Hail to the Chief

This morning found us at a TA truck stop in Wildwood, Florida (map). We parked in the car parking area, next to the restaurant, as the truck section was very busy and we are very sensitive to not taking up a truck stall when there are few to be had. Signs all over the lot said "Customer Parking Only," so we went inside and had the soup and salad bar for dinner at the Country Pride full-service restaurant. TA must be in trouble, because this is the fourth or fifth one we've seen in the last year or so, and they all look rode hard and put up wet, as if no maintenance is being done whatsoever.

When we pulled in shortly after 4 or so the only other rig in the lot was a delivery. However, three other rigs joined us before the evening was out, so clearly this is a well-known stopover. Likely much to the annoyance of the KOA on the other side of the freeway. We ended up here because we decided to take the Turnpike from around Jupiter, which cost us $21.50 in tolls but saved us $20 or so in mileage, but more importantly shaved half an hour off our drive. There are no places along the Turnpike to spend the night, at least not without exiting and re-entering and incurring even more tolls, and this was literally the first legal overnight parking spot past the end of the Turnpike on I-75.

Tonight we are at the Wal-Mart in Quincy, Florida (map). This should be our last night in the state, making it just over three months since we arrived and a record for how much consecutive time we have spent in any single state since we hit the road over six years ago. Quincy was a good stopping point for tonight, on our ~5-hour daily driving schedule, and my research showed the Murphy Oil station attached to this store to have some of the cheapest diesel in Florida. We needed about 50 gallons to get us to Mississippi without dropping below the level of our generator dip tube. In addition to the $165 of fuel, we also stocked up on groceries, including a whole roasted chicken for tonight's dinner (delicious).

We had a great time at Trawler Fest. In addition to getting to spend lots of time with friends Martin and Steph, Ben and Karen, Curtis and Gill, and Captains Chris and Alyse, we made lots of progress on our boat research. We also made some new friends, including blog reader and Krogen salesperson Laura, and fellow Escapee and silicon valley alumnus Dan who has not only a fifth-wheel hauled by a heavy-duty truck but also a 60' trawler, although we were sorry to have missed the rest of his seafaring family who were off at Disney World during the show.



We were very keen to see a Diesel Duck 41, custom built in Turkey out of steel, that we had learned would be at the show and offered at a fire-sale price. The Duck is a very seaworthy boat and I am quite fond of the design, and the price was really attractive. However, the boat proved to have way too many issues to really be worthy of consideration, and nothing about it really called to us -- the owners had custom-ordered a layout that few others would find suitable. I feel sorry for them, as the boat is brand new, delivered in 2010, and they are unlikely to get back even half what they have in her.

A 2005 DeFever 49 really caught our eye, attractively priced and ready to cruise, and offered by broker and friend Curtis Stokes. However it had twice as many engines (four) and half as many batteries as we'd like, and its blue-water capabilities are limited to extended coastal cruising. Still, a very nice boat, and we will probably continue to ruminate on this one for a while. While we were aboard, Curtis pointed out that he also had listed a very nice 60' aluminum long-range expedition trawler in Seattle at an attractive price, and even though it is really too much boat for us, we'd love to look at it if it is still on the market when next we get up that way.

Two boats in the show, though, were on our must-see list and are now both very high on our "short list": the Krogen 44, and the Selene 43/45. Both of these boats suffer, as do many of the boats in our size and price range, from engine rooms with compromised headroom -- you need to crawl or duck-walk around the engines -- but at least you enter them through a vertical door and not a hatch in the cabin sole. But the internal layouts are nearly perfect, they have enough waterline length for reasonable speed and seaworthiness, and they have the range to cross the Atlantic or Pacific oceans, yet they are compact enough to do the Great Loop as well as many European canals. All boats are compromises, but these two seem to us to strike the right balance for our cruising plans.

For anyone wondering, no we did not buy a boat. While the two boats I just mentioned are top contenders, our budget dictates a previously owned example of either of these boats (or any other boat, for that matter). But the show has narrowed and tightened our focus and we will be stepping up what is still, and has been for some time, a rather casual search. After all, there is nothing driving the timing of this move and we are at liberty to look for as long as it takes to find the right boat for us. Nothing that happened at this show, including the fire sale on the Duck, warranted accelerating that process.

I did spend the final days of my first half-century at Trawler Fest, with my birthday transpiring on the last day of the show. Louise and Steph had concocted some lame excuse to be off by themselves, and borrowed Chris and Alyse's car to trundle off in secret to Publix for an enormous cake, which was served to an appreciative crowd at the closing cocktail party Saturday night. That prompted a number of folks to buy me drinks, and I was glad the bus was parked within staggering distance. Also, we ended up with some of the leftover cake, although I persuaded the bartender to take most of it back to the kitchen staff.

While we were very busy during the show, between socializing with many seldom-seen friends and trying to learn about boats, we also had to sprinkle some Red Cross work throughout the weekend. That included making arrangements for our travel next week, continuing to work on curriculum development, and dancing around the borrowed solar-energy equipment on the floor that I keep pretending I will have time to evaluate before I show up in Washington. Somewhere in all of this the big cheese in DC casually mentioned that my "reassignment" had crossed his desk, even though I was under the impression that I still had a bunch of forms to fill out for it. So I was a bit shocked when the second-in-command at my chapter (in Elkhart, Indiana) called this afternoon to congratulate me on my promotion to "Chief." Which gives me a great idea for an MP3 ring tone I need to get for my phone.

Now that the show is behind us, and soon Florida as well, we need to fully shift our focus to our Red Cross training activities for the near future. With five hours of driving each day, we have little time left over to work on our respective curriculum activities ahead of next week's training program in Virginia. We now have confirmed flights, departing Killeen mid-day on Sunday, which puts a very firm schedule on our arrival there. I have a full two days of padding in the event of either mechanical issues or rain (remembering that we have no working windshield wipers at the moment), which we will try to spend with our friends in Beaumont/Woodville if all has gone well to that point.

