Chillin'

It's been a very happy and restful week. After all the adventures of traveling, sitting in one place for a while seems very peaceful and calming.

Even though our park is on a main drag, we are tucked back off the street, and the park is well maintained. The owners manage it, and pride in their property is evident. We weren't sure what to expect when we got here, but Mark and I are both very well pleased with our decision to stay here.

So far the weather report is holding out for us-- sunny autumn weather at least through the end of October.

We've enjoyed our family visits so far. I spent some one-on-one time with Liz this past week on one of her day's off from work. The day before that, Mark and I spent the afternoon with Josh and his S.O. (significant other), Nicole, after which we all went to dinner at the Golden Corral, a surprisingly tasty all-you-can-eat buffet.

Friday afternoon I picked Leah up and brought her over to spend the night. We watched endless movies until the poor dear conked out on our pull-out sofa (which I discovered is a queen size, not full size mattress). The next morning we had a french toast breakfast and then made cookies - Snickerdoodles! (Yum) Yes, I know...sugar, bread, carbs...all bad. But unfortunately, you can't make french toast or cookies without that bad stuff. Leah took the cookies home with her...most of them, anyway.

I'm getting used to my convection oven. The regular oven has yet to be fired up, but it makes a great storage area for my oversize fry pan, the toaster, and my stash of decaf coffee.

This morning, Josh came by to see our place and I fed him breakfast. Breakfast is such a cozy meal. How can you not have a pleasant visit surrounded by bacon, eggs, and hash browns?

Next week Savannah and I will spend some time together.

Did we ever get the furnace fixed? Yes and no. A mobile RV repair service came out and replaced the motor, but...it still makes a heck of a lot of noise. That still doesn't seem right to us, and we may need even more work done on it. But for now it keeps us warm, and the racket is a bit easier to sleep through.

Now, as previously promised, here are some pictures of the inside of our home when the slides are out...

Bedroom at the back of the coach

Bedroom looking toward the front; shower & mirrored closet

Bathroom sink and hallway (bathroom is to the right just in front of sink)

Front room area from the dinette 

Front room from the kitchen area 

The dinette area from the living room

The grand kitchen (rarely ever tidy); fridge to the far right

Combo washer/dryer (in the bathroom) 

Bathroom

Spokane Family Visit

Coming down out of the "Columbia Plateau" into Spokane

We're here, at last! We arrived at our home base for October, Park Lane Motel & RV Park, early Saturday afternoon. We had some harrowing moments on Friday, going through the mountains of northeast Oregon, with wind and snow, but for the most part, it was a beautiful and mostly uneventful two days. The only gremlin activity was the front license plate on our car. It disappeared sometime between Friday morning and Saturday morning. Was it stolen? Did the wind blow it off? It's a mystery. In any case, we'll be calling Texas this week for a replacement.

Nerve-wracking weather

Friday evening, we found an RV park just south of Kennewick (the town of my birth), on the Washington side of the Columbia River -- Agate Acres. It's the first park where we've been escorted to our space by the caretaker in a golf cart. She was a lovely old gal - cheerful and friendly. She stuck around until we'd got our rig situated properly in our spot, and then a little while later she returned with a couple ink pens she'd forgotten to give us when we signed in. All the spots there are full hookup pull-throughs, and it's definitely going on our list of parks to revisit. Matter of fact, we'll probably stop there on our way south when we leave for California.

Escort to our space

It's rather strange to think of sitting in one spot for more than a few days, but we've got this space reserved for four weeks or until the snow flies, whichever comes first. We're still having issues with our furnace. Mark's on the phone, as I write, looking for someone who can come and look at it in hopes of getting it fixed. Also while we're here, we'll be getting the damage to the car from our Texas mishap repaired. Lots to do.

Leah & Savannah

Agate Acres, overlooking the river

In the meantime, family visiting will be the primary focus of our activities. We spent some time with the two youngest granddaughters yesterday, showing off our home. But during the week I'm competing with the Spokane public school system for their time...so I expect the four weeks will go by quickly.

More pictures of our journey...

Oregon

Snow, but not sticking to the road, thankfully

Northeast corner of Oregon

Coming down out of the mountains into the Columbia Valley

Spokane or Bust!

Echo Pass, Utah

At the end of another travel day, we find ourselves in Mountain Home, Idaho. God has blessed us with a trouble-free day. Nothing broke. Nothing fell off. Nothing stopped working. Praise the Lord!

