Posts

Posted on

Helena MT and on to Milk River, Canada.

We were in Helena for 3 nights.   While there I visited the Lewis & Clark Brewery for a pretty tasty growler fill which came with a free pint!   I also found the most stocked hardware store I have ever seen the following day.  They had at least 5 long aisles filled with specialty hardware.  I had never seen that much in one place.  Reminded me of the McMaster Carr catalog in a store.   Lowe’s sometimes has about 20′ of those trays of special stuff.  This place had over a 150′ of them.   There was a bunch I had no idea what they were used for, and I am a “hardware guy”!

I was able to pick up all the remaining parts I needed to construct my rock guard for the drive to Alaska.  I previously had purchased the mesh and 50′ of bulk bungee cord, along with ends for them,  but not the hardware to hold it all to the rear of the RV and the front of the car, as I hadn’t totally figured out how to do that; but during the first night in Helena I figured out how to make it work.

We stayed at the Lewis & Clark Fairgrounds campground,  22 spaces with electric only.   There was water a few hundred yards away near the office building, so we filled the fresh water tank there prior to parking the rig.   What was odd is there wasn’t a dump station on the fairgrounds, so I started looking for one on the web and found three.  I checked them out in the car the day before leaving and only one would work for us to get in and out of without driving over curbs.   It was just on the other side of the 1-15, a few miles away, and it was our first stop on the way to Canada the next morning.

While in Helena we got to visit the locals’ laundromat.  Kathy got to hear the owner’s whole life story.   His dad owned the bar next door, which I popped my head into and it was truly a dive bar.   Right around even with the worst ones I had ever been in.   There was an odd painting on the wall inside the laundromat, so I had to take a pic.   Here it is:

 

Below are a few pics of the fairgrounds campground.

 

We got out of Helena before 10 am and proceeded north on Interstate 15 toward the Canadian Border.    Luckily the rain waited till we were finished filling the water tank and dumping the other tanks before it let loose on us.

It rained the whole day and only stopped once we crossed the border.   The crossing was interesting as they never asked about the dog or about food we were bringing in.   So throwing out all our fruit and produce was apparently not needed.   For lunch on the way we ate what was left in the fridge… not much..  but it still was a lot to eat.   Reheated a large potato and topped it with spaghetti sauce with meatballs and leftover hamburger meat and leftover chicken tenders.    It was actually pretty good, but the rest of the drive we had that over-stuffed feeling like you get at Thanksgiving.

At the border they only asked for Passports, the RV registration, if we had any alcohol, tobacco, cannabis or guns.    Nothing about food or pets.   He also asked where we were from, and really wanted to know how long we would be traveling in Canada.   He wanted specifics.

After the 8 minutes chatting with the Canadian border guard, we headed a bit further north to Milk River where I had spotted a campground on the map the previous evening.   When I had called, no one had answered.  When I got there, I understood why, really laid back place.  The office didn’t look like anyone had been in it for years.

We spent one night at Milk River, 8 Flags Campground. (I counted 9 flags!)  Right next to the not very busy highway,  ( a car about every 10 minutes) and of course there was a not very busy railroad track just on the other side of that highway.   I only heard a couple of trains go by the whole time there and no train horns were heard.   So a pretty good spot for the night.

There was a sign on the office to boil water, so I didn’t hook that up.  I just connected up to the 30 amp shore power that didn’t have a visible circuit breaker.   I really needed to experiment with that power to see what exactly we can run in the coach at the same time when only connected to 30 amp shore power.   In the states we always seemed to have 50 amp power.  But we can’t do it here as we have no idea where the breaker is and if I guessed wrong, we would be unpowered till I could find someone that had access to the circuit breaker..   (Can we run the heat pump and the micro, toaster or coffee maker? )  I am guessing we can run two of them at the same time, if they are on different circuits; but I currently don’t know which circuits anything is on.

This campground only takes cash; so after finding a spot, I asked around where the nearest ATM was located.   Went there to get Canadian money as you could pay either 30 dollars Canadian or US.   Canadian money is only worth around 75% of US money, so it is a much better deal to use Canadian money.  ($30 Canadian is about $22.50 US)  And of course, most folks probably know this, but the best exchange rate you can get is  from an ATM.   Those money exchange places really take a big chunk of what you convert from cash.   And of course, when you get home, deposit the foreign cash in your bank for a similar very good exchange rate.  Last time, my bank wouldn’t take coins, only the paper cash I had when coming back from the Med Cruise.

