Low bridge, everybody down

We are at the Wal-Mart in Monroe, Louisiana (map).

Rolling into Louisiana is something of a homecoming for us, as this is the state in which we have spent the most time since hitting the road four and a half years ago. We would never have predicted that, of course, when we started, and most of our time here has been in Baton Rouge, working with the Red Cross. But we've been all over the state, between disaster field assignments and just driving around in Odyssey. We like it here -- Bienvenue en Louisiane.

I am accustomed to typing, 'round about this paragraph or so, that we had an uneventful drive from such-and-such place, but yesterday's drive was anything but. First, we got a late start, because after our usual lazy morning answering email, reading the news, planning the route, and generally surfing the web, we decided to walk around the fairgrounds and check out the horse shows.

We caught a bit of the Palomino show (the Paints were in a different area we never made it to), and these are beautiful horses. We also spent some time browsing through some new horse trailers that a couple of dealers were exhibiting, luxurious affairs with three or four stalls in the back for the horses, and living accommodations in the front for the riders. A couple even had slides; all had a queen bed in the area above the fifth wheel, a full galley, and a full bath with large shower. Several such rigs were tucked in among the myriad more conventional RVs on the fairgrounds, and we were curious to see how the horsey set lived when on the road.

From one of the dealers we learned that this series of horse and cattle shows actually runs all month, and that the rodeo would be next weekend, preceded by the arrival of wagon trains from all over the state. Apparently, that is the time when the fairgrounds will be cheek-by-jowl full of rigs, and we might well have had trouble parking (and certainly finding a power outlet).

No fairgrounds visit is ever complete without greasy fair-style food, so we bought lunch at one of the many stands before returning home to prepare for departure. While I was out getting ready to unplug (actually, taking the photos we attached to yesterdays post), the guy who collected our fee drove up, and informed me that it was supposed to be an extra charge after 9am. That's nice, but why didn't he tell me that yesterday, when he asked me how long we were staying and I said "until mid-day tomorrow"? He didn't actually charge me anything more than the original $15 he collected yesterday, but I got the chance to ask him how much the charge would have been for dry camping -- free, it turns out, any time the facility is open. We were happy to have the power, but now we know for the next time (and we certainly could have merely unplugged by 9am, had we needed to avoid an extra charge).

We rolled out sometime after 1pm, and headed over to the Flying-J via a back road across the Pearl. The best I could coax out of the wimpy RV dispensers was perhaps ten gallons per minute (using both sides), and so it took a good 20 minutes or so to put 210 gallons in at $1.929 per gallon -- the cheapest fuel in the country, at the moment. It was after 2 by the time we rolled out of the station and onto US-80 west, which would take us all the way to the state line at Vicksburg.

Now, US-80 becomes collinear with I-20 on the western outskirts of Jackson, and they run together all the way to Bovina, just east of Vicksburg. However, both our printed map and our Garmin GPS indicated that US-80 diverts south of I-20 at Edwards. We took this route, in spite of no signage so indicating. A few miles down what turns out to be old highway 80, we started to get nervous about the absence of US highway shields, but clearly the road had, at least, once been the main route here before the Interstate. Old-time motel, restaurant, and gas station signs are a dead giveaway.

Notwithstanding a "Weight Limit 57,650 Pounds" sign just as we left Edwards (and we are amused by the precision of that number, which is common in Mississippi), we nevertheless encountered a bridge several miles down the road with a "Tandem Axle 15 Tons" sign. Well, Odyssey's tandem weighs in at just under 17 tons, so we figured that to be close enough. We rolled down the center of the bridge, straddling the line, just because that's how narrow it was, and so we had no other traffic contributing to the loading, either.

That bridge was followed by another similarly marked bridge in another few miles, but we realized that, once upon a time, this was the main (and only) truck route, so we still did not worry too much. And then, we were stopped in our tracks by this:


(Photo: Bill Black, bridgehunter.com)

What you can't see in this photo that I've linked from the web (we did not have the presence of mind to snap one ourselves) is the sign just ahead of it stating Clearance: 12'-0" (also printed on the yellow sign on the bridge crossmember itself, but so faded we could not even read it from here.)

Uh oh. Odyssey is 13'-0", and there is no place to turn around -- we are on a narrow two-lane which has been elevated from the surrounding land. We stopped and put the four-ways on. While Louise caught her breath (she takes her job of calling out the clearance signs very seriously), I got out the tape measure we keep by the driver's seat for just such occasions, and went to measure it.

It turns out that the horizontal crossmember is well above 13 feet -- only the bottom of the diagonal trusses to either side come down to nearly 12. We emptied all the air out of our suspension as a precacaution, making our height just 12'8", and slowly rolled across the bridge dead-center between the curbs. We cleared without even hitting the CB antenna, so releasing the air had been unneccessary.

This happens to be the historic R.H. Henry bridge over the Big Black River, constructed in 1929. This site provides a complete description, including the fact that the vertical clearance is actually 12'-2" and the bridge is "structurally deficient." The historic status has also become a matter of some contention, apparently. In any case, we made it across, and had no further issues all the way to Vicksburg.

Between the late start, the fueling, and the bridge fiasco, we arrived in Monroe at sundown. We had remembered a parking spot near the Olive Garden from our first visit here, but fresh development nearby made that a poor choice this time. Ironically, we had to drop south down to the freeway from where we had come in on US-80, north of town, to check that spot out, and then head right back up to US-80 again to find this Wal-Mart, in the dark. I had my mouth all set for Olive Garden, of course, but we ended up eating at a Chinese joint across the street here.

This morning we'll head into the store for some much-needed provisions, then head west toward Dallas. After checking the weather charts, we decided to stay along I-20, since much of this is new to us, rather than head down to the US-190 corridor, now very familiar.

Fuzzy Friday: Wreath Cat

The holidays are over, and we have set aside the wreath from the front of the bus to donate to charity. Of course, no feline can resist a round, cat-sized nest, and I couldn't resist taking this picture.



Later, Sean was able to get the wreath plugged in without disturbing George at all. I think she would make a nice centerpiece.

Parked among the horse trailers

We are at the Mississippi State Fairgrounds, in Jackson, Mississippi (map).

We chose this site because it is just a six block walk to our club downtown, where Louise took me for a nice birthday dinner last night. Although while we were paying our camping fee for the night, the guy advised us not to walk out of the fairgrounds -- "too dangerous." When I pressed him further on this, he just reiterated that he certainly would not walk here. We got told the same thing in Montgomery, one capital further east.

We normally ignore these sorts of dire statements, but, as a precaution, we made the decision to leave a few minutes early to walk the outbound trip in the last of the daylight. Rarely have we seen such a clean city -- there was not a single graffito or piece of litter the whole six blocks, and the route took us past a phalanx of gorgeous old buildings, including the old capitol building (now a museum, and under exterior renovation) and the governor's mansion.

Dangerous. Bah. We passed an internet cafe full of yuppies, a couple of people walking home from work, and one moderately crazy destitute person talking to himself. We are convinced, although we would that it were not so, that when these kinds of people tell us a place is "dangerous" it really means that we will encounter people of a different color. Wow, that must be dangerous -- "that man's not my color, he's, umm, the same color as ... the President of the United States." Very dangerous.

