Tag Archives: WFPB

2014/06/15 Family Time

We were parked in a fenced compound area next to the regular “campground” at the Elkhart County 4-H Fairgrounds. The campground has gravel sites with 50A full hookups, and we were allowed/encouraged to use the sewer connections to dump our holding tanks before departing this morning. We had checked out the campground last night and decided that it would be easier for us to pull around to the dump stations on the outer road than to maneuver into and out of one of the open campground sites, all of which were back-ins.

I have mentioned before what a nice facility this is. Several of our GLCC members are from north central Indiana and explained to us that the fairground is as nice as it is because it is booked every week for most of the year, winter being the exception. Elkhart is considered the center of the RV industry in the U.S., but the reality is that RV-related industry is located throughout north central Indiana, and a little bit of southern Michigan, with a few facilities in other parts of Indiana and Ohio. There is also significant RV industry in California, Oregon, and Florida, and to a lesser extent in Pennsylvania and Alabama. By “RV Industry” I am referring to manufacturing, not RV parks, resorts and campgrounds, or RV dealers and service facilities, which are obviously located all over the place.

We skipped breakfast and coffee, as we always do on travel days. Linda prepared the inside for travel and then we visited for a while with our GLCC friends. Around 9:00 AM I unplugged the electrical power, stowed the cord, turned on the chassis batteries, opened the air valve for the engine accessories, and fired up the engine. I did not have any trouble getting out of our parking spot or the compound. I drove over to the dump station, which can accommodate nine RVs at one time, and Linda followed in the car. While the holding tanks were emptying we hooked up the car for towing. With everything stowed and secured for travel we checked the toad controls and lights and were on our way, exiting the fairgrounds at 9:25 AM.

We followed the same route home that we used when we left the Escapade rally a month ago: CR-34 (Monroe St.) east to CR-29 north to IN-4 east to IN-13 north to US-20 east to I-69 north to I-96 east to M-59 east and finally a couple of miles of dirt roads to our house. We stopped at the Travel America (T/A) truck stop on M-60 at I-69 to put biocide and Stanadyne diesel additive in the tank along with 75 gallons of diesel fuel.

We had just over 1/4 tank of fuel indicated on the fuel gauge when we pulled in to the T/A. If the gauge is anywhere near accurate that was approximately 50 gallons of fuel, enough to travel another 200 miles and still have 15 – 20 gallons in the tank; more than enough to get us to the Mobil truck stop on I-96 about 25 miles before our house. I wanted to use as much of the fuel in the tank as I could before adding more but did not want to risk running out or sucking sediment off the bottom and clogging the fuel filters. In the end we decided it was safer to stop and add fuel while we still had the 1/4 tank. The 75 gallons brought the fuel gauge up to 5/8ths, which is what I expected. The fuel tank capacity is 235 gallons, but I assume the full mark on the gauge corresponds to 200 gallons. That makes every 1/8 of a tank on the gauge correspond to 25 gallons. We also presume that our average fuel economy, based on prior data, is 6 MPG which equates to 150 miles per 1/8 tank.

We did not fill the tank because the bus is going to be sitting for a while and we did not want to have all of that fuel onboard aging in the summer heat. There is a reason, however, to keep the fuel tank as full as possible. Most of the fuel that is pumped to the engine is used to cool the injectors and the DDEC engine computer and returned to the tank. The more fuel in the tank, the less frequently any particular molecule passes through the engine giving the fuel in the tank more time to dissipate the heat.

Our trip was easy and un-eventful other than the powered driver-side windshield shade quite working. Add that to the list. We got home by 1:30 PM which gave us time to unload food and a few essentials from the bus and take showers. Since Linda spent Saturday morning preparing food, she only had minimal cooking to do for dinner. Our son, daughter-in-law, and grand-daughter arrived at 3:30 PM and our daughter and son-in-law arrived at 4:00 PM. Madeline had a cold, wasn’t feeling well, and had only had a short nap, but she was fine as long as she was busy. This was a combination birthday and Father’s Day gathering, but mostly an excuse to gather our small, immediate family. We had a lovely summer meal of potato salad, collard greens cole slaw, baked beans, and cheeseburgers with chocolate cupcakes (from a local bakery) and fresh strawberries for dessert. All vegan, and all delicious.

Brendan, Shawna, and Madeline left shortly after dinner and Meghan and Chris left around 8:00 PM. Although our morning departure and drive home had been quite routine and the family gathering had been relaxed and relatively easy, it all added up to a long day. I started the download of an update to my Adobe Creative Cloud subscription that looked like it was going to take a while, so we skipped watching an Episode of Doc Martin and turned in for the night.

2014/06/09 (M) Mobile Service

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2014/06/08 (N) Positioning

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We were up around 7:00 AM, showered, dressed, and gathered up toiletries and other last minute items for our outing. I did a last minute check of e-mail and RVillage and then shut down the computers, printers, and NAS units and packed up my laptop. We started our final loading process at 9:00 AM and had everything on board by 9:20 AM. While Linda configured the car for towing, I turned the chassis batteries on, disconnected the shorepower line, stowed the cord, checked that the inverter was operating, and opened the air valves for the engine accessories and the air line to the car auxiliary braking system. While Linda closed up the utility bay I fired up the main engine and drained the moisture out of the auxiliary air tank. We checked the lights and finally checked that all of the bays were closed and locked. GPS and TPMS on with all tires reporting in, all gauges reading normal, and side mirrors adjusted. Tag axle up for the tight 180 degree turn exiting the driveway and all ahead slow while Linda verified the car wheels were turning. She was on board and buckled in at 9:30 AM and we were on our way. We have gotten reasonably efficient at this departure routine, but when driving a bus with a car in tow you do not simply turn the key and drive away.

We had light rain overnight and it was still drizzling as we pulled out. No problem; cloudy skies often make for easier travel. We drove up to M-59 and headed west, picking up I-96 westbound on the west edge of Howell. By the time we turned onto I-69 southbound at the southwest corner of Lansing, Michigan we had run out from under the rain and the overcast gave way to partly cloudy skies with patches of blue making for very pleasant driving conditions. At Coldwater, Michigan we headed west on US-12, a route we have driven many times and always enjoy. Just north of Elkhart, Indiana we exited US-12 onto M-205 which swings south and becomes SR-19 as it crosses into Indiana. About two miles into Indiana we turned east on County Road 4 and 0.7 miles later turned into the entrance to Elkhart Campground. It was a little before 1:00 PM and we had made the 160 mile trip without rest or fuel stops. I set the cruise control at 60 MPH on the Interstates and 55 MPH on M-59 and US-12, but had to slow down for interchanges and lower posted speed limits going through small towns. We usually base our expected travel time on an average speed of 50 MPH which seems to account surprisingly well for all of these variations.

We got checked in to the Elkhart Campground using our Escapees membership to save 15% off of their overpriced 50A FHU grass sites. They put us in a new part of the campground we have not used before. The spot was level so I but the tranny in neutral, set the parking brake, and shut the engine off. I shut off the air and chassis batteries and hookup up the shorepower line while Linda got the inside ready to use, our standard arrival routine. In all fairness, Elkhart Campground is not a fancy RV resort but is nice enough, and one of only two RV parks in Elkhart, Indiana, so part of what you pay for here is location. We have been here at least 9 times, usually for Great Lakes Converted Coaches rallies. It is centrally located for much of our membership and has a building with meeting rooms and kitchen facilities that they let us use for no additional charge. Our reason for being here now is to add a couple of days of RV use to the GLAMARAMA rally and position ourselves for an easy, early morning entry into the Elkhart County 4-H Fairgrounds on Tuesday.

For lunch Linda served some of the cold three bean salad she made yesterday along with tofu hotdogs (with mustard, relish, and onions, of course). After lunch we got our WiFi Ranger connected to the campground WiFi network and checked in to the campground on RVillage. The website indicated that there were 11 other people checked in here, but we knew that some of them had been here after the recent SKP Escapade and subsequently left. We went for a walk around the campground and found the FMCA Frustrated Maestros (Great Lakes Chapter) camped by the activities building. It was obvious that they were having a pre-rally and using it to rehearse before heading to the GLAMARAMA rally in Goshen on Tuesday. We recognized Ron and Meredith Walker’s Prevost XL bus conversion but did not see them outside.

As we were finishing our walk we ran into Nick Russell of The Gypsy Journal and he invited us in to their motorhome for a brief chat. Terry was busy removing their old combo washer/dryer to make room for the new one they are supposed to get tomorrow, but she put her work aside to visit. We finally got to see her loom which we have read about on Nick’s blog. Considering what a sophisticated device it is, it fits surprisingly well in their Winnebago Ultimate Advantage (which has slides). Terry was obviously very excited to have it and enjoyed describing its operation to us. She is mostly self-taught and already producing some very intricate designs.

For dinner Linda made a nice green salad to go along side a bowl of the vegetable chili she made yesterday, served with crackers and a glass of Franzia Sweet Red wine. We went for a walk after dinner and ended up having a conversation with several of the Frustrated Maestros, including Ted (K0DDB) who took up the banjo at age 56. As we walked past Nick and Terry’s motorhome Terry was outside talking to Greg and Jan White. Greg was “parting out” the combo washer/dryer that Terry had just removed from their rig to salvage as many usable spare parts as possible since they have the same model in their American Eagle coach.

We got back to our motorcoach just before 8:00 PM and tried to connect to the Technomadia live UStream videocast they were doing for the Mobile Internet Aficionados private membership Facebook group, but the WiFi at Elkhart Campground was not up to the task and I did not feel like turning on our Verizon MiFi device. Linda turned the TV on instead and checked out the stations available to us. We had all of the major networks and decided to watch the final episode of Cosmos and then turned in for the night.

2014/06/04 (W) Indian Street Food

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After working hard on our fire pit project the last three days we took it easy today. I put a load of laundry in to run while we had breakfast and browsed our blog and news feeds. A couple of recent installments from NutritionFacts.org reminded us yet again why we are following a whole-food plant-based way of eating. I made follow up phone calls to various contractors and left messages as no one seems to answer phones anymore. We often do not answer our phones if we don’t recognize the number or the caller ID is blocked, but we are not running businesses. I did get hold of Ed and we had a nice chat about the restricted water flow problem in his Aqua-Hot and what he did to fix it. I’m starting to form the impression that these are “fussy” high maintenance units.

I got a call from Chuck in reply to my e-mail to him yesterday. He is working on a project to replace the conventional bulbs in his side cargo lights with LEDs. He found a source for a double contact base that fits in place of an 1157 bulb. He can solder the wires from the LED arrays to the base and plug it in; no modification of the cargo light housing or wiring needed. I like those kinds of solutions.

I got a call back from Darryll Mech at DCM Heating and Cooling. Darryll installed a garage heater and a furnace/air-conditioner for the addition to our previous house. He is going to schedule a time to come back to the new house and figure out exactly what we need to do to prep the house for natural gas. It is going to involve running additional black pipe, installing a garage furnace and a small furnace/air-conditioner for the library, and then converting the kitchen stove, whole house generator, and hot water baseboard furnace to natural gas. We have a local guy (TOMTEK) who services the hot water baseboard furnace, so we will probably have him do the conversion on that unit. We also have a company that installed and services the whole house generator and will probably have them do the conversion on that unit along with the annual maintenance. We would like to have all of this done, except the appliance conversions, in August. The natural gas pipeline and hookup is scheduled for “late summer to early fall.” When I talked to the contractor it sounded like that meant the end of August to early October. I hope it’s closer to the former than the later.

Scott Barnes from The Renewal Group in Hartland, Michigan retuned my call. He wasn’t able to work today due to the rain so he came over to discuss our pole/bus barn project.

We got together with Steve and Karen Limkemann for dinner this evening and then went to their house in Westland to visit. As we moved to being vegetarians and then vegans Indian food rose towards the top of our list of favorite cuisines, and one of our favorite restaurants in all of SE Michigan is Neehee’s in Canton. Neehee’s is a small, unassuming semi-fast food place that serves “Indian vegetarian street food.” As the name implies, you will not find any dishes with meat, fish, or fowl. You will, however, find dishes made with paneer (an Indian cheese) and yogurt. They also serve ice cream. They have a nice selection of vegan dishes, however, and some of the vegetarian dishes can be made vegan on request. It’s a long way for us to drive just to have dinner, but very much on our way to Steve and Karen’s place. They were good sports and agreed to try it.

The menu had changed since the last time we were there. The “Indo-Chinese” section was gone, and with it one of our favorite dishes, a fried cauliflower in a spicy sweet and sour sauce. We had the Special Gujarati Thali which consisted of nine different curries and sauces, two types of puri (crepes, thin breads), and rice. It was very good. Steve and Karen were not as thrilled with their dishes, but the issue seemed to be a bit too much “heat.” Almost all Indian food (that we have had) is spicy, in the sense of being pungent and aromatic, and some of it is “hot”, in the sense of having a burning sensation in the mouth.

We drove to Steve and Karen’s house after dinner, looked at photos from trips, and talked at length about past and future travels. Steve had resurrected some very old computer games and had them running on his Raspberry Pi and displayed on their large screen TV. We played one for a while based loosely on A Hitch Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. It would have been a trip down memory lane if I had any memory of having played it years ago, but I didn’t, so it was a new old experience for me. He also demonstrated their Roku device, which connects to their WiFi network and streams a wide variety of programming to their television. Much of it is free, some of it involves a monthly subscription, and some of it is “pay-per-view.” It might be part of a solution for us at home.

2014/06/03 (T) Work-n-Play

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Linda made a tofu scramble for breakfast with sautéed onions, mushrooms, and asparagus. Nutritional yeast, soy sauce, salt, and pepper rounded out the dish. The texture and taste is very similar to the same dish made with eggs.

We resumed work on the fire pit at 9:30 AM and had it finished by 1 PM with the original burn pile raked out level. I did not count the number of bricks we used but I think it was around 80. The weather was much more pleasant for this work than the previous two days with highs in the 70’s, lower humidity, and brisk west winds. I would like to get a six foot diameter metal fire ring and install it centered in the fire pit and flush with the top of the top course of blocks. The space between the blocks and the metal ring would be filled with dirt and a top layer of rock such as egg rock.

We had a light lunch of apple slices and chickpea salad spread on rye toast and then got cleaned up. I worked at my desk for a few hours, off-loading photographs from the Sony alpha 100 and onto my Dell laptop. I edited blog posts going back to May 26 and uploaded the ones through May 31st.

Ed Roelle (Great Lakes Converted Coaches chapter) called and left a message while were working in the yard. The message indicated that he had spent the last five days working on his Aqua-Hot hydronic heating system. Apparently the fresh water tubing was clogged, severely restricting the water flow. He attributed this to the extremely hard water in Florida where they have spent most of their winters in their Royale Coach bus conversion. He knew we had just spent the winter there and wanted to make me aware of the potential issue. I was vaguely aware of having read, or been told, that the Aqua-Hot units really prefer to have softened water run through them. We have a portable water softener that I used to fill the fresh water tank most if the time we were in Florida, so I am hopeful that we are avoiding this problem to some extent.

We met Kate at The Pound in downtown Brighton at 6:30 PM. The rooftop patio was being used for a private party so we had to sit downstairs. They had the roll up doors open, so there was plenty of fresh air. Kate brought her official certificate from the Guinness Book of World Records for her participation in the Rosie The Riveter event last year at Willow Run Airport. She brought her iPad and shared photos of some of the places she and Brian had been in the last six months, including the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas. Kate is a very good photographer, and SXSW affords unique photographic opportunities due to the stage lighting at the various venues.

