Another Red Cross training behind us

We are parked on a dead-end side street off Component Drive in San Jose, California (map), just a few blocks from the Silicon Valley chapter of the American Red Cross and less than a block from the hotel where most of the other instructors were staying.

We actually parked at the chapter (map) from Thursday evening until late yesterday afternoon. Coming in after close of business gave us plenty of maneuvering room and our choice of parking spots, and we were able to find a space that was out of the traffic pattern and let us just barely get on-line through a narrow slot in the trees. The chapter was very accommodating and had agreed to let us stay until this morning, but with tight maneuvering room in the lot, we decided to clear out last night while the lot was empty rather than complicate things during business hours today.

We came here because it was close; this end of Component seems to be where lots of trucks park -- the planned commercial development at this end of the street came to a grinding halt in the downturn. In fact, the building immediately north of us is still vacant after ten years, and its parking lot plus this little stretch of street is where I taught Louise to drive the bus before we hit the road. Just south of us is eBay's campus, and two blocks from here is where I built and staffed Covad Communications' Network Operations Center back when that company was at the top of its game. (The NOC is deserted now, turned into a storage room after the function was outsourced to India.)

We had a very productive training event here, fully subscribed to capacity of 30 students. Some 20 more had to be turned away, some of whom will travel as far as Denver to take the training. Students in this class came from all over California, including Santa Cruz, Sacramento, and as far away as Butte County. One of our students was Peter, a regular reader here who chairs Communications for the nearby Bay Area chapter. Of course, between prep, teaching, and dining out with our fellow instructors, we've barely had time to brush our teeth, let alone update the blog. We finally got to catch up on our sleep this morning.

This is actually a quiet and comfortable spot, with an empty field to our west, and vacant buildings to the north and east. But we are almost out of water and our tanks are nearly full, so today we will move over to the Santa Clara Elks lodge, which has a dump station as well as nine RV spaces with power and water. Saturday marked two full weeks since we last dumped or fully charged the batteries, and tomorrow will make two full weeks since we took on water. Tomorrow evening we are due, with Odyssey, at our friend Jack's house for the regularly scheduled Tuesday night motorcycle group dinner. Jack and the gang have decided I need a belated 50th birthday celebration.

Memory Lane

We are parked in the day use lot for Bair Island (map), part of the Don Edwards S.F. Bay National Wildlife Refuge. Bair Island itself is closed, and has been for nearly four years, while the FWS and its partners continue to place clean fill on the island as part of a massive wetlands restoration project. Ironically, the project has been delayed by lack of development in the region, making clean fill hard to come by.

During the closure, this lot seems to be used only by a handful of people who arrive twice daily in their cars to let their dogs roam on the powerline right-of-way immediately to our east, and as overflow parking for the marina immediately to the north, which is how we came to be here. This marina is where our friend Martin keeps his boat, and he introduced us to the harbormaster here. The harbormaster gave us keys to use the laundry and bath facilities, and issued us parking placards. Technically the placards are only valid in the marina's own lot, which has no room for Odyssey, and carry no weight here. But in the week we've been here we have not been bothered.

The local constabulary only patrols here on a complaint basis, relying on the harbormaster to call them if anything untoward is happening, but, of course, he already knows us. If anything, we are an extra set of eyes on the property. If the lone USFWS ranger in the district ever comes by, it is possible he would ask us to move along, but the harbormaster knows him and gave us his name, just in case. We've already scoped out some nearby on-street options if that comes to pass.

We're here because Louise is helping out a friend nearby, and this spot is conveniently located. She's gone most days, while I either work on projects around the house, or take the car we've borrowed to run errands or visit friends. We've been catching up with local friends over dinner most evenings, and we also had a nice visit with Martin and Steph on the weekend, just a few minutes from here. We are hoping that at some point during our stay, the weather will actually be nice enough to take the boat out; it's been cold and rainy almost continuously since we arrived here.



