Tag Archives: SKP Photographers BOF

2015/12/02 (W) Settling In

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2015/10/06 (T) Trimming & Stripping

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We did not get an early start to our day today. I got up a little after 8 AM and Linda got up 15 minutes later. Even so, she still had our granola and berries ready before I had the coffee made, but in my defense I had the extra step of transferring the three pounds of coffee we bought yesterday from their paper bags to our metal containers with the air-tight lids. We were wondering about whether grapes are berries so Linda Googled the topic. Botanically, grapes are berries but strawberries and raspberries are not. Also included among the “true” berries are bananas, tomatoes, cucumbers, and eggplants. That’s right, tomatoes, cucumbers, and eggplants are fruits.

Linda left at 9:30 AM to meet Diane at Kensington Metropark for a 10 AM walk. Mike from Bratcher Electric showed up at 10:30 to revisit the wiring project I needed his company to do. They are going to install a 100 Amp disconnect switch next to the transfer switch in the southwest corner of the garage, run power to the disconnect switch from the transfer switch, and then run a 4-wire service entrance cable (SEC) from the disconnect switch through the garage attic to the electrical distribution panel in the closet with the HVAC system for the library. The electrical panel is currently a 60 A sub-panel of the main distribution panel in the basement and this project will convert it to a 100 A main panel while still allowing it to be powered by the generator if the utility power goes out.

When Mike left I gathered up the two metal cutting tools I borrowed from Chuck, our corded 1/2″ Craftsman drill (which I needed to power one of the nibblers), the small Rigid drill kit, and my telescoping inspection mirror. My plan was to cut one or two openings in the passenger side HVAC duct for the heater hoses but I decided to do some yard work instead.

We still had some bushes growing out over the drainage ditch by the mailbox and I wanted to get them trimmed up and add the waste material to the timber pile before Phil hauled it away tomorrow (hopefully). I was still working on this little distraction when Linda got back from her walk so she got a pair of gloves and helped. The bushes and trees in this area have an extensive system of vines running through them. I got a lot of the smaller vines cut and pulled free and I managed to trim one bush back enough to create an “entrance” to the inner part of this stand of trees.

Once I was “inside” the grove I found one of the main sources of the vine, a massive thing that looked like something out of a Harry Potter movie. It was easily 10″ in diameter where it came out of the ground and had 4″ to 6″ pieces branching off in different directions. I have no idea what kind of vine this but I suspect it is a wild grape vine. Given its size I surmised that it has been there for a very long time gradually chocking off the trees. I will have to eventually cut it out, but I would like to find out first just exactly what it is.

Linda helped drag all of the clippings over to the disposal pile where we cut some of them into smaller pieces before adding them to the pile. We noticed a small tree hanging out into the space above the driveway that Phil is about to build. We thought the tree was dead and decided to cut it down. It was 5″ in diameter 6″ above the ground–big enough to require the chain saw–and also had a lot of branches that were large enough to be more expeditiously dispatched with said same machine.

After felling the tree and de-limbing it I was not so sure that it was dead. We had a half dozen other trees along the northern edge of this stand woods that looked to be similarly dead but I decided not to cut them down. One in particular had a lot of obviously new, small branches. We will wait until spring and see which, if any, of these trees develop leaves. If they are alive I will trim them instead of cutting them down.

We put away the yard tools and took a break to have a light, late lunch of vegan cold cuts sandwiches and black grapes with a glass of beet juice. I like beets on salads and as a side vegetable. Beet juice is OK but a bit more of an acquired taste. We have added it into our daily food plans because of its ability to control blood pressure. Linda is adding ground flax seed to her granola for the same reason.

Measuring and cutting wallpaper on the dining room table in the house.

At 2 PM we decided to hang the wallpaper in the hallway of the bus so we gathered all of our tools and took them to the coach. I measured the wall and determined the lengths (30″) and widths of the four pieces; two full width (26.5″) and two partial width (15.5″), one for the left end and one for the right end. We cut the four pieces on the dining room table in the house where we could unroll over six feet of wallpaper, measure more accurately, and cut more easily. We cut the two full pieces out of the end of the first double roll and cut the two partial pieces out of the beginning of a new double roll.

Linda took the pieces to the bus and laid them out on the bed. I was getting ready to pour some GH-95 paste into the tray and roll it onto the wall when I decided to remove the trim board that separates the upper wall from the vertical mirror strips on the lower wall. My intent was to avoid having to trim the bottom edge of the wallpaper by tucking it behind this board. What I discovered was that the strip mirrors on the lower portion of the wall were glued to the wallpaper and some of them were loose.

The fact that the mirrors were glued to wallpaper and not to the plywood wall surface meant that they could be removed. I unscrewed the four vertical pieces of wood trim that framed the mirrors in three panels and then removed the bottom trim piece. I carefully removed each mirror by prying the underlying wallpaper loose from the wall using a large screwdriver and working from the top down. When the entire strip was loose I cut the wallpaper to release it. I handed them to Linda and she stored them carefully inside the built-in sofa. I managed to get all of them off except one which fractured in several places. We taped it up and vacuumed up the few glass fragments that were created when it broke.

At this point we were clearly not going to hang the four pieces of wallpaper we just cut as we needed to finish stripping the base layer of the old wallpaper first. We also had to take a little time to decide how to finish the lower wall. One option would be to wallpaper the entire wall and not put the wood trim back. We probably have enough wallpaper to do that, even after cutting the four smaller pieces for the upper wall, but we did not think the wall would look right if we did that.

Another option would be to install wood panels to replace the mirror strips. In this case we would use a light wood with a natural finish to provide an intentional contrast with all of the walnut trim. The mirror strips are slightly beveled on their long edges and measure 3/16″ thick at those edges. That means a 3/16″ hardwood veneered plywood should be a perfect fit, allowing all of the wood trim to go back in place. Maple or Birch with a natural finish are the most likely choices.

The wood panels is the option we will almost certainly pursue and we do not have to resolve exactly what panels to use in order to finish wallpapering the upper part of the wall. All told this will push our finish date back a couple of days, but we don’t really have a finish date anyway, and we will like the final result a lot better. We really do not like the strip mirrors and wish we could remove or cover all of them.

It was only 4:30 PM when we quit working in the bus for the day but we had both had a relatively physical day and were ready to quit. The lighting in the hallway was also a little dim due to the continuing heavy cloud cover which was having the added effect of lowering our energy level and enthusiasm a bit.

My last couple of e-mails to Lou Petkus of the SKP Photographers BoF had gone unanswered so I called Lou to make sure everything was OK. It was; he and Val have just been very busy. We know about busy. We had a nice chat about cameras and RVing plans for the upcoming winter.

Linda always puts nice dinner meals on the table and tonight was no different. She halved and cored a white acorn squash and baked it in the oven with a little vegan butter and brown sugar. She had a few Brussels sprouts left over and some baby carrots so she added onions and sautéed them to make a very good vegetable medley. Finally, she heated a package of mock chicken in orange sauce. The trio of dishes was not only tasty but lifted my spirits; not that either of us are down, but the weather has been heavily overcast for several days and had a slightly depressing effect on our moods.

I got a call from Phil after dinner updating me on his availability to work on our driveway and French drain project. The 2-day job he started yesterday morning is probably going to take him the entire week to finish so there is very little chance we will see him back at work on our project before next Monday. He did, however, find time to call a company that can hydrojet the culvert under our road and find out their pricing. He gave me the name and phone number and I will call them tomorrow and try to set something up. The other upside is that we have more time to pull dead trees out of the woods in front of our house, cut them up, and add them to the disposal pile, if we so choose.

Linda’s favorite TV shows are concentrated on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday evenings so we watched NCIS and NCISNOLA followed by an episode of LIMITLESS, just to see what it was like. I watched Two and a Half Men, which I happen to find very amusing, and then went to sleep.

2015/05/01 (F) May Day

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Wow, another month gone.

We got up after 8 AM this morning, were having coffee, and had not yet had breakfast when I got a call from Diane at SteelMaster Building Systems. They are certainly prompt in their follow up as I just submitted an RFQ last night via their website. I had a very informative conversation with her that left me favorably impressed with the company and inclined towards their products should we decide to build our barn this way. By the time I finished with her and we spent time studying SteelMaster’s website we sat down to have breakfast at 9:45 AM.

I started a load of laundry and puttered at my desk until Linda had chores for me to do. She vacuumed the main floor and tidied up the kitchen in advance of tomorrow’s dinner visit with John and Diane and wanted to take the storm door insert out of the front entrance frame and put in the screen. We like fresh air and have an abundance of it out here in the country.

We drove to the Sears Outlet at Fountain Walk in Novi to buy a box spring mattress foundation. They were already discounted and also on sale. The shipping was 50% of the sale price but we could not get it home in our car so that was our only choice. It was still a bargain and we will have it next Tuesday. We have been using the heavy, elaborate foundation that came with our Sleep Comfort mattress years ago, but it is broken and needed to be replaced.

We stopped at Lowe’s on the drive back to look at vinyl floor tiles and bought some Oxygenics shower spray heads and soap. We took a drive up Latson to see if we could find a metal arch garage that Phil Jarrell had recently spotted. We think we caught a glimpse of it on the west side of the road as we headed north towards M-59. Heading east on M-59 we took a detour up Argentine Road to see if we could find Phil’s place but never saw anything we felt confident was his. We headed east on Clyde Road and took Old US-23 back to M-59 where we stopped at Kroger for a few things before returning home. To Linda’s surprise and delight, the Kroger has some of the mock dairy vegan products, like Daiya cheeses, that she occasionally uses and cannot get at Meijer’s.

Linda had an agenda for today and next up was putting the umbrella in the outdoor table. Once that was taken care of we sat outside enjoying blue skies, bright sunshine, an air temperature of 71 degrees, and a slight breeze, none of which required the umbrella, but the point was to get it off the floor in the library where it was stored all winter. Next we moved the natural gas grill from the garage to the lower rear deck, reassembled it, and connected it to the gas supply (it has a quick connect and shutoff valve). I then busied myself removing the three shower heads and replacing them with the removable spray heads we bought at Lowe’s. If I did not do that right away they would still be sitting around in their boxes months from now.

Linda used the grill to make dinner. She grilled seasoned Brussels sprouts, tofu hot dogs, and bananas sliced in half the long way. This will be the first summer in a long time that we have had a grill. Linda is excited to have it as it expands her cooking options and provides a way to not heat up the kitchen in the warmest weather. I am looking forward new dimensions in our meals.

I had planned on reviewing an article for BCM but ended up involved in two phone calls after dinner. One was with Pat Lintner from GLAMA and our GLCC chapter and the other was with Lou Petkus from the SKP Photographers BOF. That left just enough time to watch Season 1, Episode 1 of Sherlock on DVD before turning in for the night.

2015/04/26-30 (N-R) Routine Returns

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2015/04/26 (N) Bentley

Turning the lights out at 11 PM last night meant I would be awake around 6 AM this morning and ready to get up, and that was the case. Linda was awake by 6:30 AM and we were up shortly thereafter. I was able to light the natural gas fireplace without difficulty. The only thing I can figure is that perhaps I did not have the Off/Pilot/On gas valve in the right position last night.

With the gas valve in the Off position gas cannot flow beyond the valve. In the Pilot position gas can only flow to the pilot flame assembly, and only while the knob is pushed in, until the flame has been lit long enough to cause the heat sensitive pilot valve to remain open at which point the knob can be released. I do not think gas can flow to the main burner tubes, however, until the knob is turned to the On position. There is also a Remote/Off/On switch that has to be in the Off position when lighting the pilot flame (with the built in spark igniter) and moved to the On position to allow the main burner tubes to receive gas. All I can figure is that I did not have the Off/Pilot/On valve turned to the On position. The Remote position is intended to be used with a wall mounted thermostat which we do not have. For us the firelogs are primarily decorative but are useful for taking the chill off of the early morning or late evening. We never have them on, however, unless we are in the living room or dining room where we can see them.

Linda fed the cats while I made coffee which we enjoyed in the living room by the firelogs. It was 33 degrees F outside this morning but in another week the morning temperatures should be such that we can sit on the rear deck and enjoy our morning brew out there. We finally both got dressed and Linda heated an Amy’s Breakfast Scramble and split it between us. We lingered a while longer in the living room and finally got to work on our various chores.

Linda’s focus was to continue cleaning the kitchen, off-loading food and kitchen supplies from the bus, and getting her domestic and professional domains back in order. She made a grocery list as the day went along. We would normally go to the Howell Farmers Market on Sunday morning, but the outdoor market does not start until next week.

I cleaned the cats’ litter tray, which seems to be my job at home but Linda’s job on the bus, and then got to work on revising the draft survey for the FMCA national education committee. While I was doing that I also started up a couple of our workstation computers, installed updates, and kept an eye on my e-mail and RVillage messages. I worked on the survey until dinner time, with a break for lunch, and had Linda proofread it before I uploaded it to my Dropbox and e-mailed the link to the committee. We have a telephone meeting at 3:30 PM EDT tomorrow and I wanted everyone to have a chance to look it over in advance of the meeting.

Linda made Farro with garlic, dried cranberries, almonds, and kale and cooked some fresh asparagus. A green salad and a glass of wine completed a very nice meal. Linda had a text message from her sister letting us know that her housemate, Linda, decided to have Bentley put down. He was the oldest of her three dogs, deaf and arthritic, and on medications that he would not take, and he had lost interest in food. We had both received a text message from Linda regarding our recent visit so I responded to that. We were sad that Bentley was gone, but glad that we got to see him one last time.

I turned my attention to editing photos for my April 10 blog post about out visit to Bandolier National Monument and Santa Fe, New Mexico but the batteries in my wireless mouse needed to be recharged so I plugged it in and called it quits for the night. Linda was watching the first episode of Wolf Hall (PBS) on her iPad so I finished reading the May-June 2015 issue of the Gypsy Journal and played a few rounds of my favorite games. Linda prepared some fresh berries for dessert and we enjoyed them to the glow of the firelogs before going to bed.

2015/04/27 (M) Caller #9

After coffee and cereal this morning I continued selecting and processing photos from our April 10 visit to Bandolier National Monument and Old Town Santa Fe. I ended up with 16 photos so I uploaded the post and put them in an image gallery at the end. After lunch I got all of my documents in order for my 3:30 PM (EDT) telephone meeting of the FMCA Education Committee. I chatted briefly with the committee chair to see if there were any surprises in store. I then worked on consolidating my draft blog posts for April 11 through 15 which included the time we spent in Norman, Oklahoma visiting with my uncle Bob and Aunt Helen, and four additional generations of relatives.

I exchanged e-mails with BCM Publisher Gary Hatt and Editor Dave Rush regarding my article on the redoing of the exterior of our coach. The article is 5,800 words with 71 photos and they would like to split it up and run it in installments over three or four issues. That will require me to go back through the article and identify the places where it can be split, making sure the photos track with the text, and write some additional bridge paragraphs to wrap up each installment and introduce the next one.

I dialed in to my FMCA meeting just before 3:30 PM. I was caller number nine (9) but I did not win anything. The meeting lasted almost 90 minutes. We discussed the survey we have been developing and approved a motion to pass it along to the Executive Board with the recommendation that it be sent to a random sample of the members both electronically and via USPS. I expect to receive minor corrections in the next 36 hours and get a final draft to the FMCA Executive Director on Wednesday so he can have it reviewed by an outside expert (Barry) at Membership Corporation of America (MCA). The FMCA executive board meets in a week so we will see what happens.

After the meeting I finished working on the April 11-16 consolidated post and uploaded it to our personal blog just in time for dinner which featured taco bowl salads. She started with refrigerated tortillas, draped them over ramekins, and baked them to create the shell. She reconstituted an ancho, red Hatch, and pequin chile and used them to season the pinto beans, mixed greens, tomatoes, onions, and olives that made up the filling. Franzia Fruity Red Sangria went nicely with the tacos. Later we had a fresh mixed fruit salad of blackberries, blueberries, strawberries, and bananas. We relaxed for a while, reading and playing games, but were surprisingly tired and went to bed before 10 PM. Change happens, transition takes time.