Tomorrow we will try to get an early start. Now that we will be heading due west, we want to try to be off the road early enough in the afternoon that the sun is not a problem. I hope to be in Biloxi, Mississippi tomorrow afternoon, where we have some casino overnight options. From there we will get another brief respite from the monotonous Interstate, as we traverse our customary route of US-90 into Louisiana. Today's drive from Ocala to Tallahassee on US-27/27A/19 was our last long non-Interstate stretch until east Texas.

Photo of Selene 45 courtesy of Selene Ocean Trawlers. Photo of Louise and Steph by Chris and Alyse Caldwell

Fast track

We are at the Bahia Mar Resort Hotel and Marina in Fort Lauderdale, Florida (map), between the ocean beach and the Intracoastal Waterway, and the venue for Trawler Fest. As they did last year, the parking folks here at the hotel are charging us $50 per night, and since we came in on Wednesday and will remain here through Sunday morning I dropped $200 in cash at the gate.

As I wrote back then, that's still favorable compared to the $170 per night for a room here or the $120 per night to dock a 40' boat, and the convenience of being to come and go at will throughout the show and to stumble back here after the nightly cocktail parties makes it worthwhile. Still, it is the most we have ever paid for a spot in an asphalt lot with no hookups.

Wednesday afternoon we reconnected with Martin and Steph and met for cocktails aboard Eagle VI with new friends Richard and Kathy, followed by dinner at Coconuts just up the block. Yesterday was the first day of the show and we had an extremely busy day on the docks, which I will report on later due to time constraints. Fellow bus-nomads Ben and Karen also came by in the afternoon to check out the show and we spent a little time with them; they are parked out at Markham county park. We also got a chance to meet blog reader Laura, who happens to be a salesperson for Kadey-Krogen.

The big news at the moment, however, happens to be that we got a call from our leads at the Red Cross on Wednesday asking if we could both fly to DC for five days in early February to help with a new training program that is being rolled out. It is an important program and since we have been heavily involved in the training development for technology for the past couple years, we felt we needed to try to accommodate this request.

Since we are still hoping to make our commitment in Death Valley in early March, what a five-day excursion to DC will do to our schedule is to more or less double our daily driving time from an average of 2.5 hours to 5 hours. That will let us get to Killeen, Texas, where our new wiper motor should be arriving, in time to fly to DC for the training. Our friends there, Don and CC, are also involved in the training development, and CC will also be flying to DC. Don has generously agreed to watch over our pets while we are gone, and they have a place we can park Odyssey.

So Sunday morning after we say our final goodbyes, we will high-tail it out of Fort Lauderdale. I expect that, uncharacteristically, we will most stay on the freeway all the way to Texas, and we should be out of Florida by the first of February. I expect this will be my last blog post from Trawler Fest, since we are somewhat overbooked here, and I will try to catch everyone up from our next couple of stops.

Back in Lauderdale

We are in Fort Lauderdale, in the parking lot of the Bass Pro/Outdoor World store (map), a familiar stop. Last night our friends Steve and Harriet picked us up here and we had dinner with them. Normally when staying here we like to eat at the integral Islamorada Fish Company restaurant, but they took us instead to a nice Chinese place downtown. Outdoor World did have the potty chemical we needed, though, so at least I was able to make a purchase.

In this same parking lot is Divers Direct, where, among other things, we bought our dive computers just a little over a year ago. The instructions that came with the computers very clearly said we needed to bring the units in for "service" annually in order to keep the two-year warranty in force, so I walked over to bring them in. The service guy looked at them briefly, mumbled some magic words, and said we were good; apparently all they can do without sending them back to the factory is change the battery.

We had no trouble dumping at the T.Y. park just a few blocks from here yesterday. The park charges an $8 dump fee, which is a bargain compared to the nightly $40 camping fee. We had a look at the campground, which is well-kept but way too closely spaced for our taste. Also it backs directly up to the Tri-Rail tracks (as does the spot we are in now, but, hey, this one's free).

In a few minutes we will roll over to Bahia Mar for Trawler Fest.

Photo by lazytom, used under a Creative Commons license.

Disappearing Dumps

We are at the Wal-Mart in Hialeah Gardens, Florida (map). We came here to Hialeah because two different dump station directories indicated there were dump stations here, at the truck stop next door and also one across the river. I walked to them last night, and the dumps do not exist. Perhaps these truck stops had them at one time, but they've been gone for so long now that the employees know nothing about them.

Knowing we were coming here, however, we had already scoped out coin laundries in the area, and after leaving Miccosukee yesterday morning we headed right for the one with the largest parking lot. Wow, was that lot ever busy; fortunately, there was room for Odyssey around back. A different coin laundry was just across the street in this overwhelmingly Cuban neighborhood, making for one of the least expensive laundry experiences we've had in a while. By the time the laundry was done, we decided to stop here for the night so I could scope the dumps on foot, and hit one of them in the morning.

While we would not otherwise have stopped here if it had not been for the phantom dumps, it was a fine place to stay, and there is a fantastic Cuban (what else?) restaurant right here in the parking lot called Don Cameron ("Sir Shrimp"), which not only had beer and wine but also served up heaping plates of food that we could not possibly finish. We have yet to go into the Wal-Mart, but I understand the in-store food venue at this location is also a Cuban restaurant, Sergio's. I'll find out shortly, as I ordered a prescription refill here via the web site, and it should be ready later this morning.

Frankly, I was somewhat surprised that overnight parking here was not forbidden outright, as we are fairly close now to Miami. However signs at the entrance forbid only trucks, no surprise since the two truck stops next door both charge $12 a night for truck parking. I understand the stores in Hialeah and Miami Gardens are also permissible options, and those were our backups in case we were unable to stay here.