Linda and I had large dinner salads that were excellent and Kate had a chicken wrap. A few bottles of beer were consumed as well. After dinner we went for a stroll on the boardwalk along the Mill Pond. There were lots of Mallards and Canadian Geese with young but the highlight for use were the turtles and 30″ carp. As best we could identify them the smaller and more numerous turtles were painted turtles, Michigan’s state reptile. We also saw half a dozen common snapping turtles, a couple of them quite large. We strolled around Main Street until we found ourselves in front of Two Brothers Coffee Shop and decided to have an after dinner cup of coffee. By the time we finished it was after 9:30 PM and Kate needed to get back to Ypsilanti, tomorrow being a work day for her. We got home and watched the next episode of Doc Martin on Amazon Instant Video.

2014/06/02 (M) Fire Pit Project

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I resumed work on our fire pit today. The probability of rain jumped up and back down at 10 AM, but the rain held off. The revised forecast had the probability back up starting in the late afternoon and remaining elevated through the evening and overnight. Clouds streamed in from the southwest all day. It was warm (~80) with 70% humidity, but the clouds provided much needed relief from the direct sun.

The fire pit being constructed around the old burn pile. View to NE towards the marsh,

Keith was mowing our neighbor’s lawn, which he does every week, and I waved him down to see if he had time to also do ours. Our normal schedule is every other week, but our clay soil is holding a lot of water that, combined with the abundant sunshine of the past five days, has caused everything to grow; a lot. He got it all done before the rains came, which was great.

Looking east towards the pond.

Linda made her scrumptious chickpea (garbanzo bean) salad/spread and we had some for lunch while Keith mowed the area of the yard around the fire pit. She served it on toasted rye bread with fresh Bing (sweet) cherries on the side. Linda loves rye bread and will eat anything on it including peanut butter and jelly. I really like rye bread for certain things, but not others. Hummus and onion; yum. Chickpea spread; absolutely. PB&J; no way. Of course in a former culinary life it was always my favorite for a ham and Swiss cheese sandwich. Rye bread is still an agreeable choice for sandwiches made from the “fake” cold cuts we occasionally buy, including “ham and Swiss” and “pastrami'” both with mustard, of course.

Looking SSW towards the house.

I took a few photographs after lunch and then worked for another hour or so until I hit my personal wall and knew I was done for the day. I gathered all of my tools into the wheelbarrow and rolled it back up to the garage. A cool shower and a long nap had me feeling almost human again just in time for dinner. A quiet evening with a small glass of Egri Merlot and a piece of the (vegan) chilled double chocolate torte, followed by Season 1, Episode 4 of Doc Martin. What’s not to like?

2014/06/01 (N) Farmer’s Market

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As of today I have been “retired” for two years. It has been a very busy, and very satisfying, couple of years and I don’t see that trend changing anytime soon.

Madeline in her Junior Park Ranger outfit.

Starting around this time of year the Howell Farmer’s Market sets up outdoors every Sunday morning around the old courthouse in the heart of downtown and operates from 9:00 AM to ~1:00 PM. During the colder months the market moves indoors and only operates every other week, featuring crafts and prepared foods, such as baked goods, jams, and pickles rather than locally grown fresh fruits and vegetables. When we were both still working we used to spend Sunday mornings at Panera. We still go there on occasion, but if we are around, and the weather is nice, we prefer to spend an hour walking through the market and buying locally grown fresh organic produce.

Our son, Brendan, called last night to check on our health and we suggested that he and Shawna, and Madeline drive up in the morning and we could all go to the Howell Farmer’s Market and then visit at the house. Shawna is deep into her professional life as a professor and researcher at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor and is currently putting her tenure package together, so Sunday is not really a day off for her. Brendan drove up with grand-daughter Madeline and met us at the market around 9:45 AM. She was finally big enough to wear the “Park Ranger” outfit we bought for her at Yellowstone National Park last summer. Too cute.

Madeline in her new Adirondack chair with matching table.

June 1st is still early for the fresh produce that will eventually be available in abundance at the Farmers Market, but it’s a great time of year for locally grown organic asparagus. Linda bought some to use for dinner along with onions, potatoes, and eggplant. One of the things we like about the Howell market is that several local area farms set up stalls and sell produce they harvested the day or two before. Other vendors sell fresh baked goods that they made or preserved foods that they personally prepared.

On our way to the market we stopped at Meijer’s to get a blow up beach ball for Madeline to play with in the yard. While we were there we found a small plastic “Adirondack” chair with a matching table that she was just big enough to use. Back at our house she picked up quickly that this was her special chair and seemed to enjoy using it. Brendan and Madeline stayed until about 12:30 PM. She is usually down for her only nap by 1:00 PM, so Brendan changed her outfit, got her buckled into her car seat, and headed back to Ann Arbor.

Madeline and her dad.

We had a light lunch after which I decided to work on our fire pit project. I am not sure why I felt I had to do this in the afternoon sun on an 84 degree day, but I did. I believe my thinking was that I was sick and tired of being sick and tired and thought the physical activity and deep breathing would be good for me, not to mention the feeling of accomplishment at getting some blocks set in the ground nice and level. The base course is where all the work is; it requires digging a trench in the dirt and then filling it in with gravel and sand and compacting it to create a proper base that allows the first course of block to be firmly planted, fully supported, level side-to-side (block-to-block), and sloping back slightly towards the inside of the curve; all while making the curvature of blocks as circular as possible. I worked all afternoon, with help from Linda, and by 4:30 PM had seven first course blocks set with six second course blocks on top. We are building the fire pit into the side of a slight hill, so the second course of blocks will be the first one that forms a complete circle and should take about 28 blocks for the diameter of fire pit we are creating.

Madeline knows about cameras.

We are using the blocks for the fire pit from the old retaining walls by the basement walkout as these walls are being replaced with low boulder walls with proper drainage and grading. We will have many more of these blocks than we can use in the fire pit project and most of them will be used to edge planting beds around the house.

We have been thinking about getting an umbrella for our patio table so Linda looked for one online. Lowe’s had a selection, so we headed to our local store to see what they had in stock. We found one we liked, got a base to go with it, and picked up four bags of paver base and two bags of paver sand. There is a 30% chance of thunderstorms in the forecast, but if we get a break on the weather we will have the materials on hand to continue working on the fire pit tomorrow. We would also like to get a small street-legal utility trailer that we can tow behind the Honda Element and the Cub Cadet lawn tractor. Lowe’s did not have anything like that so we stopped at Tractor Supply Company. They had what I was looking for, sort of, but they were not street legal (no lights) and used a pin rather than a ball coupler. We will keep looking.

Looking to the north. There is a lot yard in that direction.

Linda made roasted vegetables for dinner (asparagus, onions, potatoes, and eggplant with a little olive oil, salt, and pepper) and served it with a simple green salad and a side of “power grains” consisting of red and white quinoa, millet, and buckwheat. We finished off the evening with Season 1, Episode 3 of Doc Martin on Amazon Video, which we get as part of our Amazon Prime account. Our AT&T High Speed Internet is not very fast, but it seems to be able to keep up with streaming video to an iPad, at least most of the time.

Lots of yard to play in at Grandma and Grandpa’s house.

2014/05/29 (R) 43

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Today was our 43rd wedding anniversary, and it was a beautiful day for it with blue skies, few if any clouds, nice temperatures, and a faint breeze. While we were eating breakfast Linda spotted what she thought was a female wild turkey in the back yard. Binoculars revealed it to be a male Mongolian Ring-Necked Pheasant, the first one we have seen here. A pair of robins have a nest under our deck and we have been watching them come and go. We had a rabbit on our front porch this evening that was intent on picking something out of the sisal fiber door mat. It kept the cats transfixed for a very long time as they sat stone still and watched it from less than three feet away through a window next to the door, never revealing their presence. The hunting instincts of domestic cats are still very powerful.

We took it easy yesterday and the day before as were both still recovering from being ill. We were both finally feeling enough better, however, to get a decent night’s sleep and spend enough time at our desks during the day and get some things done. I also had a nice chat with my sister and filled her in on our plans to visit St. Louis in late June.

Keith came over and cut our neighbor’s grass (5 acre lot) and then cut ours (another 5 acre lot). The boundary line between our two lots is a long low swale that drains towards the pond to our east, sort of. It has marsh grass in some low spots and Keith managed to get his zero-turn mower stuck in the soft ground near one of them. Neither of us had a tow rope, strap, cable, or chain but I found some scrap 10-3 + ground electrical cable. I added some “fresh” gasoline to our lawn tractor tank (it had been in a full, air-tight can with fuel stabilizer for the last year), checked the oil, put a battery charger on the tractor battery, and managed to get it started. The electrical cable was long enough (20+ feet) that I was able to keep my lawn tractor out of the really soft soil. A little bit to my surprise the lawn tractor and electrical cable were up to the task and able to pull the zero-turn free. I was thinking of getting rid of the lawn tractor but perhaps I will keep it. Not to cut grass, but to haul around a small utility/garden trailer for moving mulch and other garden and small landscaping materials. I may just remove the mower deck as it does not work well anyway.

Yesterday I spent a good part of the afternoon and some of the evening writing an article for our FMCA GLCC newsletter on the recent Escapade rally. After Linda proof-read it I selected 10 photos I had used in blog posts about the event, inserted them at the end of the article, provided captions, packaged everything in a Dropbox folder, and got an e-mail off to the newsletter editors with the Dropbox link and editorial instructions.

Butch (and Fonda) called yesterday evening to wish us a happy anniversary because they thought our anniversary was the same day as theirs. It’s not; they have been married one day longer than we have.

Gary was scheduled to come over yesterday morning to discuss our pole barn project but it was raining heavily at the time, and was forecast to rain most of the day, so we rescheduled for Friday afternoon. Village Landscape was tentatively scheduled to start work today on our front entrance sidewalk/stairs and rear retaining walls. I knew that wasn’t guaranteed as they were still finishing up projects that fell behind because of how wet May has been. Once it started raining hard I knew I would not see them today and probably not this week. If they cannot start soon we may have to put them off until next month after GLAMARAMA.

Mike (W8XH) came over this morning to help us with some Windows 8/8.1 issues. We had a problem this winter in the bus where Linda was not able to connect her Windows 8 Samsung to our NAS device via a WiFi connection to our network. She has had the same problem when connecting wirelessly to our network at home. Mike suspected that it had to do with the workgroup name settings and/or the Win 8/8.1 “home group” settings. He took care of Linda’s Samsung laptop first and that turned out to be the case. She left to get her hair cut and we turned our attention to my new ASUS laptop. By the time we finished we had all of the issues on my list resolved and some good thoughts about how to approach a few other things. We discussed the SLAARC WP website development and made a few decisions about when/how we want to unveil it and what functionality needs to be in place by that time.

In the past we would normally go out for dinner on our anniversary but decided to dine in tonight. Linda made amazing pasta and lentils dish with salsa and walnuts. I know, it sounds crazy, but it was soooo good. It was one of the top 10 recipes for 2011 from the OhSheGlows website. She also made a refrigerated vegan double-chocolate torte dessert thingy. It was almost too good to eat, but we managed to each have a piece. 🙂

2014/05/17 (S) Working While We Wait

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As soon as the fairgrounds and Escapade management had asked those of us parked on the horse track infield to delay our departure until Sunday (with a free night’s stay Saturday evening) we decided to comply with their request. Our friends, Butch and Fonda, are parked next to us and also decided to delay their departure. Butch and I hung out this morning while Linda worked with Fonda on their business accounting.

Butch and I were not having any luck solving all of the world’s problems so we decided to investigate our Aqua-Hot problem. The expansion reservoir had apparently overflowed again so I cleaned up the coolant as best I could. I turned on our Aqua-Hot so Butch could observe the smoke on startup and try to detect if it had an odor associated with it. The unit startup up on the first try and produced a lot of white smoke. The white smoke eventually disappeared, but it took quite a while. Neither of us detected the slightly sweet smell of combusted coolant.

I had hoped to have a definitive analysis of our Aqua-Hot situation, but I ended up with data that was inconclusive, at best, and inconsistent, at worst. Recent experiences with a failure to start, excessive white smoke on startup, needing to add coolant, and failure to hold pressure all suggested a coolant leak, possibly into the combustion chamber. On the other hand, it started fine today and the white smoke did eventually clear up. There were alternative explanations for some of the data and these always need to be considered. Jumping to conclusions about what is wrong with a bus/conversion can be unnecessarily expensive.

The loss of pressure may have been due to our inability to keep the pressure tube vertical because of the tight quarters. The pressure is released by pushing this tube to the side where it connects to the radiator fill spout. The loss of coolant could be due to the undersized expansion reservoir overflowing when the unit heats up. I know for a fact that it does this if I have too much coolant in the reservoir when the unit is cold. To pin down whether or not there is a coolant leak into the combustion chamber I will have to remove the burner assembly from the combustion chamber, pressurize the closed coolant system, and visually check for leaks. Even if I don’t find a leak there that will not rule out a leak somewhere. Ugh. Aqua-Hot units are expensive to replace and the model we have is not longer made, so our only direct replacement option is a rebuilt unit. The unit in the coach is a rebuilt one that was installed sometime between Sep 2009 and April 2010.

We quit working with the Aqua-Hot around 1:00 PM to have lunch before heading over to the Tri-Chapter Rally (TCR). A little before 2:00 PM we drove over to the AG Hall for the opening of the TCR. The TCR is an annual joint event of SKP Chapters 6 (Michigan – Great Lakes), 36 (Ohio – Erie Shores), and 51 (Indiana – Hoosier Neighbor). The TCR is usually held in late June on the same weekend as the ARRL Field Day ham radio operating event so we have never been able to attend. Because Escapade was in Goshen, Indiana the TCR was scheduled at the same fairgrounds immediately following the national rally.

We are members of Chapter 6 and Butch/Fonda are members of Chapter 51 but neither of us registered for the TCR because we had planned on leaving today. Since we were “stuck” here we figured we would make an appearance at the 2 PM opening of the rally and play it by ear from there. It turned out that 2:00 PM was the beginning of registration; the opening social was scheduled for 4:00 PM with dinner at 5:30 PM. The rally organizer said we could come to the social without registering, but wanted us to pay if we were staying for dinner. That seemed reasonable and we indicated that we would return at 4:00 PM to be sociable for an hour.

We never made it back. By the time 4 o’clock came around we were all tired and none of us felt like being sociable. We eventually got hungry and went to the South Side Soda Shop (SSSS). SSSS was featured in an episode of Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives (Triple-D). It was appropriately quaint, the wait staff was very friendly, and the food was good and plentiful; exactly what you would expect from a place featured on Triple-D. Linda and I had garden salads with a dressing we had never had before; oil and capers. It was delicious; a new favorite. We split a veggie sandwich, flat bread with pesto and hummus, and an order of curly fries. The fries alone would have been a meal!

Butch bought a WiFi Ranger Mobile and Go2 combo at the Escapade. Earlier in the day he attached the Mobile unit to a couple of pieces of PVC pipe which he used as a mast by securing them to the driver’s side mirror on their bus. He ran the coax in through a window and hooked it all together. After dinner I worked with him to get the WFR Mobile/Go2 configured while Fonda visited with Linda.