Taken with my Android, uploaded to Picasa, edited with Picnik, and posted on Blogger. I'm such a Google pawn...

Yesterday after dropping Louise off downtown, I drove to Mountain View for lunch at the Googleplex with my friend Brent. When I had suggested Tuesday for lunch, Brent was not aware that a giant event on campus would make it nearly impossible for me to park, as well as ace us out of the canonical dining option, Charlie's Cafe. Brent declined to tell me what the hubbub was about, citing company policy, but at dinner last night with our motorcycle group, which includes some Google alums, I was informed it was a visit from Lady Gaga. I ran into her (unmarked) tour Prevost on my way off campus.



I'm not sure why, since I've had friends at Google for over a decade, but this was my first visit to the campus. The core consists of most of the old SGI (Silicon Graphics) campus, which was considered large in its day. But Google is larger, and their reach spans a half mile in either direction. That means that not one, but two buildings in which I worked in the 90s, for two separate companies, are now Google offices. (For the curious, those companies were Pyramid Technology, which was headquartered at 1350 Charleston, and Metaphor Computer Systems, at 1965 Charleston.)

I spent a few minutes driving around both my former haunts. The lone dining establishment in the neighborhood, the Sports Page bar/burger joint/sand volleyball court is still around, although it is hard to imagine how they compete with unlimited free food at Google, not to mention the countless pool tables, sports equipment, and even bowling lanes at the Internet giant. And I remember a period just before the turn of the century when these complexes were rather distressed, to the point where one of the old SGI buildings was more or less donated wholesale to the Computer History Museum, which still occupies it today. Google has certainly been a boon for the neighborhood.

This neighborhood where we are currently parked has not fared as well. If you look at the satellite view you will see a basin immediately south of us that looks as if it should contain a marina, and indeed it did, until 2001. A developer bought it in the late 90s intending to build a giant project, to also encompass Pete's Harbor to the north, involving nearly 2,000 homes, plus commercial and retail space. Some 300+ publicly available boat slips would be eliminated, replaced by a mere 60 slips unavailable to the public. The developer had already evicted over 200 boats, many of them live-aboards, from the old Peninsula Marina and ripped out the docks before Redwood City voters shot down their plans.

The marina has sat empty ever since, in a lose-lose-lose proposition that deprived nearly 200 people of affordable housing, the developer/landowner of a decade of marina revenue, and the city of spending residents. The handful of buildings surrounding the marina have trickled their tenants out over the course of the decade, including the Diving Pelican restaurant just last year, and the whole complex is a ghost town. It looks like they will finally break ground soon on a much smaller-scale project that has buy-in from a larger set of constituents.

In the meantime the lack of attention here has been good for our parking situation. We will be here through tomorrow morning, making it just over a full week. Tomorrow we will roll down to San Jose where we will be parked for four nights at the Silicon Valley Chapter of the American Red Cross. We will be helping teach the hands-on technology training there Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. On Monday we need to find a place to dump our tanks before coming back here to Redwood City for a while longer.

I had a list of projects I intended to tackle during this downtime, but I've hardly made a dent since the list grows daily. I mentioned it's been raining, and shortly after we arrived the left side awning control crapped out again. Unlike the last time this happened, when the awning self-deployed (I have since installed a transmission-in-gear interlock to prohibit this), simply drying out the control board did not cure the problem. I spent the better part of two days poking at the proprietary board with my meter -- it is again commanding a constant "deploy" signal -- but was unable to suss out the failing component. It is possible that the logic chip itself is now fried.

Without a working control board I retracted the awning manually using an adapter on my portable drill, and we can not deploy it. Fortunately it is on the north side at the moment. The board is no longer made; Girard offered to sell me a similar board for $570, but instead I ordered the more modern replacement direct from a Somfy dealer for $190. That board will not connect to our existing anemometer-type wind sensor, so I also had to order the $190 vibration sensor that attaches directly to the awning face rail. If that works well I might order another setup for the right side so I can get rid of the pesky anemometer, which we've broken off the roof twice.

