We get questions...

We are at a rest area on I-40 east of Flagstaff, Arizona (map). We are actually just north of the Barringer Meteor Crater, a major feature of the landscape in these parts. This rest area has, in addition to normal truck and car parking areas, a truck overflow lot that is a bit more distant from the freeway, as well as darker, and we should have a relatively quiet night here. In accordance with Arizona policy, we are not camping (prohibited), but "resting" overnight in our vehicle (permitted).

We pulled in just at sunset, and the temperature was pleasantly in the 70's, in stark contrast to last night's stop. A lightning storm in the distance provided us with the evening's entertainment -- quite spectacular.

Before I delve in to the problem du jour, we get lots of questions over here at Our Odyssey, and lately they have concerned the engine rebuild and what we learned.

First off, let me say that Virgil and his team at PEDCO were wonderful, as they were on our first visit. We had the run of the shop for the week, were able to borrow a vehicle as needed in the evenings to go out to dinner, or shopping, or whatever, had ample electric power (although I had to make another of my famous adaptors, this time from 208-volt 30-amp three-phase, to provide us with two legs of 30-amp by 120-volt single phase), and were always treated courteously by all the technicians. We were also very fortunate to have the same technicians that worked on us last time, so things happened more smoothly and quickly without the weird-bus learning curve to climb.

We did find dirt in the engine, and we knew from the last oil analysis that it was also in the oil. So that meant everything had to be replaced, from the liners and pistons, to the heads, to the turbocharger. We also replaced the main bearings as a matter of course, and we sent the injectors out to be tested, since they only had 40,000 miles on them (and there was no dirt in the fuel, as far as we can tell). Four of the injectors were "slobbering" a little, and PEDCO successfully negotiated on our behalf for the injector shop to replace them at no charge.

The key question, of course, was how did the dirt get into the engine? I fully expected to find a giant gap in the air induction system, either a hole worn into part of the intake, or a separation between intake components. But we found no such problem.

Fortunately, I had kept the old air filter that I replaced in Lake Tahoe, and we determined that therein lay the problem, and it is one for which I must take the full responsibility. The filter was sold to me by Danny Allison at one of the bus or FMCA shows, and I believe this is a filter that he was having custom made for the purpose. It is an oiled cotton type of filter, as opposed to pleated paper media. There appeared to be two problems with it: First, the neoprene (I think) gasket at the bottom of the cartridge was not thick enough, and it appears that the gasket did not properly seal against the back of the housing. I suspect that this issue alone was responsible for the lion's share of the dirt.

Secondly, it also appears that there was not enough oil impregnated in the cotton media, and this type of filter simply will not work without the oil. (The filter came to me pre-oiled from the factory.)

To be fair to myself, with the type of filter housing I have, which accepts a filter where the lid of the housing is an integral part of the filter, the fact that the filter gasket was not making contact was not obvious, and not really easy to detect. There is also a gasket around the lid end, so pressing the filter into the housing feels like you are compressing a gasket no matter what. In hindsight, a smear of grease around the bottom gasket would have informed me whether or not it was sealing (and would have helped trap anything trying to get past the seal anyway). And there was plenty of dye indicator on the media when I installed the filter as well as when I inspected it at the usual interval. By the time I found myself wondering why the restriction gauge was never moving, there was probably already a fatal dose of dirt in the engine. (Two cups of dirt is the lifespan of a big diesel -- whether over 250,000 miles or 2,500 miles.)

At that same show, Danny sold me an Aero-Turbine muffler as well, which ended up not fitting (it was 5" and my exhaust is 6"), but he also gave me a polo shirt. Henceforth, said polo shirt will be referred to as the $13,000 shirt -- that would cover the $12,600 and change for the in-frame, plus the $300 or so for the damn filter (which we promptly threw away after implicating it in this fiasco), and the re-stocking fee he charged me on the muffler.

Today's problem: our overheating issue is, apparently, still with us. Yesterday we noticed the needle climbing at several points along the various grades, notably Cajon Pass. Given the extremely high outside temperatures, and the fact that the access panel between the radiator intake and the engine seemed a bit loose, we were not quite ready to push the panic button.

Today, however, on the 12-mile, 6% grade between Laughlin and Kingman, it became clear that something is still very, very wrong. Before the in-frame, I had been thinking that the overheating issue was related to the low power and black smoke. The rebuild cured those, but the heat is still with us. Now, I'm hoping that this is a completely separate but coincidental problem, but part of me is worried that there is still some sort of issue with one of the cylinders -- after all, we found one cylinder with seized rings during the tear-down. But with all new liners, pistons, valves, and heads, it's hard to imagine what sort of cylinder problem could still be with us.

At this point, I am hoping it is something simple, like a bad impeller in the water pump. Of course, it's too bad we did not think to look at that while all the coolant was out of the engine, and we were in a shop surrounded by hundreds of water pumps. Monday morning we will try to find a Detroit shop that can look at the water pump for us, and maybe the thermostats. I have my fingers crossed that it is not a plugged radiator, but, knowing what other stupid things the previous owners did to this coach, it would not surprise me in the least. (Radiators don't plug at 100K unless you've filled them with tap water, or stop-leak.)

Also on Monday, we will try to find a replacement for the fuel pressure starter safety. Feedback from the bus boards suggests it is easily replaced with a 10PSI pressure switch from NAPA. In the meantime, we are enjoying the cool air at these higher elevations.

Photo by alexanderdrachmann

Back on the road

We are at the Riverside Casino RV Park in Laughlin, Nevada (map). Boondocking options abound in Laughlin, but it was still 105° when we pulled in at 8pm last night, and we opted for 50amps of power to run our air conditioning, which we needed all night. Since we were here, we had a nice dinner in the Prime Rib Room at the casino, which overlooks the Colorado and serves delicious prime rib (or a choice of three other entrées) in a prix-fixe format ($14), including all-you-can-eat salad bar and side items à la casino buffet style (although the resort also has a buffet restaurant elsewhere on the property).

It was not really our intention to bail all the way out of California last night, but we did want to get on the road, and our selected route took us onto I-40 heading east. Well, once over the Cajon Pass the temperatures soared well into the 100's, and Barstow is the last city with any sort of services on 40 until Needles. We didn't want to stop in Barstow in the heat of the afternoon, so we pressed on, and realized that we would have to make at least Needles before we stopped. Needles to Kingman is shorter through Laughlin than on 40 anyway, and more interesting besides, so we decided to press on here for better park rates and more dining options. Now that we're here, though, it feels good to be out of California, where we lived for 20 years, and back on the road.

PEDCO had our engine mostly back together by Thursday afternoon, but we interrupted them briefly to drop the tranny pan and have a look at the magnet and the valve body. We've had a few rough shifts, and it's been seeping fluid ever since we got it. They did find a leaky four-way switch, which they replaced, but there was no metal in the pan, the fluid looked good, and the valve body was perfect. It did cost me eight gallons of TranSynd, though, to refill. This is our second batch of TranSynd, meaning we can now go to the Allison extended drain interval schedule, so this should be our last fluid change ever.

Friday morning they had it all together and fired it up, and we went on a short road test. All was well, so we returned to the shop, checked for leaks, and then loaded up the bikes to head out. When I went to start it, it had trouble cranking, and that turned out to be a fuel pressure switch that, I think, cuts out the starter once fuel pressure comes up. There were no replacements anywhere in LA, so we bypassed the switch for the time being, and headed off to the paint shop.

Oh, did I forget to mention the paint shop? Someone left an engine access panel leaning up against the side of the coach, which by itself was enough to leave some dings, but, worse, it apparently was leaning there when they lowered the bus back down off the lifts, leaving a deep gouge several inches long. Fortunately, almost all the damage was confined to the battery bay door, and PEDCO sent us over to a truck painter in Pico Rivera who had the door touched up in just a couple hours.

During that time we had to be out of the shop, so we had lunch at a burger joint across the street, then wandered in to the Pico Rivera Shopping Mart, and we were instantly teleported to the heart of Mexico -- the place was completely indistinguishable from the mercado which one will find in any Mexican city, right in el centro (downtown). We wandered back to the paint shop to find them finished, and we were on the road by 2:30, just a tad ahead of the traffic.

In a few minutes we will pull up stakes, cross the Colorado and head east to Kingman, where we will take on fuel.

Cylinder-less in LA

We're at PEDCO in Santa Fe Springs. We drove here Sunday night, thinking we'd just spend the night in the driveway, but I had forgotten that they run a heavy chain across the driveway when they are closed. So we spent the night parked on the side street just north of the building (map), just a few dozen yards from fellow bus-nut Nick in his RTS. On our way here we passed the oldest operating McDonald's, in Downey, complete with original-style golden arches.

