Camping with the Corps

We are at the Army Corps of Engineers' Service Park Campground, on Coffeeville Lake (map), an impoundment of the Tombigbee River.  The river/lake is well past flood stage, as we knew from a weather alert I received on my phone while still en route, and we were warned about it when we checked in.  Another few feet and it will be in the campground.

The river is also zipping by at a good clip.  From the numerous snags and other debris racing by, including a full-size chest freezer this morning, I would estimate five knots or so.  A couple of tows went by upstream last night after locking through Coffeeville, and they were working hard, engines screaming.  Our new boat has been by this very spot once before, when the current owner brought it down from Wisconsin, and if we can deal with the extra height he has added to the boat in the form of a fixed canvas top, we'll come by here in it ourselves some day, preferably not in this much current.

This is a lovely park, apparently recently reopened after a major renovation of the camp sites.  We have 50 amps of power for our $20, and a lovely view of the river (non-riverfront sites are $2 less), along with all the usual CoE ammenities.  We're parked just one site away from the comfort station and Louise has been taking advantage of the laundry facilities.

Yesterday's drive was scenic and mostly relaxing. We stopped for fuel at a Murphy (Walmart) station in Laurel, MS, which had diesel for $3.529, the cheapest on the remainder of our route.  It took about an hour to put in 200 gallons, an amount that required four transactions as the station limits them to $200 each.  While we were fueling I kept checking my email, as we were waiting for revised closing documents on the boat -- the ones we had printed out first thing in the morning turned out to have Louise's name misspelled.

We left Laurel when we were done fueling, not realizing that Laurel was, in fact, the last town until Dothan, Alabama which had either a UPS or FedEx shipping location where we could overnight the documents back.  We couldn't make Dothan before last pickup, and we did not want to turn back to Laurel when we discovered this a half hour out of town. After much research on the smart phone, Louise finally located a lone UPS drop box in front of a bank in Waynesboro, MS, with a pickup time of 4pm.

We parked a block away from the drop box at about 3:30 and it was all we could do to download the revised documents, print them, sign them, and get a UPS label printed before the deadline.  We dropped the envelope in the slot right at 4pm; at 7:30 I got an update from UPS saying that it was in Laurel so it had traveled right back the way we had just come.

Around midnight I got another update from UPS saying our package had been in a "transportation accident" and we had visions of it on a desert island with Tom Hanks.  But this morning the tracking said it had arrived in Jackson, MS around 1:30am, so we are hoping it will still arrive sometime today at the documentation company in Fort Lauderdale.  One of the things that is in that envelope, by the way, is the paperwork to change the name of the boat.

After many hours of discussion and rumination, with hundreds of names considered, we have chosen Vector as the boat's name.  It derives from the Latin verb "to carry," which makes it suitable for a carrier of people, pets, and dreams, and it also has numerous meanings in navigation, computing, math, and science, which makes it suitable for a pair of geeks.  Our hailing port will be Bear, Delaware.  The blog will remain right here, though, as we will still be on our odyssey.

Today we will continue east on US-84 across the Tombigbee at Coffeeville, through the rest of Alabama, and past Dothan (hi, Debbie!) before ending the day somewhere near the Chattahoochee, which is the Georgia state line.  Assuming, of course, the road is not flooded between here and there, which is a distinct possibility if the river racing past us is any indication.

Waterway Preview

We are at the Corps of Engineers campground at the W.P. Franklin Lock and Dam on the Caloosahatchee River (map). This is the westernmost lock on the Okeechobee Waterway which connects the east and west coasts of Florida. We have previously stayed at the easternmost lock, as well. Unless we get one with too much draft, we expect to return to both some day in a boat.

There are 30 RV spaces here (and 8 boat-in spaces), and while far from full, we were surprised to find perhaps a dozen rigs here when we arrived. Perhaps that's due to the $24 nightly rate (no tax), which is pretty good for sites with 50 amps. The CoE does a good job outfitting and landscaping its facilities, too. We got a nice site right along the river.

When we arrived we remarked that this is only the second place we've stayed since arriving in Florida (or maybe since hitting the east coast) that is new to us, the other being Southgate Mobile Village in Vero Beach, which would not have been an option when Opal was with us since dogs are not allowed there. The route from South Bay to Fort Myers, Florida 80, is also new to us.

As nice as it is here, we have a midday appointment in Fort Myers to look at a DeFever 52, so we will vacate our site in a few minutes and move along. I expect to be in Sarasota this evening so we can look at another boat there tomorrow.

Baking lakeside

We are at the Corps of Engineers' Canal Campground on Lake Barkley, near the village of Grand Rivers, Kentucky (map). This is a familiar stop for us, ideally located a short ten-minute ride away from the boat we came to look at, over in the Green Turtle Bay marina. As I shared on that last visit, we've looked at boats in that marina before, so that, too, was a familiar stop.

This is a popular campground, and on a hot weekend just before the July 4 holiday, the campground was sold out. As I wrote here on Thursday, I booked the last reservable site on the theory that we might get aced out otherwise, even though we knew that site was too far under the trees to get online. What I did not know was that backing into the site required a tight reverse turn up a steep hill with the left drive wheels in the gravel, and that turned out to just be impossible to achieve -- the wheels just spun trying to push 24 tons against both gravity and steering.

I probably could have made it into the site by going around the loop in the wrong direction and pulling in head first, which would have kept the drivers on the pavement the whole way. But that would have necessitated using our 50', 50-amp extension cord, and with park voltage already overtaxed in the heat, that seemed like a bad idea, not to mention how testy people can get when you drive the loop the wrong way.

Fortunately, when I asked at the kiosk, this site all by itself over near the boat ramp was available, albeit for an additional $4 per night. It's in full sunlight, but we have a good shot to the satellite, and it's away from the madding crowd. We feared we might be boxed in by boat trailers over the weekend, but I think the heat has kept many people away from the lake. We have 50 amps and a hose bib, which I have been using to spray cool water on the bus periodically to reduce the A/C load. As a bonus, they did not charge me the extra $8 for our two nights' reservation.

Things started to get comfortable again an hour or so after plugging in, and after the hottest part of the afternoon had passed, we dragged the scooters out to be ready for boat viewing. I managed to reach someone at the yacht sales office to set up the viewing for first thing yesterday morning, 9am, which was fortuitous as the boat turned out to lack air conditioning. It was in the high 80s as we rode over to Green Turtle Bay and in the high 90s by the time we rode back, less than two hours later.

The boat turned out to be in pretty good shape for having been neglected for a long time. The layout mostly works for us, although the forward V-berth is a little cramped and would be a limiting factor on guests and crew. But it is seriously overpriced for the condition, and given that we'd have to add a bow thruster, air conditioning, water maker, batteries, alternators, and laundry facilities, it's probably more of a project than we want to take on. Nevertheless, it will stay on our "short list" until we see some better alternatives.

After synching back up with our broker afterwards and discussing options between ourselves, we've asked him if there is a possibility of seeing another boat we've been eyeing in Florence, Alabama. Our next stop will be North Carolina, assuming we are not called anyplace by the Red Cross, and Florence is just a 150-mile detour, making it worthwhile to look at this boat that is otherwise a long-shot.

Unfortunately, despite leaving more than one message with the listing broker, our broker has been unable to get a definitive answer on this. Since Florence is a very different direction than the more direct route to the east coast, we decided to spend one more night here to see if we can get an answer first. This is not the first time this has happened to us, so a word to the wise for anyone wanting to sell their boat: get a listing broker who at least answers their phone messages in a timely fashion.

When I re-upped the site for another night, I had to pay the full $24 rate. Add to that another $1.30 for the Redbox DVD I picked up on the way here, figuring we'd have no TV under the trees, but can't return until we get back under way. Plus another buck for running the air conditioner for two hours tonight on batteries -- the power has gone out here from 8-10pm the last two nights running, and when I went to renew we found out they expect it to be out again tonight. We ended up running the genny for half an hour each night, not knowing if the power would be out for two hours or 20, and wanting to get some charge back on before 10pm quiet hours. Now that we know the power will be back on around 10, we'll just let the batteries run the A/C for the two hours tonight.

