Monthly Archives: May 2010
The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men, Gang aft agley…
which, of course, is Scots for —
Sometimes things just screw up.
We had planned to pull out from Park of the Sierras about 9 am this morning heading for Wine Country RV Park about 40 miles north of San Francisco. But that was not to be.
About 10 minutes before we were ready to leave, I went outside to double-check a bad tire pressure reading I was getting on my tire pressure monitor system.
The monitor said that the sensor was missing on my driver’s side inside rear dual. In looking at it, the sensor was still there, but I decided to manually check the tire pressure myself. And boy am I glad I did.
The tire was absolutely, completely flat. If I had driven like that I would probably ended up losing both tires.
When I tried to air it up myself, it wouldn’t take any air, and I could hear it running out.
So my next step was to call my Emergency Road Service, CoachNet who said they would send a tire repair guy out. I also wanted him to bring a replacement tire out with him in case the tire had failed.
Because of this, CoachNet said that they would have to get somebody out of Fresno about 40 miles away, and it would be about 3 hours.
No problem for us. I had already called the Park here to extend a day and the park we were going to tell them we wouldn’t be there until tomorrow.
The tire guy showed up about 1:30 and quickly discovered that, as I had hoped, it was just a bad valve stem extension, rather than a $500 tire.
The reason I couldn’t get any air into it was that with the tire completely flat, and the coach’s weight on it, the bead on the tire rim wasn’t sealing so the tire wouldn’t hold air. He had to use his big jack to lift up that side of the coach to take the weight off the tire. This allowed him to air the tire back up.
He showed me the defective extension and said he sees this all the time. People tighten them too tight and that destroys the little rubber O-ring inside it.
So it looks like we’ll be on our way tomorrow, again.
But we’ll see.
More tomorrow…
The Acorn Pole…
Today was another ‘get ready to travel” day. We plan on leaving about 9 tomorrow morning and moving about 230 miles north to the Wind Country RV Park in Rohnert Park, CA, which will put us about 45 miles north of San Francisco.
We plan on staying there a week exploring San Francisco, Monterey, and the Napa wine country.
About 1:30 I dropped Jan off at the park laundry so she could do some heavy rugs.
When I picked her up about 4 pm we drove over to the acorn pole here in the park to see the handiwork of the Acorn Woodpecker.
And this is their work.
What you see above is a telephone pole, and food storage container for the Acorn Woodpecker and his acorns.
He enlarges the cracks in the pole and stuffs his acorns in there to keep them safe. But sometimes that doesn’t work. In Arizona, Acorn Woodpeckers stored 485 pounds of acorns in the sides of a wooden water tower that fell thru to the inside and they couldn’t get them back out.
About 4:30 pm we picked up George and Sandy Stoltz at their RV here in the park to drive into Oakhurst to have dinner at El Cid, a great Mexican restaurant we found here.
Great Friends, Great Times, Great Food. I”m sure we’ll bump into them again somewhere on the road.
More tomorrow from the Napa Valley…
