Our RV Adventures

I was up kind of early this morning, especially the morning after a long trip day, but I had a lot to do.

First up was a call to the Onan Tech Support guy to follow up with some more questions, only to find out that he was out all week for the 4th holiday. Bummer!  But Google being my friend I found another Tech Support number and gave it a call

The new guy was a lot of help, answered my all my questions, wasn’t talking on a crappy speakerphone that kept cutting in and out, and wasn’t nearly as curmudgeonly as the first guy.

He confirmed that I should be seeing 12vdc on the line coming from the controller box to the governor actuator, and that if I didn’t it would keep the genset from starting and/or running.

So getting off the phone, I went out side to unbutton the generator and find out what I had on that line. And it turned out to be no voltage at all.

Well, this brightened my day, since I thought I had a workaround for this possibility. One that might get me running. Since the actuator needed 12 volts, I’d just give it 12 volts directly.

So using a couple of heavy-duty alligator clip leads, I hotwired it with 12volts coming from the power connection on the back of the solenoid and the other lead loose so I could touch it to ground to energize the actuator box.

And a trial run produced a loud ‘clunk’ from the box that I hadn’t been hearing on previous tests. Things were looking up.

But not for long. When I had Jan crank it over, nothing had changed. Just ru-ru-ru.

Oh well. It’s back to the drawing board, or the phone, as it were.

By now it was about 2pm so I got cleaned up and Jan and I drove next door to visit my Aunt Janis, who owns this RV park, along with her son Wes

We were happy to hear that another of her sons, Jimmy and his wife Beth, were visiting from Florida.

I didn’t get a good photo of Beth. it came out too dark to use.

In one of those strange coincidences, we found out several years ago that Jimmy had gone to school in the 70’s with my client back in Houston. Small world.

Finally about 5:30 we said our goodbyes and headed over to Huntsville to have dinner at Rosie’s Cantina, a place we always eat at at least once when we’re here.

We were kind of surprised to find the place so busy on a Monday night, but then realized this is essentially a holiday week with the 4th being on Wednesday.

I had the Beef Fajitas for One and had leftovers. Really good with the meat tender and flavorful.

Jan had her usual Pollo Loco.

Also very good.

Tomorrow it’s back on the phone with Onan, and more relative visits.

Thought for the Day: 

“The press is impotent when it abandons itself to falsehood.†– Thomas Jefferson

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Jan and I were up at 6:15 and pulling out of our site at the Timber Trails RV Park by 7am

We were meeting Jan’s sister Debbie, her husband Jim, their daughter Tana, fiancé Curtis, and various and sundry kids, at the Denny’s in Vandalia. We had already scoped out a good parking spot for the rig the day before, since we were planning on already being hooked up.

And our luck held because someone wasn’t parked in our hoped-for spot. It can be difficult to find a place to park a 62+ feet vehicle that can’t really back up, so that you can get it in and out without too much problem. But this time it worked.

There have been times when we’ve parked the rig in the middle of a big parking lot with not one around for 100 feet on any side, and some a*****e will come along and deliberately park right in front of the rig, six inches off our bumper. Believe me, I have been severely tempted to just plow them out of the way, but I have resisted.

So far.

Non-RV’ers don’t realized how sharply a rig can actually turn since the front wheels are so far back from the front bumper. So far I’ve always been able to back up the foot or so necessary to get clear without unhitching the toad.

In fact, in 11 years and over 84,000 miles, I’ve only had to unhitch twice to get out of a tight spot, and both of those times it was bad routing from our GPS. Word to the wise, don’t take Poison Spider Rd out of Casper, WY heading for the Oregon Trail turnoff.

“ It’s A Trap! â€

Of course, in hindsight, nothing good can be expected at the end of Poison Spider Rd. BTW Poison Spider Rd. passes right by Poison Spider High School.

No, I’m not making this up.

Anyway, we all had our usual great meal, got our hugs from everyone, and were on the road by 8:30, heading for Athens, AL, about 400 miles away. We’ll be here until Saturday, when we start back to Houston.

The reason we were again getting such an early start was that I still don’t have generator working yet. I got it to start and then run for about 5 seconds, but then it dies. And before I could get any further with it. I had to button it all up so we could do family stuff and then be ready to leave this morning.

But we’ll be here in Athens until Saturday ,so since we won’t have quite as much family stuff going on, I’m hoping to get a handle on it before we leave.

And except for being hot and sticky, it really was a pleasant 7 hour trip, even though it was about 3 hours longer than we normally like to do. The roads were pretty good, and only one construction slow-down that turned out to be for a non-existent problem, at least on Sunday when no one was working. But because they didn’t want to move the barrels out of the way, all traffic on I-57 was narrowed down to one lane for about 5 miles, putt-putting along at 20 mph, with no sign of any workers, construction equipment, or even any work being down and not finished. Just a long of rows that started and stopped.

Jan drove again this trip, for about 90 minutes from right after we got on I-57 at Salem, to right before we turned off on I-24. She did fine, even though it was a little windy.

We pulled in to our family’s Northgate RV Park about 3:45 and got unhitched, set up, and plugged in. Then, while the rig cooled down, we got in the truck and went to have dinner at Catfish Cabin, a local favorite of ours, and a tradition that we always eat here on our first night.

Their hushpuppies, salad dressings, cocktail and tartar sauce, and many other things are all make from scratch. And it shows. Or tastes, anyway.

Tomorrow I’ll be working on the generator and we’ll start catching up with my relatives. Looking forward to it.

Thought for the Day: 

If history teaches us anything, it’s that history rarely teaches us anything.

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