Even still, $26.30 to spend another day here with enough juice to run every air conditioner we own is a bargain in this unrelenting heat. Checkout is 3pm, and I expect we'll stay here most of the day tomorrow as well. Whichever direction we head, there will need to be a power outlet at the end of tomorrow's drive as well.

Bus lagged

We are at the Army Corps of Engineers "North Shore Recreation Area" on Lake Sharpe, just upstream of the Big Bend dam near Fort Thompson, South Dakota (map). There are 24 sites here, most with fire rings and a handful with picnic tables; a few even overlook the lake. The campground is free, and even so, it was not full last night, even on Saturday. We guess most of the other campers to be fishermen, and quite a few have boats on trailers in their sites.

It was hot when we arrived yesterday, in the 90s, and our first stop was the Left Tailrace campground on the other side of the dam, where our guide said there was electric power for a fee of $14. When we drove through, however, we found the campground closed, and only the boat ramp open. We learned later that the campground was closed after damage from the 2011 floods, and will not reopen until repairs are effected sometime this year. Instead we ran the generator a couple hours to keep the air conditioning on for the hottest part of the afternoon.

We ended up staying along the I-90 corridor most of yesterday, rather than continuing north to US-14 into Pierre. The US-14 route was 50 miles longer and we did not figure the scenery to be much different, plus the road I had originally hoped would take us to 14 turned out to be dirt. Instead we turned east on SD-16, which is really the I-90 service road, and by the time we got to the next paved road north, we decided to just continue east all the way to SD-47, which brought us here.

There are really only three ways across the Missouri that made any sense for us: the I-90 bridge south of here, the US-14 bridge between Fort Pierre and Pierre north of here, and SD-47 which crosses atop the Big Bend dam. This crossing is more or less at the same latitude as our destination of Madison, and it will be a straight shot from here today on SD-34.

We crossed into Central Time yesterday, and we had just gotten used to Mountain Time. This morning we both had trouble getting up. We've already set at least one morning appointment for later in the week, so I'm hoping we'll be more caught up with the clock by then. Today will be something of a late start, but we should be within striking distance of Madison this evening.

Coach meets Trawler on the Okeechobee

We are back in Stuart, Florida, this time at the Corps of Engineers campground adjacent to the St. Lucie Lock, on the Okeechobee Waterway (map). In addition to nine camp sites with water and electricity, there are also eight slips with the same amenities. While $24 per night is about average for a campground, it's a great deal for dockage, and there were three trawlers as well as a couple of sailboats here last night. One of the boats is a Defever 49, and we wondered if we had seen them at Cruiser Expo. As I type, another trawler is waiting to lock downriver.

We picked this spot because it was nearly halfway to Cocoa, where we plan to spend the three nights leading up to the launch. We were alerted to this spot at Trawler Fest as a good place to camp in view of the lock. This is on the upriver side; there is also a county park campground on the downriver side. The county park is not nearly as nice, with less of a view, yet only $3 cheaper (although they do have no-hookup sites for $16). It's larger, though, and was our backup plan in case the small handful of sites here were full.

We had just settled in and were enjoying a glass of wine up on the deck, overlooking the channel, when Louise's phone rang with a call from the Disaster Operations Center in DC. It was the staff deployment center, wanting to send her to Orlando to help with the Haiti relief effort, specifically repatriation. That seemed odd to us, because our direct management in DC had just called us earlier in the day to confirm our participation in a meeting in Tucson just two weeks from now (relief deployments are usually a minimum of three weeks). Louise explained the meeting situation to the deployment people, and I called our leads to find out what was going on.

The deployment center was so desperate for help that they agreed to a single week for the assignment, leaving us just enough time to make Tucson (without, of course, any of our planned stops or visits en route). Meanwhile, the leads seemed to think we were unneeded in Orlando and could not understand why Louise was being sent. As it stands right now, she has deployment orders (but I do not), and we are waiting for a call back from Washington sorting out the apparent confusion.

Checkout time here is in just five minutes, so we will need to get on the road. The route for Orlando splits off from the route for Cocoa about an hour and a half north; with any luck, we will have a definitive answer before we hit that point. In the meantime, I am mulling over in the back of my mind how we can still see the launch if Louise is (or both of us are) working an operation in Orlando. Stay tuned; one of us will probably tweet as soon as we know where we're headed.

Canal zone

We are at the Canal Corps of Engineers campground (map), adjacent to the canal between Lake Barkley and Kentucky Lake, impoundments of the Cumberland and Tennessee rivers respectively. We've stayed here before, and as then we are again in the "group" area, which consists of eight 50-amp sites arranged around a large parking lot, with a picnic pavilion and a dock on lake Barkley.

We're only 30 miles or so from Paducah, where we started the day yesterday, but I wanted to stop someplace for a couple of days to get a few things done, and we knew this was a pleasant stop, and would have power for the two hours or so of 90+ temperatures we've been seeing each afternoon. It's also a short scooter ride here into the town of Grand Rivers, where there are a couple of restaurants and a grocery store, should we need one.

Mostly what I need to get done is to finish moving over to this new computer before the deadline for returning it expires. Wal-Mart gives 15 days, no questions asked, and I wanted to get some real usage time in for all my daily applications before making a decision. Getting to the point where all those applications are working has been a lot of effort, but I am mostly moved over now and things seem to be working fine.

I've been keeping notes on my process, as well as notes on what works well and what doesn't in the "netbook" format. I am leaning towards keeping this computer, and I might write a pair of articles here on the blog on setting up a new XP laptop from scratch, and on configuring one of these netbooks to minimize the frustrations they often present. Of course, I still have plenty of work ahead of me to prep my old Gateway for sale on eBay.

Even for a geek like me, there is only so long in a day that one can stare at a computer screen (although I am typing this outside in beautiful weather, with a view of the lake, which makes things a bit more pleasant). So this afternoon we headed across the canal on the scooters, and rode the Kentucky Lake Scenic Drive, stopped at the Land Between The Lakes welcome center, and did a quick loop through the Hillman's Ferry campground, constructed by the Tennessee Valley Authority but now operated by the Forest Service.

We also rode into Grand Rivers to scope out dinner options, and rode around the Green Turtle Bay Resort. We were hoping the restaurant there might be a dinner option (it's not), but instead ran into a boat show going on at their marina. We spent 45 minutes or so going through boats, and even saw a couple that would make nice starter boats for us at surprisingly low prices. The market has dropped quite a bit in the last year.

In a few minutes, we will head back out to dinner. Tomorrow, we'll decide if we want to pay for another night or two, or move along.

Allez Aux Arc

We are at the Aux Arc (pronounced "ozark," en Francais) Corps Of Engineers park and campground (map), just across the Arkansas River from Ozark, Arkansas and adjacent to the Corps-operated Ozark Lock and Dam. We've stayed here before -- that's our power steering fluid all over the ground in front of Odyssey in the photo, and I am happy to report that, almost exactly two years later, there is no trace of the stain remaining; I distinctly remember spending an hour or so with the kitty litter cleaning it all up. Oddly, on this visit, we've seen only one tow pass by on the river since we arrived.

Speaking of familiar places, after we left the Wal-Mart in Van Buren, Louise pointed out that we had stayed next door at the Lowe's there when we zipped through on I-40 back in January of 2006. I remember the stop (neither the Chili's nor Frank's Italian restaurant existed then), but I can't for the life of me recall why we chose the Lowe's over the Wal-Mart right next door. Historical satellite imagery (now available in Google Earth) shows the Wal-Mart to pre-date the Lowe's by a fair amount.

