Emigrants

 

We are at a Wyoming state rest area on Highway 220, adjacent to Independence Rock, about 50 miles southwest of Casper, Wyoming (map).  Out our windows just a hundred feet or so away, we can see the wagon ruts of the old emigrant trail, and beyond them the Sweetwater River.  Independence Rock was an important landmark on the Oregon, California, and Mormon emigrant trails.  While the department of transportation manages the rest area and parking, the park service manages the rest of the Independence Rock site, which includes many descriptive signs and a replica Conestoga wagon.

As rest areas go, it is very nice, with modern facilities designed around a passive solar arrangement, picnic shelters with grills (bagged at the moment due to a local fire ban), and even a dump station.  A sign prohibits overnight camping but one of our guides clarifies that Wyoming does not prohibit overnight stays of self-contained rigs so long as they show no signs of "camping" such as the extending of slides or jacks, awnings, etc. -- basically the rig needs to remain in "drive off" condition.  We deployed the satellite dish, but here in Wyoming we can drive off with that up without worrying about hitting anything.

After we got parked we walked around the rock, along part of the old highway grade, and past the interpretive signs.  It's actually a nice historic spot, and as a bonus our views of the surrounding hills are spectacular.  220 is lightly traveled at night, so it was quiet here, and we selected a spot where even the handful of idling trucks that spent the night did not disturb us.

Yesterday we had a nice drive west along US-20.  In Lusk, Wyoming it rejoined our old friend US-18, which arrived there via a longer and more circuitous route than we took.  Immediately west of Lusk is a Wyoming rest area much like this one, only with a fancy playground attached, which apparently was one of the first highway rest areas in the region.  It was also the first to receive the modernization program with the passive solar system.  On a different schedule, that, too, would have been a good overnight stop.

US-18/20 took us all the way to Casper, although it was colinear with I-25 for 34 miles.  We bailed off the Interstate at the first opportunity, west of Glen Rock.  In Casper, the Gas Buddy web site told us a small service station in the middle of a mostly residential part of town had diesel for $3.899.  I was skeptical, since it was a good ten cents or more higher at every other station, but we rolled down there anyway.  The price was indeed correct, and we squeezed Odyssey into the tiny lot where it took me a half hour to put in 160 gallons.  While this was $0.19 per gallon more than we paid back in Missouri, it's the cheapest we've seen since, and we won't see fuel this low again anywhere west of here.

Ironically, we also fueled the last time we were in Casper.  Back then, fuel was so high, and our tank so empty, that this was the single largest fuel bill we ever paid -- $1,310.  Good practice for the boat, I suppose.  On this visit, the little neighborhood station, a Kum & Go, had no trouble ringing up our $620 purchase on a single ticket, in stark contrast to the Safeway and its rigidly-controlled point-of-sale system.  Long-time readers may also remember that we then spent two extra nights in Casper, to install new flooring over at the Home Depot.

Today we continue on WY-220, past Devil's Gate (another emigrant trail landmark) and to its intersection with US-287, which will take us south to Rawlins.  There we will pick up I-80 west, incredibly for the first time in eight years on the road.  That's the only reasonable route west to Rock Springs, where we will face a choice to remain on the Interstate, or turn south on US-191 past Flaming Gorge to pick up US-40 in Vernal, Utah.

Oglala land

We are at the Walmart in Chadron, Nebraska (map).  We are now on US-20, which will take us all the way to Casper, Wyoming, although for part of the distance it will be colinear with I-25.  Yesterday's drive was uneventful, covering mostly prairie ranchland, in contrast to the farmland east of the river.  We also traversed two Native American reservations.

It was good to top off the batteries and dump and fill the tanks while at the state park.  It was nice enough there that we would have stayed a few days, had we not been on a tight schedule.  As it was, I did not even get a chance to knock out any projects, or even fully catch up on email.

One of those projects I finally tackled once we landed here, given that we "gained" an hour when we crossed into Mountain Time.  That would be the fourth attempt to fix the fresh water pump, which so far appears successful   After having swapped and/or reconditioned every rubber diaphragm in the pump, last night I finally swapped the pump head housing itself.  I'm not sure if the leak was in the hard-to-access pressure chamber, or perhaps the little silicone seals around the case bolts were starting to wear out, but in any case changing the housing has made a huge improvement.  I've set aside all the reconditioned parts for the next time either of the fresh water pumps starts acting up.