2015/04/28 (T) And now … the rest of the summer

As sometimes happens when we go to bed early, we slept in this morning and did not get out of bed until after 8 AM. It is nice to be able to do that if we want to. Coffee and toast got the day started followed by reading, writing, and cat admiring. It was a beautiful, sunny morning albeit still on the chilly side. In other words, another day in the idyllic paradise we call retirement in the country.

We have both been busy since we got home last Friday, unloading the bus and putting things in their place in the house, visiting family, cleaning and stocking the kitchen, going through mail, and working on bills and accounting, both personal and organizational. And that was mostly Linda! I helped with some of that but was mostly focused on finishing a draft survey for the FMCA education committee, sending it out, and participating in a committee meeting by teleconference yesterday afternoon. I will have some minor additional work to do on the survey by the end of the day tomorrow, but with the meeting behind me I can now concentrate on all of the other things that need to be done. To paraphrase Paul Harvey “And now … the rest of the summer.”

One of the chores that is always there is laundry. Linda seems to take over this task when we are living in the bus, but it is definitely my job when we are at home. Ditto for cleaning the cat litter tray. To be fair, both the laundry room and liter tray are in the basement where my office and the ham radio shack are located, so I am down there a lot more than her. When we first return home after being away for an extended time there is a lot of laundry to do. Not that we don’t do it while we are away, we do, but I like to clean everything that we had with us. This is not a one day task, in part because we like to limit the number of loads of laundry we do on any given day so as not to overload the septic tanks, and in part because I just do not want to spend an entire day doing laundry.

My main focus this morning, however, was to revisit my article for Bus Conversion Magazine on the renovation of the exterior of our bus back in 2011/2012. It needs to be split into 3 or 4 installments and I would rather do that myself, making sure the photos track with the text. I started a load of laundry and then got to work, keeping an eye on e-mail and RVillage. I finished restructuring the article just before lunch, uploaded it to my BCM Dropbox folder, and e-mailed the editor and publisher. Linda reheated the Farro-cranberries-almonds dish for lunch and served it with black grapes.

I moved the first load of laundry to the dryer, put a second load of laundry in the washing machine, and started compiling my posts for April 16 through 20. I got an e-mail from Lou Petkus regarding the SKP Photographers BOF website. Lou started, and leads, the BOF and administers the website while I take care of the RVillage group and someone else takes care of the member database/roster. He found and installed a free system for displaying photo albums. He was setting it up so each BOF member had their own login and could upload their own photos and wanted me (and Linda) to try it out. I did, and found a number of issues which I documented for him. I like the idea, so I hope he can resolve the issues.

I folded and hung up the dried laundry and returned to my blog post which I uploaded, tagged, and published before going upstairs. It was a beautiful day and while Linda was outside on the rear deck reading four deer walked up the eastern boundary of our property. We were chatting back there when the doorbell rang, which is unusual for us. It was Aaron, one of the kids (teenager?) from the house to our immediate east. UPS had delivered our Amazon order to their house instead of ours even though it had my name and our address on the label.

Linda sautéed onions until they were partly caramelized, pan-fried tofu slices, and then added bar-b-que sauce. She served these in tortillas rather than on buns. She also sautéed fresh green beans. I opened a bottle of Barefoot Moscato and we each had a small glass with dinner.

After dinner I called Joe Cannarozzi, the mobile mechanic who has done the majority of the service work on our bus since we got it back to Michigan in 2010. As planned, he is now in upstate New York where he will be working well into the fall. He plans to be back this way the first week in November and we made plans to have him do the routine chassis maintenance at that time. I also discussed our interior renovation plans for the bus and got some tips from him about how to approach that work, especially the floor, as he has done several.

I noticed that I had a voice message from Gary at BCM. He had called earlier in the day after I had uploaded the new 4-part version of the Exterior Makeover article so I called him back and left him a message. Tag; you’re it.

2015/04/29 (W) Bus Lunch

We had a typical start to our day; coffee, breakfast, and iPads (news, weather, games, reading, and writing). Actually, that’s how most of our days in the bus also start, so the only real difference is where we are sitting and what we can see from that vantage point. I needed to order a refill on a prescription medication so I tried doing that on my iPad. No problem iPad-wise, but the Michigan Public School Employees Retirement System (MPSERS) had switched the mail order prescription drug service from Medco/Express-Scripts to Catamaran Home Delivery effective January 1, 2015. Catamaran was already the third part administrator (TPA) but was now operating their own pharmacy. Even though I already had a Catamaran account I had to register for Home Delivery service. Once I did that I was supposed to be able to see any prescriptions that had transferred over. There weren’t any 🙁 That meant I needed a new prescription. I had a mid-morning appointment and did not want to spend time “holding for the next available representative” so I decided to take care of this task tomorrow.

Linda called last Friday and arranged to have our curbside trash pickup resume this week. Wednesday is trash pickup day, so the trashcan had to go out by the street this morning. (We don’t have curbs here, so I can’t say we took the can to the curb.) The last two years Alchin’s has come past our house around noon. While we figured that would probably be the case again this year we did not want to risk missing the truck, so Linda took it out early.

Linda is the treasurer of SLAARC, our local ham radio club based in South Lyon, Michigan. The club’s bank (First Merit) is there and she needed to make a deposit. I was headed that general direction so I took it with me. The deposit made, I headed on to Chuck Spera’s bus garage in Novi, MI. Chuck and Barbara have the same model Prevost bus that we do only one year newer and converted by Liberty, so fancier than ours. Like us, they spend a lot of time in it, and, like us, there are always projects to be done. Some of those, in turn, require some discussion.

I met Chuck at his shop at 10:15 AM and had a look at his turbo boost sensor intake manifold pressure hose. It appeared to be intact but old a frayed like mine was. The one on our bus failed on the drive out to Quartzsite, AZ in December 2014. Changing his hose would be more difficult than our as is chassis batteries are in the passenger-side engine bay and make access to that side of the engine much more difficult than in our bus. We have been using the same mobile mechanic for the last few years but he has found longer term employment and cut back on the mobile servicing of Prevost chassis. I indicated to Chuck that we really needed to find someone locally who is in business at an accessible location and plans to continue as such into the foreseeable future. He suggested that we take a drive to Johnie’s in Walled Lake, so that is what we did.

Denny was not there (Johnie was his dad) but I got to see the place and now know where it is. We drove back to the Panera in Novi for lunch and then back to Chuck’s shop which is nearby. By 2 PM we had not only solved all of the world’s problems we had made good progress on unraveling the mysteries of the universe. Wanting to leave something for the next conversation I headed for home leaving Chuck to ponder the mysteries of the bus, which are far more baffling than the mysteries of the universe.

I drove home on Grand River Avenue (GRA) to avoid WB I-96 and the I-96/US-23 interchange construction. I bought gas at the Wixom Meijer’s and found out 20 minutes later that I had paid way too much for it ($2.59/gal). The BP station in Brighton had regular for $2.29 and the Shell station closest to our house had it for $2.44. Bummer. I passed a First Merit Bank on the south side of GRA just west of Old US-23 in Brighton. Not right around the corner from our house, but a lot closer than South Lyon. There is also a Jeep dealership there. We are interested in getting a Jeep Wrangler Unlimited, we just don’t like the prices we are seeing.

Our Amazon shipment arrived with the two filter cartridges for the under sink housing in the bus and other things. Hopefully the delivery to the wrong address on Monday was a one-time thing. I had been trading phone messages with Gary at BCM and finally got through to him this time. I then curled up with the new B&H catalog which made it feel like Christmas in April.

Linda made a potato lentil ginger curry for dinner and it was very good. I had planned on revising the FMCA Education Survey and sending it out this evening but I was simply not in the humor to go back downstairs. I think my retirement motto is going to be “there is always tomorrow, and if not, it didn’t matter anyway.” Linda had to get up early tomorrow morning to beat the traffic headed into Detroit so we went to bed earlier than usual.

2015/04/30 (R) Steel

Linda set her alarm for 5:45 AM. The purpose of her alarm is to wake me up so I can wake her up. It worked as planned and she got up and got ready to go to the bakery while I went back to sleep.

I finally got up at 8:30 AM. I’ve been busy since we got home but also a bit tired and feeling the need to just unwind from our exciting winter out west. After breakfast I called the Internal Medicine clinic at the Henry Ford Health System Columbus Center in Novi to see if I could get my doctor’s nurse to get my doctor to write me a new prescription for my nasal spray. Naturally I never got to talk to the doctor or a nurse, but the youngish sounding lady who handled the phone call was very helpful, up to a point. She really wanted to schedule me for an appointment and was not quite piecing together that my prescription, which is for a maintenance drug, is only good for one year but my doctor only needs/wants to see me every other year. I don’t expect the new script to be a problem, but that fact that my MPSERS health care plan changed mail-order prescription providers as of January 1st may add a wrinkle. I’m not due for a physical until the fall but I will go sooner if needed to get my script. Which reminds me, I need to schedule my annual appointment with the dermatology PA.

I focused on making some last minute corrections to the FMCA education survey and shipped it off. I got an e-mail back from Diane Wolfe with some questions. She is not a member of the FMCA education committee but she and husband Brett did review and comment on it. The questions were interesting and answering them gave me a chance to explain some technicalities and cc: the FMCA Executive Director as they were as much for his benefit as hers.

I had several e-mails back and forth with Kate regarding productions at Meadowbrook Theater and an exhibition at the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA), all of which sounded interesting. Our social life is less active at home than on the road so we welcome such opportunities.

I had a phone call from Mike at Rocket Steel Buildings following up on an inquiry I made. He sent me a brochure and a price. It was something but not exactly the quote I was looking for. I still need to follow up with SteelMaster Building Systems and get to work on drawings for the wood-framed basilica design.

I compiled my blog posts for April 21-25, 2015 after finding the one for the 24th. I had e-mailed it from my iPad but it never arrived. I e-mailed it again and it bounced back. The spam blocker even said it was from a white listed sender (me!) but rejected it anyway. Huh ??? I sent it a third time to two addresses, one of which was not attached to our domain, and it came through to both accounts, naturally. I guess this was one of the mysteries of the universe that Chuck and I left unsolved yesterday. Anyway, I finally got it, finished compiling my posts, and uploaded, tagged, and published it.

I also had several e-mails back and forth with Lou Petkus regarding the SKP Photographers BOF and website. Gary sent me a link to a document in his Dropbox with photos and audio files from an interview he did for a featured bus article that never got written. I agreed to take a look at it and see what I can do.

I managed to get more things off of the bus, including bedding, and did two more loads of laundry. I do not like to do more than two loads a day as it over taxes the septic system. Someone rang the front doorbell, the second time this week. This time it was Kaylie, Aaron’s sister, from next door. For the second time this week UPS delivered a package, correctly addressed to me, to the wrong address. I was concerned this would happen and Linda said I was a pessimist. Apparently we were both right.

I called the local UPS store but the only thing they could do was give me the national 800 customer service number. I am a pessimist (just ask Linda), so I was not looking forward to that experience, but I called and fought my through their voice menu system. It did not include an option for my situation (of course) and I finally just kept saying “agent” until the system gave up and connected me to a real person.

“Chelsea” was apologetic, even though she had not personally done anything wrong, because that’s what customer service people are trained to do. I think someone, somewhere, once upon a time figured out that apologizing diffuses customers who are upset. Well, it doesn’t. And assuring me that it “won’t happen again” is equally meaningless when it comes from a person who is not in a position within the organization to make such a statement. But Chelsea verified my name and address and the incorrect delivery address and said she took careful notes and would make sure they got to the right person. I hope so.

What is perhaps most frustrating is that UPS has a local distribution center in Howell, and I have the address, but it is not open to the public except for limited package pickup hours. In other words, the mistake is being made by a driver who is most likely operating out of that location, or by someone scheduling the routing, but there is no customer support person or facility manager that I can talk to, face-to-face, and resolve this at the point of origin of the problem. We buy a lot stuff now through Amazon Prime, and it all gets shipped via UPS, so having it delivered anywhere other than to our house is a problem.

Linda called at 4:30 PM to let me know she was leaving the bakery at 5 PM and heading to Kathi’s. They were going to have dinner at La Marsa in Farmington Hills and give the I-96 traffic a chance to subside before she finished the drive home. I had some of the leftover potato barley ginger curry for dinner and then called Phil Jarrel to remind him that we are still trying to figure out how to put up a bus barn and still want him to do the site prep and driveway. I then called Butch to see if he was able to locate the front brake drums for their MCI MC-9 NJT bus. He was, and already had the driver side front reassembled. I responded to a couple of e-mails and filled out an online RFQ for SteelMaster Building Systems and went to bed.

20150411-15 (S-W) NM, TX, OK, AR, MO

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[Note: There are no photos for the five days covered in this post.]

2015/04/11 (S) Relaxing Chores

We like to get up and go do things, but we also like not having to get up and do things. Today we got up when we were ready to. I used up the last four scoops of coffee beans from our first three pounds and opened the next/last three pounds; one each of Sweet Seattle Dreams, Cafe Europe, and Ethiopian Yirgacheffe. Each of these is a half regular, half decaffeinated custom blend that Jeff at Teeko’s Coffee and Tea in Howell, MI makes for us. Linda installed iOS 8.3 on her iPad while I made the coffee.

We had toast and jam for breakfast using some more of the English toasting bread we bought at Smith’s the other day. After breakfast Linda played several of her word games, including Words with Friends, online with Karen. I installed iOS 8.3 on my iPad and then worked on yesterday’s blog post and e-mailed it to myself. (It is still the easiest way for me to get it from my iPad to my laptop, which somehow just does not seem right.)

Mid-morning Linda started cleaning the coach. We have been in dusty environments for a lot of the winter, especially the last few weeks, and the coach needed a good vacuuming. We don’t vacuum as often as we would if we did not have the cats with us as the vacuum is rather loud and they are afraid of it. They do not like the vacuum cleaner at home either but they can get a lot farther away from it and have a lot more places to hide in the house than they do in the bus.

While Linda worked on the interior of the bus I got out the water softener, pre-filter, and hoses. I first connected everything so I could run water through the pre-filter to remove any sediment and then backwards through the softener to back flush the resin bed. I then connected the hoses in the normal forward flow direction and added 26 ounces of non-iodized table salt to the captive filter housing on the inlet side of the softener tank. I no longer use this housing for a filter. Its sole purpose is to hold salt for regenerating the softener. That way I do not have handle a wet filter while trying to keep it clean so I can reinstall it.

The regeneration procedure was the same ordeal it has been all winter, taking a few minutes of my time spread out over several hours. Most of that time I worked on blog posts and photos, but my work was interrupted every 20 to 30 minutes to attend to the softener. I did, however, manage to get the water coming out of the softener to finally test at 1.5 gpg TH. That should be enough softening capacity to get us home without having to regenerate the water softener again.

For dinner Linda made a barley, split pea, and lentil dish with sautéed vegetables and a hint of soy sauce. It was very tasty. We had the TV on the local PBS station and I finished my consolidated blog post and image gallery post for the week of the Escapade rally and uploaded them to our website/blog.

2015/04/12 (N) Edgewood, NM to Amarillo, TX

Today was a travel day and we normally skip breakfast and coffee on such days, but not today. I was up a little after 7 AM and we did not plan to leave until 9 AM so we had time to make, consume, and digest some coffee and toast. I turned off the electric heating element for the Aqua-Hot and turned on the diesel burner and engine pre-heat coolant circulating pump.

When we were done with breakfast we got the Dewalt air compressor out of the car and checked all of the tires on the bus and the toad. It turned out that all of the pressures were slightly higher than where I normally set them, due in part to our altitude of 6,700 feet ASL, and that was want I wanted. In driving from the Route 66 RV Park in Edgewood, New Mexico to the Overnite RV Park in Amarillo, Texas we will drop just over 3,000 feet in elevation. That, in turn, will cause the cold pressures in the tires to drop. The current cold pressures in the tires should be sufficient to allow for that, but I will check the TireTraker monitor in the morning to be sure.

