Tag Archives: turbo boost gauge (H3-40)

2015/04/07-09 (T-R) North by Northwest

2015/04/07 (T) Space Nuts

Our friend and Alamogordo tour guide Bell Moore, points to her Gulf War service brick at the Alamogordo, NM Chamber of Commerce.

We have always been intrigued by outer space and the human desire to go there and learn about the universe so in that sense we probably qualify as “space nuts.” Indeed our first destination this morning, after picking up Bell at her house, was the New Mexico Space History Museum near the New Mexico State University Alamogordo campus at the northeast corner of town.

The museum sits on high ground at the base of much higher mountains and offered a commanding view of Alamogordo and the Tularosa Basin. The white sands of White Sands National Monument were clearly visible, including airborne gypsum sand blown into the air by the strong southwesterly winds. We examined the outside static displays which included remnants of a WWII German V-2 that was test-fired at the White Sands Proving Grounds after WWII, went off course, and crashed just southeast of the location of the present day museum. Alamogordo was much less developed then than it is now, but it was still very lucky that it did not land in a populated area.

Admission to the museum was $6 per person (senior rate) which was a fair price. We took the elevator to the 4th floor and then worked our way down using the ramps that connect the floors. As you might expect, the museum places special emphasis on the role of New Mexico in the development of missile technology and space flight, in particular Holloman Air Force Base and White Sands Missile Test Range (formerly White Sands Proving Grounds). The museum had an excellent collection of space and missile related artifacts with excellent explanatory signage. As with most good museums it would have taken a long day, or several shorter visits, to actually read everything.

A view towards Alamogordo from the outside display area at the New Mexico Space History Museum.

Even with the white gypsum sand blowing in the wind you can see great distances. It was thus odd to contemplate that the Trinity Site, which lies some 60 miles NW of the museum, might be visible from where we were standing. This is the place where the first nuclear bomb was exploded and the flash, followed by the mushroom cloud, must have been visible here in Alamogordo, and the sound surely must have been heard.

From the museum we headed north on US-54 towards Tularosa and stopped at the Eagle Ranch aka Heart of the Desert pistachio farm, processing facility, vineyard, and winery. We tasted a variety of pistachios and sampled five wines. Two of the wines appealed to us so we bought a couple of bottles of each. We also bought several bags of the green chile pistachio nut meats. We drove next door to check out McGinn’s Pistachio Farm and Winery and sampled more nuts, including some pecans. We only had a few minutes so we did not buy anything and headed back to Eagle Ranch for the 1:30 PM tour. The tour lasted 45 minutes and we gained some insight into how pistachios are pollinized, harvested, processed, and packaged. Pistachio trees are not pollinated by bees or insects but rather by the wind. Because of that pistachio plantations intersperse a mail (pollen producing) tree after every 8^th female (nut bearing) tree. The location of the male trees is offset in each subsequent row so the pollen as the maximum opportunity to find its way to all of the female trees.

The exhaust nozzle of a Saturn V rocket engine. It is more than wide enough for a person to stand up in it.

After the tour we finished the trip into Tularosa to have lunch at the Tulie Cafe. It turned out to be closed on Tuesdays, so we headed back to Casa de Suenos. Bell had a cheeseburger and we both had taco salads with beans instead of animal protein. Bell enjoyed her cheeseburger and the salads were good. The red and green salsas that came with the warm tortilla chips were excellent.

On the drive back we stopped at the Alamogordo Chamber of Commerce where there is a display recognizing all of the military personnel from the Alamogordo area who served in Desert Storm. Each person has a brick with their name and rank at the time of their service. Bell showed us her brick and I photographed it and took a picture of her pointing to it. We then spent a little time in the small museum before driving Bell back to her house. Considering that she did not know us very well when we arrived on Wednesday she was a gracious tour guide and enthusiastic ambassador for her home town.

An Army tactical missile and launcher at the New Mexico Space History Museum.

Back at our coach Linda called the Route 66 RV Park in Edgewood, New Mexico to verify that they were open and had spaces available. The answers were ‘yes’ and ‘yes’ so that is where we are headed tomorrow. Linda checked the weather forecast and there is a high wind warning out starting tomorrow afternoon and running into the overnight hours. In light of that information we decided we would leave first thing in the morning and try to get to our destination before the winds really kicked up. With that in mind we went ahead and hooked up the car. I then dumped the holding tanks and cleaned the bus windshields while Linda did a small load of laundry.

Although not fancy, Desert Paradise RV Park was an excellent place to stay and we would certainly stay here again. It is right off the main highway, but tucked behind some commercial buildings and very quiet. It is convenient to Alamogordo, Holloman AFB, White Sands National Monument, the White Sands Missile Test Range, and destinations in the mountains to the east that we did not visit. The RV sites are large with easy access, the clubhouse facilities are very nice, and the Wi-Fi was the fastest and most solid we have experienced all winter.

2015/04/08 (W) Moving North and West

Today was a travel day for us which meant we skipped breakfast and coffee. We only had a little over 220 miles to travel and would normally have targeted a 9 AM departure time. The weather forecast, however, was for very strong and gusty winds with a high wind warning starting at noon for the area where we would be traveling. The jet stream was responsible for the wind, having dipped far south over North America and dropped in altitude. We got up a little after 7 AM and pulled out of our site at the Desert Paradise RV Park at 8:14 AM.

The remains of a WWII German V2 rocket that was test-fired at White Sands Proving Grounds just after the war ended.

We took the US-54/US-70 Relief Route that bypasses most of Alamogordo just west of the city. The drive up US-54 through Carrizozo and on to Vaughn was scenic and uneventful, even with the occasional construction zone. We were traveling north to northeast so the winds out of the southwest were mostly on our tail and helped push us along. It also made for a much quieter ride than usual by reducing the net wind speed at our windshields.

Around 11 AM we picked up US-60/NM-285 in Vaughn and turned west. That is when we got the full brunt of the wind which seemed to be out of the west. Linda checked the weather for the area and it was showing sustained winds of 34 MPH out of WSW with gust higher. Driving the bus at 60 MPH into a 30+ MPH headwind is the same, in terms of wind resistance, as driving it 90 MPH through still air. The bus only has so much horsepower and was not able to sustain 70 MPH into this wind, not that I wanted to go that fast anyway. I found that both the bus and I did better if I left the transmission in 4th gear and set the cruise control at 55 MPH. Even with that configuration it was producing more power and higher exhaust gas temperatures than it would have without the headwind.

The view to the west from the 4th floor of the New Mexico Space History Museum. The “white sands” are visible on the horizon and blowing into the air.

NM-285 split from US-60 in Encino and headed northwest while US-60 headed southwest. Our northwesterly track meant we had a strong crosswind component and some headwind. We continued to climb and the terrain became more steeply rolling hills. I was able to travel 63 MPH through this stretch of the trip, which was fast enough, and maintain at least 55 MPH on the steeper hills by getting on the accelerator coming down to low points, staying on it up the other side, and dropping the transmission into 4th gear as the speed and RPMs started to drop.

When we reached Clines Corners and entered I-40 westbound we once again had the wind mostly in our face and I decided to run at 55 MPH in 4th gear. These were the strongest winds of the drive and had also become very gusty which, combined with Interstate highway traffic, made this the most challenging and stressful park of the trip.

Linda poses with the world’s largest pistachio. Note the wind-blown hair.

Most of the drive was also a gradual but steady climb which meant the engine was again usually producing more power than it does on level terrain. We were at an elevation of 4,341 feet ASL in Alamogordo but by the middle of the drive had topped out at over 7,200 feet ASL and never dropped below 6,000 feet ASL the rest of the trip. That, combined with the wind resistance, meant the engine ran a bit hotter than normal for most of the drive. Although the engine coolant temperature never rose above 195 degrees F the pyrometers indicated closer to 700 degrees F, climbing to 850 to 900 degrees F on steeper/longer grades and dropping to 300 degrees F (or less) on down slopes. The pyrometers normally run 500 to 550 degrees on level terrain. The turbo boost also ran a few PSI higher than it normally does on level terrain and often climbed above 12 (on the new gauge) and several times peaked at 15 on the steepest grades. I rarely see turbo boost readings on the new gauge above 15 and the maximum I have ever seen is 16-17.

Google Earth Pro indicated that we would encounter up and down grades on this route near 6.0% but an average of only 0.9% upgrade overall. There were many hills on NM-285 that were 4% and several that were probably 6%, but they were short climbs and the bus handled them well. Indeed, the coach ran very well all day including how it handled the wind. It was a lot of work for me, but it was doable.

We went on a free tour and bought wine and green chili seasoned pistachios at the Eagle Ranch

We took exit 187 off of I-40, looped back to the east on Old Route 66, and a mile later pulled into the Route 66 RV Park in Edgewood, New Mexico. As we entered the RV Park there was a sign with a phone number to call so Linda called it. The owners were away from the park but gave us directions on the phone to get into site # 12. The park is built on a north-facing slope with a sweeping view in that direction and all of the sites are cut from the hillside. Site #12 had full hookups with 50 A electric and easy pull through access. It was also very wide so we did not have to squeeze the bus in and could park our car next to the bus instead of behind it. The site was not perfectly level but it was close enough that we were able to level the coach using the built-in air-suspension leveling system.

The owners returned while I was hooking up the shorepower and Linda was arranging the interior. She got us registered and then we unhooked the car. With our arrival chores completed Linda sautéed onions, red bell peppers, and kale and heated up two Tofurkey brand vegan Italian sausages.

Route 66 RV Park has two Wi-Fi signals so I used the Wi-Fi Analyzer app on my smartphone to see how the 2.4 GHz band looked. As usual there were lots of signals trying to use Channel 6 (in the center of the band), and a few signals at lower Channels, but the park’s second access point was on Channel 11 all by itself, so I connected our WiFiRanger Mobile-Ti to the second access point. We then got our computers out, powered them up, and got them connected to the Internet.

A close up view of Bell’s Gulf War commemorative brick.

The wind continued to blow and the gusts increased in strength. We were both tired and had slight headaches, perhaps from the higher altitude, the stress of driving in the wind, the lack of our morning coffee, or some combination of the three. Whatever the cause we both drank some water and then took naps. When we finally got up Linda sautéed some fresh green beans and reheated the last of the seitan mock stroganoff and served them with quartered apples.

After dinner we experimented with different directions for our TV antennas and found one that captured a lot of stations, including the local PBS affiliate. Given the winds we appreciated the advantage of having OTA TV antennas that are contained in low profile, aerodynamic housings. We would not have been able to deploy a conventional crank-up antenna under these conditions.

The door of the early 18th century mission church in Old Town Albuquerque, NM.

I checked the fresh water tank gauge as Linda was doing the dishes and it was below the 1/3^rd level. I got the water softener and separate pre-filter out of the front bay and hooked everything together. Once I turned on the water I could see that the level in the tank was ~1/4. It took about 35 minutes to fill the tank and the water softener was depleted by the time it was full. That means I will have to regenerate the softener, a task I have come to dislike with our present equipment. Once the tank was full I disconnected everything and returned the equipment to the front bay. The low temperature for this evening is forecast to be 36 degrees F so I did not want to leave the water filters, softener, and hoses outside with water in them.

Linda read and watched TV while I processed photos from our drive to/from Bouse, AZ back on March 2nd. We drove through a very strong storm on that drive and captured a few interesting pictures. I looked at my draft blog posts for early March and decided to consolidate the posts for March 1 – 3. I got the compilation done but was too tired to upload it to WordPress, integrate the photos, and generate all of the tags, so I went to bed. The wind continued to blow and gust strongly but I eventually fell asleep to the gentle (sic?) rocking of the coach.

2015/04/09 (R) Albuquerque, New Mexico

The forecast low for last night here in Edgewood, New Mexico was 36 degrees F. The actual low turned out to be 28 degrees F, so I was glad that I disconnected the fresh water equipment last night and stowed it back in the front bay. Linda was up before me this morning and when I got up the temperature in the coach had only dropped to 66 degrees. We were very comfortable in our sweat pants/shirts but I turned on the electric heaters briefly to warm it up a few degrees. We have not used space heating in quite some time.

One of the many little seculded plazas in Old Town Albuquerque, NM.

I made a pot of coffee and it occurred to me that our mild headaches yesterday may also have been influenced by the lack of our usual morning brew. Not that we consume a lot of caffeine in the morning. I usually make 6 – 8 cups of coffee and it is always half decaffeinated beans, so we each get 1.5 – 2 cups of caffeinated coffee. Not a lot, really, but probably enough that our bodies don’t like it if we skip a day. Linda made oatmeal for breakfast, after which I uploaded my blog posts for March 1, 2, and 3 (2015).

Linda spent a little time looking at recommendations on RVillage for what to see and do in and around Albuquerque and Santa Fe and did some additional research online. We decided to head for “Old Town” Albuquerque by way of Historic Route 66. That turned out to be especially easy as our RV Park is on Old Route 66 which is Central Avenue in Albuquerque and runs right across the southern edge of Old Town.

One of the many very old doors in Old Town Albuquerque, NM. I think doors make interesting subjects for photographs.