The cold, rainy weather has also meant we've been running the heat quite a bit. That uses up battery, and so we have to run the generator an hour or so each day to keep them up to snuff; while the genny is running we shut off the diesel-fired heat and use the electric heaters instead. The one in the bath area, which heats the rear of the coach, has developed of late an annoying habit of tripping its little built-in thermal breaker when it tries to start, and here with daily use I finally had enough and decided to take it apart to see why.



As they are fond of saying on Mythbusters, "well there's your problem." There was enough animal fur packed into the unit to knit a whole new pet. What I could not get out with a brush or the vacuum I had to remove little by little using a pair of long, fine needle-nose pliers. So far, no further breaker tripping has been observed.

The old stomping grounds

We are at one of our "stealth" spots on a dead-end street in Sunnyvale, California (map), a spot at which we've stayed many times. I've previously written here that we can technically only remain in one such spot for 72 hours, and we've tried to stay low-profile and not test the limits of what law enforcement considers "parking." However there are a pair of class-C's just south of us that look to have "moved in," we remember these guys from our last visit. At least one of the rigs has a flat tire and looks to not have moved in weeks.

As I wrote last time, lots of folks down on their luck in the downturn have been driven to the streets; those with actual RVs are in better shape than the many sleeping in cars or even less. There are not a lot of places where these folks can spend the night in peace, and I think the Sunnyvale PD is cutting everyone a lot of slack as long as there is no trouble. Patrols come by here at least twice daily. On a dead end in an industrial area, it's no harm, no foul unless one of the businesses in the area complains. Great for us, at least right up until the fact that these rigs look "camped" causes the city to post the whole street as No Parking in the wee hours, as they have done in many other neighborhoods.

We tend to be good citizens and will be moving before our 72-hour clock expires today. Louise is going to be spending a good deal of time in the next couple of weeks helping out a friend further up the peninsula, so we've been looking for digs a bit closer.

I had really intended to post more from Monterey, where we spent two nights at the Elks Lodge (map) while visiting with Louise's dad and step-mom. However I expended all my energy following the earthquake/tsunami events and was barely able to get the last post out as it was. Now that I've caught up on sleep, I can write that we had a nice visit, even if travel around town was somewhat restricted by the tsunami-induced street closures. Staying at the lodge also gave us the chance to top up the batteries, fill our water tanks, and empty our waste, so we are good for another couple weeks (dump stations are few and spendy here in the bay area). We had put another 70 gallons of fuel in at a cheap ($4.10) station in King City on our way to Monterey Thursday.

Speaking of the disaster in Japan, several readers have inquired whether we might be sent there by the Red Cross. The answer is no, because we are not part of the very small cadre of American Red Cross volunteers who have been trained and qualified to be loaned via the International Red Cross to other Federation member nations when called for. Also at this writing, the Japanese Red Cross has not made any request for personnel, AFAIK. They have asked for monetary assistance, which is why the American Red Cross is able to collect donations directly for this purpose (by contrast, New Zealand did not make such a request after their earthquake, which is why you did not see an option to donate to that cause).

Danger to the U.S. and its territories from the tsunami had me prepared to leave if needed, but of course that danger is now past and there was no significant impact requiring mass care in the U.S.. I am still on call, however, and we are expecting a big spring flood season, so it is possible that I may be called to some operation in the midwest or elsewhere. Louise is committed here for a while, so I would go solo via air. In the meantime, I continue to remain riveted to the coverage of the unfolding events in Japan, in part because their infrastructure and ours is so similar. I think most US relief organizations will be learning a lot from what is happening in Japan.

I expect us, or at least Louise and Odyssey, to be here in the bay area at least two weeks and possibly longer. We are committed in San Jose next weekend for another Red Cross training event, and I expect we will move the bus down there for the purpose before moving back up north. And we have lots of friends here in the area to catch up with over the coming days.