With the purported dump stations here turning out to be a delusion, today we will proceed to the Topeekeegee Yugnee county park in Fort Lauderdale, known locally as TY park (even the locals don't want to pronounce it), which has 61 full-hookup RV sites for $40 per night, but also a dump station for a mere $8. I expect we will end up at the Bass Pro shop in Fort Lauderdale tonight, unless that, too, has become restricted, where we will meet up with friends Steve and Harriet for dinner at the Islamorada Fish Company restaurant in the store.

Photo by kxlly, used under a Creative Commons license.

Good friends, mediocre surroundings

We are at the Miccosukee Casino Resort, on the Tamiami Trail west of Miami, Florida (map). We've stayed here twice before, as it is a good stopping point when heading to or from the Keys. This visit, however, was occasioned by the fact that it was one of the very few places within a 30-mile or so radius of Fort Pierce, Fort Lauderdale, or anywhere in between where both legal bus parking and hotel rooms could be had on the same property. We wanted to spend a couple days with Martin and Steph within walking distance of one another.

Back when we were first hatching these plans I had proposed we spend those few days in Stuart, as there is a hotel there within a block of the Elks lodge, where we've parked before, and several nice restaurants in walking distance to boot. Those plans were shattered when we stopped in Stuart last month, only to learn that the Elks lodge there no longer allows overnight parking, due to Stuart code enforcement. That sent me scrambling back to the maps, guide books, and web sites to find an alternative venue for our couple days of R&R. The list I came up with was incredibly short, consisting of a $50-per-night RV park across the street from a La Quinta in Fort Pierce, this casino resort, and the Comfort Inn in Cocoa Beach which was, technically, a bit further off the route. After some back and forth with Martin and Steph we decided on the casino here.

The advantage of this location is that we were literally quartered on the same property, and it was an easy matter to meet up in Odyssey several times for cocktails and conversation. Also there are four different restaurants in the casino, so we did not need to drive anywhere for dinner each night. Topping it off there is a spa of sorts, and the four of us lined up for one-hour massages spanning the entirety of yesterday afternoon.

The downside is that one must transit the casino to get anywhere on the property, and it is a smoky affair. None of us can stand cigarette smoke, and we ended up hustling back and forth across the casino each time. The rooms are standard motel fare masquerading as "resort" accommodations, and the restaurants, while perfectly acceptable, are nothing special. But it was a fine place to meet up for a couple of nights, and Martin even took me out for an anticipatory birthday dinner at the fine-dining venue, which actually is not bad. We've been so busy socializing with them that I just now caught up on 300+ tweets, and have been neglecting the blog. They left this afternoon after one final buffet lunch together, and we'll catch back up to them Wednesday night in Fort Lauderdale for Trawler Fest.

Martin had arrived from Orlando Thursday afternoon, and after checking into his hotel, picked me up in the Wal-Mart parking lot. We left the bus there and headed down to the dock to meet Sandy Hook, arriving just as she was docking. Captains Chris and Alyse Caldwell served us a wonderful meal aboard, and we chatted well into the evening. Much wine was poured, making me thankful that Martin was the designated driver, and we are looking forward to seeing the Caldwells again at Trawler Fest at the end of this week. They'll be there starting tomorrow as they are giving a pre-show workshop.

The Captains Caldwell wrote up Louise and Steph's trip with lots of great photos on their web site.

Friday morning the four of us left Fort Piece and headed down to the Nordhavn office in Stuart where we had a nice tour of the brand new Nordhavn 63 model, which is being commissioned. Martin and Steph are looking seriously at a 60, which is similar in size and accommodations, and they wanted to check out the features of this newest member of the Nordhavn family. We spent a couple hours on the docks, followed by lunch with salesman Ray at, of all places, an upscale hot dog joint down the block from the office (it was quite good).



We then parted company with an agreement to meet back up here, as we had to stop off at the Kubota dealer in Pompano Beach for a generator part. Back in Arcadia a couple weeks ago, when I was showing someone the generator compartment, I noticed coolant all over the enclosure floor. A brief search revealed it to be coming from a small angled bypass hose between the thermostat housing and the water pump, and this dealer in Pompano was the only one along our route who had the hose in stock. They were open till 5, and we had plenty of time to make the two hour drive from Stuart, as we left around 2 or so.

It had rained on us while we were on the docks in Stuart, and we had the wipers on periodically as we headed south on I-95. About an hour out from the Kubota dealer the heavens opened up and I had to put the wipers on high speed. A minute later a loud thunk followed by staccato clicking told us the wiper motor had bit the dust. We gingerly made our way over to the shoulder to contemplate our options.

Long-time readers may remember that the wiper motor suffered a similar fate last October while we were in New England. After efforts to locate an exact replacement in the U.S. came up empty, and a replacement shipped from Europe was quoted at around $350 plus shipping, I ended up cobbling together a jury-rig solution using a housing from a slightly different motor, generously supplied by our good friend Bryce, plus the original shaft and ring gear from our failed unit. This was to be a temporary solution, but it worked so well that we decided to just see how long it would last. Having gotten another 15 months from it, even with the original ring gear being in pretty bad shape, was pretty good, all things considered.

Of course, what I should have been doing in the interim 15 months was to be looking for a more permanent replacement in a leisurely, low-pressure way. But out of sight is out of mind, and thus we have no ready-to-go replacement today. So after waiting for the deluge to pass, we liberally applied Rain-X to the windshield, then made our way south on Military Trail, a ~45mph surface street that roughly parallels I-95. Once the rain had stopped entirely we got back on the freeway to make the Kubota dealer before closing.



As promised they had the tiny hose in stock, and five bucks later we were on our way. I was concerned about making Miccosukee in the daylight, especially with no wipers, and I wanted to leave as much time as possible in case of more rain, so we opted for the Turnpike instead of the free route. That proved to be a mistake, as the GPS was not up with the latest changes to the Turnpike system and steered us wrong not once, but twice. We ended up exiting and re-entering the Turnpike after one wrong turn, which cost us an extra couple bucks and several precious minutes, and then we ended up heading the wrong direction on Tamiami, necessitating a rush-hour U-turn. It did, indeed, start raining again, but the Rain-X did its magic, and we arrived shortly after sunset but with some twilight left for maneuvering.

