Wally-docking close to the nest

We are at the Wal-Mart in Springdale, Arkansas (map). Actually, more precisely, we are in the parking lot of an abandoned big-box hardware store adjacent to the Wal-Mart, which is apparently now being used by the company as a training or prototyping site for Sam's Club layouts. But the enormous empty parking lot allowed us to be a little further away from the store traffic.

Across the street about a block away, in a run-down motel, is a hole-in-the-wall Thai restaurant, Pad Thai, where we had some of the best Thai food we've ever tasted. Too bad their beer-and-wine license is expired, but still, it was a find. This morning we will take advantage of the large Wal-Mart to stock up on supplies.

Once again we did not get very far yesterday. Although we got a much earlier start, around 1ish, we slowed down a bit and took our time, naturally choosing the much narrower and more winding Scenic 412-A in preference to the Cherokee Turnpike toll road, 412. But the real killer was hitting a Lowe's right on 412 in Siloam Springs, just across the Arkansas state line.

I've been looking for a convenient Lowe's for a bit over a week now. As happens about every six months or so, one of our Rainbird irrigation valves that we use to return fresh water to the tank, as we "pre-heat" the water for the shower, started leaking -- so far, this has been 100% due to calcium build-up on the diaphragm from taking on hard water. I already had a rebuild kit (although, in a pinch, simply removing the diaphragm and cleaning off the calcium crystals also works), but this time I wanted to add a manual stop valve in line with the solenoid one while I had the kitchen drawers out to rebuild it. This way, the next time the solenoid starts leaking, I can simply shut off the return line until I get the chance to repair it -- as it stands now, we need to either turn off the hot water to the fixture at the manifold, requiring trips to the bay to turn it off and on, or we need to remember to turn off the water pump between uses, otherwise we end up with no hot water, and no cold water either.

Back when I did this with the kitchen sink return line, adding a stop valve was a snap -- Lowe's carries an in-line valve with PEX fittings, and I simply cut the PEX and installed the valve. Unfortunately, there was not enough accessible PEX line upstream of the shower valve inside the cabinet, and when I returned from the store with the ~4.5" long valve assembly, I realized there was no way to install it. Thus I was glad I had opted to do the work right there in the Lowe's parking lot, as I ended up right back in the store to return the PEX valve and spend 20 minutes in the plumbing aisle noodling through an alternative solution.

I ended up with a brass ball valve and a "close nipple", which together were only 3" or so in length, and I set to installing it right against the existing Rainbird valve, then shortening the PEX and reusing the adapter fitting. It took quite a while to get it all in place, working on my back in cramped quarters, and then, of course, it started leaking around one of the joints, so it all had to come back apart, get re-doped, and be re-installed. The second time was the charm, and I was able to wrap up, going back into the store to return some extra parts that were not needed.

(No photo of this project. The valves are crammed in behind a wood support brace behind two drawers under the stove, and I simply could not place the camera anywhere that allowed a focused shot. If I can't even take a photo, try to imagine Sean's contortions to even install the valve! Try not to imagine the swearing involved. -Louise)

All in all, though, we ended up spending close to three hours there at Lowe's, and it was well past six when we rolled into Springdale, so we opted to just stop here rather than press on. Sprindale/Fayetteville is a stone's throw from Wal-Mart's headquarters in Bentonville, so I suppose it is not surprising to find this unusual facility here, which actually made this a more comfortable stop than the usual Wal-Mart.

Today we will continue our slow roll east. We have our eye on Investigation Area 94 in the Atlantic, but unless and until it becomes an actual tropical cyclone, there is no need for us to work towards a faster route just yet.

Rehab at the Hard Rock

We are at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino just east of Tulsa, Oklahoma (map).

They have a nice parking lot here for buses and RVs with several long angled spaces for pull-throughs, and a couple of parallel spaces along the grass, where we are. There is also a dump station and a fresh water spigot, along with a trash receptacle.

The casino has been here quite a while, expanding after a 2004 referendum that relaxed rules on native American gaming in the state. Had we stayed here just a month ago, it would still have been the Cherokee Resort and Casino, which is what was described in our guide, and I suspect the place would have been much less crowded.

Since August 1st, however, the casino has been branded as a Hard Rock property (it is still owned and operated by the Cherokee), which, of course, made it an absolute zoo on a Friday night. Since it's only carried the Hard Rock brand for a month, it seems like all of Tulsa is still working its way here on the weekends just to see the place; I'm quite certain that many folks who would never have visited the "Cherokee Casino" (including many non-gamblers) are coming now just because it is the Hard Rock. No word yet on whether they will be hosting overpriced pool parties for hipsters that need to be relieved of their cash.

We wanted to have dinner here last night, but there was a 45-60 minute wait to get into Toby Keith's, the buffet (seafood night) was a madhouse, and even the upscale 19th-floor steak house, McGill's, could not seat us for an hour or so. We ended up sitting in the bar at McGills, which was at least non-smoking and where they serve a light appetizer menu. We opted to just make a meal out of the apps, and we were in and out before either our table reservation came up at either place. Louise remarked that we could probably sell our pager and place in line to someone just walking up to Toby Keith's on our way out.

Tulsa is not all that far from where we started yesterday, but we got a very late start, not actually rolling out of Firelake until after 4pm. Louise had a working phone meeting at 11 that ran over an hour, then had some additional work to wrap up on the 'net, and by the time we had lunch, re-checked the National Hurricane Center forecast, and ruminated about where we should head, we did not pull out of our free-hookup parking space until after 2.

We then rolled over to the poorly designed dump station, where the sewer inlet is a pipe that protrudes a good 6" above the sidewalk, which in turn is 6" above the street. I had to high-boy Odyssey just to be able to dump, and even then getting the hose to completely empty was impossible, and a couple gallons of gray water spilled onto the street as we struggled to disconnect. Suffice it to say, dumping took longer than normal.

We then started rolling to the diesel pumps, only to stall, out of fuel, fifteen feet from the dump. (I knew we had rolled in to the place on the last of the tank, but I did not realize how close we were.) That necessitated Louise walking over to the fuel station with our 2-gallon can, and what should have been a five minute project to get the engine re-primed. (The casino shuttle driver took pity on her and gave her a lift across the large parking lot.) Unfortunately, whoever last put the bowl back on our fuel separator must have tightened the top cap with a wrench (it is supposed to be only hand-tight -- the wrench is only for loosening the cap), and several of the plastic wrench lands literally broke off as I tried in vain to loosen it. I finally had to remove the entire bowl, then it took two of us working together to get the cap off.

When I was finally able to get the bowl back in place and a quart of fuel into the separator, that was plenty to get us over to the diesel islands, where it then took another half an hour to put 265 gallons in at $2.429 (with $.03 players club discount). In that time, the clerk had somehow charged someone else's fuel to my card, and sorting out the error required another ten minutes in the c-store. So after dumping, priming, and fueling it was 4:00, and we still had to roll over to the gift shop to return our parking pass. While Louise was in the casino dropping off the pass, at least she was able to grab a dish of soft-serve ice cream from the complimentary dispensers (coffee, tea, and soft drinks also provided). (Ice cream makes any bus problem easier to bear. -Louise)

It was a great stop, all things considered, and we will certainly keep it in mind the next time we come across I-40. If that's in the next 90 days, we will definitely stop, because we each still have $10 in match play on our cards that we did not use on this visit.

From Firelake we proceeded due north until we hit old US-66 (now Oklahoma 66), wich roughly parallels the I-44 toll road. That brought us all the way to Tulsa, and between the fuel fiasco and only a couple hours of driving, we were pretty much ready to be done. Our options were an Elks lodge, a Wal-Mart, and this casino, and we opted for this place as it would mean we would already be out of Tulsa when we get rolling today.

Speaking of which, Tropical Depression Danny has fizzled to the point where it no longer presents a threat that would require our services, and so we are slowing our pace back down. We've bailed off the Interstate system, which long-time readers know is our least favorte mode of travel, and are angling to the north, where temperatures are a bit cooler.