They were ready for us first thing Monday morning, and we pulled in to the shop. Last time we were here, they did all the work with us out in the yard, and I think Virgil had intended to do the same this time, but the shop foreman stuck us in one of the bays. So we are off-line, and they've had to give us a key to the shop so we can get out to go to dinner and walk the dog. At least the weather here is gorgeous right now -- the last time we were here it was miserably hot.

Once we were in the shop, I set to work inside getting the hatch over the turbo off. This involves removing part of the wardrobe that comprises most of the back wall of the bedroom, which, fortunately, was designed for easy (but not necessarily quick) disassembly for exactly this reason. Then the carpet, which is upholstered in and stapled down, needs to come off over the hatch area. Lastly, the hatch needs to be unscrewed and pried up. Well, the last time we did this, which was when we were here two years ago for the last in-frame, we noticed that quite a bit of soot had seeped in around the hatch, and was trapped (fortunately) in the carpet liner. Wanting to avoid continuing this problem, I sealed the hatch down with 3M Fire Barrier Sealant FD 150+.

This is a product that is used by the construction industry to seal wood-to-wood and wood-to-drywall joints in fire-rated walls and ceilings, to curtail smoke and flame spread. Since we were trying to achieve essentially the same result, and since part of the hatch closure was wood-to-wood (the center of the hatch is covered with sheet aluminum, and sits in a steel frame, but the edges are plywood and sit against more plywood subflooring), I reasoned that this product was the best choice. (As a side note, the product is sky blue, making it easy to tell that you haven't missed any spots.)

I am very happy to report that the product performed very well over the last two years, with no penetration of any fumes or soot into the bedroom. However, even though the product is not an adhesive, per se, the liberal amount of sealant made it very difficult to remove the hatch. The hatch was a tight fit to begin with, and required some prying to remove last time, but this time the plywood groaned and threatened to break as I pried on the corner. I ultimately had to work the sharp, thin pry bar around as much of the seam as I could, tapping it with a hammer, in order to cut through the sealant and break enough of the seal to pry the hatch up without breaking it. Even then, I could only access one and a half of the four sides of the hatch with the pry.

All told, removing this one hatch took nearly an hour. Once I had it up, I was prepared to find a disconnected intake duct, or a hole in it, en route to the turbo. However, the duct appeared to be completely intact. In this same time, the PEDCO guys already had the coolant out of the engine and were ready to drop the pan. With the intact air induction, though, I was having second thoughts about what might be wrong. So they pulled the airbox covers off to double-check, and, sure enough, there is dirt in the engine. So now we are all scratching our heads about how it's getting in there. One possibility: the air filter cartridges are not making a good seal against the back of the housing. Once they get everything back together, they'll slap some grease on the back of the housing to see if the filter cartridge displaces it when it is tightened down.

By the end of the day they had all eight cylinders out. One of the cylinders also had a seized ring, which also suggests we ran on low oil pressure at some point. I have asked them to calibrate the dipstick when we are all done, because, as it stands, we are never sure if we have the right amount of oil in the pan. So far the good news is that the main bearings look fine, so even though there is dirt in the oil, it has not done that much damage. I'll probably end up replacing the bearings anyway, and we're waiting on pressure testing to see if the heads will need to be rebuilt. I am betting they will, as the valve guides really don't like dirt.

Since the tear-down was complete in only one day (much quicker than last time -- they put the same two guys on it, and they'd already seen our setup), I am hopeful that we will be done by the end of the week. But I certainly don't want to leave here until we have answered the question of how this dirt is getting in -- two in-frames in two years is more than enough for me.

Sunday evening we had a visit from readers and fellow bus nuts Tom and Donna, who were very kind to buy us dinner. And yesterday I got a call from someone who is looking at Neoplans, and he's talking about coming down for a visit as well, even though it's a long trek from were he is -- near Edwards AFB up in the Mojave desert.

Mariachi central

We are at the Elks lodge in Downey, California (map).

Yesterday we left Lost Wages in the cool (ha! -- it was already in the mid-90's) of the morning, in order to climb the big hill to Mountain Pass, CA under somewhat less extreme conditions. We still had to take the hill at 40, with the tranny in 3rd-gear-hold to keep the fan speed up. At Halloran summit we stopped to eat our breakfast, put the dish up and get our email, etc., knowing it was mostly downhill from there.

I expected to stop last night at Cajon Pass, but it was still in the mid-90s there when we arrived, and we did not want to sit in a gravel lot running the generator for several hours to keep cool. (As it was, we ran one A/C literally all night in Vegas, taking our batteries down 445 amp-hours by the time we started the genny in the morning.) So we pressed onward, checking out the Elks lodge in Ontario, which advertised 30-amp power. The place looked like a prison, though, so we decided to come the whole way to Downey, which is just a stone's throw from Santa Fe Springs and Pedco.

OK, I'll admit it: a big part of that decision had to do with the fact that there is an Olive Garden literally right across the street here, and we had a nice dinner there last night. Behind that is the Stonewood mall, and we did some window-shopping this morning after a nice breakfast at Cafe-n-Stuff, which shares a parking lot with the Elks lodge.

Speaking of parking lots, that's not where we are parked. The 30-amp RV hookups are on the back lawn, which gave us some pause (though our 24-ton weight barely made a dent when we backed in), behind a locked gate. It's very nice here, but it is also right next to the separate building and patio that the lodge rents our for functions. Last night we had a Quinceañera party right outside our rig which ran until midnight, complete with Mariachis. The imported security guys taped off the area where we were parked with Caution tape to keep the revelers at arm's length -- both the intoxicated adults and the merely curious children. It was actually pretty tame, as these parties can go, and the music was OK, so we didn't mind too much.

We've arranged to remain here until the afternoon, when we will head over to Pedco to be ready first thing in the morning. One of our readers, who also hangs on the bus boards, is coming over there to meet us for dinner.

Vega$ (again)

We are parked at our secret boondocking location behind Bally's casino, on the Las Vegas strip (map). I say secret, but, of course, we've blogged about it before, and I've posted a map link both times. But, generally, it is little-known, and we like it that way.

Once again we wandered over to the Flamingo for dinner, part of the Harrah's empire here that also includes Bally's and Paris Las Vegas (in whose shared parking area we are parked), Harrah's, Ceasar's Palace, and the Rio across the freeway. I had a hankering to try Margaritaville, since it was right next door, and, in spite of wandering through or past half a dozen of them in such exotic locales as Jamaica, Mexico, and Key West, I've never sampled the food. Besides, I'm a big-time parrot-head. Alas, there was an hour wait for a table, so we instead wandered down to Hamada, the Japanese restaurant in the same hotel, where we had a nice Teppanyaki-style dinner (think "Benihana").

We are here because we ultimately decided to have the engine work done at Pedco, in Santa Fe Springs (near LA). Mostly this was because we know them and like them, but we also factored into the decision the fact that continuing east until we hit, for example, Stewart & Stevenson in Colorado would mean first climbing over the Rockies, and I'm not sure we can even make it in our current condition. It's more downhill than up from Zion to LA, and that seemed a safer choice.

Speaking of which, at times like these I am thankful for the set of mapping tools that I am using, even though I spend a fair amount of time cursing those same tools. I use DeLorme's Street Atlas 2005 to work out my routes -- although I have to do a good amount of double-checking with the AAA map, or else DeLorme will put me on a dirt road, or completely miss a good state highway. But I also have DeLorme's Topo USA 6, which has the entire country in topographic relief. This program is good for figuring back-country routes, but lousy for street work, because it doesn't know where the nearest Wal-Marts, or Olive Gardens, or even most campgrounds are, and its highway information is lacking. But Topo USA will open routes already made with Street Atlas, and then one can "profile" that route in elevation. This gives you an excellent idea how much grade you will be facing, and exactly where it is. Sliding the cursor over the elevation profile reveals the exact location on the map where that part of the profile occurs. Here is a printout of the elevation profile from Zion National Park to Pedco's facility on Norwalk Blvd., so you can get an idea:



Tomorrow morning we will be heading uphill from here, to a summit between here and Baker, CA -- it's the large spike almost in the middle of this chart. We've been having a great deal of trouble with grades, including overheating, so we are going to try to get an early start, and make the summit before the heat of the day. By the time we hit the last peak, near the right of the chart, we will be well out of the Mojave and entering the LA basin, where temperatures should be quite a bit more moderate.

Eek!

At 4am this morning, I heard the cats skittering around the bus. They were chasing what I assumed to be their usual prey, a bug. I got up to use the bathroom in the pitch dark, and George jetted out of the room. As I finished up, I heard a scrabbling sound right next to me and thought, "That's a huge bug!" Feeling very vulnerable, I got up to get my robe.

Apparently Angel was still in the throne room, and she decided to jump up on the toilet to better stalk her prey. Unfortunately, in my haste, I did not close the lid or flush. Splash! Angel ended up in the dirty toilet. Ewww! I'm sure she was much more grossed out than I was, not to mention embarrassed.