I was able to get the generator hose changed yesterday morning before we needed to charge batteries, a job that uncharacteristically proved both easier and less messy than I had anticipated. And the massage in the afternoon was just the ticket after the stress of the wiper failure en route. This afternoon after our friends left I managed to get the wiper motor out and opened up, thanks to the access hole I made last year; unsurprisingly, the 26+ year old ring gear, made of some kind of composite material, was stripped by the much harder steel worm gear. The stress of moving two giant 28" wiper blades through 100° of arc all those years finally took its toll.

Having already done all the research on part numbers and cross-references last October, I was able to locate a replacement motor on eBay from a seller in Belgium and I am having it sent to friends in Texas so we can meet up with it on our way across the country in February. In the meantime we will have to rely on the Rain-X and picking our weather windows as we make our way there. Which, I suppose, is good practice for the boat.

Tomorrow we will leave the casino and head to Hialeah Gardens, where my resources report two dump stations at truck stops. We'll probably spend the night there at the Wal-Mart. I expect to be in Fort Lauderdale Tuesday night, and at the Bahia Mar resort starting Wednesday night, assuming they allow us to park as they did last year. We are hoping to again meet up with our friends Ben and Karen at the show. Trawler Fest runs Thursday through Saturday, and we expect to be on the road again Sunday morning, making our way out of the state after more than three months here.

Valve job

I am at the Wal-Mart in Fort Pierce, Florida (map). While many if not most Florida Wal-Mart stores do not permit overnight parking, usually due to local ordinance, this one does, and I counted at least another dozen rigs here last night. I shunned the "RV ghetto" in favor of the part of the lot where the trucks park. I had to listen to a reefer all night, but I had fewer looky-loos, and it was darker. I also wanted to distance myself from the group of RVers from several rigs who set their lawn chairs up in a circle in the parking lot and were chewing the fat rather loudly as I went by.



I arrived here well after dark, on account of the great valve project. I left the Flying-J right after I was done posting here yesterday, putting half a tank of fresh water in on my way out. I then headed straight for the Home Depot just a couple blocks west of here, and set up in their parking lot for the duration of the project. I was on track to be done and gone before dark, but I ended up on an unscheduled one-hour-plus Red Cross call, which put me behind.

Long-time readers have heard me grumble here about having to rebuild our hot water recirculating valves multiple times, an average of once per year per valve. The diaphragms are cheap, about $8 at Lowe's, but the valves are hard to access and the inevitable rebuild project is a royal pain, often involving muttered epithets from inside the cabinet, where I need to cram myself in order to take the valve apart. After the last round of rebuilds I decided that the next time they needed it, I would just replace them with something else, in the hopes that a different style of valve would not have the same problem.

For those joining us more recently, these valves allow us to get hot water to any of our fixtures (shower, kitchen sink, bathroom sink) without wasting a drop of water waiting for it to get hot. The water that would otherwise be running out unused into the sink or shower, additionally using up space in the gray tank, instead returns to the fresh water tank to be used later. For convenience, an electric push-button is located adjacent to each fixture to activate this water-conserving system, and the push-button opens an electrically operated valve or "solenoid." The system saves about half a gallon per use, and contributes to our 17-18 day self-sufficiency duration.

When we first installed the system we used Rainbird irrigation solenoids from the big-box store. They were relatively inexpensive and readily available, and they work on 24 volts which is our house battery voltage. They do a good job and have good flow, but the large diaphragm and relatively low pressure means they gather a build-up of calcium deposits any time we have hard water aboard, which it turns out is most of the time. Eventually the calcium deposits get large enough to interfere with the diaphragm's ability to seal, and the valve leaks slowly. In addition to running the pump unnecessarily, this can also run us out of hot water fairly quickly, and if we have an endless supply of power, it can heat the whole fresh water tank up to hot-water temperature if left unnoticed.



For the last month or so I have been keeping an eye open for a different type of solenoid with potable-water rating, 12- or 24-VDC operation, and enough flow to keep up with our 5 gpm pump. Oh, and I'm cheap, so $40-$50 per valve retail, which is what most water solenoids run, was over my budget. Eventually, however, I found a batch of new-old-stock appliance solenoids on eBay, and managed to score the whole lot of 20 solenoids for $22.50, shipping included. At $1.13 per solenoid, I can afford to keep a bunch of them around as spares in case these start to develop the same issue as the last ones.



These units are designed and sold for appliance water inlets, such as ice makers, drinking fountains, dishwashers, plumbed-in coffee makers, and the like. The manufacturer claims the diaphragm material is resistant to hard-water build up. They are rated at 14 gpm, work on 24 VDC, and of course are rated for potable water. Nearly perfect in every way, but with a configuration of inlet and outlet that presented a challenge.

Most appliances that connect to water systems use a garden hose style connector at the inlet, and the inlets on these valves are threaded for a female garden hose connection. The outlet is directed 90° from the inlet and is set up as a 3/8" tubing barb. My PEX water lines are terminated with 1/2" MIP threads, and so in to the store I went for a bunch of FIP to female garden hose fittings, as well as some 3/8" vinyl tubing, 90° barb adapters, and 1/2" threaded couplers.



I spent most of the afternoon crammed into each of three cabinets for what I hope to be the last time. Removing the old valves was the toughest part, as it is hard to swing a wrench in there.



The replacement hardware went right in, with the short length of tubing and a pair of hose clamps going on last. Should I ever need to replace one, it will be a simple matter of slipping the tubing off the barb, and unscrewing the garden hose fitting, a much easier process than rebuilding an irrigation valve in place, which involves removing six cover plate screws to access the replaceable diaphragm and spring.



