Our RV Adventures

I was up at about 8am this morning to see off our temporary next door neighbor’s Chris and Charles Yust on their trip back to San Angelo, TX

Just goes to show you how much I like them that I would get up that early.

But they didn’t even get out of the Voyager RV Resort without a problem. While they were hitching up their Trailblazer in the designated area on the road leaving the park, a Winnebago Tour came by with the door awning still out, scratching the side of their rig. Unfortunately they weren’t able to get a tag number.

Not a good start to their journey.

We had planned to go over to the Fairgrounds for the Pet Parade and Chili Cook-off starting at 11am, and the Closing Ceremonies at 3. But as the morning wore on, Jan developed an upset stomach so we passed it by. In fact we ended up not leaving the rig at all for the day.

Hopefully she’ll feel better tomorrow.

The last couple of parks we’ve stayed at  I’ve noticed that my Cradlepoint CTR350 Wi-Fi router and Verizon aircard was taking longer and longer to connect. Then this morning sometime between 7:40 (the last email) and 8:15 (when I noticed the Internet was down) the Cradlepoint died. In fact it no longer even showed up on my list of available Wi-Fi signals.

I originally had a CTR500 that I bought in 2008 which lasted until July  2015 when it went ports up. In trying to replace it, I found that Cradlepoint was not longer in the aircard router business. So while I was looking around for a replacement, our friend Janna Clark came through with a CTR350 from her box of old, outdated electronics. And that 350 worked fine until this morning.

Looking things over, and after cycling the router power several times with no improvement,  I then plugged the aircard directly into the computer, dialed in, and found I could get on the Internet with no problem, so it wasn’t the aircard.

Next up was to do a full reset on the router, taking it back to the factory settings. At this point I logged into the router directly  and set it up once again. I was now happy to see the router showing up on my Wi-Fi list.

Thinking I had fixed the problem, I unplugged the aircard from the computer and plugged it into the the router. But rather than the problem now being fixed, the Wi-Fi signal disappeared from the list. And when I unplugged the aircard, the Wi-Fi signal came back. And the signal came and went every time I repeated the sequence.

Ok, that’s weird.

So my next thought was maybe it was actually a power supply problem, with the added load of the aircard lowering the voltage. But my VOM showed 5.13 volts unloaded and 5.03 volts under load.

So no problem there.

At this point, I figured “It’s Dead, Jim” and started to look for a replacement. Amazon had a new 350 was about $150, more than they cost originally. But a used, like new one, was available for $20, so I put my order in and had it sent to the Santa Fe RV Park in Apache Junction where we’ll be starting this Saturday.

Of course the aircard still works directly on the computer, we just don’t have Wi-Fi in the coach for our Kindles and Galaxy Tab. But we can hotspot my phone for these if need be.

With the rally over tomorrow will be a fix-it day with several projects on the menu.

Thought for the Day:

“There are things that are so serious that you can only joke about them.” ― Werner Heisenberg

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Catching up on Tuesday, the first thing I did this morning after coffee was to call Voyager Maintenance about my sewer connection. When I tried to hook up a couple of days ago, I couldn’t get the cap off. I don’t know why people put them back on so tight,  but I carry a pair of groove joint pliers (generic Channellocks) in my water bay just for this purpose.

But when I started to twist the cap, the whole coupling started to turn. So not wanting to take a chance of breaking the pipe off in the ground, I made the call. When the guy showed up about 10 minutes later, he said this is a regular occurrence, and that the couplings are not glued down just for this reason. So he was able to quickly replace my coupling with a new one with a loose cap.

My Arizona CCW class went from 12:30 to 3:30, and covered basic laws, common-sense gun safety, and examples of situations where you might or might not use a weapon.

Our instructor, Byron Hibshman of TravelingCCW.com, a 30 year retired LEO, did a great job covering the material, and then leading us through filling out the forms that we will be submitting to the State of Arizona. Then we filled out our two fingerprint cards, after which he fingerprinted each of us so our submission was ready to go.

I was the last one to be fingerprinted, so Bryon and I were laughing about having to do this over and over. Between my numerous Security Clearances with the DOD and NASA, a number of financial securities licenses, and others, including gate guard licenses, I’m somewhere north of 70 separate fingerprintings.

And No, despite what you might think, none of them involved a police officer and a pair of handcuffs.

Later, for dinner, Jan and I headed out to the Silver Saddle Steakhouse, a must when we’re in Tucson.

Great steaks, really good salad bar and homemade rolls, and even the beans are good. I had the 16oz T-Bone, done perfectly with charred edges and a medium-rare center.

Just as delicious as always.

After that, it was back to the rig so I could finished prepping for our seminar.

Today, Wednesday, Jan and I got to the Escapade about 10am so she could take in a seminar on Social Media, and I could check things out for our Gate Guarding seminar at 11:30.

I wanted to be sure that my handouts had been copied and were available, and that there was a video projector in the room, since I when I checked yesterday, there wasn’t one there. But the Seminar Hosts people had my handouts ready, and there was a projector in the room, so I was good to go.

To kill time until I could get into the room to set up at 11, I made another loop through the vendor area. I was hoping to be able to talk with the Verizon guys about upgrading my plan, but as every time before, I couldn’t get anywhere near the booth because of the crowd.

As far as our class, it went pretty well, with almost 70 people showing up, a lot of good questions, and even a couple of big laughs at my jokes.

Everyone seemed to enjoy it, with a number of people telling Jan how much they learned from it, including a couple who said they were going to give gate guarding a try based on the information they got from the seminar.

After we were done, Jan and I drove up Houghton Rd. to the Freddy’s to bring back a couple burgers for us, and a couple for our friends, Chris and Charles Yust, of C and C RV Insurance, since they were stuck in their vendor booth.

Finally heading back to the rig about 2pm, Jan and I were able to get in a nap for a while until Chris and Charles, who are parked right next to us, showed up.

Today was the last day for the vendors here, so they were finally able to relax. So after they walked the dogs, we all piled into their car and headed out for the Grimaldi’s Pizzeria, one of our favorites, and I think, now one of theirs.

With both of us getting the large 18” model, it took up most of the table. Luckily they can stack them double decker style.

Tomorrow is the wrap-up day for the Escapade with the closing ceremonies at 3pm, including awarding of the big $4600 door prize.

Looking forward to it.