By the time I finished checking the tires Linda had the interior ready for travel. We hooked up the car, set the car to be towed, switched on the bus chassis batteries and engine accessories air supply, checked the lights, turned off the Aqua-Hot burner and engine pre-heat coolant circulating pump, started the bus engine, and switched the Level Low system to drive mode. A few minutes later the chassis air system was fully pressurized and the coach suspension was at ride height. We exited our site easily, pulled out of the RV Park onto Historic Route 66 westbound, and a mile later made two right turns and accelerated onto I-40 eastbound.

Once we were underway Linda called the Overnight RV Park in Amarillo, Texas to make sure they had open sites. They did, but not many so she gave them our name to hold a pull-through site that would accommodate our bus with the car attached. Since we are just staying one night we do not plan to not unhook the car.

We knew from our maps and what we could not see to the east that we were done with the Rocky Mountains. We were now in the Great Plains and would be from here all the way through Oklahoma. Not that the terrain was flat; eastern New Mexico was rolling terrain, occasionally steep, with mesas. Not surprisingly the terrain did not change abruptly as we crossed into Texas, although the road surface and time zone did. For lack of a better, or more official, line of demarcation I consider the central time zone as the boundary of the middle-west.

While not as dramatic as the mountain west the Great Plains are a place where grasses and low brush dominate a natural landscape that is largely devoid of trees and that have a beauty all their own. The other thing we noticed as we moved east was the thickening cloud cover and occasional storm clouds and virga. Linda had checked the weather forecast so we knew there was a low, but non-zero, chance we would encounter rain while driving and/or after we got parked for the evening. We did, in fact, drive through a couple of miles of very light rain somewhere near the New Mexico / Texas border.

We only stopped once for a bathroom/stretch break and made very good time. The posted (maximum) speed limit for most of I-40 in both states is 75 MPH. Back east I typically limit my speed to 62 MPH or less if the speed limit is lower. What I have discovered out west is that the bus really likes to travel at 68 MPH turning just under 2,000 RPM and so do I, at least out here in the wide open spaces.

Linda had selected the Overnight RV Park in Amarillo for several reasons. For one, the name and description strongly suggested that this park was set up to accommodate overnight visitors passing through the area in their RVs and looking for a place to spend the night. For another, it was on the east edge of Amarillo, so we will not have to drive through town in the morning when we pull out. Finally, it was right across the street from a Pilot Truck Stop, so we did not have to make a separate stop for fuel.

We pulled of I-40 at exit 75 around 2:30 PM CDT and pulled in to the truck stop. The place was crowded with trucks but we got lucky and pulled in behind a semi that was done fueling and pulled out shortly thereafter. There was some confusion regarding the pump number so it took a bit longer than usual to top off the tank, but we were not pressed for time as our RV park for the night was right across the street. Linda settled the charge and we followed several tractor-trailers to the exit, back to the main road, and then turned north and drove the short distance up to the entrance to the RV Park. We turned in and stopped by the office where Linda got us registered. As is the case in most RV Parks we got a map of the campground with our site and entrance path marked, the login for the Wi-Fi, and the combination lock for the bathrooms. We also received information about where to go and what to do in the event of violent weather. Welcome to the Midwest and Tornado Alley.

Overnight RV Park is an older park with a lot of long-term residents, but it was not run down and had some nice, mature trees and plants. I was momentarily concerned about low overhanging branches and tight turns when we pulled in but the gravel interior roads were wide enough, and the trees trimmed enough, to make access to our assigned pull-through site very easy. I did, however, lift the tag axle to allow for the tighter turns.

We went through our normal arrival routine, got connected to the Internet, and started looking at our RV park options in the greater Oklahoma City area. We plan to stay two nights and take part of our one full day to visit my Uncle Bob and Aunt Helen who live in Norman just south of OKC. I had not contacted them, however, as our travel plans have been very fluid. Now that we were a day’s drive away I called to let them know we would be in the area. I was a bit surprised that Helen answered the phone and even more surprised to learn that Bob was in “rehab” although Helen did not say why. She did say that we could visit him so we arranged to go to their house on Tuesday morning at 10 AM, get the address/directions to the rehab facility, and possibly take Helen with us to go visit him.

I texted my sister and niece to let them know that Friday from lunchtime to dinnertime would work well for us and accommodate their availability. Linda texted our children to let them know we had landed safely in Amarillo and then texted Marilyn to share the same information. Marilyn called back a bit later and Linda filled in the details.

The RV Park options around OKC were limited, which seems to be typical of urban areas including St. Louis, Missouri. The options also seemed to be less than ideal based on reviews and expensive by our standards. In the end we decided to try the Cleveland County Fairgrounds in Norman. We sent a message via RVillage to someone who is currently there in a 42′ motorhome and inquired about the place. They wrote back and said it was fine but was near full, does not take reservations, and only has 30A electrical service. All of that was fine by us. The pluses are that it is only a few minutes from my Aunt and Uncle’s house and it is only $20 per night, so we are going to leave early tomorrow and see if we can snag a spot.

inda re-heated some leftovers for dinner, after which we went for a stroll around the RV park. We had just exited our coach and got into a conversation with our neighbors to the north. They were working on errands so after a good chat we left them to their work and went on our walk. Getting out and moving around in the cool, fresh air was just what we needed after a long day of sitting and driving and invigorated us enough to stay up until 9 PM.

2015/04/13 (M) Amarillo, TX to Norman, OK

The weather forecast did not favor travel during any particular part of the day; it was going to be rainy and windy regardless of when we left. Getting a spot at the Cleveland County Fairgrounds, however, might depend on getting there early. We targeted an 8 AM departure for our 4.5 hour, 270 mile trip. We were up at 7 AM and each had a cup of tea and a banana. We did not unhook the car last night, so all we had to do was run it through the towing procedure and it was ready to go. We pulled out of our site at 8:20 AM.

Our route today was I-40 east to I-35 south to US-77 south to East Robinson Street. All but the last 20 miles was on I-40 which mostly ran east to northeast. Winds were 15 – 20 MPH and gusty out of the northeast the whole way. That meant I almost always had a headwind component and often had a crosswind component. The headwind requires the engine to work harder so I set the cruise control at 64 MPH instead of the 68 MPH I ran most of yesterday. The crosswind component meant I had to actively work the steering and the lower speed made that more comfortable as well.

Most of the trip was through rural countryside with good road surface and light traffic. We encountered a few construction zones but there was no work being done due to the weather. As we approached the Oklahoma City metropolitan area traffic became much heavier, as expected, but the highways had more lanes and everything seemed to move along just fine. In particular I-40 and I-35 always had at least three lanes allowing me to stay in the center, away from entering traffic, and move to the left or right as needed for an exit ramp. The whole drive would have been easier without the rain and constant fiddling with windshield wipers, but I was always able to see well enough to maneuver safely, it was just more work and bit more stressful than normal. I seem to handle urban road systems OK; it’s just not my favorite thing to do.

The Cleveland County Fairgrounds was easy to find and easy to access. As soon as we pulled in we could see where the RVs were parked. I pulled up out of the way while Linda called the Fairgrounds office. She was told to go ahead a find a place to park and then register at the kiosk or in Building G. I pulled up into the gravel parking area that had the RVs backed along two sides, like an “L.” One leg of the L was paved and the other was grass/gravel. We noticed one empty site in the paved area so I pulled around in front of it (so no one else could take it) while we unhooked the car. (When camping in a no-reservations, first come, first served campground you have to stake your claim to an empty site.) Linda moved the car out of the way and then spotted the rear end of the bus while I repositioned it and then backed it into site #9. We have been towed out of two fairgrounds at the end of rallies where it rained so we were glad to get this paved site.

The sites here are all full hookup with 30 A electric and include usable Wi-Fi for $20/night. That is a much better deal than anything else we could find in the OKC area, and is also the closest place to where my aunt and uncle live, so it was a great find. We probably won’t use the fresh water or sewer connections and the 30 A service will be OK. Apparently there are also some 50 A sites but we did not need that much power and did not want to take the time to see if one of them was open. Given forecasted high temperatures that will barely reach 60 degrees F we will not need our air-conditioners. As for heat, we will use our Aqua-Hot in diesel-fired mode for domestic hot water and space heating, if needed.

Once we had the power connected and got settled in I made a pot of coffee while Linda made roll-up sandwiches for lunch. She then checked us in to the Fairgrounds on RVillage and made our reservation for the Red Barn Rendezvous RV Park near Edwardsville, Illinois starting on Thursday. We will be in the St. Louis, Missouri area for four or five nights visiting family before pushing on to Twelve Mile, Indiana. She then researched places to stay near Joplin and Springfield, Missouri for Wednesday evening.

While Linda was doing all of that I finished up yesterday’s blog post and started working on this one. I then logged-in to RVillage. There are three other RVillagers checked in to the CCFG so I posted to the home feed and to the park feed to see if I could make contact with any of them. One of them (Hollywood Bob) is also a member of the SKP Photographers BOF which Linda and I help run. (I am the owner/leader of the RVillage Group.) I sent him a friend request and then a personal message.

The rain let up not long after we arrived at the Fairgrounds but the wind continued, with gusts occasionally rocking the bus. The bus is fairly massive but also has a lot of surface area and sits on air springs. We do not have leveling jacks, so strong/gusty winds can, and do, rock the bus.

Hollywood Bob and his girlfriend Barb walked by so I went outside to chat with them briefly and we arranged to walk over to a local coffee shop at 8 AM tomorrow. I then spent the late afternoon and early evening editing the text for my March 13th blog post on our visit to the Sonoran Desert Museum west of Tucson and then worked on selecting photos for the post. Somewhere in there we took a break and went for walk around the Fairgrounds. It is not a large facility but has nice buildings and grounds.

Linda heated up the last of the barley and vegetable leftovers and steamed some halved Brussels sprouts and finished them with a White Peach Balsamic Vinegar Glaze from the Queen Creek Olive Mill near Arizona City, Arizona. Yum. After dinner we turned on the front TV and tuned in PBS to watch Antiques Roadshow. I finished selecting and processing photos for the March 13th post around 11:30 PM but did not upload it

2015/04/14 (T) Bob and Helen

I was up at 6:30 AM and uploaded my blog post for March 13th. We had spent that day at the Sonoran Desert Museum west of Tucson, Arizona and photographed the sunset from nearby Gates Pass. The post was brief (by my standards) but I put over 30 photos in an image gallery.

At 8 AM we walked over to Hollywood Bob and Barb’s rigs, met up with them, and then walked the short distance to the Dora Marie Bakery and Coffee Shop just across Porter Avenue from the Cleveland County Fairgrounds. We sat there conversing over coffee until 9:45 AM, mostly about RVs and RVing as that is generally the first and easiest conversation to have with new friends. I already knew from a brief chat with Bob yesterday that both of them are members of the Escapees RV Club and that Bob is a member of the SKP Photographers BOF. Bob is also a Freethinker and knew that we were as well from our RVillage Profile. We found out over coffee that they are both members of the WINs (Wandering Individuals Network) and LoWs (Loners on Wheels) which are independent groups for single RVers. As we were walking back to our rigs we agreed to get together for SKP happy hour at 4 PM.

Our main reason for being in Norman, Oklahoma was to visit my Uncle Bob and Aunt Helen. Uncle Bob earned a Ph.D. in micropaleontology over 60 years ago when Ph.Ds. were less common than they are now. He moved to Oklahoma after finishing his degree and did extensive work on the Arbuckle Mountains. A Google search on “Robert O. Fay” produced a lot of hits referencing his published work. He was attached to the University of Oklahoma at one time and that is what brought them to Norman.

Bob just turned 88. He and Helen have been married for 49 years but never had children. Helen had one son, Scott, from a previous marriage. Scott married Linda and they had two children, Tiffany and Philip. Scott passed away a while back but Linda still lives in Norman and teaches in OKC. Tiffany and Philip and their families also still live in Norman.

I last saw Bob and Helen four years ago on the drive back to Michigan from Livingston, Texas where I had picked up our Honda Element from Dennis and Carol Hill. Helen was having problems with her back at the time but Bob was as sharp as I remembered the last time I saw him 26 years earlier while returning from a trip out west with Brendan. All of our memories of that visit were a bit vague but my recollection is that Meghan and my sister, Patty, met us there so Patty must have driven Meghan to OKC from St. Louis, Missouri.

When I called on Sunday to let Bob and Helen know we would be in the area I talked to Helen and found out that my uncle was in a rehabilitation facility not far from the house but she did not say why. When we arrived at their house at 10 AM this morning we were greeted by Tiffany, Brandy (Philip’s wife), and Helen who was up walking around and sharp as ever. We visited briefly and then followed Tiffany and Helen over to the rehab facility.

Uncle Bob is in the facility recovering from a persistent pneumonia, which was treated with an antibiotic to which he was allergic, but he also has Parkinson’s. He is still coherent but the decline in both his physical and mental condition was striking. I was not shocked by that, however, and only briefly surprised by virtue of not being fully prepared. We had a conversation nonetheless, and Bob asked, and talked, about family and genealogy which became his research passion along with geology. Tiffany took a cell phone picture of Linda and me with Bob. She had to get back to work so she took Helen home while Linda and I stayed a bit longer to chat with my uncle.

Bob was tired, dozing on and off, and it was getting close to lunchtime. Staff also needed to check on Bob so we took our leave. Although we will be back this way in future years I had the strong sense that Uncle Bob is not going to improve going forward and this may be the last time I get to see him. It was not quite the meeting I had envisioned, but I was glad for what we had. My dad will be 90 in June and cannot travel very far from his home so I don’t see any way he and his brother will ever meet again. There is always a final everything but it is usually only clear in retrospect. Such is life.

Before Tiffany and Helen left Tiffany called her mom (Linda) to see if she could be available to get together after work this evening. Linda said she could rearrange some things with her brother and would love to meet for dinner. We discussed meeting at the house and going out to dinner from there.

Tiffany invited us to stop by her school, which is just down the street from the Fairgrounds, so we did that right after lunch, which consisted of a couple of tofu hotdogs wrapped up in soft tortillas with mustard and relish. Not WFPB but definitely vegan and definitely tasty. Tiffany gave us a tour of her school and we got to meet Cody, her significant other, who also works at the school. She had talked to her mom (Linda) and Helen and they decided that we would all be more comfortable and better able to converse at the house. We explained how we eat and Tiffany said she and Brandi (Philip’s wife) would take care of bringing in food and make sure there were items for us.

I spent most of the afternoon working on blog posts but took time out to check the pressures of the two front bus tires. I thought I would have to adjust all of them now that we have descended to 1,200 feet ASL, but the front tires were still close to one another and above the minimum required pressure, so I did not get out the compressor. By 3 PM I was feeling the need for a nap and snoozed for an hour.

We walked over to Barb and Hollywood Bob’s rigs at 4:30 PM. We were going to do SKP happy hour at 4 PM but we were not sure we could carry glasses of wine around the Fairgrounds so we went empty handed. The Farmers Market opened at 4 PM so Bob, Linda, and I walked over to check it out while Barb started preparing their dinner. They had to be at a dance event at 6 PM and we needed to be at Uncle Bob and Aunt Helen’s house around the same time.

Brandi has been Uncle Bob’s primary caregiver when he is at home and she brought him from the rehab facility to the house for the evening. There was a houseful of people with laughter and energy and it was nice to see Uncle Bob and Aunt Helen surrounded by so many people who obviously love them and care about them. Dinner was salad greens, vegetables, fresh fruit, sandwich fixings, and deserts and there was plenty for us to choose from. Here’s how the family fits together:

Bob is my father’s younger/only brother (by two years).
Helen had one son, Scott Pelton, from a previous marriage.
Scott married Linda and they had two children; Tiffany and Philip.
(Scott passed away some years ago.)
Tiffany has three girls (young ladies); Alexis, Brianna, and Caitlin.
Brianna has a son, Liam, who is Bob and Helen’s great-great-grandson.
Philip married Brandi and they have three children; Cassidy, Cheyenne, and Danika.

