Red-hot road trip

We are at the Elks lodge in Kent Island (Stevensville), Maryland (map).  We left Deltaville in Odyssey yesterday afternoon after the yard had wrapped up for the day.  We've had lots of good progress and I am in a better place than I was two posts ago.  Vector is still on the hard, though, which is why we are making this trip in the bus.

The most dangerous thing to have on a boat is a schedule, and notwithstanding that fact, we made fairly firm plans long ago to meet close friends in Southold, NY, on the north side of the eastern end of Long Island this weekend.  That would have been part of a nice loop trip in the boat, which would have included a cruise past Manhattan and an excursion up the Hudson at least as far as West Point.  We may still get that far this season, but clearly we could not make it dovetail with this visit.

We did not want to miss this long-scheduled visit with friends who actually live in California, and so we decided to take a weekend off from boat projects to make it happen.  We briefly considered taking the train to New York, a very pleasant ride, but that would once again mean finding a way to get ourselves to and from Richmond, more cat-sitting, and other logistics.  So we opted to just come in the bus.

Unfortunately, I did not take into account the massive heat wave that is stifling the east coast at the moment, even though the heat index was 105 in Deltaville when we left.  Unless we want to run the generator 24/7, at around $100 a day, that means we will need to find power outlets for most of our stay.  This lodge, just a few miles from our preferred route up the DelMarVa peninsula, had 50-amp power for just $20, and is a very welcoming and active lodge -- we went in for a cold beer after we got parked.

So far, so good, but ahead of us lies a dearth of electric hookups.  I'm kicking myself now, because my two 50' ten-gauge extension cords are back on Vector, and it looks like we may well need them when we finally get to Southold.  That's in addition to the 75' of six-gauge power cord and 50' of ten-gauge cord that we already have aboard.

We are actually meeting everyone tomorrow morning in Rockville Centre, much closer to the southwestern end of Long Island, to caravan out together.  Our original plan had been to spend tonight at one of the several Walmarts or even the lone Elks Lodge nearby, but with no power available at any of those, we're now looking at alternatives much earlier along the route, possibly leaving us two hours or so away from Rockville Centre tomorrow morning.

Given that we may very well be spending the afternoon and overnight running the generator anyway, we've opted to stay here with our nice 50-amp outlet until the last yawning instant, which would put us into Long Island around 7pm this evening, minimizing both our heat load and generator run time should that be required.  In the meantime, if one of the earlier options pans out, we'll stop then and finish up in the morning.

This past week or so saw our fresh water tank re-coated with epoxy paint, NSF-approved for potable water use.  The hull bottom has also been prepped and painted, the propeller shaft and propeller installed, line cutters mostly completed, crab pot diverters welded on, and I finally finished wiring the windlass and plumbing the washdown system.


New shaft going in.

To save some money I painted the propeller myself.  The propeller had been coated with a product called PropSpeed when we bought the boat, and this is really wonderful stuff.  It was in good shape, too, with the exception of some wear right at the edges of the propeller, and if we were just doing a regular haul-out, we would have had the Prop Speed touched up.

Unfortunately, all the PropSpeed had to come off at the prop shop before they could true and balance the prop, leaving us with the prospect of having to prep and reapply a complete coating from scratch.  We're already over budget, and PropSpeed, as wonderful as it is, is very expensive -- $235 in materials alone for our size prop.  Instead we opted to go with a "barnacle barrier" treatment.  "Barnacle Barrier" is actually a trademark for propeller paint made by Pettit, and as marine items go, it's pretty reasonable, around $27 for a 16-oz rattle can.  It turns out, however, that Rustoleum "Cold Galvanizing Spray," less than $5 for a 16-oz can at Home Depot, is exactly the same stuff, and that's what I used.  When it's dry, it's basically 93% zinc.  I did not get a photo of the prop before we left, but it came out pretty nice.  I have a spare can of the spray aboard, so I can touch this up myself now any time we get hauled out.  Total cost to do the whole prop: $5.

The windlass wiring ended up taking much longer than I had hoped.  I'm not sure what they were thinking, but whoever installed the windlass ran two four-gauge wires for the up and down motor circuits, and a single six-gauge wire for the negative return line from the motor.  The main positive and negative cables feeding the solenoid and ground post were also six-gauge.  The instructions that came with the windlass call for a minimum of two-gauge, so the windlass power was undersized by a factor of three.  I don't think the windlass has been run enough over the life of the boat for there to have been any significant damage to the motor, but this definitely needed to be fixed.


Windlass motor connections exposed.

In order to get the correct size wires where they were needed, I ended up partly disassembling the windlass, cleaning out the holes in the deck, and rewiring all the solenoid wiring under the forward berth.  All of the old wire had to be discarded and I used 35' of new two-gauge marine cable.  I also got to use my new hydraulic cable crimper for the first time, which worked like a charm despite being a cheap Chinese knock-off purchased on eBay for $50.  I would not trust this tool for thousands of crimps, but for the two or three dozen I will need to make during the course of rewiring the boat, it should be fine.

The windlass is working once again, and I beat out the guys working on the anchor roller, so my part of the job will not be the gating factor to getting us back in the water (we need to get the anchor chain back aboard before going in the slings -- it weighs a thousand pounds).  I'm really happy to have new windlass wiring of the correct gauge, especially considering we would not even have thought about this project had it not been for the anchor locker renovation, which required us to remove part of the wiring.

The washdown pump is in the same area and runs from the same battery bank as the windlass, so it made sense to finish that while I was in there.  Also, the plumbing runs through the anchor locker, and I wanted to finish all that work before loading the chain back on board.  The pump works great (I had to haul a 5-gallon bucket of water down to the bilge to test it on the hard), and it will be great to have a nice high-pressure washdown available any time we use the windlass.  Previously, we had to execute a three-step procedure to get raw water on deck, involving one of us having to go down to the engine room while the other watched the helm, with the reverse three-step procedure, also in the engine room, after the anchor was stowed.

I have yet to finish the wiring, but we now also have automatic electric bilge pumps in every compartment, plumbed directly overboard via new above-the-waterline Marelon through-hulls.  We kept the complicated manually-operated high-volume pumping system as a backup, but these automatic pumps will ensure we are de-watering the boat even if we are away, or asleep, or just unaware.  A separate high-water alarm is associated with each of the four pumps.