I know we are a bit jaded. I grew up in the New York City area, where one develops a sixth sense about what constitutes real danger when walking down the street. Louise has lived enough places to know the difference. And we get the impression that some of these folks who are so paranoid about their own cities have never been to New York, or Detroit, or LA, where you can get shot for wearing the wrong colors in the wrong neighborhood. I would guess there are some rough parts of Jackson -- hoodlums are hoodlums, regardless of skin color. But the capitol district doesn't appear to be one of them.

We had a lovely drive yesterday on US-80. West of Cuba, AL and the state line, US-80 follows I-20 fairly closely, and we have noticed that when a US highway and an Interstate are that close, not only do we usually have the highway to ourselves, but it is often more of a country road than a highway. Relics of roadside businesses long decimated by the Interstate make for interesting scenery, but some of the infrastructure is not up to modern standards.

Thus it was that, for example, I had to slow to 20 or so to avoid destroying the CB antenna on a 13'-6" railroad bridge. I was not so lucky, though passing an SUV on a very narrow two-lane bridge. I had Odyssey squarely in the "middle" of our lane, which meant my left mirror was hanging directly above the double-yellow. If I had been passing another 8' or 8.5' wide vehicle, I would have adjusted for this, slowed a bit more, and moved to the very right part of the lane, putting the right mirror over the bridge rail, and the right wheels perilously close to the curbing.

I saw no need to do so for a mere passenger automobile. Why he felt the need to crowd the left side of his lane, we will never know. But that's what he did, and our mirrors collided at a combined closing speed of over 100mph. We got a barely noticeable scratch, the mirror folded in somewhat, and the little stick-on convex mirror I had put on four years ago got knocked into oblivion. We had to stop in the next town to fold the mirror back out properly. I have no idea what happened to the other bloke's mirror, but I hope, in any case, it was enough to convince him to drive in the center of his lane next time he crosses a narrow bridge, especially with an oncoming heavy vehicle.

A couple dozen miles east of here, I started to get nervous about arriving too late to get a spot -- we had called earlier in the day, and were informed that the camping was nearly full due to the Paint Horse show and one other event going on here -- and so we hopped on the freeway for the final twenty minutes. We also chose to bypass the Flying-J in Pearl, in favor of swinging past there this morning; it's only a couple of miles east. We need not have worried; the fairgrounds are immense, and, with the shows going on, they told us we could park more or less anywhere.

We drove around until we found a light pole with an available power outlet, close to the pedestrian gate we needed to get to dinner. Many eyes were upon us as we circled, and so I also had something of an audience as I repaired the power outlet, a hokey affair hanging loose from the panel on a piece of NM.



It turned out to be disconnected at the breaker, which was a simple fix, but then my tester revealed hot and neutral were reversed (probably why someone had disconnected it). Two quick twists of the screwdriver were all it took, since the deadfront was long since missing from the panel, presumably to facilitate temporary power arrangements for events.



Today we are ruminating about the route west. The deep freeze that has gripped most of the country has blanketed Texas in cold, and we are considering swinging even further south than our previous plan of staying more or less in the I-20 corridor. If we do, we may well hop on our old friend the Natchez Trace Parkway, which will bring us south to Natchez, and we can pick up the familiar US-190 corridor west of Alexandria, LA. That would take us through Livingston and Austin and onto the I-10 corridor through west Texas. Warmer, but we've done it several times and would like to try something different.

On the Tombigbee at Demopolis Lake

We are at the Foscue Creek Park campground, operated by the Army Corps of Engineers, in Demopolis, Alabama (map). We have a nice site right on the Tombigbee, just upriver from the lock and dam. A sharp-looking ketch had just up-locked and motored past us as we parked, and a dozen or so tows have pushed through since our arrival yesterday afternoon.

We only ended up spending an hour or two at the Montgomery hot site yesterday morning. All of the laptops had hibernated, probably the result of a power outage on the premises sometime in the last few weeks. Once we got them all booted, everything was back to normal, except for one laptop where the screen backlight had failed completely. We've seen this happen quite a bit on the ThinkPads.

I spent a little time getting the IP fax machine back on line, then we handed the bad laptop and the keys over to the local chapter. Headquarters will send them a replacement for the bad machine, and they can return it in the same case. The chapter folks set the alarm and locked the place up; we spent a few more minutes in the parking lot wrapping up a windshield repair.

Oh, did I forget to mention that? On Monday, maybe half an hour outside of Montgomery, we took another rock strike to the windshield. This one was rather minor, a small volcano with no legs, so we kept going and fixed it at the Lowes when we arrived. We've gotten quite good at these repairs -- practice makes perfect -- and you can't even see this one. I also filled in some pits that we developed due to another rock strike back in Florida. Those pits were not large enough to warrant using up a whole repair kit on their own.

The glass repair resin is UV cure, and the sun was low enough when we finished the job that I wanted to give the stuff another morning in the sun before scraping off the excess. So we parked facing the sun when we arrived at the hot site, and I got the razor blade out and finished up when we were done there.

We have a club in Montgomery, and thought about trying to have dinner there, but they do not serve dinner on Sundays or Mondays, and Tuesday is spaghetti night, which does not call us. We've been to the Montgomery club before, and it's one of our favorites, but it was not worth staying another night in town. We'll hit the club in Jackson, Mississippi, instead, where I will celebrate another trip around the sun tomorrow night.

From Montgomery we took the historic route to Selma on US-80, opting to pass through downtown rather than around Selma on the truck bypass. I think the history of the place and all the museums has provided downtown Selma with a bit of a tourist revival -- most of the storefronts were going concerns. From Selma US-80 brought us here, to Demopolis.

We registered for two nights here at the campground, hoping to relax a bit now that it's warm, and maybe get some projects checked off. After we got set up, though, the Internet informed us that today's weather would be miserable. We pulled the scooters out and headed to town for dinner last night, figuring it would be too crummy to do so today.

Demopolis is one of the few marina stops on the Tombigbee for pleasure boats, and I had read about the marina and its restaurant on the Great Loop mailing list several times, so we decided to try it for dinner. I sent a note to the list, in case any loopers might be in town, but got no response. The restaurant, the New Orleans Bar and Grill, was quite palatable, although too smoky inside for our taste. In nicer weather the outside deck looked appealing. Most of the slips in the yacht basin (and "yacht" is, perhaps, stretching things a bit) were occupied by houseboats, though I saw at least one trawler.

It's been cold enough here today that we are happy to have the 50-amp power. We also have a sewer connection which is too far to reach, and a water spigot, as well as a nice patio area. The Corps tends to trick their campgrounds out really well. Full hookup sites are $20 per night, and they also have five water/electric only sites for $18. Those sites were farther from the river, though, and, even though we don't need and can't use the sewer, we wanted to watch the boats go by.

I never got to the plumbing repair or the replacement of the scooter fender that I had planned for today -- just too cold and wet outside. But I did manage to fix a broken latch on the fridge, and a bad light switch in the kitchen. In a few minutes, I will replace the bad screen housing on my laptop. Louise, meanwhile, has been taking advantage of the inexpensive laundry facilities here to catch up on our backlog.

Tomorrow we will head back out of Demopolis, continuing west on US-80. We'll fuel up to the tippy-top in Pearl, with the cheapest diesel in the US at $1.93 per gallon, then head in to Jackson, where we are hoping to stay at the fairgrounds adjacent to downtown.

A girl can dream, can't she?

Sweet home Alabama

We are parked at a Lowes in Montgomery, Alabama (map).

Yesterday morning we were out of drinking water, and I did what I normally do when we run out on the road -- I went downstairs and opened the valve that transfers water from the fresh tank, through the ceramic filter, into the drinking tank. I then set a timer for 15 minutes and went back to whatever I was doing.