We left Edgewood around 9:45 AM and drove the 20 miles to Albuquerque on Route 66 which is closely paralleled by I-40. Route 66 has lower speed limits than I-40, and once we hit Albuquerque we had a lot of stoplights, so it took about an hour to get to Old Town but we got a good look at that part of Albuquerque. Most of the available parking around Old Town is in pay lots and, not knowing anything about the area and what else might be available, we went into one of the first ones we came to. We also did not know how extensive the area was or how long it would take to see it so we paid for all day parking.

Our first stop was a plaza with public restrooms. The visitor information center was in the same plaza and a very nice lady helped us with maps, brochures, and advice based on personal experiences. Old Town dates from the early 1700’s. It features a lot of low, (faux) adobe style buildings, but very are historically old. Most of the shops sold art and jewelry but there were a few were T-shirt shops and places to eat.

An interesting fireplace under a Ramada in Old Town Albuquerque, NM

We went in one t-shirt shop and saw several things that we really liked. Just down the street we struck up a conversation with a Native American gentleman, David Ramirez, who had some wonderful paintings that were part of a large scale, long-term project he is working on. He was from the Chippewa Tribe in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan and attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor years ago to study art. We were very tempted to buy something but we were just at the beginning of our stroll through Old Town and did not want to carry merchandise, so we got his business card with his contact information and decided to ponder whether we wanted to make such a purchase.

From Old Town we continued west on Central Avenue looking for Coors Blvd. NW and then Atrisco Dr. NW and Western Ave. NW which finally brought us to Unser Blvd. NW and the entrance to the Petroglyphs National Monument Visitor Center. After checking in and stamping our NPS Passport we had to drive another two miles north on Unser Blvd. NW to an area of the Monument where there is a short loop road to stops at two parking lots and provides access to three hikes. One of the hikes involved a rough path that climbed a couple of hundred feet up a steep hill, but it was worth the effort. We took our time and saw lots of petroglyphs as well as sweeping views of the Albuquerque metropolitan area far below us to the east. Indeed, one of the trail markers informed us that we were exactly 5,280 feet above mean sea level.

Some pretty flowers along the trail at Petroglyph National Monument, NM.

A cactus in bloom along the trail at Petroglyph National Monument, NM.

From the Monument we worked our way east over the Rio Grande (river), north on 2nd Street to NM-556 (Roy Ave. NE) which crossed I-25 and became Tramway Road NE. Tramway took us east along the north edge of Albuquerque towards the Sandia Mountains and then turned south to run along their western base. Tramway eventually intersected I-40 which we got on going east for the 20 mile drive back to the Route 66 RV Park in Edgewood. Tramway is so named because of the cable car that operates from a base at the northeast corner and takes passengers up to the top of the Sandia Mountains. The tram was closed for service but we would not have gone anyway regardless of the price. Linda does not do Ferris wheels, ski lifts, and cable cars.

When we got back to our coach Linda reconstituted one of the dried Hatch chiles we bought at Hatch Chile Sales in Hatch, New Mexico and used it to season a southwestern style beans and rice dish. After dinner I worked with the consolidated draft blog posts for the days of the Escapade RV rally but did not have the time to select a few photos from the 3,000+ that I took during the event. We planned to leave early tomorrow for Santa Fe and Bandolier National Monument and I needed to get to bed.

2015/03/01-03 (N-T) Wrapping Up In Q

Leave a reply

2015/03/01 (N) Clean Flying

I had coffee and toast for breakfast. That finished the sourdough bread, which lasted two weeks, and the strawberry preserves, which had been around a lot longer than that.

I spent most of the rest of the morning cleaning the inside of the coach, specifically the tile floor, and putting things away so that there was someplace for two people to sit. The floor and kitchen counter looked better than they have most of the time Linda has been away.

Heavy rain over the mountains and desert east of Quartzsite and south of Plomosa Road.

I left a little after 11 AM to drive to Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix. Linda’s flight was scheduled in at 2:35 PM MST but was delayed on departure with a revised ETA of 2:56 PM. The weather was overcast with intermittent rain; something we have not seen much of since we arrived here in early-mid December. It is approximately a two hour trip from Quartzsite to the airport so that left me two hours to take care of two shopping errands. That seemed like plenty of time but I had not calculated in the time required to deal with Sunday noon traffic at a major shopping location. I needed cat food and had an address for a PetSmart. I also needed a GE water filter and had an address for a Home Depot.

As I approached the Dysart Road exit on I-10 I saw a Home Depot. It was not the one I had programmed in my GPS, but it was right there. Little did I know that the area around that exit was a massive shopping complex that felt like square miles of retail stores. The Home Depot did not have the GE housing or filter element I was looking for, even though I bought it at a Home Depot in Logansport, IN. I no sooner got on the highway when I saw the sign for a PetSmart on the north side of I-10. I took the next exit and doubled back. In retrospect I should have taken W McDowell Road and snuck in (and out) the back way but I had no way of knowing that in advance. They had the Hill’s Science Diet Sensitive Stomach and Skin cat food and I bought a 20# bag. There was a Lowe’s on the same (north) side of I-10 on the west side of Dysart Road so I went there looking for the GE water filter but they also did not have it.

Although I still had plenty of time to get to the airport the delays associated with dense shopping traffic and finding stores led me to abandon my quest for a new water filter. I didn’t really need it anyway as the filter in question fits in a GE inline housing under the kitchen sink and provides the final filtering for our drinking and cooking water. It’s a 1 micron cartridge that filters for at least five different classes of things and costs $35 – $40 as I recall. I think it is supposed to be good for six months of ‘normal’ use. Our filter has been installed for about four to five months, and has not had that much water run through it, so it should be good for quite a while yet.

I got to the west cell phone lot at 2:38 PM, about the time Linda’s flight was originally scheduled to arrive. I knew it was delayed because she texted me when she boarded. I checked the status on my smartphone and it showed the flight arriving at 3:10 PM. It was a bit latter than that when Linda texted that they had landed. She called me from the terminal at 3:30 PM and I headed for Terminal 3, Door 5. I missed the pull-off and then missed the turn-around, ending up six miles east of the airport before I could exit and head back. I called Linda to let her know but she saw me drive by and knew I was out there somewhere trying to get turned around. Fortunately the airport was easy to get back to and this time I pulled in to the correct place, looped around, and picked her up. Another loop-around and we were headed back to I-10 West.

The first serious weather we had was on our last full day in Q.

Linda picked up a bug yesterday, perhaps just a cold, but she was obviously tired and not feeling well. She dozed off and on the whole trip back to Q. The weather had lifted a bit, with the sun occasionally peeking through the clouds, but closed in the farther west we traveled and we encountered light but steady rain for the last 60 miles. The skies were especially dark, and the rain heavier, as we cleared the last mountain range and made the long descent into the La Paz Valley and took exit 19 into the east end of Quartzsite. I stopped at the Road Runner Market for a bag of salad greens, sandwich bread, and bananas and then headed to our coach.

It was cool in the coach so I made some hot tea. I fixed a big salad for dinner after which we were not hungry enough to have soup. Linda went to bed early while I checked e-mail and then worked on my blog post for the third week of January. I took a lot of photos that week and did not have enough time left to make selections, process them, and upload the post. I won’t have time to work on it tomorrow but I will try to finish it on Wednesday and upload it.

2015/03/02 (M) Our Last Full Day In Q

Today was our last full day in Quartzsite, Arizona unless something prevents our departure tomorrow morning. After our usual breakfast of coffee, juice, and granola we filled out our mail forwarding form for the P. O. Box, signed our tax returns, and got them ready to nail. We left around 9:15 MST for the post office. There was a line so we decided to come back later and headed for the UPS Customer Service Center in Blythe, California. The center is only open for will call pick up from 9 to 10 AM PST Monday through Friday. We pulled into the parking lot at 8:57 PST and were second in line behind a couple from Alberta, Canada. I retrieved my package and then had a nice chat with the other couple in the parking lot.

We stopped at Albertson’s for cat litter and a few other sundry items and then headed back to Q. We stopped at the RV Lifestyles store to buy a repair kit or replacement for the fresh water tank blade valve. They had both 2″ and 1.5″ and I did not know which one I needed so I left empty-handed. By then it was after 11 AM MST and we avoid the Post Office between 11AM and 1 PM as those are the hours for General Delivery pickup. I stopped at the Union 76 station just behind the post office and topped off the tank before heading back to our motorcoach.

Another view of the storm.

We spent the next four hours straightening up the interior of the bus. Linda sorted through all of the brochures and guides we had picked up and designated most of them as trash. I consolidated bus parts in cardboard boxes and put them in the car. I cleaned out the storage space under the bed and we pulled out the air pump for our old Select Comfort air mattress. The pump went in a big bag and we took it over to Butch and Fonda along with some literature on things to do in/around Yuma. I reorganized the space under the bed which created room for us to store things.

At 3:15 PM we drove back to the Post Office. There was a line but it was short and was moving along. We turned in our mail forwarding form, put postage on a letter to the FMCA Freethinkers chapter treasurer, Dan Fregin, and mailed our federal and state tax returns certified mail with electronic tracking.

Back at camp Linda put a load of laundry in the washing machine. Fonda had taken Butch to pick up a “desert bug.” He found a 1969 VW bug for sale that had been modified to be an ATV. Butch drove it to Bouse with Fonda following him and we made the trip a short time later. We got to see the dune buggy and the park where they will be the working next season as the managers.

On the drive back to Q we drove through some heavy rain and pulled over at one point on Plomosa Road to take pictures. We stopped again on AZ-95 to photograph brilliant white RVs against the very dark storm clouds and then finished our return trip to Q. Linda and Fonda had left a few items on the clothesline to dry when the rains came through so she put them in the dryer. The laundry was done by 6 PM and we headed over to Crazy Jerry’s for our last meal together for a while.

I got a call from Lou Petkus. He had just found out that they are supposed to be at the fairgrounds on Wednesday rather than Friday. He wanted us to check our e-ticket which Linda did back at the bus. We were definitely setup for Friday entry which means we will not be able to enter and park together.

On the drive back we scouted out places to hook up the car and decided the ARCO station on the east end of town looked like out best bet. I had e-mails from Stacy indicating that she had finished proof-reading two more of my articles. I retrieved them from our Dropbox and did the final editing on them while Linda streamed the last episode of Downton Abbey for the season on her iPad using our Verizon MiFi. She went to bed to nurse her cold and I uploaded the final versions of the two articles and also updated/uploaded my article tracking spreadsheet. I then headed off to bed too.

2015/03/02 (T) Farewell Q

We arrived in Quartzsite, Arizona on December 12, 2014 with Butch and Fonda Williams and got our buses parked at the Liebherr-Brockner lot on the north central end of town. Our bus remained in that spot for 80 full days and was there for all or part of 82 days. We were up at 7 AM to have a cup of coffee and some granola early enough to have time to digest it before we hit the road.

After breakfast I dumped the holding tanks, flushed out the drain hose, and stowed it away. We were down to 1/2 tank of fresh water so I topped it up. I then disconnected the water softener and all of the hoses and filter housings that go with it and stowed those away.

And another view of the storm.

We were aiming for a 10 AM departure so around 9:30 AM Jim L. read the electric meter and calculated our final bill. Linda added in the loads of laundry and wrote a check to cover our obligations. I shut off the power, disconnected the shorepower cord, and stowed it away. I connected the chassis batteries, turned on the air supply valve for the engine accessories, and turned on the air valves for the auxiliary air system accessories. I also checked the oil level in the engine and it was at the ‘full’ mark.

Butch and Fonda were also supposed to leave today for Yuma but when they checked on their reservation they were told the rains yesterday had softened the ground and they should wait a day before coming down. Larry and Sandy had not returned from Yuma yet, but Butch/Fonda, Jim/Barb, and Jim L. were all gathered to wish us farewell and safe travels. Jim L. was also there to help me get the bus out of the lot with damaging anything.

The engine fired right up, I switched it into high idle, switched the Level Low system to ride height mode, and lifted the tag axle. Once the air pressure was fully up (~130 PSI) I dropped the engine back to low idle and got out to do a walk around, checking the suspension height and securing the bay doors. Linda did her own walk around to verify everything was closed and locked. At that point there was nothing left to do but pull out. Jim L. suggested I back up while swinging the noise gently to the passenger side to get a better angle going forward. I was going to back up a short distance anyway to release the brakes in case they had frozen while sitting. The humidity has generally been quite low here and the brakes were fine.

I cut the steer wheels hard to the right (PS) and pulled forward aiming for the gap between the concrete patio pad on the left and the Palo Verde tree and light pole on the right. Jim L. spotted me on the DS while Linda kept an eye on the PS and I made it through with plenty of room to spare. Once clear of those obstacles I pulled up to the left and straightened out. I then backed between the park model trailer on the PS and the cactus garden on the driver side with Linda watching the rear of the bus and the street and Jim watching the front and sides. I backed into the street and then pulled forward so I was not blocking any driveways. I shut the engine off and then guided Linda has she pulled the car up behind the bus. Hooking up the car usually takes 15 to 20 minutes or a bit longer if we gave not done it for a while.

We were ready to go for real at 10:35 AM, had one last round of “farewell for now, see you down the road” and finally pulled away at 10:40 AM.

Looking east from AZ-95 at part of the Plomosa Road BLM STVA with heavy storm clouds in the distance.

