Last rally in Arcadia

We are at the Turner Agri-Civic Center in Arcadia, Florida (map), site of the Bussin' 2011 rally which starts Thursday, the last of a series of annual rallies here in Arcadia. Early parking for the rally opened yesterday, and we are the first rig in the "occasional generator" section. By the end of the day yesterday there were already three dozen rigs here, most of them in the electric hookup area.

We had a pleasant, quiet, productive, and relaxing stay in Lake Placid. We had a nice dinner Saturday at Heron's Garden, the only restaurant (well, other than Golden Corral) in town open for the holiday. We each had a giant platter of turkey with all the traditional trimmings for less than $10 a plate, and a glass of wine was less than $3. This place was basically a Greek diner, a style of establishment long-familiar from my youth, and so a fitting place for a holiday meal. It was nothing fancy, but the food was home-cooked and tasty, and the price was hard to beat. It was only a short walk from where we were parked at the Elks lodge.



In fact, there were no fewer than five restaurants (not counting fast food) an easy walk from the bus, including the aforementioned Golden Corral. We also rode the scooters out to June lake on Christmas Eve to eat at Jaxsons on the Lake, which was also decent. We were the last patrons there around 8pm, and they closed the doors behind us.


Yesterday we awoke to 30mph winds, gusting to 40 or so. Not ideal conditions to be loading scooters or even moving the bus, but we had passed our five nights there at the lodge and were looking forward to moving on. I dialed the cruise in at 50mph as we pushed west on route 70, because those winds were basically head-on the whole way. We arrived here around 2 or so, got checked in, dumped and filled, and got parked. With our choice of spots I was able to park about 120' from a water spigot so I could fill the tub, and even though it was windy I wanted to get that done early on, since the hose has to cross the entrance road.

That was an amusing experience. We carry a single "normal" garden hose, a bright red affair about 50' long. In order to have 150' of hose, which lets us fill the tub even when legally "dispersed" camping 100' away from water sources, we also carry two 50' lengths of "collapsible" hose, made of woven material that folds flat, the way you see fire hose carried on a fire engine. When I unrolled the first one the wind grabbed it like a giant streamer and sent it in a very different direction than where it needed to go. Once I finally managed to wrestle it into position and get it filled with water it was fine, though.

Today I need to wrap up my slide presentation for the seminar I will be teaching later in the week. Tomorrow we'll go through all the bays and closets looking for excess "bus junk" for the swap meet, which really is just a table we put out in front of the bus for the duration of the rally. We'll be in this spot through New Years, and on the first of the year we will head off in a direction as yet unknown. We might head off to Vero Beach for a party on the 2nd to which we have been invited, and we certainly need to be in that neighborhood on the 16th for Louise's training cruise. In the intervening two weeks, however, we have no concrete plan as yet.

Solstice eclipse

We are at the Elks lodge in Lake Placid, Florida (map). While our guide said this would be dry camping in the parking lot, when we arrived the lodge showed us a 15-amp power outlet near the edge of the lot we could use for a small donation.

We had to leave our lovely little spot on Lake O Monday afternoon. We were the last stragglers out of the campground, but we left by 3:30 because we did not want to be looking for parking in the dark. I presume someone actually comes around at 5 on Mondays to lock the gate, which reopens sometime Wednesday morning. I had previously gotten another permit good for this week in case we had wanted to return there today.

There were a number of places we might have gone for a couple nights to wait it out, including the Wal-Mart in Okeechobee, but we decided instead to make progress towards this lodge in Lake Placid in the hopes that we could find a restaurant serving Christmas dinner here. Our guide said this lodge allowed stays of up to five nights, and since we wanted to stay through Christmas we decided to find something in between for Monday night.

The most convenient stop on the way here was the Seminole Brighton Casino (map), just a few miles west of our digs at Indian Prairie. After we pulled into the lot I checked in with security, who said we could park for the night around back in the designated bus parking. From the way they answered I got the distinct impression that this was not a normal thing for them and if we had shown up perhaps on a busy day where they had a few buses it would not have been OK. I also got the sense that one night was the limit, although we did not inquire.