After returning the inevitable unused parts to the store it was nearly 7pm. I rolled over here to the Wal-Mart, got settled in, and walked next door to Cowboy's BBQ for dinner. Apparently a Fort Pierce institution, it seems the shtick here is buxom young women in tight-fitting tops serving the food and tending bar. I ate at the bar, where house wine was 2-for-1 for happy hour, and they had a nice special on ribs and shrimp, which made putting up with such a homogeneous view all evening tolerable.

I was pretty beat when I walked back, but still made it into the store for some essentials, including a bottle of wine for this evening's dinner aboard Sandy Hook. I am expecting Martin to arrive from Orlando shortly, and we are due at the dock at 3:30. We've also lined up a tour of the new Nordhavn 63 in Stuart tomorrow, after which we need to stop by the Kubota dealer in Pompano Beach for a part before continuing on to the Miccosukee Resort for a few days of R&R with Stephanie and Martin before Trawler Fest.

Flying Denny's

I am at the Flying-J truck stop in Fort Pierce, Florida (map). While we are veterans of many a Flying-J, this is the first time I've been at one of their travel plazas that has fully undergone the "conversion" to the new Pilot/Flying-J standard. I am not impressed.

For the benefit of our non-RVing readers, Flying-J is a brand of truck stop that was known for being very RV-friendly. They often had dedicated RV parking stalls in an area separate from the truck parking, usually allowed overnight RV stays, often had a free RV dump station, and offered RVers a small discount on fuel purchases. As with most major truck stop chains, they usually had a large sit-down restaurant offering both a buffet and table service menus, as well as one or two fast-food options within the convenience store. On top of all that, we often found Flying-J to have among the lowest diesel prices in the market.

A couple years ago, Flying-J went bankrupt in a spectacular way, having lost a major gamble on diesel fuel arbitrage. The vultures swooped in, and ultimately the retail travel plaza part of the operation merged with rival Pilot Truck Stops. Two years of legal wrangling followed, as courts decided the legal nuances of the merger, including having to sell off some locations to avoid being a monopoly. Consequently the full details of the merger are only now being implemented.

One of the first bits of fallout from the disaster was that Flying-J lost their competitive edge in diesel pricing. For our first four or five years on the road we could honestly say that we spent several thousand dollars a year with Flying-J; our fuel budget runs just over $10,000 annually, and many of those years Flying-J got 70% or more of our business. However, for at least a year now and maybe longer, we haven't purchased any fuel at Flying-J at all, at least not to speak of -- perhaps we made a purchase or two totaling maybe $500 in that time. We can almost always find diesel for at least $0.10 less, which is $20 or more on a fill-up for us.

Then last year Flying-J decided to start charging for use of the dump stations. Initially this was done with a padlock and a key behind the register, however they are changing over to an automated system that requires a card or a token. A pneumatic cover over the dump unlocks for 30 seconds or so after payment, allowing you to insert your hose. Once the hose is removed, the cover again locks in place. Dumping at Flying-J now costs a relatively steep $10. If you buy enough fuel here they will discount the tokens down to $5, which we consider the going retail rate for dump stations anyway. This location now has the automated system.

In what may ultimately be the final death knell for the chain among professional drivers, one of the final decisions was to outsource the restaurant operations at all Flying-J locations to Denny's. Since we always like to make at least some kind of purchase at these places when spending the night (and fuel was out of the question), I went in to the restaurant last night for dinner.

The most immediately noticeable change is the absence of the buffet, a central feature of the room when it was the "Country Market" restaurant. The former adjacent quick-service pizzeria, "Pepperoni's," is also gone, since Denny's does not utilize a pizza oven. And the service is terrible; it took me several minutes to get seated, and a simple meal consisting of a salad and a couple of wraps took well over half an hour to arrive. I think they are trying to operate the Denny's at the same staffing level that the Country Market utilized, but the bulk of the former business was the buffet, which has a much higher throughput at a much lower staff requirement.

Truckers like their unlimited buffets, and are often under time pressure. I can't imagine they are happy with this change. Now that you can't get a quick buffet meal, or a whole pizza to take back to your truck, your only quick-service options at this Flying-J are Subway sandwiches or the usual mini-mart fare, such as hot dogs. And at this particular spot, there isn't even any place else you could walk to.

At least they still have RV parking here. Although regular readers know that we have no issues parking in back with the trucks, so long as we are not likely to be taking up the last available space -- but Odyssey does not look out of place there. Ironically, I actually had a commercial entertainer coach next to me here in the RV area last night, deadheading with just the driver aboard. First entertainer I have ever seen with a slide-out on the forward lounge. He ran his generator the whole time he was here. On my other side was a little Rialta motor home whose roof did not even come up to the bottom of our windows.

On my way here I stopped in at St. Lucie Battery and Tire, just a half mile or so east of here. They had the right plate for their spin-balancer to accommodate our wheels, and so I had them dismount, flip, remount, and balance the steer tires, a much overdue maintenance item. Today I will head over to Home Depot for some project work, and I will probably end up at the Love's tonight, in keeping with the truck stop theme. As luck would have it, the "Truck Stops" episode of Modern Marvels aired last night, but naturally I've already seen it.

Bon Voyage

I am parked at the Harbour Isle Marina, on the causeway to Hutchinson Island in the city of Fort Pierce (map). I had expected to be at the Flying-J last night, a dozen or so miles from here back at I-95, however a brief consultation with the on-site marina watchman as well as the administrative office yielded a one-night grace for the bus.

That was great because it allowed me to do several things I otherwise could not, including having a final glass of wine aboard Sandy Hook with Louise, Stephanie, and Captains Chris and Alyse Caldwell. I left the boat around 7ish just as they were about to serve dinner, and walked across the street to Chuck's, a local landmark, where I had a nice dinner sitting in the bar. It also allowed me to watch them shove off this morning from the comfort of my easy chair, courtesy of my binoculars, and then hike up to the top of the Intracoastal Waterway (ICW) bridge to snap a couple of photos as they passed beneath me.



I then walked over to the guest docks on the north side of the island and caught them again as they returned from a navigation exercise over near the inlet.