So I pulled out the mop and awakened Sean and Opal. Heck, when something disgusting happens, the whole family needs to be involved in the clean up, right? I mopped Angel's exit path to the safety of the litter box bay back to the bathroom. As I reached around the back of the toilet, there sat a trembling, terrified mouse. No wonder it was a festival of cat excitement tonight!

Neither one of us wanted to try to catch the mouse for fear of being bitten or driving it into hiding in a cabinet. We were debating which killer predator pet to send in to dispatch it when the mouse climbed straight up the Sunbrella fabric covered wall. It stopped a foot below the window. I slid the screen open, poked Mr. Mouse gently with the mop, and he scrambled to the window sill.

He paused momentarily to contemplate the 10-foot leap to freedom, then disappeared into the night. A better choice than staying in the bus with two cats, a dog, and two mop-wielding humans. This morning, he was not anywhere to be found, so I hope he survived the fall and ran back to his mousy life.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

The Good

We had another lovely day here in Zion National Park. This morning we took the shuttle up to "The Grotto," site of the original (circa 1909) visitor center (which now appears to be a staff residence), and had a picnic lunch. We then hopped back on the shuttle to "Weeping Rock," where a short but strenuous half-mile trail led us to a spot where water is cascading out of the rock, as seepage through the porous Navajo sandstone hits the impervious shale layer and seeks an exit.

In the afternoon, we heard a ranger talk at the museum on how the area and its landmarks were named (blame the Mormon settlers) and a short movie on Zion and its geology and development. After arriving back in camp, we headed down to the "swimmin' hole," a spot in the river where it is chest deep between two rapids, and had a refreshing swim -- nice to cool off in the 93+ heat. The sign in the visitor center and all the bus drivers related the water temperature as 58°, but it felt closer to 70° or so down at the campground. Maybe they were talking about the water up in the narrows.

After our swim we got back on the shuttle and headed up to Zion Lodge, where we had an excellent dinner out on the patio. We were fortunate to get an outside table, where we dined surrounded by the immense vermilion cliffs of the valley -- quite a dining room.

The Bad

Just before our swim I got a call from W. W. Williams regarding the oil sample we had drawn. I really expected them to get this back to us yesterday, but it did not come in until today. The terrible news: we have high silicon content and high wear metals. This, coupled with the symptoms we've been having, is entirely consistent with dirt ingestion. (Read the report here.) We ought to know -- we've been here before.

The fact that our filters have been intact, but with almost zero reading on the restriction gauge, tells me that the intake plumbing has come apart someplace where we can't see it. Again, this has happened before, so, however unlikely, we can't discount it.

I immediately placed calls to Virgil Cooley at Pedco, who in-framed our engine the last time this happened, and to Stewart & Stevenson in Pueblo, a company I've done business with and trust, in a location that happens to be on our planned route east. Both can take us next week, and I know Virgil will do his best to keep the costs down. S&S will be faxing me an estimate in the morning. Their shop rates are within $2.50 of each other, so that's not really a factor.

The Ugly

What all this means is that, if we go with S & S, we have to cross our fingers that Odyssey will make it over the Rocky Mountains in our current low-compression mode. If we push her too hard, we could end up smoking the bearings or seizing a piston -- not good. If we go with Pedco, we need to make a U-turn here at Zion, and head 430 miles in the exact opposite direction, to the LA area. I hate retracing my steps, and, worse, it puts us that much further from the sweet spot for any Red Cross deployment. Oh, and, in either case, we will have to delay our deployment availability until this is fixed.

We'll make a decision in the morning, before we break camp at 11:00. At the moment, we are leaning towards Pedco, because they did a great job last time, were friendly, and treated us really well while we were in the shop. Also, it's mostly downhill from here, whereas we'll need to make another 6,000' climb over the Rockies if we go east.

O Zion Haste

We are at the South Campground in Zion National Park (map).

After an hour or so on I-15, cutting through a small corner of Arizona and past Saint George, Utah, we finally turned off the freeway onto Utah 9, thus resuming our "normal" life once again. The desert is beautiful to us, and we enjoyed even the remote corner of Arizona -- but the scenery became progressively more stunning as we approached the park. I last visited here nearly 30 years ago, in the days before park service shuttles and hordes of tourists from all over the world, and it is even more beautiful than I remembered.

We arrived fairly early in the afternoon, which was a good thing, as the more developed (i.e. electric hookups) Watchman Campground was already full, and the unreservable South Campground was filling fast, with a large percentage of the RV's here being rental units. The temperature was in the low 90's, and we ended up running one air conditioner on the batteries for a couple of hours. Allowable generator hours here are only 8-10 in the morning, and again from 6-8 in the evening. By 6pm, it had already cooled off enough to do without the A/C, and we decided the batteries were not down far enough to recharge yet. These new batteries have been performing quite well -- better than the old Xantrex ones ever did. We did run the genny from 8-10 this morning to put some charge on, as we've decided to stay another day.

In the cool of the evening, we rode the park shuttle all the way to the end of the canyon and back, stopping briefly at the north end to walk the Riverside Walk along the Virgin River where it emerges from the narrows. The river, which carved this canyon and continues to do so by an inch each year, is also only a few hundred feet from our camp site, and we may take a dip in its frigid and muddy waters later, in the heat of the day. We also stopped off at the Zion Lodge, and made dinner reservations for tonight.

Our annual park pass (a must-have for full timers, and a great value at $80) waived the $25 park admission fee. Camping is $16 per night, or $18 with electricity (a real bargain at only $2 extra, but sold out when we arrived). We also paid a $15 oversize vehicle fee, which will allow us through the 75-year-old tunnel east of here on Utah 9 as we leave the park tomorrow. We will have to drive down the center of the tunnel, straddling the line, and the park service will hold traffic in the opposite direction to allow us through. During the summer months, they perform this ritual several times a day in both directions to accommodate the conga line of RV's -- even modest ones are considered oversize for the ancient tunnel, and commercial traffic is prohibited outright.

Today we will take the shuttle up canyon again, this time getting off at some of the more interesting stops. We'll likely spend the hottest part of the day lounging by the river, or viewing the air-conditioned park film, before taking the shuttle back up to the lodge for dinner. Tomorrow morning we will leave the park through the aforementioned tunnel and the town of Mount Carmel on Utah 9, then pick up US89.

Not quite out of Nevada

We are in Mesquite, Nevada, near the Arizona border, at the Oasis Casino Resort RV Park (map).

Today we got an early start out of Sam's Town, at 7:45am (trust me, that's really early for us). That's because W. W. Williams, the Detroit Diesel shop in North Las Vegas (map), told us to be there at 8:00. I'm not sure why, because we sat in their lot until past noon before they were able to get one (of a total of two) of their two-stroke qualified technicians to come look at Odyssey.

This is par for the course for these kinds of shops, but it still irks me. If they had their scheduling act together, they could have set the appointment for, say, 11am, or even 1pm, and we could have (1) gotten up at a more reasonable hour, (2) had a more relaxing breakfast (like maybe the $3.99 steak and eggs at Sam's), and (3) had the benefit of the 50-amp electrical service we paid for at Sam's to keep us cool all morning. (As it happened, we sweated for a few hours, and ran the genny for a few hours while we were at Williams.)

In any case, Hank the two-stroke guy turned out to be really good. In fact, while I was standing around, the maintenance supervisor for Clark County Fire, there to pick up an apparatus, came over to chat with me about Odyssey, and he allowed that we were lucky to get Hank. He ought to know, because fire apparatus quite commonly had the same engine we do (and were among the last vehicles to move to the four-strokes).

Hank could find no obvious problem with our engine, other than a dirty radiator. I'm a bit embarrassed that I did not notice this myself, and that gaff cost me a few coins while Williams pressure-washed the radiator at their shop rate -- something I could have done for free. While the dirty radiator may have accounted for some of the temperature problems, it does not fully explain the excess smoke or the low power, so Hank spent some time disabling injectors one at a time to see if the smoke changed. It did not, and Hank's sense was that all eight cylinders were running quite smoothly.

I asked him several questions based on suggestions I received on the internet, and he pretty much discounted each of them. Specifically, the boost readings seem to rule out a turbo problem, and there are not enough other symptoms for it to be the bypass valve. I did have him pull an oil sample, though, and we should have the analysis back in a day or two -- I'm still worried about possible dirt ingestion.

With no other diagnostics to run, he declared us good to go, and we escaped for less than $300. Subjectively, the smoke and power problems are still with us, but I have more confidence to continue driving the coach now, and I am going to hold off on doing anything further (unless so indicated by the oil analysis) until we burn through the rest of this tank of fuel, which is suspect, and put a fresh load in, probably someplace in Colorado.

It was past four when we finally rolled out of the shop, and I was already beat from getting up early and then standing around in the heat, so we made it a short-mileage day. I had hoped to be in Utah, but we opted to stop here, in a "familiar" place.