No Tsunami Danger for Odyssey

Thanks for all the welfare inquiries we've had over the last few hours. I wanted to get a quick post up to let everyone know that, while we are just a couple miles from Monterey Bay and the ocean (map), we are on high ground, 200' above MSL, and are in no danger from the tsunami waves which have already begun to come ashore here. The largest wave crests have yet to arrive; we expect them to continue for the next two hours with the peak an hour or so from now.

We were alerted to the situation in Japan through our twitter streams, perhaps just twenty minutes or so after the main quake. Of course, we've done nothing since but follow the coverage on line and on television. I was up past 3am watching the ongoing updates from the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center and the West Coast Tsunami Warning Center. Our position here less than two hours from San Jose International makes me one of the closest possible Technology responders for any American Red Cross relief operations in Hawaii, Guam, Midway, the Marianas, and most of the west coast, and I am on the Alert List this month.

Fortunately so far the U.S. has escaped any major impact from the tsunami. There were reports of 5'-6' wave heights and minor coastal inundation on some of the Hawaiian islands and there has been minor damage up and down the west coast, including an overturned boat here in Monterey Bay. However nothing so far is of a magnitude that warrants anything beyond a local response. We have a small but dedicated and highly talented Technology team in Hawaii already, for example.

Of course, the same can not be said for Japan itself, where the Japanese Red Cross has already mobilized all its major assets. It has been heartbreaking to watch the video coming out of Japan, and yet impressive at the same time. While the damage is extensive and the death toll continues to climb, it is a testament to Japan's high level of preparedness and strict building codes that the damage and carnage is not much greater. Of all the nations of the world, Japan is unquestionably the most earthquake-ready and also the most tsunami-ready. We here in the U.S. can even learn a thing or two from the Japanese.

This seismic event is poised to become the most expensive natural disaster in human history, surpassing Hurricane Katrina. Yet I expect the death toll to be far lower than that of the Haiti earthquake last January, even though this event was roughly 700 times more powerful. It will be interesting to see how the response and recovery is managed by this first-world nation, as it will give us some insight into what a similar event might be like here on our own shores.

I know many of our readers will want to know how to donate to support the relief operations stemming from this event, and I hope to have some kind of link up here on the blog as soon as it is available to us. In the meantime I have been informed by official channels that texting RedCross to 90999 will result in a $10 donation that will be set aside for Japan relief.

Lost Hills

We are at the Pilot truck stop just east of Lost Hills, California (map). This was as far as we got after a very late start out of Bakersfield yesterday. We spent Tuesday night parked on the street across from the hotel where our friends were quartered (map). There are four hotels right there, and we managed to snag free WiFi, which let us keep the dish stowed as a stealth measure. The four of us took a taxi to dinner at La Mina, an old standby of ours.

After bidding farewell in the morning, we rolled over to Delaney & Ahlf, just two miles north, to have them look at our oil leak. I ended up having to remove both inside hatches as well as the door inside the radiator bay. Unfortunately, the news is not good: it looks like we are leaking fairly copiously at the end plate gasket. The only real fix for that is to pull the power train, separate the block from the end plate, and replace the gasket. That's probably a $10,000 project, and I can buy a lot of 40-weight for that kind of money, so it looks like we will just live with it.

What we will do, though, at the next possible opportunity, is to have the alternator removed in order to tighten the three end-plate bolts that are behind it. That will be a full day and probably ten Benjamins, but now that the gasket is leaking, it's a sure bet those bolts are loose. If they back out as far as the gear train, we'll be needing a whole new engine. Tightening the bolts may also reduce the rate of leakage around the gasket.

By the time we wrapped up at D&A it was past 3. We had to stop at Lowe's on the way out of town to pick up fire-dam for the turbo hatch that I removed, and we very nearly just decided to stay right there at the Wal-Mart, which is next to an Olive Garden, for the night. I wanted to at least get a few miles under our wheels, though, so we came here instead.

