Our RV Adventures

While Jan spent the morning finishing up our friend Nick Russell’s latest book, I worked on a new website for a client, and played around with our new Jetpack MiFi.

I finished The Gecko In The Corner day before yesterday  and then Jan started. Since it’s a Kindle book we can’t read it at the same time, even on different Kindles, since it tries to jump you back and forth between your two stopping places.

Gecko is a kind of a slightly new genre for Nick, being not a murder mystery whodunit, but more in the thriller category. With still a bunch of murders, of course.

Another 5✰ book from Nick Russell. Check it out.

After lunch, later in the afternoon, I went outside to cut out the crimped section of my genset’s exhaust pipe.

The pipe was twisted toward the front of the rig, which could only have happened as the rig backing up.and the pipe hung up on something. But then something caused it to be bent back to the rear, crimping the pipe.

I used my jigsaw with a metal blade to cut the pipe off above the crimp, the only problem being that the blade was a little too short to cut straight through so I had to rotate the saw around the pipe until I was done.

Then I took the crimped piece back to the picnic table and cut off the crimp.

Monday I’ll take the pipe down to Home Depot to find a coupling and maybe an extension piece to be sure the replacement extends out past the side of the coach like it’s supposed to to vent the exhaust fumes.

When we bought our coach the end 2007 and picked it up January 6, 2008, Jan immediately named it ‘Beauty’. And when I set up our first Cradlepoint Aircard router I named our WiFi SSID ‘Beauty’ and it’s been that way ever since.

Until now.

Our new WiFi SSID is now ‘Verizon-MiFi7730L-7901â€. I think I  can change it but I’ve already connected my Galaxy S5 phone, my desktop computer, my laptop computer, 4 Kindles, an Amazon Echo, an Amazon Dot, and a Galaxy Tab 4. So I’ll wait a while to change the SSID to ‘Beauty’  because I’ll have to do this all over again.

Jan is going to take over my old S5 to replace her LG Revere flip phone, with just changing the S5  to  her old phone number all that’s needed.

Depending on the time of day, I  get somewhere between 10 and 25 Mbps. After getting used to pages coming up on 3G, they now seem almost instantaneous.

Very nice.

Thought for the Day:

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After a quiet morning at home a little before 4pm Jan and I headed up Boulder Hwy a little ways to have the dinner buffet at Boulder Station Casino, pretty much our favorite in the area.

We got there about 10 minutes til 4, which is when the dinner started. There wasn’t much of a line, so when we got up to the cashier, we told her that we wanted to pay for dinner and not lunch.

But unlike Golden Corral, who doesn’t like you to come in the last few minutes of lunch to get the more expensive dinner, Boulder Station doesn’t care, and said as long as we’re there before 4, we pay the lunch price.

So we only paid $7.99 each (including drink) for our meal. So nice.

One thing we didn’t see this was the numerous dining scams that we’ve seen in the past.

For example, we saw an elderly man come through the center exit line on his mobility scooter, whereupon he picked up a plate and proceeded down the various food lines, putting food on his plate and eating as he scooted along. When he got to the end he turned around and made another pass.

In another case, just a few seconds after a single male dinner got up and left, taking the card off its stand, letting waitress know that he was finished. Within just a few seconds another man came by, looked around, sat down, put the card back on the stand, and went to get him a plate of food.

Then another time we sat next to a table of six where they rotated 12 to 17 people through1 or 2 at at time, finally feeding 18 to 20 people for the cost of six.

Since we got our meal so cheap, Jan decided to give them another $20 in the slots. She twice ran it up to $50, but kept at it until she had given them the entire $20.

Really thoughtful of her.

Leaving the casino, I decided to drive over to the nearby Verizon store to see about upgrading my phone plan and possibly my 3 year old Samsung Galaxy S5.

As far as our plan, the guy took one look at it and started laughing. “How long have you had this plan?â€

“Well, not as long ago as we had our first cell phone, a Motorola Bag Phone, but almost.â€

Then he said that at 1992 we were the oldest customer he’d come across.

So an hour later I walked out with a new much cheaper plan, a 4G Jetpack 7730L MiFi to replace my 3G aircard, and a ‘to be here Friday’ when they’re released’ Samsung Galaxy S8+.

The phone won’t be released until this coming Friday, so I have to be there at 10am to get mine. I told him that we were leaving on Saturday, so I definitely had to have tit then.

Getting home I used Speedtest.net to check the speed on new 4G Jetpack, getting a download of almost 18 Mbps, and 8 Mbps up.

Really nice, and much better than 1+ Mbps on my 3G aircard.

I was doing some maintenance on our rig’s generator this afternoon, and when I ran it out on its hydraulic slide, I found this.

Don’t know how or when it happened. We haven’t needed to use the genset for a number of months since we haven’t needed the AC’s. But with the exhaust crimped like that it wouldn’t have run very long. Kinda like getting a banana in your tailpipe.

It’s going to be impossible to straighten out the pipe so what I’ll do is to cut off the crimp and then use a coupling to join the pieces back together.

Brandi sent over this phone of Landon after he got fitted for his new hockey stick, with lessons starting next week.

His uncle Chris said, “He’s ready. He’s already missing teeth.â€

I think the kids just want to do this so they can hit each other with sticks.

Thought for the Day:

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