Richmond update

We are parked on a dead-end street behind Martin's grocery, formerly Ukrops, off US-1 between Ashland and Glen Allen, Virginia (map), just north of Richmond. Once again I must apologize for the lack of updates, but we have had our noses to the grindstone.

We were parked in exactly this same location last Sunday night, after we moved from the TA truck stop north of here, and it was such a great spot we decided to try it again. Last week were took advantage of this spot to stock up the larder at Martin's, which turns out to be a great store. They also have a coffee bar with indoor and outdoor seating and free WiFi, though we are just a tad too far to pick it up.

This spot was also a good starting point for a relatively short scooter ride to the cousins' house, where we dined on elk burgers and had a very pleasant evening. They have a cat, three dogs, and a flock of chickens, so we felt right at home. They also had a pair of litre-class cruisers in the driveway, next to which our scooters appeared lilliputian.

Monday morning we headed back to the warehouse, where we were able to park undisturbed through Sunday. We both worked a solid five days, and I also went in on Saturday to tie up some loose ends. That got us 50 amps of power all the way through the hot spell here, as temperatures started to drop Sunday afternoon. During the course of the week we managed to get downtown a couple more times for dinner, including to the vibrant Shockoe Bottom neighborhood, where we had a coupon for local favorite Julep's.

Sunday morning I finally got a chance to unwind and more or less crash, and we were able to talk constructively about the "plan" for the immediate future, such as that is. By the time Friday had rolled around, we had been talking seriously about heading up to Baltimore for Trawler Fest, held over the weekend at the Inner Harbor. But that would have necessitated an early start Saturday morning, and, while we had loaded up the scooters and battened everything down Friday night just in case, we ended up sleeping in on Saturday and really didn't have the energy for it, especially since we are scheduled to attend Trawler Fest in Fort Lauderdale in January. Thus I ended up back in the office for most of Saturday.

We'd also been invited by some friends to spend some time at their vacation home in Cole's Point, on the Potomac, just a short walk from the historic tavern there. And, as is usual any time we are this close, we also had an invitation to stop by the Disaster Operations Center (DOC) in DC. By Sunday morning, however, we were carefully watching Investigation Area 96L, which has since turned into Tropical Depression 16 and now Tropical Storm Nicole. Knowing that moving that much further away from the potential strike zone might put us off the deployable list, we opted to stay well south of the Mason-Dixon line, and instead set our sights on the Elks lodge in Norfolk, where there is RV parking and one of our reciprocal clubs nearby. We turned down the generous Cole's Point offer and informed the DOC that we'd be staying south for potential trouble.

Having decided not to proceed any further north, I realized that this might be as close as we come to my family in New Jersey this season, and there is a single train that can take me there from Richmond. So Sunday before leaving the warehouse I called them and made arrangements for a quick visit, involving an early morning Amtrak on Monday and a return yesterday afternoon. We were so undisturbed in this secret spot last week that we decided a two or three night stay here would probably go unnoticed, and on top of being just a six mile scooter ride to the Ashland Amtrak station, there is plenty of shopping and dining right here in walking distance, so Louise would want for nothing in my absence.

As it turns out, one of the establishments a short walk away is a salon that has massage, and Louise had such a nice one Monday that I had her book me one for this morning, so we again spent last night right here. Gino's Italian Restaurant right next door to the salon was fine choice last night for dinner.

The other matter that came to some resolution on Sunday was that of the broken MotoSat DataStorm satellite dish. I've had a couple of responses to a plea I posted on the DataStorm Users Forum about both the modem issue and the cracked elevation stop, and last week someone wrote me to say he was selling his entire system -- mount, dish, modem, and positioner -- for $300. It is the same vintage as ours, but likely has fewer cycles on it, and he's upgraded the modem and positioner. It was a deal I could not pass up, even at $225 for packing and shipping, and on Sunday we closed the deal to have it sent to Norfolk.