I had some concern about the turn from southbound Lollipop Lane onto eastbound Kenoyer with the car attached but Jim assured me it would be fine and it was. We turned south on Central Ave (AZ-95) to Main Street (BL-10) then east to Riggles Road and south over I-10 to the eastbound entrance ramp. I got on the accelerator and the bus responded nicely coming up to speed as I merged onto the freeway. Leaving Q to the east or west involves long, steady climbs of 700 feet and I wanted the speed, RPMs, and turbo boost up going into the grade.

All of my gauges indicated that everything on the bus was running well except I wasn’t sure the air dryer was purging. When the air pressure in the system reaches the maximum set point the governor actuates the unloader valves, stopping any additional compression, and sends a pneumatic signal to the dryer to open the purge valve and release any water it has removed from the compressed air. The brief puff of air sounds a little bit like a “sneeze” and is often referred to as such. I always listen for the “sneeze” when the chassis first airs up but did not recall hearing it. As we were driving, however, the pressure in the auxiliary air system cycled between ~100 and 130 PSI, indicating that the air compressor and governor were doing their main jobs. Later, as we were getting ready to pull out of a rest stop, I heard the air dryer sneeze so I finally had confirmation that everything appeared to be working correctly.

The other thing that surprised me was that I never saw over 15 PSI on the turbo boost gauge. The old gauge only went to 15 PSI but the needle would routinely go past that to the limit of its movement. I had gathered from the POG and PC forums that 22 to 25 PSI was more like what I should see when asking for maximum power.

The drive over I-10 was nice as the recent rain had changed the appearance of the desert. Just before coming to the western edge of the Phoenix metropolitan area we took AZ-85 south. As we did we could see rain to the southeast and wondered if we might encounter some of it. The run down AZ-85 was flat but there were interesting mountains on either side of us. We eventually reached I-8 and got on going east. Much of the drive across I-8 was through the Sonoran Desert National Monument but we could not locate a headquarters for it on any of our maps. We also drove through rain and started to get a glimpse of the desert in spring.

Not long into our trip Linda used my phone to text Curtis and give him our ETA. He called back and asked if we could delay our arrival until 3:30 PM as he had a meeting at 2 PM. Linda found a rest stop on I-8 not too far from I-10 so we pulled in there, had lunch, and took naps. It turned out to be a picnic area with no facilities but that was OK with us; we are self-contained and it was a lovely day to sit and enjoy the scenery.

The final leg of our trip took 45 minutes. Linda texted Curtis when we exited I-10 at Sunland Gin Road and he texted back that the gate was open. Although wide enough for the bus we decided to unhook the toad before going in. We were going to have to unhook the car anyway as we will have to back up to get turned around when we leave. Curtis came out to greet us, closed the gate behind us and directed us into a parking spot. He let Augie out so he could greet us and run around, which he loves to do. Augie is a small, six year old, white dog who is full of energy but has spent most of his life living in a bus. Having the enormous yard of the house Curtis is renting to run in is very exciting for Augie and he takes full advantage of it.

$Rainbow colors refract from the rain near the center of this scene. AZ-95 looking NE over the Plomosa Rd BLM STVA.$

Rainbow colors refract from the rain near the center of this scene. AZ-95 looking NE over the Plomosa Rd BLM STVA.

Forrest & Mary Clark were already here in their Foretravel U295 so it was good to see them again. When we crossed paths with them at the RoVers Roost SKP Co-op they were waiting to have solar panels and a charge controller installed. Forrest said they did not run their generator once while boondocking for five weeks near Quartzsite so their system appears to be correctly sized and working properly. Randy & Marianne (Boondockers Welcome founders) pulled in about 20 minutes after us. After greetings and introductions Curtis gave us a tour of what is currently serving as the World Headquarters of RVillage.

The house is hexagonal and sits on a bump out into the northeast corner of a man-made lake. The house was originally a bar/restaurant, with the bar on the main floor and the restaurant seating on the second level, which was not enclosed except for railings. The property is extensive because it was once a parking lot. When the restaurant was closed in the early 1990s the owner converted it to a house, enclosing the upper level and dividing it to make bedrooms. He retained a portion of it as an outside deck that most of the bedrooms open onto. Back on the main floor the central bar was converted to a residential kitchen surrounded by an open floor plan with a generous outside deck. The building still has a functioning walk-in refrigerator that Curtis uses as a pantry. It is an extraordinary property and the driveway could accommodate eight buses as long as the neighbors did not complain.

Exciting things are always going on behind the scenes with RVillage so one of the perks of crossing paths with Curtis is hearing about them or even getting a sneak peak at some of them. It is also an opportunity to see the “back end” of the site which has the tools Curtis and his team use to develop and manage the system.

After tours and demos we all stood around on the lawn chatting and enjoying the view and the cool evening air. Too soon the air was chilly. Forrest and Mary returned to their motorhome to have dinner while Linda and I did the same thing. Randy and Marianne had business to discuss with Curtis and hung out with him on the deck a while longer. They may have gone out to dinner but we did not see them leave or return.

I had turned our generator on to bring the batteries up to charge and so Linda could cook dinner. She made a green salad and red beans and rice, which went well with the Franzia Fruity Red Sangria. After dinner we got our technology set up and got online. Linda is still recovering from the cold she picked up just before flying back to Arizona so she went to bed early. I checked e-mail and saw that Stacy had proofread another article so I made the final edits to it and uploaded it to the READY folder in my Dropbox BCM Articles folder. Since we are boondocking I shut off most of the unessential electrical loads and then shut down the generator for the night.

Travel days are exciting but also a bit stressful, especially when we have been sitting in one place for a long time, be that at home or away. But it felt good to be on the road again and to have landed in such a lovely place for the night. It’s harder on the cats, who do not like it when the engine is running and the bus is moving, but they came out of their travel (hiding) spots as soon as we were parked and were fascinated by the change of scenery. We were both tired but it was a good kind of tired.

2015/01/01-07 (R-W) Q 2015 W1

Leave a reply

2015/01/01 (R) Hola 2015

The salt restraining tube for the water filter housing. The slotted end (R) goes down and the o-rings sit in the other end.

Having stayed up later than usual last night to see the old year out and welcome the new year in we were in no hurry to get up this morning, especially given that the temperature outside was in the upper 20s. But Linda said she would make her yummy vegan cinnamon rolls for breakfast so I felt obligated to get up and eat them. Besides, it’s my job to make the coffee. The rolls took quite a while to make and we ended up having them for brunch, but they were worth the wait.

I spent much of the morning looking for new games in the iStore. I downloaded a dozen free ones and then started trying them in turn. Most of them immediately tried to sell me a full version or ran a full-screen advertisement each time I tried to start a new round of play. If they did that I immediately deleted the app. I cannot imagine what makes a game developer think someone with tolerate that more than once. At some point I realized that my AppleID was still associated with an old e-mail address so I initiated the process of changing it. The process was not as seamless as I thought it could/would/should be, but I eventually got it sorted out. Or as they say or Doc Martin, “sorted.” As it turned out my credit card information was also out of date so I updated that as well. Obviously I do not make iStore purchases very often.

I needed to regenerate our portable water softener even though it was 48 degrees F outside in the shade. It was, however, comfortable enough in the sun to be able to work. I started at noon cutting the plastic drain pipe that I bought at Herb’s Hardware the other day to a length of 10″ which is the length of a standard water filter. I cut eight 3/8″ slots in the bottom end of the tube and got an O-ring from Butch to fit in the swaged upper end. The purpose of the tube is to hold salt so that incoming water is required to pass through it to get to the softener but the salt crystals cannot actually wash into the softener.

Linda helped me transfer the contents of a 40 pound bag of solar salt to several two-gallon zip lock bags. I then put a small quantity of salt in a one-quart zip lock bag and gently smashed it with a two-pound sledgehammer, although as I write that it seems to be something of an oxymoron. I inserted the tube into the removable filter housing, slotted side down, and poured the salt around the outside of the tube. I smashed a second bag of salt and added it to the housing. I put the housing back on the filter head and slowly ran water through the softener for almost two hours. I got a water hardness test strip from Butch and tested the output of the softener. It was still showing 7 grains of hardness, exactly the same as two days ago. It appeared that the regeneration process had not had any effect. Bummer.

I discussed the situation with Butch and he suggested I back flush the softener. To do that I needed a hose with female hose fittings on each end. This is the kind of hose used to hook up a washing machine but neither one of us had one with us. Butch, however, had a female-female adapter which allowed me to connect a male hose end to a male fitting on the outlet of the water softener. (Backflushing literally means running water through the softener in the reverse direction to flush out any debris that may after gotten in through the normal inlet.)

The salt retaining tube in the filter housing with salt around the bottom outside and the o-ring visible at the top.

After backflushing the softener I tried regenerating it again. This time I used a 26 ounces of fine grain non-iodized table salt. With my homemade diverter tube still in place I added the salt around the outside and screwed the housing back on. I let the salt sit in the housing for 20 minutes to start to make a brine and then ran water through the softener until I got a very salty taste at the output. I then shut the outlet valve and let it sit for 20 minutes. When the time elapsed I ran water through the softener for another 15 seconds, checked it for saltiness, and shut the outlet valve. At the end of another 20 minutes I ran water through it at a very slow rate for 20 minutes and then checked it again for salty taste. It was still slightly salty and as it was getting close to sunset I decided to let it sit overnight. I will finish flushing it tomorrow and check the hardness again.

While I was fussing with our water softener Butch recharged theirs in about 30 minutes. When he tested the water at the end it indicated zero (0) grains of hardness; completely softened. Their softener is different from ours and the regeneration procedure is very straightforward and apparently works. For now I need to figure out a guaranteed procedure for regenerating ours, but long-term I need to figure out some other arrangement of just get a different softener.

The arrangement I am considering would be in conjunction with redoing the water bay. With a different arrangement of tanks I could create space in the bay for the softener, multiple filter housings, and associated plumbing. I could set up an arrangement that would divert the incoming water (after the first/sediment filter) through a clear filter housing into which I could put the salt. That clear housing/head would be permanently modified to force water through the salt and allow me to see when the salt was gone. It would also eliminate the need to remove and reinstall the filter the way I have to now. Alternatively I could put a tank between the filter housing and the softener (instead of the clear housing) and use it as a brine tank. If the tank was big enough to hold a 40 pound bag of solar salt it would work just like a home softening system. Water would sit in the tank with the salt for days so that the brine was ready to use when it was time to regenerate the softener. I could even rig up a separate pump just for pumping the brine into the softener. I’m going to give this a lot of thought before I start changing things around, but last winter in Florida and this winter in Quartzsite have made it very clear that hard water is a problem and we need a very effective and efficient way to deal with it.

While I worked with the water softener Linda began preparing a Tex-Mex bean soup for dinner and then went for a long walk. She finished making the soup when she got back while I took a short nap. It cooled off quickly as the sun set and nothing is quite as satisfying on a cool evening as hearty, hot soup. It also had a bit of red pepper heat which was a nice bonus. It was really good soup.

I had a few e-mails from Gary at BCM and a nice follow-up e-mail from Kathy at the Michigan Assessment Consortium. She attached a copy of their holiday letter so I attached a copy of ours in reply. I spent a little time browsing websites for OTA TV antennas and turbo boost gauges and finally went to bed without resolving what to do about either thing. I have a lot of nights that end like that.

2015/01/02 (F) Crazy Days In Q

Contact is established with our cat, Jasper.

The “show” at Desert Gardens officially opened yesterday and runs through the end of February, so Quartzsite is quickly be transformed into a crazy place. We were chatting with Butch, Fonda, Jim, and Barb after breakfast and Barb reminded us that starting now driving and parking “downtown”, and especially along Kuehn Street south of I-10, during the day will be difficult to impossible. She offered to drive us down in the golf cart and come pick us up if we did not want to walk. She also told us that many vendors will hold purchases for pickup at the end of the day. We exchanged cell phone numbers, which we had not yet done since they arrived. She suggested that if we wanted to eat out we should go early or right before closing as we might not be able to get seated/served otherwise. There’s no doubt that we have lucked out on our arrangements this winter, and the situation just keeps getting better.

Linda was browsing on her iPad and discovered an all vegan grocery store in Rancho Cucamonga, California; the largest all-vegan grocery store in the world. I looked up Rancho Cucamonga on Google Maps and it is located about half way between Los Angeles and San Bernardino. Based on the speeds I like to drive (often just below the speed limit or 68 MPH, whichever is less) it looks like a four hour drive one-way from Q. That’s obviously too far for a regular grocery run, but we might make a day trip in that direction sometime this winter and find the store while we are over there.

One of the things I did after climbing in bed last night was spend a little time looking at the Sure Marine Service website. SMS is a major supplier of repair parts for Webasto diesel-fired hydronic systems headquartered in Seattle, Washington. After studying their parts diagrams I became unclear (and concerned) as to whether the burner we removed from Butch’s old unit was a DBW2010 or a DBW2020. They are very similar but not identical. I am almost certain that our original burner is a DBW2010, but our AHU-xxx Aqua-Hot is so old that the model number is no longer referenced on the website and model specific documentation, like a service manual, is not available for download.

