April 12-13, 2012
Thursday was cold and windy all day. Missy kept a fire going. She claims that her favorite camp items are her fireproof gloves and the square red plastic plate we got at Target, which apparently has the perfect qualities for a fire-fan. I took Cassie on a hike up the nearby trail. I wanted to get to the top of the mountain, where I hoped there were magnificent vistas. Sadly, there were not. Just a lot of trees. Oh well. Cassie and I enjoyed the hike, at least. Thursday got so cold and dreary that Missy and I decided to pack up and leave the next day and head for higher and more reception-laden pastures.
Friday dawned cold. It was frustrating because we had set the furnace, but it was not working. With a bunch of on & off and sliding the temp bar, you could get it to blow cold air for a minute. Very frustrating, since the furnace worked when we used it a few days ago. The RV owner's manual mentioned that if there wasn't enough battery, the furnace would not ignite. But even with the generator on, it didna work. Jeremiah took some panels off to look for anything obvious that might be wrong. I finally took the panel off the fuse box (we have both a circuit breaker box AND a fuse box…seems excessive). There, #7 had its red light glowing. So, turns out there was a broken fuse. That fuse was NOT for the furnace, as you might guess. But rather, it was for the LP gas monitor, which Jeremiah had removed and replaced with an invertor. Now, all along I was suspicious of this invertor, and in fact it had been acting wonky lately. (warning beeps when charging the laptop when there should have been enough battery). I had recently read an RV blog post where someone had strange electrical issues and it all was traced back to a faulty invertor. Jeremiah expressed doubt, but who knows how this thing is wired. So we replaced the fuse, and the furnace worked! Then, Jeremiah did some testing on the invertor. All of a sudden, we had no battery and a dim display on the levels monitor panel. I was freaking out, because I thought there was some horrible problem whereby the battery was being drained by the invertor. Even with the invertor removed AND it's fuse removed, the problem didn't resolve. Worse, running the genny did not fix the panel and give full battery, which it normally does. Finally, we discovered that the same #7 fuse had blown (likely during Jeremiah's testing). But instead of giving a steady red warning light like before, it only flashed the warning light when you checked the levels on the panel. ?????????? Why wouldn't a broken fuse behave the same? So frustrating. We put in our last spare fuse and all is fixed. Missy and I plan to arrange for professional installation of a second (piggy back) battery and a larger invertor.
After working all morning on this issue, we no longer felt like packing up and moving out. So we decided to stay throughout the weekend. It turned into a beautiful day. If you moved into the sun, you could even get away with wearing only a t-shirt! Missy did some reorganizing of the storage spaces and the garage. I took the dogs on the down-creek hike. During the afternoon, lots of people started showing up at the campground. By 4, it was 2/3 full. Till now, only 2 other campsites have been occupied. I was guessing that this was their fishing opener. This morning the forest service was here running buckets of fish to dump in the creek. They seem to spend a lot of time and money on restocking. By the end of the day, only 3 campsites remained unoccupied. Lots of people brought dogs, so now we have to be careful to keep Buddy tied up so he doesn't run after them.
Tomorrow is the Ocoee release again! Yay! We get to paddle again! We plan to go early to have some internet time, so hopefully I'll get some blog posts up.
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