area on the north. It eventually leaves both of these and runs through the heart of the Big Cypress National Preserve.

We pulled in to the ENP entrance for the Shark Valley Visitor Center and immediately and got stuck in the line of cars waiting to get in. The parking lot had filled a few cars ahead of us and it was now a one car out, one car in situation.

Once we were in we checked out the tram ride to the Shark Valley Observatory Tower seven miles one way due south into the Everglades. It was a two (2) hour narrated round-trip and cost $24 per person ($19 for seniors). You can hike or bike out to the tower for free (after gaining admission to the NP). We did not have that much time so we walked part way down the road along an open channel of water about 15 feet wide and found lots of wildlife photo opportunities, including birds, a large turtle, and alligators. The most interesting thing we saw was a cluster of at least a dozen young alligators, ranging from one to two feet in length, piled up on top of one another.

A little farther west we left US-41 and drove a small 2-lane road for 38 miles. The first half was paved and the second half was good gravel. It was a lovely, slow drive with a maximum speed limit of 30 MPH and a few nature photo opportunities along the way.

A Black Vulture near the Shark Valley Visitor Center, Everglades NP, FL.

After rejoining US-41 we continued west through the Big Cypress National Preserve as far as FL-29 with Everglades NP once again on our left. We then headed south through Everglades City and re-entered the park. The Gulf Coast Visitor Center was very small and did not have the ENP shirts we had seen at the Flamingo Visitor Center and were now hoping to buy. The vendor operated gift store did not have them either. The only things you can do from this point in the park are explore the NW coastal portions by canoe, kayak, or pontoon boat. We did not have time for any of that on this quick visit so we pulled up the address for our RV park in the GPS unit and pushed on.

We had a better look at Everglades City on the way out of town and decided that it was an interesting looking little place. A traveling carnival of some considerable size was setting up in the middle of town, literally.

Back at US-41 we continued west as we were still somewhat east of the north-south line through Arcadia. The only other route home from here would take us north on FL-29 and then back east on I-75 and eventually back through LaBelle and up the west side of Lake Okeechobee. That would be a much longer trip and it was already starting to feel like it had been a long day.

We left US-41 at Collier Blvd. and traveled north about seven miles to I-75 north. Traffic was heavy, congested, and stop-n-go initially but eventually freed up. We traveled about 39 miles to exit 141 at Ft. Myers and headed east a few miles to FL-31. Our final 38 miles were straight north to Arcadia where FL-31 ends at FL-70 just west of our RV resort.

From the Shell station in Arcadia on Tuesday morning to our coach at 5:45 PM today we put 919.4 miles on the car’s trip odometer. The speedometer on the car reads slightly high, probably because the tires are not factory original specifications, so our actual mileage may have been slightly less by about one mile for every 60 miles traveled. That would be approximately 15 miles for our trip, making the actual mileage perhaps 905 for the four days, for an average of 225 to 230 miles per day. That’s a lot of driving, but the purpose of our trip was to get a first glimpse at a lot of south Florida that we had not seen before.

We brought a few things in from the car, spent some time with our cats, and then visited with Ron and Vera (who did not even realize we were gone), before walking over to Mara’ rig for dinner. Mara made a pot of vegan chili and a wonderful salad which we enjoyed with a glass of her favorite Malbec. We talked about our trip, how the kitties did in our absence, and discussed the logistics of Michael’s upcoming visit. We returned to our coach around 9:15 PM, finished unloading the car, unpacked a few things, adored our cats, and relaxed with our iPads for an hour before going to bed.

2016/02/13 (S) Yard Sale

I was up at 7:30 AM, partially prepped the coffee, and then unpacked clothes and hung them up or put them in the laundry hamper. Linda got up sometime after, after which I ground the coffee beans and finished making our morning coffee.

We noticed last night that a few folks had things sitting out in their front yards suggestive of a garage sale. This morning there was quite a bit of commotion outside and we noticed several yards just from our rig with lots of stuff sitting out on tables and/or the ground. Clearly Big Tree Carefree RV Resort was having an official yard sale event today.

We had granola for breakfast and then strolled through the resort. Based on one comment we overheard we got the impression that the yard sale might have started yesterday but there was still lots of stuff available. We are not yard sale people, as a rule, and our real destination was the laundry room. Most of the parking spaces were taken but the room was empty and none of the machines were in use. We walked back to our coach, loaded our laundry, computers, and iPads in the car, and drove over to the laundry room.

I got the laundry into a washing machine while Linda got her computer going and connected to the park Wi-Fi system. I then started my computer and got online. Her computer screen came up dark. It has done this many times in the past, but not recently. We think it may be related to the battery, but we are not sure.

Our main reason for bringing our computers over was to download our e-mails from the last four days. BCM, in particular, has a habit of sending me large files as e-mail attachments or links to large files in a Dropbox, which I prefer. I had at least 118 e-mails but no large attachments. I did not get a count from Linda. Both of our computers are also set up to automatically sync our Dropbox account, and one of the things it does is automatically backup four WordPress websites. We only had 2.5 GB of data left on our Verizon account to get us through February 19th, so we wanted to transfer as much data as possible via the park Wi-Fi system.

Once the laundry was dry, folded, and hung, we returned to our coach where Linda put on her swimsuit and then joined Mara at the pool. After putting the clean clothes away I rebooted and reconnected our computers and iPads to our local network and turned on the NAS. Once everything was up and running I connected the camera and off-loaded all of the photos from the last four days; just over 400 total. I got a bite to eat and then put on my swimsuit, gathered up my towel and a pair of dry shorts, and went over to the pool to join the ladies.

A Purple Gallinule near the Shark Valley Visitors Center, Everglades NP, FL.

When I arrived Linda and Mara were sunbathing. The pool was cool even though it is heated but once I was in and swimming gently I generated enough heat from muscle activity to be comfortable. I swam for about 1/2 hour and then sat in the hot tub with the whirlpool turned on and positioned myself to vigorously message my lower back. Linda had taken the soap when she went so I took that along with my towel and shorts and used to shower to rinse off the chlorine and get cleaned up. I returned the soap to Linda and walked back to our coach.

I doodled on my iPad while Linda read a book when she returned to the coach. She left at 4 PM to walk to the grocery store with Mara while I laid down on the sofa to take a nap and Jasper curled up next to me. I was aware of Linda’s return, gradually woke up, and finally got up.

Linda invited Mara to come for dinner. While she busied herself with the preparations, I went through all of the photos from our trip to Everglades National Park and Key West and backed them up to our NAS.

While I was looking at photos ESET Smart Security kept popping up messages letting me know that it needed my attention. I opened it and it presented me with a loooong list of critical and recommended updates. Given our data situation this month I deferred those until I can take my computer back to the office/laundry/activity building and use the resort Wi-Fi system.

For dinner Linda made a nice green salad and a “pasta” dish using an edamame and mung bean fettuccine style noodle. Mara came to our coach around 6:45 PM and brought a vegan chocolate mousse for dessert. It was based on blended avocados and it was a delicious finale to a scrumptious meal. There was a nice orange glow in the western sky but it was too dark by then to eat outside. It was also getting chilly following sunset so we ate inside and polished off a bottle of Barefoot Pinot Grigio between the three of us.