Friday morning brought us no closer to a real resolution on which way to head, but we realized that it was the beginning of Labor Day weekend (these holidays always seem to sneak up on us), and we had best find someplace to settle in while the tidal wave passed over us. We decided to remain more or less in NW Arkansas, and within striking distance of the Interstate, and so after one final check of the NHC forecast and the fire reports from California, we set out on what I though was a well-planned and Interstate-free route directly south on Arkansas 59 to Barling, then due east on Arkansas 22 to Paris (where I hoped to take a blog-titling photo of the bus for an "Odyssey in Paris" post here). From there it would be a short jaunt to the Ozark National Forest, with plenty of dispersed options, as well as a developed campground at Cove Lake if it was not already full for the holiday weekend, and even an easy scooter ride back for "dinner in Paris" as well.

Alas, it was not to be. After we crossed I-40 on 59, we started seeing giant yellow "No Trucks on 59 Through Van Buren" warning signs. The first few we ignored; often when we roll past such signs we both say out loud "we're not a truck." But as we got further along, the signs got more dire, with the addition of flashing amber lights, which we take as not a good sign. Eventually, just before the well-marked (but poorly paved) truck turn-around, we hit the sign that said "Weight Limit 12,000 lbs." Now, we're not bound by signs that apply to trucks, but a weight limit is a weight limit, and we weigh four times that amount. Reluctantly, we availed ourselves of the turn-around and headed back toward the Interstate.

The presumed work-around for my planned route would involve bypassing Van Buren on I-540, after first heading a few miles east on I-40. We'd then pick up 59 south of the city, and the total added to the route would only amount to a few miles. Nonetheless, once we were on I-40 and heading east, we decided to just continue on past Alma and pick up US-64 to Ozark, knowing that would give us this COE option, yet still keep open the possibility of continuing southeast on 309 to Paris if necessary, actually a shorter route than the original.

We did not hold out much hope there would be any space at this park. It's popular and well used, and it is on the reservation system. Like most COE parks, it is nicely developed, with three playgrounds, a boat ramp, a dozen or so river docks, restrooms, and 30- or 50-amp power and water at most of the sites, along with large gravel patios, nice tables and fire rings, and the ubiquitous trademark COE lantern-hanger "candy canes." So I was not surprised when we rolled up mid-day to be told that they were completely sold out.

The did allow as two (out of a total of four) unreservable "primitive" sites were still available, but "there's no way you'll get that rig in there." They were willing to let us try, however, and site #4 turned out to be plenty capacious enough to fit us, and with a rare open shot to the satellite as well. We did, however, first have to turn around in the nearby boat ramp parking lot, then back all the way to the site. We paid for three nights, at $9 each (half the 30-amp rate).

Primitive is something of a misnomer, as these four sites all have picnic tables and steel fire rings/grills, as well as paved driveways. The four sites share a concrete dock on the river, affording a nice view of the bridge just upstream, which is decoratively lit at night. Just next to the bridge, perhaps only 1,500' from here, is a decent Mexican restaurant, Mi Casita, which served us the largest portion of mixed fajitas (beef, chicken, shrimp, and chorizo) we've ever seen for less than $10, and our beer and margarita were just $2.50 each. The restaurant would be an easy walk, if not for the fact that there is a gate across the road with a "No Trespassing" sign just past it (although I think it is really a public street), and so we had to ride nearly three miles around the long way to get there (as shown on this map).



Now that we are nicely settled in with plenty of food and wine, we can sit back, relax, and watch the Amateur Hour that is Labor Day weekend at most any public campground. We're right next to the boat ramp, which is often entertaining enough, but we also have the class-C in #2 two sites over, traveling with the tent in site #1 beyond that, who have been running their generator more or less 24/7 since we arrived (even though quiet hours run 10p-6a), and blaring country music from some local station occasionally on a tinny radio. Their little yapper dog is also running around loose.

Our site shares a driveway with #3, and we luxuriously had it to ourselves when we arrived and all night Friday. Yesterday afternoon, a couple of fishermen with the world's oldest and most decrepit bass boat pulled in there and set up a giant tent; fishermen are usually quiet and sedate, so I thought no problem. As evening rolled in, though, so did another pickup truck with a pair of women in it, and these four partied well into the wee hours of the morning. I'm pretty certain they polished off two full cases of beer among the four of them, and they yakked loudly and carried on all night. At least I no longer felt any guilt that our air compressor would kick on a couple times in the middle of the night just 40' from their tent.

Around 2am or so, while I was still plugging away at getting my new computer up and running, I heard one of the women allow that she was very drunk, and wondering if she would get home safely, and then I heard her say "I wanna ride those scooters." Of course, "those" scooters would be ours, and I noticed she was eying them. Now, drunk folks have been known to lack judgment, and I would not have put it past her to hop on one of them just to try it for size, and they are actually rather easy to knock off their center stands and drop, so I doused all the lights (mostly, my computer screens) and kept an eye on them until they wandered back to their camp site and their attention turned to, umm, each other. No word on whether the ladies made it home safely, but both pickup trucks were gone this morning. The two fishermen came back just at checkout time, in yet a different pickup truck, loaded up their gear and tent, and took off. With any luck, the site will be vacant again tonight.

This couple days of downtime has been just what I needed to make progress on the computer project, and I am happy to report that I am posting this from my new laptop, although I am not quite finished getting everything in order. I am still getting used to the ~90%-sized keyboard (the one on the Gateway was luxuriously full-sized), and I've done a lot of backspace-retype here. Hopefully either the spell-checker or Louise will catch all my typos. Lots of folks have asked about the new computer, or computing on the road in general, and the detailed notes I am keeping about getting this machine set up may get turned into a dedicated blog post at some point.

We are paid up through mid-day tomorrow, at which point we'll either need to figure out where to head from here, or we'll move to a hookup space for a night to charge up our batteries and maybe even wash the coach.

Land of O'Keefe

We are at the Corps of Engineers campground at Abiquiu Lake (map), off US-84.

While we were really enjoying our stay in the Carson forest at higher elevations, we'd pretty much run out of fresh food. We wanted to spend at least a night in the red rock country, and so we thought we'd use our last day's rations somewhere around here. We broke camp in the early afternoon, and headed south.

US-84 heads downgrade rather rapidly along this section, and while that was easy on our diesel supply, the temperatures increased with every mile we drove. By the time we reached Echo Amphitheater it was well into the 90s. There is a small Forest Service campground there, with tables, fire rings, trash barrels, and rest rooms for $10 per night. A lovely spot in the red rock, but with temperatures still rising, we wanted power to run the air conditioners. As a side note, the folks at the Chama visitor center had told us camping was no longer allowed here -- wrong.

We did walk the paved trail to the "amphitheater" itself, a concave formation in the sandstone that lives up to its name. While the day use area was quite busy, with perhaps half a dozen vehicles coming through in the fifteen minutes or so that we were there, the camping area was empty. I should note that the Forest Service charges a day use fee to see the formation (our annual pass waives this), although stopping just to use the rest room is free.

A few miles further south is the turnoff for Ghost Ranch, which we skipped principally on account of their pet policy. This is where readers Kate and Terry are hosting, and the red rock formations form a magnificent backdrop to the area. We continued south to the lake, where we knew we would find power.

As it turns out, only two electric sites were available when we arrived; the camp hosts told us the place had been jam-packed over the weekend, making our decision Saturday to wait it out a good one. $14 bought us 50 amps of power and a water spigot, along with the usual CoE amenities (picnic table, ramada, fire ring, BBQ grill, and the trademark CoE lantern hanger). They also have restrooms with hot showers. With 50-amps were were able to put a good soak onto the batteries even while running our full complement of air conditioners, which were needed right up until bed time, when we were able to open up the windows.

With temperatures in the high 90s, I was looking forward to perhaps jumping in the lake, but it is not really accessible here from the campground (although there is something of a trail from the tent-only loop, a scramble down the bluff to the lake some 100' below). I rode the scooter over to the day use area, which is quite some distance, and there is easy access to the water there. Unfortunately, on a hot Sunday afternoon, it seemed like half the population of the Santa Fe region is here at the lake cooling off -- there were several dozen boat trailers, and well over a hundred cars scattered around the day use area. It did not seem like a pleasant way to swim.