We made a slight miscalculation in the sense that we did not start anything in the crock pot before we left the state park, and we were out of leftovers.  So when we arrived here to find no good eats within walking distance, we instead picked up a cooked chicken in the store.  I'm not entirely certain how Walmart makes any money on these -- perhaps it is a loss-leader item.  But they are convenient and delicious, and we have leftovers even from the smaller-sized one.

In a few minutes we will continue west to Casper, where we will probably fuel.  We'll spend tonight either in Casper or somewhere a bit further south along WY-220.

Done with lawyers and landscapers

We are at the Snake Creek State Recreation Area, west of Platte, South Dakota, right on the Missouri River at Lake Francis Case (map).  With our SD State Park annual pass, campsites here are just $18 with electricity ($14 without), and even though we did not need the power or other park amenities, there are not a lot of other stopping options along this stretch of SD-44.

Wednesday we had a very nice drive up US-75 from Nebraska City through Omaha to Sioux City, Iowa, before re-joining I-29 for the last leg into Sioux Falls.  US-75 as an alternative to I-29 for that stretch was one of the reasons we had crossed the Missouri into Nebraska Tuesday night in the first place.  The route took us through the Omaha (U-Mo'n-Ho'n) and Winebago reservations; at the former we stopped at a nice overlook of the Missouri with a small interpretive exhibit in the form of an earthlodge.

In Sioux Falls we headed straight for a familiar Walmart for the night (map), and walked next door to Chevy's for dinner.  This Walmart is the closest option to our attorney's office, and we had a short ten-minute drive yesterday morning to make our 10am appointment.  Going over and then signing all our estate documents took a full two hours, and it was after noon when we finally wrapped up at the office.  We had a quick lunch in the bus before heading south out of town on I-29.  An unexpected bonus of our visit with the attorney was that they had obtained copies of our new deed from the courthouse -- the first we'd seen it.

The estate planning firm we used was Thompson Law in Sioux Falls. The company was recommended on the Escapees forum as being full-timer-friendly, and we worked with attorney Evan Anema after taking advantage of a free consultation. We found him easy to work with and quite competent. The office building has parking along the south side driveway that is easy to get a large rig into.

By 1pm we were at our new property in Lennox.  The landscaper, whom we were scheduled to meet at 1:30, was already there.  We worked out the arrangements for him to keep an eye on things, and keep the grass mowed to within legal limits.  I spent a little time walking around the whole property -- the largest single lot I have ever personally owned, at just about a quarter acre.  We also ended up meeting one of our neighbors before we finally rolled out of town at 2pm.

South Dakota 44, which passes through Lennox, brought us all the way here to the river, almost in a straight line.  The route passed through only two more towns between Lennox and here.  Fortunately, this park is ideally situated, and happens to be a very nice park.  There are perhaps 120 sites but only about a dozen are occupied, so we have the place nearly to ourselves. In the section of the park across the highway to our north, a concessionaire operates a marina with a store and a restaurant, but they are closed this week for renovations, so instead we dined lakeside on a picnic table.

Today we will continue west on SD-44, which will merge with US-18 in Winner, on the Rosebud Reservation.  We will continue west (and a little south) on US-18 until just east of Wounded Knee (yes, that Wounded Knee) on the Pine Ridge Reservation, where we will turn south on SD-391/NE-27 to Gordon, Nebraska, where we will pick up US-20 west.  We will end our day somewhere in the northwest corner of Nebraska.

Cornhuskers for a night

We are at the Walmart in Nebraska City, Nebraska (map).  Our drive yesterday might well have been mind-numbing, but was actually pleasant, owing mostly to the fact that we are now into fall colors here in the Midwest.

We made a stop yesterday for fuel, in Kansas City, where a station attached to a HyVee grocery store had diesel for $3.759 per gallon, with an additional $0.05 off for buying groceries, which we needed anyway.  I managed to squeeze 216 gallons into the tank at $3.709, the lowest we will see now all the way to the west coast.  We'll top it up again a few more times, as fuel gets more expensive the further west we go.