That wasn't the case yesterday, however. From Laramie, we headed into the Rocky Mountains. The highway cuts through a very wide pass, and the terrain is mostly high plateau. A windy high plateau, with gusts of 40+ mph in places. We were tooling along at 60 mph, when I noticed out my window that the awning that covers the door was extended a few inches and shaking in the wind. That didn't look right to me. Mark pulled off the road immediately to check it out and discovered that the locking mechanism on the awning had broken. It brings to mind the Twilight Zone episode of years gone by, starring William Shatner, where he's looking out the window of an airplane soaring along at thirty thousand feet, and sees a feisty little gremlin sitting on the wing pulling parts off the airplane. I didn't actually SEE the gremlin break the locking mechanism, but I'm running out of plausible explanations 

A "bandaid" on the awning support

What's left of the trailer light wiring

for all the stuff that keeps happening. When we pulled into the next rest area for a break, Mark did a walk-around and found that the trailer lights that were magnetically attached to the back trunk of the car had blown off and were trailing behind in a shambles. The gremlin probably ripped those off when he was finished with the locking mechanism. They weren't working right anyway, but really! Was that necessary?

Devil's Slide rock formation, Utah

The road trip was mostly good, though. The coach is running better than ever. The scenery has been beautiful. What a spectacular country we live in! Today we drove through the canyons of the northeast corner of Utah. Especially fascinating was the "Devil's Slide" rock formation. I wish I could have waited for the truck to move out of the way for a better picture, but no luck. 

Our Wednesday stop was Evanston, WY, right on the border with Utah, and we found a reasonably priced park there, Phillips RV Park. The park itself was lovely, but the staff wasn't too friendly. And, they charged extra for water. So we opted out of water, hooked up to electric and hit the sack. Unfortunately, Mark didn't get too much sleep because he was somewhat obsessed over the noisy furnace. The sooner we get THAT thing fixed, the better.

Evanston, WY - Phillips RV Park

Since we've been staying at RV parks the last couple nights, we decided on a Walmart parking lot for tonight. Walmart has graciously permitted us to level the coach and take out our slides, so it will be almost as though we were in an RV park. We found a dump station along the way to clear our waste tanks and fill up our water. The generator is out of gas until we fill the tank in the morning. But the batteries will take care of lights and the gas furnace should keep us warm through the night, noise or no noise. It still isn't working quite right, no matter how much tinkering Mark has done with it. When we get to Spokane, I think we'll have to call out another repair tech to look at it.

Though we've been enjoying the scenery, this trip isn't for sight-seeing. We are Spokane-or-bust, before winter hits, to see the kids and grandkids. It's looking like we'll arrive there on Saturday or Sunday. Everything depends on...well, lots, but mostly how soon we leave every morning, and how long we drive each day. Of course any number of gremlin-related issues could crop up, but I'm not going to worry about that until I have to. 

Below are some additional pictures from the past couple days. 

Wyoming

Wyoming

Utah

Utah

Utah

More "Adventures"

Fall colors in the Black Hills

It's 5:45 Tuesday evening as I write this. Hamburger rice soup is simmering on the stove. Outside it's 58 degrees and sunny, but the "sunny" has pushed up the temperature in the coach to 77. You gotta love solar energy. We have opened up the windows.

It's been a few days since I posted, and quite a bit has happened during that time. The adventures continue...

Saturday we drove through the Black Hills and visited Deadwood and the Petrified Forest. It was a beautiful day. It felt like summer. The Petrified Forest is a small sampling of petrified Cypress trees that grew in South Dakota before the Great Flood. Of course, that's not what their "informative" video suggested. It spewed the same tired dogma of a 4.something billion year old earth, which you can believe if you want. But I'm going with the Bible version because, well...God said He created the earth in six "morning and evening" days about six thousand years ago, and I'm not about to call Him a liar.

Petrified tree-sitting

Deadwood is a quaint old town. We walked up Main Street with all the old buildings, which are all now housing modern businesses. We might have stayed longer, but we only had enough quarters on our person to fund the parking meter for an hour. We did have a nice lunch there, though, before we headed back down Highway 385 to Rapid City and back to Piedmont.

Downtown Deadwood, WY

Sunday morning greeted us with rain. So we watched our online church service and spent the day inside, resting and getting ready to move to our next site -- the truck stop near Butler CAT. We left our campsite around 4 pm, gassed up the coach, ate a quick dinner, and retired for the night.