This morning I sealed up the turbo hatch and fixed one or two minor problems inside the bus, so we are again getting a somewhat late start. However, I expect to be in Monterey this evening.

Photo by MarilynJane, used under a Creative Commons license.

Return to Death Valley

We are at the Furnace Creek Campground (map) in Death Valley National Park, some 200 feet below sea level. It is good to be back after an absence of two years. We actually arrived at the campground around mid-day Thursday after a lovely drive from our digs at the Wal-Mart in Pahrump, Nevada (map), where we found ourselves Wednesday night. We needed plenty of supplies for our customary campground cookout here, and we found them between the Wal-Mart and the Albertsons grocery next door; we walked across the street to El Cancun restaurant Wednesday evening for dinner.

Long-time readers may know that we try to come to Death Valley every year around this time, and in the past it has always been over Presidents' Day weekend. That was a choice driven by folks' work schedules, the fact that it often coincided or came close to the birthdays of two of our party, and the fact that it was also the date of the annual Airheads BMW motorcycle club rally here at this very campground. The consequences of that decision, however, have been difficulty in getting campground (for us) or cabin (for most of our group) reservations, and getting seated together at the three restaurants here in Furnace Creek. That weekend is one of the busiest, if not the busiest, of the season here, and the park is "crowded" (if that term can ever apply to Death Valley).

This year we collectively decided (using, of all things, a community spreadsheet on Google Docs) to postpone the get-together until this weekend. That worked much better with our schedule, as it would have been a mad dash to get here from Trawler Fest even if we did not get called up for Red Cross assignments. But it also gave us all nicer weather, everyone who wanted them got cabins, we had no trouble getting a primo spot in the campground, and we even managed to snag a last-minute spot for another couple in the group who came down in their 22' class-C. And, while not empty, the park is blissfully uncrowded -- we've had no trouble getting seated in the restaurants, and the traffic is almost non-existent. Even the Airheads have moved their rally off the logistically challenging holiday weekend. The consensus of the group seems to be to move the event into March next year as well.

While we've seen most of these friends more than once over the last couple years, it was good to be together with everyone here in one of our favorite places, even if we don't have the option of participating in long motorcycle rides with them while we are here. Last year we had to miss the gathering due to a Red Cross leadership summit in Tucson, and the year before we were already committed at our friends' wedding in Hawaii. Our longest term readers may remember our visits here, though, in 2005, 2007, and 2008, and we'd been coming by motorcycle from well before Odyssey became our home.

After we got settled in here Thursday we had a romantic dinner at the Furnace Creek Inn, where we used to stay on those motorcycle jaunts. It is one of our special places and we wanted to have dinner together before the gang arrived on Friday. We again dined there with the entire group last night, after taking in the sunset from the very lovely patio over a round of cocktails.

Friday we went as a group to the Steakhouse at the Furnace Creek Ranch, which was where the difference between the holiday and non-holiday crowd was the most striking. And, of course, Saturday we had our cookout, which has grown from ten participants back in 05 to 17 this year. It's probably a good thing we can't do the rides, because we spent a good part of Saturday prepping and cooking, and most of Sunday cleaning up. Next time I think we need to do something a bit less labor-intensive. On the plus side, one of our group works at Anchor Brewing and we had all the Anchor Steam, Anchor Porter, Anchor Bock, and Liberty Ale that we could drink. We'll end up with whatever is left after the gang leaves tomorrow.

Most of the group left this morning, some before dawn to make it back in one day. There were 11 of us at breakfast, but only six will be here tonight. We are thinking about stopping with them in Bakersfield tomorrow night, which will put us in the bay area on Thursday or Friday. If we forego the Bakersfield meet-up, we'll take yet an extra day.

Photo by Old Shoe Woman, used under a Creative Commons license.