The first ATM (and only one I thought there was nearby) said my card was invalid.  I thought I was going to have a real problem in Canada after seeing that message on the ATM screen as Google didn’t know of any banks nearby, and who knows, maybe my ATM card wouldn’t work anywhere in Canada…

I headed off to replace the produce and buy some meat to restock the fridge.   Milk River is a very small town, which means a very small market.   I guess they don’t eat a lot of veggies here in MR as the selection was lacking, and the meat selection was extremely lacking.   We will know more once we hit a larger town or city.   But the best part of going to the grocery store was they had an ATM inside.  You know the ones,  just a small kiosk.   Funny thing I found out, its fees were less than the bank’s ATM fees.  I always assumed those kiosks you find in a 7/11 or other places would really gouge you.   ($3 at the bank vs $2.50 at the kiosk)  So I was able to get cash and pay the campground in Canadian dollars.  Yeah!!   Their money looks really odd.  It’s got quite a bit of cellophane in it, so you can look thru part of their bills.   I guess it makes it more difficult to counterfeit.

The WiFi at our campground was almost nonexistent.   I could see a lot of AP’s from my roof mounted WiFi antenna , Mikrotik Metal AC Router (CPE), but not actually connect to any of them.

I must admit the Mikrotik has the most complicated interface I have ever seen.   Looks like something from the early ’90s.   My laptop could connect to one AP and it had very low power, but it was just enough access to look for the next campground.   None of the other devices could connect.  (iPad or iPhones.)  They couldn’t even see the SSID’s to try to connect.

That next morning we were off to Claresholm, Alberta, Canada

Posted on

SLC to Helena MT

It was raining as we left Salt Lake City at 9 am Thursday morning.    As we go further out of town, the rain slowed and eventually stopped.   The rest of the northern drive was dry.   I like driving the bus when it’s dry!   Just prior to Dillon, MT, the wind really picked up.   Had to fuel up there, so it was a bit shocking how windy it was when standing out in it filling the tank.   I ended up filling up at the same Sinclair station we filled up last summer.   Back then it wasn’t on Gas Buddy so I added it.   Was glad to see it was still listed when I started to plan the next fill-up.  $3.12 per gallon,  almost reasonable for diesel.   I pumped in $400 worth.   We will top up the tank once we get closer to the Canadian border as I am seeing their prices are like California diesel costs.

We stopped overnight in Idaho Falls at an Elks Lodge for $10 a night with  50 amp power and water.    It seemed pretty nice until around midnight when we woke up to someone screaming (presumably into a phone) about a fight he had with his girlfriend,  and he was pacing the parking lot around us.  He finally walked away and I fell back to sleep, but Kathy stayed awake waiting for the nightclub across the street to empty at 2 am.  She told me there was a lot of yelling and cars screeching about.   There were houses right across the street also.  Not sure how those folks deal with all the noise late in the night.  (unless they are the ones drinking in the bar)   So far we have stayed at 2 Elks lodges.   Neither place were peaceful at night.

We headed out of Idaho Falls around 10 and drove the 250+ miles to Helena.   I called the fairgrounds and made reservations for a few nights just prior to heading out.   Now that we are here, $21 a night is a great deal.  It’s actually at the outskirts of the city but seems like we are in the middle of nowhere.  Trees and grass all around, extremely quiet place.   Dusty seems to really like this place.  No stickers in his paws so far.   In Montana it seems campgrounds near cities are few and far between.   I noticed this last year when looking for a spot in Missoula when visiting my Niece.

The ride to here was fairly uneventful except for the wind gusts in the mountains.   I think we saw at least 3 Continental Divide signs on the drive here from Idaho.  6000+ summits,  not too tall for the Rockies.   I remember driving to Denver a long time ago and the Eisenhower Tunnel on I-70 was close to 12,000 feet.   Mostly I just remember the Toyota I had was having a hard time getting enough oxygen to give me any power to climb to that point.   Thankfully it was mostly downhill after that.   I wonder what this diesel would act like at that elevation.

On to Canada…next Stop!

 

 

 

 

 

Posted on

Lost Wages to Salt Lake City

We drove from Vegas to Beaver, UT on Sunday.  It’s at about 6,000′ elevation.  Pretty cold for us San Diegans.  Was 33 when we got up that morning.  I haven’t seen temps below 44 in San Diego except once when it got down to 32 degrees and killed my Heliotrope plant in the front yard.  It was purple and red one day, the next morning it was brown and never revived.