Mara left a little before 9 PM and we turned on the TV to see if anything interesting was on. One of the PBS stations was showing a three part drama titled Arthur & George based on a true life event in the life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and starting Martin Clunes (Doc Martin) as Doyle. Linda went to bed part way through the third episode but I stayed up to watch it as it was very well done. I flipped channels for a while after that but nothing else held my attention and I finally went to bed sometime after midnight.

2016/02/14 (N) Valentine’s Day

We were still tired from out whirlwind trip to south Florida and slept in this morning. When we finally got up Linda made pancakes for breakfast, this being Sunday and all.

It’s a good thing we have our 2 GB of bonus data for the next couple of billing cycles. Between the Windows 10 upgrade on two computers (most of which we did using the RV resort Wi-Fi), the upgrades to the iOS on both iPads, the inevitable updates to applications on all four devices, and quite a bit of work on BCM articles as well as our personal website/blog, we have had to monitor/manage our data usage very carefully for the January 20 through February 19 billing cycle. Even with being gone for four days to the Everglades and Keys, and taking our devices to the activity building to use the Wi-Fi, we will be very close to our limit by this Friday, which is the 19th.

There are at least eight alligators in this image and several more outside the frame. Shark Valley Visitors Center, Everglades NP, FL.

My computer was indicating that I had 22 updates available which meant that Linda’s computer probably had a similar number. One of them was a Windows 10 cumulative update which I knew would be large so I took both computers to the library and did the updates there. I then spent part of the day processing and backing up photos before turning my attention to blog posts. Even with our data situation I uploaded several from mid-October and prepared several more.

We had a relatively easy day otherwise and I did not record all of the details which are now mostly lost to me. Brenda Phelan called around 5:15 PM to let me know our tire and windshield covers were ready but she and Bill were headed out for a couple of days on windshield cover appointments. They would be back on Wednesday and we deferred dealing with delivery until then.

For dinner Linda made a mushroom bourginione with macaroni. She used a Lindeman’s 2014 Shiraz to make it and we also drank some before/with our meal. She bought a pint of Soy Delicious Cookie Dough non-dairy “ice cream” the other day and we had that for dessert. After dinner we settled in to watch our Sunday evening TV programs, including Downton Abby.

2016/02/15 (M) Ready, Set, No

We had our usual morning of coffee, juice, and granola for breakfast. Our fresh water tank had dropped below the 1/3 level yesterday or the day before. The monitor only indicates Empty, 1/3, 2/3, and Full so once it drops below 1/3rd I have to check it visually. Fortunately the tank is translucent polyethylene and is located behind a door such that I can see the water level when the lighting is right. Given how we are parked, facing southwest, the light is best in the morning as access to the tank is from the driver side of the bay.

The tank was down to the 1/8th level, which is about 15 gallons. We might have gotten one more day’s use but there was no reason to run the tank dry and the pump works better with a full tank. I dumped both waste tanks and refilled the fresh water tank. I checked the hardness of the water coming out of the softener after the tank was full and it was indicating somewhere between 0 and 1.5 gpg. I updated my Excel spreadsheet accordingly.

An Anhinga that just caught something to eat. Shark Valley Visitors Center, Everglades NP, FL.

Linda had work to do today on family tax returns and set up her computer on the temporary dining table while I continued to work at my computer on the desk. I selected and processed a couple of photos from our visit to Everglades National Park for Linda’s weekly postcard to Madeline. I then selected and processed photos to include in the blog posts for the dates of our visit to the Everglades and Keys.

Brenda Phelan had also sent us an e-mail yesterday regarding our tire covers. I replied to that and indicated that we might pick them up on Wednesday when she and Bill are back at their shop in Lakeland. With that done I started preparing for a 3:30 PM telecom meeting of the FMCA National Education Committee. I printed off six documents: meeting notice, agenda/notes, short survey results and sampling information, and the long survey results and sampling information. All told it was 55 sheets of paper, but I wanted/needed to see the survey results printed out.

At 3:29 I dialed in and was the first caller, which I though was odd. I doubled checked the meeting notice and realized the meeting was Wednesday the 17th. I knew that, but historically we have always met on Monday afternoons and I just had it in my head that we were meeting today. The upside us that I have more time to digest the data and think about how I want to handle the fact that the sample/response was too small (in my expert opinion) for the results to be considered representative of the FMCA population.

We had leftovers for dinner, after which we settled in to watch the X-Files and Lucifer on FOX as our usual Monday evening programs on CBS were preempted by the Grammy Awards, which did not interest us. At 10 PM we switched to PBS and watched a documentary on Stephen Hawking, followed Charlie Rose. Rose’s show was focused on Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scilia, who passed away over the weekend.

2016/02/05–09 (F–T) Super Windows Roadtrip

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2016/02/05 (F) Windows 10 Upgrade

We had a long day yesterday and even though we were in bed before 11 PM we still slept in until 8 AM this morning. I did not make coffee and we did not have breakfast as we were picking up Mara at 8:50. We shut down our computers and iPads and packed them for travel. We set the windows in the bus so the cats would be comfortable. At 8:45 AM we loaded the car and drove over to get Mara. We stopped at the Dunkin Donuts in Arcadia for coffee and bagels and then headed west on FL-70 for Ed and Betty Burns’ place in Bradenton.

Everglades National Park entrance sign on the road from Homestead and Florida City, FL.

The main purpose of our visit today was to upgrade Linda’s Samsung laptop computer and my ASUS notebook computer to Windows 10 using Ed and Betty’s unlimited broadband data. A secondary objective was for Linda to purchase/download the latest version of Turbo Tax. Our tertiary goal was to update iPad and smartphone apps.

We got to Ed and Betty’s a little after 10 AM, introduced them to Mara, and got busy setting up our computers. We had a bit of a false start but finally had the Windows 10 installation process launched by 11 AM. After quite a bit of conversation, Linda and Betty busied themselves making lunch and Mara settled in to go through her mail. Once the files for Windows 10 appeared to be downloaded I initiated the update process for eight apps on my iPad2. Betty washed off a bag of red grapes and set them out for all of us to enjoy.

At 12:30 PM we moved our technology to a coffee table in the living room to clear the dining room table for lunch. Betty made a large pot of vegan chili mac and we had sliced avocado, tortillas, and potato chips to go with it, along with grapes and slices of Meyer lemons for our water. Florida really is a good place to be if you want to “eat fresh.”

The ladies left around 1:45 PM to go for a walk while Ed and I stayed behind. I connected my phone to their Wi-Fi and updated a dozen apps. My computer was finally ready to configure Windows 10 at 2 PM and I went through the customized personalization rather than accepting the Express Setup defaults. My iPad was up-to-date so I started working on this post while I waited for the Windows 10 process to finally finish.

It took until 2:30 PM for my computer to be fully booted up and usable. About that same time Linda’s computer was finally ready to configure. I wanted Linda here for the configuration choices so I waited for her return. The ladies got back at 2:45 PM and Linda resumed configuring her machine. We had originally planned to go see the 3 PM practice session of the Royal Lipizzan Stallions in Myakka City, but we would have had to leave at 2 PM to get there. We will definitely go seem them, but for now this was, once again, deferred to a future day.