We stayed until almost 9:30 PM and had a great visit that ended with a discussion about Linda and her three grand-daughters coming to Michigan for a visit sometime. Tiffany texted me the cellphone photo she took of Linda, me, and Uncle Bob at the rehab facility this morning. Caitlin set up a camera and took photos of the entire group. When we got back to our rig I replied to text messages and provided our e-mail address and home phone number to Helen and Tiffany.

2015/04/15 (W) Norman, OK to Carthage, MO

There is always way more to do in any given area than there is time to do it, and the greater Oklahoma City area, including Norman, is no exception to that. But our presence here proved to be the catalyst for a large gathering of people to whom we are related by marriage through Helen, my only Aunt, and only by virtue of her being married to my only uncle, Bob. While it would have been nice to visit longer after last night’s gathering it would have been anti-climactic.

Through the serendipity that RVillage makes possible we also made the acquaintance of Barb and Hollywood Bob at the Cleveland County Fairgrounds. As much as we would have liked to have coffee with them again this morning, we don’t usually have our morning coffee on travel days and wanted to be on the road by 9 AM.

Linda had been checking the weight restrictions on the roads in our home county and noted yesterday that they will be lifted on the 16th. That means we have a green light to return to our house whenever we want to. We already have plans to spend four nights near St. Louis, Missouri and visit family, and at least a couple of nights in Twelve Mile, Indiana visiting Butch and Fonda with whom we started this southwestern adventure on November 30th, 2014. We will spend our final night at the Camp Turkeyville RV Park so we can dump our holding tanks before arriving home.

All of which is to say we had over 600 miles to travel from Norman to St. Louis, which is two day trip for us, with a reservation at an RV Park in Edwardsville, Illinois starting Thursday afternoon and arrangements to visit with family on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Linda researched possible intermediate locations to split the distance roughly in half and found the Coachlight RV Park on I-49 one mile north of I-40 near Carthage, Missouri.

We did not take the time to buy an Oklahoma Turnpike pass and decided not to take I-44 northeast out of OKC. From the CCFG we headed west on Robinson Street back to US-77 north, merged onto I-35 north, and then exited onto I-240 east. Somewhere east of OKC I-240 ended and merged into I-40. As urban highways go it was an easy exit from the greater OKC area. We stopped at a rest area just before crossing the Oklahoma/Arkansas border and took a short lunch break, having vegan cold cut rollup sandwiches.

We continued east on I-40 to Fort Smith, Arkansas and then headed north on I-540, which has been re-signed I-49, through the Boston Mountains toward Fayetteville and Bentonville, the corporate home of Wal-Mart. I-49 did not continue all the way into Missouri and became US-77 as it passed through a narrow valley and small towns. A few miles into Missouri the road became I-49 again. We stayed with I-49 up to where it joins with I-44 east near Joplin, Missouri. About 10 miles later I-49/US-77 split off to the north and one mile later we exited, crossed over the Interstate, and pulled into the Coachlight RV Park.

The weather was overcast with occasional drizzle for the entire trip but it was a beautiful drive nonetheless. Eastern Oklahoma is green and rolling and northwest Arkansas adds small mountains to that topography. The bus ran well all day including the steepest grades.

The Coachlight RV Park is located behind the Coachlight RV Dealership with very easy access. Linda got us registered but then we had to wait quite a while for someone to move the motorhome in front of us. Again, we were given instructions on where to go and what to do in the event of extreme/violent weather. The Park is built into a north-facing slope with wide paved roads behind an RV dealership of the same same. The RV dealership was the emergency shelter. Most of the sites are pull-through except along the two outside edges. All of the sites are wide, long, and level gravel with full hookups including cable TV and Wi-Fi. The Park has its own well with a water softener so the water at the sites is very soft. The Park allows customers to wash their rigs so we got out the hose, spray nozzle, and long-handled soft brush and rinsed off the car and the bus as best we could.

We went for a walk around the Park to stretch our legs and stopped by the office to check out the meeting room. There is a small RV rally here and we got to see the meeting room which was very nice. For dinner Linda made a macaroni and mushroom dish with onions, garlic, and kale followed by red grapes. Very tasty. We watched a few TV shows and called it a day.

2015/03/27-31 (F-T) Wrapping Up Arizona

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2015/03/27 (F) Queen Creek Olive Mill

This is really Linda’s post more than mine. Lou and I stayed in camp all day working with our information technologies while Linda and Val went on an explore. I have been using my iPad2 to go through drafts of blog posts dating back to March 1st filling in details, turning notes into complete sentences, and then e-mailing them to myself. I got caught up as far as that goes and then started writing drafts of posts for the last few days.

Linda and Val made a day if it away from camp. Linda took our car and drove them to the Queen Creek Olive Mill (QCOM) in Queen Creek, Arizona just beyond the southeast limits of the Phoenix metropolitan area. QCOM is a large olive grove producing 17 different varieties of olives. (Technically it is an orchard as olives are a stone fruit.) The hot, dry desert conditions in this part of the U. S. turn out to be ideal for growing olives. They are harvested by spreading tarps on the ground around each tree and stripping the olives off. Olives that fall to the ground naturally are past ripe and are not used.

Once harvested olives are processed within 24 hours. For pressing into olive oil they are simply washed to remove dust and then pressed (ground or milled, actually), pits and all, to extract the oil. The mash that remains is used as fertilizer for the trees. Olives that are destined to be sold whole may be packaged whole in a brine or have the pits removed and replaced with a piece of garlic or habanero pepper and preserved in a brine.

QCOM has a restaurant so the ladies stayed for lunch. Val had a chopped Italian salad and Linda had a quinoa and kale salad, both of which they said were ‘excellent’. The Mill also had a gift shop and Linda picked up several things there.

It was late afternoon by the time they returned and neither of them felt like cooking so Lou suggested we go out for dinner and try the Chinese restaurant we intended to eat at a few nights ago when we ended up at the Golden Corral. We piled into Lou and Val’s pickup truck and set off in search of Big Wa. Linda had checked the menu online so we knew they had several vegetarian dishes we could probably eat.

Lou and Val had been to Big Wa before and knew approximately where it was but Linda pulled it up on her smartphone and guided us in for a soft landing. Big Wa was a small mom and pop Chinese restaurant; the kind we used to patronize a lot back home once upon a time. We rarely go to Chinese restaurants anymore because it is essentially impossible to get anything vegan. We ordered vegetable Kung Pao stir fry and Moo Shu vegetable dishes. We suspect that chicken broth was involved in the stir fry and I think the Moo Shu, which was already made up when it came to the table, contained eggs. We rarely stray from our chosen diet and although doing so doesn’t kill us our systems do not always react well either. In this case our dishes were mostly vegetables and it was very tasty.

We stopped at Home Depot so I could look for a GE Water filter cartridge and then stopped at Walgreen’s so Val could pick up some things. It was well past dark by the time we got back and we retired to our respective rigs for the night. Linda and I watched some TV (Big Bang Theory) and she played online word games while I responded to some e-mails. Linda liked Queen Creek Olive Mill well enough to enter it in the RVillage Marketplace and recommend it.

A panorama of our motorcoach parked at RVillage World Headquarters in Arizona City, AZ.

2015/03/28 (S) Haircuts

Linda was awake by 6 AM and read quietly in bed. I was awake before 7 AM and got up, put on my sweats, and made a pot of coffee. Our two cats climbed up on us to be adored and when they’d had enough of our attention we had some granola for breakfast. Linda got our last bag out of the freezer so if we want this to last until we get home we will not be having it for breakfast every day.

I have been overdue for a haircut for a while so this morning we finally got the clippers out and Linda lightened the load. Not that my hair was long, but the daytime temperatures have risen into the 90’s and it is much cooler and more comfortable with my buzz cut. As long as the clippers were out I trimmed up my beard and shaved. Linda said I cleaned up pretty well. 🙂

Linda is also way overdue for a haircut but I am not about to attempt that. She and Val had planned to go to the mall in Casa Grande today anyway, so she did a quick online search and located a hair salon at the mall. She assembled a short shopping list and added the haircut to it.

While they were gone I pulled together all of my blog post drafts for the period before, during, and after the Escapees RV Club Escapade rally into a single Word doc and attached it to an e-mail to Lou. He plans to use it as the starting point for an article about the Escapade in the next edition of our SKP Photographers BOF newsletter.

Lou and I needed a break from working with our technology so we put two of our camp chairs in a shady spot with a nice northeast breeze and just sat and relaxed and chatted. Lou asked about the barn we plan to build and I described the three approaches I am considering. We were still doing that when the ladies returned home late in the afternoon. They had both done some shopping so I helped carry bags of stuff into our rig.

Linda made a nice salad for our dinner and Val heated up leftovers for them. There is a period of time in the late afternoon when the sun shines into the covered porch of the house and is so hot it us uncomfortable to sit there. Small ants have also appeared with the hot weather so we ate inside at the dining room table. We lingered for a long time talking before finally retiring to our rigs for the night.

Curtis got a good deal on this Fleetwood Bounder. He plans to put it in a rental pool.

2015/03/29 (N) Mexico Connection

I made arrangements on Friday for us to visit with Larry and Orene Brown today. We left at 10 AM to drive to their place northwest of Florence, Arizona. Larry and Orene are members of both FMCA and Escapees and belong to the Freethinker groups of both clubs, along with several related RVillage groups. We crossed paths with them most recently at the Escapade and agreed to get together after we returned to Arizona City. We stopped briefly in Coolidge to buy flowers at the local Safeway and arrived at their place in the Del Webb (Pulte) developed Anthem communities at 11:10 AM.

Larry and Orene are also active in SKP Chapter 8 — Mexican Connection, and will be the wagonmasters for the Chapter’s February 2016 caravan/rally to Puerto Penasco, Mexico on the mainland shore of the Sea of Cortez. We have not had any desire to travel to/in Mexico, but after chatting with Larry and Orene at Escapade we became intrigued with the possibility of traveling with a good sized group and wanted to know more about it.

Larry gave us a tour of their house and Orene poured small glasses of wine which we enjoyed sitting outside under their Ramada. Orene made a green salad and vegan chili for lunch. Both were delicious and enjoyed with some iced tea. By the time we were done eating the air temperature had warmed past comfortable so we went inside where Orene served fresh strawberries and cantaloupe for desert.

We spent the rest of the afternoon in pleasantly stimulating conversation on a wide range of subjects including, but not limited to, the outing to Mexico next year. We got a lot of important insights, most of which furthered our interest in going. We have enjoyed getting to know everyone from our Freethinkers chapter we have had the opportunity to meet and hope to cross paths with Larry and Orene many times in the years to come.

As we wrapped up our visit at 4 PM I got a call from Curtis letting me know that he would probably be arriving tonight between 11 PM and midnight unless he decided to pull in to rest area, in which case he would arrive early tomorrow morning. Either way it meant that Lou would have to move their 5th wheel trailer so Curtis could park his bus in its usual place. It also meant someone, most likely me, would have to open the gate when he got here. I tend to stay up late anyway, but we would obviously do whatever was required to get him in and settled.

As we were getting back to our encampment around 5:30 PM Linda called Lou to have him open the gate. After we were in and settled we let him know that Curtis would be returning late this evening. They were in the spot where Curtis parks his bus, so before it got dark Lou hitched up their 5th wheel and pulled it around 180 degrees to the east side of the driveway and pointed towards the gate. He plans to take their rig to Casa Grande tomorrow morning to buy some tires for the truck and the trailer and have them installed so the rig is positioned for an easy exit.

Having had a nice lunch Linda and I just had hummus with chips and grapes for dinner and watched several episodes of The Big Bang Theory. Curtis called at 9 PM to let me know he would be arriving around 11 PM. Linda headed off to bed while I let Lou and Val know that Curtis was definitely arriving yet this evening. I then settled in to watch TV while I waited for the call to open the gate. That call came a little before 11 PM. I opened the gate, waited for Curtis to pull in, closed the gate, and helped him get parked. I returned the gate fob and house key and we chatted about RVillage and the FMCA rally while Augie got reacquainted with his yard. Curtis asked if I would take some interior and exterior photographs of his Fleetwood Bounder before we left so he could use them to help advertise it for rent and of course I agreed. I then retired just before midnight, leaving him to finish unpacking a few things from his bus and car

Another view of Curtis’s Bounder.

2015/03/30 (M) Re-Tired

Since we knew at 4 PM yesterday that Curtis would be returning late last night, Linda started doing several loads of laundry as soon as we got back to camp. We watched TV and snacked for dinner while the loads washed and dried. She took the last load out of the dryer around 9 PM and we then folded clothes and made the bed. She turned in while I waited up to let Curtis in the gate.

I slept in until 8 AM his morning and finally got up when I heard (and smelled) the grinding of coffee beans. Breakfast was toast and fruit juice. As planned, Lou and Val left around 9:30 AM to take their truck/trailer to Discount Tire in Casa Grande. He needed two tires for the truck and two for the trailer.

Although Curtis did not leave Pomona, California until 4 PM yesterday he managed to make the 400 mile drive back to Arizona City in seven hours. In spite of what was obviously a long day for him he was up and working this morning, although we did not see him until later than usual. Launching a company is exciting but hard work.

Linda sat at the outside table and chatted with Curtis while I worked on blog posts at my computer in our bus. By 11:45 AM the temperature in the bus was 85 degrees so I turned the generator on, turned on all three air-conditioners, and closed up the coach. That kept it cool enough for the cats but I decided to take my computer into the house and work at the dining room table as the house is air-conditioned and quite comfortable.

I had copied all of the posts for January 15 – 21, 2015 into a single Word doc but by the time I finished editing it I decided it was way too long so I split it back up into individual daily posts. The other reason for doing this was that this was a very busy week during which I took a lot of photographs. I managed to upload posts to our WordPress blog for the 15th through the 19th. It was a small dent in what I need to accomplish, but it was something.

Val brought over a glass of fresh squeezed lemonade at 4:30 PM. By that time my computer battery was run down a bit and I was tired of staring at the screen so I took the computer back to our bus and plugged it in and then joined the others on the veranda to enjoy my glass of lemonade.

Although it gets pleasantly cool after the sun sets, and a bit chilly by sunrise, the hot days have brought out ants and midge flies, compounding the notion that we have probably lingered a bit longer in southern Arizona than is ideal. On the other hand, we are experiencing this for ourselves rather than trying to understand it second hand. Also, highs in the mid-to-upper 90’s are not typical for late March in this area, running 15 or more degrees above normal. That is the old (historical) normal, of course, not the new normal.

Curtis eventually rejoined use around 5:30 PM. We asked if he wanted to go out to dinner but he was not up for it so we all made and ate our own dinners. While Linda was cooking and I was wrapping up a conversation with Lou and Curtis I got a call from Butch Williams. He and Fonda had just arrived home having driven all the way from the Wal-Mart in Forest City, Arkansas. That same drive took us two days on the way out west in December. It was 7:30 PM here and 10:30 PM there.

Linda had the TV on while she was cooking and we watched NCIS Los Angeles and other Monday evening programs during and after dinner. She made a red beans and rice dish and added greens (kale) and crushed red pepper flakes which definitely kicked it up a notch. I continued working on blog posts while half paying attention to the TV programs.

One last look at Curtis’s new Bounder.

2015/03/31 (T) Farewell Arizona

As March draws to a close so does our time in Arizona. We have, and more specifically our motorhome has, been here since December 11, 2014 when we drove from the Escapees Dreamcatcher RV Park in Deming, New Mexico to the RoVers Roost SKP CO-OP near Casa Grande, Arizona. From there it was on to our winter “home” in Quartzsite where the bus remained parked until March 3rd.

On March 3rd we said our “so long, see ya down the road” to Butch/Fonda, Jim/Barb, and Jim Liebherr, our host/landlord while we were in Quartzsite. We drove to Arizona City and boondocked at the rental house of Curtis Coleman, founder and CEO of the RVillage social networking website for RVers. From there we relocated to an RV park in Tucson for a night and then went to the Escapees RV Club Escapade at the Pima County Fairgrounds where we worked very hard as event staff.