Anyway, prior to leaving San Diego I had two of the three Air Dump valves replaced as they were getting stuck open occasionally and it was irritating to wait for the air bags to fill so we could drive.   I was just replacing the one that was leaking, but par for the course, as soon as that was replaced, another one could be heard purging air when it wasn’t supposed to.   I drove all around town to locate another valve and could only get one.  But I had the guy order one from LA so I could swing by some other day and have it on hand if needed.

All seemed well after the second one was installed till the morning we were leaving on the trip.   I hadn’t made time to pick the other one up, so as we were exiting San Diego I had to drive to El Cajon and get it.  (about 20 miles out of the way)

Monday morning in Beaver the rear bags were fairly slow to fill; so while I waited, I called Freightliner in Salt Lake City to find out about having the last one replaced.   They told me I would need to wait till the 30th., 10 days from now!

So I googled Diesel Mechanics around Beaver, UT.   There was one with almost five stars on Google’s Reviews.   I called them.  They said to bring it right over and explained to me they were 1,000 feet from me.   We drove over, showed the mechanic the part.  He crawled under the coach, said it would be a quick swap, and had me drop the air and raise the coach on the jacks.

He had it replaced in 35 minutes.   The last guy took 2 hours to do it.  Paid them $110 (1 hr minimum) and we were on our way in less than an hour.   That was utterly amazing to me.  I’ve got to make sure I write up a review of them!

So we headed across the mountains toward Salt Lake City and then the rains came.  Then they turned to sleet and hail to make it a bit of an edgy ride.   When it started to sleet, I slowed to 50 mph; but I was getting passed by lots of trucks still doing the 80 mph they allow there.   Seemed nuts to me as it was very steep downgrades and climbs thru long curves during all of it.   I never felt the coach slip, but I was waiting for it to occur.

Once out of the winter weather, it was smooth sailing into downtown Salt Lake City to a KOA we stayed at on our way to Yellowstone back in 2017.   It was one of Kathy’s favorite parks, lots of grass for Dusty! Thankfully it’s a lot cooler here than it was in June of that year and a lot less crowded.

Drove over to the big temple that’s in the middle of downtown and got pizza for dinner!   The next morning it was raining pretty good and continued all day.  So I spent a lot of the day redoing my playlists on my local pc in the front of the coach so we can have tunes in the great white north where an internet connection may be difficult to find.

We switched our cell phones to Cricket Wireless as it appears AT&T has more connectivity in Canada and we could get an unlimited plan that includes Canada and Mexico for $40 each.    Our current Verizon and AT&T hotspot plans don’t include any data outside the USA.   So we are good in Alaska, but Canada will probably find us looking for WiFi when camping.   I installed a new omni-directional WiFi antenna from Mikrotik Metal AC Router on my crank-up TV antenna.

I still have my NanoStation with us for longer range WiFi acquisition situations.

Posted on

Passing thru Sin City.

We were happy to leave the incredibly windy Barstow area and make the short trek to Lost Wages.   We dropped by the local Elks Club and they had open sites, so we are camping there for the next couple of nights.   We thought we would see a show while here,  Kathy’s choice was Celion Dion for tonight’s show, but neither of us want to sit in the audience and cough thru it all.   Unfortunately, both of us caught a cold just before leaving on the trip.

We took a drive down the strip this afternoon after checking out the local In-N-Out for lunch.   Had to pick up a Tee Shirt at the corporate store.   I had never seen one one of their stores before.  I didn’t realize In-N-Out sold so much swag.   

On the way back to the strip, we found a large sculpture made up of only boats.  Most looked like canoes, but there were a lot of them all wired together.

As we drove down the strip, I was amazed just how much more crowded it is. It’s like they just never stopped building in the 15+ years since I was last there.  It’s a zoo now.  But it’s all mainly down at the south end of the strip right around Cesar’s Palace.   Get much further north and it peters out till you get down to Fremont Street downtown.

On our way toward downtown, we passed the Pawn Stars shop and the little chapel a friend of ours got married in back in the early ’90s.  I sure missed that velvet Elvis above the alter.