The reason I was looking at the parts diagrams was to identify the bearing kit for the blower as I wanted to order two of them today. What I could tell from the website was that the 2020 is a higher BTU output burner and so one of the differences is that the 2010 uses a 0.35 GPH nozzle while the 2020 uses a 0.60 GPH nozzle. That alone might account for why we seem to have poor combustion, although even money is still on bad bearings. The unresolved issues and the inability to investigate at midnight did not make for a good night’s sleep.

I have the Aqua-Hot service/repair manual for the unit I bought from Butch, both on paper and on my iPad, so I spent some time this morning looking at the iPad version. I could not tell if they used the same bearing parts so I did not order anything today and won’t until I can determine model numbers. I asked Butch if he knew which burner was in the Aqua-Hot I bought from him, but he did not. The service manual shows a Webasto label that identifies the burner model, but does not show where the label is located. More investigation was needed.

After I got dressed I e-mailed Bill Gerrie (RetiredBusNut) in Ontario, Canada with questions about gauges and sending units for our bus engine and transmission. I then started dealing with the water softener. Linda returned from her walk and started preparing lunch, so I emptied the filter housing of the little bit of salt that was still in the bottom, rinsed it clean, re-installed the filter, and let it run for 20 minutes to fully flush out any residual salt water.

Linda made a warm garbanzo bean and kale salad for lunch with lemon juice and garlic. It was the first time she had tried this recipe and we both agreed it was a keeper. After lunch I tested the hardness of the water coming out of the softener and it registered on the test strip between zero (completely soft) and 1.5 (definitely soft) so I dumped the remaining (hard) water in the fresh water tank and refilled it with 120 gallons of nice, soft water. After the tank was full I retested the water coming out of the softener and got the same reading as before. Finally, some good news on the water softener front.

With water softening taken care of (for now) I did an online search for a panoramic camera tripod head. I really like shooting panoramas and the Microsoft Image Composite Editor (MS-ICE) does a remarkable job stitching images together. Most of my panoramas have been handheld, which makes the performance of MS-ICE all the more impressive. I have shot a few panoramas using a tripod but without a nodal point (spherical) pan head, so that is what I was searching for online. B&H Photo had a Manfrotto on sale for $280, marked down from $600, but their order desk was closing for the day and I did not want to be rushed making this decision so I did not order it. They will reopen tomorrow, so I will think about it overnight and do some more research.

I got our old Webasto burner out of the front bay and found the label. It is, indeed, a DBW2010, specifically a DBW2010.75 with a 0.35 GPH nozzle rated at 45,000 BTU. Linda recorded the details, including the serial number, and then helped me rewrap it in bubble wrap so I could put back in its storage pail.

Linda then went to Parker, Arizona with Butch and Fonda to check out the Safeway grocery store and look for some things at Walmart. The Parker Safeway was supposed to carry Daiya vegan cheese products but they were nowhere to be found. It appears that our closest source will be Whole Foods. There are five of them in the greater Phoenix area but that is a two hour drive one way.

While the three amigos were gone I removed the cover from the Aqua-Hot in our coach and found its label. Much to my relief it is also a Webasto DBW2010.75, 45,000 BTU. It should also have a 0.35 GPH nozzle, and probably does, but I did not pull the burner out to check. I noticed some soot on the final fuel filter inside the housing and in other places so that gave me something new to be concerned about. I was pondering the situation when Jim and Barb and Roho came over to visit and we had a good long chat. When they went back to their motorhome I put the cover back on the Aqua-Hot and put all of my tools away.

My plan for tomorrow is to turn the Aqua-Hot off, let it cool down, and pull the burner to check the nozzle. It’s possible, though not likely, that I do not have the burner seated quite right and there’s a chance, though very small, that reinstalling it will fix, or least improve the performance. My money (literally) is still on the blower bearings. Hopefully it does not also need a new motor as everything on a Webasto is more expensive than seems reasonable. It’s another fine example of precision German engineering and manufacturing.

Even though I have quite a few e-mail addresses that I use to segregate electronic correspondence into manageable categories my inboxes still end up flooded with e-mails. Very few of them are spam—we have good spam filtering on all of the accounts—but some of the highest volume inbound traffic is notifications of things like failed login attempts on WordPress websites. Those e-mails do not get replies and often do not require any specific action on my part, but they sometimes obscure the presence of other e-mails that do require my attention.

Microsoft Outlook is able to deal with incoming (and outgoing) e-mails based on user-defined “rules” but I had never played with that feature until today. I used the online help system to read about the whys and wherefores of e-mail rules and then tried creating some. Once I understood what I was trying to accomplish it was mostly point and click to get it done, with a little typing thrown in. What I ended up doing was creating sender/subject subfolders under the inbox of certain accounts and then creating a rule for each subfolder that directs incoming e-mails matching the criteria to the correct folder. By keeping the sub folders under the inbox folder it will be clear to me that these are e-mails that I have received but not yet dealt with.

For dinner Linda made a cooked shredded Brussels’ Sprouts dish with tomatoes, dried cranberries, and pistachios and served it alongside the leftover Mexican rice with a glass of sangria. Ole! We agreed that both of these dishes were keepers and went well with the fruity wine. The rest of the evening was quiet. Linda read and played her online games while I finished up working on this post. I finally went to bed and started reading the service and repair manuals for the Aqua-Hot system and the Webasto burner. According to the long-term weather forecast tonight should be our last night with an overnight low temperature below freezing.

A few of the vendors at Desert Gardens, Quartzsite, AZ.

2015/01/03 (S) Hammer Stahl

I got up at 6:30 AM today. I had been awake for a while before that and had some things I needed/wanted to do on my computer. These were quiet tasks that I could do in the front of the coach, with the heat turned up, without disturbing Linda.

I always check my e-mail first. There was a group message from Hillary at RVillage to all of the Ambassadors regarding a new feature they will be rolling out soon and seeking our assistance. I mentioned this to Linda when she got up and we watched the two YouTube videos. We did not have time today but will work on it tomorrow in advance of a 5 PM (4 PM PST) web meeting.

My first project today was updating the spreadsheet I maintain for our FMCA Freethinkers Chapter, which I started working on last night. The chapter treasurer maintains our checking account but as the secretary I maintain the records including the roster and who has paid their dues for what years. Because I have all of those details I also generate the quarterly and annual financial statements. I entered the information for dues payments that had been received between November 1 and December 31. I then added the five worksheets for 2015 (four quarters and year), which tie together and link back to the 2014 statement, and updated the cumulative financial statement.

Linda got up so I put my work aside to make coffee while she made breakfast. We had a few bananas that were ripe so she made green smoothies for breakfast. We happen to like kale but if we didn’t, green smoothies would be an excellent way to get our daily dose along with several other healthy ingredients.

We talked about visiting the market area today and decided to go later when it was a bit warmer. The temperature a 9AM was still only 40 degrees F so Linda bundled up and went for her morning walk while I continued to work on my spreadsheet.

Once I finished the spreadsheet I worked outside for a bit. I removed the cover from the burner end of the Aqua-Hot while it was running to check for an exhaust leak (sight, smell, touch) but I could not detect one. When the cycle finished I turned the burner off. My plan was to let the unit cool off and then remove the burner to check the nozzle size and do a general inspection of the combustion chamber and visible parts, but that did not happen today.

What I did instead was return to my computer and start putting Webasto repair parts in my shopping cart on the Sure Marine Service website. The bearings on the installed burner are definitely whining and need to be replaced. They are supposed to be replaced regularly anyway, so I put two sets in the cart. It is very likely that they are causing the motor to run slow which means insufficient combustion air, and possibly lower fuel pressure, leading to the dark smoky exhaust. I also put a fuel solenoid valve in the cart. There is a good chance that the valve and/or the solenoid are not working on the other burner. There’s also a chance that the ignition coil has failed, but the solenoid valve costs 1/2 as much as the coil, so I’m hoping it’s the valve. I got the order submitted with UPS ground shipping and used PayPal to make the payment.

Once I completed the SMS order I loaded the B&H Photo app onto my iPad and spent quite a bit of time going between their website and the Sony online store trying to figure out if I should order a panoramic tripod head and/or new camera, possibly with a lens and flash unit. Sony has the Alpha 99 FF body marked down from $2,800 to $1,900 with the vertical grip and an extra battery thrown into the deal, an additional $500+ value. They will also bundle in the SAM 28-75mm f/2.8 lens for $400. The lens by itself is normally $900, so that’s another $500 savings.

So for $2,500 I could get $4,200 worth of Sony’s top-of-the-line “flagship” DSLR (DSLT, actually) equipment, except for one thing; it was all on back order with an ESTIMATED ship date of February 4, 2015. That’s my birthday, so if it actually shipped on that date it would be quite the birthday present, but if it was delayed very much there would be the very real possibility of it arriving at our location in Q after we had left. Not good.

So what about B&H Photo? It turns out that they (claim to) have all of these pieces in stock and they are selling the body with the added pieces for the same price as Sony, but they are not offering the lens at the bundled price. That was the deal breaker that saved me spending a lot of money today. Besides, I have been waiting a long time for Sony to officially announce and the ship the new (rumored) flagship alpha a99-II with its 36MP FF 35mm sensor and long list of awesome features. To decide now to by prior generation technology it would have to be a very attractive deal, much better than what I was seeing online.

I ended up ordering a Manfrotto Nodal Point Pro panoramic tripod mount from B&H. It should be here by the end of the week. When it arrives I think we will hike up to the top of “Q Mountain” and try to capture the true essence of Quartzsite in the winter, which is RVs from horizon to horizon.

We headed down to the market area on Kuehn Street with Butch and Fonda and walked around for a couple of hours in the Tyson Wells Show grounds north of Kuehn Street and west of Central Avenue (US-95). This particular market area had really filled up with vendors in the last few days. Linda bought a nice white apron and really nice Hammer Stahl 5.5″ Santoku knife. She checked online when we got back and she paid about 55% of the MSRP on the HS website. She bought it from Cutlery by LeClaire, which also has a website, and has it on sale for $20 more than the price on the HS website, marked down $20 from their “regular” price. The point is, she got it for what appears to be a good price of $59 and it came in a nice box with a ceramic sharpener thrown into the deal.

We drove farther west on Kuehn Street and pulled into the Desert Gardens show grounds. It was getting near sunset, so we did not stay long, but Linda and I walked enough of it to get a feeling for the place. It was a “rougher” setup than Tyson Wells and many of the booths were selling large, rough rocks and gemstones. The vendors also had a lot more equipment set up and were using it to process materials. We’ll be back, probably more than once, and earlier in the day so we can spend more time.

When we got back to our motorcoaches Fonda came over and worked with Linda for a little while on their business records. We then had a nice salad and some of the spicy bean and pasta soup (that Linda made the other day) with crackers and sangria. I spent more time after dinner researching stuff on my iPad and working on this post.

We appear to be in one of the few places in the country that is not getting clobbered by bad weather. The temperature is not even supposed to drop below freezing overnight. It will still be cool tomorrow, however, and we did make specific plans before going to bed.

A view of “Q” Mountain from the Desert Gardens Show area.

2015/01/04 (N) Our Village

We had vegan pancakes for breakfast which prompted me to suggest that Linda invent some recipes, even if they are interesting and successful variations on existing ones, and feed them to our grand-daughter. Linda could put them on our website using the WP Ultimate Recipe plug-in and, if they met with her approval, name they after “Bitty” (youngest grand-daughter’s latest nickname, although I think I will always prefer “Schmoo”). Perhaps Pancakes Madeline; Sautéed greens a la Madeline; Pasta Madeline; or Madeline’s vegan mac and cheese. Being retired gives me a lot of time to think.

Joe’s brother, Jim L., finally returned from Nevada today and was able to get the park model trailer unlocked. Barb has been wanting to get in and clean it since she and Jim (different Jim) arrived. Barb is a keep busy kind of gal. She is responsible for maintaining the apartment and laundry room while she is here and told Connie she would also do some deep cleaning on their house trailer, so it’s been bugging her that she could not get in to do it. As for my part, all I did was lock the door on the trailer the way Connie asked me to. Barb and Jim (husband) had lots of keys but could not get any of them to work.

Today was shower day. This is always more of a production than we would like because we keep the cats’ litter tray in the shower. Most of the time that works really well—it is out of the way and contains any mess they might make—but it is inconvenient when we want to use the shower for its intended purpose. Besides pulling the tray out into the hall by the bathroom door we have to clean up any stray litter in the shower to make sure it does not end up in the gray water waste tank. Litter tray or not we still have to spray the shower walls when we are done, squeegee off the glass door, let everything dry, and then reassemble it as a giant cat litter box. But it works and it’s one of the compromises we willingly make to live with our cats in so few square feet.

Once I was dressed I went outside to chat with Jim L. (Joe’s brother) and we discussed the possibility of upgrading the electrical service at our site to “50 Amp” (240VAC, 50A, 4-wire, the equivalent of a 120VAC, 100A residential service). It’s not an issue for us right now as the cool weather has us burning diesel fuel to make space heat, but once the weather turns warm we may need our air-conditioners. We have three but can only run one on a “30A” service and still have enough power to run other things. A 30A service is just what it says; 30A of current at 120VAC. A “50A” RV service is slightly more than three times that amount of power.