Linda purchased, downloaded, and installed the latest version of TurboTax and was done installing updates by 4:20 PM. Her update process went smoothly, if slowly, and without any apparent hitches. When the initial Windows 10 upgrade finished on my machine I did not have any of the quick start or system tray icons which concerned me greatly. After rebooting my computer, more than once, the icons eventually returned. I installed an undated driver for the NVIDIA GeForce graphics processing unit (GPU). I also had a problem with the sound but was able to resolve it using the audio troubleshooter.

I rebooted my machine for what I hoped was the last time at 4:45 PM. It took 15 minutes to fully boot up and I made one more check for updates. It appeared that the operating system updates were all done but there were still updates to install for Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom, both of which are large and tend to take a long time to download.

By this point Betty had opened a couple of bottles of wine and convinced all of us that the collect best option for dinner was to order pizza and eat at their house. Linda coordinated the pizzas and ordered them from Vertoris’ where we ate last night and which was only seven miles away. While she and Ed were in transit to get the pizza and salad I updated Photoshop and Lightroom. I started each program and Photoshop indicated that it had a problem with the video card driver and had disabled some of its enhancement features. That was not an immediate problem as I do not presently make any use of Photoshop, but the incompatibility was distressing nonetheless.

I had done what I could in the way of updates for today so I shut down my computer and packed it away to clear the table for dinner. Betty set the table and Linda and Ed returned a short time later with the food. We sat down to a wonderful meal with friends that finally concluded around 7:30 PM. It had been a wonderful day with friends and we had gotten a lot accomplished thanks to the use of their technology, but by 7:45 PM we were all tired and the three of us were on our way back to Arcadia. We dropped Mara back at her motorhome at 8:45 PM and were back at our coach by 8:50 PM. We watched the end of an episode of Endeavor and then watched another complete episode. By then we were sleepy tired and went to bed.

2016/02/06 (S) Article Uploads

We slept in this morning until after 8 AM and so did the cats. We lounged around in our sweats drinking coffee and eventually had granola for breakfast. It was cloudy with rain coming and we considered spending the day in the bus in our sweats when we remembered that it was the first Saturday of the month.

The Everglades is vast and low, but is not a swamp. Swamps involve stagnant water. The Everglades is almost entirely shallow, but constantly flowing, water like a river. Everglades NP, FL.

The Arcadia Farmers Market takes place on the first and third Saturday of each month so Linda texted Mara to see if she wanted to go. She did, so we got dressed, picked her up in the car, and drove downtown. To our disappointment there were only four vendors there and only two of them were selling food. One was a local farm that had freshly picked Napa cabbage and locally produced honey. Linda bought a head of the cabbage and Mara bought a cabbage and a jar of honey. We took a short walk around downtown and then drove to Joshua Citrus Co.

At Joshua Citrus we bought a few Ruby Red grapefruit and a few Honeybelle tangelos. Mara also bought a variety of citrus including Meyer lemons. We stopped at Walmart on the way back to our RV resort for cat litter and a few sundry items while Mara picked up some groceries. We dropped her at her motorhome and took a minute to meet another couple from Howell, Michigan who were just getting ready to pull out. We then returned to our rig around 1 PM.

Linda made rollup sandwiches with soft tortillas, Napa cabbage, dark greens, and hummus. At 1:30 PM she phoned Mara to see if she wanted to go for a walk and headed over to rendezvous with her. I had a call earlier from Dave Aungier and called him back. He had downloaded his BCM article from my Dropbox and reviewed it. We went over a few minor changes, which I made to the Word doc, and discussed the process of submitting it to the magazine and working it through to publication.

Dave and I were done talking by 2 PM and it had started to rain lightly. Linda had worn her raincoat but returned around 2:30. By that time I had turned my attention to the three articles that Stacy had finished proofreading and returned to me. I went through each one and accepted most of the changes. I then went through each one and made sure I had all of the image files properly identified and organized. I backed up all of the files, moved them to the READY folder, and then uploaded them to my Dropbox. Once everything had transferred I e-mailed Gary (BCM publisher) and Jorge (layout) and let them know the files were there. I had a few more e-mails back and forth with Gary and had to redo a panoramic photo that had discontinuities in it that I had not noticed.

Mara came to our rig to discuss some logistics related to the Holistic Holiday at Sea cruise that she and her friend, Michael, are going on at the end of the month. As it turns out we will take them to Miami and pick them up when they return and take care of Mara’s two cats while they are away. Mara waited for a lull in the rain and returned to her rig a little before 6 PM. For dinner Linda prepared a salad with diced Napa cabbage and honey roasted peanuts and a homemade dressing made with rice wine vinegar, sesame and vegetable oils, Dijon mustard, fresh grated ginger, salt, and pepper. It was very good. She then reheated the leftover pizza from the last two nights. The pizza was exceptional when it was fresh and, although it lost its crisp crust on reheating, it was still tasty as leftovers.

While Mara was visiting the leak around the bedroom ceiling vent/fan reappeared. The lower outside corner of the lower passenger side windshield also leaked, but we expect that to happen every time until we do something to fix it.

After dinner we watched a couple episodes of Endeavor and then a couple of episodes of As Time Goes By. After that we watched a PBS documentary on Jason Blair, the discredited New York Times reporter. We caught a few minutes of news and weather and went to bed.

2016/02/07 (N) Super Sunday

Today was just one of those days. It also happened to be Super Bowl Sunday, but that’s another story. As we do most days we started our morning with coffee.” As she often does on Sunday mornings, Linda made vegan pancakes for breakfast. We split a ruby red grapefruit as well.

Though much of the Everglades is open, there are stands of trees throughout. This one had a “face.” Everglades NP, FL.

Linda walked to Winn-Dixie with Mara while I settled in to work at my computer. My plan was to edit and upload blog posts but in the end I only got two more posts ready to go and did not get them uploaded. Not that I was goofing off; I was busy all day but ended up taking care of other things.

For starters, I downloaded an updated version of the Logitech SetPoint software for my Logitech UltraThin Touch Mouse and then reconfigured the settings. The mouse is capable of a variety of things with just subtle movements but seemed to be less stable than before the Windows 10 upgrade. I was also having problems with my cursor jumping around while typing. I initially noticed it while typing e-mails but noticed it later while working in Word. Linda had the presence of mind to suggest that it might be the touchpad. Sure enough, the touchpad was active. That had not occurred to me because it wasn’t active under Windows 8.1. Apparently the upgrade to Windows 10 activated it. So much for maintaining my existing settings.

I had additional e-mails back and forth with Gary and Jorge at BCM, as result of which I updated the BCM page on our website. I also e-mailed Brenda Phelan to check on the status of our tire covers. When I finally got to work on blog posts I selected and processed several photos from our visit on Thursday to the Ringling Estate. I then edited the two posts mentioned previously.

When Linda got back from Winn-Dixie she made rollup sandwiches for lunch with dark leafy greens and garlic hummus in soft tortillas. We had red grapes to go with the sandwiches. After lunch she walked up to the mail room. I got a happy birthday card from our daughter and son-in-law, which was nice. The eight pounds of coffee we ordered from Teeko’s back home had also arrived. I checked the order to make sure it was correct. It was, so I stored the box as we won’t need it for another couple of weeks. I exchanged a couple of text messages with my daughter and decided it would be easier to just call her. We had a nice chat.

