Our RV Adventures

Our last day in Tucson, Jan and I were up and out the door a little after 10am with our first stop back at the Pima County Fairgrounds to see if I could find the computer mouse I left in Seminar Rm. 4 after our Gate Guarding seminar.

The mouse was black and the ruffled cloth on the tabletop was black, so it didn’t end up coming home with me. It’s not a big deal, only a $7 Amazon mouse, but I’m cheap and it was worth a stop and look in any case.

But no luck. The room had been stripped clean.

So leaving the Fairgrounds mouseless, our next stop was the Oink Café at Kolb and Broadway, but along the way we checked out the Valero station at Kolb and Valencia to see if it was suitable for getting diesel tomorrow on our way north to Apache Junction. It’s only 3 miles off the Interstate and 30 cents a gallon cheaper than the Pilot right down the road. And since we need a little over 100 gallons, that makes a difference.

Several people had told us about the Oink Café. How can you not like a place whose slogan is ‘Breakfast, Lunch, Bacon’. And they do have bacon, eight different kinds of bacon, as a matter of fact.

Jan went with, what else, a BLT with Apple Cider Bacon.

She said it was probably the best bacon she’s ever had.

I had the 50-50 burger, which is a 1/2 patty that 50% Beef and 50% ground bacon.

It doesn’t get much better than this. And their coffee was really good too.

I also tried a sampler of 4 different types of their bacon.

From left to right: Applewood Smoked, Honey, Jalapeno, and Pepper. All very good, and all very distinctly different tasting.

And of course we had to get some donut holes to take home for tomorrow’s breakfast. And of course, they’re Maple Bacon donuts. All bacon all the time.

There’s also an Oink Café up in the Phoenix area that we might check out while were up in Apache Junction.

After lunch it was over to the big Ace Hardware over on Houghton for some hardware items. Then it was on to 3 different auto parts stores until I found AW32 Hydraulic Fluid in gallon jugs.

Getting home I took care of some maintenance items around the rig. First up was using the AW32 to top off the reservoir in the rig that powers the rig’s power steering and the hydraulically-controlled radiator fan. Next I topped off the radiator coolant and checked the engine oil.

Then I added Rain-X wiper fluid to both rig and the truck, as well as topping off the brake fluid in the truck, and checking the oil and transmission fluid too.

Finishing up with this, I worked on some Internet stuff until it was time to head down to Omar’s for a dinner get-together with a bunch of other RV’ers, including Dennis and Carol Hill, and Sharon and Don del Rosario.

As with our previous visits, our food was really good. We both went with breakfast, Jan with a Belgian Waffle with Strawberries and Whipped Cream,

while I had the Omar’s Favorite, with 3 Cheese Enchiladas, Shredded Beef, 3 Over Medium Eggs, and Country Potatoes.

All very good.

Tomorrow we’ve got a 145 mile trip up to the Santa Fe RV Park in Apache Junction where we’ll be for two weeks, before we head out for Vegas, Baby.

“I named my dog Stay, so I can say, ‘Come here, Stay! Come here, Stay!†― Steven Wright

adfadsf

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

adsfadsf