This morning Captain Chris had an errand to run and drove me around through town, just so I could see it, while the ladies did chart work before casting off. I had planned to maybe scoot around town today, and this saved me the trouble of pulling a scooter out. Before the afternoon is out I will be en route to the aforementioned Flying-J, with a possible stop at the commercial tire place I spotted on the way here, to see if they can remount and balance our steer tires.

We had an uneventful stay at the Blue lot at Orlando International (map) on Sunday night. We arrived at the lot around 3ish and I rode the shuttle over to the terminal to check out the dining options, browse the mall, and take advantage of the free WiFi to download several software updates without eating up our satellite allocation. I was disappointed to learn that the award-winning Hemisphere steak and seafood restaurant atop the in-terminal Hyatt, with sweeping views out over the runways, was closed for the weekend. Louise joined me when Steph arrived, and we settled for having a glass of wine at the lobby bar overlooking the terminal atrium, then marched down to Romano's at the other end of the terminal for a nice Italian dinner.

At some point during the evening the heavens opened and we got a good drenching overnight. Then in the morning the real trouble started, with an enormous storm system moving through the region. As it happened, our route out of the airport and over to Fort Pierce meant that after the storm had mostly passed us in Orlando, we drove right through it again on our way to Holopaw, where we stopped for lunch before turning south on 441. While we were at lunch the storm passed us again, then we again drove through it on our way south. We got drenched by the same storm cell four times; in hindsight, we should have stayed at the airport until after lunch. Oh well.



Now that Sandy Hook is out of sight I am truly on my own for a couple of days, until Martin arrives Thursday. I have lots of computer work to catch up on and I might even get to some bus projects, although I won't tackle anything major without Louise around as my safety person. After tonight's stay at Flying-J I have my choice of three more truck stops and a Wal-Mart, all just one exit south, so I won't have to go very far before the ladies return. Thursday night we are all scheduled to have dinner aboard the boat, and Friday the four of us will head down to the Miccosukee Resort just west of Miami for a few days, with a possible stop at Nordhavn in Stuart en route.

The real McCoy

We are at our familiar secret stealth spot in Orlando, Florida (map). We arrived here early yesterday afternoon, because I wanted time to scope out the airport on the scooter in the daylight. Orlando International Airport (MCO) is just a couple miles east of this spot, an easy scooter ride. We are scheduled to pick up our friend Stephanie there this afternoon.

Any time we need to bring the bus into an airport, I need to do a lot of research ahead of time. It is often the case that places where private cars normally go to drop off or pick up passengers are not open to us, either due to overhead clearance, weight limits, or both. Sometimes we've had to use the commercial bus lanes. No matter what we do we almost always end up having a curb-side discussion with airport parking or transportation enforcement officials. Often I call the airport police ahead of time to find out what I should do.

Since I knew we would be parked an easy scooter ride away, I decided this time to do a personal on-site tour first. In addition to scoping out the pickup areas, I wanted to check out the back way into the airport to avoid having to get on the tollway first. The back way involves an airport perimeter road that not only affords excellent views of the west runways, but also takes you past one of Orlando's hidden gems, the B-52 Memorial Park.



It is perhaps little-known to most travelers passing through Orlando International that the airport was once a strategic bomber base, McCoy Air Force Base. This is why the airport code is MCO, and many businesses and other features in the area have McCoy as part of their name. The Air Force is long gone, but one of the bombers formerly stationed here came home to roost. The park is on the airport grounds, and they simply taxied the aircraft into the park after its final flight. It is so well hidden that I don't think even most Orlando residents know about it.

Louise would rather pluck her eyes out than visit an air museum of any kind, so as long as I was by myself I decided to stop. I've seen B-52s up close before (including the musical group, of whom Louise is a big fan), but it is still impressive to stand next to one. The plane is moderate by today's jumbo-jet standards, but there is something about the massive (and weird) landing gear and the way every cubic inch of the plane is consumed by equipment, personnel, or bombs, that makes it interesting, in a Dr. Strangelove kind of way.

A little further along I came to the lone parking lot available to oversize vehicles, the Blue long term lot. I then ended up making four separate loops around Terminal A, wherein I discovered that

1. The Arrivals level has a weight limit of 13 tons and a height limit of 13'
2. The Departures level also has a weight limit of 13 tons but is open above
3. The commercial bus lanes are below the Arrivals level but are gated and require a transponder to enter.

Eventually I found an airport operations official enforcing curb lanes on the arrivals level, and she told me basically to ignore the weight limit (we weigh 24 tons) and that we'd fit without trouble on the arrivals level (it looked higher than 13' to me anyway). I left the airport to the north to scope out bus-friendly dining options for after our pickup.

After all was said and done, we decided to just take Odyssey over to the Blue lot later today and then ride the shuttle in to the terminal. That will avoid the inevitable conflict with the curb-lane Nazis who will either think we are a commercial bus breaking the rules, or else a non-commercial vehicle clearly over the weight limit for the upper decks. Also, we'll be able to enjoy a leisurely meal at one of the many restaurants in the main terminal, one of which is called McCoy's (naturally), without having to worry about navigating and parking the bus after dark. So while I had originally presumed we'd be right back here tonight, instead we will probably just spend the night in the Blue lot.

Tomorrow we'll head down to the marina in Fort Pierce and I will drop the ladies off before retiring for the night, most likely to the Flying-J.

The Grandest Poobah

We are at the Plant City Elks Lodge number 1727 (map), just south of the freeway east of Tampa. We arrived here Tuesday afternoon following a short drive from the Pinellas Park lodge, by way of the TA truck stop a couple exits west of here, which has a dump station.

Long-time readers know we stay in many Elks lodges, and occasionally someone asks why we spend so much time at the lodges or whether we are perhaps officers in the organization (we are not). The simple answer is actually that RV parking at many lodges around the country is one of the benefits of membership in the order, and in many places we've been, the lodges are either our only alternative or our most cost-effective alternative.

