Monthly Archives: October 2009
Bad Weather and Cold Water…
Today started out cold and rainy, and although it cleared up later in the day, tomorrow is supposed to be worse, with a high of only 44 degrees.
About 10 am Nick Russell and I got together to talk about working on his new coach. We decided to wait until Monday to take his rig to the warehouse so we can work in a dry environment.
We did drive over to the warehouse to check out the bus inverter system to be sure the connecting cable and control boxes would swap out OK. It looks good to go.
Coming back Nick and I looked at another problem on his coach. His water heater wasn’t…heating, that is.
Most motorcoach water heaters work on either LP gas or electricity. When Nick got his coach a few weeks ago, he knew the electric heater didn’t work, so he and Terry had just been using the LP gas part. However, during the night, that quit too.
After looking it over Nick noticed a couple of wires had melted insulation on them. A little further testing showed that the thermal cutoff diode had blown, thus disabling the heater. It looks like what happened is that during the night the high winds we experienced momentarily sucked the flame out of the heater that melted the insulation and triggered the thermal cutoff.
Replacing the cutoff got his heater working again. We’ll look at the electric side of things later when we’re working on the coach inside. It should be pretty simple to fix. There’s not a lot to go wrong on the electric side. Just the heating element, a manual reset switch, and a thermostat.
We’ll see.
Around 1 pm Jan and I headed out for lunch and errands. Since we were going to the Sam’s Club in Mishawaka, we decided to eat at Hooters, one of our favorite wing places.
Leaving Hooters we stopped off at Sam’s Club. We did notice a long line of people getting flu shots while we were there.
Coming back home, Nick and I shot the breeze for a while at his coach before I headed back to our rig.
About 6pm we all headed out for dinner at a place Nick and Terry knew about called Lakeshore Grill. This was a great place to eat and we all enjoyed it.
We’ll go back.
More tomorrow…
Amish Food and Amish Craftsmen…
About 12:30 pm we drove down to Middlebury to eat at Das Essenhaus, which in German is ‘The Eating House”, or ‘The Restaurant’
Very original name, huh?
They have great food, especially the fried chicken. The last time we ate there, we ate family style, where they just bring great food to your table until you explode.
This time we had the lunch buffet of fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, corn, muffins, salad, and dessert. Once again, it was really good.
Leaving the restaurant we stopped off at a nearby Dollar General to stock up on more Awesome Cleaner. This stuff is well known in the RV world for cleaning RV’s. It is fantastic for cleaning the bugs off the front of our coach.
Just spray it on, wait about 10 seconds, and then the bugs just wipe right off.
It’s Awesome!
I guess the Amish in the area also like the Dollar General, because there’s a hitching post right out front, complete with horse poo.
Leaving the DG we drove over to the American Countryside Farmer’s Market.
This place is amazing.
It’s a 3 story, 51,000 square foot building, entirely built by Amish craftsmen.
And it is beautiful inside.
And even more amazing is the fact that there is not a single nail anywhere in this building! It is all pegged together.
And here is one of the Amish carpenters working during the original construction. Only hand tools were used.
Coming home we stopped off at Martin’s Supermarket for more of the delicious Honey Crisp apples that are very plentiful right now. And while there we stopped in the Starbucks for a Pumpkin Latte and some pumpkin muffins. MMMMMM Good !
Coming back to the park we saw another great foliage view.
Another really nice day…