Mara walked down to our coach mid-late afternoon and the three of us went for a vigorous walk through the entire RV resort. We all returned to our bus and visited long enough for me to demonstrate the mapped location history feature in RVillage. Mara headed back to her rig around 5:30 PM and Linda started fixing our dinner. She made vegan Sloppy Joe’s with TVP and baked sweet potato fries. Yum.

Eventually it was time for Super Bowl L (50). I had intended to continue working at my computer all evening but my enthusiasm had waned and I found the game distracting. We kept the volume down and played games until 9 PM and then switched the TV to PBS and watched Downton Abbey. When it was over we switched back to the game. It looked like the Denver Broncos were going to beat the Carolina Panthers so we watched a documentary on PBS/World about a family in Japan. Linda went to bed when it was over but I switched to PBS/Create and watched a tribute concert to American film composer John Williams. Jasper curled up with me for a while and then indicated it was time to go to bed.

2016/02/08 (M) Travel Prep

It got down to 40 degrees F outside last night and dropped into the upper 50’s in the coach. Juniper stayed close to us for most of the night and snuggled up next to my head around 4:30 AM. The cats must have eaten most of their food during the night as by 7 AM Juniper was most insistent that I get up. I finally did at 7:15 AM, fed them, turned on the furnace, and made our morning coffee. Linda was up by 7:30, plugged in the charging cable for our Verizon Mi-Fi, and was playing word games by the time the coffee was ready. That girl really likes her word games

An Anhinga pruning its feathers. Everglades NP, FL.

Linda checked our Verizon account via her iPad and we had used 7.03 of our 10 GB of monthly data plus the 2 GB of extra allocation we got for downloading and installing the Verizon go90 app on our phones. The data usage function on the Mi-Fi device (Novatel 5510L) showed 9.03 out of 12 GB as it combines all available data, so they were in agreement. It’s a good thing we have the extra 2 GB each month for the next few billing cycles. This current cycle (January 20 through February 19) has included iOS and app updates for both of our iPads, app updates for our Android phones, uploading of four BCM articles to our Dropbox (with lots of photos), numerous e-mails with large attachments, and upgrades from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10 on both of our computers. Even though we made some use of the resort Wi-Fi while at the laundry room, and did the Windows OS and some iPad/smartphone upgrades at Ed and Betty Burns’ place using their unlimited broadband connection, it has been a heavy period of data usage for our Verizon account. Twelve gigabytes is not enough data to get us through a typical month while we are away from home.

We had granola for breakfast with fresh fruit and juice and then settled in to finish our coffee and doodle on our iPads. I e-mailed my blog posts for the last five days to myself and then download/installed the Gmail app on my iPad2. We took showers, got dressed, straightened up the bathroom, and got on with our chores. I turned on the electric block heater for the engine to warm it up for a maintenance start later today.

We are headed to Homestead and the Florida Keys tomorrow for four days so today was, in part, a travel preparation day. Linda’s first task was a trip to the post office to mail the book she bought at The Ringling estate for Madeline’s Valentine’s Day present.

We are taking the car and leaving the cats behind in Mara’s care so Linda wanted to clean up the bus a bit. We also both needed haircuts. Linda made a 1 PM appointment at a place near the Winn-Dixie. One of my tasks was doing laundry which I took care of at 11 AM. Linda finally got hold of a real, live person at the Florida Toll Road Sunpass system but the account is in my name and they would not talk to her. She found me in the laundry room and worked her way through the phone menu until she got back to an actual person and then put me on the phone. The woman was very nice and very efficient and it only took about 10 minutes to get our account reconfigured so we could access it. We logged in and confirmed that we still have a credit balance and updated our credit card information.

When I was done with the laundry I turned on the Aqua-Hot engine preheat loop. When Linda got back from her appointment she cut my hair. Another task was giving Mara a key to our coach and going over the care and feeding of our feline friends. Linda took care of that.

A few days ago our Progressive Industries EMS threw another PE2 error code, which indicates an open ground. The current error code is 0 (zero), indicating that everything is OK, so it is/was obviously a momentary problem. Presumably the problem is in the resort wiring as that is what the PI EMS is designed to monitor and protect against. I wanted to do done things with the bus chassis today so I took care of this at the same time. Unlike last time, I shut off the circuit breaker at the power pole, unplugged the shorepower cable, cycled the breaker a couple of times to wipe the contacts, cleaned the contacts on the plug, inserted and removed it several times to clean the contacts in the outlet, plugged it back in, and turned the breaker back on. All of that was designed to clean electrical contacts and remove a possible marginal connection.

Another thing I did today was start the bus engine, let it warm up, moved the bus aft and for slightly to make sure the brakes were not frozen, and re-leveled the coach before shutting the engine down. I shut of the block heater and Aqua-Hot burner before starting the engine. We are a little over half way through our stay here at Big Tree RV Resort and given the often humid, rainy conditions I wanted to make sure the brakes were not rusted closed. I also wanted to check the fuel gauge as we have been running the Aqua-Hot diesel-fired hydronic heating system on cold mornings and it uses about 1/4 gallon of diesel fuel per hour when operating. When I was done with this process I turned on the fuel polishing pump so it could run while we were away.

We still had enough gallons of fresh water on board that I decided not to dump and fill the tanks today. With the engine/chassis stuff taken care of my main focus today, when not preparing for our trip, doing laundry, eating meals, going for walks, and dealing with e-mails, was working on my blog. It may be the thing I want to do, but it is often not the thing I need to do, or in some cases, the thing I have to do.

I failed to record what we had for dinner but I’m sure it was tasty. We watched TV for a while and then went to bed.

2016/02/09 (T) Road Trip

My night was interrupted around 1:30 AM by very strong wind gusts. All of the awnings were out except the large patio awning and were perfectly capable of being damaged by the gusts. I put on my sweats, slipped into my Crocs, and went outside to stow the awnings. The two bedroom window awnings and the driver side living room awning are held open by straps with a loop on the end that slips over a hook mounted on the side of the coach. The roller tubes are spring loaded and self-retract when the straps are released. While retracting they have to be controlled, using a long metal rod with a right angle bend on one end and a semi-circle handle on the other, but are otherwise easy to deploy and stow. Besides the possibility of the fabric tearing where it mounts to the body or the roller tube, we had the front end of the driver side front awning flipped up by a strong wind gust in Sheridan, Wyoming. I would not have believed that was possible unless I had seen it happen, but we were not about to risk having it happen again.

An Egret stalks its prey. Everglades NP, FL.

I spite of my sleep being interrupted I was up at 7 AM. As we do every morning, we fed the cats, refreshed their water, and cleaned their litter tray. We finished packing, adjusted the windows, loaded the car, pulled out as of our site a little before 8 AM, and stopped at the dumpster to drop off a bag of kitchen trash. We drove to the local Shell station to fill the fuel tank and stopped next door at Dunkin Donuts for coffee and something to eat. We then headed east on FL-70.

Our destination was Homestead, Florida and Everglades National Park. Our route was FL-70 east to US-27 south to FL-821 south (which is part of the Florida Toll Road system) to its terminus at US-1 in Florida City just south of Homestead. From there we headed west through Florida City and on to Everglades National Park. This part of Florida is very flat but it was still an interesting drive. It was cloudy and cool for the whole drive down.