To get it shipped UPS rather than freight, I sent detailed instructions on how to break the unit down to more manageable pieces, discarding the enormous fiberglass dish reflector and the long aluminum mounting rails. I should have the parts in hand on Monday. One reason we chose Norfolk as an interim destination is that Mobil Satellite Technologies, our HughesNet VAR, is nearby in Chesapeake, and if I need help with this or if this latest combination of parts does not fix all our problems, it will be a short drive over to their repair facility.

In the meantime, of course, Nicole has continued her relentless progression up the coast, and the Red Cross is already marshaling resources for a response in North Carolina. At this point they are only recruiting local volunteers, so we are not on the list of possible options, but if the storm does a lot of damage we could end up being sent there before our packages arrive. I had them shipped on my own UPS account, so I can intercept and reroute them if necessary due to being deployed.

We will remain right here for a 2pm conference call this afternoon, and then head slowly towards Norfolk. I expect we will be in Williamsburg this evening.

Photo by MEL810, used under a Creative Commons license.

The free parking shuffle

We are at the TA truck stop in Ashland, Virginia (map), only a couple miles from Bass Pro across the freeway where we started our day yesterday. In the interim, we spent a few hours in the parking lot of a shopping center one exit south, where there is a Home Depot and a Gander Mountain.

What I neglected to mention in yesterday's post is that when we arrived at Bass Pro Friday night and found a relatively dark parking spot, we discovered the left front leveling actuator to be inoperative. A quick look under the wheel well while Louise operated the switch revealed the motor to be turning, but the actuator rod was not moving in or out. It was more or less stuck at dead center, which, all things considered, is better than the alternatives. Today's photo shows the original actuator when it was new, easy to see in this shot because the wheel has been removed. Click here to see a larger image.

We ended up moving to another part of the lot, where I could get level without having to adjust that particular wheel. I knew I'd need to spend half an hour or so huddled inside the wheel well to get the actuator out even to figure out what was wrong with the thing. Being able to move the bus once the actuator is out requires even more work to substitute a fixed-length arm, and I figured we'd best do the work within walking distance to a hardware store. Plus, we did not want to abuse Bass Pro's hospitality by working on the bus in their lot.

As it turned out, the jack screw itself was stripped out somehow. I can't get that part of the sealed actuator open to find out why, but I had everything I needed to repair the problem buried in the back of the parts bay. A mere five months after we hit the road, one of the wires to the rear actuator broke off right at the motor housing, as I wrote in this post. With the motor being staked rather than bolted together, there was no way to repair the wire, and we had to replace the entire actuator. I put the old one aside for some future emergency.

It was a straightforward, if tedious, matter to move the working motor and its position-sensing potentiometer from the now stripped actuator to the defunct unit from the spares bay. There are lots of tiny, fiddly little screws and gears that needed to be moved around, but the end result was a working actuator with a much "newer" jack-screw and housing, and better lubrication as well. After a few functional tests I crawled back into the wheel well to install it. The whole job took a little over two hours, and we never even needed the Home Depot.

Just as I was washing up, Louise's cousin and aunt arrived to take us to dinner, and her cousin's partner met us at the O'Banks pub across the freeway. We had a nice meal with them, but it was dark by the time we returned to the bus, and rather than hunting around for better parking we just came here where we knew they had several dedicated RV spaces. My guide reports a dump station here, too, but I could not find it in a walk around the enormous property.

Today we will find a grocery store to replenish our supplies, and we are due at the cousin's house this evening for a home-cooked meal. We'll try to find a parking spot a little closer to there for tonight, and roll over on the scooters. In the morning we will head back to the Red Cross warehouse for a few days to wrap up our project there.

Weekend off

We are at the Bass Pro Shop in Ashland, Virginia (map), a familiar stop. We had actually planned to spend last night at the Richmond Elks lodge, a bit southwest of here in Glen Allen, but we could not get our satellite on-line from any of their three 30-amp RV spots. I'm sure we could have parked elsewhere in their lot for the same $10 per night, but if we were just going to dry camp we didn't see the need to pay for the privilege. Besides that, they were having a turkey shoot last night until 10 pm, and we didn't want to have to listen to gunfire all evening.