Taking the dam bypass

We are in Las Vegas, parked at our usual spot behind Paris on the strip (map). We were a bit apprehensive before arriving since we had heard a rumor that Bally's (who owns Paris in addition to the eponymous property next door, as well as several others) was no longer allowing RVs to park here. However, a Casino Camper reader reported no problems late last year, and when we arrived there were at least four other rigs here in addition to a couple of semis.

Normally when we park here we eat at one of the Bally properties, but last night we decided to walk a couple blocks further and dined at Wolfgang Puck's Pizzeria and Cucina in Crystal's at City Center. This is a shopping mall that is so high end it had no actual customers, and is also located nowhere near the center of the city. It is, however, adjacent to Aria, one of the newer resorts in town. The food was quite good, though, and reasonably priced for a Puck establishment.

On the way back, we cut through a much more down-to-earth mall, the Miracle Mile shops at Planet Hollywood. In spite of parking here on several occasions, this was our first foray to either venue. Shortly after we returned from dinner, I received an email from readers Steve and Carol who suggested that the restaurant in the Ellis Island casino just kitty-corner from us, across Koval, is actually quite good, so perhaps we will give them a try on our next visit here -- assuming the planned sports arena in the vacant lot just northeast of us does not materialize first. Incidentally, the rectangular slab seen immediately east of us in the satellite view is the remains of a motel bulldozed circa 2005.

Yesterday I wrote that we'd be northwest of Kingman last night, expecting to stop somewhere in the desert. But it was still early in the afternoon when we passed Kingman, and between light traffic and the fact that the new bridge bypassing Hoover dam is open, we were in Boulder before we knew it, and decided to just press on to Vegas. With the time zone change, we were here by 3pm. The new bridge not only eliminates the need to stop and be inspected at a security checkpoint, but also bypasses a series of switchbacks on both sides of the dam, and, of course, the parade of road-crossing pedestrians who move even more slowly when gawking at Odyssey. Still, there is something about actually crossing the dam that I miss, including the view -- tall concrete barriers on the bridge block it entirely.

In a few minutes we will head north to an Arco station reported to have $3.36 diesel, to put in half a tank. We'll then head right back south to Blue Diamond, which will lead us to Pahrump and our re-supply stop. We'll likely spend the night somewhere between Pahrump and Death Valley Junction, inclusive.

Photo by 49er Girl, used under a Creative Commons license.

Land Management

We are on BLM land just off US-93 between Phoenix and Kingman, Arizona (map). If you zoom the map out a bit, you will see we are just up the road from Nothing. Just a mile further down this side road is a developed BLM campground with water; the last time we were here, in 2007, that campground was $10 a night. This is a lovely, dark, and mostly quiet spot (you can hear the trucks in the distance on US-93), with a panoramic view that includes a steel arch bridge over Burro Creek. Louise also posted with a photo back in 2007.

Yesterday morning we packed up the scooters and availed ourselves of the dump station at the Scottsdale Elks Lodge (map), which I can now reveal was our home for the last week. The lodge charges $13 per night for one of their eight sites, but that includes 30-amp power, which came in handy, as the temperatures dropped below freezing while I was out of town. The lodge is also a mere six miles from Sky Harbor, which made it easy for Louise to shuttle me on the scooter each way.

We made an hour-long stop in Surprise where I picked up a new cell phone at the Sprint store there. It was right next to Lowe's, and we had a few items to return there as well. We've previously spent the night in this same spot. My new phone, a Samsung Epic 4G, is quite whizzy, but of course there is no signal here, so I could not really even test it last night. It has WiFi, though, so I was able to get it far enough on-line to sort out all the transfer issues with my 350+ contacts, and get my calendar synced up.

We are scheduled to arrive in Death Valley Thursday afternoon, so in a few minutes we will head back onto the road. I expect we will be somewhere northwest of Kingman tonight, and beyond Las Vegas tomorrow.