I have done a couple of posts this past week that brought up concepts from aviation because I used to fly airplanes and thought there were interesting analogies to be made. Well, here’s another one: RVing, much like flying, is weather dependent, and more so than you might realize. We have had to be pulled out of two different fairgrounds at the conclusion of week-long rallies where we were parked on grass and it rained (hard) most of the week. Unless you only stay at campgrounds with paved roads and sites this will eventually happen. When threatening weather is in your path, you ground yourself; a high profile vehicle with an amateur driver does not belong on the road in high winds, blinding rain, or icy conditions any more than a private pilot should be in the air under those conditions. An RV has no more business crossing a flooded road than a car or pedestrian does, and the reason you have a home that can be moved is so you can get it out of harm’s way; RVs are not designed to be driven into tornadic storms, hurricanes, or blizzards.

We really need to be on the road Sunday morning as we have company coming for dinner that evening, Linda has to go into the bakery on Monday and Tuesday, and someone is coming to the house on Wednesday to discuss our pole barn project. But just because we need to leave doesn’t mean we will be able to. That will be decided by Mother Nature. If we cannot get the bus out on Sunday Linda will take the car and return home and I will return with the bus (and the casts) when I can.

2014/05/02 (F) A Day At Home

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Linda went into the bakery today so she was up early and left at 6:30 AM to get ahead of the worst of the morning rush hour traffic headed into Detroit from the northwest. She took my new laptop to have some critical software installed. With the 17″ screen, the computer does not fit in any of our existing padded carry cases, so that is an accessory I will need to get. I also have my eye on an external BluRay/DVD/CD optical media drive (read/write). The BluRay disks will store anywhere from 25 to 45 GB of data which is more practical that CDs or DVDs for non-volatile /off-site storage of photographs and critical documents.

We only have one car at the moment, so I was stuck at home today (I don’t use the motorcoach to run errands). Being stuck at home on a chilly, overcast, rainy day is not necessarily a bad thing. After a light breakfast and my morning coffee I started a load of laundry and worked at my desk for a while.

I took a break from desk work and opened the front of one of our APC Smart UPS units that had died while we were away. I had replaced batteries in a couple of these units but could not recall if this was one of them. It was not. When I opened the batter compartment I found the batteries badly swollen and I was unable to remove them from the case. The tags on them indicated that they were from 2010. The only thing I can think of that would have caused this was a failure in the battery charging circuit which continued to charge the batteries after they were already fully charged. That would cause them to gas and swell as they are sealed AGM batteries. We were probably lucky they did not explode. Given this situation I will replace the whole UPS rather than put new batteries in it. APC usually offers a trade-in allowance (called Trade-Ups) for the same or larger UPS. Otherwise I have to dispose of the whole thing as electronic hazardous waste.

Steve Degenais of Village Landscape Development stopped by mid-morning to discuss two separate projects: 1) stairs to get from the pull-thru driveway to the front porch, and; 2) redoing the retaining walls on either side of the basement walkout.

When we bought the house last year it had a makeshift pull-thru driveway and no stairs or pathway to the front porch, which is the main entrance to the house. The previous owners used the Florida room, which is just an enclosed patio slab between the house and the garage, as an entry/breezeway. It was empty and they left it unlocked, entering the house through a door to the kitchen that locked. We use the Florida room as a library, so we do not leave it open. We also had the pull-thru driveway substantially improved last spring so we can park our bus with the entrance door opposite the front door of the house. Carrying things back and forth between the house and the bus on a steep grassy slope is an accident waiting to happen. There is a four foot drop in 18 feet from the front porch to the driveway and we need a proper set of stairs.

Although we have a walkout basement, the house is not set into the side of a hill. If you walk around the house it appears to sit on top of a mound. It appears that dirt was piled around the basement walls, except by the walkout, and graded away from house, more or less. In the back it slopes in towards the walkout. There are remnants of an old railroad tie retaining wall and it appears that sometime later someone tried to stabilize the two slopes with plastic held in place with small boulders, pieces of cinder block, used bricks, and whatever else was handy to throw in there. That apparently wasn’t working very well so they built two retaining walls, each about seven courses high (~3 ft), with blocks meant for decorative edging of plant beds. It’s also clear that they did not make any provision for water drainage behind the walls and yet two downspouts from the roof gutter system discharged into these areas before I used corrugated plastic pipe to carry the water away from the house. The pipes are still there, sitting on the surface right where I put them last spring. The earth behind the walls has obviously moved over time and the walls are buckling in places. Mud pushes through and around them. It’s not pretty on several levels.

Our sump pump runs quite a bit in the spring and we need to get rainwater away from the foundation as much as possible. Drainage and stabilization of the slopes are my primary concern but I always care about aesthetics. Steve and I discussed an approach using small boulders to make low retaining walls backed with fabric and drain pipes to capture and drain the water far out into the yard. The slopes would be re-graded to provide runoff away from the house, covered with landscape fabric, and then covered with small boulders and “egg rock.” The drain lines would all be buried and run to an exit point far out in the yard.

I spent much of the rest of the day working on our website and blog with the help of our cats, who were a bit needier than usual following their visit to the veterinarian yesterday. Sometime during the day a package arrived from Amazon. On Wednesday we ordered an Amped|Wireless SR20000G (wireless router/repeater/access point) to replace the one Mike (W8XH) gave us just before we left for Florida. The SR20000G worked very well for us in our bus and is now a permanent part of our on-board communications technology arsenal. We ordered it through Amazon Prime and had it in two days; no extra charge for shipping.

Linda picked up some groceries on her way home from the bakery and we had a simple dinner consisting of a very tasty spinach salad and an Amy’s Roasted Vegetable Pizza. After dinner she worked on food for tomorrow’s visit with our daughter and son-in-law. She made her fabulous vegan Sloppy Joe’s and carrot cake cookies while I worked with my new notebook computer. Updates were available and I had to “update and restart” the machine six times before there were no more updates to install. There were 24+5+20+4+8+10 = 71 updates in all. Allen, the computer sales associate at Best Buy, had alerted me to the fact that once I activated the machine there would be quite a few updates, so this was not unexpected.

2014/04/29 (W) Normality?

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When we got home on Monday, the bus and I had been away from the house for 128 days (130 days including the day we left and the day we returned) spanning portions of five months. We moved into our new (to us) house on April 12th, 2013. From May 1st of last year through the end of April 2014 we were in our motorcoach 214 of those 365 days ( +/- a couple of days). Not bad for our first year as extended-time RVers and our first snowbird season.

Although we are still relative newbies at extended-time RVing this past year allowed us to develop a reasonable understanding of how to make it work for us. But now we are home and that entails a different pace and rhythm to which we have had to quickly adjust. First and foremost was letting folks know we were back and arranging visits with family and friends. After that we have to deal with dentist appointments, veterinary appointments, doctor appointments, car appointments, computer upgrades, WordPress websites, photo editing software, ham radio club breakfasts and meetings, a communications tower, ham radio antennas, an OTA TV antenna, a cell phone repeater system, landscaping projects, fruit trees (pruning), a pole barn, conversion of the house to natural gas, and a list of bus projects (of course). All by December 1st. Right.

Gus the cat. Look closely; he has the longest whiskers I have ever seen on a cat.

Gus the cat. He has the longest whiskers I have ever seen on a cat.

Today was dental appointments followed by a detour to Ann Arbor to visit with our younger grand-daughter and her parents. I’ve put some photos from that visit in a separate gallery post. We stopped at the Whole Foods market and picked up something for lunch as well as ingredients Linda needed for making granola. Madeline was napping when we arrived, so we got to visit with Brendan for a little while, but once she woke up she was ready to go. It was 70 degrees F outside so we put her in the stroller and took her to the park that is the centerpiece of their neighborhood. She spent a lot of time walking and running in the grass, up and down concrete ramps, but especially climbing the stairs for the slides and then sliding down. Not long after we got back to the house Shawna got home from work and Madeline got a lot of mommy interaction. By that point it was rush hour and we decided to stay for dinner.

No one was prepared to cook and rather than get carryout or delivery we decided to go to The Lunch Room, a relatively new vegan restaurant in Ann Arbor’s Kerrytown district. Linda had a vegan mac & cheese and I had a mock Rueben made with Tempeh and a cup of vegan tomato bisque soup. Everything was very good, including the vegan desserts: a grasshopper brownie for Linda and a no-flour chocolate cupcake with a Bourbon / Caramel / Pastry Cream frosting for me. All of the food was very good and reasonably priced, which is not always the case in Ann Arbor. By the time we got home and I took a phone call, there wasn’t much of the evening left.

So the new normal for us is not one or the other, it’s both/and; figuring out how to balance two very different ways of living and, in particular, how to flow back and forth between them as easily, smoothly, and quickly as possible. But that may be just the sort of challenge our brains need to remain agile as we begin our forth score of years.

2014/04/25 (F) National Corvette Museum

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As forecast, we had thunderstorms overnight. Light rain started before we went to bed, but the most intense weather was between 3 and 4 AM with lightning, thunder, and intermittent heavy downpours. It is impossible to sleep through such weather even if we could completely darken the bedroom, which we cannot, as the sound of the storm is omnipresent and the wind rocks the motorcoach. Once the storms subside, however, the sound of gentle rain on the roof makes for ideal sleeping conditions. The good news was that none of our usual leaks appeared.

The National Corvette Museum main entrance, Bowling Green, KY.

We had three things on our agenda for today—breakfast at Panera, the National Corvette Museum, and grocery shopping—all of which were in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Since we were having breakfast out we did not make coffee at home and used the time normally devoted to breakfast to take showers. Mundane, perhaps, but we keep the cats’ litter tray in the shower, so using it for its intended purpose requires at but more work than it might otherwise.

We left around 9 AM to dark, cloudy skies but with a forecast for steadily improving conditions across the region throughout the day. We took I-65 to make time and took exit 22 onto US-231, the main commercial drag into Bowling Green. We stopped at the visitor information center and got some local maps and information. The Bowling Green Panera was just down the road and we were there by 10:30 AM. Maybe it’s a southern thing, or perhaps a smaller town thing, but this was the third Panera we have been in recently where we had to wait in line while the person behind the counter carried on a personal conversation with the 1st person in line way beyond any reasonable definition of customer service. But I was patient and eventually got our bagels and coffee. Not that I had much of a choice; it was the only Panera for 100 miles or more in any direction from where we are camped.

Panera is a great place to sit and enjoy unlimited free refills of excellent coffee and use free Wi-Fi. The Wi-Fi is not secure but they do require you to log in to their network to accept their terms and conditions of use. Part of those T&Cs is a notice to please limit your use of the system to 30 minutes during the busy lunch period. We have never seen that enforced until today when both of our iPads got cutoff and we received a message that we would not be allowed to reconnect until after 2 PM. 🙁 It was past noon by that point and we were ready to move on anyway. The place was busy, but this was the first time we had ever had our use of Panera’s Wi-Fi system curtailed.

This Corvette was being raffled off at 4 PM. 1,000 tickets, $250 each.

We headed over to the National Corvette Museum where a big “bash” was taking place. The museum was open for general admission, but plant tours required reservations which were no longer available as of two weeks ago. The main parking lots were filled with Corvettes and we were parked in a field a short distance away. Because of the “bash” the lobby was packed with vendors and people, but once we paid our senior admission of $8 (each) and went into the display area it was quiet and not crowded.

The NCM was built, and is run by, a private foundation. It is not owned, or operated, by General Motors but enjoys a very close working relationship with the company, including the fact that it is on the same street as the factory where the cars have been built since production was moved there in 1981. Neither of us are “car people” but we found this to be an excellent museum and thoroughly enjoyed our time looking at the cars, reading about them, and trying to photograph them in the subdued museum lighting.

Because the “bash” was going on, the museum had opened the area where a massive sinkhole opened up on February 12, swallowing eight priceless Corvettes. Since that event all of the cars had been recovered from the hole and put on display “as is.” Most were badly damaged, some beyond recognition or any hope of repair. Work was also underway to stabilize the sinkhole and ultimately rebuild that part of the museum and return it to service. We had to sign liability waivers in order to enter this area of the museum and see the sinkhole. After we were done in the museum we walked around part of the parking lot looking at the Corvettes parked there before walking back to our car.

We back-tracked towards downtown and stopped at a Kroger’s supermarket across the street from the Western Kentucky University medical complex. This was the largest, and nicest, Kroger’s store we have ever been in. We picked up the things we needed to take care of our food needs for the rest of the trip home. Linda found a “power mix” of salad greens that included Mizuna, a slightly peppery and very tasty green that we had not heard of or seen before, even at a Whole Foods.

We took US-31W from Bowling Green through beautiful rolling farm lands back to Cave City. After unloading the groceries I had a brief chat with one of the guys from the Airstream caravan who filled me in on a few more details about how the caravan operates. The whole group had also been at the NCM today and got to tour the factory.

Linda made a pot of crushed lentil soup for dinner, from a recipe she has used before, and served it with a salad of the wonderful “power mix” greens and an “Asian” dressing. On a walk after dinner we met a young couple, also out for an evening stroll, with their 2-year old, Dakota. They said he enjoyed RVing, especially the rocks and the trains, and was a good traveler. As long as he likes trains he has a bright future ahead as an RVer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Choctawhatchee River at Live Oak Landing.

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

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

2014/04/10 (R) Dunedin (FL)

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[Photos related to this post will appear in a separate gallery post.]

I confirmed yesterday that our awning windows would not be reinstalled until Friday, which left us free to go do something today. We made sure the office had my cell phone number and then left around 9:20 AM for Dunedin, Florida about 30 miles south of where we are currently “camped” at Suncoast Designers. Most of the drive was on US-19 with road construction and moderate-to-heavy traffic the whole way. US-19 from Weeki Wachee south to St. Petersburg is just not an interesting or pleasant drive.

The destination was worth the drive, however, and we arrived at the eastern edge of Dunedin around 10:30 AM and parked near the Serendipity Café. Over the next hour we walked through Dunedin’s historic downtown area to the marina on the Gulf of Mexico and back to the car. Dunedin is the sister city to Stirling, Scotland and the historic downtown area reflects some Scottish heritage; at least the Scottish Heritage Center is there.

It was a gorgeous spring morning for a leisurely stroll with clear skies, bright sunshine, and temperatures around 70 degrees F. This was the sort of day that shows a town like Dunedin in its best light. Dunedin had a nice look and vibe to it–a bit upscale yet funky at the same time–with an assortment of unique restaurants (no chains), shops, and art galleries. It was visually interesting without being pretentious.

We were back at the Serendipity Café a little before 11:30 AM. We got a table for four and Donna and Michael arrived shortly thereafter. They had suggested this restaurant because it was approximately midway between our respective locations and it had some vegan items on the menu. Donna and Michael are members of our FMCA Freethinkers chapter and spent a few nights at Williston Crossings RV Resort in early January where we had a chance to finally meet and get acquainted. They have been vegans for a very long time, so we also have that interest in common. We were glad we could arrange another get-together with them before we left Florida.

We lingered over lunch for 90 minutes enjoying good food and good conversation. I had a “Green Monster” smoothie made with spinach, pineapple, mango, and papaya. Linda and I split the Asian kale salad which included carrots, red pepper, and roasted pumpkin seeds in a ginger/sesame/tamari dressing. We then split the Penne Fresco; brown rice penne pasta with tomato, zucchini, kale, capers, white beans, olive oil, and dill. The ingredients formed a light sauce that tasted like butter. Served slightly warm, it was pleasant and delicious. We split a muffin with dried cherries in it for dessert. It’s always a treat to find a nice little restaurant with vegan choices and even better when we can share it with friends. BTW: every dish at Serendipity Café is organic and gluten-free.

