Our RV Adventures

Today was looking to be another “Fix things that Nick broke” day, so I knew I had to have a big pot of coffee to get the day started.

Then a little later Jan fixed a great lunch of her egg and cheese sandwiches on Miss Terry’s bread. After I did some Internet stuff I went next door to Nick’s to finish up on his entertainment center problems.

My main task was to try and find which of a dozen or so unmarked cables was the one for the roof antenna. I had already traced the cable back to the antenna amplifier, so I shorted the cable end at the amplifier and then started checking all the other cables with an ohmmeter. And, luckily for me, it turned out to be the second cable I checked. So I was able to put the amplifier box back together and finish wiring up the system.

Since we’re located down in a valley, we still couldn’t get a good picture, but we did see enough signal noise to be pretty sure it was now working. The only thing left is to ziptie some of the cables back out of the way, but I’ll do that in the next couple of days. But before stopping I gave Nick an in-service on his DISH DVR. I did find that some of his confusion is understandable.

Compared to my DirecTV system, Nick’s DISH DVR is much harder to use. Things that I can do in one button push take 3 or 4 on Nick’s, but I think I finally got him on the straight and narrow. Or at least as straight and narrow as Nick’s ever gonna get.

Next I wanted to get started on his tail light problem. I noticed coming here from Las Vegas last week that none of the lights on his Explorer toad were working, except for when it started raining. And then only the left side started working.

And as soon as we were out of the rain and things dried up, the lights slowly stopped working again. Based on this alone, my first thought was that the problem had to be in the toad, since only a single wire feeds the tail light signal itself back to the toad. So if the left tail light is working, and if the right one isn’t, it means the problem is in the toad where the signal splits between the right and left lights.

And it also means that there is probably a loose or intermittent connection that can be affected by getting wet.

But before I started to look at the Explorer I wanted to confirm that I was getting signals at the plug coming from the coach. And I found out I had a problem there too.

Like many coaches, Nick’s Winnebago has separate lights for brakes and turn signals. But many toads don’t. They use the same light for both brakes and turn signals.

So to interface the two different systems, you use a converter box, and this converter box requires a 12 volt line to power it. And it looks like there’s a problem with the 12 volts feeding the box, in that it seems to come and go. But that’s about as far as we got today since we ran out of time.

It’s not unusual when troubleshooting a system, any system, to find more than one problem causing the trouble, and if you’re not on the lookout for it, it can give you fits.

And for what it’s worth, it’s also not that unusual to replace a bad part with a new one, and then find that the new part was bad out of the box.

After troubleshooting systems for over 40 years now, it’s a wonder I still have any hair at all.

The reason we had to quit working on the lights is that it was time for dinner. So we headed out about 5:45 to give El Cid, a local Mexican place another try. We had really liked it last year, but our first visit this year was a disappointment.

We hoped the 2nd time was the charm, and in this case everything was much better. Maybe we just hit them on a bad night.

After dinner we drove a couple of miles up the road to check out the RV parking at the Oakhurst Elk’s lodge. They advertise 30 amps and water for $10 a night.

Nick and I both agreed we wouldn’t want to try and get our rigs in there. Especially in the upper section where we might not be able to get them back out.

The whole park is very hilly, with bad roads, and the $10 is not that cheap when at Park of the Sierras, where we are now, we get 50 amp full hookups for $13.75 a night plus electricity.

And if you’re using one of their First Week Half Price coupons, you’re looking at $6.85 a night.

Heading home, I stopped to get gas. Only $3.93 a gallon, and it was $4.09 about 10 days ago. Nice!

Then we had to stop and feed Nick’s cappuccino addiction. He starts to get surly and cranky, or maybe that’s snivelly and whiney in his case, when he doesn’t get his fix.

We’ve created a monster.

Getting back to the rigs we went over to Nick and Terry’s to watch Big Bang Theory and try some of Miss Terry’s lemon dessert bread. I already knew it would be delicious since I smelled it baking earlier in the afternoon when I was working on the lights.

And it was!

Tomorrow we’re taking a logging train ride.

More about that later.

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Thought for the Day:

“A nation that forgets its past has no future.” – Winston Churchill

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Today was kind of a rest-up day from our 235 mile round trip down to King’s Canyon and Sequoia National Parks and back. So everyone slept in this morning.

When I got up at 10:30 I fixed us coffee and had the last of our muffins from the Sam’s Club in Las Vegas. I guess it’s time to stock up again.

We’ll have to check out Von’s in Oakhurst and see what they have in the bakery.

About 2 I went over to Nick and Terry’s to take a look at their entertainment center hookup. Between replacing three TV’s and a satellite system, then a burglary, and a cabinet remodeling, there was a problem with how everything had been wired and rewired.