We knew the casino had a restaurant with a full menu and were looking forward to a nice sit-down dinner. As it turns out, however, they were replacing the carpet in half the building on Monday and so dinner was served instead in the bingo hall, feeling for all the world like a high school cafeteria. We just could not bring ourselves to order prime rib and tilapia in that venue and settled instead for a pair of sandwiches.

The path to the casino entrance from where they had us park led us past a nondescript white tent, the sort used for outdoor events, with no visible entrance. Security eyed us nervously each time we passed, and I finally surmised that the tent must be chock full of the gaming equipment they had to remove to replace the carpet. All told, not one of our better stops, but it was free parking where and when we needed it.

The big regret, of course, was that we had to move from the completely dark surroundings of our primitive camp on the lake on the very night of the full lunar eclipse. Instead we were in a parking lot under mega-candlepower klieglights. Before we turned in for the night we walked around the lot and scoped out a dark corner where we hoped to see the eclipse starting at about 2:30am.

I am often still up at that hour and so, while Louise caught some shut-eye, I kept poking my head out to check on the moon and whether the sky was clear. At some point I realized that the moon would be directly overhead when the eclipse started at 1:30, and I do mean directly, as in straight up. As the hour approached I slipped open the opaque cover on the roof hatch, and voila, there was the moon in full view. Great, since it was now in the 40s outside, and who wants to traipse across a casino parking lot to stand around in the cold?

From inside the bus, the parking lot lighting was out of sight and presented no problem at all, so I grabbed the Celestron telescope and set it up on our little table just under the hatch. I was able to watch most of the transition from 1:30-2:30 right through the smoked plastic hatch cover, since the sky was clear and the moon was bright. After Louise's alarm went off at 2:30 we had to pop the hatch itself open; as the moon entered totality it was just too dim otherwise. We were treated to a spectacular view through the telescope and our binoculars, and we never had to leave the bus. I stayed in my shirtsleeves and Louise in her robe; it was like having our own private little observatory. We watched about the first half hour of totality and then closed the hatch and called it a night.

I don't attach any spiritual significance to the fact that the eclipse coincided with the winter solstice (well, OK, they were about 15 hours apart). Nevertheless it is remarkable to have happened in our lifetime and we were glad to have seen it live, as it were. And I can't complain about the venue, because at least we had clear skies, unlike many of our friends who had to try to catch glimpses between the clouds.

The casino parking lot was pretty busy Tuesday morning and we decided to get rolling right after breakfast. We arrived in Lake Placid mid-morning and spent half the day parked at the shopping center next door to do laundry. This is a small town, too small even for a Wal-Mart let alone a Lowes or Home Depot. Still, within walking distance of the lodge here are a DoIt Best hardware store, two major supermarkets, a radio Shack, the aforementioned coin laundry, and several restaurants.

One of those restaurants, Heron's Garden, happens to be serving Christmas dinner and, while nothing fancy or special, at least we can walk home after our celebratory wine. We made reservations, as it appears to be the only place open for 30 miles in any direction, unless you count Golden Corral. Last night we walked over to the Tower View restaurant, which turned out to be surprisingly good and moderately priced.

Now that we are squared away with a legal parking space, a power outlet, and Christmas dinner reservations, we are all set until we are ready to roll over to Arcadia on the 26th in advance of the annual bus conversion rally there. Once again I am a scheduled seminar presenter, and we are also looking forward to reconnecting with a number of people.

In other news we were contacted this week by the staff at Passagemaker Magazine, who visit our blog every time I write "Trawler Fest" (hi guys!) They wanted to quote some of what I wrote here about Trawler Fest Fort Lauderdale last year in some promotional material, I presume for the upcoming event at the same venue, and we granted permission after a quick review. It was very professional of them to ask; we've had an incident in the past where an organization which some would perceive to be professional, the Affinity Group (owners of Camping World, Good Sam, Trailer Life, and a host of others) simply plagiarized what they wanted without attribution or even asking.