We stopped here in Mesquite way back in 2000, at this very property, on the third day of a two-week, 4,000-mile motorcycle trek across the country. I have to say, we hardly recognize the town today -- there are new housing developments everywhere, and the four casinos in town have expanded quite a bit.

We thought we might just boondock at one of the two casinos that allow it, but it was still nearly 100° when we rolled into town, and so we opted for the $17 full-hookup option here at the Oasis. That gets us in to the hotel's spiffy pool complex, though, and we had a nice meal at the $10 prime rib buffet.

Photo by Nevada Tumbleweed.

Vegas in July

We are at Sam's Town RV Park, out on Boulder Highway southeast of the Vegas Strip (map).

We're here because our friend was at St. Rose Hospital in Henderson, and this is actually the closest RV park of any repute that we could find. It turns out to be an unexpectedly nice stop.

We traveled to the hospital today on public transit. $2.50 apiece bought us day passes (which are still good until tomorrow morning), and it took us just over an hour each way to go the 12 miles or so to the hospital. We had a nice, if brief, visit with her, and had lunch with her husband. Last night he met us over here at Sam's, and we went inside for the buffet, which, at $10 apiece (with players' club card), including a glass of wine, was a bargain, and actually quite good.

Knowing how long transit was going to take us, we had arranged for a 3:00 checkout today, from the park's standard of noon. However, we're also trying to get Odyssey over to the Detroit dealer, and the earliest they could get us in was tomorrow morning at 8:00. Since it's still a million degrees here, and we need full-time air conditioning, we elected to just extend our stay by a day. At $32 per night (with Good Sam discount), it's a bit pricey (they insisted we take a premium 50-amp pull through space, due to our length), but we're probably using half that much in electricity alone, and we'd easily spend more than that amount just running the generator.

The park here also has a nice pool and hot tub area, of which we availed ourselves last night and this afternoon. And the casino has, in addition to the aforementioned buffet, four other restaurants as well as several fast-food outlets. Tonight we had a nice dinner at Fellini's, the Italian place, on the "patio," which is actually in the enclosed atrium of the hotel, replete with waterfalls, real vegetation, and animatronic animals that participate in the four-times-daily laser light/water cannon/music show. I even took in a movie at the attached eight-plex cinema here this afternoon.

All in all, a pretty good place to stop, and we'll put it on the list if ever we have to stop in Las Vegas again in the heat of the summer (in more temperate weather, we already know the secret boondocking spot right off the strip).

Tomorrow we will be at W. W. Williams in North Las Vegas, to see if they can figure out our latest round of problems.

Photo by Kirstelisa

Desert digs

We are at the Millers roadside rest area, about ten miles west of Tonopah on US95 (map).

This rest area allows overnight stays of up to 18 hours. There are plenty of picnic tables, shade ramadas, BBQ grills, and even several fresh water spigots with hose threads. There is also an RV dump station, making the whole place seem rather like a campground. Making things even nicer, commercial trucks are prohibited here, so we won't have an idling diesel next to us all night. (The 18-wheelers have to park out on the shoulder area of the highway, and hoof it to the rest rooms.)

Other than this rest area, Millers is just a name on a map. There once was a mining-related boom town here, but it has long since faded into oblivion.

When we pulled in here around 5:30, it was still in the mid-90s. We found what little shade we could, and ran the air conditioners for about three hours, and the generator for two. It's now quite pleasant in the bus, and somewhere in the 60s outside. It's also dark and quiet here, just as we like it, with the lights of Tonopah twinkling faintly in the distance. I know there are two other rigs here, but they are so far away from us we can't even see them,

We had a nice breakfast this morning at the coffee shop in the Nugget before packing up to head out. We ran into an Albertsons on the outskirts of town, and stopped for some provisions -- decent grocery stores are few and far between on this stretch of highway.

Somewhere on the upgrade on US50 east of Carson, we got an intermittent Check Transmission light. I've been hyper-sensitive to drivetrain issues lately, with the problems we've been having, and, naturally, I thought the worst: that all this time, the sluggish behavior and excessive heat buildup have been some problem with the tranny, such as band slippage, and now the ECM was finally detecting a problem.

We found a wide pull-out as we turned onto US95A south of Silver Springs, and I dug out the transmission diagnostic connector to flash the codes. It turned out to be a complaint about bad signals from the shifter control -- code 23. I tightened the connector on the shifter, cleared the codes, and we finished the rest of the trip without any further codes coming up. I'm not sure whether to be relieved that the transmission is fine, or disappointed that this event did not bring us any closer to understanding the other problems we've been having.

Tomorrow we will be in the greater Las Vegas area, where the high will be around 104° and the low will only drop down to 87°. We've decided to find ourselves a campground with power, as we'll need to run the A/C full time for the pets. I'm also looking for a good diesel shop in the area that can have a look at our problems on Monday.

Changing Course

We are in Carson City, at the Nugget Casino (map). The Nugget has a separate lot for RV parking, and allows stays of up to three nights. Normally, we would have driven a bit further today, to around Fallon or so, but we have friends here, and we had a nice dinner with them at B'Sghetti's restaurant here in town.

We stayed at the Horizon up at the lake until around 2 in the afternoon, enjoying the cooler mountain air. Things were much quieter there than they were last weekend, when the parking lot was an absolute zoo on account of the celebrity golf tournament going on across the street. Either there are more rabid golf fans than I realized, or plain folk were hoping for a glimpse of Kevin Costner, or maybe Maury Povich.

Our plan had been to head east from here on US50, an old favorite of ours. However we have a friend in Henderson (near Las Vegas) who is in the hospital with cancer, and we just got word this evening that she may be able to have visitors. (Awaiting that word was another reason why we did not head further east today.) So we are changing course, and tomorrow we will head over to US95, which will take us south to Las Vegas. I expect to be there Sunday afternoon.

From Las Vegas we will head northeast through northern Arizona and southern Utah, rejoining our originally planned route in southwestern Colorado.

Our other friends made it back to the bay area safely, where they commented that our blog did not adequately reflect what a good time we all had. So let me state for the record that we really enjoyed riding the speedboat, taking the paddlewheeler cruise of the lake, horseback riding, hanging out at the beach, visiting the Tallac historic site and the Lake Tahoe museum, watching the girls learn to water ski, and just generally being quintessential tourists in Lake Tahoe. Also, we had a great time around the campfire, barbecuing, making s'mores, and "camping" with them, which is a very different experience than our daily life here aboard Odyssey.

I don't have a real update today on the smoke/power problem. We had a short grade from 6,200' to 7,100' coming out of the lake basin, and I noticed perhaps less smoke, but still felt like we were short on power. But after that, the bulk of our 25 miles today was downhill -- US50 runs at a 6% grade for over nine miles. Now that we are back down at 4,200', I will pay careful attention tomorrow to any improvement from the somewhat denser air. With new fuel and air filters, I am running out of things to try short of disassembling the bedroom to get at the turbo.

Photo by Pål Sigurd

Deja Vu

We are back at the Horizon Casino, in Stateline (map), where we stayed last Friday on our way to the KOA.

The KOA booted us out of our space promptly at the check-out time of 11 this morning, claiming an incoming reservation for that space. (Did I tell you we don't really care for KOA?) So we said our goodbye's shortly before then and the girls and their mom headed back down the hill to the bay area. Their cabin reservation actually expired yesterday, so mom stayed with us last night in the bus, in our little fold-out guest bed, and the girls had a great time in the fancy pop-tent we have in our motorcycle camping gear.

Speaking of heading to the bay area, regular readers may remember that we we considering heading back there ourselves, to get the last of the windshield leaks taken care of in Alameda, by the outfit that put the windshields in. But realistically, we need to be heading east, as we go back on the Red Cross on-call roster on August 1st, and we need to pre-position ourselves for hurricane season (although most of the disaster response operations thus far have been in the west, from fires and flooding). So Alameda would represent a 400-mile round trip from here, and probably cost us another week.

We've decided to just live with the minor leakage for the time being, and either try to seal it ourselves at some point, or perhaps have the shop we like in New York do the work, as we are thinking about having them change out our bent tag-axle A-frame. So tomorrow we will head down the eastern slope, on US50, which will carry us all the way across Nevada.

So far, so good, but the other bad news is that the black smoke, low power problem I reported here on Friday is still with us. So far, I have replaced the air filter and also the secondary fuel filter, to no avail. I've also inspected the exhaust system, which has been banged around quite a bit since being repaired at All Coach in February, and there is a slight restriction in the tail "pipe," but it does not seem like enough to cause the present symptoms.

Many good suggestions have rolled in on the bus boards, including some that I really don't want to contemplate, such as a bad turbo. There is some evidence that the new Ultra-Low Sulfur Diesel fuel, 260 gallons of which we took on in Oregon, can clean a bunch of old gunk out of the fuel system (ULSD is a better solvent than the older Low-Sulfur variety), which can then plug filters (the reason I changed the secondary), and also fuel-water separators. I'm trying now to find out if our Daveco FuelPro 380 separator can be plugged without visible evidence in the clear bowl on top of the unit.