Fifteen minutes later I went back downstairs and the wet bay was flooded. Water was virtually pouring out of a PVC fitting on one of the drinking tank inputs. It's possible that the fitting itself has cracked in the cold weather, or perhaps the glue at the joint has quit. In any case, the solution will be to replace three fittings and an 8" section of pipe, and we went into the Lowes to buy what we needed. It turns out there is a Carrabbas restaurant just one parking lot over, and so we asked the store manager if we could spend the night.

Long-time readers know that the Red Cross has a disaster relief "hot site" here in Montgomery, where we spent a few days last fall. Since we were passing through anyway, we called headquarters to see if there was anything they wanted us to check on while we were in town. They called back an hour later to tell us that none of the hot site computers was accessible on the network, and, yes, would we stop by and check. When we called the local contact here last night, they were closing, and so we agreed to call again this morning to set a time to meet at the site. Depending on what the problem is, we may be here in Montgomery another night.

Yesterday's drive was quite pleasant. We managed to stay off the freeway for most of the day, taking US-29 to the state line, crossing the Chattahoochee just south of West Point Lake. We got back on the Interstate at the last exit in Alabama so that we could stop at the welcome center rest area just a mile west of there, where there was a dump station and fresh water, both of which we needed. We bailed off at the next exit to reconnect with 29.

In Tuskegee, where we saw no airmen (I think because they all went to DC for the inauguration), US-29 turns south, and so we continued west on US-80, which brought us all the way here. Whenever we leave here, we will continue west on 80 through Selma (yes, that one) and Demopolis and into Jackson, MS, where we will fuel up.

Knock, knock.

We are at the Wal-Mart in Union City, Georgia (map).

We had a very pleasant drive yesterday on a route quite new to us, US-123. This route passes Clemson University and a handful of other institutions of higher learning in both South Carolina and Georgia, sort of a "college row."

US-123 eventually put us on I-985 into Atlanta, at about Gainesville, GA. Our plans had called for us to stop somewhere in the Atlanta area, and we decided it would be best to get all the way through the city Sunday evening, rather than fight our way through the brutal Atlanta weekday traffic today. This was really the first stopping opportunity southwest of the city.

We had a nice dinner at La Fiesta across the street, did some shopping here at the store, and had a pleasant enough night. We chose to park behind a semi that was clearly parked for the night, just to shield us a bit from the spectators. That proved to be a poor choice -- a heavy duty wrecker showed up and knocked on our door at 8:30 this morning. He had been called to tow the trucks out of the lot; as with many Wal-Marts, this one is posted No Truck Parking. This is the first time we've ever seen it enforced. We ended up moving to the other side of the lot, so he could finish his work, but he peeled out half an hour later empty-hooked.

Today we will continue south to Montgomery. We also need to find water and perhaps a dump station.

Thump, thump, thump

We are at the Wal-Mart in Greenville, South Carolina (map).

We got a late start out of Greensboro, because we had some shopping to do. Not finding everything we needed at Wal-Mart, we drove across the street to Lowes -- we needed some hardware to secure the new fish tank while under way. We ended up buying lunch from a hot dog vendor in the Lowes parking lot, and it was after 1 by the time we were rolling.

For whatever reason, I was pretty tired yesterday afternoon, and I was ready to stop somewhere halfway between here and Charlotte. As we were researching stopping opportunities, however, we discovered we had a dinner club here in Greenville, and so we pressed on a bit further.

We were hoping we might just be able to park on the street downtown -- sometimes these city centers are deserted on the weekends, and we actually parked across the street from a club in the Chicago loop once. When we rolled past, however, there were police cars everywhere, with lots of traffic. We discovered there was an event going on at the nearby Bi-Lo center, which I later learned was the Monster Jam, a monster truck event, I believe.

This Wal-Mart was just a few miles away, and we pulled a scooter out to make the trek back in to town for dinner. The ride back was a little chilly, but it's still quite a bit warmer than we were at the beginning of the week. We had a nice dinner, 17 stories above the city.

Now that we're finally warming up, and our next deadline is more than two weeks away, our attention is returning to various problems we need to resolve. Chief among them is the tire situation. Somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000 miles ago, we replaced the worn steer tires, which had lasted barely 40,000 miles, with expensive Goodyears. I really did not expect, at that time, that we'd run nearly another full two years without fixing the bent tag axle.

But here we are, two years later, and the tag axle is still bent. The bent side already ate its way through a brand new Firestone in just over a year and less than 25,000 miles. And we're certain that the screwed-up axle geometry is also having an effect on the steer tires. Alignment is probably also an issue, although we had everything aligned right after the axle got bent, but we really don't want to try to align it again until the axle is fixed.

In any case, we are right back to where we were two years ago, with the steer tires so cupped that it feels like we are driving on the stone wheels from the Flintstones. In addition to rattling our teeth out, I'm worried that the constant thumping might be wearing the kingpins and bushings. So the time has come to do something about it.

My first choice, of course, would be to fix the bent axle, align all three axles, and put six new tires on (the tags are probably fine). And I will be searching in the next few days with renewed vigor to find someone who can change the axle, but I am holding out little hope, since we haven't found anyone yet in two years.

Failing that, we can put another set of new tires on the steers. I'm reluctant to do this, because the current situation will cause them to start cupping within just a couple thousand miles, and, once a tire is cupped, the cupping only gets worse over time, even if the underlying cause gets corrected. Alternatively, we can put the Firestones from the tag on the steer axle, and move these to the tag axle, on the grounds that the tag has a smaller effect on handling and vibration through the coach.

My last option would be to get some used tires for the steer, although this makes me nervous. That said, if I get new ones before fixing the axle, I intend to get the cheapest tires I can find. No point in spending money on high-mileage tread and long-life casings for a tire that I now know will last barely a year and 20k miles or so.

Today we will continue southwest to Atlanta. Even though we continue to head south, this route takes us along what is more or less an isotherm, so we don't really expect to get much warmer now until we are in far west Texas. If that proves to be an issue, we may ajust our route further south, from our planned I-20 corridor to closer I-10.

A familiar stretch of road

We are at the Wal-Mart in Greensboro, North Carolina (map). Amusingly, the satellite imagery shows us parked smack in the middle of the Carolina Circle Mall, which used to occupy this site until sometime in 2005.

We had our warmest day yesterday since leaving Florida, with temps ranging from the 50s into the 60s. We left Richmond by way of the Powhite Parkway, where I was disappointed to see that our E-ZPass transponder again did not register. I assume that the tolls will catch up with us after the plate photos are processed.

From there we had a pleasant drive down US-360 to Danville, where, as last time, I could not get the Wreck of the Old 97 out of my head. From Danville we again headed south on US-29, stopping for more water at the North Carolina visitor center just over the state line. We neglected to ask if overnight stays are permitted, as we were not ready to stop. But it sure looks like the trucks spend the night there.

We will continue today on more or less that same route -- some combination of US-29 and I-85 to Charlotte. As last time, we'll be on this route all the way to Atlanta -- ironically, we were on our way to an airport that time, too. This trip, however, we will continue southwest to Montgomery.

Yesterday I received the oil analysis from the sample I drew in Florida. Once again, the oil is showing high silicon levels -- 28 ppm -- yet no real wear metals. As with the last sample, the report indicated that this might mean the silcon is not dirt, but maybe from gasket material or additives of some sort. Except we changed out the oil at the last sample, which also read 29 ppm of silicon.

