On The Road Again!

October 25, 2012

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted an update.   We’ve been surprisingly busy since returning from the North Shore.    We’ve had some fantastic, fun times with Josh and Fam.   Including a sleepover at his house, and a trip to Lake City.    Max and Calvin continue to amuse and astound daily.   They both are so cute it is barely tolerable.   We’ll miss them greatly as we go on the road again.  (And we’ll miss everyone else too!).    

Other than family visits, we’ve been very busy with RV projects.   Here’s a list of what we did...listed for record keeping purposes.

1)      Replaced broken 7 way adapter receiver thing on the truck

2)      Rain-Xed the windows and side mirrors

3)      Pre-washed, washed and then re-sealed the RV roof

4)      Fixed a small tear on the living room slide roof wih aquaseal.  (which reminds me…I forgot to check it out to see if it took hold.   The weather was cold and rainy when we left…I didn’t feel like going up on the roof to check it out).

5)      Attempted to buy a new part for the faulty propane tank regulator  Accidentally bought the wrong size hose.  Tried whacking the old one to see if it dislodged some small piece of debris.   That amazingly ended up working!  So we didn’t have to pay for that repair!

6)      Jeremiah and Missy did a HUGE project with electrical.   Installed 2 6 volt golf batteries (from Costco).    They also installed an inverter (wires run up through the HVAC vent in the toilet room).   It’s on a remote starter, installed in the bedroom.    Installed a 12V cigarette charger directly to the RV electrical system.   This is a major upgrade that we hope will help us boondocking.    Ideally we will be able to charge our laptops and phone more efficiently.   Previous, we had to run the generator before the house batteries needed it….wasteful!   Also, now we can make a pot of coffee in the morning with the inverter and not need the genny.   So cool!    Now we’ll just have to have some field testing to see how long the batteries will last us between genny charges.   Also need to determine how long it takes the genny to fully charge the batteries.   

7)      Replaced faulty locking hardware on the storage doors.   Hopefully now we won’t have any more instances of doors flapping as we’re driving.

That’s all I can remember right now.

So…here’s the latest on our plans and trip.   Originally we had planned on heading to Yosemite National Park in California.    We were going to spend anywhere from 2-6 weeks there…moving south when the weather got chilly.  But when we started to look for camping in the nearby National Forests, we were bummed to find that they all closed at the end of September.     We didn’t know what to do…and spent a lot of time searching online for a Plan B.   Finally, we decided to go to Sequoia National Forest.    It’s a huge forest below Yosemite.   Top to bottom would take maybe 4+ hours to drive.   We’re going to start with the campgrounds on the southern end.    They have varying degrees of closing dates.  Some closed already, some close mid-Nov, others are open year round.    Hopefully there will be plenty of options to entertain us in the manner to which we are accustomed.  J    Note: we probably will be out of range whilst in the Forest. 

After picking our new destination, we moved on to planning a route.   It’s 32 hours of driving.   We agreed to do a 10 hour day the first day, so I picked an RV park in Nebraska we could stay at.   For the second day, we would go as far as we could and see about staying overnight in a rest stop or Walmart (estimated we’d be by Grand Junction, CO).     The next night after we’d planned our route, we checked the weather for our trip.  Shit!    Denver was getting snow!   So not only would it be scary canary driving in the mountains with precipitation, we’d have to deal with freezing temps for when we stopped for the night.     I was firmly against driving in snow in CO…so we changed to a southernly route.    Only added a couple of hours to the trip.   The new route has us going south to Wichita, KS, then going SW through ABQ, NM and then heading west to CA.    We’re going to be within spitting distance of the Grand Canyon, so Missy wanted to stop.    But, once again, most of the campgrounds are already closed for the season.    Is there usually bad weather in these areas by late Oct?    Sigh.

After spending way too much time trying to work out a travel schedule, we decided to just plan our first day  and then wing it from there.   So we embarked on our newest adventure at 10:42 am yesterday!   (Hooking up in snow/rain and wind sucked.)  We drove 700 miles and arrived outside of Wichita at 11:30pm.   It was freezing!   We bundled up in warm clothes and slept in winter hats and gloves.  We could have run the furnace to a warm temp, but for some reason we decided against it.     We both slept badly (lots of loud Semis with their diesel engines going).   Got up and made coffee with the new inverter.   That was pretty exciting!   Thanks Jeremiah!

Stay tuned for more exciting adventure