The electrical hookups here are very interesting. Perhaps all RV park power pedestals work the same way, but I have never looked inside one so I don’t know. The meter is at the top and the area below it has a top-hinged cover. Under the cover are three panels about 3″ wide and 15″ tall. The panels have an outlet towards the bottom and a circuit breaker near the midpoint. Behind the panels are busses for the hot, neutral and ground with male blade connectors. The panels have female blade connectors that engage their male counterparts when the panel is slipped and then hinged into place. It is secured with a single screw. If Jim L. can find a 50A panel all we will have to do is unscrew and remove the 30A panel and plug in the new one, once we verify that 240 VAC (L1& L2) are present in the box and wired to the distribution busses.

Instead of her usual morning walk Linda setup her laptop on the dinette table and worked on accounting and tax issues for Butch and Fonda. I set my laptop there as well to work on the roster for our FMCA Freethinkers Chapter and Jasper got in between us, so we had a nice, cozy computing session. When I placed my order with B&H Photo yesterday I checked a box to receive shipping status information via TXT message. I got one this morning letting me know that my package had shipped from NYC. Cool.

With accounting chores done for now Linda prepared vegan hot dogs with mustard, onion, and relish for lunch. She then went for a long walk while I stayed at the coach and worked with a new feature on the RVillage website. I was posting a lot of suggestions to the topic thread on the Ambassador forum and got a phone call from Curtis, the founder/CEO of RVillage. We had a long chat and I was still on the phone with him when Linda got back. I worked with the website some more and at 5:00 PM we connected to an Ambassador meeting using GoToMeeting on my computer. This is a very exciting new feature and I think RVillagers and RV-related businesses are really going to like it once they know about it and see how it works.

Linda made mock (vegan) stroganoff for dinner. She normally uses Basmati but the only rice she had enough of was Texmati so she used that. Although I did not care for the texture of the Texmati in this dish (a bit crunchy), the taste was still very good. This dish requires real cooking, which means it makes a real mess. By the time everything was cleaned up and put away it was 8 PM and we were both tired. I continued to research engine and transmission gauges while Linda read and played word games. I also revisited the SonyAlphaRumors website but there was absolutely NO new information on the a99-II. I went to bed wondering if this camera will ever actually exist. Based on the comments I see online I am not the only one wondering if this camera will ever be a reality.

One of the hundreds of vendors at the Tyson Wells market area in Q.

2015/01/05 (M) VSWR 1.0

Yesterday we finished up the coffees we have been using since we left Michigan at the end of November so this morning I had to open new bags and transfer the contents from their vacuum sealed bags to our metal storage canisters. I had Teeko’s roast Ethiopian Yirgacheffe regular and decaffeinated separately, so I opened 1/2 pound bags of each. I also opened a 1/2 pound bag of our special Sweet Seattle Dreams, which is 1/2 Sweet Dreams (decaf) and 1/2 Seattle Blend (regular). I then made a pot of Ethiopian Yirgacheffe 1/2-n-1/2 while Linda prepared our granola with fresh bananas and fresh blueberries.

Linda went for her morning walk while I continued to do online research regarding the enigma known as the Sony a99-II DSLT camera and the supposedly discontinued, but apparently still very much available, Sony alpha a99. If I did not already have a nice assortment of compatible Minolta A-mount lenses and flash equipment I think I would stop wasting my time with Sony cameras. But I do, and so I continue to wait and be frustrated along with thousands of other “enthusiast” (sub-professional) photographers. Because Sony builds the image stabilization (anti-shake) feature into the alpha bodies instead of the A-mount lenses the feature is available even with older Minolta lenses and the new lenses are slightly less complicated and less expensive than the Nikon and Canon lenses, which have the image stabilization built into each lens. I think this was one of Sony’s best innovations.

I also continued to look at automotive gauges and sending units and decided to call Bill Gerrie (in Ontario, Canada) to follow up on his reply to an e-mail I sent a few days ago. We had a great chat and he was able to clarify some things and add quite a bit of specificity to his written reply. As a result I have a pretty good idea of what I am looking for; now it’s just a matter of finding it and deciding to place the order.

I was starting to work at my computer when Linda returned from her walk. She eventually fixed a couple of vegan hot dogs wrapped up in tortillas with mustard, onions, and relish. As I was finishing my meal I got a call from Gary Hatt at BCM. He recently acquired an Eagle bus conversion and had some questions about the air-conditioners and the Aqua-Hot. He plans to be in Quartzsite next to week and we are looking forward to finally meeting in person since I have been writing articles for the magazine for almost two years.

Linda has been having a problem with the brightness (or lack thereof) of the touch screen on her 19 month old Windows 8.1 Samsung laptop. It will go very dim for no apparent reason and cannot be adjusted. There was a driver update available for the Intel HD Graphics processor so we downloaded it, installed it, and re-started her computer. The screen was now bright, which was more useful than dim, but still not adjustable. That could be a coincidence or a fix, we will have to wait and see. Even though it was working (for now) I drove to the local Family Dollar and bought an HDMI cable and some lightly carbonated water. (The water had nothing to do with Linda’s laptop computer display, we were just low on sparkling water.) The cable will allow us to connect her computer to one of our two flat panel LCD (LED) TV/monitors if needed. (We did that after dinner and it worked, mirroring the built-in display to the monitor and setting the resolution to match the monitor’s 1900x1080p native mode. But it also caused the built-in monitor to dim, although not as much as before. When we turned off the monitor and unplugged it the built-in display did not return to full brightness.)

Mid-afternoon I saw Butch working on his Tarheel screwdriver antenna so I inquired as to what he was doing. He had connected his MFJ VSWR meter to it through a six foot length of coax. He had also unplugged the control harness for the tuning motor and rigged up a temporary switch to extend and retract the antenna. He had done this because he was getting meter readings when connected through the installed coax that indicated the antenna was not resonant at any frequency or that the meter was not working correctly. I climbed up on his ladder to have a look and saw VSWRs that were often greater than 31:1, and never fell below 10:1, with complex impedances that were rarely 50 ohms and with both resistance and reactance values that were all over the place. Clearly something was not right. It was not his installed coax and I was fairly certain I was not his meter, which I had used back at their house to check the VSWR on his CB and 2m ham antennas.

I climbed onto the roof of their bus so it would be easier to reach things and I could work sitting down. We tried adding a ground strap as a counterpoise but it didn’t help. Butch then grounded the strap to the chassis at the motor but that did not help either. Our concern was that the antenna was not sufficiently bonded (grounded) to the roof but nothing we tried made any difference. I decided to set the antenna to its shortest length (highest operating frequency), set the meter to a lower frequency, and then slowly lengthen the antenna, thereby lowering the operating frequency, while looking for some sort of response on the meter.

I got no change on the meter and finally realized that the antenna (via the meter) was behaving as though it was not grounded. I noticed what looked like a thick washer between the SO-239 antenna connector and the base mounting plate of the antenna. The mounting plate is the ground reference for the antenna and is connected to the base of the antenna through a coil of insulated wire (an inductor) known as a base loading coil. The spacer was a plastic insulator that was, indeed, preventing the case of the SO-239 antenna socket from making contact with the mounting plate. As a result the antenna was not grounded through the coax cable shield, preventing the meter from obtaining meaningful readings.

We removed the antenna connector, removed the insulated spacer, reassembled the connector to the antenna, reattached the coax and meter, and took additional measurements. This time we got excellent readings that made very good sense. We checked the upper bound, lower bound, and the midpoint of most of the high frequency (HF) ham bands and were always able to obtain VSWRs of 1.3:1 or less, which was excellent. Butch had been considering redoing the mounting of the large motorized fold-over base so it was a good thing we figured this out as it saved him a lot of unnecessary work. If I can solve one problem without creating others I figure it’s a good day. BTW: VSWR stands for Voltage Standing Wave Ratio and 1.0 is not a beta version, it is shorthand for a ratio of one-to-one (1:1), which is the best SWR you can have. Anything below 1.5:1 is considered excellent, below 2.0:1 good, and below 3.0:1 usable if that’s the best you can do.

Chayote is a fruit that is a member of the squash family and is related to other gourds such as melons and cucumbers. Linda bought one last week when we went to Albertson’s grocery store in Blythe, California and decided to prepare it for dinner tonight. She sliced it into long thin broad strips and sautéed them with onions, oregano, salt, and pepper. She served it alongside the leftover mock (vegan) stroganoff with a glass of sangria. Our wine friends can cringe all they want; we find the Vella and Franzia boxed wines generally agreeable and the sangrias go surprisingly well with a variety of dishes. And it has me drinking red wine, so it’s healthy too!

We lost our WiFi connection this evening. Not sure why. The wireless gateway still shows up in the WFR list but won’t associate with the WFR. Butch had the same problem at the same time so something obviously changed. We will ask Barb to open the trailer tomorrow, or get Jim to do it if she is not comfortable, so we can reset the gateway. Hopefully that will do the trick.

The sunsets in Quartzsite are amazing almost every night. This shot was taken from our campsite in Q.

2015/01/06 (T) You’ve Got Mail (Maybe)

Our mail situation here is interesting. Remember that, per our Jamaican tour guide, we do not have problems, only situations, and situations are easier to deal with if I regard them as interesting rather than annoying. With regards to receiving mail, the “situation” is as follows. Although every structure in town has a street address—necessary for police, fire, EMS, trash collection, and other municipal services—the Quartzsite post office does not deliver mail to said locations. They have an annex building on the northeast side of town that is nothing but P. O. boxes and all of the locals, and a lot of seasonal residents (including Joe and Connie, who own the property where we are staying) have a P. O. Box.

Where things get interesting is that the main post office and the street addresses are associated with one ZIP code but the P. O. boxes have a different ZIP code. If something is coming to us via UPS or FEDEX we have to use the street address and associated ZIP code, but if it is being mailed to us USPS we have to use the P. O. Box number and associated ZIP code, or have it sent c/o General Delivery using the main ZIP code. To confuse matters further, Joe and Connie had to return to Nevada because of Joe’s health and are having their Quartzsite mail forwarded back to their home, so we cannot have mail sent to us “care of” them as we originally planned as it just gets forwarded to Nevada. Outbound mail does not appear to be a problem, but then why would it be?

The other situation that developed yesterday was that our WiFiRanger Mobile Ti disconnected from Joe and Connie’s WiFi (DSL) gateway and would not reconnect. The WFR is telling us that the WPA password may be incorrect, but that is unlikely as we have been using it since we arrived last month, as have Butch and Fonda who also lost their connection yesterday and could not reestablish it. The evidence suggests that the gateway needs to be reset. Why? Who knows? DSL gremlins perhaps. Or mischievous Internet fairies. Or a problem with the local DSL service? Or perhaps Butch keyed up his 600 Watt linear HF ham radio amplifier and blew out every wireless DSL router within a quarter mile? Whatever the cause, once we can get Barb or (brother) Jim to open the trailer we will power cycle the gateway and see if that restores our ability to connect to it.

In the meantime, in order to get online last night and again this morning, we turned on our Verizon MiFi. The Verizon signal here is strong and steady, and the data rate is much faster than the DSL/WiFi connection, but we only have a 4 GB data plan so we tend to use WiFi when available. It is not always available, of course, especially while traveling (and especially if we are boondocking at Wally World or other such locations) and when it is available it is not always reliable or is so slow as to be useless. This can be the situation, for instance, at larger RV rallies and even some RV parks.

So we logged into our Verizon Wireless account, looked at our current plan, and saw that for a mere $10 more per month we could increase our data plan from 4 GB to 10 GB. The cost for exceeding your monthly data plan limit is $15/GB, so the extra $10/month was a no-brainer. And VZW made it soooo easy to change our plan (once we were logged in); just click the data plan we want, review changes to our account, and click “Apply Changes.” Done; they have our money and we have more data allocation. Interestingly, they upped our data allocation immediately for the current billing cycle, which is Dec 20 – Jan 19, and added the $10 to the bill we will receive for that cycle. No pro-rating going on here, but then we can use the whole 10 GB if we want/need to.

Interestingly the cost to go from 10 GB to 15 GB was an additional $20/month, so the 10 GB plan seems to be a sweet spot after which you pay a premium for additional access. On the one hand Verizon wants to sell you data bandwidth but on the other hand there is a finite amount of data they can move through their network, so if you want to use a larger chunk of their capacity it figures that it would come with premium pricing.

Until a few months ago Millenicom was reselling 20 GB MiFi plans (on Verizon’s network) for $70. It was the best deal around; a sufficient amount of data for the same price we were paying Verizon for only 4 GB. Kind of unfair, when I think about it. Well, Verizon decided to stop selling bulk capacity to Millenicom (and other MVNAs?), took all of the accounts in-house, and Millenicom went out of business. Not really a big surprise when you think about it. Verizon also notified those customers (as I understand the situation) of their “options” which were not, apparently, as attractive as the deal they had with Millenicom. Not really a big surprise when you think about it.