Donna and Michael had been on the Holistic Holiday At Sea cruise in early March so we compared experiences. They were on a different/newer ship than the one we sailed on so we could not directly compare notes on that. They found the educational aspects of the program very informative and decided to drastically reduce the amount of oil they use in their cooking. They were less impressed with the dining, finding many of the dishes bland compared to how they cook, the serving sizes too small, and the meals generally lacking in an adequate quantity of fresh vegetables. They ended up supplementing the special vegan dining with vegetables from the regular buffet. I think that IF you want to go on a cruise, and IF you are a vegan, and IF you would like to take something home from your experience other than a few extra pounds, then the HH@S cruise uniquely meets those requirements. If you are not really that interested in a cruise and/or gourmet vegan dining then VegFest in Pennsylvania provides the same or better educational experience for a lot less money.

We left the cafe around 1:00 PM and made the 3 mile drive north up the coast to Causeway Blvd, so named because it crosses two bridges on either end of a sand bar to form the causeway that connects Honeymoon Island to the mainland. We had to wait briefly for the drawbridge to lower to get onto the island, which got its name when someone many, many years ago built 50 cottages there for honeymooners to use. The first part of the island has some commercial development, but most of the island is Honeymoon Island State Park; the reason for our visit.

We used our annual Florida State Park pass to get in and headed to the nature center to rendezvous with Donna and Michael. The nature center is elevated, probably as protection against hurricane storm surge, but as a result it provides an unobstructed view of the park and surrounding water from its wrap-around deck. We got some good tips from the ranger about an active Bald Eagle nest and a Great Horned Owl at the north end of the Osprey Trail. We also noted the cautions about Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnakes that inhabit the island in significant numbers. The largest North American rattlesnake, it is one of the six venomous snakes found in Florida.

We drove to the trailhead, parked, and headed out, but not before changing lenses on my DSLR. Any chance I had of capturing wildlife images would require my 100-300 mm zoom lens. The trail out was level, dry, and firm but not hard, with adequate shade. The trees were mostly shorter palms with occasional taller pines, and a light breeze found its way in from the water. The Osprey Trail was appropriately named. We saw at least a dozen Osprey nests, most of them occupied with immature birds. We eventually found the Great Horned Owl roosting high up in a pine tree. The Bald Eagle nest was at the very end of the trail, by definition, as the park had closed off the entire tip of the island to keep human visitors and their pets from disturbing the birds. The pair of adult eagles had successfully hatched two eggs and the immature birds were already fledged and out of the nest. We only saw one adult bird soaring high up and far away, but the nest was impressive enough even without the eagles in it.

We took part of the Pelican Trail on the return hike thinking it might run along the water, but it was separated from the shore by high, thick vegetation. The trail was sandy and lacking in shade, making for a slightly more difficult hike. The air temperature was only 77 degrees F, but the sun was very hot, and we were all glad to get back to our cars. We chatted a while longer in the parking lot, said our farewells, and went our separate ways. Well, initially we went the same way; we were on an island after all, and there was only one way off.

Causeway Blvd becomes FL-586 which we followed east for about five miles to northbound McMullen Booth Road. We followed McMullen Booth Road, which became E Lake Road, north for about 10 miles to Trinity Blvd. Trinity Blvd cut ENE to the southern terminus of Little Road, which we followed north for about 12 miles back to New York Ave. From there it west just a mile or so back west to Suncoast Designers.

We were surprisingly tired considering that it had been a relatively easy day. Linda had some Tofurkey brand “fake bacon” made from tempeh so she made vegan BLTs for dinner along with a simple green salad. We went for a walk after dinner and strolled around the Suncoast property with Bill and Nancy who own the Newmar Essex next to us. A Country Coach Affinity 770 pulled in after we got back and the owner, Steve, came out and joined the conversation for a while. As dusk turned to night the air temperature dropped. We all started to feel the chill and retired to our rigs.

2014/04/05 (S) The Last Campfire

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I am really glad that I installed the Feedly app on our iPads and figured out how to use it. I enjoy starting most days with our freshly ground and brewed special blend coffees from Teeko’s (Howell, MI) while I easily read any new content on the nine or so blogs that I follow. I also subscribe to our blog, which makes it easy to check on how our posts appear on an iPad. Sometimes I catch typos and I can log in to WordPress from the iPad and fix them.

We got an e-mail yesterday from the Escapees RV Club reminding us that April 6 was the last day to order polo shirts for the upcoming Escapade. Apparently we missed the original announcements (we get a LOT of e-mail and do not always read the commercial messages carefully). We followed the link to the special website and ordered one for each of us to pick up when we check in at the rally next month. It’s always nice to have a new polo shirt, especially one that clearly identifies us as RVers. The other reason to order is that I prefer a pocket for my eyeglasses and the pocket shirts are only available pre-order. We also experienced at the Escapade last July that the limited stock of available shirts sold out very quickly.

As long as we were doing RV-related things online we registered for the FMCA Great Lakes Area Motor Coach Association area rally in June. GLAMARAMA14 will be the second area rally hosted by GLAMA. The first one was last September and two versions of an article I wrote about the event were published. One version appeared in the newsletter of the FMCA Great Lakes Converted Coaches (GLCC) chapter. The other version was the cover story in the January 2014 issue of Bus Conversion Magazine. We will once again be parked with our GLCC chapter.

While Linda went to Gainesville for some specialized grocery items I worked on e-mail and RVillage stuff and then finished/uploaded my blog post for yesterday. I was reading the Harvest Hosts April newsletter and decided to see if Don and Kim had joined RVillage. They had, and had already created a Harvest Hosts Group! We joined the group and sent them a friend request, which they accepted.

I had an e-mail from Chuck indicating that he might have a problem with the Vanner Equalizer on their Prevost H3-40 chassis batteries and wondering if I knew where it was located? On the drive up from Pelican Lake in Naples, Florida to the Prevost Community rally at LazyDays RV in Seffner, Florida they got a telltale light indicating the upper and lower halves of the 24 VDC chassis battery bank were out-of-balance. It just so happened that I did know where the equalizer is located, but only because I had stumbled on it while servicing our chassis batteries not long after we got the coach. (It is mounted on the underside of the chassis battery tray or the adjacent chassis electrical disconnect tray.) I sent him the info and he called later to chat.

We are already thinking about what we have to do to be ready to leave on Monday. I shut of the fuel polishing module and removed the paper towel I had wrapped around the check valve last weekend to absorb fuel from the tiny leak. Polishing is just a term for “finely filtered.” The pump ran continuously for about six days, long enough to slowly filter most of the fuel in the tank at least once. The fuel polishing module draws about two (2) gallons per hour from the main diesel fuel tank through the pickup tube that supplies the Aqua-Hot, pumps it through the dedicated Racor water separator/filter for the Aqua-Hot, and returns it to the tank. Because the fuel is moved through the filter so slowly it is better able to remove any moisture, debris, and organisms that may be in the fuel.

We came in to WCRVR January 1st with a nearly full fuel tank, so the FPM needed at least four days to filter the 200 gallons we had on board. Of course, we have used the Aqua-Hot while we were here and also run the main engine, both of which circulate fuel through Racor water separator/filters, but not so slowly as the FPM. The pickup tube for the Aqua-Hot (and the one for the auxiliary powerplant) are (supposed to be) only 3/4 of the way into the tank (from the top) to prevent them from using all of the fuel in the tank. (We have a practical range of 200 miles on a 1/4 tank of fuel with a comfortable reserve; 250 miles if absolutely necessary. At 300 miles we would risk running out of fuel. That would not be good and require the engine to be re-primed once we had fuel on board.) The main engine pickup tube, however, is near the bottom of the tank, so running the main engine also has the effect drawing the fuel from the bottom 1/4 of the tank and returning it to the top, thus mixing all of the fuel.

I had disconnected the water softener yesterday so AALL*BRITE could use the water supply to wash our coach. One of my last chores before pulling out will be to dump the waste tanks and top off the fresh water tank so I reconnected the water softener in preparation for this task.

We gathered at Jack and Silvia’s site at 4 PM for happy hour along with John and Ali, Doug and Paulette, and Jeff and Kathy. We enjoyed a glass of the Barefoot Moscato that Jeff and Kathy gave us last night as a “thank you” for helping with the electrical issues in their motorhome. We also had a chance to chat with Paulette more than we have up to this point. By 5:30 PM we were all getting hungry and returned to our respective rigs for dinner. Linda made Cauli-power Fettuccini Alfredo for dinner using a recipe that replaces the traditional cream-based Alfredo sauce with a sauce made from cauliflower. She had not made this dish before and had to substitute angel hair pasta for the fettuccini. It was very tasty. In addition to Sloppy Joe’s she is making Itty Bitty Carrot Cake Cookies for tomorrow’s pot luck dinner. The cookie recipe calls for rehydrated raisins that have soaked overnight in water, so she had to get that started today.

Tonight was the last campfire we will attend at Williston Crossings RV Resort as we are scheduled to leave on Monday. The highs have been reaching into the mid-80’s, the lows only into the upper 50’s, and it has stayed light much later due to the switch to Daylight Savings Time and the steady advance of spring. These factors work against the appropriateness of a large fire and at some point, perhaps soon, WCRVR will stop having the Friday/Saturday night campfires until next fall when the long-term seasonal residents return. That won’t keep people from gathering at the fire pit to hear Smitty, Jeff, and others who might drop by, play their guitars and sing their songs.

Alas, we will not be among those retuning. As is clear from my many blog posts over the last three months we have enjoyed our stay at Williston Crossings and would not hesitate to come back here. Indeed, we recommend the resort without reservation to anyone visiting this part of Florida. But we are at the beginning of a journey in which we hope to explore and experience many places in North America over the next 20 or so years. There are too many unvisited places for us to return to one so soon, if ever, no matter how nice it is.

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

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

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

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

2014/03/25 (T) That Is Imsane

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No; that is not a typo. Today I learned about a WordPress plug-in named “imsanity,” and yes, that is how it is spelled. Imsanity is not a well-kept secret—it has been downloaded over 45,000 times—but I had never heard of it until this morning.

I got an e-mail overnight letting me know that we had reached 80% of our disk storage quota on our QTH.com web-hosting account and asking me to delete files or contact the administrator to request an increase in our quota. I figured I would do both so I started by contacting QTH.com to make the request. I had been thinking for a while that I should go back and resize the photo files I uploaded to the website and blog, so the disk quota issue spurred me to action.

When we started the website/blog last year I was not familiar with digital image manipulation software and did not know how to resize an image for the web. I do now, of course, but I had uploaded some 300 high resolution JPEG files before I learned how. At 3.0+ MB each, our website/blog swelled to almost 1.0 GB of disk storage after only two months. Clearly that was not going to be sustainable, but going back and fixing it was going to be a big job, and deleting them was not an option I was willing to entertain.

I was pondering the prospect of spending several weeks re-sizing images, uploading the image files, inserting them into old blog posts, deleting the original images from the blog posts, and finally deleting the old, large image files, all without making a mistake. My guess is that I would never have accomplished this task, if I ever started. I am, frankly, fairly busy with projects going forward and really had no interest in spending that kind of time fixing archival material.

And then a pair of e-mail replies arrived from Scott at QTH.com; my disk allocation had been bumped up, giving me some breathing room, followed by a recommendation to check out the “imsanity” plug-in for WordPress. Not only do the QTH web-servers run extremely well, their technical support is second to none.

Imsanity is an insanely simple, but incredibly useful plug-in. It can be used to retroactively re-size images in a WordPress site, which is exactly what I needed to do. A few simple parameters establish the maximum horizontal and vertical image size for several categories of image use and the quality of JPEG to be created. A simple search function identifies up to 250 image files that exceed the maximum limits. You can select all of them at once or select individual files to process (as many as you want). Click a button and it works its way through the list. I accomplished in an hour what I thought would never get done, with no visible change in the old blog posts since the displayed size of the images is always smaller than the file size. The only difference is that now when someone clicks on one of the images the largest it will appear is 1024 pixels horizontally or vertically. The resized image files s are less than 1/6^th the size of the originals, a significant savings in the use of disk space. It also means that web pages and blog posts will load more quickly. The other use of imsanity is to resize image files as they are uploaded if they exceed the maximum dimensions set in the plug-in’s parameters. I am now resizing all of our photos before I upload them, so I should have less need of that capability.

Linda made a Swiss Chard with quinoa (instead of couscous). Magnificent. She has entered the recipe into the recipe section of our website.

2014/03/17 (N) St. Patrick’s Day

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By Sunday we were not so much tired as we were relaxed and enjoying low key days with wonderful weather at the RV resort. The temperature made it into the low 80’s and, even with the windows open and the ceiling vent fans running, it got a bit warmer than that in the coach. No matter; it was a relatively light day for RVillage website interactions and e-mail and we spent much of the day sitting outside reading. We can only sit for so long at a time, however, so we went for a few walks and raked some leaves using a rake we borrowed from John next door.

Between 5:50 PM and 7:05 PM we got six e-mails from our whole house generator. The first three let us know that the utility power had failed and the generator was running and supplying power to the house. The last three let us know that utility power had been restored, that the generator was no longer supplying power to the house, and finally that the generator had shut down in an orderly fashion and was back in stand-by mode. Sweet. With sub-zero winter temperatures giving way to highs in the 40’s and above over the next five weeks we cannot afford to be without heat or a sump pump, both of which depend on electrical power. Ditto for the AT&T Internet gateway that allows us to remotely monitor and control the whole-house generator and WiFi thermostat. Technology really is cool when it works.

Williston Crossings RV Resort had a St. Patrick’s Day dinner (a day early) but we did not go, the menu having little-to-nothing we could eat. The day was feeling a bit summery, so we had veggie burgers with cold green bean kale salad and fresh strawberries for dessert. At dusk John and Ali decided to have a small campfire at their site next door and we joined them along with neighbors Doug and Paulette (from North Bay, ON) and Jim (“Sonny Fox”). Glasses of white wine in hand we had our version of a “cocktail party” here at Williston Crossings. Our bus conversion notwithstanding, we are still “campers” at heart and love to sit around a campfire in the evening.

Rain was forecast for overnight and through the next day, so we closed up the rig before turning in for the night. The radar showed a heavy band of showers training slightly north of east off the Gulf and slowly drifting south over time towards our part of north central Florida. We got the first raindrops sometime after midnight and by 4 AM had a full blown thunderstorm in progress. Awake or asleep we are always aware of, and in close contact with, the weather when we are living in the bus and do not sleep as well as on calmer nights.

St. Patrick’s Day dawned wet and overcast with no discernible sunrise; just a gradual, slight lightening of the sky. The clouds remained thick and dark all day and the rain was almost continuous until mid-afternoon, with torrential downpours at times, so we hunkered down and worked on computer-based tasks and did some reading. By late afternoon the rain stopped but a heavy cloud layer continued to move over us from the southwest and the high temperature only reached 67 degrees F.

Soup (or stew) is always a welcome counterpoint to a cool, dreary day. Linda found a recipe for kale, white bean, and potato stew. The base was onions, carrots, and celery. She used black beans instead of white, russet potatoes instead of Yukon Gold, and substituted balsamic vinegar for red wine vinegar. She cut back on the quantity of water and ended up with a delicious, hearty soup.

We got a short walk in after dinner before the rain resumed around 8:00 PM. PBS has been fund-raising for what seems like weeks now. In recognition of St. Patrick’s Day they aired a concert by Celtic Women, followed by a concert by Judy Collins, all of which provided some entertainment for the evening. Thunderstorms were again forecast for the early morning hours, but Tuesday promised clearer weather.