We have one more hole yet to drill in the boat, for the direct discharge for the new gray water sump.  This hole will again be above the waterline, so we can tackle this after we splash.  I'm sure whoever has to install the sump will be grateful for working air conditioning.  That project is waiting on the last of two waste holding tanks to arrive, I hope sometime next week.  (The waste tanks need to go in before the gray sump.)

I am hoping that we will find the prop shaft finally coupled to the transmission when we return on Tuesday, which, together with loading the anchor chain, is the last remaining item keeping us out of the water.  With any luck we will splash before the end of the week.

New year, new boat

We are parked on the side of the road, where the trucks park, across from the Patterson Pass Business Park in Tracy, California (map).  There are no retail services here whatsoever, with the sole exception of a gas station with C-store and several diesel lanes at the corner of Mountain House Road.  The massive complex of buildings on both sides of the intersection here constitute the northern California distribution centers for many major retailers, including Costco, Jack-in-the-Box, and many more.

We're here because we wanted to have one last lunch with Louise's mom and dinner with my cousins on our way out of town.  We otherwise wrapped up in the bay area Wednesday with dinner in San Francisco, where Louise's cousins from North Carolina had just arrived for a conference.  Louise's dad and stepmom came up from Monterey for the occasion, as did another cousin from southern California, and so we got in five visits in one fell swoop.  New Year's Day was the regular Tuesday night dinner with the motorcycle crowd, and several turned out for our farewell dinner.

I had hoped to post here sooner than today, but we got incredibly busy once we landed back in the bay area.  We had a lovely Christmas dinner at my cousins' apartment in Oakley, and the delivery of Simon-the-dog turned out to be their best Christmas gift of all. He was so happy to see them -- we thought he was happy throughout the whole trip, but that was nothing compared to how excited he got when we walked through the door. Afterward we fell exhausted into bed in a nearby hotel room, and they ran us back to the bus, in the south bay, Wednesday morning.

Odyssey actually does fairly well parked by herself, and, near as I can tell, the generator did not even run in our absence other than the ten minute exercise period every other day. The solar panels kept the fridge cold and the air compressor running.  To be fair, we had spent the day before our departure at an Elks lodge, plugged in to 20 amps to top up the batteries.  It did take us a couple of hours to start everything up and extricate ourselves from our parking spot before heading out for a quick Boxing Day dinner with Louise's mom.  We spent the next couple of nights parked on the street.

Most of the week was spent cramming in farewell visits with a variety of folks, and dealing with the fallout of the various reports we had commissioned regarding the boat. By mid-week, however, the temperatures had dropped to the low 50s in the daytime, dipping into the 30s at night.  We were starting to spend more on fuel than it would cost for hookups, and we spent four nights at the Santa Clara Elks Lodge, a familiar stop for us, with 30-amp power to keep us warm.  We moved back to the street in Sunnyvale Wednesday morning so we could walk home from the train station after our visit in SF.

We also managed to fit in two whole days with my cousins, taking an excursion to Old Town Sacramento on the train, wherein we boarded in Santa Clara and they in Martinez, and a drive up the coast from Santa Cruz to Half Moon Bay.  They will be full-fledged Californians in no time.  They also had some good news on the house front, and they now have a fully signed deal with a closing later this month; the bank had to drop the price based on appraisal.

Which brings me to our own bit of news.  By the messages I have been getting, lots of people are wondering about the boat and where things stand.  We had a solid two days of inspections when we were in Savannah, including about a three-hour sea trial, and the last of the reports came in while we were en route to California.  Not surprisingly, there are lots of problems.  Some of those we anticipated, and were already factored in to the offer we made.  Many others were new findings for us, and they meant going back to the negotiating table to sort them out.  The list is too extensive to detail here, but I will likely be sharing much of it in due course.

The good news here is that the seller is a genuinely nice guy and was entirely reasonable through the whole process.  When we arrived he was already in the process of having some issues with the boat addressed, and some of the more obvious defects that arose during the sea trial he is already having fixed.

We all agreed that the reports would come back so close to the holiday that we should extend the acceptance date to after New Years and push the closing back a week, to January 22.  Louise and I used a lot of the time in the car to talk through the findings and where we stood, and after Christmas we started working on the terms of a conditional acceptance.  The one issue that remained to be addressed was determining the source of some fuel in the lube oil that was discovered during sample analysis.

The mechanics finally looked at the engine on Wednesday of this week, having been off between Christmas and New Years.  They found no issues and recommended re-sampling after the boat had been run another 50 hours.  We factored this in with the other issues we had already discussed, and made a conditional acceptance, based on an additional discount off the agreed price, yesterday afternoon.  The seller agreed to our revised terms and it looks like we just bought ourselves a boat.  Formal closing will be sometime between the 15th and the end of the month.

Our departure from the bay area yesterday was predicated on trying to be in Savannah for a closing and delivery around the 22nd or so, with enough time to drive down to Fort Lauderdale for Trawler Fest on the 30th.  Now that the deal is done, we are very glad we said our final goodbyes and got on the road, because the seller could easily ask for a 1/15 closing, and then we'd own a boat that we couldn't get to for another week or so.  But all is well that ends well and we now have a comfortable two and a half weeks to cross the country.

We need to get rolling to make our mileage for today, but I will fill in more details about the boat here as time permits in the next couple of weeks.  I've been reluctant to post too much information here before the deal was done -- we learned from our previous oh-so-close experience not to get people (ourselves included) too charged up about a deal that might not close.

Bodies in California, hearts in NJ/NY

I apologize for the lengthy absence here on the blog; we have been very, very busy, and it's been hard to find the 1-2 hours it will take me to write this post.  Lots of people have been asking if we are OK, and/or if we have been deployed to the northeast to help with the Sandy relief effort. I'll do my best to fill you in on the last 2+ weeks, so die-hard readers may want to grab a cup of coffee or perhaps a stiff drink and settle in.  TL;DR: We're fine, we're still in California and not deployed by the Red Cross to the northeast, we'll be here for perhaps another month, and we've already cast our absentee ballots so we can not be swayed by vitriolic tweets or Facebook posts.