Anyway, we will see how we do with 10 GB/month while we are on the road. We can change back to our 4GB plan when we get home, but I doubt that we will, and we can increase it to 15, 20, or even more GB per billing cycle if we need to, but that is unlikely. We have an AT&T landline at home with DSL service that provides an “always on” Internet connection (when it works). It has a 150 GB/month data allowance and allows us to monitor and control our whole house generator and WiFi thermostat. We have discussed adding a security system and a personal weather station linked in to Weather Underground’s Wundermap when we get home. I don’t think our DSL connection is fast enough, however, that we could use 150 GB in a month if we tried.

Linda went for her morning walk and I made a quick run to Barry’s Breads. Barry is a really nice older gentleman who has a small bakery stand on the north side of Kuehn Street east of Central Avenue. Just behind the stand, however, is a larger trailer in which he bakes all of his products. Those products include breads, rolls, savory items, and sweet goods. Most of his products use butter, cream cheese, cheddar cheese, or ranch dressing, but his Basic Bread is just that, flour, water, sugar, salt, and yeast. I have had some difficulty figuring out what time of day to stop by but this morning he finally had loaves of bread, and some hamburger buns made from the same recipe, so I bought a loaf and a pack of four buns.

When I got back I started working on another article for Bus Conversion Magazine. A little over a year ago I installed an RV-Critter Guard to seal around the shorepower cord and water hose where they enter the utility bay through the floor. I took a few pictures during the installation and have had the article on my “future” list ever since. By the time Linda got back from her walk I had the article mostly finished and was starting to look at the photographs.

She had stopped at the Salvation Army store, which was open, to use their facilities and ended up buying a grocery bag full of clothes for $1. Not $1/item, $1 for the entire bag. Most of the items were tagged with color codes indicating prices of one or more dollars each but they had too much inventory and needed to move some product. They told Linda that when that happens they have their $1 bag sale. Deal. She called Butch and Fonda to let them know and I think they headed there before going to check the post office box and then stop at the post office if needed.

Linda cooked a couple of our Boca vegan mock hamburger patties and served them with fresh sliced onion, lettuce, and pickles on two of the buns I had just purchased. Not an entirely WFPB meal, but very few of our meals are. Still, we try to get as much plant-based whole foods as we can every day.

Linda went for a second walk after lunch and headed down Central Avenue towards the Kuehn Street markets. She is so fond of her 5.5″ Hammer Stahl Santoku knife that she wanted to buy the 3.5″ paring knife if Cutlery by LeClaire had it for sale as an individual item.

While Linda was gone I finished working on the photos for my RV-Critter Guard article. When she returned from her walk she had both the Hammer Stahl 3.5″ Paring Knife AND the 3.0″ Birdsbeak Paring Knife. As we learned the other day from an Alton Brown video paring is actually a technique in which food is held in one hand and a knife in the other; no cutting board is involved. Paring knives are generally smaller with a shorter blade and most of the weight is in the handle, allowing very fine control of the cutting edge and tip.

The Birdsbeak is a particularly interesting and unusual knife. The bottom/cutting edge is slightly concave rather than convex like the classic chef knife. The bottom edge joins the top edge in a point with a shape that resembles certain types of curved bird beaks. In use, the knife is often held stationary and the food is pressed or turned into it, such as decorative peeling, pitting of fruit, or slicing strawberries. Linda is often reluctant to spend money on herself so I think it’s nice that she found something she wanted and made the decision to buy it. Like any high quality tool it will make the work it is designed to do easier and more enjoyable.

While I was uploading my article to our Dropbox Linda went outside to sit. Barb wandered over and I mentioned that the DSL wireless Internet gateway had quit working. She let me in the trailer where I found it sitting on the dining room table. I powered it off, waited 60 seconds, and powered it back on. All of the status lights came back on in the expected sequence and I was once again able to connect our WiFiRanger Mobile Ti to it. We ended up standing by their Country Coach Intrigue motorhome and having a long chat.

Butch and Fonda were gone for most of the afternoon so we only got to chat for a little while when they returned before the sun dropped behind the southwestern mountains and the temperature dropped along with it. Linda and I talked about going out to dinner, which we have only done once since we got here, but she remembered that we had a FedEx package scheduled for delivery today and that it might arrive as late as 8 PM. So we had leftover soup with crackers and sangria. This was the third and final meal we got out of this pot of soup and it was good to the last drop. It was a packaged mix but Linda thinks she can recreate it; getting the spices right will be the tricky part.

After dinner I read DSLR reviews on the Digital Photography Reviews website and continued to look at gauges and sending units for the bus. Around 8:30 PM I was having trouble staying awake but by 9 PM I had gotten my second wind and decided to write another short article for BCM. This one was on the failure of Butch and Fonda’s main engine air-compressor on the drive down, how he dealt with it on the road, and eventually ended up installing a rebuilt one here at our campsite in Quartzsite. I had the article written by 11 PM and decided to work on the photos tomorrow.

Sunset envelopes our coach as Linda prepares dinner.

2015/01/07 (W) Catch 22

My main pair of reading glasses broke yesterday; not the lenses or the frame, but one of the nose pads. Well, not the actual pad, but the small plate and mounting loop, specifically the mounting loop. I was cleaning them and the whole assembly fell out. The loop was split and had opened up. The loop was a very small and delicate piece of ductile metal so I squeezed it back into a circle. I removed the very tiny retaining screw, reinserted the mounting loop, and put the screw back in. I was able to do this using only the tools available on my Leatherman. The repair did not hold and it fell out again last night. This time a piece of the loop broke off so the only repair will be a new mounting pad if I can find one. There is a Wal-Mart in Parker that probably has an optical shop but I don’t know how universal this mounting system is.

I checked the level of the floor and counter in the kitchen last night and the coach appears to have settled slightly on the driver side. Not a lot, but enough that I can feel it and it registers on the level. I generally have to start the main engine and build up full air pressure in order to level the coach but I thought today would be a good day to finally pull the portable air compressor out of the car and see if the leveling system will work without the main engine running. As it turned out that did not happen today because we ended up driving to Parker, Arizona.

Our destination in Parker was the Wal-Mart. The store did not have an optical department but we found an eyeglass repair kit in the pharmacy area with a pair of screw-in pads and a pair of snap-in pads. They also had a repair kit with a tiny screwdriver, spare screws, and other parts. Between the two kits I was able to install a new pad in the car to replace the broken one. That saved us a trip the optical shop in town.

Parker sits on the Arizona side of the Colorado River which is the boundary with California. We decided to drive across and then take CA-62 over to US-95, follow it south along the River back down to Blythe, and then take I-10 back to Quartzsite. Butch called while we were in Parker to let us know that there was a Farmer’s market at Desert Gardens. It operates on Wednesdays from 8 AM to noon so we did not make it back in time but resolved to go in future weeks.

I worked on my “roadside repair” article for BCM while Linda went for a walk. Jim and Barb had gone to Blythe to buy a new faucet and Jim L. stopped by and helped Jim B. install it. They borrowed a caulk gun from us (we carry two in the bay) but had to go buy caulk. UPS showed up with yet another package for us, after which we had a long conversation about the inadequacies (incompetence) of the U. S. Post Office in Quartzsite. (The UPS driver told me that both UPS and FedEx have extra drivers and trucks delivering into Quartzsite during the peak season. What a novel idea.)

Back to the post office. We are waiting for a shipment of two bottles of water hardness test strips that we ordered through Amazon but were shipped via USPS by a swimming pool supply company in Elkhart, Indiana. I gave them the P. O. Box here in Q since the post office does not deliver mail to street addresses and it appears that they will likely get returned to the sender rather than delivered to us. The root cause of the problem (and it is a problem) is that Joe and Connie are having their mail forwarded to their home in Nevada. If their names are not on the mail the post office won’t put it in the box, but if their names are on the mail it still does not get put in the box, it gets sent to Nevada. So as of now the box is sitting there but cannot be used; a genuine “catch 22.”

Fine, we will just use General Delivery. The problem with that (and it is a problem) is that you can only pick up the GD Mail at the Quartzsite post office between 11AM and 1 PM, and there are untold numbers of people trying to do the same thing. That means ridiculously long lines and ridiculously long waits. Considering that the influx of seasonal “residents” to Quartzsite has been going on for over 30 years the postal “service” has had ample time to figure out how to handle the situation. I mean, Amazon practically runs its holiday operations with seasonal employees, many of whom are RVers. Gee, I wonder if there are any RVers around Quartzsite this time of year. While the post office is trying to figure out how to not deliver our mail we have two more UPS shipments scheduled to arrive on Friday.

Linda made a zoodle dish for dinner. She used her SpiraLife to turn a zucchini into long thin strips which she cut into 6″ lengths and then used like spaghetti in the dish. The other ingredients were onions, garlic, mushrooms, asparagus, and green beans. Everything got sautéed in a pan with a little olive oil, salt, and pepper. We had a glass of Lamb’s Valley Organic Sweet White wine and it was a lovely meal.

After dinner I put the finishing touches on my BCM air-compressor repair article and e-mailed it to Butch to proof-read. The only thing worse than writing an article that makes me look stupid is writing one that makes someone else look stupid, especially a friend.

I had an e-mail from Gary, the publisher of BCM, letting me know that the December 2014 issue was finally available online. I downloaded both the SD and the HD versions. I then clipped the cover from the SD version, pasted it into MS Paint, and saved it as a JPEG file. I opened it in Faststone Image Viewer, resized it to a thumbnail, and sharpened it. I then edited the BCM page on our website, adding the thumbnail image, the title of my article, and a brief description. I have a similar entry on that page for every issue in which I gave had an article, starting with the February 2013 issue. The December 2014 article was my 14th in 23 months.

The last glow of this sunset reflects off the passenger side of our motorcoach in Quartzsite, AZ.

2014/12/21-25 (N-R) The Holidays Arrive

Leave a reply

2014/12/21 (N) Winter Solstice

Linda was reading an interesting tidbit online this morning about the winter solstice, which occurs today in the northern hemisphere. It usually occurs on the 21st, like today, but occasionally slips into the 22nd. While it is the day of the year with the least hours of sunlight (between sun up to sun down) it is not the day with the latest sunrise (which occurred a couple of weeks ago) or the earliest sunset (which does not occur for a couple of more weeks). Why is that? Axial tilt, elliptical orbits, and a “day” that is not exactly 24 hours. Science is fun.

Today was a stay-at-home / stay-in-town day for us. Linda vacuumed the coach and mopped the floor tiles. She says she likes to do this once a week to keep the cat hair under control. By “likes” I think she means “needs.” She also decided to do the laundry. When we are at our house the laundry is usually my chore but for some reason, to which I am not privy, she takes over this chore when we are living in the RV, at least initially. The same thing happened last year at Williston Crossings RV Resort, although we eventually both did laundry until I was able to win back my rightful chore. So far again this year it has been her self-selected task here at Quartzsite and I have not gone out of my way to reclaim my rightful place as master of the laundry.

What I did instead of laundry was spend the morning finishing our 2014 Year-in-Review holiday letter. Linda proof read it and then I converted it to PDF and did a final check of the layout to make sure the text and photos had not shifted or been clipped. I copied it to a flash drive so we can take it someplace in Blythe tomorrow and have it printed.

The other day I noticed that the manifold pressure sensor (turbo boost) on Butch and Fonda’s 6v92 was mounted vertically on the front passenger side of the ECM. I could not see exactly how it was mounted, however, so today I finally looked it up in the DD 92 Series manual. I did not attempt to reattach our sensor module today but I was curious to see what would be involved. I also continued to interact with other Prevost owners on the Prevost Community forum regarding the turbo boost issues and the dashboard gauge, which does not have the correct scale for our engine. That thread has led to a dialogue about the SilverLeaf systems, including the VMSpc that we have, and an alternative system from RV Tech Tools that uses an iPad app named “RV Dash” and a wireless (WiFi) interface named “CANpod” from Cubix Labs.

With our various chores done we had a light lunch of chickpea salad on a bed of mixed greens and then went for a long walk. The walk took us down Washington Ave. and then over to Kitsap Ave. to see a gorgeous Adobe house that Linda had discovered on a previous walk. That led us to the backside of the west-central “vendor” (flea market) area on the north side of Main St. We are not collectors, and we are not into antiques, guns, rocks, jewelry, or junk, so we saw very little that interested us. We did see a few pieces of Pyrex, which our daughter and son-in-law were collecting at one time, and I am always on the lookout for a good deal on a tool I can’t live without, but mostly we saw endless quantities of stuff that we could not fathom anyone buying.

We crossed Main Street and visited the Tyson’s Well Stagecoach Stop Museum. The grounds and building were open, admission was free, and it was unattended. There were items for sale and if we had wanted something we would have put the money in the collection box. That’s small town.

We headed east on Main Street and crossed back to the north side using the crosswalk at AZ-95 (Central Ave.). We then continued east and stopped at the Road Runner Market. We were pleased to find that they had a small but good selection of fresh produce. On our way out the door the florist gave Linda a red and white carnation. We will definitely be doing some of our local grocery shopping there. We knew there was a restaurant/bakery on the far east end of Main Street so we kept on walking. Sweet Darlene’s looked like a nice local place for a home-cooked style meal, but did not have anything on the menu we could eat. The bakery turned out to be a small display case with pies and sweet rolls, but they did not make their own bread, so we won’t have any reason to come back.