Today we will continue east on US-412 into Arkansas, and I expect a pretty drive through the Ozarks.

All the way to Fire Lake

We are at the Firelake Grand Casino, about 25 miles east of Oklahoma City on I-40 (map). I am not, however, wearing my gypsy leathers.

I wrote here yesterday that our goal for last night was Oklahoma City, where diesel could be had for $2.459, and we knew we could find parking and a place to grab dinner. While we were on the road, a comment came in for that post on my Blackberry from long-time readers Steve and Carol, suggesting that just 25 miles further down the road was this place, with free 50-amp hookups, and $2.439 diesel (with players club card) to boot.

Now I was really not keen on going further than OKC, especially considering we'd have to plow through it at rush hour. Plus, if we decided to angle north, I-44 would be the favored route. However, I am above all a cheapskate, and the lure of free hookups, cheap diesel, and discounted casino food easily overshadowed another 40 minutes of driving, which is what it took by the time we muddled our way through traffic. We did better than anyone westbound, though -- freeway construction had traffic in every direction but east at a complete standstill all the way through the city.

After we got settled in and hooked up, we headed inside for players' cards, a free three-day RV parking pass (renewable, apparently, indefinitely), and a nice prime rib dinner at the steak house. After dinner we met Steve and Carol over at Odyssey for cocktails, conversation, and show-and-tell. We had a nice evening, and really enjoyed meeting them after several near-misses, including one wherein we literally rolled right past their photography studio in Meeker a couple of years ago.

Carol is a very accomplished professional photographer, and she insisted on coming over this morning and taking a few casual portraits of us. Later, Steve dropped off a CD with all the shots, which make our feeble efforts with our little point-and-shoot Canon pale in comparison, rank amateurs that we are. I liked this one, with Opal:


Photo: Carol Dwyer Photography
Contact: caroldwyer@hughes.net

Now that we are here and enjoying unlimited air conditioning, I have to say I am at a loss as to where we should head next. Danny is fizzling out; the current track has it missing the Outer Banks by a fair margin, and it will likely be only a depression if anything at all by the time it reaches New England. Whereas the fires in the west are picking up in intensity, with 500 homes evacuated this morning in southern California, and new threats in Monterey County. Where we sit right now, we are almost squarely in the middle of the country, and could be on either coast in a matter of two (long) days.

Yellow

We are at the Elks Lodge in Amarillo, Texas (map).

Tuesday night I suggested we would be somewhere around Albuquerque Wednesday, chilling out and tackling the project backlog. However by yesterday morning, Atlantic Investigation Area 92 had morphed into Tropical Storm Danny, and we decided we'd best keep moving east in case it takes the westerly edge of the forecast track and makes landfall in the Outer Banks as a hurricane.

By the time we figured out what we were doing, we got a fairly late start out of the Route 66 casino, and we set our sights here on Amarillo. There are a number of places we could have stopped closer to the freeway, but we needed water, so we came here to the Elks, where dry camping is free (we made a small donation for the water), and we could have a 30-amp hookup for $10 if we needed it (we did not). They also appear to have a nice pool here, which we will not get the chance to try.

This morning we spent a couple hours on a Red Cross conference call, and have since been on the phone with follow-up calls. We should be back on the road shortly, with a target for tonight of Oklahoma City. We will be nearly out of fuel by then, and at $2.459, some of the cheapest diesel in the country will be found there. It's hard to believe we paid $1.969 just a few weeks ago.

Tomorrow morning we will sync back up with the NHC forecast track to determine if we need to continue east on I-40, or can angle northwards a bit to stay in a little cooler weather. If it starts to look like Danny will miss the Carolinas, then Massachusetts or Maine becomes a more likely destination anyway.

Photo by gravitywave, used under a Creative Commons license.

Closing the loop

We are once again at the Route 66 Casino (map) west of Albuquerque, New Mexico, a little over a month after we spent four days here with a broken turbocharger. In that month, the temperature has dropped 30 degrees; when we left it was 105°, and when we pulled in this afternoon it was 75°.

This morning found us at the Wal-Mart in Gallup, NM (map), after an uneventful and pleasant drive yesterday from our dusty digs on the outskirts of Flagstaff. The hardy valve cap seems to have completely cured the air loss from the right tag, and ought to hold now until I can replace the valve core in the next day or two. The compressor jury-rig also did quite well.

We knew Gallup would be pleasantly cool, and we needed supplies at Wal-Mart anyway. It turned out that there was also a Home Depot right next door, which would be perfect for getting the air system back together and buttoned up. We had a nice dinner at Applebees across the parking lot, and we also walked over to the dollar store for reading glasses -- I'm very hard on my glasses, and I go through them just as fast if I pay $10 or $1, so I pretty much stick to the dollar store for reading glasses these days. A perfect place to stop for the night and get some errands done.

This morning I hoofed over to the Home Depot, nominally to pick up an air chuck for the external bus air connection. During the tire air-up fiasco, we had tried to plug the air hose into this fitting once the compressor failed, hoping to use Odyssey's on-board air pressure to fill the tire. Unfortunately, the chuck had pretty much corroded stuck since the last time we had to use it (three years ago? four?), and my efforts to free it up with liberal amounts of WD-40 and a pair of Robogrips were successful only to a small degree. Fresh brass universal chucks are $3 at HD, and I decided to just bite the bullet and replace it.

While I was rummaging around in the air compressor accessory aisle, I ran into a 0-125 psi regulator, complete with gauge (which I don't need) for $21, and even though I had already decided to just keep the one that I had jury-rigged and hack the front panel to accomodate it, this one was much closer dimensionally to the one that failed, and 125 psi to boot, and the price was right, even if it was a cheap-o Huffy model (one notch higher than Campbell-Hausfield, or maybe lower depending on whom you ask).

And so it was that I ended up spending most of the afternoon right there in the Wal-Mart lot wrapping up the compressor project. Since the jury-rig was working fine, I had intended to put this off a day or two, but having bought parts at HD I wanted to get them in to make sure they fit and worked properly. The Huffy regulator was not a drop-in replacement, but it was close enough that I only needed to enlarge and elongate the three holes in the front panel slightly with my handy Dremel tool, then ease some of the plastic where the regulator pokes through. Once the fittings were mounted up and the plastic retaining nut threaded back over the regulator, you can't even tell the panel has been modified, and the compressor is back together and sturdy as ever. Now have a spare 0-160 psi air gauge in my parts box, and we can once again use the compressor to air up our tires.

Between getting a late start to the morning, having lost an hour when we crossed the Arizona border (Arizona does not observe DST), and spending three hours on the compressor, we did not roll out of Gallup until past 3:00, so we set our sights here, where we knew we could get a decent meal at a good price, and a quiet spot to park, just a couple hours from Gallup. We did divert off I-40 for 25 miles, though, to loop through the Acoma nation and see the Sky City Pueblo. We spent about an hour there, exploring the museum and taking in the surroundings, but we had missed the last guided tour to the mesa itself by about half an hour. Still, we very much enjoyed our visit.

Photo by puroticorico, used under a Creative Commons license.

We are now fairly well positioned for any forthcoming disaster relief work. We can easily be anywhere in the eastern seaboard hurricane belt within three days, and we'll have at least that much warning for anything that might develop in the Atlantic. We're a day or two from anywhere in the Gulf coast. We're also still in striking distance of any western wildfire-related activity.

A more ideal location would be Amarillo, Texas, another 300 miles east. However, temperatures there (and anyplace further east or south) are still higher than our comfortable boondocking threshold. So we will probably not head much further east than Albuquerque, just half an hour from here, or maybe Clines Corners, the last hillcrest before the plains. It's all downhill from there, and we prefer to remain at the higher elevations until we have some sense we will be needed elsewhere.

It's possible we might stay another night here at Route 66, but then we will need water, and Albuquerque will be in order. That will be a good place for me to tackle the project backlog, which has been at a standstill due to my computer failure as well as these other things that keep cropping up, such as the tires and the compressor.