For example, we have often found ourselves in the northeast in the late fall, when traditional campgrounds have already closed for the season. While we could spend a night or two at, say, a Wal-Mart, staying longer than that to visit family, or taking the scooters out to see the sights, requires a more appropriate venue, and often an Elks lodge is the only nearby alternative. In many cities, such as San Jose, an Elks lodge is the only legal parking alternative within range of downtown. And here in Florida, where few Wal-Marts allow overnight parking and many campgrounds require advance reservations (something we never make), the lodges enable our preferred point-and-go travel style.

Some lodges, such as San Jose, or the Brandon lodge just west of here, have their own revenue-generating campgrounds and are happy to let us stay as long as we wish, so long as we continue to pay the nightly fees. But most lodges at which we park have no RV facilities and simply provide the parking as a courtesy to traveling Elks, with no expectation other than perhaps a token donation. We actually prefer this type of opportunity to the more developed ones, unless we need power in the heat of the summer. But we are sensitive to the fact that the lodge is not in the camping business and we try not to overstay our welcome, which is why we left Pinellas Park after a full week there, only to travel just 40 miles to this lodge in Plant City.

Little did we know until we arrived here that this lodge is the home lodge of the current Elks National President, also known as the "Grand Exalted Ruler" (GER), Michael F. Smith (blog). We arrived before the lodge opened, and had to widget our way in the back entrance due to FDOT blocking the road in front of the main drive while they repair a sinkhole. I knew approximately where to park from reading about it on the Elks RV parking Yahoo group, but it occurred to us that the extensive roadwork might mean the lodge was closed for the week, and so I went on-line to look it up, which is when I discovered we were in, to borrow a phrase from the Flintstones, Grand Poobah territory.

Whenever we stay at a lodge we make every effort to go inside and be social, to put a human face on the giant bus in the parking lot. Sometimes it's impossible, either because the lodge hours are incompatible with ours, or because the lodge is in a state or county that still allows smoking in the lodges. We'll go in for a cocktail, and if the lodge serves food during the course of our stay we might go in for dinner as well. And so it was that we actually got to meet Mike-the-GER that same evening for cocktails and again on Wednesday when the lodge was serving Cuban pork for dinner.

People who rise to such a position of leadership in national organizations, whether that is the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, the American Red Cross, or the Congress of the United States, universally possess a certain charisma, and exude a kind of confidence, that is immediately recognizable and impressive. Mike is definitely confident and charismatic, as well as a genuinely nice guy. We were glad to have met him and his wife Sandra and wish him great success in his term as National President, at a challenging time for the Elks.

We very nearly did not make it this far Tuesday, as we whizzed past the annual Florida RV Super Show at the state fairgrounds in Tampa. It looked to us like there was RV parking at the fairgrounds and we thought perhaps we'd drive in to check out the show. When we stopped just a few minutes later at the TA to use the dump station, we made some phone calls to find out the scoop.

Unless one is willing to buy a three-day package, RV parking at the fairgrounds for the show is strictly dry camping at $15 (or $20, we couldn't get a straight answer) per night. That's on top of the $10 daily parking fee, plus entry to the show itself. Faced with a minimum of $25 to park for a single night so that we could pay another $20 to see a show we were only luke-warm on, we opted instead to continue here to the Elks lodge.

Now that we've had a chance to settle in, think about it, and find a discount coupon for show admission, we're planning to ride the scooters back the 15 miles to the fairgrounds later today and spend two or three hours there. Hopefully they will charge us a single parking admission for both scooters. It's a bit warmer today than yesterday, at least, when we froze our buns riding over to the Carrabba's just a couple miles from here for dinner.

This has been a very pleasant and quiet place to stay, at least overnight. During the day we are just across from an endless parade of cement trucks, maybe a dozen each day, disgorging their contents into a pump which is trying to fill the sinkhole. The lodge told us it might go on for six weeks, as the hole is over 200' deep. Plant City is the strawberry capital of the U.S., and when temperatures drop to freezing the growers have to pump many more acre-feet of groundwater out to save the crop -- sinkholes here are a constant problem.



Tomorrow we will bid a fond farewell to this very pleasant and welcoming lodge, and head east to Orlando and our secret stealth parking space there. Our friend Steph flies in Sunday evening and we have agreed to pick her up at the Orlando airport, which is just a few miles from that spot. I still need to research what unnatural acts we may need to do to drive Odyssey through the airport -- sometimes they make us use the bus lane. On Monday I will be dropping Steph and Louise at the dock in Fort Pierce for their training cruise before heading off to parts unknown as a bachelor.

New decade, new masthead

Happy New Year. Lots to catch up on here in my first post of the decade. We are parked at the Elks lodge in Pinellas Park, Florida (map), between St. Petersburg and Clearwater and right across the bridge from Tampa. More accurately, we are parked across the street from the lodge in a lot they own. It is an excellent location, with shopping just a block away and including an Applebees, a Chilis, a Chipotle, and a BJ's Brew Pub. Importantly it is only a short scooter ride to the Petsmart/Banfield where we needed to pick up prescription cat food, as we were completely out when we rolled in here on Monday.



Before I get further into updating our status here, I'd like to thank good friend and professional photographer Karen Nace for our new masthead photo, taken at Bussin' 2011. Louise spent a couple hours redesigning the blog template around the new masthead, and so you may notice some changes to the sidebar widgets as well. While it looks for all the world in this photo like we are intently driving down the road, in fact the parking brake is engaged and we are rocking out to Elton John on XM radio.

I'll try not to bore you too much with the play-by-play update from the rally, other than to say that it was well-organized and smoothly run as always, and to say a hearty "thank you" to Jack and Paula Conrad for organizing this rally for the past eleven years. The Conrads are retiring from the rally business and new organizers have stepped up to the plate for next year; I understand they intend to hold a similar rally in the same venue.

