Our RV Adventures

After coffee, I started the morning by heading down to the office to pay up for the next 10 days. It’s nice to be only paying $3 a day again instead of $20.

Wednesday, May 1st, we’ll head northwest about 300 miles or so to spend two weeks at the Las Vegas Thousand Trails. We’re really looking forward to being back there again, especially since it’s cooler there than it is here in Apache Junction.

My next stop was Nick and Terry’s rig to do some electrical work. Nick’s been having a problem with his house batteries not staying charged when he’s plugged into shore power.

Supposedly there’s a contactor/relay that causes this, so Nick ordered a replacement last week, and today’s the day to replace it.

The first thing we wanted to do was to disconnect all power from the coach, shore power, house batteries, and chassis batteries. But we ran into a small problem. Although Nick’s Winnebago Ultimate Advantage has a switch to disconnect the house batteries, as far as we could tell, there’s no way to disconnect the chassis batteries except to disconnect the cables at the batteries themselves.

But after that, we still had voltage on the contactor, but strangely enough it was about 18.5 volts. After scratching our heads for a few minutes, we finally figured it had to be coming from the solar panel battery charger on the roof of the rig. And after Miss Terry put a rug over the panel, the voltage dropped to zero.

Getting the contactor out wasn’t hard, but it was hard to get to.

The mounting screws were blocked by the large gauge cables, and the cable’s mounting lugs were blocked by the adjacent relay and circuit breaker panels.

But eventually I was able to get the old one out, carefully labeling each wire as I went.

Then it was time to get the new one back in

When that was done it was time to hook up the batteries and check things out. And it was good to see that everything seemed to be working fine. But it will take a while to be sure it’s charging the way it should.

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Here’s another picture of Zoe Nadeau, Landon’s beautiful red-haired 2nd cousin. Hard to believe she’s only about a week old.

Between the red hair and those blue eye, she’s going to break a lot of hearts.

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About 4pm we picked up Nick and Terry and drove over to the #1 Eastern Super Buffet to meet Ken and Paula Lougee for dinner.

Ken and Paula have been gate guarding for the last year and it was good to compare notes. Unlike Jan and I, who moved four times in four months when we were gate guarding, Ken and Paula have been parked at the same gate for over a year.

We had a lot of fun exchanging stories and experiences, and talking about the weird things that happened. They plan on being back on their gate after a month off, while Jan and I plan on gate guarding from August to November this year.

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I swear I haven’t been Googling Cluster Bombs, but you know how you Google something and then the next website you go to has ads for what you were just looking for.

So this is what I had pop up earlier tonight.

I’m sorry, but who orders bomblets online?

What if I need something bigger?

Can I get a quantity discount?

Is the DHS going to be checking me out because I wrote about this on the blog?

If there’s no blog tomorrow, you’ll know why.

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Thought for the Day:

He attacked everything in life with a mix of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence, and it was often difficult to tell which was which. — Douglas Adams

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Today was once again moving day. We had to move back one space to the left. A real pain in the butt, but it means we go from paying $20 a night to paying $3 a night for the next 10 days.

Since it was supposed to be 90 today, we decided to move a little earlier than we did last Sunday, so about 12:45 we hit the road, or at least drove across the road and then backed into the site next door.

It took several back and forths to get in straight because the site doesn’t have a lot of room between the pad and the sewer connection.  As it was, when the rig was right along side the patio, the sewer connection was only about 6 inches from my rear tire on the other side.

But it fit, which is what mattered. So we’re now parked until we leave for Las Vegas on May 1st.

About 1:30 I drove over to Nick’s to take a look at a couple of projects we’re going to tackle, probably tomorrow.

After coming back home for a while, Jan and I picked up Nick and Terry about 3:30 and headed about 25 miles away to Fry’s Electronics. As it turns out, I needed an RF Modulator to finish hooking up our new DirecTV HD DVR.  Our old DVR had an F connector output on channel 3/4 that feeds the bedroom TV. But our new DVR only has video/audio outputs, but no RF. So I needed one of those things people used to hook their video games up to their TV, but I wanted one that also had an S-Video input for the best quality.

After finding what I needed, (and a few other things of course), and everyone else had done their shopping, we headed down the road about 5 miles so we could introduce Nick and Terry to another of our favorite BBQ places, Rudy’s BBQ.

Jan had the Loaded Baked Potato with Brisket, and I had a little brisket, a couple of ribs, and a half link of jalapeno sausage, i.e. a little bit of every thing.

Miss Terry also sampled several dishes, while Nick had brisket and ribs, later saying it was the  best brisket he’d ever eaten.

Getting back to the park, we spent some time at Nick and Terry’s rig listening to some of the possible narrators of Nick’s Big Lake books, finally getting home about 8:30, a long, but nice day.

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Thought for the Day:

A dog may bite you in the ass, but it will never stab you in the back.

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