travel Archives - Tomorrow's Journey

We planned 5 days to get home – and pushed the trip into 4 to get back before the bad weather. We ended up taking the north route AZ to Albuquerque, NM to Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, and finally Illinois. We saw lots of grass fires and were bored out of our skulls crossing Kansas. At one point I said, “If there weren’t all those bugs on the windshield, we’d have nothing to look at!” The new horn button works great – we had one opportunity to use it. A trailer leaving the campground before us had its entrance door pop open.

The RVIBrake wanted to do an update on the first day – but we didn’t have time to let it happen. The second morning I let it update. In the middle of day 4, the RVIBrake and hub lost pairing – for no good reason. We drove the rest of the way without it as the software pairing routine needed a QR code and my unit was so old it didn’t have one. I wrote RVIBrake and they emailed me a QR code which worked, but no explanation as to why we lost pairing.

The cold and rain followed us home, and we had a flurry of appointments to take care of the first couple of weeks. We are just about to get back to the house for some more downsizing. But not so fast….. The rear AC quit. Oh, it moved air and the compressor was running, but it didn’t cool. I used to work on ACs, so it didn’t take long to diagnose it was out of freon. I found the leak. I “can” fix that but I’m not allowed to buy freon without certification which requires having training and expensive recovery equipment they can verify. So, I looked around and found we could wait days after ordering one online. Or we could drive 90 minutes to Pontiac RV and pick one up – just a bit more expensive, but in hand the same day, which we did. The weather didn’t cooperate however and it took several more days before I could work on it.

So, how does one get an 80-pound RV AC 12 feet up onto a class-A roof? Well, either lots of McGyvering or have someone offer to use their front loader. It was still a bit of work because the loader didn’t quite reach, but way more reliable method especially when a couple of other campers volunteered to help.

Before I took the old one down, I documented all the wiring to make sure I could install the new one correctly. It turns out that just four screws hold the AC in place. I found what appears to be a common problem (found this in my previous RV too). All of the wiring for the AC comes out of the roof in the return air portion of the ducting. Often there is a couple of feet of extra wire that is just shoved in there with no attempt to get it out of the air path. I took the time to clean up the wiring before putting it all back together. And I made one mistake. These ACs are often installed with an inside unit instead of being ducted like ours. Thus some if not all the hold-down bolts are put in from the bottom. So this (and my old) AC had four long screws with the front ones running through threaded inserts(normally used for bolts from the bottom) before entering the roof structure. The problem was the screws engaged the insert threads and stopped turning when they hit the insert instead of pulling the AC unit down and compressing the seal. I don’t know why I didn’t realize this when installing, but having done a major job like this, I rehash the process in my mind later. I realized that problem with the screws and went back up the next day. I removed the screws, drilled out the inserts so the screws could turn freely, and reinstalled them. When tightening, they compressed the seal nicely so no leaks in the future. One last thing, this picture is of the return side of the evaporator. If you have a removable ceiling cover for the AC, you can see this from the inside. If you have a ducted system like mine, the only way to see this is to remove the cover and open the “cold side” of the AC. This is 5 years of dirt, despiting having filters inside on the return air that I cleared periodically.

While we were here in Illinois the eclipse was coming so we made arrangements to visit friends down in Marion – right on the center line. The eclipse was spectacular. I took lots of shots with my camera but forgot to remove the solar filter during totality 8^{ But it was a great experience. Traffic from central Illinois to Marion and back was the worst we’ve ever seen on I-57. We spent about half the trip on parallel state roads.

Also, I bought a Coach Proxy microprocessor. What is that? Coach Proxy came out of a group of Tiffin owners. The microprocessor talks to the Coach’s Spyder system and presents a web page that can be accessed by our phone or computer. Everything the Spyder system can see or control can be controlled remotely. The version I bought was new, preconfigured for my 32SA as well as my WIFI (or was supposed to be). I needed to tweak the config files to get the WIFI up and running. I used this feature to turn the rear AC on/off while I was on the roof. The source for the software is available and some people have ported it to other brand RVs but it sounds like a real programming project. Finally, Coach Proxy users have used a service called NGROK which allows the Coach Proxy to be accessed from the Internet when away from the RV. I couldn’t get the free version to work. So I switched to Dataplicity – which some people said worked – nope, no soap at first either. It was installed and configured and showed up on Dataplicity servers but no communication. I talked to their support and they gave me one more install command after which things worked. Their installer assumed a certain piece of software was already installed on the Coach Proxy system. Now I can turn my ACs on/off, control lights, etc from anywhere on the internet.