This sample also shows a very high level of copper, which the last sample did not. That's normally bearing wear, but only when accompanied by tin and lead, and there was no significant tin or lead in the sample. I'm stumped. Having dirted the engine out twice now, even a hint of silicon makes me nervous, and I am trying to figure out what my next diagnostic step should be to track this down.

Thawing out

We are at the Bass Pro Shop in Ashland, Virginia, just north of Richmond (map).

We had noticed this brand new store, complete with Islamorada Fish Company restaurant, as we whizzed passed on our way north to DC, and made a note of it. Bass Pro Shops generally have a designated oversize vehicle area and allow overnight parking, and this one turned out to be no exception.

Yesterday we retraced our route from December as far as I-95, then hopped on the Interstate to beat a quick retreat from the cold. When we fueled up at the Flying-J in Carmel Church, though, it was a balmy 50 degrees, as the region is seeing some relief from the subfreezing cold earlier in the week. That allowed us the luxury of a shorter day and a stop here. Remembering that all the truck stops on the way north had their water spigots shut off, we put some water into our completely empty tank at the Virginia Welcome Center north of the Flying-J, which gives us another day or so.

Today we will begin our gradual sweep west, heading southwest towards Greensboro and Charlotte. US-360 will bring us to Danville, where we will pick up US-29 through the Carolinas.

Reader assistance request -- San Diego camping

One of the consequences of having made the decision to, ahem, attend the inauguration, is that we had to cancel out of our scheduled and paid-for attendance at the TrawlerFest event in Stuart, Florida, which started today. Fortunately, I was able to escape penalty on our fully paid conference registration, some $800 worth, by pleading with the organizers to allow us to merely defer our attendance to the next event, in San Diego, California on February 26-28.

That's really too bad, actually, because we liked the seminar line-up and presenters in Stuart better, and I expect we would have seen quite a different collection of boats than we will see in San Diego. But it presents an even bigger problem, one that I did not really have the bandwidth to handle in the rush to make it to the inauguration. To wit, where in the world we will park Odyssey.

For the Stuart event, we had been all set with an Elks lodge just a few minutes away, an easy scooter ride even on Louise's 50cc Honda. We had been very careful to check on that possibility before sending our reservation in for the event. San Diego, however, has no such convenient option.

TrawlerFest will be held at the Kona Kai Resort and Marina, on Shelter Island. This is more or less in the busiest and most developed part of San Diego, and I have already exhausted my list of traditional options. There are no Elks lodges, UU churches, Cracker Barrels, Bass Pro Shops, or even Wal-Marts (not that any Wal-Mart in San Diego is even an option for us) anywhere within scooter distance of the event.

Ironically, the public park on Shelter Island, operated by the port, is chock full of RVs every day. But the park officially opens at 6am and closes at 10:30pm, and all these RVs trundle away every evening, presumably staying on public streets in residential neighborhoods overnight, only to return first thing the next morning. Apparently, there are dozens of folks living in San Diego on the cheap this way.

We certainly don't want to be shuttling Odyssey around every night and every morning to attend the show. In particular, the event ends every evening with a cocktail party, wherein some of the most educational conversations happen (at least in our one previous experience with this event), and we'd like to have a glass of wine or two with new friends who can further our education. Clearly, I don't want to then be navigating a 24-ton vehicle around the streets of a major city at night.

To be clear, we are more than happy to pay for the privilege of parking near the event. I even contacted the resort directly to ask if they could accommodate us at some price, and, in spite of some sympathy from the sales department, the general manager turned us down. (And it is, therefore, a pretty good bet that we will not spend any money in their restaurant or cocktail lounge, other than what has been pre-arranged for the event.) After all, Silver Strand state beach is collecting, I think, $35 a day for dry camping on an asphalt parking lot (albeit on a fairly stunning stretch of beach).

The closest commercial park is a good 7.5 miles away, 20 minutes or so in traffic, and not really doable on the scooters due to the roads and traffic involved. So even though we are willing to pay commercial rates (which, in San Diego, are pretty high), even that is not really an option.

So herewith is my plea to any of our readers in San Diego: We need a place to park within scooter distance of Shelter Island for the four nights starting Wednesday, February 25th. That can be a driveway, the street in front of someone's house, or the parking lot of a business, boat yard, yacht club, hotel, or wherever you have an "in." If you have such a place yourself, or a connection with someone who does, please either post a comment here, or send me an email. And we're not looking for a handout -- we're happy to pay the going rate for dry camping, or more if a power outlet is involved, though long-time readers know we will not require any sort of hook-ups.

I have perhaps another week or so to work on this problem. If I don't find a solution in that time, I will have to call the TrawlerFest people again, and either beg for some of our money back, or see if they will grant yet another deferral to a later event, perhaps the one in Anacortes in May.

Moving on

We are at the Sam's Club in Sterling, Virginia (map), just around the corner from where we parked back in December. That was a nicer spot, behind the building and mostly obscured from public view, but they are now building a gas station here, and that area was full of construction vehicles when we arrived.

We had tentatively made plans to have lunch yesterday with folks over at the Red Cross headquarters hot site facility, and so we packed up around 10am. I had 75' of power cord out, to reach the 50-amp receptacle from our chosen parking spot, which we selected to get satellite access through a line of trees to the south. It was so cold still at that hour that I could hardly coil the cords enough to stuff them in the bay -- it felt like bending copper tube, with the added hardship that it all kept trying to uncoil like a giant spring. It had also gotten cold enough over night that a new crop of coolant leaks has sprung up, including from the main connection to the lower radiator, and somewhere in the bowels of the driver heater plumbing.

We arrived at the Red Cross facility ahead of lunch time, but not late enough to avoid being pressed into service to label and hump dozens of equipment cases for shipment back to the technology maintenance center in Austin. The equipment was here, as were a couple of volunteers with an ECRV, in the event of any incident surrounding the inauguration -- we were happy to send it back unopened.

At least we actually earned our lunch -- lasagna and caesar salad that had been brought in to the center. We also got to meet some of the new HQ staff since our last visit two years ago, and it's always good to catch up with everyone. These are folks we spend hours and hours talking to on the phone, but rarely see in person.

While we were at the hot site, I got a call from regular blog readers Randy and Pam, who inquired if we were still in Fairfax and up for a visit. We agreed to catch up once we parked for the night here in Sterling -- we knew we did not want to try to fight our way out of the area at rush hour after wrapping up our Red Cross visit, and we also remembered there were several restaurants here.

We first had to make a stop at the nearby Petco. The filter unit on the fish tank crapped out a couple days ago, and Louise has been having to change water every day to keep the fish alive. The filter unit is integral to the acrylic tank assembly, and we will have to order it from the manufacturer, but we were at least able to pick up an external unit to tide us over.

We had a nice visit with Pam and Randy, and we all went to dinner at the Macaroni Grill two parking lots away. They are shopping for a full-timing rig now, and had many questions. We hope Odyssey gave them some good ideas.

In a few minutes, we will head into Wal-Mart to pick up some necessities, including some more coolant to make up for our leakage in the last couple days. After which, we will get back on the road, heading south for warmer climes. We'll be fueling today at the Flying-J in Carmel Church. Fuel is $.04 cheaper in Wyethville, on I-81, but it's several degrees colder in the Shenandoah valley that here on the coast side, so we will stay this side of the ridge, retracing our December route as far as Richmond, then swinging southwest towards Charlotte and Atlanta.