As this will likely be my last post this week, we want to wish all of our readers a very happy holiday season, whatever you may celebrate at this time of year.

Photo by Rich Anderson, used under a Creative Commons license.

Shaking off the dust of our feet

The dust of Stuart, Florida specifically, for they shall no longer receive us. Instead we are at the free Glades County campground at Indian Prairie Canal, on Lake Okeechobee (map). This is a wonderful little spot, on the lake side of the levee. There are a couple dozen sites here, most with stone fire rings and a few with picnic tables. Trash service is provided, but no other amenities, and the price is definitely right. Our only neighbors are one class-A and a handful of fishermen in truck campers.

We ended up here after being booted out of Stuart. You may recall when last we reported here we were at the Elks lodge in Port Saint Lucie, which was very pleasant. However by Wednesday morning we needed water, and the spigot was further away than the 150' of hose we carry. We were also only a couple of days from needing to dump, and we had been at that lodge a full week by then and did not want to overstay our welcome. So Wednesday morning we loaded up the bikes, pulled up to the building to put a little water in, and headed south the five miles to the Stuart lodge, where we have stayed in the past.

On our first visit to the Stuart lodge we liked it there so much we stayed over a week. I even wrote here later in our stay that we liked Stuart well enough that we were adding it to our very short list of places we might settle down, whenever we are done traveling. We spent a lot of money in the city, and we remembered the lodge being very welcoming, and having a short signed agreement for us to sign in order to stay in the parking lot. And so Stuart has been on our "RV friendly" list ever since, and we even spent another pleasant night there just last month.

Given all that, we had planned on staying there again this week, in the hopes of finding a nice eatery in town serving Christmas dinner. Likely we would have gone out to eat on Christmas eve as well, and probably several other nights in the course of the ten days. We had even been making some extensive plans with our friends Martin and Steph for right after Steph and Louise's January trawler training cruise, just a few miles north in Fort Pierce, that would have involved us staying at the Stuart lodge and them staying at a hotel next door or just down the block.

When we arrived back at the lodge Wednesday evening, the offices and lounge were closed, and we parked in our usual spot (map). I found someone in the kitchen area who was preparing for bingo that evening, just to let someone know we were there. So imagine our surprise when a knock came on the door a few hours later, as evening was falling. It was a pair of lodge officers, coming to let us know that parking was no longer allowed because the lodge had been cited by the city. Apparently either a disgruntled neighbor or, more likely, a nearby campground operator complained to the city, who decided to start enforcing some existing but unpublished ordinance about parking on private property. They told us we could spend the night, as we were already there, so long as we left in the morning.

We've moved Stuart into the RV-unfriendly category, and, frankly, we prefer not to spend any money at all in such places so as not to reward this sort of unfriendliness with tax revenue. Had it been any earlier in the day, I think we would have left on the spot, so as not to get the lodge in any further trouble and also to preclude any midnight knocks from law enforcement. We would have prefered taking our restaurant dollars with us. However, it was already starting to get dark, we had no ready-made backup plan, and -- this one is the biggie -- we had our mail sent to General Delivery at the Stuart post office a short walk away, and it had not yet arrived.

So we decided to spend the one night as offered. Given the circumstance, we left the scooters in the bay, and headed off to dinner at Flanigan's next door. In the morning, as we were finishing our breakfast, we spotted a Stuart code enforcement truck eying the bus, and decided that it was high time to clear out of the parking lot. With our mail still en route, we headed across town to a shopping center parking lot to see if it might arrive before we had to leave town for the night.

We got lucky -- the mail arrived at the Stuart post office first thing Thursday, and after spending an hour or so plotting a diesel purchase and where to stock up on groceries (not in Stuart), we swung by the PO for the mail and then headed west out of town. I already knew about this campground just a few miles off our route, and my guides said it was free with a 14-day stay limit.