After the Escapade we drove back to Arizona City with Lou and Val Petkus, stayed three nights, and then drove over to Why, Arizona for a week to visit Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. The four of us then went back to Arizona City to decompress for a week and try to catch up on some computer/Internet-based work.

While we were in Arizona City we managed to drive the Florence-to-Kelvin scenic road with Lou and Val Petkus, tour Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West (just the two of us), visit an Olive grove/mill (Linda and Val only), visit with fellow FMCA/SKP Freethinkers Larry and Orene Brown (me and Linda), and visit with Curtis when he was there as much as his work permitted. The daily high temperatures the last few days have been in the mid-to-upper 90’s while only a couple of hundred miles to the north they were just reaching 70 degrees F with lows at or just below freezing. Our Aqua-Hot is working better than our air-conditioners and we are ready to start moving east and north.

Lou and Val pulled out today at noon for the short drive to Tucson and checked into the Prince of Tucson RV Park where we stayed for one night just before going to the Escapade. We will depart tomorrow and head to Deming, New Mexico, or thereabouts. From there we plan to head over to Las Cruces and up I-25 to Albuquerque where we will look for a full-hookup RV park for a few nights so we can explore the area a bit.

From Albuquerque we will push on to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma to visit my only uncle. A long day’s drive from there will put is in an RV Park near Edwardsville, Illinois not far from where Linda’s sister (Marilyn) and her housemate (Linda) live and a reasonable driving distance from my sister (Patty), niece (Amanda), and her family. We plan to hang out in the area for a while if folks can make time to visit with us and keep an eye on the weather and road restrictions in southeast Michigan.

Another day’s drive will put us at Butch and Fonda Williams’ place in Twelve Mile, Indiana; the place from which our two two-bus caravan departed for the southwest on December 3rd, 2014. We will likely linger there a few days and try to figure out what is going on with our two front air-conditioners. Once we leave there our final stop will probably be an overnight at the Turkeyville Campground south of Lansing, Michigan where we can dump our holding tanks in the morning before driving the last 80 miles to our house.

With the hot temperatures have come bugs so we spent a long evening inside the house having a relaxed conversation with Curtis and getting to know each other better. It was the first time we have had a chance to talk to him without RVillage being the focus of the conversation. We opened the bottle of Black Currant wine we bought at the Forestedge Winery in Laporte, Minnesota in July 2013 and remembered why we bought it and why we brought it along. It was nice to share it with our new friend. We finally went back to our coach at 9:30 PM, had an easy, light supper, and went to bed.

2015/03/13 (F) Sonoran Desert Museum

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We were up at 6 AM and left the fairgrounds a little before 7 AM to drive to The Sonoran Desert Museum west of Tucson, Arizona. That meant we missed the hitch-up breakfast, which is the last official activity of the Escapade. We also missed the SmartWeigh operation, an activity run by the Escapees to determine individual wheel weights for RVs, toads, and toters. We were not going to have our coach/toad weighed, but it would have been nice to get some photographs of the operation.

We drove separately from Lou and Val Petkus and were running a little ahead of schedule so we stopped at a McDonald’s about seven miles from the museum for coffee. We met up with Lou and Val and another couple from the SKP Photographers BOF in the parking lot. We needed 12 people to get the discounted group admission price so we all paid full price and went in.

The museum is spread over 21 acres at a mean elevation of ~2,800 feet. Most of the museum is outdoors and is a magnificent collection of Sonoran Desert flora and fauna that was worth the price of admission. We did not mind paying the asking price for this museum, however, as it is undoubtedly an expensive operation to run.

One of the highlights of our museum visit was the raptor demonstrations at 10 AM and 2 PM. We went to both and took a lot of photos. We were surprised how many people were there to see both demonstrations, especially children, as it was Friday (work/school day). Perhaps the area schools were on spring break. We had lunch in the cafe and it was very good. Reviews for the restaurant were excellent but it had white linen tablecloths, so we took a pass on that.

We left around 4:30 PM and drove up to Gates Pass where we parked and took photos of the mountains and sunset. The light was fading as we pulled out but we made it down the mountain road before darkness fell. It was way past dark by the time we got back to the coach; a long but very productive and satisfying day.

Sunset from Gates Pass west of Tucson, AZ.

Following is a gallery of some selected photos from our visit to the Sonoran Desert Museum. Some of the photos were taken by Linda. Photos were taken with Sony alpha 100 DSLR and Canon 50D DSLR. The photos are presented without captions.

2015/03/06-12 Escapade Images

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Here is a gallery of additional images from the 2015 Escapees RV Club Escapade. Most of them are of our friends, old and new.

: Dennis and Carol Hill used to own the RV Driving School. We bought our Honda Element from them a few years ago.

: Bob and Molly Pinner, Escapade Directors, with Dortha Hall, one of the Escapade Coordinators.

: Friends Nick and Terry Russell of The Gypsy Journal.

: New SKP/RVillage friends Marianne Edwards and Randy Sturrock of Boondockers Welcome. We joined as host members during the Escapade.

: Friends Chris and Jim Guld of the Geeks On Tour. Yeah, they really are that much fun.

: Our RV insurance agents, Charles and Chris Yust, at the vendors dinner.

: Friends Don and Kim Greene of Harvest Hosts at the vendors dinner.

: Bill McGrath and Anna Johnson from Park of the Sierras SKP CO_OP. Bill was one of the volunteer photographers. He and Anna are fellow members of the SKP Freethinkers BoF.

: Steve Pinn was the other volunteer photographer. He and Carol were camped off site having service work done.

: Friends Chris Dunphy and Cherie Ve Ard of Technomadia sporting their Xscapers shits in front of their bus Zepher.

: Travis Carr (SKPs RV Club) and Curtis Coleman (RVillage) at the Xscapers launch party.

: I don’t remember his name, but this guy also cleaned our holding tanks. He is working on someone else motorhome here.

: Lou Petkus, who started/heads the SKP Photographers BoF, on “the row.” I run the RVillage group for this BoF and my friend Kate de Fuccio designed the logo.

: Our friends and fellow SKP/FMCA Freethinkers, Orene and Larry Brown, representing SKP Chapter 8 Mexican Connection on “the row” They are leading a caravan in Feb 2016 to Puerto Punesco (Rocky Point) Mexico.

: Jason Snow, Forrest Clark, Kristin Snow, Mary Clark, and Cherie Ve Ard. Jason and Kristin are the “Snowmads.” Forrest and Mary are involved in the DOVES BoF (American Red Cross). Cherie is one of the Technomads.

: The creators of the Xscapers club-within-a-club. L-2-R: Melanie Carr, Cherie Ve Ad, Travis Carr, and Chris Dunphy.

: Friends Cherie Ve Ard and Chris Dunphy of Technomadia having a quiet moment at the end of a very busy week.

: Sky Renfro (SKP staff) and Melanie Carr at the RVillage Social / Get-Together.

: Escapees RV Club president Cathie Carr (SKP#3) and RVillage founder/CEO Curtis Coleman at the RVillage Social / Get-Together on the 1-year anniversary of the launch of RVillage.

: The Escapade ended with a very dramatic sunset as seen looking west from our bus.

2015/03/06-12 (F-R) Escapade 2015

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2015/03/06 (F) SKP Escapade Arrival

Linda sitting with Val Petkus at the opening staff meeting.

We unhooked our car last night so we could go grocery shopping and left it disconnected as the Escapade prefers that folks arrive with their toads unhooked if possible. We only had a 28 mile drive to the Pima County Fairgrounds so driving two vehicles was not an inconvenience. There is, in fact, an advantage to having the car follow the bus as it can create space for lane changes in dense traffic.

Lou and Val drove over from their RV Park on the other side of I-10, turned their rig around, and positioned it so we could follow them onto the highway. We pulled out at 9:15 AM.

Kay Peterson, SKP#1, is recognized at the opening staff meeting.

We had arranged to rendezvous in Tucson so we could park together, which requires us to arrive together, or so we thought. It turned out that staff parking was pre-assigned and since Lou was the head photographer and I was the assistant photographer we were assigned parking in different areas. Our location was not that far from Lou and Val’s and actually afforded us more privacy, a better view, and 50 A electrical service, so we had nothing to complain about. We were a bit less convenient to the activity buildings, but the Pima County Fairgrounds was compact and very walkable. Besides, we were parked next to Travis and Melanie Carr, who were next to Cathie and Bud Carr. Cathie is the president of the Escapees RV Club and Travis is Bud and Cathie’s son.

Linda puts a pin on the map to mark our home town.

And walk we did. Even though the Escapade did not start until Sunday afternoon, and regular participant arrival was scheduled for Saturday and Sunday, the fairgrounds was already abuzz with activity. Besides the staff arrivals, which were spread out over several days, the vendors were arriving and setting up, seminar rooms and hospitality areas were being prepared, and there were two pre-rallies taking place. One was the Escapees RV Boot Camp and the other was the Geeks On Tour Camp Re-Boot. And the job of the staff photographers was to capture all of this activity.

Things quieted down by dinnertime. A bit later Brendan (our son) called to update us on his interview at Eastern Michigan University where he is a finalist for an art history professorship. He is also a candidate for a curatorial position at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor Art Museum so we are excited at the possibility of him securing one of these jobs.

2015/03/07 (S) Escapade Setup

I was up and dressed before 7 AM and slipped out of the coach while Linda was still asleep. Today was the final day for the RVers Boot Camp. Their day started with breakfast from 7 – 8 AM and I wanted to take a few photos of their meal. As long as I was up I wandered around the fairgrounds taking pictures of the facilities and RVs and occasionally a person or group of people. The parking crew was in position and started parking rigs at 8 AM. The parking process went on until 2 PM but most of the arrivals were solo rigs that dribbled in. I was told that 300 rigs were scheduled to arrive tomorrow and they expected it to be a bit crazy, so I will look for photo ops of groups of arriving rigs tomorrow.

I went to Old Pueblo Hall to get some free coffee and wandered around to see if any more vendors, chapters, or BoFs were setting up but there was not a lot of activity. I talked to Wanda Lewis about our missing event shirts. Lots of folks were apparently aware of the situation and several of them had looked through the “specials” packaging but ours were nowhere to be found.

SKP Chapter 6 displays their banner on “the row.” We have been members of this chapter since the 2010 Escapade but have yet to make it to a rally.

I went back to our rig and had breakfast. I then resumed my photo rounds, still looking for shots of RVs arriving and being parked. I ended up back at Old Pueblo Hall by which time the participant registration desk was open and there were very long lines. The Escapees Mail desk was also open along with the Store and other specialized SKP functions. Teresa Moore, the COO of the Escapees RV Club, was in the Store so I talked to her about our missing shirts event shirts. They had shirts for sale and I suggested that she give me our pair before they were gone. She agreed, albeit a bit reluctantly. We won’t wear them while they continue to look for the rest of our order, but my guess is that this was not really a priority for anyone and I doubted that they would find them because I don’t think the shirts ever got ordered even though we were billed for them. They would have refunded the cost of the two shirts but we really wanted the shirts, that’s why we ordered them in the first place.

Bill McGrath and Stephen Pinn from the SKP Photographers BoF contacted Lou Petkus, the head photographer, and Lou arranged for all of us to meet briefly with Lora Newby, the Escapade coordinator under whom Photography falls. I ended up having a long chat with Steve afterwards about mobile communications. He also let me use his 18% neutral gray screen and color checker squares to shoot a series of exposure compensation test shots. When looking through some of the images I had shot over the last 24 hours I noticed that a lot of them had the highlights blown out, especially when using the on-camera flash.

We stayed at the RoVers Roost SKP CO-OP on our way to Quartzsite for the winter.

I copied photos to my computer and worked with the color checker and gray scale images. Many of my photos from the last 24 hours seemed to be overexposed and I was using the color checker and gray scale images to determine if I needed to make an exposure compensation under bright sunlight, shadow, or indoor flash settings. I was using Lou’s older Canon 50D, so I had no prior experience with how the exposures might need to be tweaked. I did not arrive at a definitive conclusion other than deciding that I should figure out how to enable automatic exposure bracketing, which Lou eventually showed me how to do.

2015/03/08 (N) The 55th Escapade Begins

Our motorcoach, parked in an out-of-the-way place with Cathie & Bud Carrs motorhome, Travis & Melanie Carr’s Airstream, and the Rivolli Review’s motorhome.

Although the Escapees RV Club Escapade officially began at 3:00 PM (MST) today the event is really multi-faceted and aspects of it have been taking place since Thursday with the Escapees Boot Camp followed by the Geeks On Tour Camp Re-Boot. Some of the staff have been here for weeks, but most of us arrived on Wed, Thu, or Fri. The staff appreciation dinner was Friday and the Vendor appreciation dinner was Saturday. Early arrival for attendees started Friday and continued Saturday with regular arrivals starting at 8 AM this morning. The registration desk opened at 10 AM on Saturday and the vendor area opened at 9 AM this morning. The “first timers” meeting was held at 2 PM. The opening ceremonies commenced at 3:00 PM and lasted a little over an hour. We had time for dinner and then headed back to Thurber Hall for the evening slide show, door prizes, and entertainment. The Rivolli Review, a husband and wife team, was the evening entertainment. Their motorhome is parked right next to our bus but we have not seen much of them, or had any conversation with them so far, as all of us are usually busy away from our rigs.

L-2-R: Chris Guld (Geeks On Tour), Cathie Carr (SKP President), and Linda chatting at the informal Xscapers launch party.

2015/03/09 (M) Seminars & Socials

Today was the first full day of the Escapade. That meant a full schedule of seminars during the day and a full slate of social gatherings in the late afternoon. The vendors were open for business and “the row” was open to greet attendees and explain the joys and benefits of SKP CO-OP Parks, Chapters, and BOFs (Birds Of a Feather, a SKP special interest group).

Linda with Howie & Nora Glover, fellow SKPs and RVillage Vegan RVers.

I spent most of the day capturing images of the event. We then attended the Xscapers launch party at Technomadia’s bus where I got some additional photos. We wandered over to Thurber Hall around 6:30 PM to catch the pre-entertainment slide show, much of which was built using photos I shot the prior few days. The door prize drawings started at 7 PM. We did not win anything. Once the drawings were done The Mentalist was introduced and kicked off his performance. We stayed long enough for me to take a few photos and then went back to our rig. I off-loaded photos onto my computer and backed them up on our NAS, post-processed the ones I considered usable, and loaded them onto a thumb drive to give to Lou. It doesn’t sound like much, but it was a long, full day.

2015/03/10 (T) More Escapade

L-2-R: Val Petkus, Lora Newby, and Linda. Have you noticed that Linda always seems to be having a good time at the Escapade?

Today started with “Donuts for CARE.” CARE (Continuing Assistance for Retired Escapees) is the Escapees RV Club subsidiary that provides assisted care for club members at Rainbow’s End in Livingston, Texas. One morning during each Escapade donuts are made available for a donation rather than a fixed price. Up until today the largest amount donated for a donut was $500 but this morning someone (a vendor) presented the Executive Director of CARE with a check for $2,000!

The rest of the day followed the same pattern as yesterday with the five seminar rooms busy every session, the Ladies Luncheon, line dancing, music jamming, vendors selling, socials, and entertainment. We attended the SKP Freethinker BOF social at the rig of fellow photographer Bill McGrath and his wife Anna. It was a smaller gathering than the previous day and we missed the Boomers social, which apparently had 150 people in attendance. As with so much in life, it was just a matter of timing.

L-w-R: Melanie Carr, Marianne Edwards and Randy Sturrock ( of Boondockers Welcome), and Linda.

There was no entertainment this evening so I took pictures of the cards and games activity and the music jam. Big RV rallies, including Escapades, are exciting but intense experiences. An evening without major activities gives attendees an opportunity to go out to dinner or just relax with a few friends.

2015/03/11 (W) Free Day

Today was “free” day at the Escapade. Not for me, of course, I had to work harder than ever. No, today was “free public admission” day, and the public came in droves. By one count 700 people took advantage of the opportunity to check out what was going on at the Pima County Fairgrounds.