We stopped at the Visitor Center to get a map and stamp our National Parks “Passport.” We entered the park using Linda’s Senior Access Pass and a few miles in stopped at the Anhinga and Limbo Gumbo trails area. We walked both trails, each about 1/2 mile in length, and I took quite a few photos. By the time we got back to our car it was 1:30 PM. We were hungry and wanted to get more information about boat tours so we drove the 34 miles to Flamingo. We had lunch at the Buttonwood Cafe and went over to the Marina to check on buying fuel. They wanted over $5 per gallon so I passed.

We also checked on the pontoon boat tours. Two different tours were available, one into Florida Bay and the other into the Mangroves. Both tours left on the hour starting at 9 AM with the last one departing at 4 PM. The tours lasted just under two hours, and cost $35. They did not take reservations and tickets could only be purchased the same day. We decided to return to the park tomorrow and deferred any decision about the boats until then.

By this time, it was late enough in the day that we decided to start back towards the entrance 34 miles away. We stopped at Pa-Hay-Okee and hiked the boardwalk before leaving the park for the day. On the way back to our hotel we stopped at a Shell station in Florida City and filled the fuel tank for a more reasonable price per gallon. We found the hotel, a Hampton Inn just off exit #2 of the Florida Toll Road between Florida City and Homestead, and checked in. We had lunch rather later and were undecided about what to do for dinner, or when. We drove across the street to the Publix supermarket, bought snacks for tomorrow, and bought red grapes, hummus, and sourdough pretzel nibblers to have for dinner in our room.

We had Direct TV in our room but eventually found PBS and CBS and watched our usual Tuesday night programs. We also found The Weather Channel and Weather Nation and checked the current weather and forecast for the next few days with great interest. Some of the coldest weather of the year was dropping down through the upper Midwest and Great Lakes, affecting the Northeast, mid-South, mid-Atlantic, and Deep South past our location and all the way to Key West. We had brought a variety of clothing, so we were prepared.

2016/01/26-31 (T-N) Coming Off The Road

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2016/01/26 (T) Filter Me This

The low temperature overnight was forecast to be 50 degrees F. That’s good sleeping weather for us, so we left several windows open and did not need the furnace and I did not turn on the heater pad on the bed.

As I have written the last couple of days I have not been feeling quite right. This morning I had a productive cough. That is never a good thing but it is better than having stuff in my lungs that won’t come out. I was feeling better today so perhaps I am finally kicking out whatever it is that got hold of me.

I made our morning coffee and used up the last of the current batch of coffee beans. We have used six pounds of coffee in the last 60 days; a pound every 10 days on average. We left home with eight pounds of coffee from Teeko’s; two pounds each of four different beans/blends packaged in 1/2 pound vacuum sealed bags. I blend pairs of beans in equal proportion when I grind them to make our daily half-caffe morning coffee. We have four 1/2 pound bags left, which will carry us for about 20 more days at our current rate of consumption. We have been vacillating about whether to order more beans from Teeko`s but decided today that we probably should, and do so relatively soon.

The entrance to Gold Tree MH community in Bradenton, Florida where our friends, Ed and Betty Burns, bought a place after they came of the road as full time RVers of many years.

Breakfast was our usual, but always scrumptious, granola and fresh blueberries with orange/grapefruit juice. After breakfast Linda spent some time trying to get in touch with someone from the Florida Sunpass (toll road) system but was unable to ever speak to an actual human being. We have a Sunpass transponder in our Honda Element from two years ago and have a Sunpass account to go with it. Unfortunately, we did not record the details of that account in our password app and have been unable to access the account to see if it is still active, has a credit balance, or to add money. Up to this point we have not needed to use the Florida toll roads, but eventually we will. She finally got frustrated, sent an e-mail to their contact address, and then went for a walk

When she returned from her stroll, Linda busied herself with her counted crisis-stitch project. Last night she made arrangements for us to visit SE Florida and the Florida Keys. She zeroed in on February 9, 10, and 11 and confirmed that Mara was willing/able to take care of our cats while we were away. After looking at various options we decided that we wanted to use Homestead, Florida as a base from which to explore the area. One reason was that the prices for lodging in Marathon were $200+ per night and in Key West $400+ per night. We are not late night party animals, so we did not need to spend that kind of money just to have a place we could stumble home to in the middle of the night.

The best price she found for a hotel was a well-rated Travel Lodge in Homestead for $109 per night but Trivago would not let her specify a non-smoking room. The Travel Lodge website clearly showed both smoking and non-smoking rooms so we were not about to risk ending up in a smoking room. The next best deal was for a non-smoking room in a Hampton Inn for $160 per night, which includes breakfast. We have always liked Hampton Inns and as a bonus they did not have a reservation cancellation fee. She booked us for the three nights.

Our plan is to leave early on the 9th and visit Everglades National Park via the Homestead entrance. We will then check in to the Inn late in the afternoon. On the 10th we will leave early and drive through the Keys, seeing what there is to see along the way, and eventually arriving in Key West. We will get a taste of the Conch Republic but leave in time to get back to the Inn in Homestead at a reasonable hour. On the 11th we might return to Everglades National Park and/explore other things in the area. We will probably sleep in on the 12th, enjoy the complimentary breakfast (as much of it as we can eat), and then check out and head back to Arcadia.

While Linda was walking and working on her project I edited seven more blog posts. Late morning I took a break to finish the regeneration of the water softener. I removed the clear housing from the pre-filter housing attached to the inlet on the water softener, removed the diverter tube and flat washer, and returned them to the plastic zip lock bag I store them in. I put the opaque blue housing back on without a filter element inside and ran water through the tank to flush out any remaining salt brine. I tested the water coming out of softener and it was at 1.5 gpg. That was a very discouraging result given that I just used almost 52 ounces of table salt to regenerate it. In the 3-1/2 years we have owned this water softener I have only once successfully regenerated the softener back to zero (0) grains per gallon. Overall it has been a disappointing purchase.

It was time to replace the sediment filter ahead of the softener and the carbon filter going into the fresh water tank but we did not bring spare cartridges with us. I took a minute to take several pictures of the caulk that is peeling loose from our new passenger side lower windshield and attached one to a text message to Chuck Spera which resulted in a brief exchange. I then took the car and went on an errand run.

My first stop was Walmart where I found a pair of 5 micron 10″ sediment filter cartridges, a pair of 10″ charcoal wrapped taste and odor whole house filter cartridges, two 48 ounce boxes of coarse Kosher salt for future regenerations, and a bag of animal crackers. (I checked the label and they did not contain animal products)

My next stop was the local NAPA Auto Parts Store. They had small tubes of silicone adhesive caulk, both black and clear, but I did not buy any at this time. My next stop was the local Shell station where I topped up the fuel tank. I then moved the car next door to the Dunkin Donuts and got a frozen mocha latte made with almond milk. It was warm today and I wanted a treat.

Back at our coach I measured our windshield wipers and then e-mailed Brenda Phelan the dimensions so she can send us the correct sun covers along with the tire covers we ordered from her and Bill at the Tampa RV Supershow. With that done I contacted Florida Grande Motor Coach Resort near Webster, Florida to see if we could take advantage of their 2-for-1 special and stay two weeks for the weekly rate.