Speaking of the computer failure, I was able to get full Windows to boot finally by replacing a few more corrupt files. It still kept hanging until I turned paging off -- even the page file is having problems. Once I could boot, I was able to run diagnostics on the disk, which promptly failed, so it looks like the drive is bad. Before I can take the next step of either trying to correct the problems with the manufacturer-supplied software, or replacing the drive (it's under warranty till 2014), I need to first get all the data off it. To continue working until the drive is fixed or replaced, I will need to move the operating system as well, from that drive to this one. With only two extra drives to work with, and all three drives already full of "stuff," this is a little like the puzzle the Towers of Hanoi. I suspect it will take me several more days to get to the point where the drive can be returned.

Unenchanted Forest

We are parked just off a dirt road, Forest 518, at the junction of two high-clearance roads, in the Coconino National Forest (map), just a few miles west of Flagstaff, Arizona.

We did not make it far yesterday. In a sort of comedy of errors, I carefully observed both new tires during my pre-drive walk-around, even thumping them with a hammer (yes, I know -- not a reliable indicator of proper inflation). No sooner had we gotten onto the Interstate, though, when the tire pressure monitor system reported the right tag to be 40+ psi low, at around 70 psi. We had noticed a couple psi drop while driving the day before, and were mildly concerned the tire might have a slow leak; this confirmed it.

We pulled off in Seligman to take care of it. I ended up parking in a lot by one of the kitschy Route-66 joints, hauled out the air hose, and plugged it in to our on-board Hitachi electric compressor. Usually, we have the compressor set on 85 psi or so, which is all we need to keep the suspension up, operate the air door, and flush the toilet. To fill a tire, I need to crank the regulator back up to the compressor's maximum output of 135 psi.

As I was turning the knob on the regulator, it popped off in my hand, hitting me in the chest and landing on the ground. It turns out the plastic housing had become brittle, and the increased tension on the regulator spring caused the top of the housing to break clean off, sending the knob flying under spring pressure. With no regulator spring tension, we could not get any air out of the compressor, even though there was 135 psi in the tanks.

By holding the spring in with the broken knob by hand, we were able to get the tire back up to 85 psi or so (it only requires 90 for the load on that wheel), and we then limped along to the Chevron truck stop at the east end of town, where they had an air hose that could finish the job (most auto-only gas stations have their air systems set too low to fill a heavy duty tire). It turned out that the leak is in the stem valve, and I've stopped it temporarily with a stout metal valve stem cap with a rubber insert; as soon as I can, I will replace the valve core.

Knowing that the very next thing we'd have to do is fix the compressor -- so many things require air, and we'd have to start up the main engine every hour or so without the electric compressor available -- we decided to stop in Flagstaff, in case we needed a store or a shop. As Flagstaff proper is RV-unfriendly, we ended up here, in the National Forest, at basically the first place we could park Odyssey for the night. Under normal circumstances, we would have driven further into the forest in search of a more scenic and relaxing spot, but I wanted the easiest access to town if I needed to run in on the scooter for something.

Now, it happens that I had an air pressure regulator lying around, almost identical to the one on the compressor, except it is a 5-100psi unit instead of 5-135. Unfortunately, it was broken -- it had been part of the air toilet installation (the toilet requires the air pressure to be regulated at precisely 60 psi), and it had failed only a about a year after we hit the road. Not wanting to fiddle with the regulator, we simply stopped at Grainger and picked up a (slightly different) new one for around $12. I set the old one aside because I figured it just needed a cleaning, or a new diaphragm.

So after we got settled in here, I pulled out the spare, disassembled it, and cleaned and lubed it with WD-40. After fiddling with it for a few minutes, I finally got it to stop leaking, then set to disassemblng the compressor to swap regulators. After several unkind thoughts about Hitachi's design engineers (the thing seems to have been optimized for appearance over maintenance, unforgiveable on what amounts to a contractor tool), I managed to get the spare regulator in place, and all is working again.

There are two problems with this regulator. One is that it only goes to 100 psi -- fine for our daily use, but it means we can't get our tires above that pressure if needed; probably not a big factor, since 100 psi is enough to get us to a proper shop, and we can use the engine-driven compressor to get up to 120 psi in a pinch. The other is that it is just enough different from the stock item that it will not fit into the cutout on the compressor's control panel.

For the time being, I have things jury-rigged around the front panel. Even if I buy a 135 psi regulator, though, I think it will have the same problem unless I order the exact replacement form Hitachi for double the price. I'll probably end up just enlarging the cutout on the panel, in which case we might as well just use this regulator until we find some reason to replace it.

So, not really needing anything from Flagstaff, we will head back onto the Interstate today. The closest Grainger, which is really the quickest place to get a regulator, turns out to be in Albuquerque anyway. We'll probably make a quick stop at the Wal-Mart here though, to pick up a few grocery items and a valve core remover, since I can't find the one I know I have someplace.

For anyone following along with the saga of my computer, I was able to identify a number of corrupted DLL's using Microsoft's WinDiff utility, and I can now boot into safe mode after replacing those DLLs. Still can't get the full monty to run, but I am making progress. It is now looking to me like the hard disk itself is failing, although many CHKDSK passes have found no problems. I think I need to get a better disk checking utility.

Tonight we should be somewhere in the vicinity of Gallup, New Mexico, barring any further tire issues.

Seeking reader assistance -- XP gurus

OK, I am finally at my wit's end (Louise might disagree with the "finally" part of that statement), and I need to make a plea for help. The following is arcane, technical, and probably of little interest to anyone who is not a computer jockey, so if that's not you, feel free to skip this post.

Let me start by saying that I am a fair XP jockey myself -- it's what I do for the Red Cross, and back in the dark ages, before Microsoft moved out of command-line operating systems, systems programming and timesharing monitor internals were my lingua franca. I also have a degree in Computer Engineering, which means I ought to be able to figure this stuff out on my own, but there comes a time when one is so far out of the loop that it just pays to ask someone more current for help.

The problem started a few days ago, when I went to "wake up" the laptop after it had been idle for a while. I have my power settings such that the screen goes dark after a while, and my screensaver set to prompt for a password. So when I moved the mouse, the screen backlight came on, but the screen remained black, with no background and no password box. This is on a Gateway MX6930 laptop with XP MCE at SP3.

I power cycled the machine, and since then it will not boot. On one attempt, I got a BSOD for a Session 3 Initialization Failure, however, mostly it gets past the splash screen, brings the background up, and displays a dialog box saying that Windows is starting up. It then just sits there.

Booting into Safe Mode, with or without command prompt, yields the same result. It gets as far as a black background, release level across the top, "Safe Mode" in the four corners, and a mouse cursor, which I can move around the screen. The shell never seems to come up, and the system does not respond to Ctrl-Alt-Del.

I know the hardware is fine, because I am using it right now. I upgraded the disk drive a few months ago, and I set aside the one I removed (still fully loaded with the OS and all my files from back then) as a backup. Putting it back into the machine, everything works fine, and all hardware diagnostics are normal.

Nor does there seem to be a problem with the subject hard drive itself -- it mounts fine using a USB adapter, and CHKDSK finds no problems with it. I can look at all the files, and Windows seems to be intact.

I have no Windows install disk -- only a destructive "recovery CD." However, using instructions found on the Internet (just like making a bomb) and the "bootable diskette image" available for download from Microsoft, I was able to construct a bootable CD to launch the Recovery Console. That, too, runs normally, and none of the tools thereon can find any problem.

Unfortunately, one thing the stand-alone Recovery Console can not do is run the System File Checker -- for that, Windows needs to be running. So I am stuck here. I either have a corrupt system file someplace, or a bad start-up setting either in the registry or in a configuration file. If I could just figure out exactly where that is, I can access the disk to repair it, either in Recovery Console, or by mounting the drive from a working system.

If this sounds familiar to you, and you have some suggestions for where I should be looking, I am all ears. If I had a clue, then I could start comparing what's on the disk to one of the three other working configurations we have here on board. Alternatively, if you know of a way to get SFC to check the files, either from the stand-alone Recovery Console or by mounting the drive on another working system, let me know.