Tonight we will be in Sioux Falls, and in the morning we have an appointment with our estate attorneys to sign the documents.  That more or less completes our move to the state of South Dakota.  On our way out of town we will stop at our property in Lennox and meet with someone who can keep it mowed, as required by the city.  I'm not sure I will get a chance to post from Sioux Falls, so it may be Friday by the time you hear from us again.

I have received a great many more comments regarding my post title from Monday.  In fairness to the folks who perhaps missed the wordplay, I should point out that the posts I make here are automatically fed to my Twitter account, and my Twitter feed is automatically sent to my Facebook timeline.  Because Twitter only accepts 140 characters, anyone following me on Facebook sees just the title and the first line or so of these posts, unless they also click the link to the original post.  So most Facebook followers would have seen the title, but not enough of the body to know what it referenced.  I suspect very, very few of my Facebook friends actually click through and read the blog.

Show me.

We are still in Missouri, at the Walmart in Clinton (map).  This is a bit further, in miles, than I had projected, but we actually drove less than four hours.  I think Street Atlas underestimated the size of MO-13, which is actually four-lane divided highway all the way here from Springfield.  We walked across the street to El Camino Real Mexican restaurant for dinner.

Today we will pass through Kansas City, where we will fuel up, and on to Saint Joseph and most of the way to Omaha for our final night before Sioux Falls.  Unfortunately, the efficient diagonal route will have us on the Interstate for most of the day.

Apparently, from some of the comments I received off line, I need to clarify yesterday's post.  I do not have 2,000,000 friends on Facebook.  I have two friends on Facebook named Million.  We've also stayed at their spread, Two Million Acres, which is really ten acres in size, if memory serves.  I tend to put puns or other word-play in my post titles, and sometimes I go overboard or get too obscure.  Mea culpa.

Two Million friends on Facebook

Once again I am a day late (I have often stated I try to post from every new location), and my excuse this time is an unexpected visit in Memphis yesterday with good friends.  This morning finds us at the Walmart in West Plains, Missouri (map).

We arrived in Memphis Saturday afternoon after a fairly short drive from our digs in Hamilton, but not until after I had rebuilt the water pump two more times.  Unfortunately, the symptoms are still with us, even after putting in a half tank of water at the Mississippi Welcome Center, where we also availed ourselves of the dump station.  While we were passing through Mississippi, we also put in 100 gallons of fuel, enough to get us to Kansas City where it will be somewhat cheaper.

We parked in an undisclosed location just a few blocks from the Crescent Club, in East Memphis near Germantown.  We had a nice dinner in the bar, as the dining room had been rented for a wedding.  Notwithstanding Memphis' reputation for nightlife, especially on a Saturday night, we actually made it an early evening, settling in for the night in our stealth parking spot.

No sooner had I sat down at my computer than I noticed a couple of posts to Facebook from our friends Mark and Mary Million who were just across town from us on Beale Street.  I knew Mark had just wrapped up the Isaac relief operation in Hattiesburg and was heading home; what I did not know was that he had a rental car that needed to be returned in Memphis.  Mary had come down to meet him and make a weekend of it.  Had we known they would be in town, we might have angled for a parking spot downtown so we could meet them on Beale Street.

They, of course, did not know we'd be in town either, and when we finally connected on Facebook Saturday night, the best we could do was to plan for brunch Sunday morning.  They met us at a big-box parking lot not far from where we spent the night, and we went to the Blue Plate a few blocks away for a hearty breakfast.  The place is packed on Sunday mornings, but we only waited a half hour to be seated.  It was great catching up with them; regular readers will remember we spent a week in their driveway in June.

The Millions were spending another night in Memphis, but we needed to get rolling, and we got under way after saying our goodbyes around 1pm.  We left Memphis on Interstates 40 and 55, but turned northwest off I-55 onto US-63 in Gilmore, Arkansas.  Eventually the huge breakfast got to us, and we ended up taking a nap at a truckstop in Jonesboro, next door to the Post plant. The smell of toasting breakfast grains drifted in through the window as we snoozed.