Not the photos I hoped for

This morning, CNN had this link on its web site to an interactive satellite photo of the Mall taken at 11:19 am yesterday. It was used to estimate the crowd at that moment to be 1.5 million people.

We used it for something else: we could clearly see, in this image, that none of the other security checkpoints had anyone waiting except ours, the Purple checkpoint. And here we are, at about that time (click to enlarge):



This is the view from where we stood, taken just a few minutes later, at 11:34:



We already knew that we were not alone, but yesterday's web site statistics provided more of the story. We normally see perhaps 600 hits on this blog every day we post, but yesterday's post garnered over 1,200. When we drilled down, we discovered that all of the additional hits were referrals from search engines, with people searching on such phrases as "what happened at the purple gate," "purple gate security breach," and the like. Since click-throughs from such searches are only a tiny fraction of the number of times we display in the results, and since many similar searches would not put us in the results at all (or nowhere near the top, anyway), we can only surmise that thousands of people must have searched on such phrases yesterday.

Louise has added a photo to yesterday's post, taken at the start of our journey (before our no-show bus was due), and I will add another photo of happier times -- this is the good-natured crowd on our Metro car, just a few minutes before the whole car broke out into song:



At least we got a party invite out of the whole affair, and we had a nice time last night.



Dressed up for the inaugural ball.

I even won one of the door prizes -- a Barack Obama bobble-head doll. Long-time readers know we seldom accept door prizes and the like, but Barack now has a place of honor on our dash board, just in front of Hula Dog and Hunu, the hula guy, who have bobbled their way across the country with us for four years. And now I can say we drove all the way to DC, but did not come away empty-handed.

Thwarted

We are back home after our valiant attempt to witness the swearing in of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States.

I barely have the emotional energy to post, but I know many of our readers have been following along. If you did not get our Twitter streams today, then perhaps you have not yet read that we never made it through the gates. We were not alone; I would estimate that several thousand had to turn back at the Purple security checkpoint. We were in sight of the gate, perhaps 100 yards, and an eternity, away, at 11:45. Everyone in the crowd, as us, had valid Purple tickets, and there was periodic chanting of "Purple, Purple" and "Let Us In," but it became clear that we would not make it through by the time of the swearing-in. Worse, the crowd was becoming more and more distressed, and we could see the situation becoming dangerous. We fought our way back to the street and left.

The consequence of spending all our time and energy trying to get into our assigned, ticketed area meant that we were completely aced out of even getting to the Mall to see the ceremony on one of the myriad Jumbotrons deployed there. The bottom line was that they simply did not have enough security screening capacity to admit all the ticket holders in the 3.5 hours allocated to do so.

We did spend some time ruminating about having chosen a later start this morning -- a calculated decision based on our understanding of when the gates opened and how the lines were to be managed. As it turns out, it made no difference. We ended up standing next to several couples who had lined up at 7am (the gates opened at 8) and were in that line for over four hours. The fact that we arrived in the neighborhood of the gates at 10am and ended up right next to them speaks volumes about the nature of the problem -- whatever semblance of order was intended for the process, it degenerated into utter chaos well outside of the screening checkpoint.

When all things are considered, we were glad that we spent an hour and a half on the metro, where it was warm, and an hour and a half trying to get in the gates, as opposed to having spent four hours in a cold line only to still be turned away at the gate. We're also glad we spent only a few hundred dollars, mostly in fuel, to attend -- many who were turned away had flown here from their home states and paid for hotel reservations.

We left Odyssey this morning at 7:35 in 18°, but clear, weather. Our plan was to catch a 7:51 bus, and we wanted to be several minutes early, just to be safe. That bus never came, and we ended up on the 8:21 instead, so we were off to an inauspicious start. We arrived at the Vienna station just as they were closing off the parking lot, which was now full. The Metro system was so overloaded that trains were being removed from service, and we had to wait for another train to come in from the east.


Waiting for the bus, still happy

Lo and behold, that train was already full -- apparently, anyone trying to get on at points east could not board an eastbound train -- they were leaving Vienna already packed. So they merely boarded the westbound trains, and stayed on board at the terminus. So we boarded an already packed train, but Louise scored a seat, and I was able to sort of lean on her armrest.

Good thing, because the train proceeded very slowly, with nearly ten minutes at each stop, between waiting for other packed trains ahead of us, and a handful of people trying to squeeze on our train, keeping the doors from closing. The normally 35-minute ride to our transfer point took well over an hour. At some point, the entire car started singing, and we went through God Bless America, America the Beautiful, the Star Spangled Banner, and even We All Need Somebody (to Lean on). That was, for us, perhaps the most moving part of the day, and there were several teary eyes.

Things cleared out before we made our transfer to the Red Line, and we had a smooth ride the rest of the way. But the delays put us at the gate area at nearly 10am, more than a full hour after our plan. What we saw when we arrived made our jaws drop -- the line to First street curled around D street and then down the tunnel under the mall, as far as the eye could see. We nearly gave up at that moment, since it was clear that line would never even make it to the checkpoint, and nothing was moving.

We later learned that the line had stopped due to a medical emergency, which added to the chaos. But we also noticed that lines converged onto First street from three different directions, and we simply went around the block and got into a shorter line. A lesson learned from our experience at the House office buildings yesterday. That, I think, is how we ended up next to folks who arrived three hours ahead of us when the lines again started moving.

Just as we arrived in the area of the gates, they closed the First Street entrance, and instead opened the gates a block away, and that was the final nail for us. We could see very little from where we stood, near the 101 Constitution building, and could hear nothing, so we decided to make one last push to the new gate, where we were ultimately stalled. Someone with a bullhorn at the gate kept announcing/asking that everyone entering the gate needed a purple ticket, and in unison, thousands of hands clutching purple tickets would go up.

As near as we can tell, the thousands who actually made it through the purple gate either had lined up in the small hours of the morning, or had come down a different street (one not on the "approved" directions provided to us) thus bypassing the medical brouhaha that had stalled the line for so long. Many of the folks standing with us expressed frustration that people who did not follow the "rules" (loose as they were) made it in, while those who followed directions were penalized. We kept a low profile, having somehow bypassed much of the line that some of these folks spent hours in.

In any case, we have to content ourselves with having been, at least, in this historic place at this historic time. We have since watched the inaugural address on-line, and we now have the TV on to catch the parade, which is already behind schedule, as President Obama has just left the luncheon at Statuary Hall. And, finally, when local friends learned of our strife today, they called to invite us to dinner and an inaugural party here in town. So I will be signing off here shortly to dust off the tux -- we're going to make the most of our time here in town, and, by this time tomorrow, I expect we will have gotten over our disappointment and will, instead, be rejoicing in a new hope for the nation.

Speaking of this time tomorrow, our associates at the Red Cross have asked us to stop by the Ashburn hot site, where HQ is operating while the DC building is inaccessible, for a visit tomorrow, so we will head up there in the morning.

The Lay of the Land for the Laity

For those of you following along at home, here is a map of where we will be standing.



Our tickets are for the "North Standing" area, in purple. We checked it out yesterday, and it's not bad. Folks directly in front of us will be sitting, and the ground slopes up gradually, making the sight-lines pretty good. We're shooting for a space right on the letter "N", which has a clear view of the JumboTron located about where the handicap symbol is in the yellow area. There are a couple of small, bare trees that shouldn't block too much of the view in the purple area, but several large evergreens in yellow that are quite opaque. Oh, and there are about 20 Porta Potties right behind us.