Before getting into the minutiae of our lives, I want to say that our hearts go out to all those affected by Hurricane Sandy.  We'd been watching the storm in horror, not only because we are disaster responders, but also because I have family in the area and we have friends there as well.  My parents live in Brick, New Jersey, just five miles from the Atlantic Ocean at Point Pleasant, two miles from salt water, and six miles or so from some of the hardest-hit areas documented in this series of shocking before/after satellite images posted by NOAA and making the rounds of the Internet.

All our family and friends are fine; they were well-prepared, natch, and my folks even have their power back on, much to my surprise (it's still out all around them).  Almost everyone we know in the Red Cross is already there, helping with the relief efforts in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and West Virginia.  It's incredibly hard for us to sit on the sidelines at a time like this, watching from afar and knowing that the cupboards are bare, so to speak, with few volunteers left in reserve.  That said, no one is indispensable  and we know the operations are in good hands, having personally worked for every one of the managers currently in charge at one time or another.

Several folks have asked why we were not deployed.  The simple answer was that we were not listed as "available" in the staffing database, and while we have been known to change our availability status at the last minute for a major disaster, in this case, we were simply too far out of position to do it.  We could have started pre-positioning for the storm when it first started threatening the northeast, at our own expense (close to $5,000, all told), but that's a gamble, a game of probabilities.  Also, in the overall scheme of things, we'd be better off just sending them that amount of money.  And if they really got into a jam, we could have parked the bus here in the bay area, while one of us (probably me) flew east to help out, as happened last April when the tornado swarm hit Alabama.

It was a difficult but sensible decision to remain off the availability list as the storm hit (although I did let the Disaster Operations Center know that they could call me in a pinch).  Our mission here in California to help my cousin get settled here after moving from New York remains as yet unfulfilled, owing mostly to bank delays regarding the house they are trying to purchase on a short sale.  We'd really like to be here to help them through their transition and move into the area before we head east, and I have the uneasy feeling that the relief operations, particularly in New York and New Jersey, will still be ongoing those many weeks from now, so perhaps we can be available to relieve some of the weary crew sometime in December.

Catching up on our whereabouts these last two weeks, we did head over the bridge to Fremont after our stint on the street in Menlo Park.  We spent two nights at the Elks lodge there (map), where we topped up the batteries with the 30-amp hookups, a good deal for the bay area at $18 per night.  That includes use of the dump station, and after 18 straight days (a new record for us) we were full to the brim when we were ready to leave on Sunday.  We also topped up the water tanks in anticipation of another couple of weeks on the street.

The Fremont Elks was a great jumping-off point for dinner Friday with friends in Milpitas, and an excursion Saturday to Pleasanton, where we met my cousin for dinner, about half the distance to his hotel in San Ramon.  He did not have any good news from the bank or his agent on the home-buying front, other than to note that the bank had postponed foreclosure proceedings, usually a good sign when trying to complete a short sale.  We spent some time discussing next steps, but agreed that probably nothing would happen to push us to Oakley in the ensuing week, and that he'd be back east for a visit the following weekend anyway.

Sunday after we wrapped up our dirty work at the Elks, we moved over to Sunnyvale to try our luck at an old standby (map), even though a new class-A office building was going up right across the street.  I wrote about this project, and my interaction with the construction superintendent, the last time we stayed there.  The building is mostly finished, and they are just in the final stages of finishing up the parking lot, architectural glass, and interior fixtures, so we hoped the heavy equipment noise would be minimal.  No such luck -- Monday morning the clanking of heavy machinery and beeping of back-up alerts had us up at 7am.  Nevertheless, we stayed another whole day, but after two days of rude awakenings, we moved a quarter mile down the street (map).

That spot proved to be much quieter, and we got to sleep in a bit longer in the morning.  We ended up staying for our full 72 hours.  Toward the end of the third day I noticed a Sunnyvale parking officer eyeing the bus, and I had a nice chat with him.  There were, at the time, three other rigs on the street, including a fiver that had been dropped there, with no sign of its tow vehicle for days.  I recognized at least one of the rigs from many previous visits.  Apparently the superintendent had taken my advice from our little chat, and after calls to the city, they had been sending a parking officer out to keep after it.  Previously, parking enforcement never visited this part of town (downtown meter enforcement is far more lucrative), with sworn officers dealing with the rare parking issue on routine patrols.

With the developer having succeeded in chasing the rigs from that end of the street, the several going concerns in this block were now getting restless with a bevy of dilapidated RVs near their businesses, and complaints were resulting in stepped-up enforcement.  We had chosen to park in front of an empty lot for exactly this reason, and we were within our 72 hours, unlike all but one of the other rigs, which had not moved since we arrived from Fremont Sunday afternoon.  We left as planned shortly after my chat with parking enforcement, and when we swung by that block yesterday to check on things, nary a rig was in sight, leading me to believe that enforcement got aggressive, and these guys, who'd rather not have to move every three days, headed off to less well patrolled backstreets.  It's a great spot, within walking distance of the Caltrain station, a bakery, a grocery, and a couple of restaurants, so we hope this latest skirmish in the parking wars does not put it off-limits to us forever.

Even though we had a rental car, I did avail myself of the Caltrain access while we were there, catching up with Louise in Redwood City one evening.  We ended up with a dinner engagement every night of the week, and Louise had lunch dates most days as well, while I worked on a backlog of repairs around the house.  Thursday found us at a brand new spot for us, wedged between Symantec and a brace of Google buildings in Mountain View (map).  Google provides free WiFi throughout Mountain View, so we could keep the satellite dish down as well, and we spent a quiet weekend in that same spot.  From there it is a long walk to the light rail station, and there is a small coffee shop open for breakfast and lunch five days a week a bit closer.

Monday we turned the rental car back in right at the three week mark, and headed down to Monterey for a nice visit with Louise's dad and stepmom.  As is now our custom, we stayed at the Elks lodge there (map), which has 30-amp power, water, and a dump station for $18 per night, with a three-night limit.  We stayed the full three nights, enjoying long-time favorites Rio Grille and The Sand Bar as well as a recent addition in Pacific Grove, Il Vecchio, which was quite nice.  Our only hint of Halloween was the costumed wait staff at dinner.