Our current departure date from Big Tree RV Resort in Arcadia is March 7th. Florida Grande was able to take us starting on that date for two weeks so I made the reservation. The resort is south of Ocala and The Villages, north of Bushnell, northeast of Brooksville, northwest of Lakeland, and west of Orlando, so it is centrally situated to a part of the state where we can easily spend two weeks exploring and touching base with some friends in the area.

With Florida Grande in hand I pulled up the website for Jetty Park Beach and Campground at Port Canaveral on Cape Canaveral. We were hoping that we could get in there when we left Florida Grande. Our GLCC friends, Pat and Vickie Lintner, moved to Jetty Park when they left Fort Wilderness at Disney World in mid-February. They have done this every year for at least the last six years. I visited them there two years ago after dropping Linda at the Orlando airport, so I know it’s a nice little park in a unique location and an ideal place to explore Florida’s Space Coast.

The Jetty Park online reservation system indicated that no sites of the type we wanted (full hookup) were available starting on March 21st but said to call or e-mail the office. I knew from my conversations with Pat and Vickie that the park campground was extremely popular with repeat visitors who book their reservations a year in advance. They had also told me that folks occasionally cancel reservations but if I called and checked repeatedly we might be able to get in.

I got an answering machine and left my name, cell phone number, and the dates we were interested in. I got a call back a short time later from Scott. He was able to put us on a site for one night on March 21^st at the daily rate, and a different sight for seven nights starting on the 22^nd, which qualified for the weekly rate. Sold.

Jetty Park is a bit more expensive than what we normally like to spend for camping but it is on the Atlantic Ocean between the Kennedy Spaceflight Center and Cocoa Beach. It is also on the south shore of the channel that separates the park from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and the Spaceflight facility as well as and a U. S. Navy submarine base. If you are there at the right time submarines can be viewed as they are going into or out of the base. The Port/channel is used heavily by cruise ships, including the Disney Cruise Lines. If the timing is right, rocket launches can also be viewed from there, up close and personal. I was lucky enough to see a military satellite launch when I was there two years ago. My recollection is that it was me and about 10,000 other people, not only in the park but lining the access roads for miles to the west. I remember thinking then that it would be much better to be camped at Jetty Park Campground than fighting this traffic after the launch. Indeed, I crashed (no pun intended) on Pat and Vickie’s sofa for 90 minutes until the traffic dissipated and then drove back to Williston Crossings.

I e-mailed Pat and Vickie to let them know we got into Jetty Park Campground and give them the dates. We hope they will still be there for at least part of our stay but even if they have already moved on there is way more to do in the area than we can experience in one week. I then e-mailed Ed Roelle and Bruce/Linda Whitney to update them on our travel plans.

With all of that accomplished I returned to working on our water system. I use a sediment filter cartridge in the first housing, which I removed and replaced with the 5 micron cartridge I bought earlier at Walmart. I then unscrewed the housing that is mounted inside the water bay. I had to use my large slip pliers since the filter wrench could not be positioned properly to turn it far enough to loosen the housing. The element that was in there was a specialized cartridge that I bought it in Quartzsite, Arizona this past winter. It was more expensive than most and my recollection is that it contained some silver and had a very small micron rating. We have a 0.5 micron drinking water filter that filters for five different things including cysts, lead, and VOCs, so a whole house carbon wrapped filter on the water input to the coach fresh water tank should be more than adequate.

We went for a walk and stopped at the activity building. We were expecting a package from Amazon tomorrow but Pat, one of the resort managers, flagged us down to let us know it arrived today. We picked it up from the office and carried it back to the coach. It was 15 pounds of the Science Diet Sensitive Skin and Stomach cat food, which we could not find locally.

For dinner Linda made sautéed kale with garlic and turmeric and vegan quesadillas with Daiya cheddar cheese. Red grapes rounded out the meal, which was simple but delicious. We went for another walk after dinner and then settled in to watch our Tuesday evening TV shows. All of the shows were repeats that did not require our full attention, so Linda worked on puzzles and I worked on this post.

2016/01/27 (W) Rained In

The rain started around 2 this morning and intensified through the 4 AM hour before tapering off and ending, temporarily, around 7 AM. We awoke at 7:45 AM and realized it was Wednesday. The weekly coffee at Big Tree Carefree RV Resort (BTCRVR) is Wednesday at 8 AM so we got dressed quickly, grabbed our complimentary coupon, and walked over. As with the last time we went, the place was packed with no seats available as the “regulars” had all arrived at 7:30 AM. They were out of regular coffee so we both filled our travel mugs with what was left of the decaf. We decided not to stay for the announcements and door prize drawings and walked back to our coach.

The weather forecast was for the rain to resume late morning and continue until dinner time tomorrow so Linda decided to get a long walk in before the rain returned. While she was out I used my computer to upload two more blog posts. My goal is to get 5 to 7 of them uploaded each day, but after doing two I tired of the task. I don’t feel sick, but I am still coughing stuff up occasionally and I feel a little tired, which I attribute to fighting off whatever ailment I have developed. Jasper, our 11 year old male mackerel tabby cat, started sneezing yesterday and the sneezing became more frequent today. He is eating and drinking, and does otherwise appear to be out of sorts, but we will have to keep an eye on him.

Mid-morning I phoned Teeko’s Coffee and Teas back home and ordered eight (8) pounds of custom roasted coffee beans, two pounds each of four different things, to be vacuum packed in 1/2 pound bags. I ordered Ethiopian Yirgacheffe, both regular and decaffeinated, Seattle Blend (caffeinated), and Sweet Dreams, a decaffeinated blend. When I grind the beans just before making our coffee I mix the Yirgacheffe beans 50/50 or I mix the Seattle Blend and Sweet Dreams 50/50 to make Sweet Seattle Dreams. The Yirgacheffe is a single bean coffee, smooth and pure, whereas the Sweet Seattle Dreams is a blend of many beans and is slightly more complex in flavor. We like both so I usually alternate between them from day to day.

We left home the day after Thanksgiving Day with eight pounds of the same assortment of beans. At our current rate of consumption of one pound every 10 days our current supply of beans should get us to mid-February, approximately 80 days from when we left to head south for the winter. The new beans will be shipped USPS and should be here in 7 to 10 days.

That was the last thing I did of any note for the rest of the day. We were socked in by the weather since we chose not to walk in the rain. Linda worked on her counted cross-stitch project and I took a nap. I eventually got up and played games on my iPad while she took a nap. I laid down a second time and flipped through the various local OTA TV news and weather stations but did not fall asleep. Rainy days are good for that, especially when there isn’t anything else I feel like doing. Eventually Linda made dinner which was a bit of work. She made mujadara, a brown lentil and basmati rice dish with cumin, cayenne pepper, and cinnamon, topped with caramelized onions. It was very good.

After dinner we watched the PBS Newshour, which is providing reasonably intelligent coverage of the 2016 presidential campaign and the upcoming Iowa Caucuses. We then watched our usual Wednesday evening PBS nature and science programs. Linda went to bed at 10 PM but I stayed up until midnight to watch Charlie Rose, which I consider to be one of the most intelligent shows on television. I went to bed to the pitter-patter sound of rain lightly falling on the roof of our coach and drifted off to sleep.