I'll be watching things closely as we climb the grade out of the Tahoe basin, and we'll see if anything improves when we drop down to lower altitudes. But at this point I am stumped, and I will need to start looking for a good shop to help us with this. We'll be heading east through Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Kansas, and Missouri if anyone has any recommendations.

Settled in for a bit

We are at the Lake Tahoe KOA, a few miles south of the lake on US50 (map). Well, actually, at the moment I am sitting on the beach at Camp Richardson, right on the lake, paying $10 for WiFi -- we're under the trees at the KOA and can't get on line.

Speaking of the KOA, regular readers will know that this is a rare event for us. In three years, we have stayed at a KOA only twice before: once to visit San Antonio, and once in Abilene when we were desperate for electricity to run the air conditioning.

Generally I try to stay out of KOA's as a matter of policy, even on the rare occasion when we've already decided to stay in a commercial park. That's because KOA has been leading the charge among all private park operators to "shut down" roadside parking opportunities such as Wal-Mart. This park in particular also has overt religious messages on its web page and inside its office/store, which is a real turn-off for us (irrespective of which religion's messages are being promulgated).

In this case, we ended up here by a process of elimination. We wanted to "camp" with our friend and her pre-teen daughters (who call us aunt and uncle). Mom's non-negotiable requirement was a cabin, preferably with a private bathroom. Our non-negotiables are unchanging: the pets have to be welcome, and our rig needs to fit in the campground.

We looked at Camp Richardson and Zephyr Cove as great spots with camping and cabins, but the "no pets" rule meant we could not stay there. And there is a wonderful city park campground in South Lake Tahoe, but the one cabin there has no bathroom, and it was too close to the ice rink (don't ask). When we looked at all the options, only the KOA had space available, pets allowed, and a cabin available with a private bath. So we took it, and are just toughing it out.

Among the more annoying KOA policies are an extra charge for pets, and fee-for-use WiFi that doesn't reach into the actual camp sites.

In other news, on our way to the KOA from Stateline, we passed a NAPA that had our air filter in stock, and we replaced the air filter right in the parking lot. Unfortunately, it did not in any way mitigate our black smoke/low power problem. So I have posted a general plea for help on the bus boards. I hope I will get some good suggestions there. (Incidentally, one of our readers here suggested one or more dragging brakes, but our in-wheel temperature sensors would have alerted us to that already.)

Also on our way out of South Lake Tahoe, we had to make a routine stop at the California agricultural inspection station, where we were forced to eat all the Rainier cherries we had brought from Washington on the spot. (The inspection station on 395 was closed, as usual, when we passed through on Thursday.)

Today we all drove down here to Camp Richardson, sans Opal, and have had a great day relaxing on the beach, and tooling around the lake in a rented speedboat, complete with towable inner-tube setup. We'll have dinner in the little lake-front restaurant here before heading back to kamp.

I'll likely not be posting here much until we are out of the KOA and back on-line, sometime after Thursday.

Smokin' into Tahoe

We're in Stateline, Nevada, at the Horizon Casino Resort (map). This is, as far as we can tell, the only casino in town that allows RVs to overnight in the parking lot (security will issue a pass for up to four nights). We're packed in just like at a truck stop, but happy to have the spot -- the whole lake is jam-packed for a beautiful summer weekend.

Yesterday we decided to stay on the cool side, and made a right onto California 70 at Hallelujah Junction. A short while later we made the left onto 49, which segues into 89 just before entering the Tahoe National Forest, where we stopped at the first campground, Cottonwood (map). The place was empty, with only three other sites occupied, and a Forest Service crew was clearing fuels from the area, taking a break from working fires. Apparently, they had just reopened this spot after a fire-danger closure.

It was cool, dark, and quiet, really quite a lovely stop. Of course, well into the trees, we had no satellite coverage.

Today we continued south on 89 into Truckee, then down North Shore Road into Kings Beach. That's when it hit us that the lake was in full swing. In spite of press reports that Tahoe is having to work to attract crowds after the fires, we saw no evidence of any slow down. "No Vacancy" signs were the rule, and the streets were packed. We continued all around the east side of the lake in basically a giant conga line, and every turnout and parking spot was jammed with cars. The weather here today was gorgeous, and people came out in droves to enjoy it.

Unfortunately, Odyssey struggled with the trip today. I've been noticing more and more smoke, and the coach has been feeling sluggish. Way back in Harrisburg I pulled the air filter out for inspection, even though my restriction gauge has been reading a dead zero. Frankly, I've been worrying that our air intakes had perhaps come loose again, since I haven't seen a restriction reading since installing the K&N-type filter 25,000 miles ago, but there was plenty of evidence that the filter had been doing its job -- I shook quite a bit of caked dirt from it before reinstalling it.

Since then, we've been monitoring fuel rate, turbo boost, and engine load for signs of problems, with no concrete results, other than a general sense of being sluggish, and more and more black smoke on acceleration (and more gray smoke at other times, especially when starting cold).

The problem has come to a head on the last few grades coming up to 7,000 feet. Not only is the smoke problem absolutely horrific, but power is way down -- starting from a stop on the upgrade is a major challenge. Moreover, the heat loads are way up, and we had to pull into turnouts to cool down as often as every half mile on the 8% grades. This is definitely out-of-character for our drive train.

The last time this happened, it was the end-game set of symptoms of the engine being completely dirted-out, and I now have a growing sense of foreboding about this. However, back then, these symptoms were also accompanied by copious amounts of oil blowing out the airbox drains, and we've seen none of that this time. (Of course, we found out during the rebuild that the drains were stuck open, and we've replaced them, so maybe we've got oil in the airbox anyway.)

I've got my fingers crossed that the whole current mess is just a badly plugged air filter, which would mean the fancy restriction gauge isn't working worth a damn (and yes, I do test it by sucking on the little tube periodically, which works fine). It's possible that the gauge is not the proper calibration for our filtration system. In any case, I'm going to look for a replacement filter element, throw it on, and see if that helps. I'm just going to spring the $80 for a paper one -- I don't want to mess with cleaning and re-oiling the "permanent" cotton gauze one until I understand more about the current problem.

If changing the air filter doesn't ameliorate these symptoms, I will need to turn to the collective wisdom of the bus conversion community on their various bulletin boards for some suggestions. And I will be pulling an oil sample for analysis, even though it's only been a thousand miles or so since the last change. I've asked each of the last three shops that changed the oil to pull samples for analysis, and each one forgot to do so before the oil went into the collection bins -- one of the things that has been contributing to my anxiety on the matter.

Suffice it to say that, after the exhausting climb (pardon the pun) into the Lake Tahoe basin, we were happy to be off the road and in quarters for the night, even if we are cheek-by-jowl with neighbors on both sides. We lucked out by getting a spot where our satellite dish can just shoot the bird in between hotel towers, and we were even treated to a rock concert emanating from an open-air stage at Harvey's next door. We also wandered across the street to the Montbleu (which was Ceasar's Tahoe until last year sometime) for a nice dinner at their steak house, Ciera.

Tomorrow we will head to the Lake Tahoe KOA just a few miles from here, where we will rendezvous with our nieces for a week of "camping" (we'll be in Odyssey, of course, and they'll be in a cabin with their mom).

Photo by Patricia Gimeno

Just missing the heat wave

We are at Goose Lake State Park, in Oregon, a stone's throw from the California line (map). And when I say "stone's throw" here, I mean it literally.

This is a small park (48 spaces) in a very remote area near lightly-traveled US395. The spaces have water and electricity, and I noticed when we drove in that the pedestals are identical to the ones at our last stop. I'm guessing they were wired by the same "electrician" (and I use that word generously). Having been once burned (somewhat literally), I decided to open up the pedestal here before plugging in.

Good thing I did, because this outlet was also a problem waiting to happen. Once again, a 20-amp service was fitted with a 15-amp receptacle, and, as with the last place, it was a standard residential-type 5-15R such as you might buy at Home Depot for about a dollar (as opposed, for example, to a commercial-grade outlet which will stand up to much harder use). These outlets have "quickwire" terminals on them: in addition to normal screw terminals, there are little holes into which one can just push the ends of the wires. As any real electrician (or code inspector) will tell you, these push-in terminals can only be used with 14-gauge solid wire (many safety experts will tell you not to use them at all).

Just as at the last park, the short hot wire from the breaker was a #14 stranded wire. Nevertheless, it had been pushed in to a quickwire hole. It looks to have been twisted and soldered first -- I would guess that all 48 hot jumpers had been prepared this way in advance. Twisting and soldering the end will allow it to slide into the quickwire hole, and will appear to give a tight fit. But over time, heating of the wire will cause the solder to flow, and the diameter of the wire end to collapse, and the pressure of the quickwire terminal to relax, resulting in yet more ohmic heating. This wire was already loose in its quickwire slot.