After returning from Monterey Thursday we decided to try quartering just a block or so from an old favorite here in Mountain View.  As I wrote here in my last post, new construction has eliminated a pair of vacant buildings that gave us peace, quiet, and unobtrusiveness for three days at a stretch.  But the convenience of the light rail station and the free Google WiFi persuaded us to try a spot just a few hundred feet further down the block, adjacent to a church quartered in a light-industrial building here in this neighborhood of mixed office and light industrial use.

We spent just a single night in that spot, because the church is of the Seventh-Day Adventist denomination, which meant services and a full parking lot Saturday morning.  So Friday night after the businesses closed up shop, we moved to the next block; as I finish typing this Monday morning we are still here (map), across from the Coupons.com headquarters.  As our 72 hours will be up, and the neighborhood is no longer dead calm as it was over the weekend, we will move again this evening to an as-yet undetermined location.

Proximity to the light rail here enabled us to get around for a couple of days, and we had a nice couple of dinners in downtown Mountain View just a few minutes' ride away.  But our social calendar is again full, and we needed more than either the scooters or transit can provide, so Saturday morning we took the light rail down to San Jose airport and picked up another car.  At just $15 per day, all inclusive, this one is an even better deal than our last ride.

We had the car in time to drive to Pleasanton Saturday evening for yet another meal with my cousin, who has come to the end of his temporary housing reimbursement, with little progress in closing on the house.  Finally after several weeks of waiting, there is something concrete we can do to help, and today and tomorrow I will be making phone calls to try to find them a short-term apartment somewhere within their target school district, so they can get moved out here into some bridge housing while they wait on the banks to get their act together.  I am guessing those calls will lead to some on-site visits by Wednesday or so, which I will do in the rental car.  The goal is to be ready for them to move out mid-month sometime, even if that means most of the household goods go into storage.

In the meantime I expect we will be staying on this side of the bay until either that move happens, or the house closing moves up to a point where we can go out there to be the on-site presence for inspectors, painters, and other professionals.  We're still working through our list of visits on this side of the bay anyway, so we have plenty to keep us busy.  That said, I am going to try to keep the blog updated just a bit more frequently -- this post has taken a full 24 hours to complete, with all the interruptions, and smaller chunks are probably better for you and me both.

Topping up

We are at the Elks lodge in Vallejo, California (map).  We've been here since early yesterday afternoon, and, frankly, we had already decided to just continue on all the way to Redwood city yesterday.  As luck would have it, though, the decision to stop here got made for us.

We had an uneventful drive out of Reno climbing the east side of Donner Pass  With the new radiator we are now able to climb at full power without overheating, although to be fair, the east side of the pass is the "easy" side, as you are starting from nearly 5,000' to begin with.  Donner pass itself is quite scenic, whenever you can divert your attention from the road directly ahead of you.  And, again owing to the new radiator, we were able to make most of the western descent on the retarder alone; I barely touched the brakes the whole way down.

West of Auburn you are more or less finished with the grade, and can breathe easy.  Of course, that's when the trouble started.  We were driving merrily along when, in a routine mirror check, I saw smoke coming from the left side of the bus.  Slowing down so I could put more attention on the mirror, I noticed it was coming from the water bay and it looked more like mist than smoke.  We pulled off in Penryn to check it out.

It turned out the fresh water pump was busy emptying the entire fresh tank into the bay.  The pump is connected to the fixed plumbing via a short length of flexible reinforced vinyl hose, and after nine years the hose has become hard and simply popped off the barbs on the pump.  Of course, the inside of the bay was now soaking wet. and we had to turn the pump off, and thus had no fresh water capability.  Plus, we were now out of water, whereas we had come over the hill with one day's worth, just in case.

That pesky hose

Before this happened we had been ruminating about stopping here for the night, just to top up the batteries with the 30-amp electric hookups and fill the water tank without having to find a friendly spigot elsewhere on the route.  Now needing to fix the water plumbing, and learning there was a Home Depot and a Lowe's within a mile of the lodge, we decided to make it an early day and stop here for the night.

Home Depot no longer sells this hose by the foot, so even though I needed only ten inches I had to buy a package of several feet.  I also bought a fresh barb fitting for the end opposite the pump, and within an hour I had the water system back together and both water tanks filled.  As long as we had the scooter out for the hardware run, and not really enough leftovers for a full meal, we also ran out to Olive Garden for dinner. Louise also got her hair cut and is quite unhappy with the result.

Today we have just an hour's drive to Redwood City.  Now that it's mid-day we should also have fewer issues with traffic than we would have encountered yesterday afternoon as well.  Yesterday, we got stuck in a slight rubberneking backup due to an overturned big rig on the eastbound side -- the backup in that direction extended for many miles.

Final day in Orlando

We are at the Elks lodge in Winter Park, Florida (map). There is but a single 15-amp power outlet here (for a suggested donation of $10 per night), and the 12 amps thus provided has been enough to keep us cool for two days, thanks to temperatures topping out in the mid-90s and being parked in a good deal of shade. Daily afternoon overcast and thundershowers have also helped.

We stopped here because it was the closest reasonable power outlet to the tire shop, in Ocoee, about 45 minutes west of here. It's also within scooter distance of the Citrus Club in Downtown Orlando, where we had a nice dinner last night. We opted to eat in the bar rather than the dining room this time, as they had a nice, low-key musical duo, half price wine for happy hour, and free hors d'ouvres. We also snagged a nice window table, likely better than we would have scored in the dining room.

After leaving Fort Wilderness just at our 1pm extended checkout, we rolled straight over to Crawford's Tire in Ocoee to finish up the tire exchange. I was very careful to avoid any need to back up in the process, except for just a few feet while jockeying in to the service bay, because I did not want to scuff our brand new steer tire that was doing temporary duty on the tag axle. We ended up waiting a half hour or so before they got to us, and the same tech who had done the road service call took care of us, obviating the need to explain to anyone else the proper jacking points for the axles, a hard-learned lesson from previous tire-shop experience.

It took them a full two hours to rotate the tags to the steers, mounting one tire and balancing two in the process. The need for and benefits of spin-balancing were made clear when they even had to un-bead one of the freshly-mounted tires and spin it nearly 180° on the wheel before applying weights -- that's a lot of imbalance. I paid $25 apiece for the mount-and-balance, and $25 a side for the rotation, so our two hours was a relative bargain at $100, on top of the $500 apiece, plus tax and disposal fees, for the two fresh Sumitomo 727 tires. We were out for under $1,200 and I counted myself lucky. The road service visit cost us nothing (well, I did tip the tech), courtesy of Coach-Net.