My plumbing seminar went off without a hitch, and was well attended both in person and via live streaming on the Internet. I even took questions from remote attendees who submitted them in a chat room monitored on-site by expert busman Ewen Steele, who was recruited by Bus Nut Online webmaster Ian Giffen to operate the live feed. One of my on-site attendees was a retired professional plumber with over three decades of experience, and it was most gratifying to hear from him afterward that I had done a good job with the presentation. I believe the live stream is being archived and will soon be available on the BNO web site, and I will post a live link to it here as soon as it is ready.



On Tuesday before the rally Ben and Karen arrived in their Liberty Prevost conversion, and we had carefully coned off a spot right next to Odyssey so that we could park together. In addition to facilitating our nightly hot tubbing ritual and providing some privacy for the tub between our two coaches, this also allowed us to "power share" for the duration of our time there. That made the buses into symbionts in a way, if "symbiotic" can be extended into the inorganic realm.

Ben is working on converting a vintage Flxible coach into their new rolling home, and he is incorporating energy efficient boondocking capability into his design. In stark contrast, the Liberty conversion is anything but; "power hungry" and "needy" are both terms that come to mind. With the Flxible on the horizon, it makes little sense to invest in retrofitting their current home to be more boondock-friendly, especially since that would make it less readily serviceable by technicians at Liberty Coach, possibly detracting from its resale value. For many factory conversion buyers, there is comfort in knowing they can take the coach to the converter's service centers for anything they might need.

The upshot is that the Liberty really wants to be plugged into shore power when parked, or else have the generator running nearly full time. With power hookups for the rally already sold out, Ben and Karen ended up in the occasional generator section with us. We were able to lend our enormous battery bank to the cause, providing them with a 20-amp circuit from our inverter. That was enough to run the household-type fridge, water pump, computers, and a handful of lights on the Liberty, so long as they kept everything else shut off and had mostly already-charged batteries (no way to turn off the battery charger without losing all AC power in the bus), and they could go overnight without needing the generator.

In turn, we plugged our 50-amp shore cord into the "buddy plug" connected to their enormous 20kW generator. We settled into a routine where they ran the generator about two hours each evening, topping up the batteries on both coaches and allowing them to do their cooking, washing, and whatever else was needed. By the morning our batteries would be down to the point of requiring recharge (in contrast to our normal run of two to three days between charges) and they would run the generator again for an hour or so, which got both of us hot water for the day as well as enough battery charge to carry us to evening with help from our solar panels.

This made for an odd arrangement with power cords going in both directions between the buses. A couple of people looked askance at them and I was sorely tempted to tell them it was a free-power infinite loop, sort of like a perpetual motion machine. While our generator did kick on a time or two briefly, they provided most of the generator run time for our entire stay. We provided the battery cycles, as well as the hot tub heating, which comes from our diesel-fired boiler.



Extending the symbiosis somewhat, I was able to help Ben with a couple of minor technical issues on his coach, including an inoperative generator auto-start system. In turn, being extremely left-brained myself, it was great to be around such creative talents for a few days, and Karen was very generous to provide us with several of her fantastic photos, including our new masthead as well as the great shot of Opal at the top of this post. That should please Kelly, Rocket, and Mojo who asked just today in a comment on my last post to upload another photo of her. To see some of Karen's other photos from the Bussin' 2011 rally, have a look here.

We spent a lot of time at the rally, particularly in the evenings, with Karen and Ben, who are kindred spirits to us in many ways. But we also caught up with many old friends and met several new ones. On Tuesday evening the four of us went to dinner with our friends and fellow Neoplan Spaceliner owners Steve and Harriet Siems from Fort Lauderdale, along with John and Lynn Silver from Central Florida Bus Repair whom we saw in Lakeland last month, and several others. We were also very pleased to finally meet in person long-time bus-board acquaintances Russ Long from California and Ewen Steele from Ontario. We very briefly caught up with Lou and Renee Kirk, who also own a Spaceliner, Marty Nixon, upon whose hospitality we prevailed in Atlanta a few years back, Dave and Carol Lang with the gorgeous Starliner in Karen's photos that we parked next to back in '05, Ace and Susan Rossi, and many others whom we have met or messaged over the years.

It was a great rally with good company, good eats, and plenty of interesting buses to see. We also got rid of a fair amount of excess stuff, and we enjoyed ringing in the new year in style, with a glass of New Jersey (really) champagne in the hot tub at midnight. The rally had the Turner center booked through Sunday, and so we opted to spend one additional night there. We spent so much time Sunday morning socializing with the remaining folks and cleaning up our camp, that by 2pm we were still without a plan for where to head next, although we were at least packed and ready to roll. Another hour or so passed without being able to nail down a destination or interim plan for the next two weeks, and we finally conceded defeat and decided we'd spend the night at the Arcadia Wal-Mart (map), as we had to be out of the Turner center. We were the third-to-last rig to depart.

As it happened, Ben and Karen were in a similar situation. I think by the end of the day they had more or less decided to head over to the secure facility at Liberty Coach in Stuart until their next commitment, where they could get free hookups and maybe have Liberty look at a couple of things, but since it was Sunday they could not get the entrance gate code. They decided to join us at Wal-Mart where we were able to continue our symbiotic power-sharing arrangement for one more night, as well as have a nice dinner at local Mexican restaurant El Pirata a short drive away. There is actually a Chili's right there in the Wal-Mart parking lot, but we had eaten there Saturday night when El Pirata turned out to be closed for the holiday.

Around mid-day we finally parted company, with Karen and Ben heading east to Stuart while we finalized our plan for the next few days. After ruminating for several hours and poring over the maps we finally decided to head towards Tampa, where we knew there would be a choice of at least three Elks lodges at which to park as well as the much-needed Banfield for the prescription cat food.

As long as we are here we will try to meet up with James and Maria whom we met at the shuttle launch last year and perhaps some other folks in the area. We'll also zip over to Tampa for dinner at our club there one night. At this writing it is uncertain how long we will stay in the area; we are not due in Orlando until the 16th.

All photos by Karen Nace, except second from top. Used with permission.