2016/01/28 (R) Bloody Nose

The rain continued overnight into this morning and intensified between 4 and 6 AM. I was awake off and on starting at 3 but awake to stay by 7. We both got up at 7:30.

Jasper, our make cat, started sneezing occasionally a couple of days ago and was sneezing more frequently yesterday and into the evening. We awoke this morning to find blood spattered on the living room floor and a couple of spots on the captain’s chair nearest to the desk. It appeared that Jasper was probably sleeping in that chair when he had to sneeze. We were able to clean all of the blood off of the tile and get the spots out of the chair fabric.

Before I could make our morning coffee I had to open the last four vacuum-packed bags of coffee beans and transfer them to the airtight stainless steel storage canisters. While I did that, and then ground the beans and prepared the brewer, Linda researched sneezing and bloody noses in cats. (She is our Google queen.) Based on what she found, he almost certainly has an upper respiratory infection, but beyond that it’s hard to say. He is eating and drinking, which is good, and his behavior has not changed as far as we can tell, which is also good. (He’s an 11 year old cat and normally sleeps more than he is awake.)

The rain quit by 8 AM but it was solidly overcast. The chance of precipitation through lunch time was only 15% but jumped back up to 30% at 1 PM. Juniper, our 7-1/2 year old female cat, seems to be just fine and climbed up in Linda’s lap where she likes to be whenever possible. While we drank our coffee Linda used her iPad to check in on the world and play a few games, while I used mine to finish up yesterday’s blog post and start on today’s post.

I decided to call the veterinarian’s office at 9 AM and see if we needed to bring Jasper in. They said we probably should and scheduled an appointment for 12:30 PM.

We had granola for breakfast and then got dressed. I settled in at the desk and worked on blog posts for the rest of the morning. The rain was forecast to continue through the day and into the evening before finally clearing out of the area by midnight. There was a bit of a lull during the morning, during which Linda walked over to the dumpster with our small daily bag of kitchen trash and then got in a long walk before returning to our coach. Once she got back Linda worked on her counted cross-stitch project.

We put Jasper in his carrier at 12:15 PM and drove the short distance to Desoto Veterinary Services where Dr. McNulty checked him over. His lungs were clear and his heart was strong and normal, but his temperature was elevated slightly. Doc gave him a shot of a multi-acting antibiotic and antibacterial nasal drops. The drops were actually ophthalmological, but he pointed out that anything designed to work in the eyes will also work in the nasal/sinus area as that is where fluids from the eyes end up via the drainage tubes.

As long as Jasper was there Dr. McNulty scarped some tartar off of his teeth. I had never seen this done on a cat that had not been anesthetized but Jasper tolerated it quite well. Linda said she had seen our vet back home, Dr. Carron, do this before. In addition to the bill for today’s services we purchased six more doses of Cheristin flea medication. That will cover both cats for February, March, and April until we get home. We will switch them back to Revolution as we still have quite a supply of it and it also protects against heartworm.

Before returning to the RV resort we drove to the Turner Agri-Civic Center to drop off our plastic recyclables. By the time we got back to the coach it was starting to rain again. Jasper was glad to be back in the coach and out of his carrier and we glad to be snug in our home-on-wheels and out of the rain.

We had a bite of lunch and I resumed editing blog posts but was struggling to maintain my concentration and interest, so I took a nap. When I got up I checked e-mail and had a reply from Pat and Vickie Lintner. They will be at Jetty Park Beach and Campground at least through the end of March so we will get to hang out with them while we are there.

Late afternoon I had a call from Michele Henry of Phoenix Paint. We chat occasionally but this call was promoted by a visit to our website where she noticed that my latest blog post was from early October 2015. She was wondering if I had stopped blogging or if we had, perhaps, stopped traveling. The answers were ‘no’ and ‘no’, of course, but that was just an opening to a conversation, not the end of one.

For dinner Linda made tortilla wraps with BBQ pan-seared tofu and caramelized onion and served a side of corn and edamame. I really like this way of preparing tofu but it is messy. I have come to the conclusion that my favorite way to have it is wrapped in a soft, warm tortilla. It’s tasty, and helps contain the mess.

After dinner we tuned in the PBS Newshour for our daily dose of presidential campaign nonsense and analysis. We then watched our usual Thursday night CBS TV programs for a brief escape from the bizarre reality of American politics.

Ed & Betty’s place at Gold Tree MH community in Bradenton, Florida with our car in the driveway.

The rainfall over southwest Florida in the 48 hours from late Tuesday evening through late this evening has been epic, and the rainfall totals for the month of January have been historic. Some places closer to the Gulf Coast to our west, southwest, and south received almost 13 inches of rain and most locations received 5 to 10 times their normal rainfall for the entire month. Fortunately Arcadia, in general, and Big Tree Carefree RV Resort, in particular, seem to drain well and we did not have any issues with flooding. Our coach continues to have leaks, however, and while that is frustrating enough by itself, they seem to appear in new places and not reappear in previous locations.

This time around the carpet runners on the entry stairs were soaking wet. Besides the leak around the new, and newly installed, passenger side lower windshield, it appears that water has gotten under the new landing platform as the passenger side rear lower corner is water stained and wet. My guess is that water ran down into the stepwell from there but how it got there in the first place is a mystery. Given the problems I discovered with water under the pilot and navigator seats, my guess is that water somehow got to the landing from there, but that only begs the question of where the water gained entry and how it got that far in the first place.

2016/01/29 (N) Ed and Betty

Jasper had a difficult night, sneezing often and usually multiple times when he did. As a result I did not get the best night’s sleep. The weather cleared out overnight and in spite of Jasper’s difficulties I did get some rest. I woke around 7 AM to a beautiful sunrise lighting scattered clouds to the southwest. We had coffee, toast, and juice for breakfast, showered, and got dressed.

We pulled out of our site at 10 AM and stopped at the Resort dumpster on our way out. We left the Resort about 10:10 and headed west on FL-70 towards Bradenton. We stopped at the Publix supermarket in Lakewood Ranch, just east of I-75, and Linda bought flowers. We arrived at Ed and Betty Burns’ home, just east of I-75 and south of Fl-70, around 11:15 AM.

It was great to finally see Ed and Betty again. Since the last time we saw them they have sold their motorhome and bought a manufactured house (double wide) in a nice development in Bradenton, Florida.

For lunch Betty had baked a loaf of German Rye Bread and made a pot of vegan vegetable soup from a mix she found. She also had grape tomatoes and orange segments. It was an excellent lunch of good food shared with good friends and we very much appreciated her accommodating the way we eat.

After lunch we went for a walk around their gated community and I took a few pictures along the way. We stopped at the clubhouse and pool to check it out. Like the rest of the park they were large, excellent facilities. Back at their house we sat outside chatting and enjoyed some hot tea. It eventually cooled off to where we started to get cold and went inside to continue talking. Rather than go out for dinner we decided to have dinner at Ed and Betty’s. That led Linda and Betty to drive to the Publix supermarket about a half mile from their house to gather ingredients while Ed and I stayed home a opened a couple of bottles of wine. We chatted into the late afternoon enjoying wine and tortilla chips with peach salsa.