My last resort (because it will be a huge amount of time and work) will be to try to create a complete XP installation CD from one of the running installations, in much the same way I created the Recovery Console CD, then slipstream SP2 and the required SATA drivers onto it, and launch it to do a "repair installation" of XP. That will then require me to reinstall SP3, but I am also nervous about what else might break once I have completed a repair install -- Microsoft says all applications and settings will remain intact, but I distrust them in this regard.

Post your suggestions here in the comments, or you can email me directly. Thanks for any and all assistance.

Photo by ebbandflo_pomomama

Ahhh... cool at last

We are at a small turnout at the junction of Anvil Rock Road and Fort Rock Ranch Road, just off I-40 about 13 miles west of Seligman, Arizona (map). It was a dark, quiet, solitary spot, with only perhaps a dozen vehicles passing by on Anvil Rock, and far enough from the Interstate to muffle the sounds. It was listed in our Day's End directory, along with two spots at this same exit closer to the freeway, where some trucks spent the night.

Friday night I went outside just before midnight to start loading up the scooters. It was still in the 90s; the National Weather Service had actually issued an excessive heat warning for Las Vegas Friday that did not expire until 7pm. I had reasoned that, as with the previous day, the morning temperatures would escalate rapidly and I wanted to get this done in cooler temperatures and not in full sun.

As I was working, though, the winds picked up quite a bit, blowing people's furniture around and sending dust and detritus flying through the RV park. This was the beginning of the arrival of a system carrying monsoonal moisture into the area, and by yesterday morning temperatures had plummeted -- it was 83° when we woke up, and barely 90° by noon. That made me a bit sorry I had loaded the previous evening, but at least it was done and we were ready to roll. I managed to get in a midnight swim as well, a nice cool-off after loading.

Yesterday we cleared out of the park at 11 and headed for Ted Wiens Tire across town on Blue Diamond. On the way we passed the Silverton Casino -- they've finally bulldozed their RV park and erected a parking structure and another casino building. When we pulled in to the tire bay we found our two tires sitting there waiting for us:

Not those tires, of course -- although I think they would give us some better off-road performance. It took them perhaps half an hour to swap out our two tag tires, and I was thankful that it was so much cooler while this work was getting done. As always, I watched closely as the jacks were placed, and took lots of photos to document the tire condition.

One of our old tires (the one that prompted the detour to Vegas) looked like a racing slick -- completely smooth around the entire circumference.

I was very pleased, though, to see how even the wear was from side to side; perhaps we have finally nailed the alignment issues. The other side had a little tread pattern showing, and wear was heavier on the inside shoulder. This was the one on the bent axle we just had fixed in February, and it had also itself been a take-off, so I am not reading too much into the uneven wear.

The tires that Wiens put on are five year old (date code 1204) Michelin traction tires. I would have preferred rib tires on the tag axle, but these were the only take-offs I could find anywhere from Las Vegas to Holbrook, and they at least had a closed shoulder. I would say they have 20% tread left, and the sidewalls show minor weather checking. They should be good enough to get us through perhaps another year, 20k miles or so, at which time we'll just move the steer tires back to the tag, and put fresh rubber on the steer axle. We just put new steer tires on back in March, and at only 6k miles, I was unwilling to consign them just yet to tag duty.

We escaped the tire shop for just $350 -- Rick the truck-tire salesman (who came down with the tires from a different store, which had no Saturday hours) took a liking to us and gave me the large-account pricing, waiving the disposal fee on our trades, which are actually great candidates for regrooving or retreading -- the casings are in perfect condition and less than three years old.

Now that we have legal tread on all eight wheels, we are again ready in the event we get a disaster call. Hurricane Bill has turned into a non-event for the U.S., and nothing else is yet brewing in the Atlantic or Gulf, so we can continue east on a very leisurely pace.

It was only 1:30 or so when we wrapped up at the tire shop, and we arrived in Boulder City just after 2. We had been toying with the idea of waiting somewhere in that area until nightfall, mostly to avoid the traditional hours-long slog through the checkpoint and down the hill to the dam, with a bonus of seeing the dam in all its flood-lit glory. But the prospect of spending six hours hanging out on the Nevada side was unappealing. We did have a nice visit with fellow bus owners and blog readers Van and Cheryl (hope I got that right) in the parking lot of the Welcome Center there before girding ourselves and heading to the checkpoint.

Much to our surprise, there was no line at all for the checkpoint, and after the inevitable Odyssey body-cavity search, we absolutely flew down the hill and over the dam -- I simply do not know what happened to the usual Saturday traffic. Folks coming the other direction did not have it so good (also unusual) -- the conga line extended from the dam crest all the way up the hill to parking lot 14, probably a 45-minute or so wait to cross. As we went across, we could observe great progress on the bypass -- the concrete arches spanning the gorge are complete, and the vertical towers for the suspension nearly so, as well as approach decks on either side. Impressive.

The speedy crossing put us in Kingman around 5, and we opted to pass straight through the RV-unfriendly city and continue here for a quiet night in relative cool at 6,000'. Today we will continue at least to Winona, where it will also be cool, or perhaps to Holbrook. Where and when we progress from there will depend on the weather forecast.

Vega$

We are at Sam's Town RV resort, on Boulder Highway in Las Vegas (map).

We've stayed here before, under similar circumstances. As then, it is stinking hot here now, 113° or so, and we're making good use of the 50-amp hookup to run all three roof air conditioners. And the pool, in this weather, is mighty refreshing.

Colorado lost the coin toss, so to speak, although several folks voted for that route (after we had already left Tonopah). After arriving in Tonopah from our lovely digs in the desert, we made a quick stop at the Napa Auto Parts store, where I had called the previous day to inquire about motor oil. Despite having told me they had plenty, and my telling them I would be in to pick up a couple gallons, the local mine had come in first thing in the morning and cleaned them out. I was very annoyed.

We then rolled over to the local no-name gas station and put in 75 gallons at $2.719, which would later prove to be 30 gallons too much. But at least that let us fire up the generator. The only heavy-duty tire outfit in town did not have our size, which left only a quick stop at local market Scolari's to replenish the larder, and we were ready to leave town.

We actually sat there in the Scolari's parking lot for a good ten minutes, trying to decide which way to go. Ultimately, our nervousness about finding tires and motor oil tipped the scales in favor of US-95 to Las Vegas, even though our weather and scenery sensibilities were calling us towards Colorado. As it turns out, just a few minutes down the road, some tooth pain Louise has been having flared up with a vengence, confirming our decision: it would be much easier to find a dentist in Las Vegas than in Ely.

As it turns out, we left Tonopah (and got our shopping done) just in the nick of time. Yesterday was the first day of the "Vegas to Reno The Long Way" off-road race, and Tonopah was the overnight stop for the whole shootin' match last night. As we rolled past the high school (across the street from the market), there were already a couple hundred rigs, and dozens more lined up down the highway to get in. I counted at least four high-end Prevost conversions (this sport has some money), plenty of HDT/MDT conversions either with garages in back, or towing race trailers, and hundreds of more conventional RVs of all stripes, including class-A and -B rigs pulling race trailers, and work trucks pulling toy haulers. Rental units were also well represented.

We passed another hundred or more rigs on US-95, and were thankful to be going the other direction. We could also see rooster tails in the desert from the actual racers in the distance, and we passed two of the day's pit stops on our route, along with another couple set aside for today. Wednesday, we had passed another one out on US-6; they really mean it when they say "the long way."

We had toyed with the idea of ending our day in Beatty, but opted instead to press on to Vegas and just spend two nights here. Louise managed to get a dentist appointment for first thing this morning, and I settled in to find oil and tires. That took me a good part of the day; our tire size is not all that common, and while many shops were willing to sell me a pair of brand new ones that would come to something well north of $1,000 after FET, mounting, and disposal fees, I only found one place in town that had a pair of used take-offs in decent shape, for a total of $330. They are open till noon tomorrow, so we'll head over there around 11, on our way out of town. I had also checked Kingman and Flagstaff, to no avail, since we're heading that way.