In Imboden, US-63 joins with US-412, a route we had taken on our touring motorcycles a dozen years ago.  The road is better suited to bikes than buses, and I got my steering workout for the day.  We were again on new ground from Hardy to Mammoth Spring, where we briefly retraced our route from 2009 as we headed north to Thayer.  The grade and alignment on US-63 improved in Missouri, and we had an easy drive the rest of the way to West Plains.

As challenging as the driving can be, the Ozarks are simply beautiful.  We are not yet in fall color here, but the temperature has been dropping rapidly.  Last night it got down to 45 degrees here, and today I am back in long pants for the first time since finishing our relief operation in Orlando.  It's hard to believe that less than a week ago we were running the air conditioners 24/7 and I was jumping in the pool daily.

Today we will continue northwest on US-63 until it meets US-60 in Cabool, which will take us west to Springfield.  From there we will again head northwest on MO-13, and I expect we will end our day somewhere between Collins and Osceola.

Parking lot maintenance

We are at the Walmart in Hamilton, Alabama (map).  We might have been into Mississippi last night, but getting through Birmingham yesterday afternoon was a total slog, with heavy stop-and-go traffic coming and going.  That brought back memories of the seven weeks I spent there last year, after the devastating swarm of tornadoes tore through the state.

We're ahead of schedule, though, and so we'll have a short day today, stopping tonight in Memphis, Tennessee, where we will have dinner at our affiliate club.  That will give us plenty of time to stop for fuel and water along the way.

We're not quite out of water yet, but our pump has been struggling, and I've been fiddling with it since we arrived yesterday afternoon.  In the past, low-water-level pump issues have been related to calcium build-up on the rubber check valve assembly, reducing the amount of self-priming lift available.  So last night I removed the valve and soaked it in vinegar to dissolve the deposits, and then WD40 to swell the rubber a bit.  That helped, but did not cure the problem entirely.  This morning I replaced the O-ring, to no avail, and I am now soaking an old back-up assembly to see if that will finally fix it.

Whether or not I can fully repair the pump, I know that just filling the water tank to reduce the amount of vacuum it needs to draw will eliminate the symptoms, which include low water pressure and air in the lines.  We only have a couple days' supply left, anyway, and we can also use a dump station.  The diesel level has dropped below the generator pickup -- not a huge issue in this temperate weather -- and we'll need to put a quarter tank in as we roll through Mississippi, enough to get us to Missouri where it will be about as cheap as we will see on this leg.

Roll tide

We are at a Cracker Barrel  in Opelika, Alabama (map).  Our travel plan yesterday had us stopping in the vicinity of Columbus, Georgia, but we simply could not find a place to stop for the night.  We pulled in to the Walmart in Phenix City, Alabama, just across the Chattahoochee from Columbus, but it was a small lot and posted No Overnight Parking, so we continued on to Opelika.

There's a Walmart in this town, too, a bit further along the route.  But this let us stop fifteen minutes sooner at the end of a long day, and we did not want to take the chance that this Walmart might also prohibit overnight parking.  That seems to be a disturbing trend in this state.  We don't care for Cracker Barrel's dinner offerings, so we went in this morning for breakfast instead, a decision we may regret later in the day. We had a quiet night in their parking lot and the weather cooled down enough for us to sleep with the windows open, a nice change from the roar of the air conditioner overhead.

Today's drive will take us northwest across the state on US-280 and US-78, through Birmingham and Jasper.  We'll stop for the night before we make it to the Mississippi state line.

Endeavour and Odyssey, both California-bound

I'm really a day late with this post, but it was a long day yesterday, and I did not get the chance.  It started when we rose before the sun, and stumbled up onto our roof deck to watch the flyover of the space shuttle Endeavour, perched atop the 747 carrier aircraft on the last ferry flight of the shuttle program, taking Endeavour to her new home at the California Science Museum.  Long-time readers will remember we were also on the Space Coast for Endeavour's last night-time launch, back in February of 2010.

The flyover was impressive, passing nearly directly overhead.  That meant we got to see the ensemble nearly head-on as it emerged from some low clouds less than a half mile away, and watched it disappear the same way about a minute later.  I would estimate we were less than 2,000' away at the closest point, where I snapped the photo above.  The carrier was accompanied by two chase planes, what looked to be one of the Nasa T-38s and a larger passenger aircraft of some sort.