We have been working (and parked) at the Red Cross maintenance facility in Richmond since Monday morning. Just before I turned in on Sunday night I heard back from our "big boss" in Washington (we normally deal only with his direct reports) that he would be in Richmond around 10 am Monday to meet us, and we had a mad scramble in the morning to get the scooters loaded and hit the road. We were in Richmond by 11:30.

The Red Cross facility in Richmond is mostly a large warehouse, used to store disaster supplies such as cots, coolers, toiletries, cleanup kits, and shelf-stable meals. A very small section of warehouse has been dedicated to technology resources, and nearby is what used to be a snack/break room for the building's previous tenant, and we are turning that into a technology maintenance and computer imaging room. At the other end of the building, nearly a quarter mile away, is a small cluster of office space, which we've turned into a "hot site" similar to the ones in Montgomery and Baton Rouge that I have written about previously.



In addition to being usable as a hot site for a disaster relief operation, such as the one we worked here in Richmond back in 2006 (in a different, earlier Richmond hot site), this site can also be used as a backup to the Disaster Operations Center (DOC) in DC. The primary DOC backup is in Ashburn, but that is close enough to DC that this somewhat more distant facility would be needed in the event of a large enough disaster in the metro Washington area. We've spent most of this past week getting the hot site operational.

After scoping out the entire enormous facility, we found a loading bay door close to a power panel with a 30-amp outlet and several 20-amp ones, and we got Odyssey settled in Monday evening after getting our marching orders. The warehouse manager had already cleared it with the landlord's maintenance staff, but, apparently, on Tuesday some higher-up on the landlord's staff noticed the bus and told the warehouse manager we could not stay overnight. After several back-and-forth discussions involving how we were volunteers and the Red Cross would have to expend donor dollars to house us elsewhere and that we were parked where no one but the landlord's own maintenance staff could see us resulted in a grace for "a few days."

Not wanting to push our luck, we pulled up stakes mid-day Friday and moved to the front parking lot until we were done for the day. We'll go back to our spot and plug back in on Monday, and we have our fingers crossed that we can just stay there until we are done with our project sometime later in the week. While we have a key card and the alarm code and could easily have worked this weekend, the warehouse staff is off as are the folks in both DC and Austin, Texas with whom we have been consulting all week, so we, too, took the weekend off.

Louise has relatives who live in the Richmond area, and we will try to visit today or tomorrow. The Elks lodge, in addition to being the cheapest "official" place to stay in the Richmond area, would have coincidentally been very convenient for that visit, but here in Ashland is nearly as good. However, we will likely need to bounce around to three different locations across the three nights, as the generally accepted overnight etiquette at Bass Pro and many other retailers is one night only.

We had a nice dinner last night at the Islamorada Fish Company restaurant inside the Bass Pro store, and today we watched the fish feeding in the 23,000 gallon aquarium as well as the "trout stream." On our way back out of the store they were selling hot dogs, so we had lunch here, too. In a few minutes we will roll out to Home Depot, just down the road, to take care of some maintenance items.

Storage Ideas from the Tiny House Blog

On Saturdays I occasionally write about strategies for living in 300 square feet.

Linda Merrill has a great article over on the Tiny House Blog, "18 Brilliant Storage Ideas for Tiny Homes." Quite a few of these tips can be easily adapated for RV living. Here are just a few (numbers refer to Linda's list of 18):

2. We installed a white wire shelf in one of our closets. They are inexpensive and easy to find at Home Depot and Lowe's. The shelves can be cut to any length and aren't as thick as wooden shelves, and allow for more air circulation in a small closet.

5. Linda suggests using cool-looking vintage luggage as coffee tables. That may not be practical in an RV, but if you store any luggage at all, it makes sense to fill it with something such as out of season bedding so it isn't just wasted space. We occasionally take a vacation from full-time RVing and need a few suitcases for our airplane and cruise ship travels. When we aren't using the suitcases, they hold emergency pet supplies and some scuba gear under the bed.