As we rolled into town here, I put another 150 gallons of fuel in the tank at an incredible $2.479, a full 12 cents cheaper than anyplace else in town (and 24 cents less than what I paid earlier in the day, in Tonopah, making me wish I had put in less there). Unfortunately, it was at a crappy little 7/11 store, where the dispensers would only sell $75 at a pop, and the clerk could only go to $150. It took three transactions to put in $375 worth, and I finally quit in frustration, even though we could have taken on another 30 gallons or so. We won't see these prices again until Texas (if we're lucky), if current price trends continue.

Last night's project, in the relative (low 90s) cool post-midnight, was to rebuild the fresh water pump, which appeared to have quit after five full years of continuous, 24/7/365 operation. Of course, only after replacing the pump diaphragm with our on-board spare and cleaning everything up did I discover that it was merely a plugged water filter. I now have to repeat to myself "check the simple things first, stupid" before every repair project. Oh well, at least I know my spare is working.

Since our last stay here, another casino hotel has gone up next door, here on the "Boulder strip," a row of casinos between Las Vegas proper and Henderson that markets heavily to locals. The Eastside Cannery, which is actually closer to where we are parked than our host Sam's Town, has a 16-story glass hotel tower completely girded with color-changing lights, and a night club on the top floor which we are hoping will be fairly low key on Friday nights, given that I could easily hear the recorded stuff last night while I stood outside grilling. Speaking of which, 110+ is too hot for that (although at least the sun had dropped below the hills by then) -- tonight we're eating out.

Photo by Jack Black's Stunt Double

Running on empty

We are at the Millers Rest Area on US-6, just west of Tonopah, Nevada (map). This is a familiar stop, as we spent a night here just over two years ago, and we remembered what nice facilities it has for RVs.

As with that stay, it was in the 90s when we arrived, and we had to run the air conditioner for a couple of hours. Unfortunately, this time around, we arrived here with nearly empty fuel tanks (we will need to fuel in Tonopah no matter what), and so we could not run the generator, which gets its fuel from somewhere around the ¼ tank level. I had to run the main engine last night for twenty minutes, and again this morning for ten, just to charge batteries.

Fortunately, as last time, the temperature dropped quickly after sundown, and we had a very pleasant evening with just the fans running. It was also so pleasant out at night that we took the Celestron telescope out (thanks, John!) to observe Jupiter on this dark and clear night. We disagreed on the number of moons we could see -- two were crystal clear, and I thought I could see two more. We also peered at the Milky Way; the sheer number of stars visible here in the desert on a clear night is impressive. Later I put the porro-prism on the scope and tried to see Tonopah in the distance, but I could not get a steady enough view to make anything specific out of the lights.

We're out of fuel because I'm too cheap to pay California prices for diesel. I never saw any for less than $3 since arriving in the bay area, and, of course, in Yosemite and the Eastern Sierra, the price ranged from $3.65 to nearly $4. I knew we had enough to make Tonopah in the tank, but once the level drops below that magic quarter tank mark (which is nearly 80 gallons on our tank), we can no longer run the generator (or diesel boiler, for that matter). In hindsight, I wish we had extended those dip tubes down at least half again that amount -- 40 gallons is plenty of reserve.

For the curious, the alternator on our main engine makes 6.5 kilowatts, larger than some RV generators, and so it is no slouch when it comes to charging the batteries; in fact, with nothing else running, it charges them faster than our AC battery charger can. The downside is that the main engine requires twice as much fuel while parked, 2.2 gph vs. 1.1 gph for the generator, not to mention how much louder it is, so we only do this when we have no other option. By contrast, the main engine alternator is the most efficient way to charge while driving, since the incremental fuel use to run the alternator is then only 0.3 gph.

Yesterday we had a Red Cross conference call, and so did not break camp until after 1pm. We made a brief stop at the mini-mart at the corner of 120 and 395 to get milk and some dinner items for last night, then had a lovely if somewhat twisty drive across 120 to Benton, California, theoretically famous for its hot spring, but nowadays almost a ghost town, with only a DOT maintenance station and the agricultural inspection station keeping the town alive.

As we reached the hot spring on the far west edge of town, I was rolling along at perhaps 10mph, having just mostly coasted all the way down the hill west of town, and slowed quite a bit for the last tight turn. There is a small "resort" at the springs which straddles the road, and just then a dog ran across the street, who looked to be a regular resident. I had to stand on the brake to avoid running it over, and even at that slow speed, it showed how important it is to secure all loose objects. Lots of things shifted forward on the counters -- the coffee maker was hanging by its power cord, and the fish tank wedged hard against the forward bulkhead. Our own dog, who was sleeping at the top of the steps, came flying downstairs still mostly asleep. Fortunately, she did not seem to be injured in any way.

We normally do not allow her to wander back upstairs unrestrained while driving. She either rides on the cockpit floor, with us, or locked in her kennel under the bed. However, the twisty and bouncy nature of 120 had Angel quite car sick, and Louise was in the middle of dealing with that when the dog wandered off. Lesson learned -- we need to pay more attention to where the dog is while we are moving.

Ultimately, no harm done, either to us or to the dog who darted across the road. It did make for a five minute stop in Benton, though, while we checked everything out and got Opal out walking around. We stopped across from the one surviving business in town, a small café-cum-store at the junction of 120 and US-6, where we've eaten when passing through on our motorcycles. Nice to see it is still in business.

We can not say the same for the Montgomery Pass Casino and Hotel, another place we ate (and stayed) on one of our motorcycle trips, just over the Nevada state line at the top of (where else) Montgomery Pass. The place is completly defunct and boarded up. We're not really sorry to see it go -- we had the worst steak ever there once. Still, it was a port in the storm back then, and its demise means there is no gas, food, or lodging between Tonopah and Bishop or Lee Vining, other than the tiny café in Benton.

We knew we did not want to go any farther than Tonopah yesterday, and rather than taking a chance on finding a place to stay in town, we decided to just stop here. This morning we will head in to town for fuel, and I can also use a gallon or two of 40-weight oil. I'm also going to check with the lone tire shop in town to see if that have something in our size -- one of the tags is bald, and I'm afraid it will be down to the belts before long.

We've narrowed down to a choice of two routes from there. We can continue east on US-6, connecting with US-50 in Utah, which will take us all the way to Salida, Colorado (co-linear with I-70 for a good ways), where we can await marching orders in relative cool. That route keeps us a good bit north, which is cooler, but also makes it more difficult to respond if called. It also involves ascending the 11,000' Monarch Pass, which was a bit of a challenge the last time we did it.

The other alternative is to head south on US-95, which would take us into Las Vegas, and connect to I-40 via US-93 over Hoover Dam. From there we can head east to Flagstaff for some cooler temperatures, and even continue on to Santa Fe, also cool, for better positioning. This route involves more freeway, and a slog through some real heat from Vegas to Kingman, but is around 100 miles and 3 hours or so shorter to anyplace we might need to go, plus it involves a lot less climbing, as the Continental Divide is much lower in New Mexico than in Colorado.

I'm almost at the point of flipping a coin, as both of these routes are old ground for us, and my desire to stay in cooler temperatures is balanced by my desire to conserve diesel and keep Odyssey on gentler grades. Perhaps the tire issue will decide it for us -- if I can't find tires in Tonopah, we might have to go half way through Utah to find them on 6, whereas I know I can find them in Vegas on the more southerly route.

Yosemite in high season

We are at the Lower Lee Vining Forest Service campground (map), along Lee Vining Creek, perhaps three miles west of the eponymous town at the junction of Tioga Pass Road and US-395.

Monday morning we got a fairly early start (for us, anyway), leaving the Oakhurst Elks by 9:30 or so. I wanted to make the ascent into the park in the cooler part of the day, and I also knew that just before noon would be the best time to try to score an unreservable camp site, as noon is the official checkout time.

As always, the drive through the park was wonderful and scenic. With outside temperatures in the 70s and the low park speed limit of 35, Odyssey had little trouble with the enormous climb, although we did heat things up enough to cook some more oil out of the exhaust -- I will sure be glad when it is finally all gone and we don't have to smell it any longer. I bet the folks driving behind us felt the same way.