We drove on down to Fremont Street so Kathy could get a gander at the spectacle that is “Las Vegas.”   It didn’t disappoint, even the rather plump almost naked gals posing for pictures wanted to pet our Dusty.  Unfortunatly I missed that picture..

 

 

 

A new to me thing on Fremont Street are the 4  ziplines overhead.   They travel the whole way under the FSE overhead structure.   Our hour parking space was just about up, so we headed back to the car and off to find a fill-up station for the car, Nevada gas is quite a bit less than home.   I filled the RV with 130 gallons at $3.15, probably 75 cents less a gallon than anywhere in California right now.   And the car gas was more at $3.34, still about 50 cents cheaper than the gas in CA.

Oh,  you San Diego folks will get a kick from this.  Last night I was able to stop at a local Roberto’s Taco Shop.   I never thought there were any outside of San Diego, but this one used the same TM Logo.    If you get here and need a fix, it’s at the corner of Pecos and Las Vegas Blvd N.

And yes while we were here I was able to fix the camera and GPS feeds.

 

 

 

 

Posted on

Alaska or Bust!

We set out for the great adventure Wednesday afternoon making it a ways north on I-15 about three hours to just past Barstow, CA.   To my delight right before the exit I saw the sign for Calico Ghost Town.   I had seen that on a map back in the 1980’s and wanted to go there since.   I guess I forgot about that till that sign reminded me I never made it there.

I had been planning on just an overnight, but I paid for two after the gal at the desk mentioned CGT was 3 miles away, and am glad we did.   The ghost town was way better than expected.   There is even a campground inside the park which turns out to be a county park.   From what I read, the guy who created Knotts Berry Farm restored that town back in the 1950’s then donated it to the county.   This is a must see if you have never been to a ghost town, but I would probably not go there in the summertime.  It’s in the middle of the Mojave Desert.  It was a beautiful 70 degrees and a bit windy while we were there.  I can only imagine what it would be like in July. (probably 120 in the shade)

That evening the winds were blowing so wildly I considered pulling in the slides to move in the center of gravity for stability.   Everything was howling that night,  not much of a restful sleep for either of us.

Posted on

Reducing the 24×7 power draw on the RV batteries

During our 8 days of boondocking in Tucson last month I was monitoring the constant power draws on the batteries.   One thing I noticed was the Inverter was drawing a constant 6 amps of power from the battery 24 hours a day.   The inverter is what creates 120v AC power from the 12 volts of power the house batteries produce.  It has a few amps of overhead and there is also a conversion loss there, not to mention the power conversion loss that also happens at low power devices we have plugged via wall warts.  (those little black transformers you plug into wall outlets)

My solution was to find DC-DC power converters that will use the 12v direct from the batteries to change it to the voltage a particular device needs.   Some examples are:  8 Port Gigabit Switch   It actually runs on 5v so removed the wall wart and used one of these 5.5mm Power Adapter barrel connector coupled with a 5v power supply and also tied in our HDhomerun to that same power supply via another 5.5mm barrel connector.

A note on that power supply, the width around the terminal screws was so small I had to grind down the crimp on connectors.  And they were the smallest (Red) connectors I have seen.

I also switched out my 120v POE supply with one of these 12v models:  Gig DC-DC POE power supply My WiFi device is passive POE (24v) and this device converts 12v to 24v and injects it into the Gig Ethernet cable to power my  Mikrotik Metal CPE   The Mikrotik is a CPE WiFi device with an Omni Directional antenna attached that I use to grab WiFi signals when near WiFi Access Points I can logon to.    That WiFi signal, once connected to the internet provides a connection to my internal  TP-Link AC750 WiFi Access Point via Ethernet cable thru the gig switch.  That access point also runs from 5v, but it uses a micro USB cable for power.   I power that from one of these 12v to 5v power micro usb output

My DVR (Sage-TV) runs on an Intel NUC  in the RV.  I found this 12v NUC power supply

I tied these all together with this Fuse Box. I also added one of these 3 port 12v power outlet switch box to allow for the Dash-cam and new NUC power supply to connect.    I have one left over to power the NVIDIA Shield Android TV device if I ever find a 12v adapter.   Is appears that no one makes one yet.  And no one makes a decent replacement remote for it either.

In its current form it appears I have reduced the current draw from 6amps to about 2.5amps.   A reduction of about 80 amp hours per day from the always on stuff.  That’s a lot of amps to replace when not connected to shore power!