I also rode over the dam and back, then down the downstream face on a series of switchbacks to access the Chama river downstream. Here, too, was a day use picnic area with river access, but, again, it was chock full of families on their Sunday outing, including one family gathering that looked to be well over fifty people. I gave up on swimming yesterday, and decided that, if I still felt like it today, we'd take Odyssey over to the day use area after checking out of the campground at noon.

We had figured to have canned rations or maybe pasta for dinner, but after we got the dish up I discovered that there is a small hotel with a café another seven miles down the road in Abiquiu, and so we rode down there two-up for a nice dinner. No liquor license, though, so we had to suffer without our customary glass of red wine. Part of the inn is given to an art gallery and gift shop -- you can't spend any time in this area at all without tripping over art, and particularly Georgia O'Keefe tributes.

Today we will continue south along the Chama, right back through Abiquiu, and then west a bit to Los Alamos, where we will likely stay at the Elks lodge, with the Juniper campground in Bandelier National Monument as a backup option.

While we were in the cooler elevations of the forest, I spent a good part of our three days there getting projects knocked off my list. On Saturday I decided to tackle the rear leveler actuator, which crapped out nearly a year ago, reducing our front-to-back leveling travel by half and thus limiting us to less tilty sites for that time. Fixing the actuator is a fairly large project that I always dread (I've repaired this particular leveler four times now), and I've been waiting for the combination of relative privacy, temperate weather, and a whole day with no agenda to tackle it.

What is involved is to chock the wheels, fold up the mud flap, then shinny in between the drive wheels and the tag wheel on the curb side. Any time I am under the bus with my legs sticking out between the wheels I am nervous, with my heart and breathing rates up; the need for relative privacy has to do with a somewhat (but only a little bit) irrational fear that someone is going to run over my legs driving past us.

Once underneath, I then need to reach a bolt that is three feet above the ground, with not one but two wrenches. So I end up doing abdominal crunches for part of the work, and propping myself up by my head against the brake cylinder for the rest. During part of the process, air starts coming out of the suspension bags, adding to the anxiety. And, of course, this area is one of the dirtiest parts of the bus, with grease and oil slung off the propeller shaft combined with road grime kicked up by the drive wheels.

At some point I slithered back out from under the wheels with the cantankerous linear actuator in my hands, and brought it inside to work on the single broken wire that occasioned this whole repair. Louise remarked that the grime speckling my face and sprinkled in my hair made me look vaguely like a Māori warrior, and she insisted on snapping a photo.



Somewhere in the middle of this I conked the middle of my back on a sharp part of the bus, and between being sore from that, and having done more abdominal crunches in the span of an hour than I normally do all year, I am one sore puppy today -- more so even than yesterday. It hurts when I stand up, and when I sit down. I am hoping that, by tomorrow, I will be in good enough shape to actually walk around Los Alamos a bit.

On the Tombigbee at Demopolis Lake

We are at the Foscue Creek Park campground, operated by the Army Corps of Engineers, in Demopolis, Alabama (map). We have a nice site right on the Tombigbee, just upriver from the lock and dam. A sharp-looking ketch had just up-locked and motored past us as we parked, and a dozen or so tows have pushed through since our arrival yesterday afternoon.

We only ended up spending an hour or two at the Montgomery hot site yesterday morning. All of the laptops had hibernated, probably the result of a power outage on the premises sometime in the last few weeks. Once we got them all booted, everything was back to normal, except for one laptop where the screen backlight had failed completely. We've seen this happen quite a bit on the ThinkPads.

I spent a little time getting the IP fax machine back on line, then we handed the bad laptop and the keys over to the local chapter. Headquarters will send them a replacement for the bad machine, and they can return it in the same case. The chapter folks set the alarm and locked the place up; we spent a few more minutes in the parking lot wrapping up a windshield repair.

Oh, did I forget to mention that? On Monday, maybe half an hour outside of Montgomery, we took another rock strike to the windshield. This one was rather minor, a small volcano with no legs, so we kept going and fixed it at the Lowes when we arrived. We've gotten quite good at these repairs -- practice makes perfect -- and you can't even see this one. I also filled in some pits that we developed due to another rock strike back in Florida. Those pits were not large enough to warrant using up a whole repair kit on their own.

The glass repair resin is UV cure, and the sun was low enough when we finished the job that I wanted to give the stuff another morning in the sun before scraping off the excess. So we parked facing the sun when we arrived at the hot site, and I got the razor blade out and finished up when we were done there.

We have a club in Montgomery, and thought about trying to have dinner there, but they do not serve dinner on Sundays or Mondays, and Tuesday is spaghetti night, which does not call us. We've been to the Montgomery club before, and it's one of our favorites, but it was not worth staying another night in town. We'll hit the club in Jackson, Mississippi, instead, where I will celebrate another trip around the sun tomorrow night.

From Montgomery we took the historic route to Selma on US-80, opting to pass through downtown rather than around Selma on the truck bypass. I think the history of the place and all the museums has provided downtown Selma with a bit of a tourist revival -- most of the storefronts were going concerns. From Selma US-80 brought us here, to Demopolis.

We registered for two nights here at the campground, hoping to relax a bit now that it's warm, and maybe get some projects checked off. After we got set up, though, the Internet informed us that today's weather would be miserable. We pulled the scooters out and headed to town for dinner last night, figuring it would be too crummy to do so today.

Demopolis is one of the few marina stops on the Tombigbee for pleasure boats, and I had read about the marina and its restaurant on the Great Loop mailing list several times, so we decided to try it for dinner. I sent a note to the list, in case any loopers might be in town, but got no response. The restaurant, the New Orleans Bar and Grill, was quite palatable, although too smoky inside for our taste. In nicer weather the outside deck looked appealing. Most of the slips in the yacht basin (and "yacht" is, perhaps, stretching things a bit) were occupied by houseboats, though I saw at least one trawler.

It's been cold enough here today that we are happy to have the 50-amp power. We also have a sewer connection which is too far to reach, and a water spigot, as well as a nice patio area. The Corps tends to trick their campgrounds out really well. Full hookup sites are $20 per night, and they also have five water/electric only sites for $18. Those sites were farther from the river, though, and, even though we don't need and can't use the sewer, we wanted to watch the boats go by.

I never got to the plumbing repair or the replacement of the scooter fender that I had planned for today -- just too cold and wet outside. But I did manage to fix a broken latch on the fridge, and a bad light switch in the kitchen. In a few minutes, I will replace the bad screen housing on my laptop. Louise, meanwhile, has been taking advantage of the inexpensive laundry facilities here to catch up on our backlog.

Tomorrow we will head back out of Demopolis, continuing west on US-80. We'll fuel up to the tippy-top in Pearl, with the cheapest diesel in the US at $1.93 per gallon, then head in to Jackson, where we are hoping to stay at the fairgrounds adjacent to downtown.

Good news/Bad news

We are in the Land Between the Lakes, Kentucky, at the Corps of Engineers "Canal" campground (map), just north of the canal joining Lake Kentucky and Lake Barkley. With temperatures pushing 90° when we arrived yesterday afternoon, it was nice to have some power to run the air conditioners. Based on our size and the fact that we asked for open sky to get our dish on-line, they put us in the group area, which turns out to be the nicest digs in the whole place, with wide and level concrete pads, 50-amp pedestals, and a picnic pavilion and dock right on the lake.

After we got settled in, I called the vet back in Montgomery, Illinois. The biopsy results were in, and they found no cancerous cells, leaving the diagnosis as hyperplasia. That's the really good news -- so far, the evidence is good that she may not actually have cancer. The bad news is that the splenic lesions are still a problem, with the potential to cause fatal splenic bleeding, and, of course, the anemia is still a major concern. So her spleen will need to be removed.

Fortunately, we found a great vet in Little Rock when we passed through there a month ago, and we've talked it over with him and he has agreed to do the surgery, which is now scheduled for Thursday. Our plan is to arrive there tomorrow afternoon.