Monday morning, bright and early--more like dark and early (6:30 am), we dropped off the RV at Butler for the final (we hope) batch of repairs, went to breakfast, and then waited around for them to finish. By lunchtime, as promised, we had our house back.

Part of our process, every time we travel, is a light check. We make sure all the lights on the RV are working properly-- turn signals, brights, emergency flashers, and brake lights. And before we left the Butler CAT property, we did our usual light check. Everything was working as expected, except for the brake lights on the trailer. I think we might be carrying a gremlin around with us unbeknownst. It seems like as soon as we fix one thing, something else breaks. (He's certainly persistent.)

Mark drove the rig right back to the truck stop where we spent the night and someone in their garage looked at it for us. He more or less narrowed down the problem, but wasn't familiar with where to find the connection in the coach that needed to be checked and probably replaced. He sent us up the road to a local RV sales & service company, but of course, they were booked up. Everyone is winterizing. In fact, of the three businesses we contacted, every one was "booked up! - Sorry."

So we are now traveling down the roads with no brake lights on the tow vehicles (car or trailer).  I'm pretty sure this is completely illegal, but perhaps the Highway Patrol that pulls us over (the way things have been going, I'm more or less expecting it) will be understanding when we tell him our sad tale. It's possible.

In any case, our plan is to wire up the car when we get the body work done (from the Texas crack-up), which we'll be doing in Spokane. Then we can get rid of the portable trailer lights we've been using. They're hard to see and mostly useless anyway.

With the late start getting out of Rapid City, we didn't arrive at our next campsite, in Lusk, WY, until a little after 5 o'clock. It was cold. Mark was eager to get the coach leveled, the slides out, and  plugged in for the night, but the comedy of errors continues...

At about 7:30 or so, well after dark, we realized the electric heater wasn't activating. We had no power. He called the office to let them know and they suggested that we move to a different site. Here is where I should insert the concept of shortcuts...and why they usually get us into trouble. What I learned the next day is that our power cord from the coach to the electrical plug-in was stretched too far, which caused the power connection to keep breaking. No power, no heat. Had we, at 7:30, pulled in the slides, retracted the jacks, and moved the coach a few feet, Mark would NOT have had to do it at 10:30 at night...after we had been sleeping for nearly two hours. Shortcuts are not our friends. They just delay and usually intensify whatever inconvenience they are intended to avoid.

We needed the power because our furnace, which operates on gas, was still not working quite right. It was making sounds that resembled an idling Harley Davidson motorcycle. Mark finally solved that problem by taking it apart and making some adjustments this morning. Now it runs as quietly as the mouse in our air conditioner.

High plains of Wyoming, elevation - 8,000+ feet

Today's drive was amazing. Things just may be looking up! We decided not to drive all the way to Rawlins, WY, which was our intended next stop. Instead, we are boondocking at the Laramie Super Walmart. We pulled in about 3:30 and spent the rest of the afternoon resting and recuperating. And by the way, Denver might be the famous "mile high city," but it's got nothin' on Wyoming. Cheyenne beats it by a full thousand feet, and Laramie is sitting at about 7,400 feet.

Our route is taking us across I-80 and then up I-84 through Ogden, UT, Boise, ID, and Kennewick, WA. Barring any other mishaps, we expect to be in Spokane on Sunday.

Here are some pictures from the week's travels...

Petrified Cypress

This wood pile will only work in a gas fireplace

High plains of Wyoming...in October

All Fixed Up

Today we are parked in a cheap campground in Piedmont, about ten miles northwest of Rapid City. There is nothing noteworthy about it, other than an inexplicable fly infestation. I thought it was going to be $18 a night, but they charge by the day...and any portion of it, apparently. Arriving on Thursday afternoon and leaving on Saturday morning turned out to be three days, and our $18 "a day" turned into $29 a night. This park will go on our list of "Do Not Return" sites.

It turns out that Sioux Falls doesn't have too much more to see than what we saw the first day we were there, except maybe the zoo, which we skipped. They do have a Barnes & Noble, though, and that's always good for an hour or so of browsing. So we checked out of our hotel, had a fabulous breakfast at The Original Pancake House (they fry their hash browns in clarified butter! Yum!), and hung out at the Barnes & Noble until about two o'clock. I-Truck still hadn't finished the repairs yet, so we decided to go to a movie. We found a "second run" theater playing "All Saints"...and of course got the call half-way into the film. "All Saints" is a great movie, by the way. I highly recommend it.