What the guides failed to mention, and we did not find out until we arrived and saw it on a sign at the entrance, is that one needs a permit to camp here, available at the Glades County road department office, and the campground is closed from 5pm Monday to 7am Wednesday every week. A quick call to the roads department revealed that they were open till 4 and permits were free. Given they were another 20 miles down the road, toward Moore Haven, we opted to park the bus and I headed down there on the scooter, arriving a half hour before closing.

I pulled a permit for this week and also one for next week, in case we want to come back here Wednesday after spending two nights elsewhere. It's not clear that there is any permit enforcement anyway; the rules stipulate self-contained units only, and some of the fishermen are sleeping in their vans (there are no rest room facilities here). I also haven't spotted a permit in any other windshield.

Given that we expected to boondock all the way to Christmas, we stocked up on victuals before leaving civilization back in Palm City. The nearest restaurant is a tiny affair at the marina in Buckhead Ridge, perhaps six or seven miles from here up a 60mph road. A slightly larger restaurant is two miles further at Okee-Tantie, where we also found a dump station for $10 on our way in.



We'll need to find a place to stay Monday and Tuesday nights, and also find a place for Christmas dinner. One option is to head west to Lake Placid where there is an Elks lodge and a number of restaurants, and we'll probably do that on Christmas Eve if we don't head that way Monday. I am hoping that, for the two nights Indian Prairie is closed, we can just stay at the Seminole Brighton Casino about a dozen miles from here.

Top photo by otherthings, used under a Creative Commons license.

About that boat...

Photo by Koocheekoo

My last post here generated a question of sufficient magnitude to warrant answering with its very own post. At some point I will post separately with our current whereabouts and plans for the next week or so.

Reader Lisa asked: "Are you getting rid of the Odyssey when you get the boat????"

This, of course, is an excellent question, and deserves a complete and thoughtful answer. Which is, "Maybe." In all seriousness, when we first decided to follow our land tour of North America with a sea tour of, umm, the rest of the world, we assumed that we would be somehow parting with Odyssey whenever we completed the transition to the boat. The "ideal" situation would be that we'd be able to live in Odyssey at the boat yard while "the boat," whatever she may be, was outfitted and readied and tested and whatever. Then we'd pass along Odyssey's keys to her happy new owners as we sailed off into the sunset. Or so the story goes.

To that end, at some level, Odyssey has always been "for sale." And, face it, like that old "will you for a million dollars" joke, nearly everything in the world is for sale, at the right price. Having said that, though, I will tell you that in our very first year on the road, a woman expressed interest in buying Odyssey and we were definitely, at that point in time, not ready to sell -- at least not at any sort of real-world price. But after perhaps our second year we started saying that if the right offer presented itself at any time, we'd take the money and run. And of course, the "right offer" naturally has decreased over the years.


Photo by Elsie esq.

In our first year on the road, someone would have needed to offer us not only every penny we invested in the bus, including the value of our own sweat equity, but also something extra to make up for the time setback to our dream, sort of a loss-of-use payment. Somewhere during the second year our price had dropped to just under what we had invested, and after we'd been to every state in the continental U.S. it was more like "fair market value," where our idea of fair market is influenced by the special capabilities we included when we built it.

What has happened, though, in the past two years has really changed everything. Which is to say, the bottom has dropped out of the RV market, and in particular the bus conversion market. Many of our readers already know that several coach builders went out of business entirely, and others were bought for a song. Inventories are at an all-time high, and used rigs are all but worthless. Many RV owners found themselves upside down on their coach loans in short order, and the resulting short sales and foreclosures or repossessions have driven used inventory up even further and prices lower.


Photo by P M M

The reality is that we'd have trouble selling Odyssey in today's market. Oh, sure, I harbor fantasies that there is someone else out there "just like us" who would value the highly specialized features and capabilities of our bus as much as we do and would be willing to pay a premium for them. But to most buyers, Odyssey is just another converted bus, and a quarter-century old one at that, and there are thousands of used bus conversions on the market today. Most are newer than ours and many are selling for a fraction of what we could accept for our beloved bus. Compounding this issue is the fact that we have led a very public life right here on this blog, and so every tiny little problem with the bus, whether since corrected or not, is now public knowledge. We can't very well claim that it belonged to a little old lady who only used it to boondock at church on Sunday.