After we leave here this afternoon, we'll stop by for a brief visit with some fellow bus enthusiasts in Union City, Tennessee on our way towards one of our two choices for crossing the Mississippi. Those would be the I-155 bridge west of Dyersburg, or the I-40 bridge in Memphis. We'll decide tomorrow, based on schedule and how much freeway driving we want to do.

The land of bourbon, horses, and tobacco

We are in Kentucky, at the Bailey's Point Corps of Engineers campground on Barren River Lake (map).

Yesterday we had a quiet morning at the Murfreesboro Wal-Mart. The generator, which had run for about three hours Monday night, came back on around 9am, perfect timing to crank up more air conditioners as the day warmed up. We did a little shopping and some projects around the house, and I called over to the post office around noon.

It took a bit of explaining (and two different clerks -- apparently, fewer and fewer employees at the USPS even know what General Delivery is), but I finally convinced someone that we were from out of town, and that our mail must be there, having been sent Priority Mail from Washington six full days ago. That person rummaged around for a while and finally found it. There's a good chance it had actually been sitting there since Monday, but the clerk Louise saw in person refused to look anyplace but on the General Delivery shelf.

By 1:00 we had picked up the mail and were on our way north. US231 took us directly out of town and north past the Cedars of Lebanon, and put us on US31E near Bethpage north of the town of Lebanon. 31E brought us over the state line and here to the lake. Today we will continue north on 31E through Glasgow. When we reach Horse Cave, east of Mammoth Caves National Park, we will rejoin a route we left two years ago, on our way south. We will likely be retracing a good part of that route, as the Markland Dam is one of the very few river crossings along that stretch of the Ohio, and we would otherwise need to go west to Madison or east to Cincinnati. (Oddly, Street Atlas still shows a handful of ferries along this stretch, but they all shut down years ago.)

The campground here is enormous, with five separate loops and about 100 sites. It's mostly empty, and we had our pick of nice lakefront sites with 50 amps and good satellite access. We walked the few feet to the shore and had a nice swim yesterday afternoon, and I would guess the water temperature to be in the high 80's right now. With the air temperature pushing 100, though, it felt refreshing. Speaking of which, we are heading towards the Indiana/Ohio state line, which my weather maps indicate has been a bit cooler than where we've been. We are moving slowly toward Goshen, where there will be an Escapade in a little under two weeks.

Between now and then, we need to survive Labor Day Weekend, when parks such as this one, now nearly empty, will be full to capacity. I am hoping it will be a bit cooler, because we will likely end up boondocking for the two heavy nights. Or we could get deployed, which would render the subject moot. There is a large disaster response right now in Grand Forks for the tornado that ripped through southwest of there. We were 20+ hours away when they decided to ramp up the response, so they initially deployed someone who could fly in sooner than we could get there. If either of the two tropical systems that are currently under investigation in the Atlantic (AL942007 and AL952007) turns into a numbered tropical depression, we will halt our progress toward Goshen and reposition.

Hotter than Hades

It's been a long and hot couple of days since I last posted here.

We got rolling Wednesday around the middle of the day, and blasted east on I-40 to the Flying-J west of Nashville, where we tanked up on $2.669 diesel, the cheapest we've seen in a while. From there, Tennessee 96 took us most of the way to our friends Russ and Pat over in Christiana (although, annoyingly, vehicles over 10,000 gross are prohibited through the town of Franklin, and so we had to detour several miles around it).

We had a really nice visit, and I enjoyed talking shop and kicking tires with Russ and looking over his post-Neoplan project (a Kenworth T2000 with which he is going to haul a 40' custom fiver). Russ had exactly the tag axle A-frame that I needed, and he also happened to have a set of bushings for it still brand new from Neopart, which he was happy to sell me. He's also got three thermostatically controlled fans identical to ours, which he gave me, and he's even storing them for us in the event we ever need them. He has quite a few Neoplan parts that are still new-in-box, such as brake shoes and drums, brake cans, and air bags, but the likelihood that we will ever need to replace these items while we still own Odyssey is slim. It may take him a while, but I think he will get good money for those parts from someone who really needs them. In the meantime, if I rip an airbag while he's still got them, I'm sure he'd be happy to FedEx me one.

Russ had a 30-amp, 240-volt outlet available, and between the two of us we cobbled together an adaptor to keep Odyssey cool during our one night stay in their enormous yard. Good thing, because it was 103° during our visit.

Russ was kind enough to call around to some shops while we were on our way in, and by the time we had arrived he had already arranged for us to be seen by Covington Detroit Diesel in Nashville. They had told him to have us bring the coach up at 5:00pm Thursday, and the night shift would be able to get us in. So we took our leave in the afternoon and trundled up to Nashville.

We had a bit of a scare when we pulled in and the night manager said he couldn't fit us -- apparently, the day guy who took the call didn't get the memo over to the night shift. Nevertheless they had us back the coach in over the pit to let things cool down while they figured out how to squeeze us in. In the meantime, the night manager found the note from the day guy in some odd place, so all was well.

The oil change was no problem, of course, although about as expensive as they come, with shop labor at $99 per hour and Detroit PowerGuard 40wt at over $15 per gallon. But beggars can't be choosers, and the last several shops we had tried either couldn't get us in, or didn't stock 40wt, and it was really time to get the break-in oil changed out.

While we were over the pit, I had them look at the power steering leak, showing them the hydraulic hose that had been replaced in Little Rock. They tightened it down (much easier over a pit than squeezing underneath like the guy in Little Rock had to do), and had me turn the wheel some. The bad news: the hose is leaking at the crimp. So, bottom line, I paid the shop in Little Rock to install a brand new hose that's bad, and will have to be replaced again anyway. And, of course, there is no way to get a hydraulic hose made up at 8pm -- one of the downsides to having work done by the night shift. If I had thought for a minute that it was something other than a loose connection, I would have held out for a day slot.

As for the fuel emptying out of the Davco, this is now the third Detroit distributor in a row who has told me to ignore it. So, perhaps, it isn't a real problem, although it continues to nag at me.

It was around 9pm when we rolled out of the shop, and we headed off to the Madison Elks lodge, the closest lodge in our guide which claimed to have power available, "more than 20 amps". When we got there, the only power outlet in sight was a 15-amp convenience receptacle that was clearly on a shared circuit. No way was it going to run two air conditioners, and maybe not even one, so we regrouped.

We started to head north to where we thought there might be a Corps of Engineers campground on Old Hickory Lake. After a few miles, though, we realized it was further than we originally thought, and we were dog tired and driving in the dark -- not a good combination. We ended up spending the night in the parking lot of a Sam's Club adjacent to a Wal-Mart that we passed a few miles north of the lodge (map). At least we could run the generator there without bothering anyone (the Elks lodge was in a residential neighborhood). And it was peaceful and quiet, if not dark.

Now, this kind of relentless and oppressive heat is hard on the air conditioning and thus even harder on the electrical system. The generator has had a hard time keeping up, and so has the inverter. For example, in the heat, with one AC running full blast, the inverter is apt to trip off on an overload condition when the air compressor kicks on, as it does for a half minute or so every 30-60 minutes. We're very careful to manage loads in this circumstance, as breakers and equipment lose 20-30% of their rated capacities in the extreme ambient temperatures.

Thus we did not really notice anything amiss at first when we started having trouble keeping all the air conditioners running. But almost universally, the generator will run everything without complaint, particularly after dark. So last night, with the generator running, we realized we had a bigger problem as first one AC, then two, then all three would trip off consistently, defying all our efforts to keep them running by resetting breakers and shedding other loads. We finally found one combination of two air conditioners on two different circuits that would run long enough to get things cool, and then we were able to sleep with one unit running on the batteries overnight, apparently without trouble.