2014/02/14 (F) Valentine’s Day

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“Hallmark Holidays” have never been a big deal for us, and Valentine’s Day is no exception. However, we had no plans to visit state parks today, had been looking for a day to visit the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida in Gainesville, needed to make a visit to Walmart, and wanted to try one of the vegan-friendly restaurants in Gainesville, so Valentine’s Day provided the needed excuse to do all of that in the same trip. Before I go on, I am including a picture of us taken by Marian Hagan on our outing with her and John to the two Crystal River state parks last Sunday.

Us at Crystal River Buffer Preserve State Park. (Photo by Marian Hagan.)

We selected The Jones Eastside which was open all day serving breakfast and lunch, and was staying open for dinner. We can usually find acceptable food for lunch and dinner if we are thoughtful about our choice of restaurant, but breakfast is often limited to dry toast with jam and/or fresh fruit. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but also nothing special about it. At The Jones Eastside, however, we were able to order a tofu scramble with sides of potatoes and fruit and a stack of vegan flax seed pancakes with fresh blueberries and real maple syrup. We split each dish in half and had a really nice breakfast. The Jones Eastside was highly recommended on both HappyCow.com and Yelp.com, and deservedly so. It’s a quaint little place using organic ingredients and providing attentive service; you go for the food, not for an upscale setting.

From The Jones Eastside we drove through the heart of downtown Gainesville to where we thought the Florida Museum of Natural History was located. We enjoyed seeing the non-university part of town, and parts of the UF central campus, but the museum was not where I thought it was. Our Garmin 465T GPS did, however, and we followed its directions into a major traffic jam. We had been to Gainesville several times, but had not seen traffic like this before.

We found the museum, paid $4 to park, and went in. Admission was free except for the Butterfly Rainforest and special exhibits. We spent a couple of hours exploring the free exhibits and plan to return for the Butterflies and a special exhibit titled “Wolf to Woof” on the evolution of the domestic dog. Like most serious museums, you could spend days here depending on the level of detail you wanted to absorb.

By the time we were done at the museum it was 4 PM. Our Valentine’s Day still needed something “sweet” so we headed to Karma Cream for vegan ice cream. We fought our way (slowly) through more terrible traffic, but it was worth it. 🙂

“GPS, find us a Walmart, please.” It showed two in Gainesville so I picked the closer one just up the street. It was closed, the building vacant. 🙁 So I selected the other one on SW Archer (US-24). We routed ourselves over to FL-121 southbound which intersects Archer close to the Walmart. YOU DO NOT WANT TO BE ON THIS ROAD DURING AFTERNOON RUSH HOUR, which is actually “hope you’re not in a rush” hour. Truthfully, you do not want to be in Gainesville during the evening rush hour. Period. End of story. Total gridlock. Fortunately we were not in a rush to be anywhere in particular by any certain time so we only had to deal with our self-imposed frustration at being stuck in traffic. It won’t happen again, at least not in Gainesville.

We eventually got to the Walmart (thank goodness they are open 24/7). We do not go out of way to shop there, but it’s the only place locally where we can find Calgon Bath Beads which we mix with water and Pine Sol and add to our holding tanks. It is also where we bought our microwave popcorn popper and have to get the disposable cardboard heating discs that go in the bottom.

Shopping done, we had no choice but to venture back out into traffic. OK, we had a choice; we could have sat there for a couple of hours until traffic thinned. If we had been the least bit hungry we could have gotten something to eat while we waited, but having just had ice cream our appetites were satisfied. Fortunately we were close to the SW corner of Gainesville by now where FL-121 turns SSW and heads through the country to Williston. We arrived back at the RV resort after 6 PM, but there was no fire going in the fire pit.

WCRVR was having a Valentine’s Day dinner/dance starting at 5 PM so the Friday night fire had not been built by Kevin at its usual time as he and his wife had gone to the dinner/dance. But a short time later I noticed a flickering flame and went to investigate. Next door neighbors John and Ali had not gone to the dinner/dance either and John, being the backup fire guy, was getting one going. We opened our bottle of sparkling pink moscato, bundled up a bit against the cool evening air, and went over. Ali brought John’s guitar, the rocking chairs slowly filled up (~16 people), and we sang along when we knew the words. It was a lovely capstone to a very nice Valentine’s Day (traffic notwithstanding).

2014/02/12(W) Back In Time

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We woke to an overcast sky with rain in the forecast for the afternoon. One of the closer state parks to us is the Dudley Farm Historic State Park. I don’t know how many types of state parks Florida has, but so far we have been to: “Regular” (un-designated/default); Preserve; Buffer (Preserve); Wilderness (Preserve); Archeological; Geological; and Wildlife/preserve. This was our first Historic(al) park and I know they have Battlefield parks. I will not be surprised to find out there are other types as well, such as Marine or Bird Sanctuary.

Located in Newberry, Florida the Dudley Farm Historic SP is NW of Williston and due west of Gainesville. We also needed to do some shopping today, so a trip to the state park in the morning (before the rain started) followed by a swing through Gainesville was our plan for the day. We were on our way by 10 AM, taking US-27/41 NNW out of Williston through Archer to Newberry where we headed west on Newberry Road (FL-26) about a mile to the park entrance.

Although there was plenty of room to park, we were surprised by the number of cars in the parking lot. The park is not open on Monday’s and Tuesday’s, but the reason for the crowd became evident when we entered the visitor center. In addition to the normal park staff and volunteers there where at least six women in period clothing working on an old large quilt and another woman weaving at a small loom. Wednesday mornings is when this happens and it added a touch of “living history” to our visit. I have posted a separate photo gallery of our visit to the Farm.

There were a few buildings by the visitor center for display and demonstration, but the main farm was a quarter mile walk through the woods on a level path. The Dudley Farm was a thriving, successful family enterprise that began before the Civil War and continued until after WW II. The farmstead, consisting of 18 buildings, equipment, and furnishings, was donated to the State in the early 1980’s along with 23 acres of the 600+ acre farm. The State later acquired an additional 232 acres and more recently another 80 acres for the visitor center, entrance road and parking lot area. This is not a “recreated” farm; all the buildings are in their original locations except for the General Store, which was moved to the farmstead from its location near the main road.

We roamed the farmstead for over an hour looking at, and going in, buildings and taking photographs. We had the place to ourselves except for some birds, chickens, turkeys, and three mules. Although the farm was “rough” by modern standards, it was interesting to try to imagine this place as a “state of the art” operation full of generations of Dudley’s and farm hands engaged in the slow but steady work of farm and domestic life. The tendency is to romanticize and envision this place as somehow idyllic. It wasn’t. The farmhouse was certainly comfortable compared to being outside, and life was good (at least for the Dudley’s), but it was no doubt a hard life.

By the time we were done touring the farmstead the overcast had lowered almost to a ground cloud and it had started misting. Although we lacked bright sunlight, blue skies, and intense colors, the soft, even, subdued light was ideal for making lower contrast images and seemed somehow appropriate in mood to the empty, gray, weathered buildings of this now quiet farmstead, preserved so that we might glimpse a moment back in time.

If the Dudley Farm HSP was the past, Gainesville is definitely the here and now. As we got to I-75 on FL-26 we encountered heavy traffic. We had not been to this part of Gainesville yet, but now we know where the major shopping area is located! You name it, it’s here. Conveniently for us the Office Max, Michaels, Trader Joe’s, and PetSmart were all in the same mega shopping center (one of many). Trader Joe’s had a quite a selection of house brand wines for $2.99/bottle (750 mL) so we bought several. I hope they are to our liking, because I sure like the price. They did not, however, have a house brand moscato 🙁 A final stop at the Kangaroo filling station for fuel and we were on our way back to WCRVResort.

Linda made one of our favorite dishes for dinner; whole wheat capellini (angel hair) pasta with garlic, onions, mushrooms (two kinds), sun-dried tomatoes, and basil lightly sautéed in olive oil; simple, but absolutely delicious.

2014/02/03-04 (M&T) Happy Birthday

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After our fairly active weekend we wanted to be home bodies for a couple of days. It’s not that we couldn’t go all day every day; it’s that we don’t have to and choose not to. We are not on vacation and we do not have to fill every waking minute with new and exciting adventures to the point of mental and physical exhaustion. Linda needs quiet days to work on her cross-stitch project and I need quiet days to process photos and write. Besides, Tuesday was my birthday and Linda wanted to bake a cake. Oh, and we had to tend to bus issues.

Our male tabby cat Jasper, in his Sphinx position.

A bus issue that had been developing for a while involved our auxiliary air compressor. It was sounding worse by the day when it ran, vibrating excessively and making loud, unpleasant sounds. I checked the mounting of the air compressor and the vibration dampening rubber mounts appeared to still be OK. I noticed that the sight gauge on the side of the air accessories filter housing was showing water at the 80% full level so I decided to try draining the auxiliary air tank.

A hard copper line runs from the auxiliary air tank to a drain valve on the front outside corner of the floor in the bay under the driver’s seat. I had to open it carefully using a pliers, but once it was open it let out what I estimated to be at least a quart of water, including a considerable quantity of milky white liquid similar in appearance to skim milk.

There is a petcock style drain on the bottom of the auxiliary air filter housing so I also opened that. I got some water out, but not much, and the water level in the sight gauge did not drop. I needed to start the main engine to roll the bus forward so a different section of the tires was in contact with the pad to avoid flat spots from being parked for three months. I let the engine fast idle for over 10 minutes and used the higher pressure, very dry air from the main engine air compressor to purge the auxiliary air tank, air lines, and other air accessories. When I was finally getting nothing but dry air from the drain I closed both drains tight and shut the engine off.

I was checking the bay and heard a distinct hiss indicating an air leak. I sprayed soapy water on various fittings and finally got bubbles on the air compressor side of the check valve in the main air line from the auxiliary air compressor to the auxiliary air filter. With the auxiliary air compressor not running this indicated that the check valve itself was leaking, not just the fitting.

I texted and then talked to our mobile mechanic, Joe Cannarozzi, about all of this. Although he is staying at an RV park an hour from here He was tied up with a major bus project and unable to come work on this for us. He was confident, however, that I could replace the check valve myself and that Prevost Jacksonville had them in stock. (He had just spent four days there with the bus he is working on.) He wanted to know when I had last drained the auxiliary tank. I couldn’t recall the last time, but it was probably several years ago. He suggested that I drain it daily.

Since I would have to depressurize the entire air system to replace the check valve I figured I would replace the filter element in the auxiliary air filter at the same time. I looked up the part in the Prevost CatBase system and found the part numbers for the filter element and the O-ring/gasket kit. I called Prevost Parts in Elgin, Illinois to order them. As sometimes happens on an older bus our filter housing, and the service parts for it, were no longer available and had been superseded by a different assembly. The check valve, however, was available and in stock at the Jacksonville service center. I wanted to see the part before I purchased it to make sure it was what I needed, so I decided not to order it and instead drive to Jacksonville on Wednesday to get it. That would be a two hour trip one way, so started looking at what else we could do over there.

Sunset light on thunderstorm cloud to the east. Our car and coach visible lower right.

Linda found a recipe for a vegan vanilla cake and made it for my birthday. We went for a walk while it cooled. Thunderstorms were building in the area as the sun set and we got some nice light on the clouds. It turned out quiet well. She made a sauce from fresh red raspberries to put on top and it was also very good. Life is good.

2014/01/30 (R) Fort Wilderness

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Yesterday was a stay at home day after our 2-day whirlwind trip to the Venice, Florida area to visit with Steve and Karen. We got up a bit earlier this morning than we have been lately and were on the road by 8 AM. Our destination this time was Fort Wilderness at Walt Disney World in Buena Vista, Florida. The purpose of the trip was to visit Pat and Vickie Lintner, friends and fellow Prevost owners from our FMCA Great Lakes Converted Coaches chapter.

Walt Disney World is just southwest of Orlando and about 100 miles southeast of Williston. We decided to take US and FL highways on the drive down return by way of the Florida Turnpike and I-75. We stopped at a Dunkin Donuts south of Ocala for coffee and bagels and arrived at the overflow/visitor parking area for Fort Wilderness around 11 AM. We had to pass through two gates to get to this parking lot, but each time we simply told them we were visiting campers at FW and they let us through without having to pay. I phoned Pat and a few minutes later he and Vickie picked us up and gave us a driving tour of the campground on the way to their campsite.

Linda had been to Walt Disney World many years ago when our children were very young and stayed at Fort Wilderness in my parents’ motorhome. We were there together in the early 2000’s when Linda had a professional development seminar at the Swan hotel near Epcot. That was my one and only visit to WDW prior to today.

Like everything at WDW, Fort Wilderness is a really nice campground. It’s divided up into sections, each with its own loop road. The roads are narrow and winding, but the campsites are all angled so that even 40 foot motorhomes can back in easily to the paved sites. There is extensive landscaping between the sites which, combined with the twisting roads, affords a lot privacy. But there was only room for one car at each site, which is why Pat had us leave our car in the parking lot. The common areas include playgrounds, bathrooms, shops, and restaurants, all done to be visually consistent with the Fort Wilderness theme.

The weather was light drizzle with temperatures in the mid-40’s and enough breeze to create a wind-chill factor, but we decided to go explore WDW anyway. I did not, however, take my camera. The photos in this post were provided by Vickie Lintner (thanks Vickie!). From FW you can use the WDW transportation system, specifically the boats and monorail, to visit most of the hotels that are spread around the property free of charge. We never entered any of the actual theme parks, which required the payment of an admission fee.

This horse with no name was very interested in us. (Photo by Vickie Lintner.)

When we got to the Polynesian Hotel we decided to have lunch. Pat had checked in advance and been told that any of the restaurants at WDW would make vegan dishes on request even if they were not on the menu. Before being seated, the chef came out to talk with us and made some recommendations for vegan dishes he could prepare. We ended up ordering a Pan Asian Noodle dish with tofu, and some100% Kona coffee, both of which were excellent.

Us on one of the WDW boats bundled up against the weather. (Photo by Vickie Lintner.)

We were a bit chilled by the time we got back to their coach, so Pat turned on the cube heater and we huddled under some throws to warm up. While Vickie began preparing dinner Pat drove us to one of the other campground sections to visit with David and Marie Ross. David and Marie had spent two nights at Williston Crossings visiting with us before going to Fort Wilderness to meet up with Marie’s sister and her husband for a week. We got to meet them too and had a nice, but brief visit, before Pat returned to fetch us for dinner.

Us back at Pat & Vickie’s coach getting warm. (Photo by Vickie Lintner.)

Vickie made a (vegan) butternut squash soup from scratch using her Vita-Mix and it was very good. We learned about the Vita-Mix on our first Holistic Holiday at Sea cruise. They are so powerful that you can make soup in them, not just blending ingredients, but heating them to boiling hot. Following the soup course we had potatoes and mixed vegetables.

After dinner we drove to Downtown Disney, the shopping, eating, entertainment center of WDW. We followed Pat but Vickie road with us to make sure we got there. The weather had moderated a bit and there were a lot of people there, but we enjoyed walking the grounds and window shopping. By 8 PM we were back at our cars. Pat and Vickie led us to the entrance to the toll road, made a U-turn, and headed back to FW as we got on the highway and started for Williston.

2014/01/16 (R) Wi-Fi Woes

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The Wi-Fi at Williston Crossings RV Resort has been very good since we got here. There are professional grade access points with decent antennas positioned on towers all through the park. The signals have been strong and steady, and the bandwidth generally very good. Wi-Fi is always going to slow down when lots of people are using it, but the resort seems to have enough access points feeding into a robust enough router and gateway to handle the demands placed on the system by the residents.