The neutral wire on this pedestal looked to be a #10 stranded. What they did here was to separate just enough strands to fit into the quickwire hole, twist them, and insert them (strands on #10 are themselves thicker, and will push in to the terminal without first being soldered). Several of the remaining strands were clipped, and two strands were tucked under one of the screws.

I ended up completely removing this receptacle from the box, clipping the soldered end off the hot, and re-terminating both wires under properly torqued terminal screws. I also tightened the clamp screw on the breaker. At least I got to do all this in the daylight (the downside being snide comments from the neighbors). We've been pulling a constant 16 amps through it since we arrived, and the whole shebang has stayed cool to the touch.

Yesterday we had a great drive down a new route for us, Oregon 31, AKA The Oregon Outback Scenic Byway. This very lightly traveled two-lane follows a series of valleys through rolling hills and past several lakes, winding its way from US97 just south of La Pine, to US395 north of Lakeview. And, while the forecast for Lakeview had called for temperatures in the 90s, it was overcast most of the day and the mercury did not climb past the 80s. It was very pleasant when we arrived here at the park, and we've not needed any air conditioning at all.

Today we will continue down familiar US395 to Susanville, where we will need to make a decision about proceeding on the shorter but hotter route through Reno, or the longer and more strenuous, but likely cooler, route through Truckee. I am hoping that, in either case, our good fortune with respect to temperatures will continue.

Staying dry-side

We are at La Pine State Park, on the Deschutes river (map).

After looking again at the agenda for Bus'n'USA, and a last glance at the weather forecast, we decided to stay on the east side of the Cascades, AKA "the dry side," and forgo the few hours we would have had at the rally. Really, we were just hoping to catch up with old friends over cocktails and maybe dinner tonight, but with temps in the high 90s, we're guessing folks won't be sitting around the campfire, as it were, until sometime past 8ish. Also, I'm guessing that several of the folks we'd like to reconnect with won't even come in until sometime tomorrow (one person we heard from won't arrive until Friday). And the only items on the agenda tomorrow morning are exhibit hours and coffee -- we'd have to leave before the first seminar starts.

So my apologies to anyone who was hoping to catch up with us in Rickreall -- perhaps we will see you elsewhere on the road.

That decision took a lot of time pressure off our travel plan to Tahoe (if we left Rickreall tomorrow afternoon, we'd have just two days -- faster than we like to travel, with no safety margin). Instead, we headed directly south on US97, with our first waypoint at a fuel stop in Bend. You may recall I was lamenting having to bypass Troutdale, where our price for diesel at the Flying-J would have been $2.709. However, one of my on-line resources indicated $2.699 diesel at a no-name station in Bend (Space Age Fuel), so that's where we went.

This is, of course, a "normal" gas station, with no truck island, and so, after jockeying around to even get in the joint (one of the two driveways was too highly inflected for Odyssey), we pulled under the canopy to the lone diesel dispenser. The attendant (you do know that there is no self-service in Oregon, right?) was dumbfounded when, after confirming that cash and credit were the same price, I said "I'll take $700 worth, please." It took nearly an hour to put 260 gallons in through the little automotive-sized nozzle, and, since their system could only handle a maximum of $300 per transaction, we had to split it into three chunks and I had to pay three times (prompting a fraud-alert call from Discover Card). But we were less than an eighth of a tank from empty, and $2.699 is not only the cheapest diesel in all of Oregon, but also the cheapest we will see anywhere west of Louisiana, at least at the moment.

Fortunately, their diesel dispenser was double-sided, so others could fuel while we sat there for an hour, but the line on that side was always three or four deep. Most folks waiting were pleasant, and curious about the bus, but I think we got a couple of dirty looks as well.

Our thought had been to head into the hills after Bend, spending the night in the Cascade Lakes region where the combination of heavy forest, lake surface, and another few hundred feet of elevation would have the temperatures in the more comfortable low 80s. By the time we were done fueling, though, the mercury was already falling, and we decided to come here, where there would be (so we thought) power to run our air conditioning if needed.

This is a really nice park, with a lovely trail along the Deschutes that we walked this morning. The river is both swift and deep here, and it looks like nice swimming if you stay close to the shore on the inside bend, in relatively slack water. But the river is cold, and it wasn't nearly hot enough this morning to want to dunk in water that cool. But back to the power: we drove around both the "electric/water only" and "full hookup" (same price: $17) loops, and discovered that all the power here is 20-amp -- barely enough to run one air conditioner, but that was plenty by the time we pulled in around 7pm. So we parked in the more primitive non-sewer loop, which has much more widely-space and private sites.

I hauled out the 10-gauge cord (the one with the 5-15P household plug on it), dialed the inverter down to a maximum 18-amp draw, and got us plugged in. We turned the water heater off to avoid using the batteries while the A/C was running, and all seemed normal. After dinner, temps had dropped into the 70s and we turned the A/C off, opened the windows and vents, and turned the water heater back on. So far, so good. In the meantime, the batteries had been charging slowly from whatever headroom was available in our 18-amp service.

I watched a little TV while the water got hot, and sometime after midnight got up to wash the dishes and head to bed (Louise had already turned in, as she seldom stays up past midnight). And then I noticed that the inverter was inverting, and claiming no input power. Must have tripped the outside breaker, I thought -- odd, considering I had just checked on load and draw around 10:30 and all was fine, and had been since we hooked up around 7. Oh well -- head outside to reset it.

On reaching the pedestal I immediately noticed that the breaker was not tripped. However, no power at the outlet, and now I see why: the molded rubber plug on our cord is melted, and the outlet where it is connected is scorched. Harumph. So there I am in the pitch black, at 1:something in the morning with a flashlight in my mouth, disassembling the park outlet.

Unsurprisingly, given the general condition of the pedestals and the massive code violations I had already noted before we even plugged in, I found improper workmanship on the connections inside the box. While the ground and neutral wires were solid, the hot wire was stranded, and completely fried off at the receptacle end, while partly fried and loose at the breaker end. The neutral was not properly looped around the terminal screw, either -- just tucked, and I surmised that the hot wire had been hanging on to its terminal by only a few strands. This, of course, resulted in ohmic heating of that side of the outlet, so much so that it fried the outlet and melted our plug. (To boot, the outlet itself was a 15-amp model, while the breaker was a 20, which really calls for either a 20-amp or a combination 15/20 amp receptacle.)

At that hour of the morning I was not about to rummage around in the bus for some fresh wire and an outlet (although we carry both). Instead I cut the worst 3/4" off both ends of the already short hot wire, tightly twisted both ends, took a full wrap around the one remaining good terminal screw on the duplex receptacle, tightly clamped the other end into the breaker, reassembled the pedestal, cleaned the carbon off our plug, and plugged back in to the unscorched half of the receptacle. I also dialed our power draw down to 15 amps, and so far no further problems. I really should send the park a bill.

In a few minutes we will head out. We'll either continue down 97 to Klamath falls, then angle in towards the sierras, or we'll cut across on Oregon 31 to US395.

Gorge-ous

We are at Maryhill state park, on the Washington side of the Columbia (map). We are just downstream of the John Day dam, more or less at the beginning of the Columbia River Gorge.

This is a nice park, with a large full-hookup RV loop, a separate loop for tenters, a day use area with a boat ramp, windsurf area and swim beach, and a large group site. When we arrived, the check-in ranger offered us a choice of a back-in full hookup site in the RV loop for $26, or a spot in the group area with power and water only for $17. We went for the group area, because we thought it might actually be more private, and we certainly did not need a sewer hookup. (Besides which, there is also a dump station if we needed it.)

We made the right choice -- when we strolled through the regular campground, it was nearly full and a bit noisy. In contrast, we had a section of the group area all to ourselves, with nary a neighbor all night, and view of the river obstructed only by the riparian vegetation. Well, until 10:30 this morning, when a clueless family of picnickers came in their two cars, and, out of an entire empty parking lot, parked right next to us -- I mean, not even ten feet away. Then they walked over to the group pavilion, which is a hundred yards from here, and they could have parked right there. Of course, they're not even supposed to be here -- the day use area is on the other end of the park.

The group area, by the way, would be a great place for a motorcycle rally. In addition to gobs of parking, a large group-sized fire ring, and a pavilion with lights, power, grills, and tables, there is a bathroom with showers and 16 30-amp RV hookups. For non-group use, the rangers consider each of the quad-30-amp pedestals to be one site (so they will only assign four rigs here), and I used one of my many adapters to feed two of the 30's into our 50-amp shore cord. (The ranger had told me there was 50 amps here -- I don't think he realized it was divided up into a bunch of 30's and 20's. The regular RV loop has "normal" 50/30/20 pedestals.)