This morning when the genny started back up, all hell broke loose. We had some arcing from our electrical panel, which, upon inspection, appeared to perhaps be internal to the AC selector switch, and no configuration of switch positions and breaker settings would allow us to keep things running. I finally found one particular setting of the switch that would allow us to run two units with the generator running, and one without, and we carefully put things back together until we could figure out our next move. By this time, we were pretty sure the generator itself was not implicated, but we knew we were going to need external power tonight and tomorrow anyway, so we packed up and got on the road, after a quick run into Wal-Mart for another half gallon of ATF, which I'm sure we'll need with that hose still leaking.

We came directly here, to the Corps of Engineers campground at Poole Knobs, on Percy Priest Lake east of Nashville (map). We have plans to visit with friends tomorrow who live just a few miles west of here, and we had already targeted this spot as a good place to overnight if we needed power. Rolling in, as we did, on a Friday, we were very lucky to get this space -- they only had maybe a dozen spaces left with power when we rolled up, and this one is one of maybe three spots in the whole park where we could get on-line, the other two already having been booked.

Now, our electrical situation was already precarious when we rolled in, so it was frustrating in the extreme when nothing I could do would persuade the 50-amp campground receptacle to give us 240 volts, or to stay un-tripped. After fiddling with our own systems for a while, I finally determined that the problem was actually a bad 50-amp, two-pole breaker in the pedestal. Well, we were already in one of the very last spaces that would fit us, and the only one with a shot to the satellite, so I wasn't going to move. And I knew that reporting the bad breaker to the camp host would elicit a repair by, perhaps, Monday (if even that soon). So I walked to the (empty but reserved) space next door and stole the 50-amp breaker. Well, more precisely, I swapped them. Voila -- working power on both legs, and at least a little relief from the 102° heat. As a footnote, I was quite relieved when the neighbors showed up with a 30-amp rig, so it will not be them, but rather some future occupant of that space who will end up dealing with the bad 50-amp breaker.

Spending half an hour in the hot sun rewiring campground pedestals (apparently a habit of mine) wiped me out, so, after cooling off a bit in the air conditioning, we put our suits on and jumped in the lake. The lakefront spaces had been sold out, so getting to the lake meant cutting through a reserved-but-unoccupied space, but the lake was wonderful. Warm enough to spend all day in the water, but still enough cooler than the air to feel refreshing. After swimming the air did not feel so oppressive, and I even managed to survive standing outside to grill some burgers for dinner.

Tonight's big after-dinner activity was removing the suspect AC selector switch. I wanted to do this in the relative cool of the evening, because it meant turning off all the AC's temporarily. Fortunately, it only took about five minutes to disconnect the air conditioners and the incoming power from the switch, and then hardwire each AC to a power source. So we had the air conditioning back on fairly quickly, but then getting the selector switch out altogether was a bit of a challenge, as one of the set-screws connecting the selector knob to the switch had corroded and was fused in place.

After a 20-minute fight I had the switch out, and the problem became clear: three years of use in all manner of conditions, including low pedestal voltage on a number of occasions, had melted and/or fried to a crisp the insulation on some of the cross-over wires. Eventually, the insulation abraded through in one spot where two wires crossed, and thus the arcing, which in turn melted the wire all the way through. And this is one reason why all my panels are dead-front (not dead-font; sorry about the typo), as required by code.

Tomorrow I hope to persuade our friends to swing me past Home Depot at some point, so I can pick up some wire, ring terminals, contact cleaner, and a new set-screw. After I replace the bad wires and screws, I'll probably disassemble the switch body itself and check the contacts and wipers for any similar signs of damage.

Photo by √oхέƒx™

A nice visit

Yesterday we had a nice drive from Foss Lake, although we abandoned the Route 66 plan early on, as the route was hard to follow and the roadbed was in bad condition in many places -- we'll try again when we are in a more leisurely mode. We ended up getting back on I-40 after Weatherford (although we did follow the old route through Clinton and Weatherford before giving up). That took us all the way to Oklahoma City, where we took on 130 gallons of fuel at the Flying-J before crossing the city on the freeway and bailing off onto US62, which took us most of the way to Okmulgee.

Louise found us a great place to stay -- Okmulgee Lake State Park (map), where for $16 we snagged 30 amps of power for our air conditioning. That meant our friends had to trek about five miles to come get us, but we really needed the AC in the humidity. We almost had to turn around before the park entrance, as we rolled up to a bridge clearly posted "Weight Limit 10 Tons" (we weigh 24 tons). While we were sitting there with our flashers on, digging out the two-way radios so we could back out onto the highway again and head off to who-knows-where (probably the Okmulgee Wal-Mart for a night of generator fun), the park ranger rolled by in the other direction and stopped to ask what the problem was. We explained the bridge issue and he told us to just go over it -- the park gets deliveries all the time by semi-truck and they cross the bridge with no problem. Having thus been granted permission by law enforcement, we proceeded over the bridge and into the park, which was actually quite beautiful. The campground, while not empty, was lightly used on Friday night, and we found it quite enjoyable.

We had a very nice visit with our friends, who fixed us dinner on Friday, and then fetched us again this morning for breakfast. After breakfast, I spent a few minutes trying to further tighten the fuel supply line, filled up the fuel separator, and we got back on the road. Although as we were leaving I noticed quite an oil slick leading into our parking space from where we pulled up to back in -- I asked Louise (who was standing outside giving me signals as I had backed in) if we had made it, and she emphatically said that, no, nothing was leaking while we were backing and, besides, it was in the wrong place to have come from us. So I thought nothing more of it.

After leaving the park, we passed through Okmulgee and headed east on US62 again, which eventually connected us to US64. 64 follows I-40 rather closely, criss-crossing it and winding its way through cities and towns that 40 bypasses, and this road will take us all the way to Tennessee. We won't need to get on I-40 again, but it's available in short order should we get a call and need to speed up our progress.

US64 was a beautiful drive today, crossing the Arkansas river several times, and showing us the underside of Salisaw, OK, and Fort Smith, Van Buren, Dyer, Mulberry, and Ozark, AR. Tonight we had intended to be even further east, but just west of Ozark, we heard a loud "crack!" as a rock from completely out of the blue hit the windshield, just above and to the right of my main field of view. It left a volcano the size of a dime, and the beginnings of a star the size of a quarter. I haven't a clue where the rock came from -- a car had just passed us in the opposite direction, but it seemed like the rock hit a good second or more afterwards.

Having much experience with this by now (we are on our third windshield), we immediately slowed down to around 30mph (from the 45-50 we had been doing in a 55 zone) to take the wind pressure off and reduce jouncing and vibration, much to the annoyance of cars behind us. We limped along this way to Ozark, where we stopped at a Wal-Mart to take stock of the situation and make some phone calls. Why, oh why, do these things always happen at ~4:30 on a Saturday afternoon? Most of the glass repair places we called were already closed for the weekend, and the couple of major national chains allowed that the best they could do was have someone out Monday morning.

We briefly considered just staying there at the Ozark Wal-Mart until Monday morning. But the fact of the matter is that the last time this happened, the star became an 11-inch crack overnight, while we weren't even moving. Now, without any special insurance on the glass, we really, really wanted to get the chip filled not only before we moved further, but also before nightfall.

After about a dozen phone calls came up dry, and realizing that Ozark, Arkansas is nearly the middle of nowhere, we decided to fill it ourselves. Wal-Mart carries the fix-a-windshield brand repair kit (from the makers of fix-a-flat), which appears to be one of the better ones out there. The kit consists of a suction-cup-mounted frame, similar to the ones professionals use but made of plastic, and a screw-in pressure fixture to inject the resin, along with a small bottle of resin, a razor blade, and several clear plastic sheets to cover surface repairs while they cure.

The kit worked reasonably well, as far as we can tell. We'll know in the morning, I guess. Because our windshield is dead vertical, it was hard to get the resin into the fixture -- a complaint that the professionals made on more than one occasion as well. But it did seem to get quite a bit of resin into the damaged area. After the injection fix, we put two liberal coats of surface resin on everything that looked like it might be an all-the-way-through crack. Tomorrow morning I will scrape off the excess with the razor blade. I have my fingers crossed that the repair holds -- you can definitely still see some damage, but I don't care about the appearance as long as it does not spread into a windshield-eating crack. We liked the kit so much, that I went back into the store and bought another one, to have on hand for the inevitable "next time."