By the time the commotion was over, it was nearly 8am, and we had breakfast before packing up the deck and the scooters and getting Odyssey ready to roll.  I got in one last swim before saying goodbye to our host and also to Chris and Cherie, who had moved down to join us from Jetty Park.  It is somehow fitting that they were with us for Endeavour's final ferry flight, as we had met them in person for the first time at the night launch two years ago, when they were still in their Oliver.

Like Endeavour, we are now en route to California, with a stop in South Dakota along the way.  I know in my last post that I suggested we would be remaining on the east coast, and flying west briefly for a wedding, but we've had a last-minute change in plans.  We made the decision in the car (generously lent to us by our friend, host, loyal reader, and benefactor Dave in Cocoa Beach -- thanks Dave!) on the way back from Palm Beach. Five hours in the car round-trip afforded us lots of time for discussion and planning, and I also ended up making several phone calls during Louise's turn at the wheel.

One of those calls was to our broker, who more or less talked us out of a return visit to the boat in Savannah unless and until we are ready to make an offer.  We don't think the timing is right for that, and our plans to swing by and see it were driven more by proximity and a general plan of heading north towards Baltimore, in case we wanted to try to make Trawler Fest there.

Some of the other calls were to family in the northeast.  One of the factors causing us to want to remain on the east coast was a couple of possible medical concerns there, but the news I got on Tuesday was that all tests were negative.  So it really came down to just boats that were keeping us east, and we have flat run out of boats to look at, at least for the time being.  We were already luke-warm on going to Trawler Fest in Baltimore, and we learned from our friends the Caldwells at dinner Sunday that meals and other elements of the social part of the program have been eliminated, further reducing our motivation to attend.

What finally pushed us over the edge, though, was the fact that my cousin and his family will be moving to California next month, to the area around Walnut Creek, just a stone's throw from our usual hangout of the SF peninsula.  He starts his new job there, coincidentally, the day after our friends' wedding reception, and his family will be joining him sometime in the following month.  Moving, as they are, from upstate New York, they will face culture shock and sticker shock all at the same time, compounded with having no family or friends in the area.  We can fix the family side of that equation just by staying in the bay area for a month or so after the wedding, the length of one of our typical visits to the region when we are there in the bus.

And so it is that we are now on our way to California.  Having made the decision just 16 days ahead of our first scheduled event there, we needed to get rolling right away, in order to keep the daily driving down to a comfortable amount.  Making matters slightly worse is the additional decision to stop in South Dakota.  While not exactly "on the way," adding a Sioux Falls stopover to the trip adds just 520 miles.  At our current operating rate of around 75 cents per mile, that's less than $400 to get both of us there, probably the cheapest way to accomplish this any time in the foreseeable future.

We need to get to South Dakota to sign our new estate documents.  While lots of legal matters can be handled by phone, fax, email, and U.S. Mail, estate documents must be executed within the borders of the state in which they will be adjudicated.  We completed most of our official legal move to South Dakota on our visit there back in June.  We were able to complete all the legal paperwork for the property we bought nearby, and even our new health insurance, via email.  But the estate documents took six weeks to prepare, and there was just no way to wait there for them to be completed, so we agreed to return at some point to sign them.

Those extra 520 miles mean we will need to do 4-5 hours of driving every day to make our schedule, about double our "normal" amount.  That said, we are no strangers to 12-hour driving days, typical when we are making a beeline for a disaster relief operation, and so this amount is well within our comfort zone, or possibly even a "relaxed pace."  I will be front-loading the driving, doing more hours in the early days so we have some margin for error -- lots can happen in 3,600 miles of driving.

To that end, we took a fairly direct route yesterday.  Normally we eschew freeways and especially toll roads, but after stopping at the UPS customer center in Rockledge to pick up our mail (which, fortunately, arrived just in time for our departure), we got right on the Bee Line toll road, which took us to the Turnpike and on to I-75.  We ended our day yesterday here in Lake City, Florida, where we are at the Walmart (map).  In addition to being convenient to the Interstate, there are a half dozen restaurants in walking distance, and we had a nice dinner at Cedar River Seafood.  This morning we will go into the store for some supplies, and I will walk next door to the Lowe's for some repair parts.

