Our RV Adventures

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Starting out today, I found my Delorme Street Atlas 2015 software, and I think that’s the last of what I’m looking for as far as personal stuff to install.

One of the things that got lost in the Great Hard Drive Failure is the stuff I had prepared to post in my Greg’s Favorite Apps area, so it’ll be a couple of days  until I get back to that. I do have a paper list around here somewhere that will help me get things back on course.

Somehow I forgot to mention in yesterday’s blog about the great Beef Stew that Jan fixed in the crockpot.

Made with Stew Beef, Carrots, Potatoes, Onions, and Parsnips, Jan spiced it perfectly, with just the right amount of heat. And enough left over for . . . well leftovers.

Our son-in-law Lowell alerted me to the fact that one of our favorite places to eat in Houston burned to the ground this morning.

Cleburne Cafeteria has been around since the early 40’s in one building or another, and we’ve been eatiing here since the 80’s. In fact we just ate here a little over a month ago with Landon and his other grandparents, Sonja and Lendell.

Hopefully they’ll rebuild.

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Nick Russell called me this afternoon to let us know that we’ve gone viral again on the Internet. The last time was in 2009 when we visited Busch Gardens in Tampa, with this result.

After I posted this on our blog it showed up all over the Internet, on Awkward Family Photos and a number of other websites.

But this time it was our rig, on Facebook. It showed up on Guy Scrivner’s page.

That’s our rig, traveling in Washington state in 2011. There was construction up ahead, so we spent about 45 minutes, just creeping along. And note, despite the caption, there’s no shoulder to pull over onto.

A couple of days ago Jan tried out a new recipe she first had a few months ago when she had her yearly get-together with her ex-coworkers from the hospital.where she worked before we started RV’ing.

The dish is a dessert called Sopapilla Cheesecake, and Jan found a recipe for it on Debi Hurlburt’s Facebook group, Debi’s RV Cooking.

And it gets even better after being in the fridge for a day or so. If it lasts that long.

I’ll post the recipe on Jan’s Favorite Recipes later tonight.

Thought for the Day:

“If you’re in the con game and you don’t know who the mark is … it’s you.”

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Recapping yesterday’s trip, we were hooked up and on our way by
9:50am. We made our first stop at the Luling Buc-ee’s for diesel, $1.79, the cheapest we’ve seen in the area.

And we’ve never seen Buc-ee’s this busy. It took a while to thread our way through the cars to get around to the larger pumps in the back. But we were able to pull right up to a end pump and fill up. Then it was another obstacle course to get out, but we were in and out in about 25 minutes, so it wasn’t too bad.

Then it was another 120 miles, and about 2 and a half hours to Medina Lake, the time mostly due the hilly, curvy road from Boerne to the park.

We got in to the park about 4pm and headed in to find a spot. We knew our friends, Dave and Lynn Cross, were back in the ‘F’ section so we headed that way. And then as we were meandering around, looking for a site, who popped out to flag us down, but Dave,who directed us to a 50 amp site two away from he and Lynn.

And as I mentioned in yesterday’s blog, Lynn Cross had prepared us a delicious spaghetti dinner and we spent several hours talking, having a great time.

When we got back to the rig, I tried to get the satellite system up and running, but without any luck. Our site is pretty heavily treed so I knew it was going to take some fiddling. But the first problem I had was getting power to the dome. I have about 75 feet of coax that lets me move the dome out into the open, but I only have 50 feet of 12 volt power cable.

The 12 volts is only needed to power the motors that aim the dome. Once that’s done, the 12 volts can be disconnected. But now I needed to get power to the dome, so since I didn’t have a 12 volt extension cable, I decided to take the power supply to the dome.

So I used my 12 volt power supply on an extension cord to power the dome

I’d modified it to add a 12 volt socket just for needs like this.

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But it still didn’t work. Although my voltmeter showed the power supply was putting out 12 volts, it wasn’t getting to the dome for some reason. But by this this time it was dark, so I called it a night, and we just watched stuff we’d recorded earlier.

Then this morning, I went down to the guard shack to let them know what site we were in and pay for our 50 amp electric. Or at least I tried.

When I tried to start the truck, I found the battery dead. I had left a accessory switch on, and had run it down. So I dug out my battery charger to fix the problem. But then I ran into another problem.

The charger I have does auto 6 volt/12volt selection, and since the battery was down to about 5 volts, the charger kept treating it as 6 volt battery. Not good.

So now what to do? I have 2 sets of  battery cables that I can chain together to let me charge the truck from the rig batteries when it’s hitched up, but that’s still not long enough. I could take the battery out of the truck and take it back to the rig batteries, or take out a rig battery and use that to start the truck.

But that seemed like too much work. There’s got to be a simpler kludge.

And then I realized I already had the solution at hand – the 12 volt power supply that I had tried to use for the satellite. It puts out a current-limited 6 amps steady, 8 amps surge. So I used it to charge the battery up to about 9 volts, and then let the big charger take over. It’s 3/5/20/75 amp model, so at 20 amps, it didn’t take long to top off the battery. So about 30 minutes later I was on my way to the gate.

And while I was there, I also wanted to get my driver’s license back. They recently started holding your Thousand Trails membership card until you come back and settle up.

But I no longer have a TT membership card, since the last place that held my card, the Bend/Sunriver TT in Bend, OR, lost my card and couldn’t give it back to me. And since I know my membership number by heart, I never needed it again.

Until today. So instead, they held my driver’s license.

i guess this will finally get me to call TT and get another one.

This morning our friend’s Brett and Frankie got in touch to tell us that they were also here at Medina Lake and wanted to get together. But it had to be today, since they’re leaving for Conroe tomorrow.

So, about 3:30, Brett showed up at our rig in his golf cart to Uber us back over to their rig. Frankie had coffee and cake waiting for us, and we had a great time talking over their recent travels all the way down to Key West and back to Texas.

Too bad they’re leaving tomorrow, since we would have liked to spend more time with them. But I’m sure we’ll catch up with them down the road.

Getting back to the rig, I got back on my satellite problem. And when I hooked up the power this afternoon, suddenly the dome was getting power and scanning for the satellites. Not sure why it suddenly started working, but gift horses, and all that.

But it took trying 3 different locations to find one that worked. And unfortunately, the one that works is on the picnic table of the site next to ours, about 60 feet away..

But this is a 30 amp site, and since the temps are edging in the 90’s now, and there are a lot of empty sites, hopefully we want have a problem.

Hopefully.

Thought for the Day:

Physics is what humans call the part of the God code that we can understand.

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