For the photographers it meant more crowded venues but also the opportunity to get more photos of crowds of people. Otherwise it was business as usual except for the “row party.” From 10 AM to 1 PM all of the Chapters, BOFs, and CO-OPs put extra effort into staffing their tables and talking to attendees about their group.

The attendees at the Xscapers Social (except me, of course).

4:30 PM brought another round of socials, including one for the new Xscapers club-within-the-club. It was well attended and I got lots of nice photos including one of the entire group of about 100 attendees.

The evening entertainment was the Ham-O-Rama, the amateur talent show that has been a feature of Escapade for many years. With 851 rigs and 1,400 people staying at the fairgrounds, plus additional attendees staying at other venues, there is always plenty of talent to form a show. Lou covered the event photographically and I went back to our rig to process my photos from the day.

Chris Guld (Geeks On Tour) and Linda with big smiles for the camera. Escapades tend to make people happy 🙂

2015/03/12 (R) RVillage Birthday

Today was the last day of the Escapade, sort of. Closing ceremonies were at 3 PM but there was still a lot going on before and after that, some of which had to be photographed. I spent much of the morning, however, processing photos.

The big daytime event was the Chili Cook-off. There were at least 18 entries including a vegan chili (yum) and a chocolate chili (which everyone claimed was incredibly good). Some were hot/spicy and some were not; something for every taste. Attendees got a small sample of any chili they wanted to try (until it ran out) and voted for their favorite(s) by putting money in a jar at each table. The jar with the most money was declared the winner, and all of the money raised went to the CARE program (Continuing Assistance for Retired Escapees).

Some of the attendees from the Xscapers Social gather for a sunset photo.

The closing ceremonies are always fun and touching. Attendees, volunteers, and staff (especially staff) are tired, but it’s a good kind of tired. It’s been an exciting, intense week and folks are ready to move on and slow down, but always with a bit of reluctance at parting company with old and new friends. Those who have worked to make the event happen get recognized, which is always appreciated.

After the closing ceremonies there were more socials. RVillage launched one year ago today and founder Curtis Coleman scheduled an RVillage get-together / Escapade social for 4:30 PM. We went to that one. It was well attended and he announced that the beta status had been removed from the website at midnight, a significant accomplishment for only one year of being online.

Some of the Xscapers looking to new horizons and the future of a new generation of full-time and extended-time RVers.

There was bingo and a farewell party at 7 PM (two separate events) and I photographed both activities. I spent the rest of the evening post-processing photos but turned in earlier than normal as Lou had planned a SKP Photographers BOF photo outing for tomorrow.

A panorama of the sunset. This is what we saw out the windshields of our bus.

2015/01/18 (N) The Desert Bar

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Today was divided into several distinct pieces. At 8:30 AM we connected Linda’s iPad to our Verizon MiFi and Facetimed with our son, daughter-in-law, and grand-daughter. At 25 months her vocabulary is developing quickly and she recognizes us on the iPad as Grandma Linda and Grandpa Bruce.

The Nellie E. Saloon at The Desert Bar outside Parker, AZ.

When we concluded the call I made a quick run over to the Quartzsite Market Place to touch base with Gary Hatt and the folks at the Eagles International bus rally and the FMCA Western GM Bus Chapter rally. I returned to pick up Linda and we chatted briefly with Jim Guld of Geeks On Tour. He and Chris are staying at our encampment for at least this week.

Linda at The Desert Bar, upper level.

We headed up AZ-95 to Plomosa Road and headed east into the BLM camping area to pick up Mara. She is camped with the WINs (Wandering Individuals Network) but we drove past their camp and she flagged us down on the return. We got a brief tour of her Fleetwood Bounder and then headed for the Desert Bar. It was over 40 miles to get there with the last five on a primitive road that is not regularly maintained. It was very rough in places but our Honda Element had enough ground clearance to handle it and 4-wheel drive was not needed. It was, however, a slow drive. There is also a network of rougher trails that ATVs use to get to the bar.

The lower level of The Desert Bar. Lots of people for a Sunday afternoon.

One of the buildings that makes up The Desert Bar is the Nellie E. Saloon. It is named after the mine that operated there at one time. The bar began very humbly in 1983 and has grown considerably since that time. It is the quintessential “let’s build it and see if they come” venture. And come they did. It is completely off-grid and powered mostly by solar energy, although we did see a propane tank which we presumed fuels the cooking grills. Hours are weekends (Sat and Sun) noon to 6 PM from the first weekend in October to the last weekend in April. We got there a little before it opened but there were already people there and by 1 PM there were at least 200 people milling around and eating and the live band started playing. It was an older but active crowd, reflective of what we generally see around Quartzsite. The Desert Bar has moved beyond famous and is now legendary.

Linda with our friend, Mara, at The Desert Bar.

The beer was canned but cold and fairly priced, especially considering the location. We had veggie burgers that were tasty and cost $3.50 each. We shared an order of garlic fries with Mara and they were excellent. There were lots of other choices on the menu as well, so of which we could have had. As we were getting ready to leave we spotted riders on horseback coming up the road so we stuck around long enough to photograph their arrival. These were the original, 1 HP, ATVs of the American west. We had a great time there and it was certainly a unique place and experience for us.

The dance floor at The Desert Bar.

We left at 2 PM, stopped at the Wal-Mart in Parker, and got back to our rig at 3:30 PM. I dropped Linda off and headed over to Lloyd DeGerald’s place. Verda was there but Lloyd had their credit card machine with him so I said I would come back tomorrow morning to buy the Webasto flame detector photocell. I then headed back to the Eagles International and Western GM bus rallies to grab some general bus photos.

Linda and Mara enjoying the vibe at The Desert Bar.

Gary and I touched base with Buck Bolding to get squared away with arrangements to photograph his Eagle later in the week. We also walked over to the Western GM rally and made arrangements with Larry Hall to photograph his bus on Tuesday morning.

Byron Pigg and his wife Betty had straightened up their 1985 model 15 Eagle so I spent some time photographing the interior. The rally was having a pot luck (carry in) meal at 4:30 PM and invited me to stay so I had some plain spaghetti and green salad. While I was there I met Rico and Monica, a couple from Europe that have spent four months each winter for the last 15 years traveling around the world in a decommissioned Swiss military truck with a large trailer behind it. Rico drives buses in Europe for a living and works enough hours in eight months to earn his full year’s pay, which gets paid out to him once a month all year long and making it convenient to fund their annual travels. Gary and I chatted with folks until it was dark and I finally left to go back to my coach.

Patrons arrive at The Desert Bar on the original, 1 HP, ATV.

BCM publisher Gary Hatt (L) at the Eagles International bus rally at the Quartzsite Market Place drycamp area.

I spent the rest of the evening copying photographs from my camera to my computer and working on this blog post. Somewhere in all of that I got a phone call from Lou Petkus of the SKP photographers BOF and we figured out a time/place to meet.

Sunset over ‘Q’ Mountain from the Eagles International bus rally site.

2014/07/01 (T) July And Counting

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Well, here it is the 1st day of July, the beginning of another month, and things are just not getting checked off of the “to do” list as fast as I would like. It finally felt like summer yesterday, and the heat and humidity erupted into severe thunderstorms overnight. We had the house partially opened up when we went to bed with a couple of fans going in the bedroom, but I still heard the sirens when they were activated around 2:15 AM and I woke up enough to see the first flashes of lightning. I got up and closed all of the open windows and then checked the weather on my iPad.

A storm front, which ran the most of the length of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, was pushing east producing severe thunderstorms with up to 70 MPH winds and 1 inch diameter hail. The storms pushed through our location between 2:45 and 3:15 AM. There was plenty of lightning and thunder, and the trees whipped around quite a bit, but the rain was only moderate and I did not hear any hail. By 3:30 AM the front had moved east of us and I was able to go back to sleep.

I would have liked to sleep in this morning, but I got up around 7:00 AM to make sure I was ready for the landscapers when they arrived between 8:00 and 8:30 AM. They didn’t, and with the rain last night it’s anybody’s guess if/when they will arrive. We moved the bus yesterday evening in anticipation of the landscapers being here early. It was also very warm yesterday, which was easier on the engine when starting it. I had not started the bus since we got back from the GLAMARAMA rally and with the humid conditions of the last couple weeks the auxiliary air tank had a LOT of water in it. After I backed it up, with Linda acting as spotter, I lowered the suspension all the way down and turned off the auxiliary air compressor. I will leave it off until I get the aux air water separator/filter replaced. That’s one of the projects that is not getting checked off of my list as I am waiting for the landscaping to be done first. Why? Because once I open the air lines the bus cannot be moved until I get everything put back together. No air, no brakes and no suspension.

I uploaded the blog posts for the last three days including a gallery post of the photos from Saturday. I then spent some time researching alternative ways to display photos in a WordPress website/blog. The native Gallery feature of WordPress is very easy to use, but is not very sophisticated when it comes to viewing the images. The WordPress Jetpack includes a Carousel feature that sounded like it might be what I need. The Jetpack makes a large collection of features available to self-hosted WordPress sites that were previously only available to sites hosted on WordPress.com. My hesitation with the Jetpack is that I don’t need, and do not plan to use, most of its features so it potentially complicates my control panels without corresponding benefit.

Linda went to the local Salvation Army resale store in search of a highchair to keep at the house for Madeline. They did not have any, so she tried Walmart and Target and found one she liked at Target. She stopped at 5th/3rd Bank to make a deposit for our FMCA Great Lakes Converted Coaches chapter (GLCC) and while she was there she set up the account so she can get online statements. Our chapter has done its banking with 5th/3rd for a while and does not pay any fees for the account. She inquired as to the requirements for a free account and was told that the organization had to have 501(c)3 status (IRS non-profit entity). We were looking at the IRS 501(c)7 status for the SKP Photographers BOF, which is for “social clubs,” but we will have to set it up as a 501(c)3 if we want free checking.

The landscaping crew arrived just after lunch, followed by a truck that dumped a load of very large boulders in the yard just west of the driveway. A little while later another truck showed up and unloaded the nine pre-cast concrete steps for the front stairs. They are 46″ W x 19″ D x 7″ thick and very heavy. Steve showed up a little while later with his excavator, a Kobelco sk35sr-3. He unloaded it and drove it around back to do some excavating. He then used it to select some of the largest boulders and place them on the trailer so he could haul them to the back. He used the excavator to unload them and roll them down the hill to where he needed them. Steve needed the excavator on another job so he loaded it back on the trailer and left. He came back at 9:20 PM, unloaded the excavator and used it to place a few very large boulders onto the lower shelves on either side of the walkout. He quit at 11 PM and left the machine here so he could get an early start tomorrow morning and continue placing boulders so his crew would have work they could do when they showed up.

Pre-cast concrete steps for front porch.

Boulders for the retaining walls behind the house.

2014/05/15 (R) Base Leg

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As a private pilot of a small airplane there is a standard way to approach an airport that does not have air traffic controllers directing the flow of aircraft to/from the runway(s) and surrounding air space. That standard way is called “the pattern” and when landing one must enter and follow the pattern correctly. The pattern will be clockwise (right hand turns) or counterclockwise (left hand turns) and involves segment called “legs.” Standard radio frequencies may let you know which runway and pattern are currently in use.

The pattern is usually entered on the “downwind leg” which is parallel to the runway with the wind coming from behind (tailwind) as much as possible. You generally enter this leg at a specified altitude above the runway elevation and then start to descend. How far you need to be from the runway is partially determined by your airspeed, but when I flew I would typically be a quarter to a half mile away. As you pass the end of the runway you continue descending on the downwind leg for another 1/4 to 1/2 mile and then turn 90 degrees towards the runway.

This was our way out of the Elkhart Co. 4-H Fairgrounds horse track infield. Not gonna happen.

As you complete the turn you are now traveling perpendicular to the centerline of the runway on what is known as the “base leg” where you continue to descend. On the base leg you often have a crosswind trying to blow you sideways off of your intended path and have to correct for that. As you approach the centerline of the runway you again turn 90 degrees towards the runway, timing your turn so that you are lined up with the centerline as you complete your turn.

You are now on “final approach” and descending at a rate that puts you very close to the ground as you cross the end of the runway. On final approach you are flying into the wind as much as possible, causing your ground speed (motion with respect to the earth) to be slower than your airspeed (motion with respect to the air mass you are flying through). This slower ground speed makes it easier to land, particularly on a short runway. Once you are over the runway you cut the engine power, bleed off more airspeed, and put the wheels on the ground.

Lou Petkus, head Escapade photographer, at the SKP Photographers BOF “row” table with Linda. My friend Kate designed the logo.

Landing an airplane is a complex task but all of the things you need to do become second nature with enough practice. You develop a “feel” for your aircraft and the ability to visually judge altitude, distance, and speed, or use instruments to know these things.

So what does that have to do with the Escapees RV Club Escapade? Not much, except that I have always liked analogies and today was the “base leg” of the event. Tomorrow we “turn on final” and land. Saturday is when we taxi from the runway back to our hangar. For other attendees it will be a “touch-and-go” in which the landing is immediately followed by the application of full power and the airplane is taken back into the air. Perhaps it will go around in the pattern and land again or it may vector off in some direction on a cross country trip. I could extend this analogy in other ways, but I’m not going to.

Linda at the SKP Ham BOF “row” table pretending to use the HF rig. We had a special event call sign (W9E) but not a good location for antennas.

It was cold and overcast with light rain this morning and the Escapade decided to stop running the golf carts into the infield where we are parked because they were getting stuck in the mud. (Golf carts are not off road vehicles.) That meant we had to walk through the mud and puddles (small lakes, really), drive our car, or stay put in our coach. I checked-in to the 7:30 AM ham radio 2 meter net and then put on a pot of coffee.

We wanted to hear Nick Russell’s seminar at 10 AM so we drove over around 9:45. We gave a lift to one of our fellow infield campers who was struggling through the bad conditions using a cane. After Nick’s talk we were heading to the hospitality area when I got a call from Curtis Coleman, founder/CEO of RVillage, inviting us to his rig for a chat. We spent an hour with him and Patty (village tart) and his dog, Augie, who was very cute and friendly. The central focus of our conversation was FMCA and how to get the leadership to understand what RVillage is, and how an FMCA/RVillage relationship is a win-win situation. I have been appointed to the FMCA National Education Committee, which is charged with examining this issue and making recommendations to the national executive committee and that is why Curtis and I have been trying to arrange a conversation for awhile.

Curtis had an online business meeting to attend so we made our exit and headed over to the Geeks On Tour seminar on The Cloud. In many respects the “cloud” is just another name for the Internet, with a subtle but important distinction. In the past our interaction with the Internet (World Wide Web) was conscious, intentional, explicit, and initiated/controlled by us. We typed in web addresses and navigated websites. With the Cloud, much of the interaction with the Internet has been moved into “apps” that automatically move our data around and make it accessible from multiple devices from anywhere in the world with an Internet connection. Take a picture on your smartphone and it shows up on your laptop and tablet. Click, click and it’s in your latest blog post which shows up in a subscriber’s aggregator/reader. It’s not magic, but it seems like it at times.

L-2-R Cherie and Chris of Technomadia and Curtis, founder/CEO of RVillage.

We went back to our rig and Linda prepared fresh grapes to take to the RVillage social at 4:30 PM. We had a good turn out with about 90 people in attendance. Many of them were already RVillage members, but some were not. Just prior to the social there were 39 RVillage “members” “checked-in” to the 54th Escapade, although some of them, like us, were couples. Everyone brought a snack, hors d’oeuvres, or beverage to share. We mingled for a while and then Curtis connected his computer to the projector and grabbed the microphone. He spoke at length and his vision, enthusiasm, and passion for this project was obvious. Even those of us who are active on RVillage learned something.

After the social we moved the car over by Lou and Val’s 5th Wheel, which is parked near the Assembly Hall. We watched the slide show and were pleased to see that quite a few of our images had been used. We did not win a door prize, and left before the Ham-O-Rama talent show began. Lou was there so I did not need to stay and take pictures. Since he was taking photos I gave Val the Compact Flash card from my camera so Lou could transfer the photos to his computer after the talent show. We then returned to our rig.