A couple of weeks ago the resort announced that they were going to reconfigure the Wi-Fi system slightly and that starting on January 10 we would need a username and password. We generally prefer “open” Wi-Fi signals since we connect to them with our roof-mounted Wi-Fi Ranger Mobile, which repeats the signal as a secure hot spot around out coach. Our current configuration goes one step farther. We have an Amped Wireless SR20000G Wi-Fi router/repeater configured as a bridge to the Wi-Fi Ranger. The SR20000G creates a local area network to which we connect wirelessly along with a RAID 1 Network Attached Storage device connected via Ethernet. The SR20000G then connects to the private/secure hotspot side of the Wi-Fi Ranger Mobile, which is connected to the wide area network on the public side and from there to the Internet. It’s a great setup when everything works correctly.

In the past we have used our Wi-Fi Ranger Mobile successfully with both secure and filtered Wi-Fi networks, and both types are handled through the Wi-Fi Ranger web-browser interface. Secure Wi-Fi systems require an encryption key, which is entered through the Wi-Fi Ranger control panel and stored for future use. Filtered Wi-Fi networks are not secure. After the radio and logical connection is established, you are taken to a web page where you enter a username and password and accept the terms and conditions of use. Indeed, places like Panera don’t even bother with the username and password, they just want you to acknowledge the terms and conditions of use before allowing you access to the Internet through their system. Fair enough, the Wi-Fi Ranger is designed to handle that as well right from the control panel.

We have had our system configured and working flawlessly right through yesterday morning. When we returned from a day of hiking and visiting it was obvious that something had changed. It still wasn’t working properly this morning so I inquired in the office and they confirmed that the guy who takes care of their Wi-Fi network had made changes yesterday and was working on the system today. I reconfigured some of our equipment to use our Verizon Mi-Fi to get online and take care of e-mail and some BCM article tasks. I called the Wi-Fi guy and chatted with him briefly, just to explain our setup and make sure there wasn’t any reason for it to now work. I spent part of the rest of the day working with and reconfiguring our equipment and by late afternoon everything seemed to be back to normal. I even found a better spot in the coach for the Verizon Mi-Fi device.

The day ended well, however, as Linda made whole-grain angel hair pasta with garlic, onion, mushrooms, and sun-dried tomatoes, perfectly dressed in olive oil. It’s one of my favorite dishes.

2014/01/11 (S) Silver River State Park (FL)

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We finally had a day with some sunshine and no rain and Karen suggested that we go to Silver River State Park. Karen had been there many years ago and had fond memories of the place. The park is in Silver Springs, Florida on the eastern edge of Ocala, Florida, about 35 miles from our wintering grounds at the WCRV Resort in Williston, Florida. We left around 10 AM and were there by 10:45 AM. I have posted a photo gallery with today’s date in addition to this blog posting.

Silver River SP is large for an urban location and has two entrances. We went to the west entrance first. This is where the water park, springs, glass bottom boats, concessions, and entertainment facilities are located. There was also a major Ford car club show going on. We could not buy an annual pass at this entrance, however, so we drove to the east entrance. The east part of the park is where the campground, hiking trails, historic Cracker homestead, education facilities, and museum are located. We bought an annual park pass, good for admission of one vehicle with up to eight people at most of the Florida State Parks, went in, and parked at the trailhead area.

Silver Springs SP, Silver Springs, Florida.

Silver River SP, Silver Springs, Florida.

We had a leisurely stroll on the 1.9 mile Swamp Trail. The trail took us through pine Forest and cedar swamp to the south bank of the Silver River. There was a variety of interesting flora along the way (with an occasional explanatory placard) that Steve and I stopped to photograph. When we finished the hike we explored and photographed the Cracker homestead recreation, although none of the buildings were open.

Steve and Karen Limkemann., SRSP (FL).

While we were on the trail Linda got a call from our daughter. She was at our house and said the road was icy and the driveway had not been plowed. We had contracted with someone to take care of this in our absence and apparently they had not been there since the most recent heavy snows and extremely cold temperatures. I called the phone number we have and got a Verizon message indicating that the number had been changed, disconnected, or was no longer in service. Great (not).

Us at SSSP (FL). (Photo by Steve Limkemann.)

Us at SRSP (FL). (Photo by Steve Limkemann.)

We had gotten a referral for this snow removal service from the realtor who helped us by our house so I gave him a call. I made it clear that we understood that this was not his problem and we did not consider him in any way responsible, but if there was any way he could contact this guy and determine if he was still in business we would appreciate it. I thanked him, indicating that we really did not have anyone else we could call and appreciate any assistance he could provide. This is one of the potential downsides to being away from home in the winter, but no reason to spoil a good hike.

The World Famous Glass Bottom Boats, SSSP (FL).

The World Famous Glass Bottom Boats, SRSP (FL).

Our hiking done we returned to the east end of the park. This part of the park was once a private/commercial enterprise but is now a Florida State Park. The water park wasn’t open this time of year, but we were there to ride the famous glass bottom boats. The 30 minute ride gave us a great view of seven of the 20 springs that feed the Silver River. The water was crystal clear, so light penetrated easily to the bottom (as much as 55 feet down in the spring openings) and was teeming with aquatic life. A variety of birds were also there, especially Anhinga. We did not see any alligators, but we did see plenty of warning signs.

Ford car show at SRSP (FL).

The springs have been used for many years to film underwater scenes for movies, including one of the James Bond films. Most famous, however, was the Sea Hunt TV series starring Lloyd Bridges. All of the 120+ episodes were filmed in one particular spring that we were able to see.

Linda and Karen on the Swamp Tail, SSSP (FL).

Linda and Karen on the Swamp Tail, SRSP (FL).

The Ford car show had a lot of vehicles and a lot of people looking at them. One whole area was high performance Shelby Cobras with a Ford GT nearby. We wandered around and took a few pictures. The wind started to come up and when Linda checked the weather there was a storm front moving our way with severe thunderstorm warnings for Williston. We decided to head back as we had a couple of stops to make on the way and wanted to be back at the coach before the storms hit.

Steve photographing palms on the Swamp Trail, SSSP (FL).

Steve photographing palms on the Swamp Trail, SRSP (FL).

Sometime on Friday the Dropbox service developed a major problem as the result of some maintenance they were doing on the system. Our desktop clients were suddenly unable to connect with the Dropbox cloud servers and I was also not able to log in through the web interface. I had planned to upload photos for the BCM Arcadia Rally article and couldn’t. Plan B was to put them on a flash drive and mail them. I found a 16 GB unit for $9.99 at Staples and bought a padded mailing envelope to ship it in. We then stopped at the Publix supermarket on US-27 to pick up some things Linda needed to make risotto. It just started to rain as we got back to the coach, so we quickly got our groceries and ourselves inside. Moments later the thunder, lightning, wind, and rain began in earnest.

Linda, Karen, and Steve at the Cracker Homestead, SSSP (FL).

Linda, Karen, and Steve at the Cracker Homestead, SRSP (FL).

Although Saturday is also fire pit night at WCRV Resort but they do not build a fire when high winds are forecast. We heard voices over by the fire pit later but decided to hunker down for the evening. Linda made a traditional Arborio rice risotto with mushrooms, onions, garlic, Pinot Grigio (which we also drank), and four different greens (kale, Swiss chard, spinach, and arugula). It was truly excellent. We had fresh strawberries and dark chocolate covered almonds for dessert. We four people in the coach for dinner everyone has to hold their plates on their laps, but Steve and Karen were good sports about it.

2014/01/02 (R) Rainy Days And Chores

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As I have written here before, full- and extended-time RVing is not the same as being on vacation. For one, we have the same housekeeping chores that we would have at home and rainy days are good days for doing inside chores. We have enough clothing with us to last about 10 days and had not done the laundry in over a week, so today was laundry day. Our site (439) is a short walk to the laundry room in the old/south section of the Williston Crossings RV Resort. (Old means that it was here before the new/north section was built. The old section is very nice with mature landscaping and facilities that are in excellent condition.)

When I checked my e-mail yesterday I had one from Donna Bartolomeo. Donna and Michael are members of our FMCA Freethinkers chapter and fellow vegans. They also arrived at Williston Crossings yesterday and will be here for a week. By mid-afternoon the rain had let up so we went for a walk in the general direction of their site (245) and found them just as they were heading out for a bicycle ride. We chatted for a few minutes and invited them to dinner, which they accepted.

They came over to our coach at 6 PM and brought a bottle of wine. Linda prepared a nice green salad and made her mushroom kale barley risotto with garlic and shallots. As with all of the other members of our chapter that we have had the pleasure to meet, we had a long, easy, comfortable conversation. During the course of that conversation we found out that they have a home near St. Petersburg, Florida but had specifically booked this week at Williston Crossings back in October because we had announced that we would be here starting January 1^st! They invited us back to their motorhome for dinner sometime while they are here and I know we will spend more time in conversation with them before they leave.

A cold front has been pushing this way and the rain was forecast to end overnight with the low temperature dropping to 35 degrees F. It looks like we will have a couple of days with mid-30s low temps and then a couple of days early next week with lows in the upper 20s but we knew that this part of Florida occasionally sees those kinds of temperatures in January, and we are prepared for them.

2013_10_20 (N) The Blue Ridge Parkway, VA

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The Beginning of the Blue Ridge Parkway headed south.

After breakfast we arranged ourselves in Ron and Mary’s Honda mini-van and around 10 AM headed up I-81 towards Waynesboro, Virginia and the Blue Ridge Parkway. We had beautiful blue skies, with no threat of rain and highs forecast to be in the 60’s. We exited I-81 N at US-250 and headed east through Waynesboro to the northern terminus of the Blue Ridge Parkway.

Our merry little band of intrepid hikers.

Our first destination was the Visitor Center at Humpback Rocks. We spent a few minutes there looking at the indoor exhibits and used the “facilities.” We set Marilyn up in a comfy chair with her book. Ron, Mary, Linda, and I then walked through the period farmstead on our way to the Humpback Rocks Trailhead.

Interior of an early 19th century mountain farmstead cabin.

The Humpback Rocks are a rock outcropping near the top of a mountain that requires a 0.8 mile hike with a 900 ft vertical elevation gain. Most of the trial was in excellent shape considering the number of hikers who were using it. It was entirely wooded, with natural rock “stairs” in some places and steps that clearly showed the hand of man, but were very well done. Parts of the trail near the top were wet and the rocks were slippery but passable.

Mary, Ron, and Linda on the Humpback Rocks.

The Humpback Rocks are devoid of trees and provided a panoramic view of the valley to the west and the mountains beyond spanning more than 180 degrees from south to east of north. Unfortunately, we were there around noon to 1 PM and the lighting was not ideal for photographing the valley and mountains. We spent an hour up there enjoying the view anyway before heading down.

Linda, Ron, and Mary on the Humpback Rocks.

The hike down was harder in some ways than the hike up. Uphill hikes are generally about leg muscles, but the pace is naturally slower and it’s not too hard to find good footing. Downhill hikes are about impact on joints, and footing is tricky, especially on the wet/slippery rocks we had to deal with in a few spots along the way. Ron and Mary use adjustable hiking poles, and had an extra one for Linda, which she needed. I should have used one, but didn’t. We have a pair of adjustable poles at home, left over from a previous era of winter camping and cross country ski backpacking, but we added a new pair for each of us to our “next time” list.

We made it back to the Visitor Center around 2 PM and had a picnic lunch that we had packed that morning, rested for a while in the warm sun, and eventually made ready to continue down the Blue Ridge Parkway.

A red berry bush along the Blue Ridge Parkway, VA.

The rest of the afternoon we drove south along the Parkway, stopping at some of the scenic overlooks to overlook the scenery and take photographs. The time of day and angle of the sun were not ideal for photography, but that did not take anything away from the views.

We exited the Parkway at US-60 and headed south through Buena Vista on US-501 to Natural Bridge, where we vectored off on VA-130 over to US-11 N and drove the few miles back to the entrance to the Natural Bridge / Lexington KOA.

Tonight was Linda’s turn to prepared dinner and she opted to make her Farro with mushrooms which is a favorite of mine. She added leafy greens to the leftover salad from the night before, and served the dish with whole grain bread. A little wine helped wash everything down. Ron, Mary, and Marilyn finished the pie from the previous evening and Mary sliced up some fresh strawberries for me and Linda. Ron and I did the dishes, after which we started a campfire and sat around until late in the evening talking and enjoying our last night in camp together.

2013_10_16 (W) GSMNP

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I was up late last night post-processing images for the yesterday’s blog and downloading/installing 32-bit versions of the some of the free 64-bit software Lou had provided via flashdrive for SKP Photographers Workshop. As a result we slept in a bit and, not having anything we had to do today, Linda made her yummy vegan pancakes and served them with real Maple syrup.

The Great Smoky Mountain National Park (GSMNP) re-opened this morning, and is supposed to remain open through at least Sunday. We are camped about a mile outside the Cades Cove (Townsend, TN) entrance, so we decided to go for a drive in that direction. We left around 10 AM, and in spite of the RV parks (and motels) around here not being full, due to the government shutdown forced park closure, lots of other people had apparently stuck around in the hopes the park would re-open and had the same idea about where to head. Most of GSMNP is not accessible by motor vehicle, and Cades Cove has always been the major tourist draw for those who are sight-seeing in a car.

Giant fungus (18” diameter) along the Cades Cove Loop Road, GSMNP.

Traffic on the 11 mile long road to/from Cades Cove was bumper to bumper and moving slowly-to-not-at-all; but we were not in any hurry and it was fine with us. We eventually reached the Visitor Center at the end of the Cades Cove Loop Road, found a parking spot (not a guaranteed thing), and walked around the area looking at and photographing the old buildings. We stopped in a few pull-outs along the way and I shot a few landscapes and a babbling brook, but the day was heavily clouded with low light levels and color vibrancy and I wasn’t feeling particularly inspired photographically speaking. We were also a little tired and did not do any of the waterfall hikes. Besides, there were no open parking spots at many of the trailheads and vantage points.

We eventually made our way back to our starting point in the park and then continued on through the park on Scenic TN-73 towards US-441 to the northeast. This was a very nice drive, but not really suitable for a large motorhome and we did not see any on this leg of the journey. I mention that only because part of what we were doing today was scouting our exit route. We eventually got to US-441 and headed north towards Gatlinburg. Gatlinburg is an attractive tourist town with bumper-to-bumper traffic that moves slowly, but persistently, allowing me to gawk as I drove. (Linda usually does the tourist toad driving, but her hip was bothering her, so I took over after Cades Cove.) It’s also small enough that we were out the other side in a reasonable amount of time.

One of the two Baptist Churches we passed in Cades Cove, ca. 1839, GSMNP.

We continued north on US-441/US-321 to Pigeon Forge, home of Dolly World, to the point where US-321 South split off and headed back to Townsend. We went this way partly for the scenery, which was nice, and partly to check out the road, which semi’s were advised on either end not to use. While most of the road was fine for a larger, longer wheelbase vehicle, there was a stretch where the bus would not have gotten through easily due to narrow lanes and hairpin turns. Also, for much of its length there was little-to-no shoulder and places where the branches overhanging the road had not been trimmed up and would have damaged the coach.

Our Trucker’s Atlas indicated that this stretch of US-321 is a truck route, and we had hoped it would be passable by a large motorhome as it in the direct/short route from where we are to where we need to go on Friday. Linda found some online reviews that corroborated the warning signs; this was not a road for semi’s and motorhomes. As a result, our confidence in being able to rely on our Trucker’s Atlas is somewhat reduced, and we are inclined to believe posted signs.

The water powered mill at the Cade Coves Visitor Center area, GSMNP. The mill was operating, demonstrating the grinding of corn into corn meal.