So here's the answer: Odyssey is, and has been for some time, "for sale." If someone walks up to me with the right offer, which might be cash in hand or it might even be a trade for an appropriate boat, with some cash in one direction or the other, we are ready and willing to move out of it and turn the keys over tomorrow. But we are not yet to the point of actively pursuing such a sale by, say, creating a sales page on our site, or listing Odyssey with any brokers or sales sites, although that day will surely come. However, we are making alternative plans for the possibility that we will move aboard a boat without selling Odyssey at all.


Photo by Ole M

Those plans broadly fall into two categories. One would be to find a nice, inexpensive, secure, and climate-friendly place to store the bus indefinitely. We would take all the appropriate precautions to preserve its condition for some future time when we retire from boating and return to the land, at which point it would again become our home. In the meantime, several of her systems and appliances might be moved into the boat for use there, such as the marine refrigerator, the inverter, the diesel boiler, the Advantium oven, the A/V equipment, and even the batteries.

The other would be to find a "tenant" or bus-sitter. Someone with similar interests and skills who would be willing to take care of Odyssey, keep up the maintenance, and take care of any problems in exchange for the ability to live and/or travel in her rent-free. There would be a contract and some sort of deposit to ensure that the bus was not deliberately mistreated in our absence.


Photo by tracky_birthday

We are often asked about timing. When, exactly, would any of this happen? And in keeping with the rather unplanned and unscheduled nature of most of the rest of our life, the answer is not pat. We're asked often enough, though, that I am very practiced in responding: We will move from the bus to the boat when one of three things happens: 1. We get an offer we can't refuse on the bus. 2. We get a deal we can't pass up on a boat. Or 3. something happens to the bus that renders it impractical to repair (Louise worries about this one every time we embark a ferry). At this writing, #2 is the most likely event of the three. But you never know -- maybe someone with cash and a secret longing to own our bus is reading this post.


Photo by bunky's pickle. All photos used under a Creative Commons license.

Repairs, reunions, rocket launches, re-lamping, and relaxation

We are at the Elks lodge in Port Saint Lucie, Florida (map). RV parking here is just a spot in the grass behind the lodge, but temperatures have been pleasant since we arrived on Wednesday night, and we've only run the generator about four hours since we got here. The lodge has been very welcoming and we've even gone in for a couple of meals.

Last weekend was quite cold at the shop in Lakeland, and we were very happy to have a power outlet. We had a pretty quiet weekend, and I used the downtime to get some projects done, including installing a relay so that the awnings can not be deployed while the coach is in gear, a response to the problem we had back in October at Hampton Roads. That also let me throw away the giant note we had taped to the dash reminding us to turn off the awning power before driving away. I also changed the oil on my scooter, a bus garage being nearly the perfect place to do so.

On Monday they were finally able to roll us over the pit, but it was well into the afternoon by then, and we had already resigned ourselves to missing the COTS-1 rocket launch scheduled for Tuesday morning. We had hoped to watch that from Titusville or maybe Cocoa Beach. When I let shop owner John know we had waved off our Tuesday "commitment" he told us that on a clear day launches were usually visible from the parking lot, and so we made plans to do just that.

In the meantime, while the techs got to work changing our fluids, I got a text message from WhereIsBen asking if we were still in Lakeland. They had plans to fly out of Tampa for the holidays to visit family, and figured we'd be right on their way from Sanford. We arranged for them to stop by, and John generously offered up a parking spot for the night, sharing our power outlet. Amusingly, Ben did not tell Karen about our little plan before they arrived, and I think I startled her by jumping in their bus out on the street to direct Ben into the lot.

Sometime during the day Steve Siems had also returned to the shop to shepherd the additional work on his Series-60 upgrade, and we all ended up going to dinner Monday evening. We, Ben, and Karen all piled into Steve's SUV and followed John and his wife Lynn over to a tasty Mexican place. We all agreed to meet in the parking lot in the morning to watch the launch.