6., 7. & 12. I'm a big believer in putting hooks everywhere. S-hooks, peg boards, and pegged dowels could be installed in many places in an RV. How about lining one side of a basement bay in peg board and hanging tools there? The peg board would add strength to RV walls and you wouldn't have to drill as many holes.

13. Fabric is a great way to hide an area temporarily. A long table cloth around the dinette would be pretty to look at and make that pile of boxes less noticable. Or, it could provide a private space for a child to play. We close off our downstairs cockpit in the winter with a large decorative cloth. It helps to keep the cold air out of the living space. By the way, if you need a large piece of pretty cloth, look at fabric shower curtains. They come in many designs, are usually thicker than a bed sheet, come pre-hemmed, and are often quite inexpensive.

15. As Linda says, "Hanging shoe organizers aren’t for shoes alone." I use a clean one to hold scarves. Actually, I cut it in half and use half for shoes and half for scarves. I like her idea of using one for craft supplies. A shoe organizer full of yarn or quilting squares would be colorful and fun! Like shower curtains, shoe holders come in a variety of pretty colors and fabrics, so you could even use one in the living room near the front door to hold hats, short umbrellas, dog leashes, etc.

18. RVs don't usually have soffit space, but there is a surprising amount of hidden areas that could be converted into storage. Look in toe kicks and under banks of drawers, in the backs of basement bays behind dividing walls. You might find a cubby that just needs a little hatch cut through a thin wall for access.

Does Linda's article inspire you to try some creative new storage? Leave your ideas in the comments.

And by the way, if you don't regularly read the Tiny House Blog, check it out! Lots of neat and interesting small space living ideas, and a nice community of folks who are interested in leaving a smaller footprint on their budget and environment.

Photo by Let Ideas Compete. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Catching up in Rocky Mount

We are at the Elks lodge in Rocky Mount, NC (map). Our guide said this lodge had parking with electric power for $10, but the price has gone up to $15. Still, that's $10 less than we were paying over in Raleigh, and we have the whole place to ourselves. We've got a pair of 20-amp outlets, and there is water and even a dump on the property.

We ran the air conditioner when we arrived, but the last couple of days have been cool enough that we've been OK just with the fans, so paying for power seems a bit excessive. However once we were settled in with the scooters out, we didn't want to go hunting for other digs, and besides, this is a nice private spot to get some work done up on the roof, which is not the sort of thing I would do at, say, Wal-Mart.

Speaking of fans, Friday's roof-top project was getting the bedroom FanTastic fan working. It quit entirely on Thursday, and no amount of fiddling with the three switches would get it running. I could tell it had power, because the separate motor which raises and lowers the lid worked, but the fan itself would not spin. My guess was a corroded pin switch, which stops the fan from spinning when the lid is closed, and that's a roof-top repair.

The bedroom fan is on the one part of the roof that's hard to access, necessitating a precarious shuffle between the solar panels and the roof edge on a slippery slope. I took the inside grille off the unit so Louise could hand me tools up between the fan blades as I worked. The pin switch turned out to be fine, and poking around with the meter revealed that the power was stopping at a small thermal cutout device just under a small grille in one corner of the unit. That turned out to be an inside repair, and so back down I went after poking all the tools back down through the fan.

As it turns out, FanTastic implements the "three speed" feature of these fans by using a DC motor and a pair of open wire-wound resistors for the two intermediate speeds. The fan itself is supposed to blow some air over the resistors, and the small grille in the corner is for the heat to escape. Centered in that grille immediately above the resistors is a small sacrificial thermal fuse. I think what happened here is that something dropped into the fan from outside, keeping the blades from spinning, which caused the resistor to overheat -- we almost always run the fan on its lowest setting. That blew the thermal fuse.



I've got a note in to FanTastic about getting a replacement. In the meantime, I replaced the thermal fuse assembly, which had spade lugs, with a 10-amp ATO automotive fuse I had lying around, as the blades on these are about the same size as spades. At least we'll have some ventilation in the bedroom while I wait for a replacement. With five mammals on board, working vents are mandatory.