What was unclear from our reconnaissance mission was where the actual swearing-in podium will be. There is scaffolding all the way up the Capitol steps, with VIP seating in the nosebleed sections. It looked like there would be room for a chorus and an orchestra/band. I thought I saw a gleaming white podium on the lower level, which would be great for us if Mr. Obama stands there. But it could be the conductor's place. (Sneak preview of event: if rousing patriotic music is played, I will cry. I always do.) We couldn't get any closer than just outside the purple area yesterday and they were still setting things up, so even with a lot of squinting we couldn't see the final layout.

Today we are bringing a small pair of binoculars, which should help. Of course, the JumboTrons won't require magnification, but part of me wants to see it all with my own eyes. (Those of us who wore thick glasses for many years consider binoculars an extension of our prescription.)

Here's the program:

Musical Selections
The United States Marine Band

Call to Order and Welcoming Remarks

The Honorable Dianne Feinstein

Invocation
Dr. Rick Warren, Saddleback Church, Lake Forest, CA

Musical Selection
Aretha Franklin

Oath of Office Administered to Vice President-elect Joseph R. Biden, Jr.
By Associate Justice of the Supreme Court
The Honorable John Paul Stevens

Musical Selection, John Williams, composer/arranger
Itzhak Perlman, Violin
Yo-Yo Ma, Cello
Gabriela Montero, Piano
Anthony McGill, Clarinet

Oath of Office Administered to President-elect Barack H. Obama
By the Chief Justice of the United States
The Honorable John G. Roberts, Jr.

Inaugural Address
The President of the United States, The Honorable Barack H. Obama

Poem
Elizabeth Alexander

Benediction
The Reverend Dr. Joseph E. Lowery

The National Anthem
The United States Navy Band "Sea Chanters"

The parade route can be found on this website. The map is interactive, so I can't just paste it into this blog post. Most likely, we will not stay for the parade. The swearing-in ceremony is at 11:30 and the parade is at 2:30. By 12:30, we'll be frozen and tired from standing for at least 3 hours, so we'll try to make our way back to the Judicial Square Metro station and head back to the bus.

Obama-mania

"One nation, indivisible, with liberty and Porta Potties for all."

We are parked at the Arlington/Fairfax Elks Lodge (map), just a few blocks from where we parked at the old Red Cross Falls Church facility a couple years ago, and, amusingly, literally right across the street from the Arlington chapter office. If anything should happen here in DC in the next day, we are well-positioned to respond.

We are the only rig here at the lodge, despite five electric hookups and easy access to transit from this location, and I am a bit surprised. Perhaps I should not be -- most Elks are extremely conservative, and we may be the only two who actually voted for Obama. We're still having to run the Webasto for a few hours each day to keep the bays from freezing, but the 50-amp hookups are keeping the batteries topped up and letting us get by with our electric heaters during the day. A steal at $15 per night.

For those who had asked previously about where we might stay here in the DC area, I can now reveal that this was Plan C. Plan A was the metered RV spaces at the Franconia/Springfield Metro station, but Metro decided they would be sweeping through every station in the system between 02:00 and 03:00 Tuesday morning to make sure no long-term vehicles were entrenched. Plan B had been the new Wal-Mart over on Kingstowne in Alexandria, which is even closer to the Blue Line terminus at Franconia/Springfield than this spot is to the Orange Line terminus at Vienna/Fairfax. That spot also had a plethora of dining options "on campus," so to speak, and even a multiplex theater, but our hopes were dashed when we saw the "No Overnight Parking" signs on our way in. We did ask, just in case, but to no avail.

We also had plans D through H, involving one other Elks lodge, two other Wal-Marts, one Unitarian church, and another Red Cross facility. So we had our bases covered, but I am glad that this option worked out. The bus stop is nearly right outside our door, and it's a ten-minute ride to the Metro station. There are also several decent dining choices just a short walk away, familiar to us from our nearby stay two years ago. The lot here has good security, and the electric power is a bonus.

We spent most of today getting our inauguration tickets. Picking up the tickets from our congressman's office actually took less than five minutes -- we "live" (domicile would be a more accurate word) in a very republican county that is almost as far away from DC as you can get -- perhaps why we were able to score these tickets in the first place. But getting into that office involved first going through security screening, and we waited close to an hour in one of the perhaps dozen or so lines at various doors into the house office complex.

We left the Elks lodge on a 9:15am bus, and it was noon by the time we had tickets in hand. At which point we headed to the basement and had an overpriced lunch in the House cafeteria, where we were somewhat disappointed to have French Fries instead of Freedom Fries -- that flap, apparently, blew over years ago and we missed the memo. After lunch we spent another two hours navigating over to where our security checkpoint will be tomorrow -- we have tickets for the North standing area inside the Purple security checkpoint. We'll actually be right behind the seated section, which is good -- some congressional ticket holders are standing as far away as the Mall. We'll actually be able to see things, other than just on the Jumbotrons that have been strategically placed throughout the area.



The entire capitol area is thick with satellite trucks, video cameras, cop cars of every stripe, mobile command posts, generators, and the trucks with the aforementioned Jumbotrons sticking out of them. Security is extremely tight, and the crowds today were barely navigable. We made the mistake of walking to Union Station to get back on the Metro (we had gotten off at Judiciary Square), and it was a complete zoo, made worse by the fact that the station lobby had been closed off for a catered event of some sort, possibly one of the balls. Adding to the confusion, people are everywhere selling Obama-related souvenirs -- hats, shirts, programs, posters, buttons, you name it.



There is a sense of excitement in the air that is palpable. Some of the Washington locals seemed jaded by it all, but most people we encountered, even the long-suffering in security lines in the bitter cold, evidenced a party mood -- think Mardi Gras, or Superbowl Sunday. Perhaps the only tourist attraction not packed to the gills today were the open-air buses, but even the folks bundled up on the top decks were dancing and shouting as they passed us. We admit to a great deal of it ourselves.

We are hoping that our dry run today will give us something of an edge tomorrow morning in the crunch to get in to the event. It helps that we are veterans of transit systems around the country, including the Metro here (which has a byzantine system of variable fares, card readers, and automatic gates that tends to confuse out-of-towners). We've already got our fare cards for tomorrow, and we noted a significant line at the dispensers this evening on our way out of the station. Nevertheless, I expect lines to board the trains here at the end of the line (and standing room only at any stations further in), and chaos to reign in general.

We've already been advised that cellular networks will not be able to keep up with the traffic tomorrow. That said, we will make every effort to keep everyone informed through our Twitter streams -- see the boxes in our sidebar on the right, and click to follow us. We are on two different cell networks, and are hoping that, between the two of them, we should be able to get some updates out. Not that we're planning on it, but, should anything go wrong, that's also where we will be yelling for help -- voice calls will be well-nigh impossible in such a circumstance.

Speaking of data traffic issues, we were off-line yesterday because we exceeded the HughesNet "Fair Access Policy" usage threshold on our satellite first thing in the morning. Among other things, that kept me from blogging yesterday, and also from finishing my transit research for Plans B-H. It caught us completely off-guard, because we're very careful about our usage; a quick check of records reveals that Louise's computer has, unbeknownst to us, been downloading a bunch of stuff every morning when she starts it up, and we're now trying to figure out exactly what that is and why.