By the time we returned from dinner, though, I learned that SpaceX had scrubbed the launch attempt due to cracks in the second stage nozzle, and it had already been rescheduled for Wednesday, making us very glad we did not do anything unnatural to try to get out of the shop Monday night. Ben spent much of the morning discussing control systems with Steve and looking over Steve's Spaceliner, and we had lunch in town with Karen and Ben before they headed out for Tampa.

As long as we were still over the pit I asked the techs to change our coolant and inspect the air system, and we were able to complete most of our maintenance checklist with the exception of rotating the tires. They could handle the rotation, but did not have a balance machine and I really want the steers rebalanced when we swap them. The service technicians were very accommodating and the final bill was quite reasonable; coupled with the live-aboard-friendly attitude we can recommend Central Florida Bus Repair to anyone with a converted coach. They also work on more conventional diesel motorhomes and had several in the shop while we were there.

The extra work took us all the way to close of business on Tuesday and there was another rig parked behind us, so we spent another night on the pit. Wednesday morning found us all standing out in the parking lot for the rocket launch, along with local busmen Ace Rossi and Jack Campbell, whose Eagle was the rig behind us and next scheduled onto the pit. Ultimately the launch was delayed another hour and three quarters due to some countdown anomally, however at quarter to 11 they succeeded in getting it off the pad and we were treated to a nice clear, albeit distant, view of the first commercial launch of a recoverable capsule. I suppose most people are jaded about commercial space launches now, but personally I find the COTS program to be almost as interesting as those early flights five decades ago. They had, BTW, a picture-perfect flight and splashdown, the very first commercial spacecraft ever to do so.

The hour-plus launch delay was enough time for Jack to move out of the way and for us to back off the pit, and so by the time the rocket disappeared into the distance we were nearly ready to leave. At the last minute we decided to pull onto the wash rack for a quick wash, and while we were there I filled the water tank as well. We pulled out right around lunch time and headed east.

We were scheduled to be in Stuart Friday for an open-house event at Nordhavn, and I had it in my mind that we would park Odyssey in the empty lot next door to their office, where we stayed last year for Cruiser Expo, while we toured the boats. This lodge in Port Saint Lucie was on the way, and so we set our sights here for the intervening two nights. On our way, we ran into an outlet mall with a VF outlet, which is more or less the only place I buy pants these days, and we ended up making an hour-long stop there to replenish my supply. Louise used the time to pick up some gifts for our nieces. The unplanned stop put us here at the lodge well past dark.

We told them we'd be here just two nights when we checked in. But Thursday morning I realized that we were all of five miles from Nordhavn, just down US-1 in Stuart, an easy scooter ride. So we decided to just stay put, and run down there on the scooters instead. Thursday was bleak and rainy and we just stayed in the bus all day, but Friday was gorgeous and a perfect day for a scooter ride an also to stroll the docks and look at boats. We're very glad we did, because we had something of an epiphany while at Nordhavn.

I should mention here that we'd love to have a Nordy, but a new one is out of our price range. Frankly, even most used Nordhavns are out of our league, even the ones in our size range. But that said, they are in many ways the ideal boat for our cruising goals. We find ourselves, consciously or not, comparing the other boats we are considering to the Nordys that we've seen.

At this open house we were able to board and inspect, side-by-side, the two models that might conceivably fit our needs and budget, the older and thus more affordable Nordhavn 46, and the much newer and probably still out of our grasp Nordhavn 43. The important discovery we made Friday is that notwithstanding the 3' difference in name, the 43 is actually the larger boat. More importantly it has better engine room access and a preferable layout, with the master stateroom amidships rather than in the bow. The boats have almost identical waterline lengths, meaning the same top speed and equivalent seakeeping, while the 43 is slightly shorter in LOA, which is a good thing vis-a-vis dockage and close-quarters maneuvering.