We picked up the coach and were on the road by about 5:30, pulling into our campground just as the sun was going down. Driving still didn't feel quite right though. We headed out in the morning, on our way to Rapid City where we intended to stay a couple days, and the engine began to do the same thing it was doing before-- shuddering under 1,600 rpm and losing power over 2,100 rpm. South Dakota is NOT flat, by the way. At every hill, our Follymobile was going slower and slower.  As much as we wanted to, hoped and prayed to, make it to Rapid City, by the time we neared Wall (of "Wall Drug" fame) we were limping along so slowly that even the butterflies were in no danger from our vehicle. They just fluttered by us. With cars racing by at 80 mph, we were literally a danger to the traffic. 

So we crawled off the freeway at Wall and called for help. Mark had been on the phone with his truck-driving brothers throughout the day and got the name of a Caterpillar engine dealer in Rapid City, and by 5:30 in the afternoon they got us right in and started trouble-shooting. If you have a CAT engine in your truck, Butler CAT, in Rapid City, is the place to go.

In the end, the problem was a bad fuel pump, which they fixed, and a clogged fuel filter, which they replaced. Another night in a motel, but at least I was able to get all my laundry done. And now we can hit those hills at 65 mph again...like a truck engine should. They also found two more issues that they recommended we take care of. Preventive maintenance. I'm all for that.

Again, I see God's providence in all of it. If the first shop had diagnosed the fuel pump and filter right away, which was the real problem, they might never have seen the cracked housing on the turbo charger, which could have caused very serious problems down the road. God sees what we don't. Our job is to trust Him always...even when things aren't going well from our viewpoint (which is blindness).

Romans 8:28  "And we know that all things work for good to those who love Him..."

This afternoon Mark, with the help of Jim, a local RV repair technician, has repaired the furnace. We have heat, finally!

Things are looking up. The sun is out after a brief rain. It's a beautiful day in South Dakota. Tomorrow we're going to go look at petrified trees and check out Deadwood, the town.

Morning road trip through eastern Black Hills

Fall colors

A Pause in the Plan

Sioux Falls Park

Today we are in Sioux Falls...still. We spent Friday and Saturday nights in the I-Truck parking lot, and this morning we gave them the keys, said a prayer, and went to breakfast. We may as well make the best of an otherwise bad situation.

There's not too much to do in Sioux Falls in October. After breakfast, we drove over to their main attraction, Falls Park. It's not hard to see why this town exists. What a beautiful scenic water fall. One poet described it as "a thousand waterfalls in one," and it's easy to see what they meant as you walk around and see cascade after cascade up and down the river.

"A thousand waterfalls in one"

We got in a good morning walk through the park, and then Mark wanted to visit the Battleship USS South Dakota Memorial (I sat in the car for this one). Unfortunately, the inside museum portion was closed for the season, but he walked around the outside a bit and looked at the displays. 

It was chilly and drizzly here today, so we decided to head over to the local mall, which is always good for escaping the weather. We had Caribou coffee and walked around some more. (I managed to clock over 10,000 steps today. Yay me!) 

USS South Dakota Memorial

After a visit to one of the area wineries and lunch, Mark decided to check on the progress of our repair and was told that the turbo charger needed to be replaced. The case was cracked! 

Needless to say, we're getting a little frustrated with the expensive problems this motor home keeps throwing at us. Just before the turbo charger problem, our furnace stopped working. So we need to have a mobile RV repair service in Rapid City look at it when we arrive there. It's rather important to get that working, as the electric heater on the AC unit doesn't work especially well in very cold weather. And this morning the living room slide is giving us grief again. We're not sure how much longer it will hold out before we have to replace the motor. We're beginning to think we bought a Class A "money pit." 

Sweetie is happy to be out of the car.
(And yes...that's yarn on the bed. It was pretty.)

Tonight we are renting a room at our "home away from home," the pet-friendly La Quinta Hotel. Watching the Weather Channel, we learned that snow is predicted for Montana and the Rocky Mountains later this week-- in feet, not inches. Once the turbo charger is fixed, and the furnace is fixed, and (God willing) we're back on the road again, we'll be moving our route a little further south in hopes of avoiding winter weather.

In the meantime, what else can we do in Sioux Falls?...that doesn't cost money. That's our challenge for tomorrow.