There were two other rigs in the group area last night, but they parked around the corner from us in the other lot.

Yesterday, we had a nice drive down the river to the Tri-Cities, where we stopped to get our mail and have lunch. We marveled at how much the place has grown in the last two years, with plenty of new housing going in even today. I'm not sure what is driving the economy here, since I think Hanford has been pretty much stable (from an employment standpoint, anyway) for the last few years.

While we were passing through Kennewick, we decided to stop in at our home Elks lodge, Tri-Cities 2755. The admin, Leslie, was there, and we had a nice chat. It is the first time we have ever been inside the lodge that I've belonged to for more than three years. It's a decent-looking lodge, and they have plenty of room to park Odyssey, an option of which we will avail ourselves the next time we visit.

Today's plan had been to continue down the Columbia, fuel up in Troutdale, and spend the night somewhere around Portland, eventually working our way down to Rickreall tomorrow afternoon for the first day of Bus'n USA before continuing on to Lake Tahoe. However, the weather forecast tells us that it will be 99° in Portland today, and 97° in Rickreall tomorrow, so we are reconsidering the whole plan.

If we do go to Rickreall, we'll swing south from the Columbia and climb the hills south of Mt. Hood, where the forecast high today will only be in the mid to upper 80s. Then we will drop back down into the Willamette valley tomorrow afternoon, as the mercury starts to fall, with a Rickreall arrival in the relative cool of the evening. That presents the problem of finding inexpensive diesel on that route, since it bypasses Troutdale with its $2.71 Flying-J.

The other alternative is to skip Rickreall this year, since we'd have less than a full day there anyway, and head south from here on the dry side. That will take us through Bend, which has some good diesel options, and give us a more leisurely track to Tahoe. Beating the heat will still be an issue, since I don't want to widget through the mountains the whole way, but at least we will have more options.

We need to decide before we break camp, since one route dictates turning west on I-84 after crossing the river, while the other will continue south from Biggs Junction on US-197.

Maryhill State Park

Camped in the group area, within spitting distance of the Columbia River.

Perfect BBQ weather

Sean cooks up a steak in the RV campground at Desert Aire, WA.

Home

We are at our official home, Desert Aire in eastern Washington (map).

We had a great July Fourth holiday, watching myriad fireworks over Lake Tapps at the home of Bob and Shirley Lewis. Infinity was able to knock out our short project list in the day and a half we had there, making and installing base trim and stair nosing for the new floor, and sealing the trailing edge of the front cap.

This latter item was the result of tests we did while in Harrisburg. Once the carpet was up, we found evidence of more water intrusion than we had realized from the area under the front Peninsula windows. We pulled the inside window trim while it was raining and found quite a bit of water coming down from above the window, so after the rain stopped, I pulled out a compressed air hose and a bottle of soap suds. Blasting air into the window frame from the inside while spraying soap on the outside revealed some leakage around the front cap.

When Infinity cut through the paint and dug out the old sealant, they found quite a bit of evidence of water intrusion. Since our rain gutters essentially dump all the water from the roof right in this region, I suppose it should have been no surprise. In any event, they cleaned out as much stuff as they could and injected fresh sealant into the seam, so we hope that this particular set of leaks is now behind us.

When I called our painter Friday, he was still running over on another project and determined that he could not squeeze us in today, so we shifted gears, deciding instead to swing by here to check on our property, something we have not done in nearly two years. We spent an extra night at the Infinity shop, since we wanted to be in the tri-cities this morning, but didn't want to be here on the dry side any sooner than Sunday afternoon -- it's quite hot here right now. We will stop this morning at our mail box in Richland, then head back towards the coast along the Columbia valley.

Our property here looks basically unchanged from two years ago, although a new house has gone in right next door. We met the new neighbors, Don and Cindy, just as they were buttoning their place up to head back to their other home in Buckley, not far from Sumner. We gave them our contact information -- it's always good to know your neighbors, and now they know whom to call in the event an alien space ship lands on our little plot of dried sagebrush.

After checking on our lot, we rolled over to the campground on the lake, expecting to spend the night. There was an attendant at the gate, and we were informed that camping there is now $15 per night, even for homeowners. Camping for members of the owner's association used to be free, as I wrote here two years ago. After grudgingly forking over the $15, we discovered that every camp site had a day-use car parked in it -- people wanted to play on the lake on a hot Sunday afternoon. So, apparently, even though they are collecting fees and paying someone to do so, they can't enforce even the most basic rules, like day users should park in the day-use lot. (The camp sites are closer to the water.)

We took back our $15 and drove two blocks to the full-hookup RV "park," such as it is -- really just a row of eight angled gravel parking stalls separated by perhaps ten feet of grass with a 30-amp pedestal and a spigot. It was only another $5, and just as well, because we needed to run the air conditioners from when we arrived until about 9pm, and we've had one on this morning for the last hour or so as well.

It's actually quite beautiful here, with the hills rising above the river/lake in the background, but now that they are charging us $15 for dry camping, we're less inclined to plan spending the night.

We noted some other changes as well, such as that there continue to be houses built here. In addition to our new neighbors, we've seen a dozen or so new homes or homes under construction, and that's just in the part of the development we drove through. Also, there are quite a few vineyards along the river that were not here two years ago. I expect to see more of that as we drive south into Richland, and on our way downriver.

The motorcycle bay

Twice in the last week I've been asked how we carry our motorcycles/scooter along in the bus. And twice I've searched through our blog archives, our old photo website, and my computer for a picture of the motorcycle bay setup. I know there's a good picture somewhere of that bay, but beats the heck out of me where it is!

So, I just went outside and took some new pictures of the darn thing. Here's the bay with my Honda Metropolitan scooter and Sean's Suzuki SV650, all strapped down and ready for transport. You also get a glimpse of some of the other stuff stored in that bay. Like everyone's garage, it is full of miscellaneous junk: bicycle, firewood, spare parts, orange safety cones.





We chose a Neoplan Spaceliner specifically for these very large luggage bays so that we could convert one into a garage for the bikes. We then visited many motorcycle dealers with a measuring tape, looking for bikes that would fit inside with little to no modification. The unfaired Suzukis fit the bill perfectly. We only need to unscrew the mirrors for the bikes to roll right in.


I also have a Suzuki SV650, but it is being stored at my brother's house in Houston. This post explains why we left the bigger bike there. And this one explains how a scooter came to take its place.




The bay is symmetrical, with the same fold-down door/ramp on both sides of the bus. It is possible to remove both bikes through the same door, but easier if there is access from both sides and each bike can be backed out. If one needs to roll forward down the ramp, the Pingel wheel chocks are removable.

We love our new flooring

Here's the old carpet:



The carpet is gone, revealing the plywood subfloor:



The new floor being installed:



A close-up of the pattern:



The finished product:

Another photo catch-up day

A few that have been hiding in my camera for the last couple of weeks:

Deep in the forest near Sol Duc hot springs.



On the coast in the Olympic National Park.



Opal goes to the vet. See what happens when you nip at the vet technicians? The muzzle doesn't stop her from complaining vigorously; the tech in Portland called her a "drama queen."

Deja Vu all over again

Happy Birthday, USA!

We are back at Infinity Coach in Sumner, WA (map).

The guys in Harrisburg managed to get all our new flooring in place by yesterday afternoon, and, up to that point, we had been mulling over in our heads where we were going to park over the July 4th holiday. At 5:30, when the last piece of furniture was bolted back down, I called Infinity to see if they might be open at the end of this week, to help us get some more trim in place where the carpet removal had left voids, and also to try to finally seal this leak over the front cap.

Much to my surprise, they told me they would be open this morning, until 1pm, and then again on Friday, but closed tomorrow. Wanting to have plenty of buffer, we made the decision to high-ball up here yesterday evening. We made it as far as the Washington rest area at MM54 (map), where we hit the hay around 11:30. (There is no "camping" in WA rest areas, but they allow stays of up to eight hours in vehicles, so it works well as a sleep stop.) We had also stopped at the rest area at MM13, which has a dump station, to empty our tanks. We finished the last 90 miles this morning, arriving around 9:30.

So we will be here over the holiday, and through Friday afternoon. I'm supposed to call our painter, Mike Wilson, in Eugene on Friday to see if he will be able to squeeze us in on Monday and Tuesday, in which case we will be heading right back the way we came over the weekend. Unfortunately, if he can't fit us, we're going to miss him entirely, because will we have to leave soon afterwards for Lake Tahoe, where we need to be on the 14th. If that's the case, we will have to have the paint touch-up done by Coach Specialties in Alameda when we go back there to address the window leaks.

All of us here aboard Odyssey wish you a pleasant holiday.

Clandestine carpet replacement

I'm struggling a bit with how to present today's update. That's because we're, umm, not really here.