We arrived at Crane Flat around 12:30, a bit later than planned due mostly to two stretches of park road under one-way traffic control for maintenance. One of those stops was so long we ate our lunch -- no big deal for us, but we detected a palpable sense of frustration among the other drivers in line with us as we approached the 20 minute mark. In any case, we arrived just in time to grab the last 35' (nominal) camp site (map), which accommodated us easily and was actually a lovely spot. As I expected, though, it was under the trees, so we were unable to deploy the satellite dish. As a side note, Crane Flat is 50% (of 166 spaces) first-come-first-served, yet it is not listed at all on the Camping Without a Reservation page; perhaps that's why there were still plenty of spaces left at 12:30.

We observed that Yosemite Valley was, unsurprisingly, a complete zoo as we rolled past on the way to Crane Flat. Nevertheless, we were able to get a 5:30 dinner reservation at the Ahwahnee Hotel, an old favorite of ours. We rode back down the hill on the scooters, roughly 20 miles to the hotel. We had left ourselves plenty of time, in case we got caught in the construction again, but this time the delay was just ten minutes. So we decided to ride around the valley a bit, and see what we were missing at the valley campgrounds (100% reservations-required).

I have to say, our digs at Crane Flat were much nicer. The Upper Pines campground was absolutely cheek-by-jowl, and the Lower Pines only a little bit less so. Many sites had four or five tents in them, and the six-person limit per site seems to be widely ignored. Had I managed to book a site in one of these camps (several sites popped up briefly as available during my search, but all would have been a gamble on fitting us), we would have had the advantage of free shuttles to valley destinations (including dinner), and swimming in the Merced River nearby, but we would have been miserable from the crowds.

If we had, in fact, managed a site in the valley, we might have spent more than one night. But that was plenty for us, Yosemite veterans as we are, and we broke camp yesterday morning to head over the pass. Again, cool temperatures and a fairly low speed limit meant the climb from 6,200' at Crane Flat to 9,600' at Tioga Pass was fairly uneventful, and I only had to turn out a handful of times. We stopped briefly near Tenaya Lake for lunch, and again at Tuolumne Meadows for a bathroom break and to stamp our passport, which had somehow escaped it thus far.

The back side of the pass always makes for exciting driving, and even though we did not burn a single drop of fuel on the downhill run, I still had to pull over once to cool down, just from the retarder shedding that much heat into the engine coolant. I still had to stab at the brakes a few times even with the retarder engaged, but we made it down without heating either up excessively.

The drive over the hill is physically tiring, and we decided to stop at one of the half dozen Forest Service campgrounds on the eastern slope. This is actually the last one in the eastbound direction, and it turns out to be a lovely spot. We are in a lush grove of aspens, with wide separation from other campers (unlike in the park, where we opted to turn the air compressor off overnight to avoid disturbing the tenters). If we intended to stay a few days, we could choose a spot next to the river and set up the hot tub; since we are just passing through, we opted for a more isolated space closer to the entrance. There are nearly 60 sites here, but you wouldn't know it from the entrance or where we are parked.

Today we will make a quick stop in Lee Vining for some groceries, then continue east on 120 to the state line. We call this section of 120 the "whoop-dee-doo" road, because it traverses a set of rolling hills that give the road a roller-coaster aspect; when we've done it on motorcycles we've even gotten "air" on some of the hills. We will endeavor to keep Odyssey firmly on the pavement. That will connect with US-6, which will take us all the way to Tonopah, Nevada, where we will need fuel. From there we have a choice of three directions, and we will pick one tomorrow morning based on the weather outlook.

Familiar surroundings

We are at the Elks lodge in Oakhurst, California (map), at the junction of California 41 to the south entrance of Yosemite, and Road 222 to Bass Lake. This is a very familiar place, as I used to work in Oakhurst and spent a little over a year parked right here in my 32' Fleetwood class-A.

That seems like a lifetime ago, although it was in fact a mere 13 years ago, from '95 to '96. Many things here are little changed, including the Yosemite Forks Mountain House restaurant just across the street from the lodge, where we had dinner tonight. I must have eaten there 50 times or more when I lived here.

We are here because our nieces really wanted to go water skiing before the older of the pair has to start high school this week -- the only other time they've done it was when we spent a week with them at Lake Tahoe two years ago. I had suggested Bass Lake because it is a good deal warmer than Tahoe, as well as a full hour closer to where they live, yet still has all the natural beauty of the high sierra. It turned out to be a picture perfect weekend.

Friday morning we picked them up in Odyssey, and they were thrilled to ride upstairs behind the big upper windshield. Each of the nieces took a turn riding downstairs with me, asking many questions about driving the bus and what all the gauges and dials meant. Louise rode upstairs the whole time with their mom, and it was a very pleasant trip, with stops at the San Luis Dam overlook and the Vons grocery in Oakhurst for dinner fixings.

Never underestimate the eating capacity of teenagers -- I had the meat guy at Vons cut me up a half dozen strip steaks at nearly 3/4 pound each, and the six of us polished them off in one sitting. In any event, after arriving here at the lodge, we took a scooter out to scope out possible camping alternatives that might be more rustic, however all the forest service camping at the lake was sold out (not unexpected, as we had been checking frequently), and current fire restrictions meant that any dispersed spot we might find would have to be a "cold camp."

As it turned out, though, the B&B at which they were staying, the Pine Rose Inn (a fixture here at least since my stint here a decade and a half ago), had both a BBQ grill and a free-standing fire pit, which met all our needs for cooking and evening campfires. In addition, they also had a hot tub, which was a nice bonus. We ended up schlepping all our utensils up there and doing all the cooking on their grill, then hanging out around the fire pit each evening. We got to partake of the hot tub as well, although it was a bit too hot (106°) the first night.

We opted, therefore, to just keep the bus right here at the Elks, and we had a nice steak BBQ Friday night at the Pine Rose, with an early start on the lake Saturday morning. We had the boat for four hours, along with a retired competitive wakeboarder as a driver/instructor. Each of us had a turn at water skiing or wakeboarding, although I regret to report that neither Louise nor I was able to get up out of the water and onto the board. We had fun trying though, even though we are paying dearly for it today with sore muscles in places we didn't know we had. I did have a blast tubing at the tail end of our boat rental, however. At one point, a bald eagle dipped its talons into the lake in front of us, then returned to a tall pine.

After another nice BBQ (pork tenderloins and grilled veggies), camp fire, and hot tubbing last night at the Pine Rose, we went back up to the lake this morning to just relax on the beach, although the girls were keen to play Charades and Alias, where, at last, Aunt Louise and Uncle Sean could hold their own. We bid them a fond farewell after lunch at the Forks resort, as they piled back into their van for the trek back to the bay area.

It took us most of the rest of the day to get the bus back in order and everything packed back up, including the floaty toys we had taken up to the lake this morning. We are now all set for an early departure tomorrow morning, providing my muscles are up to wrestling with the steering wheel by then.

Our plan from here is to head north through Yosemite National Park to California 120, which will take us over the Sierra Nevada and to the Nevada state line, where we will pick up US-6. Before we leave the state, we will check in with the Disaster Operations Center to make sure we will not be needed for either the La Brea or Lockheed fires (near Santa Barbara or Santa Cruz, respectively), but with the Atlantic storm season starting to heat up, we really feel the need to be further east.

Photo by km6xo

Final night in the bay area

We are again on the street, this time in Mountain View (map), just about a mile from our last digs on the street in Sunnyvale. We ran out another 72-hour stint there, and decided we ought to move along before the constabulary took notice (although they'd passed us every day there with nary a raised eyebrow -- we are not the 'droids they're looking for). Felicia, of course, passed Hawaii without incident, allowing me finally to stand down (and unpack my bag).