By the time we were done with the repairs, including letting things stand for a while in full sunlight, or at least as much as there was (the resin cures in UV light), it was getting late. And I was past done for the day. So Louise dragged out the guides and discovered that right across the river was a Corps of Engineers park, "Aux Arc Park", with a nice campground and electric hookups (map). It's actually quite lovely -- we have a site right on the river, just upriver of the Ozark Dam, power house, and lock. As we arrived, a tow was locking down-river.

We found a nice space that looked good for getting on the satellite. As Louise was standing behind Odyssey backing me in, she screamed that smoke was coming from the engine. We decided to get fully backed into the space to deal with it, and that's when she noticed transmission fluid all over the road where we were backing up.

Aha! This was the same fluid pattern I had noticed back at Lake Okmulgee. So it was, indeed, us. And the symptom seems to be that we are leaking gobs of tranny fluid (the expensive, $40-a-gallon stuff, natch), but only in reverse. Leaking so forcefully that the fluid is hitting something hot and smoking. Now, on our way to Stewart & Stevenson from Santa Fe, we had a brief "Check Transmission" light and found a code 12, which sometimes indicates low fluid. I put half a gallon of fluid in and cleared the codes, and S&S found the tranny to be low. Odd, since we thought it had been topped up properly at PEDCO, but sometimes it's hard to get the level right after replacing the pan -- some of it disappears into the filter or the cooler or whatever. We did not think much of it.

I am now pretty sure that the tranny leak developed either at PEDCO or not long afterwards, and we've been leaking fluid across seven states. As soon as we figured this out, I called S&S, who, fortunately, was open today. I managed to get the same tech who did the work on Odyssey, and I related the symptoms. He thinks it's the reverse pressure switch, which is, basically, what makes the backup lights work. It makes sense -- this switch is on the outside of the tranny, threaded into a 1/8" port through the case and into the reverse hydraulic circuit. When you shift into reverse, fluid pressure builds in this circuit, and, among other things, closes the switch to make the backup lights work. If the switch is cracked, or loose in the port, or broken internally, then fluid will shoot out under pressure, but only in reverse gear.

Tomorrow morning, when all has cooled down, I will crawl under the bus to see if I can get to the switch. Hopefully, the problem will be obvious, but, if not, we will chock the wheels and Louise will put the tranny in reverse while I keep my eyes open for where the fluid is spurting out. Fortunately, I have a 1/8" pipe plug and two extra gallons of TranSynd with me. But I do feel bad about spilling toxic waste across seven states and in some pristine campgrounds. I would have fixed it sooner -- had I only known.

Rend Lake, on the Big Muddy

We are at a Corps of Engineers campground on Rend Lake, an impoundment of the Big Muddy River (map). We are here principally because a group of people we have met on the internet have congregated here in a pre-rally for the upcoming Escapade rally in Du Quoin, about 20 miles west of here.

The group is the "Full-Timing Class of 2005," a loose-knit group that came together spontaneously in an on-line forum called RV.Net, a bulletin board that Louise visits regularly. The theme here is people who began full-timing this year, and we squeaked in even though, technically, we hit the road near the end of 2004. (There is no "Full-Timing Class of 2004," as far as we know.) The group organized around the concept of having a rally in Quartzsite, AZ in January of '06, and somewhere along the line, morphed into an Escapees Birds-of-a-Feather group.

We will be here through Sunday morning, when we will all move over to the fairgrounds in Du Quoin for the Escapade. This is actually a pretty nice spot, with well-separated, wooded sites equipped with 30-amp electric service -- handy, since we are still running at least one air conditioner pretty much around the clock.

We arrived here yesterday, and staked out a spot that the volunteer at the gate had told us was available for our entire stay. However, when we hoofed it back to the gate to pay, his computer would not let him book us into the site for more than one night. Apparently, the reservations system run by a contractor (in Canada, I'm told) has a few quirks. They were able to fix the problem today and we are good through Sunday.

After driving back through Cairo yesterday morning, we discovered that our planned route of US-51 would put us on the interstate, so we elected instead to continue up the Great River Road, Illinois 3, until we had to jog over to De Soto on IL-149 to pick up our waiting mail. We then continued on 149 to 37 into Benton to approach the lake from the east. The more direct route from the west comes in over the dam, and there is a ten-ton weight limit on the spillway bridge.

Tomorrow is the big pot-luck dinner.

Critters aplenty

Our campsite here along the Mississippi River is literally crawling with creatures. We have seen at least 5 large toads hopping across our grass, and one small green tree frog. The cicadas are huge and rest on the concrete parking pads. Crickets scurry everywhere. All are safe from Opal because her cone slows her down.

Yesterday at Lake Merrisach, I got up early to walk around the campground while it was still cool. I saw many Great Blue Herons, which were flying low across the water and honking their calls to each other. The park has a pond designated for "Kiddie Fishing Only," and I spent about 45 minutes sitting on the banks. I could see many small fish near the water's edge, and at one point something emerged from the muddy bank nearly at my feet, stirred up the water, and disappeared. I assume it had fish for breakfast. A young female Cardinal approached me saucily and we stared at each other for a good 5 minutes before I moved and startled her.

Across the little pond, in a grove of oak trees, I kept hearing an unfamiliar bird call, a sort of high hoarse chirping, and what was obviously woodpecker tapping. I walked across the foot bridge and on my way to the grove, saw a beaver on the water's edge. It didn't see me immediately, so I was able to watch this shy beastie for almost a minute. Then, bad Indian that I am, I stepped on a twig and the beaver dove out of sight.

There were about 5 woodpeckers in the grove and as they flew from tree to tree I was able to see that they were Red Headed Woodpeckers. Gorgeous! When I got back to the bus and looked in my Sibley's Guide to Eastern Birds, I learned that they were making the hoarse cries, as well. I also saw Blue Jays and Robins in the oak grove, and one Great Egret feeding in the pond, making short work of the little fish.

Arkansas Post Canal

Our stealth camping experience last night was peaceful and uneventful. As we suspected, the nearly-defunct shopping plaza attracted no attention. Even though the plaza was clearly built for retail shopping, only one retail store remains, a discount clothier. The few other occupants were all closed today -- a mortgage lender, the Louisiana State Lottery field office, and the Transportation Security Administration (really -- I guess they have to have an office someplace). You can tell a shopping center is on the skids when government agencies, notorious for low-rent accommodations, start moving in.

We had another first last night -- running one air conditioner overnight on batteries alone. We ran the genny, with all three roof airs, from when we returned from Olive Garden until we went to bed. At that point, the batteries were mostly charged, and we opened the windows and turned the FanTastics on. Even though the outside temperature had dropped into the 70's, the latent heat in the coach along with the outside humidity were just too much for me to be able to sleep comfortably, so I turned the bedroom air conditioner on medium. The wall thermostat night-time setting cycled it on and off, and I would estimate it ran about 50% duty from 2ish until 9ish when I got up and started the genny back up. In that period it drew about 200 or so amp-hours, about one half of our usable capacity, out of the batteries.

The deficit was easily replaced in the three hours of genny run time this morning, which we needed in any case to run all of the air conditioners as the day heated up. I am quite pleased with the system's performance.

Today we continued north on US-165 into Arkansas, and stopped in at the Arkansas Post National Memorial, on the Arkansas River just off our route. This is one of those gems that we did not even know existed, yet it was a very informative stop. I can not, in the space of this blog, do justice to the multifaceted history of this trading post. (The river itself moved away from the post years ago.)

Upon leaving the memorial, we continued north on 165, heading for AR-1 across the White River. It being the end of the day, we decided to find a nice place to stop, and our guides directed us here, to the US Army Corps of Engineers campground on Lake Merrisach (map).