As soon as we are done shopping we will head northwest into Georgia.  I-75 will take us to Valdosta, where we will depart the Interstate for our more preferred mode of travel, picking up GA-133 northwest toward Columbus.  I expect to be near the Alabama state line this evening.

Back at the beach for some R&R

We are finally finished with the Red Cross relief operation for Tropical Storm Isaac here in Florida. Logistics wrapped up Monday afternoon, and after a mad scramble to tear down and empty what was left of Headquarters, we finally finished up around 7pm. The last half dozen cases of equipment missed the FedEx pickup, of course, so we loaded them into the back of our rented Prius and took them down to the FedEx customer center at the airport ourselves.

We didn't want to have ten grand worth of equipment sitting in the back of a rental car overnight, or even while we were at dinner, so we made the airport drop-off Monday evening, even though the gear was tagged for Tuesday shipment. That put us at a late dinner, and we just ran over to the nearby Olive Garden.

We would have just dropped the rental car off at the airport after FedEx, and maybe grabbed a bite at McCoy's before taking the hotel shuttle back home, except that we had agreed to hand off the car to another couple who had a mid-day flight Tuesday. It was too late to move the bus Monday evening anyway, and so we made arrangements to meet them for breakfast at 9am while handing off the car. We ended up just eating at the hotel, which was a bit pricey but certainly convenient. It was close to 11am by the time we finally got back to the bus and started preparing for departure.

We made our way directly here, marking I think the first time in our history with the Red Cross wherein we actually returned to our point of departure after a relief operation. More often than not, we've proceeded instead directly to another operation, or a special assignment, and if not we are usually just moving along to the next place on our global itinerary.

As soon as we arrived, our first order of business was to avail ourselves of the sewer cleanout to dump the tanks. We went 19 days without having to do this, a new record for us, and I think we even had capacity for another day. It helps that we were away from the bus fully 12 hours a day, using the restrooms at operation headquarters instead, and eating all of our evening meals out, with no dishes to wash.

While this was by no means our longest stint away from a power outlet, it did set a record for generator usage. We ran the generator 74 hours over the course of those 19 days, as we needed to have the air conditioning running whenever we were home. This would have been flat out impossible when our beloved Opal was with us, as the AC would have had to run 24/7, more than doubling the generator run time and making an RV park, no matter how distant, a more cost-effective option. The cats, on the other hand, love the warmth, and leaving the bus with just the windows open and fans running when we were not home was no problem for them.

It's good to be back on shore power and finally have the batteries fully topped up. And we're also almost back to normal on our own sleep schedules as well, although it took all of yesterday being complete slugs around the house to do it. I couldn't even muster the wherewithal to blog. I did, however, catch up on a number of long-outstanding emails, along with the fallout from a minor family medical emergency that happened just as we wrapped up in Orlando.

Now that we are all caught up, our attention has once again returned to our boat search. We just learned that the seller of the boat we looked at in Kentucky in July is highly motivated to sell it before he would otherwise have to winterize it. That boat was not tops on our list, but the price would be attractive -- the catch, however, being that we'd need to move quickly. That has lead us to contemplate making an offer on one or more of the boats higher up the list, so that the Kentucky boat can still be a viable backup if those offers are not accepted.

We've been waiting out the market on a couple of those, so this means we'd need to, as they say, fish or cut bait. That has set some wheels in motion for us, and even though we came here to relax for a while, we will most likely be hitting the road in just one week's time. Between now and then, our schedule is already filling up.

First up on the agenda is getting together with Chris and Cherie of Technomadia. They are en route from Savannah to Melbourne, and when they learned we would be in Cocoa Beach, they decided to swing by for a visit. They will be staying in nearby Cape Canaveral at Jetty Park, a lovely place which we had investigated a couple of years ago when we were planning for watching a space shuttle launch.

On Sunday we will head down to Vero Beach either in a borrowed car or on the scooters to have dinner with our good friends Captains Chris and Alyse Caldwell. In addition to being good friends and mentors, they are also our trusted advisors regarding many things nautical, and we want to chat them up about the various boats still under consideration.