Other things I want to change out will be the two TV’s.   Until then we will need to run the Inverter only when we use them.  Or maybe look into a couple low wattage individual inverters.   For now we can just turn on the main inverter to sit in front of the boob tube…

 

 

 

Posted on

Updating my Solar install to allow Web Portal Access

Having the Bluetooth (BT) connectivity to my solar controllers was to me a necessity so I went with the Victron line of controllers after looking at what was available.   The issue that came up was very short range for the Bluetooth connectivity.  This was due to mounting them inside the electronics bay, a metal compartment at the rear of the bus!  That all aluminum bay is acting as a Faraday cage which made the connection from a phone or tablet a very short range affair.   Basically I can only connect to it from the RV’s bedroom located right above that bay.  I found that I could also add a Victron Bluetooth Dongle to one of the charge controllers and mount that up inside a bedroom cabinet allowing my phone to access it from the front seat of the coach.  That was nice but now that we have two controllers and the Victron Connect App cannot view both controller screens at the same time.  The App allows only one connection at a time.  That’s very limiting in my opinion when you have two controllers charging one set of batteries.

I had read about the Victron VRM portal that allowed a couple of their accessory devices, the Venus GX or the Victron Color Control GX to upload the solar data from multiple devices like controllers, battery monitors and many other devices Victron Energy produces to a website that you can access from anywhere with an internet connection.

I looked at buying one of those devices but they are pretty costly and didn’t feel the need to spend that kind of money just for the convenience.  So I starting looking around to see if there was another way to do the same thing.

Turns out there is.  Those devices firmware (actually their OS) is in the public domain. (GNU) so I looked around and found to find a device someone has ported it to.  I found it ported to Raspberry Pi (RPI).   Currently they are $38 so I pulled the trigger and ordered one to see if I could make this work for me.

I had a few old 2 GB microSD card (had a bunch of them from over the years laying around)  So I downloaded the Venus OS from a repository on the web.  I then burned it to a microSD card and once the RPI arrived I pushed it into the slot on the underside of the little board (RPI) and then plugged in a micro USB adapters power cord into the power port and an Ethernet cable into its port and powered it up.

Bamm, it booted up and finished with the Victron Logo on the screen and stopped at the command prompt.  I typed in ifconfig hit enter and it showed me the IP address it had received from my home networks router.   I walked back to my desk and put that address into my web browser and connected to the device.   (It was a bit more complicated for me because at first I downloaded a version of the OS that didn’t support that new RPI device.  v2.30 or above is needed)

That is the required version to run on the B+ device (newest device available when I did this, early 2019) is here in the development folder:   https://updates.victronenergy.com/feeds/venus/develop/images/raspberrypi2/   Those files change often so by the time you read this the working version may have been release to production and be here: https://updates.victronenergy.com/feeds/venus/release/images/raspberrypi2/ in the Released area.

I also had to get a couple USB to VE Direct cables that connect from the RPI’s USB ports directly to the Victron Controllers.   I used a phone power supply i had laying around to power it until I could get a power supply to hard wire into the bay.     Hard wired 12v to 5v power supply

In order to burn the image I downloaded I needed a minimum of a 2 GB microSD card.  If you don’t have any lying around this link will give you two cards for very little money.  SanDisk 32GB MicroSD HC Ultra Uhs-1 Memory Card, Class 10   2 GB cards might be found on EBAY.  But these new 32 GB ones are extremely cheap.

First thing I had to do to the card is format it, I used SD Card Formatter, the  newest one from there. I always scan new downloads with all my virus and malware scanners prior to running and unzipping them to my laptop.  After a  successful card format I used this free tool to burn the downloaded VenusOS image to that card.  Win 32 Disk Imager.   In all, I have $109 into the install now that its done.  1/3rd the cost of a Venus GX and 1/5th the cost of a Color Control GX device.   There may be a way to use Bluetooth to connect to the controllers negating the need for the special USB cables but I am not sure how to do that yet.  Maybe someone else can try and let me know.   We were leaving for the 59th Escapade the following week so I took the easy way and bought the two inexpensive cables from Bay Marine here in San Diego.