Mike

Well, it was an interesting trip, for some definitions of interesting. Three weeks, two families, two travel trailers. 5 adults, 4 children, all girls, ages 1-6 and two small dogs. This trip had two different goals – one vacation, the other a trial for eventual full time living on the road. Six thousand plus miles, 4 national parks, 10 campgrounds, 2 boondocks in 26 and 35 ft travel trailers.

My goal? To get everyone home in one piece.

Things I learned on this trip:

The weather this time of year is unpredictable more than a day in advance.
Don’t go to popular places during spring break.
RV’s made today are junk. (I already knew this, but was reminded multiple times).
No matter how bleak things are, wonderful serendipity can happen.
There is no grass west of the Rockies and east of California. Some doggies simply do not know where to “go”, when there is no grass.
Most people you meet are really nice and want to be helpful but some are just plain incompetent.
Late March, early April – even in the southwest – its COLD! Only a couple of times on the entire trip were we pleasantly warm. We also froze a water pump on an unexpectedly cold morning.

My expectations for this trip were pretty low. It’s not that I don’t love to travel, I do. It’s that I simply can’t forget how complicated it can be. Keeping everything running, on the road and safe is, at least in my mind, largely my responsibility. I know things rarely go as we plan, so I’m always waiting for the next “thing” to happen, whether it is something broken or an over–heated interpersonal relationship. On the way out, we had plenty of issues to deal with, from re-routing to avoid high winds and storms to mechanical failures and simply getting used to caravaning such a group.

We had picked a pretty aggressive route: Illinois to the Grand Canyon, via Texas and New Mexico, up to the Moab area via Monument Valley and back, all in about three weeks. That alone was enough hike the tension level.

Yet for me it came together, the highlight of the trip, was walking hand in hand with one of my grand daughters on a trail. I never had this kind of time with my grand parents. What little time we spent together, they were always busy and seemed to barely tolerate the presence of children. Of course there were 8 of us kids, so sometimes we were barely tolerable. Our grand daughters hopefully will remember this trip fondly for the rest of their lives. We were traveling in separate cars, sleeping in separate trailers, but much of the rest of the time, we were all together. Every gas stop, most meals, most trail hikes – we divided up the girls so every little one had an adult hand to hold. They tended to pick a favorite person to walk with. I belonged to AJ. Deb (my wife) belonged to JC. EJ belonged to Sylvia (cousin). GG belonged to no one if she could help it. Having recently learned to walk, she was happiest, toddling down the sidewalk between us, totally independent, walking on her own. If you tried to reach for her hand, she’d push it away. It didn’t matter that she fell down every 10 feet or so – she got right back up, squealing with excitement tottering down the sidewalk. Just for good measure, every once in a while, she’d turn around and head the other direction to demonstrate her independence. Despite all the distractions, the girls often ended up the center of things and rightly so. I am using just their initials throughout this blog.

The “fun” started before we left. Watching the weather, it seemed the logical thing to do was to leave a day early as no one wanted to start out driving through thunderstorms.. That compressed two days of planning and packing into one, which mathematically means 5 things would be forgotten to be packed. Well we managed without them anyway. Some things we thought we didn’t pack were discovered when the trip was nearly over. In the rush, we simply forgot where they were put. Many other things were packed that were never used. We always take too much for this kind of trip. I’m sure on a slower paced trip, we might get to use most things we packed. The plan was to pull one trailer out of storage – to our house to finish loading and partially fill the fresh water tank. Then go hang out at Walmart while we pull the second trailer out and do the same thing. We underestimated by a couple of hours how long that would take – and the lock on my trailer storage “basement” broke while packing. Fortunately I had a spare lock that was originally on the trailer to swap it out with. We finally left town at 3pm, not noon.

We headed south out of central Illinois – aiming to pass into Missouri well south of St Louis. We like parts of St Louis, but pulling two trailers through it when we had no time to stop was not on our top 10 list. We got as far as Dexter, MO and boondocked in a Walmart there. We pulled in well after dark – parked and went to bed. I heard there was too much parking lot light, too much traffic noise and too much train noise – but I didn’t notice; I slept.

We woke up early, loaded up and hit the road. Half an hour later, we stopped for breakfast at Huddle House in Poplar Bluff (Rolla?), Missouri. Another 8 hours or so on the road and we pulled into Oak Glen RV just outside of Chandler, OK.

continued in next post.

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Tag: travel

Back Home (sort of) in Illinois

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