Although I am not thrilled at the prospect, our route out of here on Friday morning will be to backtrack on US-321/TN73 S/W to US-66 N to Maryville and pick up US-129 N to Knoxville where we merge onto I-40 E which takes us to the southern terminus of I-81 N and on to Lexington, Virginia. I have really studied the satellite images of the highway system in Knoxville and the US-129 N to I-40 E transition should be a no-brainer unless the highway signs are completely screwed up or they have a road closed with a poorly marked detour.

Linda made a whole wheat penne pasta dish with homemade marinara sauce, pan-fried eggplant, and garlic. She made the marinara sauce a couple of weeks ago and froze some of it. I raved about it when she made it, and it was just as good thawed out and re-heated.

The Little River along Little River Road en route to US-441, GSMNP.

The photo workshop participants reconvened at 8 PM in the resort classroom building to go over the agenda for Thursday. With rain forecast to move in for the afternoon, the plan was to drive about 15 minutes in the morning to a nearby waterfall, capture some images there as interest and weather permitted, and then return to camp for lunch, followed by another 3 – 4 hours of classroom demonstration and discussion. Lou showed some photographs he took on his cell phone and demonstrated several cell phone camera apps that he uses. We agreed to meet for breakfast at 8 AM at Riverstone Family Restaurant, just up the road from our resort, and leave for the falls from there.

2013_08_27-28 Babysitting And Our First RV Visitors

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Linda has signed up to babysit our youngest grand-daughter, Madeline, on Mondays so our son and daughter-in-law can attend to their professorial duties at the University of Michigan. (Our step-grand-daughter, Katie, is 16 and does not need a sitter.) However, Linda sat on Saturday the 17th. This week she sat on Tuesday because of our Monday dental appointments. Next week she is going to sit on Tuesday because Monday is Labor Day. Like I said, she is babysitting on Mondays.

We both left the house early, Linda for Ann Arbor in rush hour traffic and me for Dearborn in rush hour traffic. As retired people we are not supposed to be in rush hour traffic; it tends to spoil that special, relaxed mood that is the hallmark of the happily retired. Morning rush hour traffic headed south on US-23 into Ann Arbor is always bad. Morning rush hour traffic headed into the northwest suburbs of Detroit on I-96 is always worse. I was late for my 9 AM dental appointment, but only about 10 minutes. I won’t be making any more 9 AM appointments in that part of town.

When I was done at the dentist in west Dearborn I headed for Ann Arbor, looking forward to spending some quality time with my grand-daughter. As I was nearing Ann Arbor I got a call from W. W. Williams in, where else, east Dearborn, letting me know that my special order part was in. Life really is all about timing. I continued my journey to babyland. When I walked in the front door, Madeline was sitting up in the middle of the living room playing with Grandma Linda. She turned, looked at me, and started crying. You can’t take anything an 8-month old does personally, but it wasn’t quite the reception I was hoping for. She got herself all worked up. Linda tried feeding her, but she was not to be consoled, so we took her for a walk in her very spiffy stroller.

We peeled back the sunshade so she could turn her head and look up at me, which she did frequently. She stayed calm for the whole ride, and even babbled for a while, apparently satisfied that I was at least doing something useful. Or perhaps I am less scary when viewed upside down? As soon as we got back to the house, however, she got herself all upset again. Having no other plans for the afternoon, I made my exit and drove back to Dearborn to get the special order part for our bus. Linda told me later that Madeline settled down as soon as I left and had a nice lunch. It won’t always be that way, of course, and it’s not a contest to see who wins. Eight month olds are spontaneous, irrational beings, and you just have to accept that and work with it as best you can. That’s why she has parents, aunts, and grandmothers.

By the time Phil was done working on the driveway on Monday evening he had mixed 14 tons (yes, that’s 30,800 pounds) of sandy silt into and on top of the 6 inches of 21AA road gravel that forms the top layer of the pull-through driveway. What we really needed at that point was a good, soaking rain and starting late Tuesday evening and overnight into Wednesday we got our wish. The rain helps the fine particles work their way down into the gravel and lock it together to form a dense mass that will not spread out when driven on, even by a heavy vehicle. At least that’s the theory. I drove on it again with the car Wednesday morning and it seemed to be packed pretty hard.

The first test of the pull-through driveway came when the UPS truck showed up with our Centramatic dynamic wheel balancers for the bus. He pulled the truck right up on the pull-through driveway and backed it out with no difficulty. That was a good omen. The next test came when Ed & Betty arrived around 1:30 PM in their Tiffin Phaeton motorhome. They unhooked their car just after pulling onto our street as I needed them to be able to maneuver the RV to get it parked. They were also going to have to back out when they left and you cannot do that with a car attached to the rear end of the rig. I met them at the end of the street, led them to our house, and got them positioned to turn into the pull-through driveway. Betty drove their car and parked it in our regular driveway. Ed gave me one of their walkie-talkies and I guided him in to the pull-through driveway with voice and hand signals. Their motorhome tires did not even leave visible tracks! Finally, success. Their rig has 6 tires and weights about 33,000 pounds, so the weight on each tire that is similar to our bus, except that our front tires carry a couple of extra thousand pounds each. Once they were parked and settled they came inside and we quartered a small, round watermelon and had that as a light lunch/snack.

We had the pull-through driveway built for our own use as a convenient place to park the coach while we load/unload it. We installed an electrical outlet so that we could also run the refrigerator and maintain the batteries while it was parked there. We plan to eventually have a “bus barn” to store it in, but for now the pull-through drive is where it will live when we are home. That meant that we might also want to run the air conditioners while it was parked, so we installed a full “50A” RV electrical service since that is what our coach is designed for. We also had in mind, however, that it would be nice to have RV friends be able to come for a visit and have a level place to park with some nice shade and decent electrical service. We also have water available, but we do not currently have a way for folks to dump their holding tanks. We eventually hope to be able to dump ours using a macerator pump connected by a garden hose (reserved for that use only) to a fitting on the first septic tank. We can’t use a normal gravity drain hose because we have to pump the tank contents uphill to the septic tank lid. If we get this to work, guests could do the same as long as their rig is equipped with a macerator pump.

Some of the RV clubs we belong to allow members to list their home or place of business as available for no-cost overnight stays. FMCA calls these “Stop’in Spots” and the SKPs include them in a list of free and low-cost camping. There is also a program called “Boondockers Welcome” that our friends Butch and Fonda joined. We are members of Harvest Hosts, but can’t be a host site as we are a residence not a business.

Ed and Betty originally planned to stay two nights, but they are on their way to some temporary work at the Middleton Berry Farm, a pick your own (PYO) operation east of Ortonville, Michigan. They have worked summers there for some years, usually during the strawberry season. At one time they owned a strawberry farm in upstate New York and were the secretaries of the National Strawberry Growers Association. Ed has a PhD in plant pathology and has done extensive extension service work as a plant pathologist. The owners of Middleton Berry Farm needed Ed & Betty’s assistance ASAP as the raspberries have come in very well this year.

We did our usual first time visit thing and gave them a complete tour of the house, yard, and bus. We got to see their motorhome as well, and spent some time trying to tune in over-the-air TV stations with their roof antenna. The only station we could get was FOX out of Detroit, so Ed turned the system off and put the antenna back down.

Ed and Betty are pretty avid cyclists and have a pair of very interesting tricycles. They are Spike models made by Trident Trikes and purchased from Craig and Linda Current of http://www.boomersbentsandbikes.com in Florida. It’s a two front, one rear wheel design with disc brakes all around. The two front wheels steer and the central structural member is hinged to allow the rear wheel to fold up between the two front ones for storage. They got the 24-speed gearing option. I test drove Ed’s and Linda test drove Betty’s and we both found them very comfortable. Linda can’t ride a bicycle because of occasional balance problems related to her loss of hearing in her left ear, so a tricycle or quadcycle is her only viable option. At this point in my life, I would just as soon have the stability of a 3-wheeler as well. Another alternative for us would be a side-by-side 2-seater, which might be a lot of fun, but would probably preclude either of us going for a solo ride.

We sat and talked like old friends and enjoyed a bottle of Pinot Grigio. Eventually Linda and Betty set about making dinner. Betty had prepared a “vegan cheese” out of cashew nuts and served it on Saltine crackers. It was very good, and it reminded Linda that she had purchased a vegan cheese book on our last Holistic Holiday At Sea cruise, but had not yet used any of the recipes. Linda prepared a nice green salad. The main course was quinoa with mushrooms and Swiss chard. She served it with a side of fresh corn, cut off the cob. We opened at bottle of the 2009 Egri Merlot to go with dinner. This wine is a little sweet for red wine aficionados, but it is one of the few red wines I will drink. It lacks any hint of tannin, and is full-bodied enough to stand up to the earthy grain/mushroom/greens dishes that Linda often prepares. After dinner we sat on the back deck for a while and continued to enjoy our Merlot. The mosquitoes appeared about the same time we were ready for dessert so we went back inside and enjoyed the last of vegan chocolate cake Linda had made on Monday served with fresh strawberries. It was still as moist as when she baked it and you would not know it was vegan. We washed it down with the end of the Merlot, which also goes very well with chocolate cake and strawberries.

The rest of the evening was a free- and far-ranging conversation about life, travels, kids, health, careers, and interests. We looked at maps and old copies of Wilson’s Free And Low Cost Camping directories and talked about getting large rigs into National Forest campgrounds, which Ed and Betty have done successfully on numerous occasions. Being full-timers, they are by necessity knowledgeable and skilled when it comes to finding places to park for the night.

2013_08_16 (Fri) BTTB Rally – Day 2

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We had another cool night overnight that was great for sleeping. 7:30 AM found the coffee brewed and the bagels, fruit, muffins, and Danish pastries awaiting the rally participants. This isn’t a “fancy” rally in a fancy place, but it sure is a nice one.

Mike Mullen’s Flxible (on right), the only one at this rally.

Two more buses showed up today; Mike (GLCC vice-president) & Mary Ann Muller and Mark (CCO president) & Diane Reid. Linda took off with a group of the women to search out garage sales, but came back empty-handed. (She is not a garage sale person.) Over the course of the morning bay doors were opened on various buses and small groups of (mostly) men could be found peering deep inside. These sessions are sometimes for the purpose of seeing/admiring someone’s latest handiwork, and sometimes for the purpose of trying to help diagnose a problem and fix it if possible. There was some of both today. On Wednesday, for instance, someone blew a transmission hose just as they were pulling into their parking space. With the help of some of the other participants, a new hose had been custom made by a local supplier and installed, tested, and verified as operational in less than 24 hours. Today several guys worked on diagnosing a severe vibration problem someone in the rear of a GM 4104.

Bill Gerry’s Harley Davidson with Leyman trike conversion. Bill is in the center of the photo, directly behind the bike (dressed in black, of course).

Mid-late morning Bill Gerry showed up on his Harley Davidson Leyman trike conversion. He left the Toronto, Ontario area around 6:00 AM for the 4.5 hour trip plus several fuel stops. As you can see in the picture, it’s a gorgeous machine. Bill is the de facto “ring leader” of the Canadian contingent that usually attends this rally, but he and Karen could not come this year because of a 50th wedding anniversary party being held tomorrow for some of their best friends back home. (Karen stayed home to help with the preparations.) Still, I think it says a lot that Bill thought it was worth driving 9 hours round trip to hang out with all of us for a few hours. Such is the attraction of the bus conversion community, and the camaraderie of those who choose to be part of it. As mentioned yesterday, Dennis and Bernadette did make it to the rally in their Class B, so our Canadian friends were represented.

Late morning conversations in the pavilion.

Everyone was on their own for lunch today, so Linda and I had some sun-dried tomato hummus wraps with onions, lots of onions. Because we knew we would only have a 20A connection, Linda planned the meals we would have to provide for ourselves around not having to cook things. With the way we eat, however, “no heat don’t mean no eat.” It was a bit warmer by lunchtime than the last few days, and the cold dishes were particularly satisfying under such weather conditions.

Since most of the rally participants were now on site, I decided to bring out the copies of the February 2013 issue of Bus Conversion Magazine and the May-June issue of The Gypsy Journal to distribute to those who don’t already subscribe to them. We left home in early June with about 60 copies of the BCM issue and picked up about 100 copies of TGJ in Gillette, Wyoming. We have been carrying them with us every since and passing them out at campgrounds and rallies. After today’s distribution we have less than 10 of each left.

Almost everyone was present for the roundtable discussion, which lasted two hours.

At 1:00 PM (Ed time) we circled up the chairs for our roundtable discussion. This has been a regular Friday feature of the rally since it began. We had 20+ people in the circle, 30 total in the pavilion, and almost everyone participated. Someone was having a problem with a 2-year old leather chair that was peeling, and the group helped problem-solve how to deal with the vendor, who was being very reluctant to make good on the situation. We ended up on speaker phone with them, and made it clear that 30 of us were listening to the conversation. By the end there seemed to be a greater willingness on the part of the vendor to try to make the situation right.

Other topics of discussion included electrical shorepower and how to build/use a combiner box to plug a “50A” connector into two smaller capacity outlets (30A, 20/15A). Some of us indicated that we also carry long, larger gauge extension cords with 50A RV/marine twist lock connectors that have the L1 and L2 pins internally jumpered. There’s no magic to this—20A is 20A—but it does allow power to be applied to both legs of the coach’s electrical system so that everything onboard is able to receive electrical power (except for any 240VAC devices). That doesn’t mean you can run everything; 20A is still just 20A after all.

We had an extended discussion about supplemental braking systems. While everyone present indicated that they use one, there were several different types represented, and questions about each of their methods of operation, and opinions about their relative merits. Like any other vehicle, buses have brake systems designed to safely stop their GCWR (Gross Combined Weight Rating). This is the maximum amount of weight the bus is designed to move and stop, including anything it is towing. Most states and provinces require supplemental braking for anything being towed that weighs over a certain amount, with 1,500 pounds being a common specification. A major consideration is break away situations, in which the toad breaks loose from the bus. Many supplemental braking systems are designed to apply the car brakes hard and keep them applied in this situation.

Several discussants had issues with their pneumatic systems so those were put forward and discussed. At lot of things on buses operate on air, including suspensions, brakes, accessories, and even engine throttles. The universal reality about air systems seems to be that they leak, so the issue is never IF, but HOW BAD? Many air leaks are small enough that you can live with them, but not always.

The subject of Coach-Net came up. Many FMCA motorhome owners have Coach-Net emergency roadside service policies. What the policies cover is actually fairly limited, but does include towing (a huge benefit for a bus or large motorhome owner), fuel (if you run out), and telephone technical support. If you need a roadside repair they will try to get the right person to your location to do it, but the cost of the repair is not covered. Several of our GLCC members had recently had their service canceled, in spite of not having made any claims. The reason they were given was that Coach-Net had changed their policy and would no longer cover buses (specifically?) that were more than 40 years old. Pat indicated that he had talked to Jon Walker, a member of GLCC and the recently elected FMCA National Vice President, and that the contract between FMCA and Coach-Net had ended as of July 1 and not been renewed. The rally participants who were affected by this had no problem signing up for Good Sam Emergency Road Service.

There was a question about solar panels (photovoltaic). The question generated a lot of comment, but no definitive recommendations. It was a systems sizing question that was simple to ask, but not simple to answer without specific analysis and calculations. Finally, several rally goers reported on recent, successful service experiences and gave positive recommendations for the service providers.

After the roundtable ended around 3 PM Bill said his farewells and left for Toronto. Folks returned to their coaches, resumed their conversation groups, and returned to their “bay watch” patrols and repair work.

L-to-R Gordy, Marty, and Glenn cooking up the burgers and hotdogs for dinner.