Ironically, we are just seven miles due east of the Arkansas Post, however it was a drive of some 30+ miles by road. Tomorrow we will back-track half that distance to re-join our planned route.

This facility exists because the Corps built a channel, dam, and lock to connect the Arkansas river to the White River, a shortcut to the Mississippi. The canal cuts through the bayou that was formerly the bend of the Arkansas along which the post had been constructed. Just another skirmish in the Army's unending war with the forces of nature.

This morning we received some disappointing news. Due to the massive Katrina relief, instructors are in short supply, and more than half of our scheduled Red Cross training in Du Quoin has been canceled. Consequently, there will be no training in advance of the rally, and only four days worth afterwards. Our target date of 9/22 to arrive in Du Quoin has thus evaporated, even though we are already en route and just three days away. The good news is that, we are told, the training that is still being made available will qualify us for immediate deployment on the ongoing relief efforts.

Since there is not really much else we can do with the three extra days, we are going to continue with our present course and speed, and we will try to join up with a pre-rally for the "Full-timing class of 2005," a group with which we are also involved. We are already scheduled to be at the class of '05 rally in Quartzsite in January, and had expected to miss out on this pre-rally due to our now-canceled training commitment.

I will close today's post with a comment on the photo Louise has already posted of our site here. It's a great shot, but it looks for all the world like I am putting money in the parking meter! It's actually the 30-amp electrical pedestal -- one of the things that attracted us to this site, since we are still running air conditioners 24 hours a day.

Big update today, since I have not posted since Tuesday morning.

Which brings me to my first point: frequency of updates. I have to mention here that, actually, I have surprised myself with how frequently I have been posting updates here. Part of my motivation is that I want to write things down while they are still fresh in my mind, and all the positive feedback we have gotten on the blog has reinforced the behavior. Also, we are using the blog ourselves as a sort of tracking mechanism, where we can go back to the appropriate blog entry and click on the "map" link to remember where we were on any given date (you would be surprised how jumbled-up it all gets in one's mind after a month or so, especially when changing locale on a daily basis). That means keeping current with the map links, and those need to be either posted or otherwise saved in near-real-time or I have no way to retrieve them.

All that being said, I want to remind all our readers that my original goal for this blog was to post perhaps every week or so, or maybe just when we changed venue in some significant way. At the outset, neither of us thought we would feel motivated to chronicle our journey on anything close to a daily basis. I bring this up because we have gotten some feedback of the "where are you and why haven't you posted" kind lately. And, of course, while now is not really one of those times, I am anticipating some days when we just will not feel like being found, or informing the entire world of our travails. So it's best to get this out on the table now: we enjoy keeping everyone informed, and we are pleased so many people are following along, but please, folks, relax and just enjoy it as it comes -- if it starts to feel like a burden to post here on some kind of deadline, I'm certain that I will lose interest in doing it at all.

There. I said it, and I feel better already.

Moving on, and in keeping with my trend here thus far, let me pick up where I left off Tuesday morning. You may recall that we spent Monday night at Mineral Wells State Park, which was one of our nicest stops in recent memory. Tuesday brought us all the way to Fort Worth, and our first order of business was to check out the small commercial RV park we had booked for Wednesday, since our experience with urban locations leads us to be cautious. The park was small but well kept, and the neighborhood appeared to be fine. While there are few amenities, the sites have 50 amp service and several are large and unobstructed. We decided it would be fine for our purposes, but no need to check in a full day earlier than necessary.

We opted instead to check out the Arlington Elks lodge, since the directory said it had a pool. Unfortunately, the one location where the lodge had power was inaccessible to us, and we had to fall back to plan B. That brought us to Grapevine Lake and the Silver Lake Park (map). Louise posted a photo of our site there on Tuesday. The folks at the gate took one look at Odyssey and put us in the group pavilion site, since it was unoccupied. We could easily have fit in one of the regular sites, but I didn't argue because (a) the group pavilion was quiet and isolated on its own little peninsula and (b) it had not one but four 30-amp pedestals, thus I was able to use my "cheater" cord to double up the power so we could run two A/C's and still get hot water.

Grapevine lake is a Corps of Engineers project, and the CoE built this campground along with several others around the lake. At some point, this one was turned over to operation by the city of Grapevine, which is doing a great job with it.

We even swam in the lake, which was quite warm, though a bit muddy on the bottom. At some point, I noticed that the pilings for the marina across our little arm of the lake rose quite a bit higher than our camp site, which I thought was odd. Turns out, a good bit of the campground, power outlets and all, is inundated when the lake is full. Have a look at this Google aerial view. That thing that looks like a roof right in the center of the photo is our camp site, and specifically it is the roof of the pavilion ramada.

Wednesday morning we drove over to Buddy Gregg Motorhomes to see if we could get an appraisal on Odyssey for our insurance. Pretty much the entire sales staff came out to see it, but no one would commit to a reasonable appraisal on it. Harumph. Interesting to note, though, that even surrounded by dozens of brand new, million-dollar-plus bus conversions, Odyssey attracted attention from most of the staff and all of the customers on the lot. Our experience at Buddy Gregg is just another chapter in the ongoing insurance saga -- one of the serious shortcomings of owning a one-of-a-kind vehicle.

We finally checked in to the Fort Worth Midtown RV Park (map) Wednesday afternoon, and settled in for our conference.

We are attending the 2005 General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association, just a few blocks from here at the Fort Worth Convention Center. This is essentially the annual meeting of the church, with delegates from all the congregations nationwide. We have been to one General Assembly previously, when Louise was a delegate for our congregation in Palo Alto, California. Now that we live full time on the road, we no longer belong to a bricks-and-mortar congregation (and isn't that such an internet-era expression?) and instead belong to the Church of the Larger Fellowship (CLF), which is a kind of cyber-congregation (even though it pre-dates that concept). CLF really exists to serve those UU's who are isolated from a regular congregation, usually by distance, and most have fixed residences. It is a perfect fit for us, of course, though we are still a bit unusual even by CLF standards.

I mention all of this because Louise is once again a delegate to the assembly, and, as an official representative of CLF, is journaling her conference activities. This also means that she has to attend all the plenary sessions at oh-dark-early or whenever (she's at one now, even as I type), whereas I get to sleep in, and just go to the sessions that I find interesting. And the cocktail parties, of course. Her other blog is the one getting all of the update attention while we are here, and that will continue until the conference is over Monday night.

As it stands right now, we are planning on packing up and heading out sometime on Tuesday. We will have just about a week to make it to Rickreall, Oregon for Bus'n'USA, so we will be taking the more-or-less most direct route, which will take us into the Texas panhandle and through Amarillo.

I will end this post with another problem-du-jour Odyssey anecdote. The last thing we did at Mineral Wells was dump our tanks, in case we ended up spending a week in Fort Worth in some parking lot. I pulled up to the dump station and opened the large pantograph bay door enclosing the tanks, and the door came right off in my hand. Sort of. Actually, one side of the pantograph hinge was intact, and the other side disengaged, and the door fell off to the point where the wiring for the turn signal and marker light, which just happen to be mounted to the door, caught most of the weight on that side. Of course, I couldn't let go of the door or the wires would snap and the weight of the door would pretzel the other side of the pantograph. So I screamed. It took several screams before Louise understood I was in trouble and came out to help, and between the two of us we managed to get the door precariously balanced back in the pantograph. We found a way to temporarily secure the whole mess with a C-clamp.

It turns out that the nylon socket for the ball-and-socket joint on the end of the pantograph simply disintegrated from age. Likely the other three similar items are close to doing the same. Wednesday morning I called Infinity Coach to see if, perhaps, they still had the other two pantographs, which had been removed from what are now the drop-down ramp doors for the motorcycle bay. Thursday morning they called to say they had found the pantographs, all of which have similarly deteriorated nylon inserts, and they overnighted the ball-and-socket ends to us. Sometime before we leave here I will replace the broken end with one of the spares, and Infinity will replace the whole lot of them with new items when we are there next month.

Our site on Silver Lake. Going swimming now!