I was able to look at my charging information while attending seminars at the Escapade in Tucson.   I had setup my device to upload info every 5 minutes, you can lower that to every 1 minute but I only did that while testing it, then I moved it back to every 5 minutes.    Now I want to get my battery monitor talking to it before we head for Alaska this summer.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted on

Boondocking in Quartzsite Solar Notes

It’s the middle of January 2019, the sun is low on the horizon and we are dry camping about 10 miles north of Quartzsite, AZ on BLM land off Plumosa Rd.  We camped with quite a few others, hooking up with David Botts’ group.   Tuesday, the afternoon we arrived, was pouring down rain and the dips on Highway 95 were running rivers of muddy water.  When we saw that, I  knew we would be in for some fun pulling out into the muddy desert, and suspected the two washes we had to cross would be flowing pretty good.  You always have to wonder how deep they will be when they are full of water.   They weren’t too bad, but the next day I must admit, I had never seen the coach so dirty.   The skies cleared within a couple hours of us getting there and deploying the slides, carpet and chairs. 

The following morning turned out to be a gorgeous day, and amazingly each day afterward was very nice too.   Warm and sunny till we headed back to San Diego. 

On our first full day here, the panels put out a respectable 160 amp hours of power,  2.15KW.  Pretty phenomenal for 640W of panels lying flat on the roof of our RV in mid-January.   But as it turns out, only about 80 amp hours made it back into the batteries, and the other 80 or so amp hours produced were consumed real-time by the loads running in the coach during those 9+ hours of daylight.   We did get the batteries juiced back up to 87% SOC, so that was pretty decent, although not what I was looking for.    So It was time to set up the solar suitcase I built last spring to provide those extra 8 amps every hour the coach consumed during those 9+ hours.  Hopefully that will allow all the power being generated by the roof panels to go into the batteries. 

After building that solar suitcase last spring, I returned the small 15 amp controller and purchased a larger 50 amp model that would handle the load from 640 watts of panels.  Fast forward to now and I did not have a controller to use with those 200 watts of panels.   They run at a different voltage from the roof panels, precluding me from hooking them into that controller, meaning I had to go out and buy one before I could hook them up.   So that afternoon,  Friday, I drove around Quartzsite looking for a 15 amp controller that could handle the 44 volts my suitcase was wired to produce.   Discount Solar had nothing to work with that voltage, and Bill’s Solar had something they said would work for about $300.  I decided to wait till the show that was to start the next morning to search for a solution there. 

We hit the big show tent early Saturday morning, trying to get in and out prior to the crowds.   Parking there can be a real pain, but someone was pulling out of a spot as we were about to pass them, and we pulled right into that spot!  We wandered all around the tent and spotted a booth from http://www.offthegridrvs.com which had a  Victron SmartSolar 75/15 controller on their table, and the cost was within a buck of what they cost on Amazon.   I bought that one.  And while I was paying for it, Chris’s girlfriend’s parents greeted us and we snapped this picture!!

Afterward we headed back to the coach to install it.  Turns out I didn’t have enough wire with me to complete the install, so I had to head back in to Quartzsite to a hardware store I had noticed on the way back to the coach that afternoon,  picked up a couple lengths of 10 gauge red-and-black wire.   

That allowed me to complete a temporary setup at around 4pm Saturday afternoon, a couple hours prior to sunset.   I could see that it would really help the situation tomorrow, our last full day prior to heading back to San Diego.   

Saturday night was the potluck dinner, and the band showed up before 7pm and started a few-hour gig.  They were fabulous as they had been last year.  The band is Notes from Neptune,.  They play the clubs in Phoenix. 

Sunday, our last day in the desert, was hazy with high clouds most of the day, lowering the amount of solar irradiation.  Thankfully the suitcase helped by adding another 5-8 amps of power all day long.   One note about using a suitcase is you need to remember to reposition them about every couple hours to point toward the sun as it moves across the sky.  It makes a fairly large difference in watt output each time you move it.  

Now we will need to wait till our dry camping adventure in Tucson during March to test again.  Should be a lot more solar power available by then. 

We saw this little fireplace while we were there.  It’s a wood burner and had a small adjustable blower fan in the orange box on the side to adjust the amount of heat being produced.   It was kind of clever.    This other device was hooked to David’s Komodo Joe cooker.   It was a temperature and WiFi enabled air blower that will keep the temperature you program for cooking in your KJ.  David was using it to smoke some ribs at right around 200 degrees.   Now that’s some slow cooking  🙂  

It’s now the middle of February and I finished the permanent controller installation for the suitcase this week.  