On Tuesday we will again borrow or perhaps rent a car so we can head down to Palm Beach to look at another boat, and later in the week we will pull up stakes and head north to Savannah. One of the front-runners in our search is there, and while we've already been aboard, we'd like to have another look before possibly making an offer. We also have good friends in the area, and if our schedules align perhaps we can get together for dinner.

After that, things get fuzzy. We're considering heading to Baltimore for Trawler Fest at the end of the month, but that is by no means set in stone. We're pretty sure that we'll be staying somewhere here in the east, though, which means we will need to be making some flight reservations to be in the SF bay area in early October for our friends' wedding celebration. Getting a halfway decent fare means we will need to pretty much commit to a departure airport by this time next week at the latest.

I also now have a backlog of maintenance projects on the bus, and we need to get cracking on getting it listed for sale. We also need to be working on the backup plan, which is to find someplace to store it long-term, preferably indoors and climate-controlled. So much for a little R&R at the beach. We'll try to get in some swimming and maybe a massage while we are here, and I might even get another chance to blog before we leave town.

A workout for the generator

We are still at relief headquarters for Tropical Storm Isaac in Orlando, Florida.  Most of the operation wrapped up early in the week, and the only ones left here are a handful of Logistics staff and the two of us.  So many semitrailers of relief supplies were moved into or around the state that the Logistics folks will be here through the weekend getting it all squared away and back to the warehouses for the next event.

Logistics is a heavy database user, so we can't back up and break down the servers until they are finished, nor can we pull down the satellite dish that provides dedicated, secure connectivity back to Red Cross headquarters.  That tear-down and load-out will require two people, so we opted to stay ourselves and I sent the rest of my team home or to other operations in Mississippi and Louisiana.

We're still living in the hotel parking lot, and with no power available in the Florida heat and humidity, the generator is getting a real workout.  We've averaged just 225 hours of generator run time per year since leaving Infinity Coach eight years ago (last month).  Since we arrived here in Orlando we've put over 60 hours on the unit, or over a quarter of what we use in a normal year.  We're on our 15th day, so we're averaging about four hours a day.

I have a spreadsheet that calculates my cost-per-hour for the generator based on the current price of diesel.  I also know about how much each kWh of power drawn from the batteries and later replaced costs, and between the two of them that's around five and a half bucks an hour to supply us with power, or around $22 per day.  That's way cheaper than what the hotel rooms cost for the rest of the staff, and half what it would cost us to stay in a campground, if there even was one nearby. 

We're spending about a dozen hours a day at home, getting back from dinner around 8pm and leaving for the office at 8am.  So the four hours per day represents a 33% duty cycle, or about what I have always used as an estimate.  This is our first real-world test of that over such a long term, and it's good to have confirmation that the numbers were correct.  It also gives me a good indication that our batteries and charger are healthy.

If we stay here much longer, we'll need to take a brief excursion off site to dump our tanks.  Two weeks is what we consider "normal" and we've gone as much as 18 days in a pinch (also on a Red Cross operation).  We might be able to make it to Monday if it looks like Logistics will wrap up then, otherwise we will probably find a dump station tomorrow.  This morning we ran out of fresh water (I had not filled the tank to the very top back in Cocoa Beach), but there is a spigot within reach of where we are parked and I put in another half tank at lunch time.

We're coming up on being due for another day off, and since we're spending most of our time in here doing busy-work -- there's only so many times you can re-inventory a box or re-wrap cables -- we'll probably alternate a few hours off each over the weekend, with one of us remaining in the office for customer support.  On our last day off, Sunday, we went out for relaxing massages, and I'm ready for another, and we each have some personal errands to run.

Assuming we are not redeployed elsewhere, whenever we finish here we will head back to Cocoa Beach for a bit more relaxation.  We'd like to get back down to Palm Beach to look at a boat, and if we are still here on the east coast in another week, we'll make plans to head to Baltimore at the end of the month for Trawler Fest.  We're trying not to get married to any specific plans, though, as we are in the heart of hurricane season, and we're on call for the rest of the month.