At least one reader has already noted that the tag tires were nearly bald when we scrapped them, and there were even a couple of spots with the belts starting to show. There's a good reason for that, and it starts with the fact that I never, ever put fresh rubber on the tag axle, having learned my lesson after the very first full set of brand new tires I put on the bus. The reason is simple: backing up takes a terrible toll on the tag tires, leaving large angular scuffs on them, and matching wear marks or even gouges in the pavement. This kind of scuffing leads to irregular and premature wear on the tags, and that axle will eat through $500 tires like they were made of Play-Doh.

Because each tag contributes at most 11-12% of the total braking force on the coach (and far less when braking from speed), I don't worry about tread condition on the tags. I pay careful attention to the carcass condition and tread adhesion, because either a blowout or a tread loss can damage other parts of the coach or other vehicles on the road, and I replace the tags before the belts can become damaged or the tread separates. After 48,000 miles on the steer axle, the tires now on the tag will probably be done and ready for the scrap heap within the next 10-15,000 miles.

The reason the tag axle eats tires this way has to do with its "steerable" feature. The independent tag axle suspension has a trailing-arm pivoting mount for the wheel, so that the tag axle steers to follow the path of the coach, like a caster on a cart. This lowers our effective wheelbase to just 18', making the coach highly maneuverable in tight turns. A pair of air cylinders actuates to hold the wheels in the straight-ahead position once the coach gets to 30mph or so, for extra stability at speed. The same air cylinders operate when in reverse, to try to keep the wheels straight while backing up.

That's all well and good when backing up in a straight line, from having just been driving forward in a straight line. Of course, parking a motor coach almost never involves this; rather, getting into a camp site or a parallel parking space usually involves fairly aggressive steering angles. The little air cylinders trying to hold the wheels straight just can't compete with 475 horsepower in low gear trying to drag the wheel a different way, and just as shopping cart casters try to spin around when you suddenly back up, our tag axle will quickly go caddywumpus, hitting the stop on one side or the other and then dragging semi-sideways for the remainder of the reverse maneuver.

If I have the room, I do my best to pull straight forward periodically during these maneuvers, to try to get the wheels straight before doing more damage. This often leads to quizzical looks from bystanders such as shop technicians, to whom it must appear that I simply do not know how to back my coach in anyplace. Another side effect of the off-angle tags is that they try to push the coach to one side or the other, leading to a hefty lean angle even on flat ground. When backing into a camp site, we always "over-reverse" so we finish the maneuver with a few feet of forward driving, to straighten the tags completely.

Now that we have fresh rubber, I feel better about driving all-out, if need be, should we end up being deployed someplace during the remainder of our on-call period for the Red Cross. I had to deal with replacing a tire in the middle of a cross-country disaster-response jaunt once, and it was nerve-wracking (and I had to spring for new rubber, to boot). All that said, there is nothing on the hurricane center's forecast maps threatening the US at the moment, and so we again find ourselves somewhat at loose ends.

Since there really isn't anyplace we can drive from here where it will be significantly cooler or otherwise more pleasant, at least not without remaining in prime hurricane-response territory, we've decided to return to Cocoa Beach for a little while, where at least we can walk each evening, get some swimming in, and bask in the air-conditioned comfort that 50 amps can provide. That still keeps us well-positioned for any disturbance on the east coast, and within striking distance of anyplace along the gulf.

Mouseward Bound

We are at the Elks lodge in Brandon, Florida (map), just east of Tampa. We are here because it is the closest reasonable power outlet to Tampa, and we wanted to spend a few days in the area to regroup. The lodge has 23 RV sites, of which 14 are 50-amp, six are 30-amp, and three have no power. All sites are on firm grass and have water spigots, and most have a picnic table and tiny biting ants. Sites with power are $17.50 per night, a relative bargain in Florida, and the lodge even has a dump station.

There are just three other rigs here, but two of them are clearly just being stored. The lodge also has an RV storage area on the other side of the building, but these two rigs clearly wanted power. The third rig appears to be occupied long-term by perhaps an itinerant worker -- he's been gone all day every day, and so we have mostly had the whole place to ourselves.

We never did connect with our friends here. One couple was tied up with out-of-town guests, and my emails to the other were returned by a spam-bot, so his account has been hacked. We did, however, ride a half hour each way to our club downtown Thursday night -- they were doing a "lobster night" that I did not want to miss. On the way home after dark, Louise's blue ground-effect LED lights earned her a traffic stop by the Tampa PD (I have similar ground-effect lights on my scooter, but they are green). We are not the droids they are looking for, so after running her license and registration they let us move along after she promised to switch them off. I noticed he followed us for a few blocks to be sure. A second cruiser arrived during the stop -- can't be too careful with the bad-ass middle-aged scooter trash.

One of the tasks on my plate while we were here was to find some tires. Our tags are nearly bald, and over ten years old (they were old when I got them). Due to the way that they scrub sideways when we back up, chunks of rubber are now starting to come off the tread shoulders, and I was starting to worry that we could throw a whole tread at speed. Since our steer tires are also nearing end-of-life (at three and a half years and 48,000 miles), I decided to put new rubber on the steer axle, and move the steers to the tire-eating tag axle.

Tires on the steer axle need to be spin-balanced, and I called nearly a dozen tire places before I found one in Ocoee with the correct balancer mounting plate for our large-hub European wheels. They also had a good price on a pair of Sumitomo 727 all-position rib tires, which they have to order. We made an appointment for Wednesday and told them to order two tires.

Between here and Ocoee is ... Disney World. Now, regular readers will know that we were just at Disney in December, and so this would seem to violate our "once every few years" penchant for the place. We know that there are folks who go every year or even multiple times per year, but that's not us. However, this is the first time we'll be there in the summer.

When most people think of Disney World, two of the iconic theme parks spring to mind -- The Magic Kingdom and Epcot Center. We've been to those, of course, along with Disney's other two major theme parks, Hollywood Studios and Animal Kingdom. Perhaps lesser-known, however, is that Disney also has two world-class water parks, Blizzard Beach and Typhoon Lagoon. All of our previous visits have been in the dead of winter, and even though the water parks were open, we're just not comfortable at a water park when the outside air temperature is in the low 70s.

