And Me In A Body Bag . . .
I spent the morning talking with our travel agent, Chantelle Nugent, finalizing the last details of our European trip.
One of the things we were talking about is the trip insurance for the Paris/London land tour part of our trip. The trip insurance for the cruise part comes through Viking, but for the land part we’re on our own.
Chantelle said she had two possibilities. The first one covered pretty much anything for any reason. If your brother-in-law’s cousin’s neighbor’s hairdresser gets a zit, you can cancel for a full refund. That one cost about $475.
However, if I just wanted a policy that covers only cancellation for major medical/death reasons, personal or family, that one is $315.
Guess which one I bought.
I told Chantelle that as far as Jan was concerned, I don’t think my death would cause Jan to cancel the trip. She’s been wanting/planning this trip for too long. She would just go, come hell or high water, while dragging me along in a body bag.
I did get a call from Richard at RV Mobile Lube this morning saying he was in the area and would come by this afternoon to take a look at my leaking oil filter. For his sake I’m glad he’s coming this afternoon and not this morning, because it just poured down the whole time, but, as forecasted, it cleared up in the afternoon.
Richard showed up about 5pm and got right to work.
He pulled the old filter off and we checked it out. It wasn’t loose and the filter housing itself seemed fine, with no cracks or dents, and the threads looked fine with no burrs or cross-threading. Not ever having seen the gasket on one of these big filters, I figured that the gaskets were a flat fiber washer like on an auto/pickup vehicle.
But they’re actually a large rubber doughnut-looking thing, so no way to leave it off, or use the old one and the new one at the same time like on a car. And in this case the gasket looked perfect, also with no nicks or cuts. Richard also said the threads on the engine side of the filter looked fine too.
So at this point the next step was to install the new filter and gasket and see if it helped. After Richard got the filter cleaned off and the area wiped down, I crank up the rig, set it to high-idle, and then we waited.
When I checked it out on Tuesday and ran it for 30 minutes, oil started dripping within 10 minutes. But this afternoon, after 30 minutes, the ground pads were completely dry. I’ll check it again this weekend for maybe an hour for confirmation, but for now it looks the problem might be fixed.
Yah!
Richard’s last task was to top off the oil with about 6 quarts of Shell Rotella 15W-40.
I did learn a neat trick watching him do this. Adding oil though the normal oil filler cap is a pain in the rear on this engine. So I was surprised to see Richard adding it though the TDC (Top Dead Center) port.
But this looks like a much faster, easier way.
As soon as Richard left, Jan and I headed over to Whataburger for burgers and salads. Then afterwards, Jan noted that today was National Coffee Ice Cream Day and that we needed to stop by the nearby Marble Slab to take part in the celebration.
Personally I think she made it all up.
Thought for the Day:
It’s not a lie if no one believes it. – George Costanza
gsdfg