As the sun sank low in the western sky I photographed the infield of the horse track where we are parked. The fairground is placing large quantities of gravel to try and repair the rutted, muddy mess that has developed as a result of the rains this past week and vehicle traffic going in and out of the infield. The fairgrounds and Escapade management worked out a deal whereby we have been asked not to move our rigs until Sunday in exchange for a free night’s stay Saturday night. We have been towed out of two other fairgrounds in the past, and would rather not repeat that experience if it can be avoided, so we will be staying until Sunday. We would like to get out then as we have company coming for dinner Sunday night, but if not we will stay until we can.

I worked with Butch via telephone to get them set up on RVillage. Even though they are parked next to us, we were both comfortably situated in our own buses for the evening and did not want to go back outside. The high temperature today was around 50 degrees F and dropped quickly as the sun set. With a strong wind from the north the wind chill was even lower.

2014/05/13 (T) A Full Day

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The Escapees RV Club Escapade started yesterday afternoon and ends on Friday afternoon, so Wednesday evening is the middle of the event. Many attendees arrived on Sunday, and many others, including us, on Saturday. Most of the event staff, and many of the volunteers, arrived even before that so today probably felt like we were well into the event even though it just started yesterday.

Curtis Coleman, RVillage Founder and CEO.

Yesterday we crossed paths briefly with Curtis Coleman, the founder and CEO of RVillage, at one of the seminars. Although I had communicated with him in the past via RVillage messaging, e-mail, and telephone, it was the first time we had met in person. We were all on our way to somewhere else and agreed to meet up at the Paul Evert’s RV Country social at 4:00 PM.

Linda and I continued our work as volunteer event photographers while also trying to attend a couple of seminars that interested us. Kelly Hogan, founder/president of WiFi Ranger, gave an excellent talk on mobile connectivity. Chris and Jim Guld, better known as the Geeks On Tour, did a nice overview of technology tools for travelers.

Chris and Jim Guld, the Geeks On Tour, presenting a seminar.

We take a stroll through the vendor area and ordered a new regen tube and end caps for our portable water softener. We bought the softener from A-1 Water Treatment of Michigan at one of the RV rallies in Gillette, Wyoming last summer. The owner sold A-1 but retained the portable RV softener business and now operates as RV-Water-Treatment.

Nick and Terry Russell of the Gypsy Journal in the vendor booth.

We had hoped to meet up with Curtis at the Paul Evert’s RV Country social at 4:00 PM, but we had to leave for the Photography BOF social before he arrived. BOF stands for “Birds Of a Feather,” the name the Escapees RV Club uses for special interest groups. BOFs are distinct from Chapters which are geographic in scope. We had a dozen folks show up for the Photography social. Most of us had never met, so we spent some time sharing our photography background and interests. By the time the social ended the weather had turned.

The gathering storm. It’s been strange weather lately.

Dinner? What’s that? We went early to the evening entertainment to see the slide show Lou had put together from our previous day’s effort. Once again we failed to win a door prize. The Homestead Pickers, a bluegrass trio, gave an excellent, high energy performance. Linda wasn’t feeling quite right and left early. I stopped at Lou and Val’s 5th Wheel after the concert so Lou could transfer my photos from today to his computer for inclusion in an upcoming slide show. It doesn’t sound like much, but it was a long, full day.

The Homestead PIckers in concert.

2014/05/11 (N) A Pre-Game Show

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Linda received Mother’s Day wishes this morning from our daughter and son. Modern communications technology has certainly changed the RV experience, making it possible to stay in contact with family and friends, and even work or conduct business from the road. The Elkhart County 4-H Fairground has WiFi and the WiFi Ranger Company is sponsoring WiFi connectivity and the WiFi Cafe during Escapade. Our friends were having difficulty staying connected from inside their metal hulled bus, but we found and locked onto a strong signal using our WiFi Ranger Mobile Ti and shared it with them.

Panorama of the Elkhart County 4-H Fairgrounds.

Today was still early arrival–the Escapade doesn’t officially start until tomorrow–but many rigs were already here and more arrived during the day. For a rally that had not yet started there was a lot of activity. Escapees runs a very popular “RVers Boot Camp” as a pre-rally before every Escapade. They also have their SmartWeigh program set up to weigh vehicles. The Geeks On Tour (Jim and Chris Guld) were also running pre-rally workshops on technologies for travelers, including Windows 8, cell phones, Picasa, and blogging. Yesterday and today were big setup days for the vendors and Escapade volunteers were busy setting up the registration area, seminar rooms, and other venues.

I got a call from Lou Petkus (K9LU) regarding photography during the Escapade. Linda and I had previously volunteered to be part of an official SKP Photographers BOF Escapade photography team. He picked us up in a golf cart around 9:00 AM and we drove back to Building A to meet up with Sue Spahn, the forth member of our team. Since the advent of digital photography, Escapade has featured a slide show of the previous day’s events just ahead of the evening announcements, door prizes, and entertainment. Kathy Carr, Escapees RV Club president, and her daughter-in-law, Angie Carr, have handled this in the past, but asked the SKP Photographers BOF if they would take responsibility for it this year. It was fortuitous that the BOF agreed to do this as Kathy and Bud had to return to Texas for medical reasons. Kay Peterson, SKP founder and SKP #1, returned to Texas with them.

Molly Pinner (Escapade Director) and Lou Petkus (head photographer).

The photography team met for about an hour, looked at the schedule of events for the week, and discussed the kind of photos we were after and the logistics of covering all of the activities and still having some time to participate. Head and shoulders shots of smiling people were at the top of the list, of course. We each got a flash drive to use for transferring our photos each day to Lou whose job it would be to assemble the daily slide show.

Registration opened at 10:00 AM so we took care of that and picked up our 54th Escapade polo shirts we had pre-ordered. I got a few photos of the Registration area/process, coffee/donut area, and Escapade banners in the WiFi Cafe. Kelly Hogan, the president of WiFi Ranger, had his magnificent Class D motorhome and matching communications trailer parked just outside the building and we were able to chat with him briefly to thank him personally for figuring out how to get our WFR-MTi working with the Williston Crossings RV Resort WiFi system this past winter.

There were signs of spring at the fairgrounds.

Linda headed back to our coach to start working on a project with Butch and Fonda while I stopped at the AG building to take a few photos of the Geeks On Tour in action. I also stopped by the RVers boot camp for some photos and then climbed the grandstand to take a panorama of the fairgrounds. Back at our rig I shot another panorama of our row and then settled in to work on Butch and Fonda’s project until we had to meet with Lou again at 3:30 PM. We found Lou and Val’s rig and then drove over to Sue’s rig in Lou’s golf cart. While we were there Lou got Wayne to take a picture of the photography team.

We decided to go to dinner with Lou and Val and headed back down US-33 looking for Culver’s. Linda and I were able to get nice salads there and split some French fries. Lou started to drive us back to our site but we kept stopping for photo ops. One of those opportunities was the Vendor pizza party/social. We got our photos and visited briefly with folks we knew like Chris Guld of Geeks On Tour, Nick/Terry Russell of The Gypsy Journal, and Charles/Chris Yust of C &’C Marketing (our RV insurance agents). Escapade directors Bob and Molly Pinner were there along with some other vendors that we recognized. Molly invited us to stay, which we appreciated, but we are not RV vendors and this was their social.

Terry Russell, Chris Guld, and Nick Russell at the vendor/speaker social.

The RV vendors are their own little community (sub-culture) within the larger community/sub-culture of RVing. Many (most?) of them are full-time RVers who make their living traveling the RV rally and show circuits selling their goods and services. As such they share experiences and perspectives that are different from those of us who just attend rallies and shows, especially those of us who are retired. They are often at the same events and, even when they are competitors, frequently become good friends.

Wallce Lewis (Escapade Assistant Director), Dortha Hall (Escapade Coordinator), and Jim Guld (speaker) at the vendor/speaker social.

We finally got back to our coach where I downloaded photos from our Sony alpha 100 SLR camera to my laptop computer while Linda downloaded photos from her Samsung Galaxy S III smartphone to her laptop computer and then onto her SKP flash drive. I used Microsoft Image Composite Editor (ICE) to process the two panoramas I had photographed and then transferred everything to my SKP supplied flash drive. We walked over to Lou and Val’s 5th wheel and visited for a while as Lou downloaded the photos from the flash drives and took a quick look at them.

We decided to take the long way back to our coach by walking through some of the campground areas we had not yet visited. Thick clouds had moved in and the skies to the west were getting ominously dark. Several people stopped us to let us know that possibly severe storms were headed our way portending damaging hail and wind gusts of 70 MPH. We shortened our walk and headed back to our rig where we found Butch outside talking on his cell phone. We put up the two awnings we had down for sun shade and stowed our chairs and end table. High wind and awnings don’t mix well. Butch and I chatted until the mosquitoes got bad and then retreated to our respective buses for the evening.

Panorama of EC4HFG horse track infield parking area.

It got into the low 80’s today and the humidity was up with the approaching weather, so the coach interior was in the upper 80’s. We were watching the approaching storms on our weather apps and the weather/radar sub-channel out of Ft. Wayne, Indiana. It was a fairly aggressive system but showed signs of dividing and going around us to the north and south. The rain eventually started, forcing us to close our ceiling vents and narrow our window openings. Serious lightning developed and the rain intensified to the point where we had to close the large entrance door window and reduce the awning window openings to about an inch. With a forecast of continued rain overnight and a low of only 65 degrees F we knew it would not be the best night for sleeping. Still, I love storms and enjoyed seeing/hearing nature’s power while I worked on blog posts for yesterday and today.

2014/04/08 (T) End Of XP

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Today marked the official end of support for Microsoft’s Windows XP operating system, and with it the end of an era. Windows XP has been around for 12+ years, and one estimate is that it is still used on 30% of the Windows PCs worldwide. That’s a lot of computers, but my techy friends have pointed out to me that it is simply obsolete and, as Microsoft has stated officially, it’s time for them to stop putting band-aids on it and devote their resources to their current generation of OS and development of new ones. Somewhat ironically, I received notification that updates were available and one of them was a security update for Windows XP. A last hoorah? Perhaps support ends at midnight tonight, Pacific Daylight Time? I plan to get a new laptop when we get home, although I am not looking forward to the time required to set up a new machine and learn to use it. I’m very impressed with the quality of Linda’s Samsung and am waiting to see what new products they unveil this month.

We kept the coach closed up and ran two air conditioners overnight because of the elevated humidity and forecasted rain. It was cool enough (not really) but stuffy compared to what we have been used to for the last four weeks, and the bedroom A/C is noisy, so we prefer not to run it unless we have to. The rain started around 7:15 AM. We were cozy inside our rig and had our usual coffee and juice to start the day. We decided to have toast with jam and fresh fruit instead of our usual cereal. I put my rain coat on at 8:30 AM and made the short walk to Suncoast Designer’s office to fill out some paperwork.

Our “site” at Suncoast Designer’s in Hudson, FL.

It continued to rain through the morning, becoming heavy at times. Jim came out from the shop during a lull in the precipitation to see which windows we wanted repaired and mark them with tape. The rain put them behind schedule and they were not able to remove our windows today. I told them that we did not have to leave by any date certain, and we were OK with being here through the weekend if needed. It is much more important that they repair these windows correctly than it is that they do them quickly.

Several rigs at Suncoast Designer’s with windows removed and openings covered.

I also asked if they would allow me to do a story for Bus Conversions Magazine [ http://www.busconversion.com ] and was told to check with the general manager, Jeff. I took “before” photos of our windows and of a couple of the workers removing windows from other rigs and covering the openings. What I want to do is follow our windows through the whole repair process as much as possible. I will talk to Jeff tomorrow.

DS front awning window in our bus; badly fogged and etched inside.

By the close of business they had 20 RVs on site; 14 motorhomes and two 5th wheels in the sites with hookups, one motorhome off to the side, and three motorhomes dry camped in the back lot. Suncoast Designer’s is a busy place.

With so many other rigs here, most of them occupied, and with good area lighting and video surveillance cameras, we felt that the coach was perfectly safe if we left for a while and decided to explore the area south of here by car. We drove down Little Road as far as FL-52 and then headed west to New Port Ritchey. We found the old downtown area (along Main Street, of course) and looped through it. It was not super upscale, like Venice, but it was nice. We like the look and feel of these kinds of downtown areas. We worked our way back to US-19 and headed north back to Hudson. The drive down Little Road and through New Port Ritchey was nice. US-19 is an endless strip mall with a 6 – 10 lane divided highway running down its middle with lots of construction. It is not the sort of place to drive for fun, and most of the shopping areas did not make us want to stop and spend money.

When we got back to the coach the air temperature had dropped and the sun was mostly obscured by clouds. The relative humidity was still relatively high, but we decided to turn the A/C units off, and open some windows and the ceiling vents. For dinner Linda made a curry and garlic dish with red lentils, butternut squash, and spinach. We finished the bottle of Barefoot Moscato we opened on Sunday and I found that the sweetness provided a nice counterpoint to the food.

SKP Photographers BOF logo. Design by Kate de Fuccio.

My good friend and colleague from Wayne RESA, Kate de Fuccio, designed a logo for the SKP Photographers BOF so I would have something to upload to the RVillage Escapees BOF – Photographers group page. I also e-mailed it to the Escapees RV Club and they are adding it to the BOF listing on their website. Kate does great work. Thanks Kate!

Chris from Geeks on Tour posted on the RVillage Bloggers group in the WordPress Plug-ins topic about a plug-in named Wordfence Security (WS). The plug-in provides a variety of functions. It performs a daily scan of a WordPress installation and compares the installed files to the versions in the “official” WordPress library. It also looks for malware and other nasties. It provides protection against repeated login attempts by hackers, and defends the site from denial of service (DOS) attracts and distributed DOS (DDOS) attacks. This last feature is particularly interesting. WS has been downloaded almost 1.5 million times. Using U. S. based cloud servers, if a DOS attack is detected on any WordPress site running WS, it protects all sites where WS is installed and active, preventing the DOS from becoming a DDOS. It also includes a caching system that can speed up WordPress sites by 30 – 50 times. It has many other features, but those were the highlights for me on first look.

I installed Wordfence Security on all four of the WordPress websites I am working on and ran a scan on this website. While I was at it, I installed the Imsanity plug-in on two of the three other sites (I had already installed it on this site and used it to bulk resize image files).

Bus Conversion Magazine publisher Gary Hall put a post on the BCM BBS/Forum about the April 2014 issue of the magazine and e-mailed those of us who had articles in the issue. I adapted part of his post and posted it to appropriate topics in three different RVillage groups: Bus Conversions; FMCA GLCC; and Converted Coach Owners (CCO). I also posted it on our home page. I think that means the 32 people with whom we have Friend connections will see it on their home page. I could not post it, however, on the BCM Fan Club group because the forum feature is not enabled.

2014/03/28 (F) Singing In The Rain

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Here’s a synopsis of our day in list form:

Fresh ground Ethiopian Yirgacheffe 1/2 -1/2 coffee from Teeko’s in Howell, MI Read blog posts on Feedly
Breakfast: Homemade granola
Shopping: Winn-Dixie, ACE Hardware, and CVS Counted cross-stitch Dump and flush black water tank Dump grey water tank Fill fresh water tank Mix tank treatment solution and add to waste tanks
Lunch: Chickpea salad
RVillage website and e-mail (SKP BoF – Photographers and SKP BOF – HFH) Visit Lazydays RV display at WCRVR
Dinner: Kale with cannellini beans, macaroni, onions, garlic and hot pepper flakes
A small group gathers at the WCRVR fire pit (Forecasted rain keeps the crowd small) John “Smitty” Smith plays guitar and sings (He does a lot of Peter, Paul, and Mary songs this evening, and we all sing along)
7:00 PM tropical deluge begins; John sings anyway (The small group pulls the rocking chairs in to hear Smitty and avoid the rain)
We stay at the fire pit until almost 11PM.
The Fan-Tastic vent fan in the bedroom ceiling is NOT leaking. Score!
Upload blog post for Mar 26 while Linda reads Sleep to the ever-present sound of rain on the roof of coach.