Now that it's in the 90s every day, we though this would be a great time to partake of water park fun, Disney-style. Plus, we have some time to kill, and need a power outlet, so Disney's Fort Wilderness is not a bad stop, albeit pricey at $51 per night (AAA rate). Still, it's the cheapest way to stay on Disney property and get all the benefits thereof, such as extra hours at the parks and access to the Disney Transportation System.

So in a few minutes we will pull up stakes here and head to Bay Lake. I booked three nights at Fort Wilderness and a one-day park pass with two water park add-ons, which ought to keep us busy the whole time. Mindful of how hard it has been to get into the resort restaurants, I also made dining reservations all three nights. Wednesday we will check out and head to Crawford's Tire in Ocoee.

Photo by Samantha Decker, used under a Creative Commons license.

No boat, radio

We are at the Elks lodge in south Sarasota, Florida (map). The last time we were here, we were doing the same thing -- looking at nearby boats. This time, our broker was unable to come meet us, and arranged courtesy showings instead. On Monday we looked at a DeFever 52 in downtown Fort Myers, where parking the bus was a bit of a challenge, before coming directly here and getting squared away. The lodge offers two spaces with 30-amp power, but we've had the place to ourselves since arriving.

Yesterday we took the scooters out and rode the ten miles to the Sarasota Yacht Club on the Ringling causeway to look at a Cheoy Lee 55. As long as the scooters were already out, we also rode to dinner last night at a nearby Thai restaurant. I stowed the scooters well after dark, when it was a few degrees cooler.

Neither boat was in acceptable condition for us, especially for their asking prices. The Cheoy Lee was particularly disappointing, inasmuch as it had been apparently well maintained until a couple of years ago, after which all maintenance stopped abruptly and it's just been deteriorating slowly in the sun and weather -- a real shame. The DeFever was in slightly better condition, but still needed a ton of work, probably to include coring repair on the upper deck and possibly elsewhere.

Unfortunately, we have come to the end of our list. There are no more boats to see here in Florida, or, for that matter, anywhere in the southeast. We've added a couple of long-shot possibilities on the west coast (of the country, not Florida) along with two boats on the gulf coast, including the other DeFever 52, but nothing so far that warrants a mad dash cross-country in Odyssey nor even, probably, a round trip flight from Tampa or Orlando.

As disappointing as it is to be out of options for the time being, I think we are still testing the bottom of this market, by which I mean that used boat prices are not yet on their way back up, in spite of some increased sales activity which I attribute to more realistic pricing. So we do not feel any pressure to close a deal sooner rather than later, and we have the luxury of time on our side -- the right boat for us (at the right price) is still out there, and just has not come along yet. In time, either an acceptable, well-priced example of, say, the DeFever 52 will come on the market, or alternatively one of the boats we've had our eyes on will drop in price to a point where we think it fruitful to make an offer. Time will tell.

In the meantime, we are now somewhat at loose ends. We have no specific plans to look at more boats, and no specific destination in mind or commitments on the calendar until October. Nevertheless, we are on call this month and probably September as well for the Red Cross, so we are reluctant to move too far from hurricane alley. We need to regroup, and to that end we will head this afternoon to a location a bit closer to Tampa, so we can have dinner one evening at our club there and connect with friends while we hatch a new plan.

Photo by macieklew, used under a Creative Commons license.

The oldest city

We are at the Elks lodge in St. Augustine, Florida (map). This is a familiar stop for us, with 30-amp power and water at each site for $20. Unlike the adjacent Anastasia State Park, which is nearly full, we were here with just one other rig last night. They look to be settled in for the long haul. Louise found a coupon for nearby Fratelli's restaurant and we had a nice Italian dinner.

Now that we are heading south down the coast, I thought I'd try to snag a spot at Gamble Rogers State Recreation Area, where the camp sites are basically right on the beach. The earliest availability they have, though, is for a single night on August 2nd. The lodge here was the fall-back on our way to Cocoa Beach, where we have a friend with a 50-amp circuit just across the street from the beach, and with a pool to boot. I expect we will be there through the weekend if not longer. We can use a little break after being scheduled every day for the last few weeks.

One of the next boats we will try to see is not even for sale. It is a DeFever 52 Offshore Cruiser belonging to a member of the DeFever Cruisers club. We met quite a few of the DeFever Cruisers at Cruiser Expo in Stuart a couple of years ago, and when we started seriously considering some DeFever models recently, I paid the dues and joined the group to have access to their discussion forums. We see a couple of DeFever 52s for sale on Yachtworld, albeit in less than perfect condition, and when I made some inquiries about the model, this gentleman offered to show us his boat in Palm Beach so we could at least get a feel for it and see if the model even appeals to us before galavanting off to distant ports to look at the ones for sale. It is a kind offer and we are eager to see his boat.

On our way we will try to look at a couple of boats in the Fort Pierce/Stuart area, and also try to get together with our friends in Vero Beach. I'll be spending the next day or so researching our overnight options in the area now that we need power for the air conditioners -- the last time we were in town was in temperate weather, and we had lots of options there.

Photo by wenzday01, used under a Creative Commons license.

Another one off the list

We are at the Elks lodge in the Orange Park neighborhood of Jacksonville, Florida (map). There are four sites here with 50-amp pedestals and water, along with a difficult-to-access dump station, for $15 per night. One of the sites is permanently occupied by the on-site host; just as when we were here last year, it was just us and the host for the whole duration of our stay.

We arrived Saturday afternoon, got set up, and went in to have a beer and pay for two nights. While at the bar, I got pressed into service to fix the DirecTV setup, which apparently has been out since a storm last week. I think their switch box is fried, but I managed to get it working, at least for a while, by power-cycling the switch, which was miraculous enough, apparently, to warrant free beer. Free or not, we enjoyed chatting with the other Elks in the bar. We had figured to leave Monday morning, since our boat appointments were Sunday afternoon.

I mentioned here on Friday that we'd booked a rental car so we could drive up to St. Marys after Jacksonville, in order to look at yet another boat there. By the time Sunday morning rolled around, however, we had decided against even looking at that boat. We had been less than luke-warm on it to begin with, adding it to the list because we were going to be passing St, Marys anyway. When we reconsidered the cost and logistics of it, it didn't make much sense. Instead, our friends and brokers Curtis and Gill picked us up here at the bus and we drove over together to Lambs Marine here in town to look at the boat here, a 62' custom steel boat.