Bottom line: the Nordhavn 43 has moved to the top of the list as the perfect boat for us (money aside). The 46 is probably a distant second, with all the other contenders well beyond that. In the overall scheme of things, the 43 is a relatively new boat, and we are hoping that as the early ones age, and owners trade up to larger models or retire from cruising, that a few of them will come down from the stratosphere into a more affordable price range in the next few years.

Speaking of Nordhavn 43s, after coming to this conclusion and while strolling the other docks at the marina we ran into Three @ Sea, a 43 belonging to a young family out cruising the world. I have followed their blogs on and off for some time now and they have many interesting stories. Interestingly they came to trawlering more or less the same way we did, and are also refugees from the Silicon Valley rat race. I am hoping we will meet them at Trawler Fest; they looked quite busy when we strolled by, and we are perhaps overly sensitive to "blog stalkers" dropping by unannounced so we merely waved.

While it was gloomy on Thursday I started another "bus project" that has been languishing in my project bin. I knew it would be a bear and had probably been subconsciously avoiding it, but driving down to Saint Lucie from Vero Beach in the dark drove home that it was overdue: upgrading the dashboard lighting.

Odyssey is a 24-volt bus and we have the original factory dash, with lots of 25-year-old rocker switches, VDO gauges, and an Argo tachograph (recording speedometer). That makes for three different kinds of fiddly little hard-to-find 24-volt bulbs, and they seem to last only a thousand hours or so. Since we drive with our lights on all the time, that means a dash lamp lasts us perhaps a year and a half, and so we've replaced them, from a secret stash that I ordered when we first got the bus, three or four times each. The last time I noticed a couple of gauges unlit, early this year, I put my foot down and said that I was not going to replace another bulb before I tore the whole thing open and replaced them all with LEDs. I bought the LEDs for the project way back in March.

With more than half the dash unlit on our way here, the project was clearly overdue, and with a few days of downtime it was time to just get 'er done. I won't bore you with all the details -- I'm saving that for the readers of Bus Conversions Magazine, where I am turning my pain into a feature article for a future issue. Suffice it to say that I used a bunch of super-bright green LEDs that I purchased in a lot of 100 for less than five bucks, and between roughing them up to approximate omnidirectional bulbs, soldering resistors into the circuit, and figuring out how to mount tiny LEDs where much larger lamps had been, the whole project took maybe a dozen hours over three days.



I'm very happy to have this project behind me, and I am also happy with the results. The LEDs are much crisper and brighter than the wimpy incandescents they replaced (made worse, in the case of the gauges, by a green coating on each bulb), and I will never again need to replace a dashboard lamp.

We are now contemplating our next move. I am thinking that the Port Saint Lucie/Stuart area, where we have not one but two Elks lodges from which to choose, is probably our best bet for the upcoming Christmas holiday. There are a number of hotels and resorts here in the Treasure Coast area, so someone is bound to have a nice Christmas dinner on tap, and maybe even a brunch someplace. I have plenty more projects I can knock out in the next ten days, and our next scheduled stop is Arcadia for the bus rally over New Years, so pretty much anyplace else we could go actually takes us further away from where we need to be next.

"R" Photo by christopher.woo, and "Green LED" photo by project+ landscapes+; both used under a Creative Commons license. Nordhavn 43 photo courtesy of Nordhavn.com.

Everyone loves a parade

We are parked at Central Florida Bus Repair, in Lakeland, Florida (map). It has been a while since I posted, so lots to update.

We had a very enjoyable, if a bit strange, Thanksgiving dinner. The "restaurant" was actually a coffee bar (think Starbucks, only independent and local) in what was clearly a former fast-food franchise, perhaps Wendy's. The drive-up window was still intact and used by the baristas to serve coffee to commuters, and the place really did not have a kitchen. I got the impression the food for the big holiday meal was catered. At the last minute I called the place to see if they had wine; good thing, because it was strictly BYOB. We brought a couple of bottles with us.