What I mean to say is that we are parked at the new up-and-coming home of a business that is not yet open and therefore whose details I can not yet share. Suffice it to say that the owner is a long-time friend of ours and his new business here will involve RV renovations and updates, and he has graciously agreed to help us with replacing our carpets with a more durable flooring that will not retain pet fur as the carpet did. As soon as the business actually opens I will post the details here. At this point, I don't think I can even discuss the actual flooring material, other than to say that it is a woven vinyl material with a rubber backing that goes down very similar to sheet vinyl flooring, but is at the same time more resilient and more durable. We've chosen a weave that looks similar to a far-eastern woven mat of, say, rattan or bamboo, which complements our maple cabinets without being too close in color. We'll try to post some photos when it's done.

We arrived Thursday morning in the hopes that we'd be done by Friday afternoon, but various complications got in the way. Notably the fact that once we removed the carpet, we found areas that will need to be trimmed out in some way -- plush carpet over ten-pound pad hides a multitude of sins. Also, since the rough carpentry for the living room and penthouse assumed from day one that the flooring would be carpet, there were a number of spots on both levels that needed to be sanded flush, and corners that needed to be squared off or rounded off depending on which way the new material will run. So it looks like we will be here right up until the July 4th holiday, if not beyond. That's fine with us, as it gives us this weekend off to catch up on a few things, including posting here to the blog.

While the guys worked on getting the carpet out and taking their measurements, I squeezed myself into the right front wheel well to deal with the flaky ride-height valve. I'd done this before, so I was a little surprised when I had trouble squeezing my body in between the wheel and the fender (once inside, there is plenty of room to sit upright and work). And I know I've lost weight since the last time I was in there, dropping from a 36 to a 34 waist. Then it hit me -- we'd changed from 12R22.5 to 315/80R22.5 tires, and the extra girth was not mine, but the tire's. We had to run that wheel up on 2x6's for me to finally squeeze in.

Once I got the valve apart the problem was immediately evident: there was a hard clump of crud sitting right on top of the piston, perhaps 1-2mm in diameter. I'm sure just brushing that off would have cured the problem, but as long as I had the valve apart I pulled both piston heads and the spring, cleaned them and the inside of the chamber, and carefully put the whole thing back together. After half an hour in the confines of the wheel well I was more than happy to be done and squeeze back out. We aired the bus up and -- voila! -- the other valve (on the driver side) immediately began leaking. Harumph.

I had had enough claustrophobia for one day, so we decided to just let the air compressor run every few minutes, as the left side leak was much slower than the right had been. Also, I know that often this problem just goes away on its own after I drive a few miles, and whatever dust particle is trapped in there, keeping the piston from sealing, flushes out on its own in the regular operation of the valve. Sure enough, after a full day of compressor cycling the valve closed of its own accord, and I am hoping I am not in for another valve rebuild for some time to come.

Yesterday we got booted out of the bus while the flooring was being cut to shape, so we contented ourselves with sitting in the shop reading or surfing the net. It did rain quite a bit yesterday, and we were disturbed to note a continuing leak above the left Peninsula window -- I'm closing in on it, though, and have narrowed it down to an area of the front cap just below the rain gutter. I need to get out the compressed air gun and a bottle of soap solution to pin that sucker down.

Today's project was fixing an annoying squeak in the bathroom FanTastic. I spent a couple hours on the roof, pulling the fan/motor assembly out of the housing. After removing the hub set screw to remove the fan blades, I discovered that the fan hub was corroded to the motor spindle, and nothing I did would shake the two loose. Both the motor mount and the fan blade are plastic, which have likely become quite brittle in four years, and I was only willing to put so much pressure on either one before I gave up. I squirted some WD40 (yeah, yeah, I know -- it's a solvent, not a lubricant, but it's the only thing I had that would reach) as best I could in the general direction of the motor spindle and bearing, and put the whole mess back together. It squeaks a bit less, now, but I foresee a replacement FanTastic in my future.

We now return to our regular programming

We are back on the road after a full week in Portland.

We had a good, if somewhat exhausting, conference, which ended Sunday night. We spent a good deal of Monday recovering, and trying to get more details posted on the conference blog (I'm still not done with that). Monday evening we decided to take advantage of the fact that our transit passes still had another full day on them, and rode the bus down to the Olive Garden. It turned out to be only half a mile away, so we worked off some of our pasta by walking back. Chalk the close Olive Garden up as another selling point for this particular stopover.

The dog's ear has been bothering her lately -- we noticed she has been shaking her head a lot. So yesterday morning was given over to taking her to the vet. It turns out that Tri-Met allows pets on board, so long as they are in a carrier, so we walked her over to the Max station and put her in her cage for one stop, then had another two block walk to the vet. Even though we couldn't see it that far down, she had a mild infection in both ears. So we've got a couple weeks of antibiotic drops ahead of us. And kudos to Portland Tri-Met for the pet policy -- evidence of a real commitment to getting people out of their cars (along with the generous pass policy, and the fact that the entire downtown core is "fareless").

After the vet, Louise brought Opal back home, and I headed to OMSI, where I had a hankering to see the submarine. I lucked out: being the only person to show up for my scheduled tour time, I got a private showing. Last night we used our passes one last time to go to dinner downtown at Pazzo, an upscale Italian place in the historic Hotel Vintage Plaza.

This morning we finally buttoned up and headed south, stopping in Salem to do laundry. Tomorrow morning we need to be in Harrisburg to deal with getting the carpet replaced, so tonight we are at the Pioneer truck stop (map), essentially a big lot behind a Travelodge hotel, a restaurant, and a 76 station with a truck island. The place is familiar, as it was a regular food stop for us when we were hauling up and down I-5 in the car while Odyssey was under construction (although I note that the hotel was a Best Western in those days). We had a nondescript dinner in the restaurant, just to make ourselves official customers.

We've gone for a good couple weeks without any real bus-related problems, so we were due: when we got parked here, we noticed that air was rushing out of the right-front ride-height valve. The valve is sort of stuck in a mode where air is trying to to into the bag from the supply side, at the same time it is venting out of the bag from the exhaust. We've seen this before, on the left side valve -- the cure was to disassemble, clean, and rebuild the valve. I didn't want to start that at 6:30 in the evening, so we'll spend the night with no air at all (and the front door held closed with bungees) and I will take care of it tomorrow while the carpet is being replaced. I have my fingers crossed that cleaning the valve will do the trick -- if it needs to be replaced, we could be in for a long wait.

Settled in to Portland

We are at the Gateway Elks Lodge, in Portland (map).

We had an uneventful and mostly scenic drive down from Chehalis yesterday, a route that is extremely familiar to us. We did cross the river in Longview to get a slightly different set of scenery on US30. I did notice, since the last time we came through, that they have finally torn down the coolant recovery tower at the defunct Trojan nuclear power plant in Rainier.

Somewhere along 30 we stopped at a closed Oregon weigh station. (Oregon helpfully puts a scale display in full view of the driver and leaves their scales turned on when they are not open.) We found we've added about 250 pounds to the front axle since our last weigh-in, also in Oregon on our way north. That's about what I expected due to the new, heavier batteries we just put in, bringing our steer axle to right around 13,000 pounds. We put 160 gallons of diesel in at the Flying-J in Troutdale, where we nearly coasted in on fumes. We also took advantage of their dump station.

We chose this Elks lodge because it is a two-block walk to the Max light rail station, and from there a 15 minute ride to the convention center. $19.50 buys us an all-you-can-ride seven day transit pass, good for the Max and the buses, and you can't even park a car downtown for one day for that price. There is also a Fred Meyer store across the street.

The lodge is pleasant enough, although I am a little miffed by their "campground" operation. Generally, we prefer lodges that just ask us to park in some empty space out back and leave us to our own devices -- we usually have no need of power or other hookups. Our generator will come on as needed, including should we need to leave an air conditioner on standby for the dog.

At this lodge, they have set up an actual campground in the back, with a dozen spaces. Unfortunately, those dozen spaces share only six power pedestals, each with one 30-amp and one 20-amp receptacle. So the second rig next to any pedestal gets a mere 20-amps -- again, usually no problem for us, except that generators are forbidden here. On top of which, the paucity of power means that air conditioners (as well as electric heaters) are also forbidden. In Portland, this is usually no problem, except that this week is something of a hot spell, with temperatures in the 80's. We've got all the windows open and the fans on, but, still, I do worry a bit about the dog while we're away. I may try to get back here during the day to check on her and take her out.

In any case, they are charging us (umm, "requesting a donation") $12 a night here, which would be reasonable if we got some power and could run an air conditioner. But for what amounts to dry camping ten feet from another rig, it's a bit excessive. Beggars can't be choosers, though, and we need the proximity to transit, so we ponied up.

In a few minutes we will hop on the Max and head to the convention center to start our conference, the General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association. For the rest of the week, we will be blogging our experiences there as congregational delegates over at a blog we have set up for that purpose, the CLF Delgates' Notes blog. I will likely not post much else here until General Assembly is over.