Laboring over the weekend

My apologies for the lack of updates on the blog. We've been working 10-14 hour days since we arrived in Orlando last Thursday. We are parked in the parking lot of our second hotel in as many weeks, and with no power available, we've been running the generator about four hours a day.

When I posted here last Wednesday I had anticipated that Tropical Storm Isaac would be threatening Florida by the weekend, and we would have marching orders by perhaps Saturday. In fact, the call from the Disaster Operations Center (DOC) came not long after I had posted, and they wanted us moving the very next day. Given the uncertainty of the track, and the potential for jeopardy statewide, they had decided to stage the operation in Orlando.

Whenever an advance leadership team is sent in pre-landfall, it's not unusual to stage at a hotel, and that's where we reported after a 50-mile drive from Cocoa Beach, with a stop en-route to add some diesel to the tank in case we needed the generator. We expected to be in that hotel only for a couple of days, until the track revealed itself and we had a better sense of whether to headquarter in Orlando or perhaps elsewhere in the state. There was a convenient dead-end near the hotel's minuscule parking lot, and we parked the bus there under the shade of some trees.

As it turned out, Isaac was uncooperative, refusing to firmly choose what parts of the state it would impact, and we ended up staying in the staging hotel for a full five days. We absorbed all the conference space the hotel had, and by the time we left people were crammed in the room like sardines. We might well have stayed another few days, had the hotel not already had an event booked in half the conference space we were using.

It was a decent hotel, at least, and we had staffing list us as extra persons in some of the rooms that the team was using, which got us room keys and access to the free breakfast. At various points in this process, it looked like we might move HQ to Tampa, Tallahassee, or points in between.

After the storm passed the Keys and the damaging northeastern quadrant had passed over Miami-Dade, we learned that things in both areas were not as bad as they might otherwise have been. The storm did not intensify as much as it could have before hitting the keys, and instead we started gearing up for a major impact as a Category-2 somewhere in the panhandle. By the time the ramp-up had reached its peak, we had over a thousand volunteers in-state, ready to open shelters, start feeding runs, distribute bulk items, and provide counseling and other direct assistance to clients.

Over the course of the next two days we watched the updates from the National Hurricane Center as they continued to move the forecast track westward with each successive update. Eventually the forecast landfall moved past the end of the Panhandle and into Alabama, then Mississippi, and finally Louisiana where it actually hit. Of course, landfall of the eye is not the whole story, and with the storm several hundred miles across, we still had to gird for storm surge, damaging winds, and flooding in the panhandle, already saturated from Debby.

By the time we were booted out of the first hotel, it became clear that we might not have enough of an operation in Florida to even make it cost-effective to move into a large headquarters, whether in the panhandle or anywhere else. Ultimately the decision was made to finish up the operation right here, in yet another hotel conference room just a few blocks from where we started. No free breakfast here, though.

The major focus since we got set up in this building, an effort that had me and my team here until midnight on moving day, has been to close the operation and move assets to Mississippi and Louisiana, where they are needed. I sent a good deal of my staff to those two states, and we've been sending equipment back fast and furious to the Maintenance Center to get it re-certified for deployment to those other locations.

As of this writing we are down to a dozen or so workers here at headquarters, and all the technology assets have been recovered from all the field sites with the exception of the lone remaining warehouse on the operation, elsewhere in Orlando. Tomorrow, Louise and I will be taking a much-needed day off after ten straight days. We have two other staffers here who will mind the store. Monday we will have to downsize again, and it may very well come down to just the two of us, unless we are needed elsewhere. Both of our positions are already covered in Mississippi and Louisiana (the Alabama operation, like ours, is already closing), so unless something goes off the rails we will probably not be sent in that direction.

Our challenge for our day off tomorrow will be to find something to do. Hanging around the bus, as is our custom in such cases, is an expensive option if we have to run the generator all day to keep cool. And Labor Day Weekend is no time to be gallivanting around Orlando partaking of the local entertainment. We have the use of a rental car, and the other hotel we're still using on the operation has free WiFi in the lobby, so perhaps we will spend some time there. We'll probably also try to find a place to get a massage, possibly a tall order on a holiday weekend.