In any case, to catch the blog up, we spent Saturday night in Roanoke Rapids, at the very same Wal-Mart and only a few feet from where we stayed on our way south (map). The new tire is holding up just fine, and we took on fuel in Dillon, SC and Carmel Church, VA, the latter at $2.12 per gallon, the least we've paid in several years. Turns out that we should have taken on more water while still in Florida, though, as all the spigots were turned off at the last two stops. There is water here at the lodge if it gets critical.

No more blog posts now until the next presidential administration. See you on Twitter.

Tired and cold in SC

We are at the Wal-Mart in Walterboro, South Carolina (map).

It was 23° here when we went to bed last night, and the same temperature when we got up this morning. I suspect it dropped somewhere into the teens overnight. We ran the Webasto all night to keep the bays warm; even so, when I went to walk the dog this morning, I discovered we were completely out of air. Apparently the compressor quit, between being overwhelmed by the air loss and hard-starting due to the cold. This afternoon, I'll pull it out and check the oil, just in case.

We had an uneventful drive here from Jax on I-95. However, we became increasingly concerned about the condition of our right tag tire, whose tread was wearing down perilously close to the belts. Long-time readers of this blog know that, two years ago, a careless tire shop bent the tag axle on that side, and we've been unable to persuade anyone to replace the axle for us in all that time, even though I managed to acquire a used but serviceable replacement.

That wheel position, consequently, eats tires, and we last dealt with this about a year ago, while we were racing across the south to respond to the wild fires in California. On that trip, under the gun as we were, we plunked down good money for a pair of brand new Firestones, replacing the left and right tags simultaneously. A bit more than a year and perhaps 20,000 miles or so later, the left tire still looks new, whereas the right one had plenty of tread on the inside shoulder, but was worn to the nub on the outside shoulder.



I've been monitoring the tire pretty carefully, and we noticed in Fort Lauderdale that the tread was near critical. Ever the optimist, I was hoping I could nurse it to DC, and deal with the whole issue after we were out from under any time pressure. On yesterday's pre-drive inspection, I grew concerned that it was not going to make it much more than another day, and checking it during a mid-day rest stop confirmed it. Since it was Friday, I was concerned that we'd have difficulty finding a tire if we waited until the morning, and I resigned myself to spending a couple of hours on the Internet and the phone finding an open tire shop with our size in stock.

Sometimes you just get lucky, and, on our way in to Walterboro we spotted a billboard for Hills Tire Service. It was 4:30, and a quick call revealed they were open until 6. We were able to pull right into the shop, and I asked what they had for used tires in our size. In another stroke of good luck, they happened to have a pair of the exact same Firestones we already had on the tags. The guy quoted me $125 and I talked him down to $100 for the better of the two, apparently take-offs from a fire apparatus, with an acceptable date code from 2006 and close to 70% tread still left (fire departments, generally, do not screw around with their tires).

It was a flat $24 for mounting, and, as often happens, I had to lend them my bottle jack to lift the axle, as their shop unit was too tall to fit. The whole changeout took less than half an hour, and we were back out the door with more-or-less matching tag tires, $138 poorer. (They charged me a disposal fee for the old tire, and I wasn't going to argue that they had already collected the disposal fee from the fire department.) We were just in time on this tire, as the belt was just starting to show through.



By this time it was sunset, but it was just a five minute drive here to the Wal-Mart. We ate at the only establishment in walking distance, the chinese buffet in the adjacent strip mall. We actually like these sorts of places, but we always have to remember that "all you can eat" is not "all you should eat."

Today we will continue north, stopping at the Flying-J in Dillon for fuel, and ending up somewhere near the Virginia border for the night.

Last stop in Florida before the icebox

We are at a Wal-Mart in Jacksonville, Florida (map).

We could easily have pressed on yesterday most of the way through Georgia, which would have evened out the daily mileage somewhat. But after studying the weather reports yesterday morning, we decided to stay in Florida last night, which seems to have been the nadir of the current deep-freeze across the US, and trade longer days for less time in the frozen north.

That gave us the opportunity to have dinner at the University Club here in Jacksonville, on the top of the Riverplace tower, with a stunning view of the river. We picked this Wal-Mart because it was a single bus ride away from downtown. Shortly after parking, security came over to check on us, and to let us know that the store closed at 11, and that he thought this was a "rough area." Hmm... the bus shelter had not a single grafitto, and the neighborhood is relatively clean. We wonder, sometimes, what some of these folks think of as "rough," and whether they've ever been to, say, Detroit, or New York, or LA.

In any case, we had a pleasant enough stay. Temperatures dropped below freezing last night, and our air compressor has been running quite a bit to keep up with the cold-induced leakage, but at least it appears that the coolant leakage has been rectified with the replacement of the suspect hose. Wal-Mart had the mailer I need to send in the oil sample that I drew yesterday in for analysis, and now I just need a post office to get it sent out.

Tonight we should be somewhere around Savannah or so, and tomorrow, unto the breach -- we're already pulling out the heavy coats, hats, and gloves. I also expect to have to run the Webasto full-time starting tonight, as opposed to the ~2 hours or so in the morning that is our usual cold-weather ritual.

Shivering in Orlando

We're back at our secret stealth-boondocking spot in Orlando (map). Since the Red Cross lease on this lot expired at the end of December, we no longer have an undeniable right to be here. However, when we stayed here twice last month, we noticed both times that several trucks pulled in and spent the night. Clearly the word is out, at least among the local truckers, and we figured sauce for the goose...

We had actually tried to find what our guide claims to be an Elks lodge with overnight parking about two miles from here, but clearly that lodge closed down years ago. This was our backup option, and it worked out fine. We took a scooter out last night for a quick jaunt over to Carrabbas for dinner, and this morning I was able to get a bunch of things done in the engine bay, as today is the last relatively warm day we'll see until after the inaguration. Specifically, I needed to re-test the coolant and top up the SCAs, and it turns out I also needed to add glycol, since we'll certainly be in well-below freezing temps in DC. I also topped up engine and transmission oils and checked the belts and hoses.

Tuesday night we had another nice dinner with Martin and Stephanie, along with their local friends Armando and Susan. They were all nice enough to meet us at Olive Garden, which (honest) turned out to be the closest restaurant to the RV park which was still open at 9:30, when we finished our Red Cross conference call. As of that time, Martin's Tiara Sovran was still on the hard, but they were talking about splashing it Wednesday, after replacing an exhaust elbow that had been eaten away by electrolysis. I have to say that the Tiara's azimuth drives are quite whizzy, but they sure seem to be a maintenance headache. Poor Martin, I think, has been in the shop more than on the water in the three years since he bought the boat. Unless they improve tremendously, I think we'll stick with a more traditional propulsion system whenever we get our boat.

Yesterday we had an uneventful drive from Naples, and got our last licks in on two-lane, as we bypassed the Tampa area on Florida 31 and US-17, right back through Arcadia. Today, our goal is Jacksonville, which is really close, but we want to wait out the coldest day of the freeze currently gripping the country someplace where it will hover above freezing (mostly). It will be a few degrees warmer still right here (although we did hit the low 40s last night), but we don't want to have to push it too hard tomorrow. From here, we will be on the Interstate all the way to DC.

Neapolitan Neoplan

We are at the Rock Creek RV "Resort" in Naples, Florida (map).