The company, of course, made the evening, and it was very nice of Karen and Ben to invite us along. The food was also tasty and included all the traditional Thanksgiving flavors, with the addition of Tofurkey (I passed). Each of us had at least two helpings before piling back into the Mini and heading back to Sanford and the hot tub.

We ended up staying at Millennium all the way to Tuesday morning. We had previously decided not to overstay our welcome, and certainly not to look like we had moved in, and so Sunday night after we all got out of it I drained the hot tub. I also stowed the scooters, and put away all the patio furniture including the LP fireplace, in preparation for a Monday departure. On Monday we toured another Millennium coach, a four-slide, $1.8M affair, and then dropped all of $15 in the parts department. We were all set to leave when we decided to stay for one last meal with our friends, and we all ended up back at Efe's Turkish Restaurant on the waterfront for another excellent dinner.

We really, really enjoyed the time we spent with Ben and Karen, who are kindred spirits. We are looking forward to connecting with them at least once more before we leave Florida, at the Bussin' 2011 Rally in Arcadia over New Year's. They have even allowed for the possibility of catching Trawler Fest in Fort Lauderdale, our last scheduled Florida stop before heading west.

On Monday I had called Central Florida Bus to see when they might get us in, and head honcho John Silver allowed that he could definitely get us in by Monday and possibly as early as Wednesday or Thursday. He already had two buses scheduled over the two pits, and it turned out we knew both of them. One was Steve Siem's Neoplan Spaceliner, into which Central Florida had installed a new engine a few months back, and the other was the Eagle belonging to Jack Campbell. Having no place else we needed to be, we decided on Tuesday to just head here to Lakeland to wait it out, where we knew there was an Elks lodge with RV parking.

We decided to drop by the shop here first, to see what the situation was and whether they could order any parts ahead of time, and we ended up just parking in the back lot with a 15-amp outlet. That gave us the chance to go out to dinner two nights in a row with Steve and Harriet Siems before they headed back down to Fort Lauderdale in their tow car late Wednesday evening. Steve's bus is still here, and we are parked tail-to-tail looking very much like a Spaceliner convention. The shop finally had a spare tech today and they started on servicing our air dryer; on Monday they will try to wrap up the other work including an oil change. Looks like we are living in a bus garage for the weekend.

Yesterday Louise went into town for a haircut, wherein she discovered from the stylist that 7pm last night was the annual Lakeland holiday parade. We thought it a bit unusual for such an event to be on a Thursday night, but hey, when in Rome... After looking up the parade route on line, we called the Texas Cattle Company restaurant right on the route, and across from the fireworks over the lake. They had no problem reserving us a table with a view of the parade, but were very concerned that we could not reach them because all the streets around the route would be closed starting at 5:30.

Notwithstanding one run-in with the local constabulary, who seemed put out about the whole parade and in less than holiday spirits, we were able to stash the scooters just three blocks from the restaurant after a brief hunt, and were seated just as the fireworks started. The parade arrived in front of our window just as we finished our entree, and we had a nice, warm view of the ~120+ floats and perhaps half dozen marching bands. It took an hour and a quarter for the whole parade to pass.



Last night temperatures here dropped below freezing, and by parade time I would say it was in the 40s, so we were happy to be inside. The streets and sidewalks were jammed with people in lawn chairs, shivering. The very last float carried Santa, who was indeed a jolly old soul. We had already seen several floats with what looked at first like Santa but turned out, as they came closer, to be The Grinch. I counted no fewer than six Grinches, so either Lakeland is a very grumpy town, or parade organizers mandated that there could be only one real Santa float, and The Grinch makes a convenient substitute.

Since we have a power outlet, Louise fixed something in the crock pot for tonight, and we are settled in for the weekend. I am hoping they will finish us up on Monday and we can still make Tuesday morning's COTS-1 rocket launch, especially since the next shuttle has been pushed back to February. However, I don't want to leave here until all the work is done, so we are prepared to stay all the way to Thursday if necessary, and be in Stuart by Friday for the Nordhavn open house.

Both photos by lakelandlocal, used under a Creative Commons license.