Yesterday's rooftop project involved the long-dormant satellite dish repair. Regular readers know that the automatic aiming function has not worked now for several months, the problem initially starting when HughesNet moved us to a different satellite transponder. They have since moved us yet again, but alas this did not magically fix the problem. As I wrote here back in June, I had purchased some used dish parts on-line in order to continue the troubleshooting process, wherein we had been told our hardware was too outdated to be supported.

Since leaving Minneapolis, it's just been too hot outside to be working on the roof, and we had a manual work-around. The very small handful of times it has been both cool and dry enough to be disassembling waveguides, we've been busy with other things or unable to go without Internet access for the roughly four hours or so the project might take. Yesterday was the magic confluence of perfect weather (I finished just before the rain started) and no other obligations; Louise was out running errands, so she would not miss the network access either.

I'm sorry to say that replacing the entire business end of the dish as a set did not fix the problem. I did not think it would, but it was the mandatory next step in the troubleshooting process. After the testing, I had to put the original electronics back on, because my feed arm does not have the correct mounting hardware for the newer electronics. Had the test worked, I'd be back on eBay looking for the right style arm. I'm back to square one at this point, with my next project being to put a sniffer on the net while the modem and positioner are doing their dance, then combing through the resulting capture to see where things are going wrong. What a pain.

While I was up there I also took the shroud off the bottom of the mount. For the last couple months the dish has made horrendous noises during the "stow" process, where the positioner brings the dish up to full elevation, and I could see the support arms starting to crack the shroud. Once I had it open, the problem was painfully obvious.

The dish has three low-power DC motors that move it into position along its three axes. Each axis has a fixed range of motion, but there are no limit switches or sensors to inform the positioner that the end of travel has been reached. Instead, the positioner is monitoring the motor current, and when it sees the current rise above a set threshold as the motor stalls out at the end of the travel, it stops. Inside the coach, you can hear the motors bog down each time they hit their stops.

This tends to put a lot of stress on various parts near the travel limits. Long-time readers may remember that five years ago a tooth sheared off the azimuth ring gear due to the stress of hitting the zero-limit, and we had to bring the whole dish back to MotoSat in Salt Lake to get it fixed (they will not sell parts, such as the ring gear). Fortunately at that time, they deemed the plastic ring gear to be a design problem, and replaced it with a metal one under warranty.

The current problem, pardon the pun, is much the same. There is a pot-metal casting mounted to the swiveling part of the elevation bearing that is supposed to act as a stop, hitting another pot metal casting at what is supposed to be the top of the elevation travel. While the casting is more than an inch thick, there is (stupidly) a screw pocket right at the point of maximum stress that leaves only a quarter inch of low-grade metal to take the strain. After seven years, the pot metal had enough and gave way. You can even see the screw threads visible through the crack in the metal.



I know from our experience five years ago, and again when we knocked the feed-arm off on a low overpass (long story, here) that MotoSat will not sell us this part, although I will call to ask tomorrow. Perhaps one of their installing dealers might be willing to order the part for me. I suspect, however, that what I will need to do instead is to find a machine shop someplace who can mill me one out of aluminum, and spend a night there while I disassemble the mount far enough to get the piece out -- it's sort of a donut and the elevation axle goes right through it.

In the meantime, I will now need to use manual motor controls to stow the dish as well as deploy it, since we are likely to do even more damage if we continue to let the motor stall out with the elevation supports stopping out on, as it turns out, the motor mount. Considering our dish is one of the original pre-production beta-test units, I suppose I can't complain too loudly that pieces are failing now after six years of hard use.

We both had a pile of unanswered emails and forum posts that had accumulated after we were deployed to Earl, and I think we are now mostly caught up. I also got my monthly column for Bus Conversions Magazine sent in just under the wire for the October issue. Yesterday afternoon blog reader Jay dropped by on his Gold Wing. He participates in a motorcycle drill team, and they apparently had an exhibition here in Rocky Mount yesterday morning. I'm sorry we did not learn about it ahead of time, as we would have gone to see it.