I put that term in quotes because, while they are certainly charging resort rates, at $50 per night plus tax, the place is just half a notch above "trailer park" on our scale. The vast majority of the spaces are rented seasonally, and clearly many are on long-term leases, with the predictable consequence that the place is filling up with decrepit single-wides and travel trailers that have not been moved in most of a decade. While many units are well-kept, and there is something of a community block-party atmosphere, it's definitely not our cup of tea. It does not help that we are not here for the party, or that we are, bar none, the youngest people here by a full generation.

We're here because we are visiting friends who are staying at a hotel downtown while they are waiting for their boat to be splashed, and this was the closest RV park, at just about two miles, making for an easy scooter ride. Naples, being something of a resort destination, has outlawed parking virtually everywhere, and there is no Elks lodge in town, leaving us no choice but to stay in a commercial park. Apparently, half a C-note is the going rate here in-season.

We arrived yesterday afternoon, after a pleasant drive down "alligator alley." We got something of a late start from Fort Lauderdale, as the coolant hose replacement took a good five hours at Atlantic Ford. We ended up putting the old coolant back in, but I insisted on testing it, and they managed to soak me for $35 for a package of five test strips. Bah. A bottle of ten strips was just $15 at the Detroit dealer next door, where I went to buy the SCA package, as the molybdate was reading low for the nitrite levels. I decided not to have them do any of the other things on my quick checklist, such as sample the oil (I also bought a test kit next door, and will pull the sample myself in the next few days).

We had a nice dinner with our friends Martin and Steph last night, and will have one last meal with them this evening after our 7pm-9pm Red Cross class, which Louise is teaching and I am auditing. Tomorrow we will start our journey north to DC for the inauguration. The detour here to Naples has used up our buffer of Florida warmth, and we will pretty much have to slog to DC on the freeway, with the exception of one stretch of US17 between Fort Myers and Orlando to bypass the Tampa/St. Pete metropolis. We should be somewhere between Orlando and Jacksonville tomorrow night, near Savannah Friday night, and near the NC/SC state line Saturday, after which we will go into stealth mode until after the inauguration.

I know I promised here a report on our trawler charter, and I still intend to get to that, but my available time for blogging has been limited for the past few days. Stay tuned. And again a big thanks to our Fort Lauderdale hosts Steve and Harriet, and their neighbors Frank and Harriet who watched the pets while we were cruising -- we had a great time staying with you, and look forward to connecting someplace on the road.

Ahoy!

We are back on dry land and once again aboard Odyssey, still parked at a friend's. There is much to recount about our time aboard the Miami Mermaid, which I will save for another post, perhaps tomorrow. Rather, for those not interested in our nautical exploits, I will herewith update our schedule:

Steve leveraged his extensive local knowledge and contacts to get us an appointment first thing Monday morning at Atlantic Ford Truck to get our leaky coolant hose replaced. This is a critical item; it's down low in the system, and so we can easily leak most of our coolant out here. Also, the hose is 20+ years old, and could rupture at any moment. We need to deal with this before we drive anyplace else. Consequently, we are here in Steve's driveway until Monday morning.

We've desperately needed to do laundry for a few days now, and Steve offered us use of his machines today, so that chore is now behind us. Louise marveled at how large residential machines have become, rivaling the large commercial ones she favors when we stop at the laundromat. Also, I called the Dania post office this morning, and my eBay-purchased computer parts along with two packages of our mail from Washington were all in, so this afternoon I picked them up on the scooter. That leaves us ready-to-roll just as soon as the coolant hose is fixed.

In other news, our good friends Martin and Steph from California have arrived in Naples, coincident with the arrival by truck of Martin's 43' Tiara yacht. The boat is on the hard now, but should splash Monday or Tuesday. As long as we are within striking distance of Naples (~100 miles or so), we will be heading over there after the hose repair to visit with them before they embark on a grand cruise through the Caribbean. I am hoping (hint, hint, Martin) that the boat will be in the water when we arrive, and we'll get to do a short test cruise with them. We've been on his boat before, and I am taken with the whizzy azimuth propulsion system.

So I expect the earliest we will be heading north is around Wednesday or so. I want to leave plenty of time for a leisurely drive to DC, with perhaps a visit or two thrown in. We skipped some folks on the way south due to schedule and illness. And, yes, we've read the increasingly dire warnings about driving into the DC region for the inauguration, and, no, we're still not telling anyone where we plan to park (or what backup options A, B, and C are).

In a few minutes we will head out to dinner with our hosts. Tomorrow I have a list of household cleanup items, and, with luck, I'll have enough time to post the story of our Trawler School Charter here.

Early arrival

We are at the home of fellow Neoplan Spaceliner owner Steve, in Fort Lauderdale. As usual, no map link when we are staying at someone's home.

Our plan after leaving Arcadia yesterday had been to drive a couple of hours and stop for the night in Clewiston, near lake Okechobee, where our guides said there was a Wal-Mart supercenter which my on-line resources indicated allowed parking. Unfortunately, after arriving, we saw signs clearly posted at the lot entrances stating "no overnight RV parking." At 2:30ish in the afternoon, there were two rigs in the lot, as well as a half dozen trucks despite the "no truck parking" wording on the same sign.

We generally don't park when the signs forbid it, even if a visit to the store manager might result in permission. For one thing, other customers will think you're breaking the rules, even if you have permission, and that does not help RVer reputation in general. More importantly, we take such signs as a signal that the community does not welcome us, and we prefer not to spend any money at all in such communities. So we continued on down the road.

No problem -- we have a backup plan. Our 2007 Elks guide indicates that there is a lodge in Plantation which allows RV parking in their lot. Perfect -- the Plantation location, while another two hours down the road, is just a couple of miles off our route. We arrived there around 4:30 or so.

What we found, however, was an empty lot, with a sign indicating that it would soon be part of the neighboring city park. There were no signs at all that an Elks lodge had ever been there, and, when I checked later, satellite imagery from 2005 showed an empty lot as well. We called the number for the lodge listed in our guide, and got a "disconnected" message. (It turns out, on subsequent research, that the lodge moved to Sunrise several years ago, and no longer offers parking.)

With rapidly dwindling options, and not much daylight left, I called Steve and asked if we could arrive a day ahead of schedule. We pulled in to his driveway just before sunset. After kicking tires and swapping war stories for an hour or so, we all went to dinner at a local favorite of his nearby.

So we are now settled in for a week. We have arrangements made to watch all the pets, and Monday we will start our trawler school cruise. I'm certain we will not have internet access once we leave the dock, so I will likely not even bring the computer. I will try to tweet our updates from my BlackBerry whenever we have cell service, and I will get email that way, too, as available. You will not otherwise hear from us until we return on Thursday or Friday, although I may make one more post here before we depart. Keep an eye on the twitter feed for updates.

Happy new year

We are still at the Turner Agri-Civic Center in Arcadia. The Bussin' 2009 rally officially ended yesterday, but Louise is once again under the weather (really), with a cold this time, and we did not feel like packing everything up, so we just stayed an extra night. Besides, we had gone to the trouble of setting up and filling the hot tub (our 175' of hose barely making it to the nearest spigot), and staying here gave us one more evening to use it.

It was a nice rally, and I finally got to meet many of the folks that I converse with weekly on the bus boards. The local paper did a nice article, and Odyssey made the cover of the second section. My electrical seminar, all three hours of it, went off without a hitch -- and anyone looking for the handouts can now find them here.

We have nailed down our Fort Lauderdale parking arrangements with a fellow bus enthusiast, and we are expected there tomorrow. We'll be packing up and heading out of here by around mid-day, and I expect to be in Clewiston tonight, assuming we can find a place to park.