As usual nothing was labeled and there were a lot of extra cables connected to nothing. But with some some cable-tracing and diagram-drawing, I finally had a handle on how it was wired.

The only thing that was presently working was the satellite system feeding directly into the TV on an HDMI cable. And the Wii system was also hooked up directly to the TV using the 3 wire AV input.

However the DVD player was not hooked up, nor was the over-the-air roof antenna. Or rather there was a cable connected, but it wasn’t the right one.

It looked like the best way to hook up the DVD was to use another HDMI cable and feed it directly into the TV on the 2nd HDMI input. And neither Nick nor I had one. But I figured the Radio Shack in Oakhurst would.

As far as the roof antenna, I decided to wait to trace that cable until we took the LCD TV off the cabinet mount to install the 2nd HDMI cable.

It was getting close to 4 so we decided to head out to Oakhurst to get the cable and then have dinner at the Chukchansi Casino.

While we were at Radio Shack I also had Nick pick up an AC plug strip. I wanted to wire things up so he could turn everything off with a single switch, especially the DVR system.

These units all have a computer hard drive in them. That’s how they record your TV shows. And if the unit is plugged in, the hard drive is spinning, even if the box is turned off. And unlike laptop hard drives, the ones in DVR’s are not really made to move around, like when you’re bouncing down the road in the RV. Plus these units all generate some heat which is not a good thing in a closed cabinet.

So unplug your DVR when you travel!

After a great meal at the Casino we got back about 6:30 and I went over to Nick’s to install the cable.

Of course the first thing I discovered that there wasn’t a large enough hole, between the left section that held the DVD and the center section where the TV is mounted, to run the HDMI cable thru. So out comes the drill.

More fun.

After Terry and I took down the TV, we finally got the DVD’s HDMI cable hooked up and tested. Finally.

At this point we also found out that we had no idea what had happened to the cable from the roof antenna. The one that was hooked to the ANT input on the TV didn’t go anywhere. A little searching found us the control panel for the roof antenna amplifier, so I decided to try and trace it back from there.

But first I just wired it up directly to see what I had. And discovered another problem. As I thought, we’re down in a valley with mountains between us and the nearest TV stations in Fresno 35 miles away. All we could get was a flicker of a station on channel 27, but turning off the amplifier made the very fuzzy picture go away, so I’ll have to assume it’s working. We just don’t have a signal.

By this time it was after 9 pm so we decided to call it a day and finish up tomorrow.

More tomorrow. I’ve reposted some of our trip through Oregon last year.

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Thought for the Day:

“Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really wanted to make a million dollars, the best way to do it would be start his own religion.” – L. Ron Hubbard, the science fiction writer who later founded Scientology

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Sea Lions and Sea Food…

Originally posted on May 18, 2010

Just what I wanted to see when I got up this morning – Rain.

Few things are more fun than trying to get ready to roll while you’re getting soaking wet.

But I guess it’s about time we saw some actual northwestern rainy weather. We’ve actually have very little rain since we hit the west coast.

Into every life, and all that.

We left Midway RV Park about 8 am, earlier than normal, because we wanted to stop and see the Sea Lion Cave just north of Florence, OR.

We got there about 10 am and found easy parking for our rig. But then we had a mad dash across the street to the entrance, trying to dodge cars zooming by on US101.

But it was all worth the trip. The cave was really great!

The Sea Lion Cave was discovered in 1880 and opened as a tourist attraction in 1932 when US101 was still only a gravel road.

And by the mid 50’s it was still going strong. Don’t you just love those car colors.

This photo from the observation deck shows you the kind of weather we had today.

We had about a 100 yard walk along the trail leading to the elevator.

We took the 200 foot elevator down to the sea lion cave and looked out into what is billed as the largest sea cave in the world.

And there were sea lions everywhere. Along the walls, on the rocks, in the water, all over.

The other end of the cave looks out over the cormorant rookery, and what is called “The Most Photographed Lighthouse in the World", the Heceta Lighthouse.

Back on the surface we looked out over the other side of the cave.

We arrived at Circle Creek RV Park just south of Seaside OR about 2:15 pm.

Around 3:30, after we got set up, we headed back down the road about 7 miles to eat at Mo’s Seafood, a place that Nick Russell had recommended.

And, as usual, Nick’s recommendation was dead on. It was great. Jan had a Seafood Platter with Clam Chowder, and I had a bowl of Oyster Stew and a Blackened Cod Fish Sandwich. Hmmm, Hmmm, Good.

Tomorrow, we only have a 105 mile run to Westport, WA, so we’ll probably go out to breakfast and drive around a little before we leave.

We’ll be in Westport for 3 nights catching up with our friends, Al and Adrianne Cox, who we first met in Fairbanks, AK in 2008.

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