As the saying goes “just another day in paradise.”

2013_10_14 (M) The Cherohala Skyway

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(Photos at the end)

Today was day 1 of 4+ for our SKP Photographers BOF mini-rally and digital photography workshop. In the morning we got introduced to each other and then spent a couple of hours going over photography basics, with an emphasis on how digital SLRs deal with some of these issues through their available camera settings, and with a preview of the topic of image post-processing software and techniques. We wrapped up with a discussion of our afternoon/evening field trip and then broke for lunch around 11:15 AM.

We reconvened at 12:15 PM in our cars and headed out caravan style. We had four vehicles. Lou and Val Petkus took the “wagonmaster” (lead) position since they knew where we going. Linda and I took the “tailgunner” position (last in line) as we had a 2m amateur radio installed in the car and Lou had one installed in theirs. The other two cars had Family Radio Service (FRS) radios, but Linda and I did not, and Lou and Val left theirs at home. It allowed me to communicate to Lou if one of the intermediate vehicles signaled a need to pull over. I also allowed me to stay in touch with Lou in case we got separated, which in fact we did going through Maryville, TN. As with Knoxville the other day, the route appeared clear enough and easy enough on the map but we got separated from the group at a stop light and then missed a turn. We caught up with them shortly thereafter at a Pilot gas station. I don’t know why, but I have come to the conclusion that we apparently have difficulty reading highway signs in Tennessee.

Our destination was the Cherohala Skyway, which runs through the large tract of national forests immediately south of Smoky Mountain National Park. SMNP was where Lou originally planned for us to go on photo outings, which is why we are in an RV park 5 minutes from Cades Cove. Since SMNP remains closed due the idiocy of the United States Congress, Lou had to find alternative locations.

Although the eastern terminus of the Cherohala Skyway at Tellico Plains, Tennessee was 90 minutes from our encampment, it was a great choice for landscapes and worth the drive. It crosses the Appalachian Mountains into North Carolina, cresting at 5,300 ft. ASL before dropping back down below 2000 ft. ASL and ending at Robbinsville. The highest points are in North Carolina. We drove past them, but not all the way to Robbinsville, and then came back to Big Junction at 5,200 ft. ASL with a great view looking southwest across ridge after receding ridge of mountains and valleys.

We got there around 6 PM, got our cameras set up (on tripods with shutter releases, of course) and then had the “sack dinners” we brought along. We started looking for photo ops around 6:30 PM and were actively shooting from 6:45 until about 7:30 PM. Sunsets are not an easy subject, and you never know how they are going to progress. One of the mistakes a lot of people make is to quit shooting before it’s really over. The best shots often come a little time after you think there isn’t anything else to photograph.

We wrapped up at Big Junction around 8 PM and drove back to Townsend, TN in the dark, arriving at the Tremont Outdoor Resort a little before 10 PM.

Cherohala Skyway.

Big Junction, Cherohala Skyway.

Cherohala Skyway.

Big Junction, Cherohala Skyway (in NC looking west towards TN).

Big Junction, Cherohala Skyway.

Setting sun from Big Junction overlook, Cherohala Skyway.

The final glow. Big Junction, Cherohala Skyway.

2013_09_05 (Thu) A Picture Perfect Day

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Today was a picture perfect day in more ways than one. We are in the middle of one of those weather spells that makes Michigan the perfect place to be; highs approaching 70, lows around 50, light breezes, and clear, blue skies. It was also the day we decided to start putting paintings and photographs back up on the walls of our new-to-us house. It’s an easy job to put off because it is slightly tedious work requiring careful measuring, trips up and down ladders, putting pencil marks on walls we paid someone to patch and paint just 7 months ago, poking holes in them with screws and nails, getting the piece actually hung, and hoping it ended up were you intended for it to be. We got 13 paintings hung, and a number of others positioned where we think they are going to hang. Not only does it make the house start to feel a lot more like home, it finally started clearing the art clutter out of the library, opening up the possibility of finishing other unpacking and shelving projects that the stacked artwork was blocking.

Today was also a day for delving a little deeper into digital image processing software. Although our website only has a few pages, and I have only been doing this blog since early June (2013), I was surprised to find out from Scott at QTH.com that our WordPress installation had already expanded to 1 Gb of disk space. While I don’t necessarily consider 1 Gb to be a lot of data, web-hosting companies do keep an eye how much resource you use, and will put caps on it and/or raise the monthly price. Any company that tells you they will give you unlimited everything for $2 /month is probably practicing the virtual reality version of bait-and-switch. Getting to that level in only 2 months seemed to indicate that I needed to do something different going forward, besides simply paying for more disk space.

The culprit, of course, was all of the photographs I have uploaded as part of the blog entries. I tend to shoot high resolution JPEGs, as they are usable for a variety of things just as they come from the camera. The images are 3,872 x 2,592 pixels (10 Mpixel sensor) and roughly 10 Mb files in raw mode. The JPEG files are typically between 2.5 – 3.5 Mb each. That’s a substantial compression compared to raw format, but 300 of those and you’ve got yourself a gigabyte of photo data. Hmmm, that sounds familiar. While 300 photos may sound like a lot, it’s only five per day for two months. I haven’t gone back to check, but I would not be surprised if that is what I have averaged.

What I find interesting is that WordPress sizes these images to 300 x 200 pixels when I insert them into a blog. That’s a reduction factor of approximately 167, suggesting a file size of approximately 20 Kb. Kate de Fuccio, who I mentioned in a recent blog post, told me that she can click on the images in the blog and get the full resolution photos. But if my intent is to only make them big enough to view in the blog, it doesn’t serve any purpose to have the hi-res files available. So, what to do? Resize before uploading, of course. The two default Microsoft programs for manipulating images on a Windows XP Pro / Office 2007 platform are Microsoft Image Composer and Paint. They can do a lot of things, but resizing images easily (or at all) is not one of them.

Lou Petkus, K9LU, of the SKP Photographers BOF had mentioned at a BOF meeting back in July that he generally shoots in raw mode and uses a couple of different free programs for a variety of post-processing tasks. We are attending a SKP Photographers BOF photography workshop/rally in October, organized by Lou, and the schedule of events indicates that there will be a session on post-processing software for digital images. I contacted Lou to find out what programs he will be discussing and to ask about re-sizing my photos prior to uploading them to WordPress. The programs he will be discussing are Faststone Image Viewer and Photoscape. He suggested I use Faststone to re-size and then sharpen the images (in that order) before uploading them. I downloaded the programs successfully and have explored Faststone Image Viewer a little bit. I will see how well it works the next time I post images.

2013_07_04 (Thu) The Nation’s Birthday

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We attended an excellent seminar on Amateur (Ham) Radio and RVing put on by Tom Abernathy, W3TOM. Tom is an assistant division director for the ARRL and the current leader of the SKP Ham Radio BOF, as well the SKP coordinator for The Row. We returned to our coach to work for a bit and make our brown bag lunches for the SKP HAM Radio BOF gathering at noon.

The SKP HAM BOF brown bag lunch was well attended. Tom, W3TOM, shared some information with the group. One factoid I found interesting was that at larger SKP rallies, such as the Escapades, hams usually make up 8-10% of the attendees. This is probably a higher percentage than in the membership at large, and much higher than in the U. S. population, which has about 750,000 licensed amateur radio operators out of more than 300 million people. Tom had quite a few books to give out as door prizes, along with ARRL pens and HAM bumper/window stickers. We got a book on transmission lines and one on emergency communications.

We returned to the coach after lunch and worked until it was time to go to dinner. It was another warm day, and the humidity was up a bit as thunderstorms were forecast for later. By mid-afternoon we had stowed the awnings, closed up the coach, and turned on the air-conditioners.

The 35^th birthday celebration dinner was underwritten by Paul Everts RV. Dinner was preceded by recognition of all the staff, volunteers, and presenters who made the Escapade possible. There was a look back at 1978, the year the Escapees RV Club was formed. The two grand prize recipients were also drawn (we did not win). The prizes were a 16-day Adventure Caravan for two and the Rose Parade HOP (Head Out Program), also for two. Dinner was buffet style, and they got everyone through the lines very efficiently. The only thing we could eat for sure was the dinner rolls, so we each took two. We had some of the corn, although it may have been prepared with butter. The lack of a green salad was a bit disappointing, but we expect that our food choices will be limited in group meal settings such as this. Still, with the number of older RVers who obviously have health issues, it saddens us to see what they are served to eat, and how they gobble it up. Dancing followed the meal, with live music by the Rivoli Review, but we didn’t stay. I don’t dance, and we had heard enough of the Rivoli’s the other night to last us for a while.

We were (understandably) a bit hungry when we got back to our coach, so we had popcorn. Not the healthiest choice, I know, but quick and easy (and yummy).

The City of Gillette fireworks were scheduled for 10 PM at the CAM-PLEX. By the time we got back to our coach, unofficial fireworks were being set off all around us. As Boxelder is on higher ground, we had a good view in all directions. By 8 PM it was obvious we had thunderstorms moving into the area, with an impressive lightning show to the west around through the south to the southeast. The SKP Photographers BOF met at 9 PM in the southwest corner of Boxelder RV Park to assist members interested in photographing the fireworks. By 9:30 PM light rain was starting to fall and I headed back to the coach. I got there just before it started to rain in earnest, and shortly thereafter the main fireworks show began. Either the announced time was wrong or they pulled it forward because of the weather. Fortunately, we were parked so that we were able to watch the show from our living room window. It lasted over 30 minutes, during which time the rain steadily increased, but they got it in. We left the air-conditioners on as storms were forecast to continue through the overnight hours.

2013_06_30 (Sun) Happy Birthday

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Sunrise over Boxelder RV Park, CAM-PLEX, Gillette, WY

Sunrise over Boxelder RV Park, Gillette WY CAM-PLEX

Linda was up early this morning and went for a sunrise walk. Perhaps she was too excited to sleep because it was her birthday, but this is the 53^rd Escapade and the 35^th anniversary of the founding of the Escapees RV Club, so it could have been that. When she got back I brewed up some Jamaica Blue Mountain coffee (from Irene’s Beans in Milford, MI) and she opened her birthday present. Linda now has her first “cowgirl” shirt! She liked it so much that she made blueberry pancakes for breakfast with real, fresh blueberries and real Michigan maple syrup. (If you are thinking that I should have prepared breakfast for her, let me state that in the past I would have, and could have, done this but she is the resident WFPB culinary expert, and I have basically stayed out of the kitchen, and out of her way, since we started down this path two years ago.)

We got a call from our son who was checking on our house. Linda had asked him the day before to check our answering machine because it wouldn’t pick up when we called. It turned out that we didn’t have a dial tone, but our Internet connection appeared to be OK. He said there had been a lot of rain this past week, so that may be the reason. Our phone and data service come over the same wire, so I’m not sure that is the problem. We decided to wait a few days and see if it clears up. If not we will have to contact AT&T.

We had more coffee at 9 AM at the WiFi Cafe and more conversation with Charles Martin. We returned the defective Camco hose and got a replacement. Their analysis was that the metal sleeve had not been swaged properly which is why the barbed fitting did not stay in. While we were there we looked at the Camco Genturi genset exhaust stack. This is an auxiliary exhaust stack that fits on the end of the generator tailpipe and carries the generator exhaust up past the roof line of the RV. It’s made of 3” PVC in 4 foot sections, so it can be taken apart and stored. A tailpipe extension curves up into the base of the 3” pipe with room to draw in cooler air around it and creating a Venturi effect, thus the name of the product. This is a fairly easily duplicated design; the main reason to buy it is that you don’t have to source all the materials and make it yourself. The vertical pipe has to be supported somehow, and suction cups are one of the options. The vendor suggested getting large ones from Harbor Freight that are normally used for handling windshields and other large pieces of glass. If/when I build one of these, I would like to be able to hook it onto the gutter rail where the roof starts, but the large suction cups are an interesting idea, although I am not too keen on that idea with the new paint on the coach. Our Aqua-Hot exhaust exits out under the driver side of the coach right next to the generator exhaust, and I have considered building a double stack that hooks to both of these. In both cases, however, I have to be careful not to restrict the exhaust flow and create back pressure.

We walked through the vendor area again and talked to Sean at WiFi Ranger about the factory default reset we got when we turned the power off and back on. I also bought a roof mounting bracket for our WiFi Ranger Mobile. Linda bought a silicone cooking sheet for use in the microwave from RV SpaceSavers. We stopped and talked briefly to Nick & Terry Russell of The Gypsy Journal and gave Nick a copy of the February 2013 issue of Bus Conversion Magazine. Until a few years ago, Nick and Terry lived in an MCI bus that Terry had converted. (Nick is famous for not knowing how to use tools.) We talked to a vendor who provides mobile black/grey tank cleaning service, but deferred signing up. We also chatted with a satellite TV vendor who felt strongly that Direct TV was a far superior choice to Dish Network, especially if we were also going to use it at home. She confirmed that Moto-Sat had gone out of business and that RF Mogul was started by former Moto-Sat employees. We discussed the possibility of using a fully-automatic open style multiple-satellite dish on a tripod or other mount rather than having it attached to the roof. She seemed skeptical, but did not see any fundamental reason that it wouldn’t work. (In fact we have seen a lot of open style satellite TV dishes mounted on tripods or sitting on the ground, although most of them are manual dishes, not automatic.)

After our jaunt through the vendor area, we visited “The Row” to get our “bingo” sheet filled in but ended up talking to many of the chapter and C-BOF representatives. We finally met Steven Gullette from the HFH BOF, with whom we had exchanged many e-mails in the last few months. He will be one of the co-leaders on the build in Sheridan in a couple of weeks. We chatted with Lou Petkus, K9LU, and signed up for the newly formed SKP Photographers BOF (no charge). We also talked to the Elks BOF and found out that we can join the Gillette lodge while attending Escapade, so we took some information and an application form. The initiation is Friday evening.

We got back to the coach around 12:45 PM and grabbed a quick lunch before running some errands. We went back to the Boot Barn to exchange Linda’s new shirt for a different size, and had to join their “loyalty program” in order to do the exchange. The manager had to approve the exchange and was a bit surly. We will not be shopping there ever again. We also mailed an anniversary card to our son & daughter-in-law. Linda received a birthday call from her sister and a video birthday greeting from our son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter. In many respects, RV life is just like regular life.

We attended the opening / welcome ceremony at 3 PM and were delighted to see and hear from Kay Peterson, SKP #1. Dinner was leftover risotto with the rest of the Lawrence Elk black currant wine from Prairie Berry Winery, and both were excellent. I was sorry that they were both gone, but there’s more where they came from.

We went over to the Wyoming Center at 7 PM for the Door prize drawings followed by the Rivoli Review for the evening entertainment. They do a good show, with lots of energy and humor, although the patriotism was laid on fairly thick, and there were moments that were just plain jingoistic and inappropriate. Although many of the attendees were enthusiastic about their show, there were plenty of folks sitting on their hands who were clearly not so pleased.

The Phase Place

Welcome to the next phase (hosted by QTH.com)

Tag Archives: SKP Photographers BOF

2015/12/02 (W) Settling In

2015/10/06 (T) Trimming & Stripping

2015/05/01 (F) May Day

2015/04/26-30 (N-R) Routine Returns

20150411-15 (S-W) NM, TX, OK, AR, MO

2015/03/27-31 (F-T) Wrapping Up Arizona

2015/03/13 (F) Sonoran Desert Museum

2015/03/06-12 Escapade Images

2015/03/06-12 (F-R) Escapade 2015

2015/01/18 (N) The Desert Bar

2014/07/01 (T) July And Counting

2014/05/15 (R) Base Leg

2014/05/13 (T) A Full Day

2014/05/11 (N) A Pre-Game Show

2014/04/08 (T) End Of XP

2014/03/28 (F) Singing In The Rain

2013_10_14 (M) The Cherohala Skyway

2013_09_05 (Thu) A Picture Perfect Day

2013_07_04 (Thu) The Nation’s Birthday

2013_06_30 (Sun) Happy Birthday