Before leaving Sunnyvale we stopped at the Elks lodge, as long as it was right there across the street, to dump our tanks before heading up the hill tomorrow. We were only 30% full, but that's still nearly 500 pounds of weight -- no sense hauling an extra quarter ton up the hill unnecessarily. We were also nearly out of water and I put perhaps 20 gallons in, which will cover any needs until we are settled in the Sierras. I also let them know we would not be needing their parking, and made a small donation to cover the dump station, and the fact that we've been using their dumpster.

Last night we had one final visit with our friends in Milpitas while we still had the car. Today we did some final errands, and returned the car in a complex dance involving borrowing yet another car, then getting a ride back here. At least we got in a final dinner with our friend Eric and daughter Emily and were able to say a proper in-person "thank you" for letting us use the car.

Tomorrow morning we will head up to Menlo Park and pick up our nieces, who really wanted to ride up to Bass Lake in the bus instead of their mini-van. Mom will be along for the ride, too, thus allowing dad to come up in the van after work, and alleviating the need for them to bring two cars. We're really looking forward to having them aboard, although it means we will not be able to make any stops we otherwise might, such as checking out our friends' Italian restaurant in Los Banos, which we'll be passing through.

I'm expecting Bass Lake to be something of a zoo, this being one of the last summer weekends before many schools start, but at least we have a reservation for an RV space at the Elks lodge down the hill at Yosemite Forks. This place is very familiar to me -- I worked in Oakhurst for about a year, and I lived in a 32' class-A I owned at the time, parked right there at the lodge under a special agreement (the normal stay limit is two weeks). That said, I am hoping we will be able to find a more rustic spot in the forest once we arrive -- I know the girls were really hoping for a campfire.

Once we are done at Bass Lake, I have a wonderful route mapped out that will take us north through Yosemite, then east through Nevada on US-6 en route to Colorado, and mostly staying in relatively cooler temperatures than we would experience along the I-40 corridor to the south. Southern Colorado is blissfully cool, yet within striking distance of Hurricane Alley should an Atlantic storm start to develop, as well as centrally located for anything else that might arise. At this writing, however, it is beginning to look more and more likely that we will not even make it out of California -- there are serious wildfires in southern California (LaBrea) as well as just a few miles west of where we sit right now (Santa Cruz). If either of those starts to consume residential structures, we may well have work to do right here in-state.

Photo by romainguy

Hurry up and wait

Well, I am still in California. Specifically, we are still on the street in Sunnyvale, a block from the Elks, although we actually turned around and moved to the opposite side of the street yesterday, to comply with the 72-hour rule.

The 6-am call never came yesterday, and after checking on line to see that Felicia's track had again been moved north to Maui/Oahu (it had been moved back down towards the big island Sunday night), the system had been downgraded to a depression, and landfall had been moved back to Tuesday afternoon, I emailed the DOC for an update.

Unsurprisingly, the decision was made to hold off on sending any more personnel until after landfall, to see if there would really be any need (I am guessing there will not be). So we carried on somewhat with our lives here, although I have kept my bag packed and ready, and we opted to stay here an easy block away from the Sunnyvale lodge just in case. Of course, here it is Tuesday afternoon, and I still can't unpack -- landfall is now expected this evening, and we still need to wait to see if there will be any mudslides, wind damage, or what-not. I don't expect now to get the word to stand down until tomorrow morning sometime. Looks like another night here on the street.

We enjoyed another nice dinner last night with some local friends, and tonight we will catch up with our old "motorcycle gang" at the regular Tuesday night dinner. Assuming I am not deployed to Hawaii, we have plans to go water skiing this weekend with our nieces up at Bass Lake, and, having thus made it 120 miles out of the bay area, we will just continue eastward from there next week, probably via Yosemite National Park and US-6 through Nevada. That gives us merely another three days here to wrap up visits and errands. Although I have to say, we are really enjoying the temperate weather, and will be sorry to leave it behind.

We had a conference call today with our Red Cross leadership in DC, wherein we learned that this July was the first one in nearly a decade where no alert team was deployed. It has been, thankfully, an incredibly slow hurricane season this year, in sharp contrast to the recent past. By this time last year, we had already been deployed a full month, and would remain deployed continuously for another three. The downside, of course, is that with no disasters in the news, donations are also not forthcoming, and so money is very tight. Also, there's a bunch of disaster operations people in DC on the edges of their chairs, just waiting for something to happen. We are very happy to be unpaid volunteers -- we get to just carry on with our lives until something actually does happen.

I've managed to catch up and clear out a lot of my project backlog, and Odyssey seems to be just humming along right now. And fixing a bunch of things on our friend's 13 year old car served as a good reminder that every vehicle has its problems, and our 24 year old bus does not really have any more than its fair share. With a little luck and timing, I will be able to clean all the roof air conditioner condensers before we head back into the heat -- one backlogged project I have yet to tackle here.

Photo by macropoulos

Maui wow-y

We are parked on the street again in Sunnyvale, just a block from the Elks lodge there (map). We arrived Friday afternoon, and other than the lunch-time walking crowd from nearby offices Friday, it has been quiet and desolate here. Tomorrow will mark the end of the 72-hour allowed parking window.

Before we left the Fremont Elks lodge on Friday, we ran down to San Jose to pick up the trinary switch for the air conditioner, and I installed it as soon as we got home. The Schrader valve which isolates the switch was in good shape, and so I was able to make the change with no loss of refrigerant. The new switch works fine, and the air conditioner is running again, although subjectively we think it is not cooling as well -- it's possible we have a tad too much refrigerant now. Oddly, the new switch has less hysteresis than the old one, and so the condenser fan cycles on and off in fairly short bursts.

We were settled in here in plenty of time to make our niece's party, and I even had time to fix the last niggling problem with the car we are borrowing -- the left side-view mirror was nearly completely black. Mercedes, in its infinite wisdom, chose to make this mirror "self dimming," a feature which it implemented with a layer of LCD material. When being followed by bright headlights at night, the LCD would activate, darkening the mirror, and you would see the reflection in the glass on top of the LCD. Otherwise, the LCD would be clear, and you would see normal daytime images in the silvered back of the sandwich.

The failure mode of this sort of contraption involves the sandwich of glass separating a bit, the liquid moving around, and environmental heat turning it completely dark all the time. I was able to carefully separate the two layers of glass, and clean out the LCD fluid. I then glued the outer glass layer back on. The mirror now has some imperfections, and there are some "ghost" images, but at least it is usable both day and night. Our friend Eric, who lent us the car, has asked if I can next move into the house for a few months to fix more of his stuff...

Also on Friday I wandered down to the lodge to clear with them our plan for parking Louise there in the bus if I end up flying to Hawaii; they have space and were amenable. So it will be a ten-minute affair to move over there and get settled tomorrow morning if necessary. There are always plenty of people around at the lodge to keep an eye on things, including several folks staying in their RV area. Yesterday I got a few more projects done around the house, including getting my Red Cross files in order on my thumb drive. We then drove out to Half Moon Bay, where our good friend Robert was performing with his jazz quartet.

We had a nice dinner, accompanied by some great jazz, and got a chance to catch up a bit with Robert after his gig. Around quarter to ten or so, we were helping him get his keyboard loaded into his car, when we heard a mighty crash as some guy in an older Dodge van backed into someone in the parking lot, then tried to just drive away. Robert and I raced over and stopped him; after parking for a minute to hear us out, he tried to get in his van and drive away again. We called the sheriff, and the three of us ended up having to stick around for another forty minutes or so to give statements. We looked at the Camry he hit -- at least $500 worth of damage, making it an attempted felony hit-and-run ("20,002" in California cop-speak). As we were leaving, he was having trouble coming up with valid insurance, too, and the number of sheriff's cruisers had escalated to four, with the CHP on the way. We at least felt good about the Camry owner not having to come out to find his car mysteriously damaged.

Today's chore was running all the pets over to the vaccination clinic. If Louise ends up following me to Hawaii, we might have to kennel the three of them, and the kennel will not accept them without current vaccinations -- and they were all due.