By this time it was getting to be late afternoon, the cloud layer had thickened, and it was getting a bit chilly so we headed back towards Central Avenue. We counted laundromats along the way, and passed at least four before getting back to our coach. Not that we need a laundromat—we have a laundry where we are staying—but with all of the boondockers in and around Q it is a matter of some curiosity to us how/where they take care of things like this. By the time we got back to our coach we had walked just over five miles.

Sunset over the Dome Rock Mountains due west of our encampment.

By 5:15 PM the sun had slipped just below the mountains to our southwest and the sky started to glow pink for 360 degrees around us. The sunset went on for over 30 minutes, the pinks deepening to reds. And then, just like that, the color was gone and darkness enveloped the valley.

For dinner Linda made a simple green salad with raisins and peanuts. She then heated up some vegan re-fried beans, pan-grilled a package of fajita vegetables she got from Connie before they left, and then heated two tortillas. We each made a tasty roll up, adding some salsa and vegan sour cream. She washed some black seedless grapes and set them out for desert. They were very refreshing after the somewhat heavier and spicy main course.

2024/12/22 (M) Compressed

We had planned on driving to Blythe, California today but those plans changed fairly early in the morning. Butch got an update that his air-compressor was on a UPS truck in Blythe and scheduled for delivery today. I had promised to help him with the installation and provide a few tools he did not have with him so we decided to stick around camp. We were also waiting for Connie’s realtor, Carolyn, to come by and pick up two yellow Post Office slips.

Linda took her morning walk after breakfast while I downloaded the October and November issues of Bus Conversion Magazine in both standard- and high-definition. I was really glad to finally see these issues. The October issue included my article on our T. F. Hudgins Spinner II Centrifugal By-pass Oil Cleaner project. That was my one remaining article waiting to be published. I have at least a half dozen in process, at least that many more for which I have taken photos (and written blog posts), and a very long list of future projects, so it’s time to get the next batch of articles ready to submit.

When Linda got back I drove to the print/copy/fax/pack/ship/etc. store on east Main Street to see if they could print our holiday letter. They had plain 8.5×14 white paper, and the photos looked OK, but it was going to cost $4 per letter ($2/side) so I paid for the one copy and left. They suggested that I try Weeks Printing in Blythe (20 miles west) or Staples in Lake Havasu City (70+ miles north). Since we will likely head to Blythe tomorrow we will check out Weeks first.

As long as I was out I stopped at Barry’s Breads and bought a couple of fresh “rolls” which were really small loaves of bread. Barry runs a little seasonal bakery out of a temporary vendor stand on the northeast corner of Central Avenue (US-95) and Kuehn Street. Most of his products have butter or cream cheese as ingredients—his Danish pastries are as big around as a dinner plate—but he does make just plain bread and everything is made fresh daily. Back in camp Linda called Weeks Printing and they quoted $1.25 for each 2-sided letter. Much better. We will check them out when we make it to Blythe; probably tomorrow.

For lunch Linda made a batch of her scrumptious chickpea salad/spread and served it on one of the rolls I bought at Barry’s. After a week of cloudy skies, cool temperatures, and a little rain we finally had a day with clear, sunny skies and the high temperature up into the 70s. Butch decided to remove his defective air-compressor and there wasn’t anything we could do to help (or stop him) so we decided to clean some more of our coach exterior. I wanted to work from the top down, which meant starting with the roof. That, in turn, meant getting out the Little Giant convertible extension/step ladder and setting it up as a 14 foot extension ladder. In this configuration it extends beyond the top edge of the roof at the front, making it safer for me to get up on the lower roof area from the driver’s side.

Rinsing down the roof of the coach (photo by Linda).

The roof was very dirty and it appeared that we might have more than just embedded dirt to deal with. The roof has a sprayed-on ceramic-infused white coating with a surface akin to medium grit sandpaper. It reflects sunlight and provides a nice nap for walking on, but also traps dirt. The last time the roof was cleaned was in early April, just before we left Williston Crossings RV Resort. I had been on the roof subsequent to that, in our pull-through driveway at home, using it as a platform for trimming tree limbs. I do not recall it being unusually dirty at that time, but I was focused on other things. If it had been, I probably would have washed it, but maybe not; I was focused on other things.

I used a little bit of Dawn dish soap in several gallons of water and our soft, long handle, brush to try and scrub it clean and then rinsed it with softened water. It was better by the time I was done but far from 100% clean. I also scrubbed all of the metal awning covers and then hosed them off and rinsed the awning fabric. When I was done on the roof I sprayed off all four sides of the bus, but even with the softened water it left spots and streaks. Another unfortunate side effect of this work is that it frightened our male cat, Jasper, who ended up hiding behind the steering column in an attempt to escape the sights and sounds of a ‘monster’ on the roof.

We would like to get the body clean but there’s no point doing anything until I get the roof finished (Linda does not climb ladders and she does not get on the roof of the bus.) At a minimum I am going to have to use a stiff scrub brush and a stronger solution of Dawn dish soap, or perhaps a commercial cleaner that can treat mold/mildew along with just plain dirt. We will then have to do the vertical surfaces in small sections, scrubbing, rinsing, and drying as we go. We have a sprayer for our hose that has a small bottle for additives and one of the reasons I bought it was to try using a dishwasher rinse aid, like Jet Dry, to see if it would eliminate spotting. To-date, however, I have not tried that.

The old Bendix Tu-Flo 700 air-compressor out of Butch & Fonda’s MC-9. The governor is the silver thing on the left. The open port on top is the air discharge where the unloader valves are located.

Once Butch had the old air-compressor out of their bus he turned the input shaft and noted that the pistons were not pumping air. This confirmed that something had failed internally and ordering a replacement was the right thing to do. There wasn’t much else to do so we all sat around in the warm sun and waited for the UPS truck to show up, which it finally did around 3:45 PM. We (me, Linda, and Fonda) suggested that Butch wait until tomorrow to start installing it, but we knew that was not going to happen. The compressor was a significant road failure that had bugged him since it happened and he was anxious to get it fixed.

The new (re-built) Bendix Tu-Flo 700 air-compressor with the old spline and new port plugs.

The Bendix Tu-Flo 700 he received is designed specifically for mounting on Detroit Diesel 92 series 2-stroke engines but has more ports on it than are typically used in this application. Making sure to match the configuration of the old compressor, Butch installed new plugs in the unneeded ports. He then removed the fittings from the old unit one at a time and installed them in the new one, being careful to line them up exactly the same way. I helped by holding the compressor on a work table while Butch tightened the pipe threads. This was the easy part of the project as we were standing at a tall bench with plenty of room to work and good light.

The new air-compressor with fittings. Note the alignment marks for orienting the fittings correctly. The spline is in the upper left of the photo.

The hard part was getting the air-compressor re-installed. Butch eventually got it onto two of the four mounting studs, which then took the weight. We discovered a clearance issue with one of the port plugs and he had to pull the compressor back out. He removed a plug from the old compressor, which did not stick out as far, and reused it in the new compressor. With the compressor back on the studs it now lined up better but the spline would not engage the drive gear on the end of the engine camshaft. He put a wrench on the crankshaft pulley nut and turned the engine slightly by standing on the end of it while I jiggled the air-compressor.

The “governor” mounted on the new compressor.

The spline eventually engaged the engine gear and the air-compressor gear enough that Butch was able to fully seat the flange and insert/tighten the four mounting studs, lock washers, and nuts. Per the instructions, he reconnected all of the lines except for the air discharge and called it a night. The coolant goes back in tomorrow and Butch will then start the main engine to make sure the compressor works, check for leaks, and let any contaminants get blown out the discharge fitting. If everything looks good he will attach the discharge line, which connects the outlet port of the air-compressor to the coach air system, and air up the bus.

The new air-compressor (blue) mounted on the rear of the engine block (towards the front of the bus).

The new air-compressor (blue) mounted on the rear of the DD6V92TA engine block (towards the front of the bus) in Butch and Fonda’s MCI MC-9B NJT.

At least we were successful in convincing Butch to wait until tomorrow to put the coolant back in the engine. By the time we finished working, put our tools away, and got cleaned up it was 7:30 PM and had been dark for two hours. Linda reheated the leftover fajita fixings and we had open-faced tortillas with Fritos corn chips, salsa, black grapes, and Sangria. We were both tired so we relaxed for a while after dinner and then went to bed.

2024/12/23 (T) Blythe, CA

We got a call from Connie right after breakfast letting us know that the two packages Carolyn picked up yesterday were for us and Butch. We needed to pick them up before 11AM as Carolyn had an appointment at that time. Linda was headed out for her morning walk anyway so she walked to Rock Reality, near the post office and uptown drugs, to get the packages from Carolyn. (Carolyn is Joe and Connie’s realtor.) She dropped off the two P. O. Box – Mail Pickup Notice cards at the post office while she was there.

Our package was from Madeline (Brendan and Shawna), to be opened on Christmas Day. Butch’s package was the unloader valve kits for our Bendix Tu-Flo 700 air-compressors. He ordered them while we were in Forest City, Arkansas for delivery to Amarillo, Texas but they did not arrive in time so his friend forwarded them to our Quartzsite location.

Butch and Fonda used most of the morning to put the coolant back into the engine. Our buses, which still have their over-the-road heating systems, hold a lot of coolant. Ours requires 34 gallons. The buses are not identical, but I suspect theirs requires at least 30 gallons. And it is very important that the cooling system is filled to capacity and has had all of the air purged out of it. It’s a big, messy job.

They got as much in as they could by standing on a ladder and pouring it through a funnel into the filler tube for the surge tank. The radiators on the MCI MC-9 are located above the engine, one on each side wall at the rear of the bus, and the surge tank is located above them, so the filler tube is approximately 9 feet from the ground. Butch started the engine to warm it up enough for the thermostat to open and to circulate the coolant and opened a couple of bleeder valves to let air out. He also checked the outlet fitting on the new air-compressor to verify that it was pumping air. It was (hurray!), so he shut the engine off, attached the air line to the outlet fitting, and started it back up. The chassis air system (suspension and brakes) came up to pressure and the air-dryer “sneezed” (momentarily opened its purge valve) so the system was fully operational.

We planned to go to Blythe, California today and Butch and Fonda wanted to go too, so he shut off the engine and they cleaned up their campsite. We were sitting in our coach when the winds came up rather strong. Linda checked the weather and the winds were out of the north at 20 MPH and forecast at 22-25 MPH until 6 PM. That was strong enough for us to retract our awnings, close our roof vents, collapse our folding chairs, and stow our patio mat. Butch and Fonda also retracted their patio awning and stored all of their outdoor equipment and furniture. We had the old patio awning on our Itasca Sunrise torn off by strong (thunderstorm) winds while we were away from the motorhome and have been extra careful about awnings and wind ever since.

With all of that done we headed to Blythe in their Chevy Suburban. From 879 feet ASL in Q we climbed to about 1200 feet ASL over the low mountain range that separates the two valleys, and then descended to 240 feet ASL as we crossed the Colorado River and entered California. A few miles later we took the 7th Street exit and we were there. The 20 mile drive was only five more miles than the trip we made from Williston Crossings RV Resort to the Publix grocery store (at the southwest corner of Gainesville, Florida) last winter, so it did not feel like a long way to go for groceries. At home we have supermarkets about five miles away in three different directions. Butch and Fonda typically drive into Logansport for their groceries, a distance of 12 miles, so we are all used to traveling some distance to purchase our food.

The Smart & Final Extra and the Albertson’s were on the NW and SE corners of 7th and Hobsonway, just north of I-10, making them especially convenient for us, so this is where we will likely shop every other week or so. But our first destination was a few blocks farther west on S. Main St. where we found Weeks Printing. They were eventually able to access our flash drive and open the PDF of our holiday letter. They had a high quality paper in 8.5”x14” size, and were able to print our letter 2-sided on a good quality color laser printer for a very reasonable price of $1.25 per letter ($0.625 per side). They did not take credit cards so we paid cash, but it saved us a 73 mile trip (one way) to Staples in Lake Havasu City.

Self-portrait of the blogger. I am merely a reflection of my former self.

At the Smart & Final Extra we bought fresh produce, soy milk, and some bulk, canned, and packaged items. They did not carry the Silk brand soy coffee creamer that I like, and there were a few items Butch and Fonda needed that the store did not have, so we drove across the street to Albertson’s and got those items. I stayed in the car with the groceries, but I already knew that the Albertson’s would be a nice store based on our experience with the chain in Sheridan, Wyoming during summer 2013. With our shopping done we returned to Quartzsite.

I carried the groceries from the car to the bus and Linda stored them, discovering that she had an empty tub available in the cabinet above the refrigerator. By the time she was done it was approaching 4 PM so she prepared chickpea salad sandwiches as a quick, light lunch and then announced that we should go for a walk before it got dark. She let me chose the route so we crossed Central Avenue (AZ-95) and walked to the city park, which has a very nice baseball field with lights and the only grass we have seen in Quartzsite. There was also a skateboard facility, a football field, and two F4 Phantom jets (minus the engines and other equipment). The Quartzsite Metal Detecting Club (QMDC) has a practice field adjacent to the park. The park is located near the following municipal facilities: Community Center and Library, County Court, Police Station, and Post Office Annex (where most of the P. O. Boxes are located). The Fire Department is a little farther north on Tyson Wells Street just east of Central Avenue.