We are paid up through tomorrow, and we should find out in the morning if we will be heading up I-95 to Richmond. While Hurricane Igor, Tropical Depression 12, and two investigation areas are all spinning out in the Atlantic, none is threatening land in the next few days.

In the Wolf Den

We are at the North Carolina State Fairgrounds, in Raleigh (map). The fairgrounds has plentiful RV sites with 30- and 50-amp full hookups for $25 per night. That's steeper than our usual fare, but not bad in an RV-unfriendly town. In addition to the state capital, Raleigh is a university town, being home to the NC State "Wolfpack," and college towns are notoriously hard for parking.

We had a nice drive from Greensboro Tuesday afternoon on US-70, which brought us all the way to Raleigh and the Elks lodge off Lead Mine Road, where we had planned to stay. Our guide said they had two 30-amp spaces for $10 a night, and the Elks parking Yahoo group had a couple of posts with more detail about how to access the lodge.

When we pulled in, however, we were accosted by an extremely rude individual, a member we presume, who informed us that parking was no longer permitted there. I went inside to check with the manager, and, sure enough, a reckless RVer who caused thousands in damage has ruined it for everyone else (that's no excuse to be rude about it, though). There is no longer any RV parking at the Raleigh lodge.

As Raleigh has forbidden RV parking almost everywhere else in town, this left us few options. Fortunately the fairgrounds was convenient for us, and it's been hot enough that having unlimited power for the air conditioning has been a bonus. It was a short two-mile scooter ride to Louise's cousins just down the road, with whom we had a nice visit. It was another two miles beyond that to one of our two clubs here in Raleigh, the Cardinal Club, where we had a very pleasant lunch today on the 28th floor, overlooking the Capitol and a vast panorama of verdant forest, so so it would appear from that lofty height.

With our visit done, we are eager to move out of the high-rent district, and so will be moving on shortly, after availing ourselves of the "full hookup" aspect of our site. We checked in this afternoon with our Red Cross handlers in Washington, and, given how close we are, they'd like us to head up to the "hot site" in Richmond, Virginia (about three hours from here). We had all the arrangements made to meet up with our "big boss" there tomorrow morning, right up until we all found out that this is the weekend of the Nascar race, and the track is literally across the street from the hot site. Qualifying will be tomorrow, and the race will be on Saturday, making the facility all but inaccessible between the traffic and the cops directing it. While our Red Cross badges will get us around the cops, none of us wanted to battle thousands of crazed Nascar fans driving to and from the track.

What we decided on instead was a plan to slow-roll toward Richmond, with the idea of being there perhaps Monday sometime and spending a few days there. A very slow roll, because in the next few days what is currently Atlantic Investigation Area 92L might become some kind of storm, and we may well have to reverse course and head south or southwest. After consulting our myriad directories we found an Elks lodge in Rocky Mount, NC with power for $10 a night, and that's close enough to where we are now for us to be settled in well before Louise has to teach her class tonight.

If Rocky Mount turns out to be suitable, we'll likely spend a couple days there, at least until we know what 92L and/or Tropical Storm Igor are doing.

Wrapping up in Greensboro

We are in the parking lot of the Red Cross chapter office in Greensboro, North Carolina (map), where we have been since our arrival Thursday night. The chapter has kindly provided us with a 15-amp power outlet, and we have a mostly shady spot adjacent to the train tracks. We are just down the street from the historic Cone textile mills, now being converted to offices, and just a couple of miles from downtown.

Hurricane Earl was mostly a non-event, and the relief operation here is already over. As is fairly common for us, we were the last ones out the door, sometime around 7 or so last night, after packing the last of the equipment. Everyone else was gone by 2pm. We would already be done and gone from here right now, if it were not for the fact that today is Labor Day, and FedEx is closed. We have a pile of equipment that needs to be returned to Austin, and we can't leave until we drop it off at FedEx. We also have to return a box truck to the rental agency.

With everyone else gone, the box truck is also our only transportation (we are not allowed to use our scooters or the bus when we are on an assignment), and we drove it to dinner last night at local favorite Natty Greene's downtown. The weather has been perfect since we arrived, and we've had several nice meals al fresco, including the previous evening at Liberty Oak, also downtown, with technology teammate Keith, and lunch at Ham's Lakeside yesterday with the job director and pretty much everyone still left -- six of us.