Dinner this evening was classic summer fare; grilled hotdogs and hamburgers with the fixins’, potato salad, baked beans, and potato chips. Some raw veggies were left over from the other night as well. We supplied our own tofu hotdogs, which Glenn grilled up for us very nicely. We garnished them with fresh raw onions and mustard. Potato chips and raw veggies rounded out our meals, which, while not exactly whole-food, plant-based, were definitely vegan.

Prepping the buffet line. There were a few young folks at the rally, although not as many as in past years.

Not long after dinner Bill Foley stopped by. Bill is a CCO guy who lives nearby but was not able to attend the rally with his bus. Bill has a bus barn that Don has been trying to arrange for some of us to go see. I ended up at Ed’s coach and had a long chat with Ed, Bill, and Don. We discussed bus barns, but we also talked about the situation with our driveway at some length.

I eventually returned to our coach to sound of the nearby race track. We have heard these vehicles at various times most days, presumably making practice runs, but we assumed tonight were actual races. Some of the rally participants started playing bingo in the pavilion around 9 PM. They were done by 10:15 PM, after which conversation continued along with the racing. RVers, or at least the ones we hang out with, tend to be up early and turn in early. This particularly rally, however, tends to keep folks up a bit later, especially on Friday and Saturday evenings. We are gathered out in the country, not in a commercial campground or state park, so we have only our fellow rally participants to answer to, and no one objects to conversations extending into the evening. Eventually the rally site quieted down and the only thing that disturbed the nighttime silence was an occasional train. (For those who don’t know, it is a requirement that wherever two or more RVs are gathered, there must be an active rail line nearby. If there isn’t, I think there are special crews that get dispatched in the middle of the night to quickly build one.)

2013_08_01 (Thu) A Short Drive And A Winery

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Jasper on the couch.

We only had 168 miles to travel today to get from Red Trail Vineyards in Buffalo, North Dakota to the Forestedge Winery in Laporte, Minnesota so we were in no particular hurry to leave. I was up by 7 AM, however, so I could turn the generator on and top up the house batteries before we hit the road. I also wanted to add air to the driver-side front tire as I noticed yesterday when I checked the Pressure Pro Tire Pressure Monitoring System that it was starting to read a little lower than I would like.

Juniper by the windshield.

Since I was up I took the opportunity to take some pictures of the property to replace the ones I inadvertently did not take yesterday and updated yesterday’s blog post with a few of them. I also took some pictures of our two cats, Jasper and Juniper, who have been with us on this whole trip, but have not received the attention they deserve in this blog.

Adding air to the tires accurately, however, requires that they are cold and all at the same temperature. It also requires the main engine to be running to get the air tanks up to 120 PSI. We were parked facing north, and by the time I got around to this task the passenger-side tires were already reading 5-6 PSI higher than the driver-side due to the heat of the morning sun.

I checked the pressure in the driver-side front tire with my tire gauge, and it was reading 110.5 PSI. This was adequate, but the lower limit of what I want to run, and at least 3 PSI lower than the passenger-side tire. I hooked up the air hose and chuck to the auxiliary air fitting in the driver-side front bay and tried to raise the pressure in the tire. In spite of the manifold gauge reading 120 PSI, all I managed to do was lose a few PSI from the tire. Although the tires have held their pressure fairly well, they have lost a little bit over the course of our trip. It has become very clear to me that we need to travel with an auxiliary air compressor that is capable of producing at least 150 PSI at the air chuck if we are to have any ability to adjust tire pressures while away from home.

We pulled out of the Red Trail Vineyard around 9:15 AM and continued east on I-94 towards Fargo, ND and Morehead, MN. Just three miles shy of the border, detoured south on I-29 for ½ miles and exited to go to the Pilot / Flying J truck stop where we topped off the tank. They have air pressure lines at each pump, and I started to get the air hose, chuck, and gauge out but decided not to. We have had our PP-TPMS longer than we have had the bus, and in general it works quite well. It has one major downside, however, namely, that the “baseline” pressure for each tire is determined by whatever pressure is in the tire at the time the tire pressure sensor is threaded onto the valve stem. Had I removed the sensor at the truck stop, added air, and reinstalled the sensor, it would have reestablished the baseline pressure at a value that was way too high due to the tire already being hot from being driven 35 miles on I-94. Later, when the coach sat overnight and the tires cooled off, it would have given us a “low tire” alarm, which would have been annoying. Newer competitive products have addressed this issue by making the baseline pressure something the user programs into the receiver. The other major downside to the PP-TPMS sensors is that the batteries are not user replaceable. At some point they will stop working and have to be replaced at a cost of $35-$50 each. At that point, we will probably just buy a different system with programmable baseline pressures and user replaceable batteries.

Minnesota, our 9th state on this journey.

We returned to I-29 north to I-94 east and crossed into Minnesota, our ninth state (including Michigan) since we left in early June. We had a very pleasant and uneventful drive through very pretty country; the best kind. Eastern Minnesota was a combination of green rolling crop lands, lovely lakes and ponds, and northern mixed forests. Our route was I-94 to MN-336 to US-10 to MN-34 to MN-64, and the roads were all very good except for a short stretch of MN-34 with seams at regular, and annoying short, intervals. The bus ran very well, and the transmission even behaved the way I think a transmission should, shifting between gears on hills as needed with the cruise control set and no intervention from me. This primarily occurred on stretches of MN-34 and MN-64 where the speed limit was 55 MPH. Apparently the transmission is willing to drop out of D into 4 (or at least out of torque converter lockup) when climbing hills, something it does not do as often when I am cruising at 62-64 MPH.

The one thing I noticed on this trip was the auxiliary air system pressure gauge I had installed in the cockpit was indicating that the system would reach 120 PSI and then fairly quickly bleed down to about 105 PSI and then re-pressurize to 120 PSI, over, and over, and over… At the same time the primary and secondary tank gauges indicated that these tanks were holding 120 PSI until I applied the brakes.

Entrance to Forestedge Winery near Laporte, MN.

We arrived at the Forestedge Winery around 1:00 PM, pulled around back per Paul Shuster’s e-mailed instructions, got the car unhooked, and got the bus parked and leveled. We went over and introduced ourselves to Paul. He was busy serving wine to potential customers, so we went back to the coach and had a bite of lunch. We then went for a stroll around the property and worked our way back to the tasting room, where we were able to sample most of his wines.

This driveway goes behind the winery, which is where we parked.

Paul and Sharon have a very nice operation in a beautiful setting at the edge of the Paul Bunyan State Forest, and across the road from Lake Benedict. It’s a tourist/vacation/recreation area, and there was a good flow of traffic through the winery. There is a nicely gardened sitting area outside and besides tasting and purchasing bottles, you can buy a glass of wine and sit outside and drink it.

Our coach and car parked by their Bluebird next to the forest.

Forestedge makes only “fruit” wines, and has 13 or 14 products. Although grapes are obviously fruit, this label is used to indicate wines made from any other fruit than grapes. (Mead, of course, is wine made from honey.) They started with only rhubarb, and their rhubarb is still grown on the property, but their offerings now include raspberry, strawberry, cranberry, blueberry, chokecherry, black currant, apple, and pear in addition to rhubarb, as well as blends of some of these. We sampled most of these, and purchased some of the white cranberry, blueberry, chokecherry, black currant, plum, and rhubarb/blueberry. We won’t be able to do this at every Harvest Host location where we stop, but Paul and Sharon are also members of the FMCA Freethinkers chapter which Linda and I belong to, so there was an additional connection here. Besides, we liked their wines! And we decided early in our trip that we were going to purchase wines as our major travel “souvenirs.” We can enjoy them while traveling, or once we return home, but eventually they are gone and we don’t have to find a long-term place for them in the house.

I finally shut the generator off around 3:30 PM. I did not let it run long enough this morning to bring the batteries back up to full charge. In generally it is not good for the batteries to only be partially recharged so I wanted to make sure I did so this afternoon.

The tasting room, art gallery, and patio.

The weather here was wonderful; blue skies with puffy white clouds and temperatures in the mid-70’s. We are parked behind a winery, alongside what appear to be a grove of white birch (paper birch) trees, in view of orchards and gardens. This is no part of this not to like. While I was resting outside in one of our folding campchairs a Bald Eagle soared overhead.

The tasting room and patio looking towards their house.

Paul invited us for dinner, so we had to explain “the vegan thing.” Sharon rose to the challenge, making a green salad with fresh picked greens from her own garden, zucchini and onions sautéed in olive oil, and black beans and rice accompanied by their own Raspberry Rhubarb wine. We had a long, great conversation over this meal, including some tips on what to see and on our visit to Hibbing, MN tomorrow. As we left their house to return to our coach his final words for the evening were to not be surprised if we heard wolves howling. We can only hope.

2013_07_30 (Tue) TRNP-NU and Medora ND

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Entrance to Red Trail Campground.

We are staying at the Red Trail Campground in Medora, Montana. The WiFi signal is strong, and the Internet connection is fast enough to work, IF nobody else is using it. We kept getting disconnected and finally turned on our Verizon MiFi device. Bingo! I love 4G/LTE when it’s available.

Entrance to TRNP South Unit in Medora MT.

We decided last night that this morning we would tour the North Unit of the Theodore Roosevelt National Park. It’s a 62 mile drive to get from the entrance of the South Unit in Medora to the entrance to the North Unit, in the middle of nowhere. Rain was forecast for today but we wanted to get there early, so we were on the road by 7:15 AM MDT.

(BTW: This MDT thing becomes important in this part of North Dakota as the dividing line between the Mountain and Central Time Zones zigzags around this part of ND basically cutting off the southwest corner of the state for Mountain Time and leaving the rest as Central Time. A careful look at the state highway map revealed that the dividing line runs right down the middle of the North Unit of TRNP on an east-west line. We actually crossed the line while in the Park and our phones changed to Central Time for a while.)

The North Unit may be in the middle of nowhere, but it is very much on the route to somewhere, namely Williston, ND some 60 miles north and bit west of the Park. Williston is the hub of the northeastern Montana / northwestern North Dakota oil boom, and the truck traffic and equipment moving up and down US-85 was something to experience. Apparently North Dakota expects this to continue for a while as much of this stretch of US-85 is being widened.

CCC shelter overlooking the Little Missouri Scenic River; TRNP North Unit.

Once we turned into the Park, however, all was very quickly quiet and peaceful. Not being adjacent to a major Interstate Highway, the North Unit is probably much less visited than the South Unit, and we encountered very few other vehicles driving the 14 mile road (28 miles out and back). The weather was thick, as is obvious in these photographs, but it was an interesting and different way to see the Park. We encountered a “back country ranger” at this overlook and had a great, long conversation with him about the Park and the area around it. He told us that the North Unit does not have the wild horses that the South Unit has, but it does have bison, moose, bighorn sheep, and mountain lions. Although he didn’t mention them, we saw wild turkeys and a pheasant in addition to a couple of bison and deer.

Thick weather in the TRNP NU.

The weather in the North Unit was very thick this morning and the mood in the park is very different in this kind of weather. The Ranger told us that The North Unit is usually very dry this time of year but has had an unusually high amount of rain this season, and has already exceeded its normal annual rainfall. The Little Missouri Scenic River has water in it, when it would normally be dry, and the Park has a lot of greenery and flowering plants.

Clouds rolling up out of the river valley to the rim; TRNP NU.

On the drive back to Medora we stopped at the Painted Canyon Rest Area and Visitor Center on I-94. This facility is located at the southeast corner of the South Unit of TRNP and affords nice views of a corner of the park where the interior roads do not go.

[04722 CN A chokecherry bush (I think).

Back in Medora, we stopped at the TRNP South Unit Visitor Center, which was closed when we went for our drive last night. On the way in from the parking lot we passed through an area of plantings that were labeled. I think this bush was a chokecherry, but I didn’t see a label for it. There are a lot of chokecherry-based products for sale in Medora, so I’m sticking with my story.

TR’s “nicer” log home, now on display in TRNP SU Visitor Center in Medora MT.

In the backyard of the center is Theodore Roosevelt’s 2^nd (and nicer) North Dakota log cabin. Our timing was good as we got there in time for the 2 PM Ranger-led tour of the house, which is otherwise locked. It was very fancy for its time (1884), with three rooms, wood floors, an attic, a cold cellar, and glass windows.

We left the South Unit Visitor Center and drove through the adjacent De Mores Meat Packing site, now a state park with the smokestack and remnants of the foundations of the buildings that once stood there. We then had a slow drive through Medora and back to our coach. Here are a few pictures of the town:

Just down the street from the entrance to TRNP SU in Medora MT.

Shouldn’t every pizza parlor have a saloon, and look like this?

Medora is a much more refined town than its “rough” exterior suggests.

Even the post office and bank are quaint.

For dinner this evening Linda prepared a Kabocha squash that she bought for $1 at the Cody Farmers Market last Saturday. Niether of us had ever heard of this squash before she bought it. She cut it in two halves and microwaved them for 8 minutes to start the cooking process and cut down on convention oven time. She sauteed a mixture of brown rice, onion, garlic, carrots, bell peppers, and kale seasoned with salt, black pepper,dried basil, and Tamari sauce and stuffed the squash halves with it, mounded over the top. She backed these for 15 minutes at 350 degrees F using convention feature of our convection microwave oven. The squash came out perfectly cooked with a light yellow to slightly green color that paired wonderfully with the slices of honeydew mellow and the Riesling wine that accompanied the dish. Savory, nutty, chewy, and a little spicy without being “hot”, it was another wonderful example of what she has learned to do with these basic WFPB ingredients.

We have been back in “vacation mode” last week and this. We would prefer not to be, but we need to be back in Michigan in early August and are trying to see what we can on this trip with the time we have. We have not taken hikes that we would like to have taken, done any geocaching, or had the luxury of waiting for the weather to change. We did not go for pre-dawn or post-dusk drives and we did not stay up late enough to view the stunning night sky at the new moon in the deep, deep darkness of the west. We did not visit the Chateau De Mores (State Historical Site) or see the Medora Musical (OK, never really planned to). And we did not bring/operate our ham radios. But we did what we could with the time that we had, and it was all good. And when we are be back this way we intend to be managing our time differently. But for now, tomorrow we must move on and cross North Dakota.

The Phase Place

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Tag Archives: WFPB

2014/06/15 Family Time

2014/06/09 (M) Mobile Service

2014/06/08 (N) Positioning

2014/06/04 (W) Indian Street Food

2014/06/03 (T) Work-n-Play

2014/06/02 (M) Fire Pit Project

2014/06/01 (N) Farmer’s Market

2014/05/17 (S) Working While We Wait

2014/05/02 (F) A Day At Home

2014/04/29 (W) Normality?

2014/04/25 (F) National Corvette Museum

2014/04/10 (R) Dunedin (FL)

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

2014/03/25 (T) That Is Imsane

2014/03/17 (N) St. Patrick’s Day

2014/02/14 (F) Valentine’s Day

2014/02/12(W) Back In Time

2014/02/03-04 (M&T) Happy Birthday

2014/01/30 (R) Fort Wilderness

2014/01/16 (R) Wi-Fi Woes

2014/01/11 (S) Silver River State Park (FL)

2014/01/02 (R) Rainy Days And Chores

2013_10_20 (N) The Blue Ridge Parkway, VA

2013_10_16 (W) GSMNP

2013_08_27-28 Babysitting And Our First RV Visitors

2013_08_16 (Fri) BTTB Rally – Day 2

2013_08_01 (Thu) A Short Drive And A Winery

2013_07_30 (Tue) TRNP-NU and Medora ND