The sun was getting near the tops of the mountains to our southwest so we headed pack to our coach and settled in for the evening. For dinner Linda made a barley risotto with garlic, shallots, mushrooms, sun-dried tomatoes, vegetable both, and seasonings. While she was cooking I got a call from my dad and got him caught up on our whereabouts and activities. The risotto was excellent and we each enjoyed a glass of sangria with our meal.

I don’t know if we are just relaxed, or really tired after a hard summer and fall, but we have both been going to bed earlier and waking up later than usual. Or perhaps it is just the effect of fresh air and sunshine. Whatever the reason, it’s nice to be able to just sleep when that is what we feel like doing and get up when we are read.

We have an excellent Verizon signal here in Q. Linda often likes to pace up and down Lollipop Lane while talking on the phone. If you lived on Lollipop Lane you would too.

2014/12/24 (W) Christmas Eve

It’s Christmas Eve and we woke to a temperature of 37 degrees, clear skies, light winds, and no snow. The forecast high for today was 66, with no snow. Do I miss snow at the holidays? Not really. At one time (high school) I considered myself something of a “romantic” in the sense that I liked the classical music of the romantic era, but I am not particularly nostalgia. If I was, we would own a restored 1957 Chevy; red, of course. No, we had snow at home before we left and as a harbinger of things to come we took it as a sign that our departure was overdue. Christmas in the desert will be a new experience for us, but so far it looks very agreeable. We will miss being with family, of course, but we are not alone here and technology keeps all of us much more connected than it once did.

Having been to Blythe yesterday we did not have any last minute shopping to do today. The desert was there yesterday and will be there tomorrow (I presume) so we did not have to see it today. With the holidays upon us I did not feel like working on bus projects. Linda started addressing the envelopes for our Year-In-Review Holiday Letter and then worked on food preparations for tomorrow’s dinner with Butch and Fonda. It seemed like a good day for me to finally start catching up on some things that I have not had time for in a while. For instance, I need to work on articles for Bus Conversions Magazine, update our bus project list/status, update our website, upload some blog posts (OK, a LOT of blog posts), and catch up on the blogs I follow using the Feedly app on my iPad. I am way behind on all of these tasks and starting to feel some pressure about it, albeit self-imposed. I do not have to do any of these things if I don’t want to, of course, but they are activities that I enjoy and want to do. Still, being way behind takes some of the fun out of it and makes it a bit more like work. I won’t get caught up in one day or one week or even one month; it will take many weeks of persistent effort.

After checking e-mail, I settled in to work on my article about the exterior renovation of our motorcoach. Michele Henry of Phoenix Paint helped me finish the article in early October but I still needed to select and caption all of the photos. While I worked on that Linda walked to the Road Runner Market and managed to snag the last 3-pack of yeast. When she got back she made her orange cranberry relish for tomorrow’s dinner.

We took a break for lunch and then Linda headed out for her daily power walk. When she got back she continued addressing envelopes for our holiday letter. Just as I was feeling like I needed a break, Butch knocked on the door to let me know he was working on a small project that might interest me. He had already burped the coolant lines that supply heat to the living area of their bus when driving and gotten the last of the coolant into the system. His new project was getting an alternator driven tachometer connected and calibrated.

It turned out that he needed positive DC power to the tachometer in addition to the ground and RPM signal. He was able to temporarily pick up 24VDC from the positive terminal of the starter, found a convenient ground point, and picked up the rotational speed from the stator terminal on the back of the alternator. With the engine running at low idle he measured the RPM of the main crankshaft pulley using an optical sensor instrument. It was just over 600 RPMs so he adjusted the tach via a set screw on the rear to match the reading. He kicked it into high idle and measured the rotational speed as 950 RPM. That is what the tach displayed within the precision of the markings. He already has a signal wire run from the engine compartment to the cockpit but needs to mount the tachometer in a separate bullet housing, connect the wire on both ends, and provide positive and negative (ground) DC to the instrument. He decided not to take on that project today.

(Note: RPM is universally understood to be an abbreviation for “Revolutions Per Minute” but that is not necessarily correct. An object such as the pulley on the end of an engine crankshaft rotates about its own axis, just as the earth does, and has angular velocity which is properly measured in rotations per some unit of time or angular displacement per some unit of time. The abbreviation is, of course, still RPM. In the case of the pulley, however, Butch put a small piece of white tape on the face of the pulley at the outside edge to act as a target for his optical sensor. If we consider the piece of tape as a separate object then it does, indeed, revolve around the center axis of the pulley, just as the earth revolves around the sun. Viewed thus way, revolutions per minute is technically correct. As with many things in physics, it depends on your frame of reference. So much for today’s physics lesson.)

This building houses (L-2-R) the laundry room, the apartment, and a small workshop at our compound.

As long as I was outside I borrowed Butch’s metal detector and went in search of a couple of tie downs that Joe told us were buried somewhere near the outer edge of our patio awning. I knew they were lined up with a reference mark on one of the concrete patio slabs and it did not take long to locate and uncover them. We put a couple of medium-sized rocks on top of them so we could relocate them easily.

We got several multimedia messages from our son today with pictures of our grand-daughter at our daughter’s house helping make cookies. Brendan, Shawna, and Madeline are spending the night and Katie is joining them tomorrow. Butch and Fonda will spend most of the day at the local church Fonda selected, including a carry-in (pot luck) luncheon, but will have dinner with us around 6:30 PM.

I finally returned to our coach and worked on my article about the Zena power generating system I installed to charge our house batteries while driving. Again, the article was mostly finished a long time ago, but I could not submit it until I completed the installation, got the system operational, and took a few more photos. All of that happened in October and November but I was too busy with other projects and preparations to pull it all together at that time. I had a couple of e-mails today from Gary, the publisher of Bus Conversion Magazine, indicating that the December 2014 issue might not be out until early January 2015, and wondering if I might have a finished article they could use.

For dinner Linda made a salad of dark mixed greens with raisins, nuts, and pear slices drizzled with raspberry walnut vinaigrette dressing followed by pan-seared tofu slices with caramelized onions and bar-b-que sauce served open-faced on hamburger buns. We split a Sam Adams Pumpkin Spice Ale. I am not a big fan of ales or pumpkin but beer seemed like the right beverage for this dish. It was OK, but I would have enjoyed a Yingling or Shiner Bock more.

I made good progress on both articles today. I got an e-mail from Mike, the editor of BCM, wondering if I had a finished article. The ZENA article was close enough that I decided to finish it and upload it to our Dropbox before going to bed. I e-mailed Mike back to let him known it was there and offered to finish the other one by the end of the weekend.

Earlier in the day I updated our personal WordPress site to the just released version 4.1 and updated several plug-ins and themes. My last task before turning in for the night was to replicate the update process on the other three sites I manage. By the time I got to bed it was Christmas Day.

2014/12/25 (R) Christmas in Q

The wind came up strongly overnight and we were awakened by the rattling of the vent fan domes. From our north facing bedroom window we could see flags and the tops of trees blowing briskly in the wind. We could also hear and see the awnings on the south/passenger side of the coach flapping. Linda checked the weather channel app on her iPad and it reported winds at 20 MPH. We were not expecting winds that strong until the daytime and they were strong enough for us to be concerned about our awnings. By that point we were wide awake so we put on our sweatpants and shirts, slipped on some shoes, found a set of keys, got the step-stool out of the front bay and the awning rod out of the folding chair bay, retracted the two awnings, returned the rod and step-stool to their respective storage compartments, and finally went back to bed.

Linda got up at 6:30 AM in order to start making cinnamon rolls from scratch. I usually get up first and make a pot of coffee but I was up past midnight working, so I slept in for another hour. The yeast she bought yesterday wasn’t cooperating so we turned on one of the Broan ceramic cube heaters to try and create a warmer and more consistent environment to get the dough to rise.

We borrowed Butch and Fonda’s Verizon MiFi (unlimited data plan) so we could Facetime with our children and their families, who were gathered at our daughter and son-in-law’s house. We got to watch all of them open the presents we left for them when we were there on Thanksgiving and they got to watch us open the gifts they sent with us or shipped to us here in Quartzsite.

Brendan, Shawna, and Madeline (son, daughter-in-law, and grand-daughter) sent a 2015 Shutterfly Calendar with photographs of all the different family members placed on the dates for birthdays, anniversaries, and such. We do not need much at this point in our lives, but a collection of photographs that also reminds us of the people and dates that are most important to us is something we appreciate and treasure. Meghan and Chris (daughter and son-in-law) bought us each a genuine Tilley hat. I have known about these hats for a while but never bought one. Given our outdoor oriented RV lifestyle, these were excellent gifts.

After we were done with our Facetime session Linda took the cinnamon rolls over to the apartment to bake since it has a range with an oven. She will finish cooking dinner there later and the four of us will eat there this evening as it has a table that will seat four people.

The apartment bedroom.

In spite of early indications to the contrary the cinnamon rolls rose and baked just fine. The dough used flour, salt, vegan butter, yeast, and flax meal with water (egg substitute) and a little sugar. The filling was made with brown sugar, vegan butter, cinnamon, and maple syrup. The topping was a glaze of sugar, water, and vanilla with raisins and chopped walnuts. Linda took two of them over to Butch and Fonda and we had some for breakfast still warm from the oven. It’s a good thing that these are as much work to make as they are or I might want them for breakfast every day. 🙂

Linda had a call and TXT message from her sister (Marilyn) and sent a reply. She was on her way to her housemate’s family gathering and they agreed they would talk later today. She also sent merry Christmas TXT messages to her sister-in-law, Mary, and good friend, Diane. At noon our time (1 PM CST, UTC-6) I called my sister to wish her a happy holiday. Her daughter, grand-daughter, and future son-in-law had already been there in the morning as Ryan had to work that afternoon.

I made a second pot of coffee, which is unusual for us, but we planned to spend the day lounging around the coach cooking (Linda) and working on the computer (me). Linda cleaned up the breakfast cookware, poured another cup of coffee, and started working on the chocolate cake for tonight’s dessert. With the cake prepared and in the apartment oven she turned her attention to making the candied yams. Once those were done the only thing left to do was bake the Tofurkey, roast the asparagus, and heat the gravy. It was a lot work for her but it was spread out over two days and she enjoyed, and did it, willingly. We could have gone out for dinner if she wanted, even though we would not have found much we could eat, but I am glad she preferred to cook.

Once I wrapped up the conversation with my sister I got back to work on the Outside Makeover (Exterior Renovation) article. Although I thought I was done writing I made a few more edits and selected additional photos. By 5 PM I had 74 photos selected and placed in sequence to match the flow of the article. I had also done as much of that work as I cared to for the day.

We were down to 1/4 tank of fresh water so I decided to refill it. About that same time Linda decided it was chilly enough in the apartment that she wanted the propane space heater turned on so I shut off the water and took care of that. The heater had a hose that went through the wall at floor level to the outside with a regulator and POL fitting on the end of it. I found a couple of 20 lb. propane tanks in the workshop and connected one of them to the regulator. It took a while but I eventually got the pilot flame to light and then got the heater to ignite. I then went back and finished filling our water tank.

The little apartment is very cute with three rooms: a bathroom on the east end, a bedroom on the west end, and a kitchen/dining/living room in the middle. It has a shower, a 4-burner electric range with an oven, a refrigerator/freezer, a small microwave oven, the aforementioned space heater, a small window air-conditioner, a small TV/monitor with a satellite receiver, two easy chairs, a small dining table with four chairs, and a queen sized bed. Marilyn is seriously considering coming for a visit the last week of January and if she does she will stay in the apartment and get to experience Quartzsite.

Linda starting to set the table in the apartment for Christmas dinner. No pictures of Butch & Fonda (they are camera shy).

We bought a bottle of Sternthaler Nurnberger Christkindles Gluhwein spiced red holiday wine at Central Market in Fort Worth, Texas to serve with our Christmas dinner. It is a mulled wine that is supposed to be gently heated before serving, but we found it quite agreeable straight from the refrigerator. About 20 minutes before dinner time we set it out on the counter to warm up slightly, the space heater doing a very effective job heating the small apartment even on its lowest setting.

Linda and Fonda both contributed dishes to the meal and Fonda made a couple of things that we could eat. They brought chicken and traditional mashed potatoes for themselves but also tried some of the Tofurkey roast. Linda made a vegan chocolate cake for dessert and whipped refrigerated coconut milk solids to use as a whipped cream substitute. Our daughter did this for the Thanksgiving meal and we really liked it.

We sat in the apartment for a long time after dinner and just talked until we were all tired. Linda and Fonda had already cleaned the dishes so we turned off the propane space heater and carried all of our stuff back to our coaches. Linda put the leftovers away while I did a final check of my e-mail for the night. I then shut my computer off and we headed to bed. Like so many things in our retirement RV lifestyle, this Christmas holiday was a new and good experience.

The Phase Place

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

Tag Archives: turbo boost gauge (H3-40)

2015/04/07-09 (T-R) North by Northwest

2015/03/01-03 (N-T) Wrapping Up In Q

2015/01/01-07 (R-W) Q 2015 W1

2014/12/21-25 (N-R) The Holidays Arrive