Had Earl actually turned out to be destructive, we would have moved the entire operation closer to the coast Friday afternoon, and so we had not really planned to be here at the chapter for more than a night. As it stands, we hope to be out of here early enough tomorrow to not be too disruptive to the chapter. We'll have a relaxing "day off" today for Labor Day, as is fitting, and wrap up tomorrow morning at the truck rental.

Louise is teaching an on-line class Tuesday evening. She has relatives in Raleigh, just an hour and a half east of here, and barring any further deployment from the Red Cross we will probably head that way Wednesday for some kind of visit. After that we are somewhat at loose ends, although we are carefully watching what remains of Gaston, heading past the Leeward Islands and threatening to redevelop into a tropical cyclone in the next day or two. I suspect from Raleigh we will be heading south to reposition for the next storm; tropical depressions are spitting out from their rookery off the coast of Africa with alarming frequency and regularity.

Photo by Majiscup - Drink for Design, used under a Creative Commons license.

Duke of Earl

Just a short update tonight -- it's late, we've had a long day and are tired, and tomorrow will be an Early morning. We are at a truck stop off I-75 in Valdosta, Georgia (map), en route to US-84.

Yesterday afternoon we unofficially consulted with our leads at the Red Cross Disaster Operations Center about whether we should perhaps reposition ourselves a bit further east, in case we might be needed to respond to Hurricane Earl. It's always a dicey proposition to move ourselves like this, since it costs us real money (we do not get reimbursed for any mileage until we are officially deployed), and we did not want to drive a few hundred miles if they had other resources on hand to deal with it. The answer yesterday afternoon: sit tight, we have plenty of time before the Friday landfall, and no decisions have been made.

9:30 this morning the phone rang, inquiring if we could be in Raleigh by tomorrow evening if we were officially deployed to do so. Still no problem, and we started packing up, a process that took extra time because not only were both scooters still out, but the deck was set up, and I had three eBay items to pack and ship before we left Destin. It was nearly 1:30 by the time we rolled out of the Elks parking lot. Mind you, with no official deployment orders yet, this is still just us leading our usual nomadic life, by heading east.

We did not even make it two miles before the phone rang again, asking if we would be available to go to Boston. By plane. Logistically speaking, that's difficult, and we basically said that one of us could go to Boston, but the other would have to stay behind with the bus and pets -- Louise was not willing to drive the bus all the way to Boston without me, and, in this particular instance, they did not want her without me. After fifteen minutes of noodling through logistics, we agreed that if we were asked to do so, we could try to make Boston by Saturday, meaning someone from the DOC would have to be there ahead of us to cover for me. Still, it would mean 30 hours of driving across two and a half days, a brutal schedule.

We were almost to I-10 (it turns out to take over an hour to reach I-10 from Fort Walton Beach via Destin) when we got word that they found someone else to cover Boston, so we were off the hook, and we went back to our Plan A of heading towards Raleigh. That gave us a little more breathing room and we decided to stop at our club in Tallahassee for a nice dinner.

The club is at FSU and is staffed mostly with students from the hospitality school. With this being the very start of the school year the servers are very green, and despite our exhortation that we were on a tight schedule and wanted faster service than the usual very laid-back, nearly 2-hour affair that normally constitutes dinner at these clubs, we still ended up sitting there for well over an hour, even though we took our dessert to go (12-layer chocolate cake, and we only made it through half our single slice, together, tonight). In hindsight, the club stop was a mistake, albeit a delicious one, because it cost us perhaps 90 minutes beyond what a "normal" dinner would have, and we'd be much farther into Georgia tonight.

Tomorrow morning we will resume heading towards North Carolina. With any luck we will get some official deployment orders in the morning. If we do not get deployed to Earl, Gaston is not far behind, and has the potential for a U.S. landfall.

Photo by The Brain Toad, used under a Creative Commons license.