At this writing, Felicia is stubbornly refusing to shear apart as hoped, and may make landfall as either a tropical storm or a tropical depression. The forecasters have also been steadily moving the track envelope northwards, and the chief threat has shifted from the big island north to Maui. At this track, anything is fair game -- Hawaii, Maui, Molokai, or even Oahu, although the storm should weaken quite a bit before it can get that far west. The long range track guidance has it continuing along the northwest Hawaiian island chain all the way to French Frigate Shoals.

If the shear environment does not tear the storm apart by first thing tomorrow morning, with a conclusive downgrade to depression or lower, then I have every reason to believe they will call me between 6 and 7 and have me head over to the airport. I will be packing my bag just as soon as I post this blog entry. If the current track holds, it looks like I will be heading to Maui. I'm not bringing the laptop, so keep an eye on my Twitter feed for updates.

Photo by Magalie L'Abbé

On alert for Felicia

We are still at the Elks lodge in Fremont, California, for our final night here (they have a five day limit). Tomorrow I expect we will move back to our cozy on-street digs in Sunnyvale for a night or two.

This morning the phone rang at oh-seven-hundred (we are never awake that early, unless we are in a shop or on a disaster) with a not-unexpected call from the Disaster Operations Center, putting us on alert for Hurricane Felicia, which is threatening Hawaii. They expect the earliest they would send us, if at all, would be Monday, and it might be just one of us (me) at the start. It would be the first national-level response of the season, and they want someone experienced out there if anything is going to ramp up -- I guess I've made the big time.

Unlike the last time they tried to send us to Hawaii (also for the "F" storm that year, "Flossie"), this time we are actually well-positioned to go, and so couldn't really say no in good conscience. We're already in California, where Hawaii flights are generally cheapest (and shortest), and we are in a place where we have several options for parking Odyssey, as well as several folks willing to care for the pets. Still, I have my fingers crossed that the system fizzles out before making landfall -- neither of us really wants to go to a disaster on an airplane -- we much prefer to have the bus with us.

While we have been well-parked here, I've continued to get some projects done, including getting tires for the car we've borrowed, as well as making some minor repairs such as the broken rear-view mirror therein. Today I delved into the mysterious cockpit air conditioner problem, which involved removing some of the front bodywork as well as the dashboard bookcase.

I knew that the condenser fan was not coming on, and I needed to test the fan itself as well as the "trinary" switch that actuates it. The fan was fine, so that left the switch, which turned out not to be closing. That could mean a bad switch, or it could mean a problem with the refrigerant charge level or even the compressor. Without a set of manifold gauges (and a big can of R-134A) I could not test or adjust refrigerant level, so once I had gotten that far, I called a commercial refrigeration guy in the local area.

He ended up putting a couple ounces into the system, but the gauges showed good pressure, and hot-wiring the condenser fan brought the pressures down where they should be, so we concluded it must be the trinary switch. I thanked and paid him and sent him on his way, then set to trying to find a replacement switch, which is a Red Dot part -- common to heavy trucks, but not something a commercial refrigeration guy would have. It turns out they have a distributor in San Jose, who should have the part tomorrow. That's good, because I really don't want to put the front fiberglass and heavy brush guard back on the bus until the switch is replaced.

Tomorrow we'll take advantage of the water and dump station here before rolling out sometime around mid-day. We need to be settled in someplace in plenty of time to make it to our niece's 14th birthday party. I expect we will spend the weekend getting the bus ready to be laid up, tweaking the files on our USB drives (essential when flying to a disaster, since I won't have my laptop), and packing our bags. I'm hoping this last item will be the clincher that causes the storm to peter out, sort of like taking an umbrella to keep it from raining.

Image from Weather Underground

Projects akimbo

We are at the Elks lodge in Fremont, California (map). This is a much more pleasant spot than our usual digs in San Jose, and they have a dump station in addition to power and water (they also used to be $3 cheaper, but the rates increased to $18 in July). This used to be my home lodge, so it's familiar, along with its surroundings.

There is no access to transit here, to speak of, which is why we usually choose San Jose instead. But we have a car on loan from our good friend Eric, who has a spare, and this spot is a tad closer to some friends we have been visiting for the last couple of days, the principle reason for our return visit here. He has just been released from the hospital with cancer that has metastasized to several organs, and we don't know how much "good" time he has left -- as long as we are in a holding pattern with the Red Cross, we wanted to spend some time with them now.

We'd only paid for two nights when we arrived -- we're trying not to get too ahead of ourselves, since we can still be called to a disaster response at any time. Today we will pay for another night or two, since we are well-situated.

Since the health issues have dictated that our visits be kept short, I have been using the down time here to get a few things done. For one, now that the turbocharger issues are behind us, I had quite a bit of work to get the cover back over it and the flooring back in place. Most of the effort involved scraping off the old sealant and bits of the plywood hatch that had stuck to it.

The other big project I tackled yesterday was repairing my computer. A couple months ago, one of the hinges that holds the screen to the laptop base broke. The broken piece is part of an aluminum casting that forms the base of the computer -- no way to repair it, other than to replace the whole base. Still, that's less work for me than switching over to a new computer, so I hit eBay looking for parts.

I ended up buying a whole laptop, advertised as "for parts only -- does not boot." That cost me less than what most sellers wanted just for the case bottom naked -- in part because the seller could not spell "Gateway" (he left out the "e"). It actually turns out that the only problem with that laptop is the DC power input jack (a known issue with these machines -- new jacks are ubiquitous on eBay for $6). When I slapped a fully charged battery in it, it fired right up. The 80-gig hard drive was completely full -- with rap, hip-hop music and pornography. Louise speculates it belonged to a middle-class white teenager trying to be all gangsta.

The base is probably the most difficult part of a laptop to replace -- absolutely the entire machine must be dismantled. It took me the better part of five hours to completely disassemble both machines, swap cases, then reassemble them. I also had to carefully remove and swap all the labels -- serial number, model number (they were different models using the same case), WiFi information, and Microsoft COA sticker.

My computer is back to its old self (well, OK, this case is a little more beat up than my old one), a welcome relief from having it taped into a cut-up shoe box in order to even be able to use it.



And I now have a complete spare, hip-hop and all, waiting in the wings. Since Louise and I have the same model laptops, this gives us spares for the screen, keyboard, DVD, WiFi, CPU cooler, trackpad, and other items. Plus, the computer is actually usable as-is in a pinch. I'm sure I could solder in one of those $6 power jacks, buy an AC adapter for another $10, and sell the whole thing, broken hinge and all, for more than $116, making a profit on the deal. But having the spares is actually a better plan.

Today's project is to find tires for the car we are borrowing -- the ones on it now are shot, and I thought it would be a nice gesture to do the legwork.

Top photo by flattop341

Living on the street

Just time for a quick update here. We are parked on a cul-de-sac in an industrial neighborhood in Sunnyvale (map), just a block from the Elks lodge here.

We've stayed here before, just as we have also stayed at the lodge. We do the latter if we need power, but in this weather we do not. This spot on the street is perfect, since it is off the traffic pattern, and we have an empty lot (bulldozed years ago for environmental remediation) on one side, and a vacant building, for lease, on the other. This street is also routinely used by truckers looking for an overnight spot.

We had a nice drive up from Monterey yesterday after taking advantage of the dump station, which also allowed me to replace the last of our three sight glasses. After nearly six years, the clear vinyl tubing had become brittle, yellowed, and translucent. I was able to replace the ones on the fresh and drinking water tanks "hot" -- pulling the bottom of the tube off got me a snout full of fresh water, but it's possible to get the new tube slipped on with a minimum of spillage, perhaps a quart or two. The gray tank needed to be done empty, of course :)

Last night we caught a quick dinner with Louise's mom, who will be out of town the rest of the week. As long as we were here anyway, we thought we'd catch her while we could. Today we are getting together with friends in Woodside. We are meeting at Alice's Restaurant, one of our old motorcycle hangouts. While Odyssey could make it there OK, I'd rather not waste the diesel or put the strain on the engine (or my upper arms) climbing that hill, so we are going to look for a spot along 280 and get a lift up the hill. In any case, we will have to leave here in a few minutes to make it in time for lunch.

Photo by jpeepz