 

 

 

Posted on

The General Patton Museum

We took a bus about an hour east from the Indio CA rally facility to the Patton Museum. I was surprised it was right off the 10 freeway. Turns out it is on the original spot of Camp Young, one of many camps spread out over thousands of square miles of California, Arizona and Nevada desert. The first thing you saw as you walked in was a huge terrain map of all the camps. Kind of helped give you a perspective of just how large an area they used for training. Turns out the the furthest east encampment was about 20 miles east of where we would be camping next week. And we would be camping over 2 hours drive from here at 75 MPH freeway speeds. That must have been one hell of a drive back then on dirt roads.

Anyway,  the museum was much nicer than I expected.  The really put in a lot of work to make it a nice place.   Lots of tanks to look at and some with cutaways, others with turrets removed and stairs allowing easy from the top.   They even had a Sherman tank and it had a lot of 50 cal holes in it.  No wonder why they were called Ronson’s by the Gerrys.   

Posted on

The Indio FMCA Rally

We signed up for the FMCA rally at the Riverside County Fairgrounds for early January 2019. We loaded the coach and set out for Indio, CA. After checking in, we were lead to a large lot of dried grass and parked next to many other coaches already there. Kind of surprising they parked motor homes on that grass as newer diesels have an exhaust system that can get extremely hot during regen process and catch that dried grass on fire. Luckily we didn’t see any smoke. 🙂

After deploying the slides, I got out the carpet and started screwing it down where I found my first goats head sticker in my knee. Those things are nasty, very hard burr like things. Turns out they were everywhere.  Poor Dusty, he found lots of them over the course of our stay. The first morning after getting there I was scheduled to take a bus trip to the Patton Museum which is about an hour east of the Rally. I’ll put that into another post.

After getting back from the excursion that afternoon, I poked my head into one of the new coaches lined up for sale near the drop-off spot. I walked thru a new Allegro Bus. It was really beautiful inside; and as I walked into the back bathroom and stepped into the shower to see how much room was in there, I realized I hadn’t hit my head when stepping into the bathroom, which I did on all the prior coaches with rear bathrooms. The floor was level from front to back. How novel. But I was curious how they did that, so I asked the salesperson who was sitting up front. To my surprise, Tiffin had raised the height of the coach to around 13’4″ from 12’7″. And it also appeared to me they lowered the engine a bit. That change allowed them to make the floor level front to back and also added about 5″ to the height of the basement. Impressive. Except when I was thinking back to a couple encounters with very low branches on our travels back east the prior summer, driving this coach would have given me nightmares of poking holes in the roof or tearing off an air conditioner or two.

The next day the seminars started. They were very similar to what I experienced in Coos Bay last summer. Most of the seminars were just sales pitches for something the person was selling in a booth inside the vendor tents. I am seeing a pattern with FMCA rally’s, which I will need to think about prior to setting up another one in the future.

There were two seminars that didn’t follow that pattern. One was on our coach’s 120v electrical systems and the other on Onan Generators. Both of them were excellent and I learned things I hadn’t known previously in each. Well worth coming over to the desert. In one of the prior seminars I had learned that (according to the speaker) if you set your local TV Satellite channels to Los Angeles, they will follow you all over the country without paying extra for their Distant Network Services I tried that in Quartzsite and it worked, but that wasn’t the best test of it as we were only about 250 miles east of downtown LA. The real test will be when we are in Tucson this March. It’s closer to 500 miles from LA. If they work there, then the speaker was probably correct.

While at the rally we met up with Scott and Tami for a few of the seminars and went out for Mexican one evening to the El Mexicali Restaurant. The restaurant was next to the RR tracks, and when the trains went by, it felt like they were inside with you. The food was excellent (my opinion), the place was packed, and about 1/2 way thru dinner a musician with a harp, of all things, came in and played for the crowd. I think the last time I was around someone playing a harp was at the Cat in the Hat show at the Lowes Resort on the Silver Strand when Chris was very young. Personally, a harp is much nicer than the strolling Mariachi’s at other Mexican places. Especially when they stand right next to you and play.

When the rally was over, we drove only about a mile to Indian Waters RV resort for a couple nights prior to driving the couple hours to Quartzsite on Tuesday. We were able to dump the tanks and fill up the fresh water tank before our next week of dry camping off Plumosa Road’s BLM dispersed camp sites.

On a rainy Monday afternoon we got together with Kathy’s cousin Kay and her family for a wonderful lunch in Palm Desert!