Linda and Betty started preparing our evening meal at 5 PM. We had a nice salad that included non-dairy Daiya mozzarella style “cheese.” Slices from an Italian baguette with non-dairy spread accompanied the main dish of angel hair pasta with a slightly sweet Ragu pasta sauce. We waited a while and then had dessert of Marie Callander’s Peach Cobbler served hot with Almond Dream non-dairy ice cream on the side. Once again it was a wonderful meal and we were stuffed.

We finally left at 8:30 PM and drove back to Arcadia. We stopped to check our mailbox and were back in our coach by 9:45 PM. An episode of Endeavour had started at 9:30 PM and we picked it up in progress. When the episode was over at 11 PM Linda headed to bed and I tuned in Charlie Rose.

2016/01/30 (S) Blog Swimming

The temperature dropped back into the 50s last night so we had good sleeping conditions and the coach was only slightly chilly when we woke up this morning. I ran the heating system just long enough to bring the temperature inside up to 70 degrees F and chase away the chill. We had a beautiful day on tap with high, scattered clouds, sunshine, light winds, and temperatures climbing into the 70s. This is why people come to Florida in the winter.

After coffee and a light breakfast of grapefruit and toast, Linda went for a walk and I settled in to work on blog posts. She ended up at Walmart looking at swimming suits for me and called me to see what my waist size was. I did not know, and did not want to dig out a tape measure at the moment, so I told her I would go to the store later and find something. The swimming pool here is heated and there is also a hot tub with a whirlpool feature. Both of them are used regularly but we had not been in them yet as the weather has been too cool and/or too wet. I thought it was still too cool today, but Linda was determined to get in the water.

When Linda returned from her walk I took the car and drove over as I wanted to top off the fuel tank while I was out. I had measured my waist so I had a rough idea of what size swimming suit I needed. Walmart only had one style that I liked so I bought one, along with a new pop-up nylon mesh laundry basket. When I got back to our coach I tried the swimming suit on. It was huge and needed to be returned. I wanted this swimsuit crisis dealt with now. Linda had bought something that she wanted to return so I took both items and their receipts back to the store.

It seems that there are often long lines at Walmart Customer Service counters, but that is just a matter of timing. I did not have to wait very long and the returns were easily accomplished. The problem with the swimming suits at Wally World is that there are gaps in the waist sizes. They had the same style I had previously purchased but the next smaller size looked like it would be too small. Given how much too large the supposedly correct size one was I decided to buy it. I did not have much in the way of options at that point.

I tried it on when I got home and it seemed to fit OK. At my urging Linda had already gone over to the pool. I wore a shirt with my swimsuit, put on my Crocs, and walked over to join her. I found her in the pool hanging on to a foam swim noodle and floating around with a smile on her face to match that of any kid. We were both good swimmers when we were kids, but that was a long time ago. I no longer regard water that is deeper than my shoulders as a friendly place.

The pool was cool on first contact but I could tell that the temperature would be OK after I had been in for a few minutes. I eventually got all the way in and got my exercise by walking around in water up to my neck while moving my arms back and forth through the water. All movements under water are done against considerable resistance and provide good exercise. When I first got there the sun was still bright and warm but eventually thin clouds started to obscure it.

When we were done in the pool we moved to the hot tub, which was quite warm, and Linda turned on the whirlpool pump, which was quite invigorating. When we were done in the hot tub Linda rinsed off in one of the showers to get the chlorinated water out of her hair. I had not gotten my head wet, so I did not bother rinsing off. I had the slight shell of chlorine about me the rest of the day and evening, but it was OK; kind of like a perfume for men.

I resumed uploading blog posts until dinnertime. For dinner Linda prepared large salads with mock cold cut slices, garbanzo beans, fresh blueberries, grape tomatoes, and Daiya shredded non-dairy cheese. She finished up the balsamic vinaigrette and dressed my salad with an Asian soy-ginger vinaigrette. We had a couple slices each of the Italian baguette she bought yesterday and it made for a large, tasty, and satisfying meal.

After dinner we took our iPads and smartphones to the activity building and used the Resort Wi-Fi to download and install all of our app updates. Linda also downloadable and installed the latest update to the iPad operating system (iOS 9.0.2 I think). Once the updates were done we walked back to our coach and watched another episode of Endeavor, which tells the story of the beginning of Endeavor Morse’ career with the Oxford, England city police department and how he became Inspector Morse. Like most BBC dramas, it is extremely well done. We stayed up and watched an episode of “As Time Goes By”, a delightful British comedy starring Judy Dench. There wasn’t much else on that interested us after that and we turned in earlier than usual. I had the lights out before 11 PM.

2016/01/31 (N) Bus Article Photos

Today was another pleasant day, weather wise, with light winds and a high temperature in the mid-70s, but more cloud cover than yesterday. Whatever I caught a few days ago is still with me and Jasper is still sneezing, so the boys on the bus are both still a little under the weather.

I met Dave Aungier at the Arcadia Rally 2016 and photographed his 1977 MCI MC-5C bus conversion. Dave wrote an article about his bus for Bus Conversion Magazine (long hand) and had his friend Bonnie put it into MS Word. She e-mailed the file to Dave and to me. Other than breaks for lunch and to go for a walk with Linda, I spent most of the day reformatting the article in two columns, doing some minor editing, and then selecting, processing, and inserting photos into the article. I did not finish the work by dinner time and figured I would finish it tomorrow.

Linda and Betty strolling down one of the interior roads at the Gold Tree MH community. Gold Tree is a clean, well-kept, and attractive gated manuactured housing community with nice amenities.

Our friend Mara was scheduled to be at Horizon Coach tomorrow for repairs on a slide out seal and then check into our RV Resort. Her cat, Sabra, has been ill and she decided to push everything out by a day so she can take Sabra back to the veterinarian where she is staying near Ft. Lauderdale.

Lunch was roasted red pepper hummus with onion on the dark German rye bread that Betty Burns baked for us last Friday. Double yum. On our first joint walk of the day we found a small group of musicians playing at the gazebo to an equally small audience. The Petanque (p’tunk) and shuffleboard courts were also in full use and there were folks in the swimming pool. Petanque is a form of Bocce Ball that is favored by the Resort residents from Quebec. Linda went swimming later in the afternoon. We had baked potatoes for dinner topped with a sauté of onions, mushrooms, broccoli, and kale. A dollop of Tofutti vegan sour cream added a bit of creaminess. We went for another walk after dinner and stopped by the activity building. The library was full of folks playing dominoes and other folks were gathering for the 7 PM karaoke session.

I was done working for the day and settled in with Linda to watch Downton Abbey and whatever else might be on TV this evening.

The Phase Place

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Tag Archives: iPad updates

2016/03/18-20 (F-N) Detailing Brakes FGMCR Finale

2016/03/12-14 (S-M) Middle of Nowhere Close to Everywhere

2016/03/04-06 (F–N) BTCRVR Conclusion

2016/03/01–02 (T–W) Politics and Nutpods

2016/02/22-24 (M–W) 1 SP, 2 S-A-H

2016/02/16–20 (T–S) Friends, Food, and Good Times

2016/02/05–09 (F–T) Super Windows Roadtrip

2016/01/26-31 (T-N) Coming Off The Road