Even though that boat was well within our price range, leaving us a few dollars to spruce it up and fix some issues, it turned out to need a lot more than we wanted to do to the boat. Right off the bat, it would need stabilizers, and they'd have to go in underneath the master stateroom, a bigger project than ones that go in the engine room. The boat also rolled a lot more than it should have for a 150,000-lb boat sitting in a calm marina. And the amount of finish work required in the accommodation areas was overwhelming. It was a lot of boat for the money, and somebody will get a good deal, but it was not the right boat for us.

Sunday evening, after a somewhat disappointing day, we were considering a plan to bomb down to Fort Lauderdale over the next three days. That's because we got a call from a production company on Friday doing a special for the Travel Channel on custom RVs. They are doing a shoot Thursday of our friend Steve's Neoplan Spaceliner, and he had mentioned us to them, and they thought it would be great to get both of the coaches together in the same shoot. Had we been anywhere else in the country, we could not even have considered it, but here in Jacksonville it was certainly within the realm of possibility.

This is the third time we have been approached by someone doing a Travel Channel RV special. The first time, we went through a number of conversations before finding out that, basically, they wanted us to shoot the footage, write the copy, and then sign over all rights to them. Ha. After being soured by that experience, we basically blew off the next outfit that called. This time we were more open to the idea, because they were clearly sending a film crew, and, hey, we're trying to sell the bus, and you know what they say about no such thing as bad publicity.

We were still vacillating on the idea, in part because we didn't want to steal any of the limelight from Steve and his gorgeous coach. But more because it would mean flying right past boats and/or friends in Fort Pierce, Palm Beach, and possibly St. Augustine and Cocoa Beach. We'd still want to see those boats and those friends, necessitating a follow-up trip right back up the east coast, adding more mileage to see the boats and friends on the west coast later.

What ultimately killed the notion of zipping down to Fort Lauderdale for the shoot, however, was yet another boat, this one in Savannah, Georgia. Yes, we did in fact just come through Savannah last week, and it certainly would have been more convenient to see the boat when we were there. I just did not know about it at the time; my own fault, really.

In addition to our brokers keeping their eyes and ears open for boats based on what they know of our tastes and wishes, I've been scouring FSBO listings and "Yachtworld," what is essentially the worldwide "multiple listing service" of boats for sale, "yacht" or otherwise. Yachtworld is actually difficult to search, unless you are looking for a common model in a limited geography.

Since there is no "search for boats that might interest Sean and Louise" button, instead I need to run two to three dozen different queries each time. Unless you are a broker, Yachtworld does not allow you to store these queries in any way for use later. Instead I need to "modify" the query by hand over and over again, changing makers, keywords, hull materials, and geography to get the results to something manageable. If I don't do it this way, and just go with "common denominator" inputs, the return is in the thousands of results.

What I should have done, while we were in or approaching Savannah, was to broaden the search terms but limit the geography to Savannah alone, which might have turned this boat up while we were still there. The boat was just listed July 14, which is why I did not turn it up when I did my broader queries a bit earlier, when we were planning the route down the coast. So we just missed it. I caught it Sunday night, when I was once again re-searching the entire country after crossing the Jacksonville boat off our list of contenders.

The good news was that Savannah was exactly where our brokers went after they left us here in Jacksonville on Sunday, and we knew they would be there overnight. I caught them early enough to have them go preview the boat while they were still in town. Their report was quite positive and they sent us a number of photos. Based on the positive reviews and their comments. we decided we'd best go see it while we were still close enough to Savannah to do so without spending a fortune.

We decided to re-up here at the lodge for another two nights, book a rental car, and make the round trip drive yesterday just to see the boat. Between the rental car and the gas we spent $80 or so, whereas taking the bus round trip would have been $180. We also stopped at Skipper's Fish Camp in Darien on the way back for dinner.

This is another weird, one-off steel boat, and the asking price is right at the top of our budget. Not surprisingly, the boat needs some work that we could only do if we got it for considerably less money. Since it just went on the market ten days ago, the seller is probably not at a place where he's going to take that kind of offer, so we're just going to let this one simmer. Our experience with these sorts of boats is that there is a very limited market for them, and after this one has sat without any takers for a few months would be a better time to talk turkey. And so in the meantime, our search continues. We knew this could be the outcome, but it still made more sense to see it now when it cost us $80 rather than have to fly in or drive from even further away later, if and when they lower the price.

We turned the rental car back in this morning, and in a few minutes we will continue south, probably to the Elks lodge in St. Augustine. We've had a very nice four nights here in Jacksonville. In addition to looking at two boats and catching up with Curtis and Gill, we also had a nice dinner Saturday night at the University Club downtown, and Monday evening we met our good friend David, who just wrapped up the Red Cross relief operation for Tropical Storm Debby, for dinner at a nearby restaurant. He was kind enough to drive all the way here from Lake City just to see us before flying home to Ohio. We also made it back to the massage school here Monday for a pair of much-needed $30 massages.

Photo by fellinlovewithoutyou, used under a Creative Commons license.

Dropping like flies

We are at the Elks lodge in Charleston, South Carolina (map). We've been here before and remembered it as a nice stop. Parking is free, but there is no power available. Given than it only made it into the upper 80s yesterday, however, we figured we could squeak by for a day on batteries and generator. That costs us just $20 or so, whereas the nearby James Island County Park, where we stayed last year, is a whopping $50 per night.

It was really a short drive here from Murrells Inlet yesterday, just 70-odd miles or so, but we wanted to have dinner at the Harbour Club downtown, a ten minute scooter ride from here. We love riding through Charleston, and dinner was nice. The temperature was even pleasant enough to stroll the waterfront, as a rainstorm just before we left the bus had cooled things down nicely.

Careful readers may recall there was also a boat we had wanted to see in Charleston. It is the same make and model as the one we just looked at in New Bern which had, sadly, gone under contract just before we got there. Our broker had already informed us that the one here in Charleston was in much poorer condition and probably did not even warrant a visit, but as long as we were in town anyway, we asked if he could arrange to get us aboard.

