Our RV Adventures

After another wet, gloomy morning, we actually started to see glimmers of sunlight peaking out from the gray. And by the afternoon it was bright and sunny, although it’s rained so much for the last week, that everything is still very soggy.

Yesterday’s power converter install is still working fine. The house batteries are staying fully charged, and the system is regularly switching over to top off the engine batteries.

So far, so good.

I was thinking about adding  some new photos to the rotating slideshow at the top of the blog, so I was going through some of the more than 27,000 pictures we’ve taken in the last 7 years.

No, that’s not a typo. Since we hit the road February 6th, 2008, we’ve been averaging over 10 pictures a day. Thank God for digital cameras, otherwise we couldn’t afford the film developing costs.

I did find a few new photos that I’ll be posting in the next few days, but Jan and I really ended up just paging through the pictures, reminiscing on our trip to Alaska, and visits to Yellowstone, Glacier National Park, Grand Tetons, and many others.

In fact we spent all afternoon on this, until suddenly it was time to head out for dinner. We’ve been wanting some good fried chicken so decided that Golden Corral was the place. So we headed out about 4pm for the one about 5 miles south of here.

As usual the food was really good, and even better, Golden Corral is running a promotion where you get to take home 6 free yeast rolls.

Yay, free food.

Leaving GC, our next stop was the Lowe’s right down the road. I needed a new 1/2” x 3/8” drive socket for my set. I noticed yesterday that one was missing when I went to use it on the power converter install. And I also wanted to get a small paint roller handle for another project that I’ll talk about later.

I had also planned on getting a replacement Danco faucet nozzle to go with the Danco ‘Universal’ replacement hose for our sink faucet. But blog reader Rod McElhenry reminded me that Moen faucets have a lifetime warranty, so I’ll wait and give them a call on Monday.

Then it was on to the Wal-Mart right next door for a few things, and then a last stop off at Starbuck’s to get a couple of Chesnutt Praline Lattes, and to get registered in their Starbuck’s For Life contest. Of course if you read the fine print, ‘Life’ to the Starbuck’s corporation is 30 years. But I’d be 96 by then so the point is probably moot.

Getting back to the rig, we found we had a new neighbor. Randy Lazarine, who was parked next to us in Columbus a couple of weeks ago, showed up. If you remember, he’s the guy with the new-to-him coach that had been completely mis-wired so that his power converter was not even hooked up, and his house batteries and engine batteries had been wired together. His solar panels kept things going at first, until we had a week of no sun. Then all his batteries ran down and he couldn’t even start his coach.

I didn’t have a chance to talk much tonight but I guess it’s still working OK. I’ll know more tomorrow.

Tomorrow looks to be a stay-at-home day. We’re going to put together a big batch of chicken vegetable soup in the slow cooker and goof off.

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Thought for the Day:

If you can’t make it good, at least make it look good. = Bill Gates

I guess this finally explains Windows Vista – Me

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Another cold, rainy day here at the Lake Conroe Thousand Trails with no nice weather forecast until Sunday. Nice as far as no rain, but still a low of 29 degrees Sunday night.

I guess you can’t have everything.

Later in the morning I called our friend Garland to set up our dinner plans tonight. Looks like it’s another visit to El Bosque Mexican.

Mmmm, Good. Looking forward to it.

Next up, I called the Danco  Co. up in Irving to find out why my Universal Kitchen Faucet Hose won’t fit my Moen faucet, even though the package says that it Fits All Faucet Brands.

The Danco Tech Support guy acknowledged that the hose would not fit my faucet, and that the Fits All Faucet Brands statement didn’t really mean that it fit ALL Brands, just a lot of them. Ironically the picture of the faucet on the box is identical to my Moen faucet.

The Tech Support guy suggested that I buy a Danco replacement faucet nozzle to go with my Danco hose. That’s another $25 to go with the $25 I’ve already spent, but a new hose alone from Moen is $65 and would take about two weeks to get here. So I guess I’ll pick up a new faucet tomorrow from Lowe’s.

Since I still had a few hours before our dinner get-together, I decided to go ahead and install my Power Converter in the compartment under the bed. My main goal was to just get it up and running inside the coach, instead of out in the battery bay where it resides now.

It took a while to get the connections set up, but within a short time I had it wired up and working fine.

That’s the new transfer switch on the left and the new power converter on the right. This is so that the cooling fan on the power converter is up against the vent on the side of the compartment. It’s amazing how much difference in the size of these units 16 years makes.

I haven’t fastened them down yet and won’t until I decide what I’m going to do about the inverter(s). When I do that, I’ll reroute the wires and lace them up neatly.

We don’t boondock very much where we would need a big hunking inverter. Our old one that I just ripped out was a 2500W modified sine wave unit. I’ve thought about replacing it with a 2000W pure sine wave unit, or maybe a 2000W and a 1000W unit.

The microwave is the only thing we have that would need the 2000W unit, and that’s for short periods. Next would be the toaster oven, The only other things we would run are the TV/DVR and the Computer/LCD Monitor, all of which will run on one 20 amp outlet.

I’m going to have to think on it some more.

Garland and Valencia picked us up at 5:00 and we headed over to the new location of El Bosque.  The food was delicious, and unlike our last visit a month or so ago after they just opened, the service was really good too.

We really enjoyed getting together with Garland and Valencia and hope we can do it again soon. Unfortunately it will probably be a while, since they’re heading out tomorrow. But hopefully it won’t be too long.

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Thought for the Day:

“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” – Aristotle

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