When he contacted the listing broker he learned that, this one, too, has just gone under contract. The worse news is that the boat we wanted to see in Savannah also just went under contract, and one of the boats in Jacksonville as well. This last one is perhaps most disappointing in that it seemed high on our candidate list. Our broker told us he had written contracts on a number of his own listings recently, too, so the market might be picking up.

One of the boats in Jacksonville is still available, as well as the boat in St. Marys Georgia. Yesterday we nailed down plans to meet in Jacksonville Sunday to look at the boat there, our top candidate on our list of boats remaining to be seen. Looking at the boat in St. Marys, though, presented a logistical challenge. Our broker is actually driving up from Ft. Lauderdale, and is continuing on to Savannah after St. Marys, leaving us on our own for getting back to Jacksonville.

We ended up booking a rental car in Jacksonville for Sunday afternoon, so we will drive to both boats on our own and meet him there. After St Marys he will continue north and we will return south to Jacksonville, where I expect we will be staying at the Elks lodge south of town. This whole process would be much easier in weather that did not require air conditioning full time. The temperature will be in the 90s over the next few days, which means we will need it even when we are away from the bus, to keep the cats safe.

In a few minutes we will head south in search of a power outlet. All the state parks between here and Florida require a two-night stay, which would have worked when we were looking at Monday viewings, but moving them up to Sunday is more of a challenge. With the boat in Savannah now off the table, we're not limited to staying within its gravitational zone, but options are few and far between. There are no more Elks lodges with power along this route. Our first attempt will probably be the Camping World in Pooler, which has a handful of first-come, first-served pedestals out front. They fill quickly, though, so we are not getting our hopes too high.

Boats on the brain

We are at the Elks lodge in Wilmington, North Carolina (map). Oddly, this is our first visit here, despite this route down US-17 being very familiar for us by now. We're here principally because they have 30-amp hookups for just $15 per night, and we are once again trapped in the bus by the oppressive heat. The lodge is actually pretty close to downtown, and in nicer weather we'd be tempted to explore.

We arrived shortly after 3 yesterday, and as it is now past 2 we are coming up on nearly 24 hours. We'll roll out of here before we make it a full day, but we're dallying here because we have good WiFi access, and at our next stop we might not even be able to deploy the dish.

That stop would be Huntington Beach State Park, near Murrell's Inlet, South Carolina. I got the very last reservation for tonight by calling several times throughout the morning until they found me an early check-out. We had hoped to spend the night a few miles north at Myrtle Beach State Park, but the enormous popularity of that park during their high season aced us out. Advance reservations were out of the question, as we are just passing through and they require a minimum of two nights' stay.

We'll stop in Myrtle Beach on our way south, anyway, as they have the cheapest diesel we will see on our route, around $3.40 per gallon. I expect the fuel stop to take a half hour, and we should be in quarters at Huntington Beach before dinner time.

With the heat trapping us inside, and good Internet access, I've been dealing with various fallout from our recent "move" to South Dakota. Getting all the T's crossed and I's dotted on the coach insurance policy has been something of a headache, and even AAA managed to screw up our transfer (the Washington state AAA simply changed our street address to SD, rather than transferring our membership to the SD club).

The rest of the time, I've been surfing the 'net looking at boats. One of the consequences of having just looked at three boats in person is that it clarified some thinking, as well as raised new questions. Between looking at on-line listings and then back-up material on brands and models, my brain is nearly full. We are trying to prepare for the next four boats we will see, in quick succession on Sunday and/or Monday. At least two of them are, on paper anyway, excellent candidates for us. I have learned, though, not to get my hopes up too much based on information and photos on YachtWorld, which we have come to refer to around here as FraudWorld.

In order to be in position to see these boats, we need to be at least as far as Savannah by Saturday, and maybe as far as Jacksonville. So rather than delay further here, we're doing short driving days and continuing down the coast. I am hoping for more pleasant weather in at least some of the stops; last night we waited until 10pm to take a walk, and it was still too muggy to be comfortable here.

Photo by [ changó ], used under a Creative Commons license.

Bears repeating

We are at the Elks lodge in New Bern, North Carolina (map). A 20-amp power circuit has been keeping us cool since we arrived Sunday afternoon, at least until an hour ago when we finally tripped the breaker. It's not accessible to us, so I moved the cord to a 15-amp receptacle further away. We're now slowly draining the batteries, but we'll be on the road shortly anyhow.

We had a nice dinner on the water downtown, after running the gauntlet of fiberglass bears and bear flags throughout the city, at Christoph's in the Doubletree. We sat outside, just across the pool from "The Deck," the hotel's outdoor bar, which sported live music, even on a Sunday evening. After dinner we strolled the docks, and spotted one of the boats we were scheduled to look at.

Yesterday morning our broker Curtis picked us up here at the bus, and we drove right back to where we had scooted Sunday evening. The other two boats were a bit further afield, and it was past 1pm by the time we ended up back in town for lunch at Captain Ratty's, a New Bern institution. Curtis dropped us off on his way back to the airport, and we grilled a steak for dinner.

Two of the three boats we saw are actually already under contract, and thus unavailable (although contracts do, occasionally, fall through). Those were a Hatteras 48 LRC, and a DeFever 49 RPH. The third boat, a Symbol 45 Pilot House, which was "on the hard," we judged unsuitable for our purposes for several reasons.

The other two boats, however, are firmly on our short list. This Hatt 48 was the nicest one on the market, and I was shocked to learn that it went under contract at just under 80% of asking. That makes all the other Hatt 48 LRCs on the market now "overpriced," although that can be a negotiating point should we decide to buy one.

We have looked at other examples of both these models before. Yesterday was the first time that we have seen them back to back, as it were. While either of these could be the right boat, at the right price, condition, and amenity list, if all other things are equal, I prefer the DeFever. For one thing, it has a larger and more accessible engine room. It also has walk-around decks on both sides, which we prefer over the Hatt's full-beam salon. And the pilothouse layout is more appealing, with a taller settee arrangement for visibility, and an inside stair leading to the flybridge.

We spent only a modicum of time aboard each vessel, re-familiarizing ourselves with layouts and systems. Since neither boat was really available to us, we did not open all the bilge hatches, or sit in the engine room contemplating systems arrangements and what the boats might need to bring them up to snuff. If the contract on this Hatteras 48 falls through, however, we might come back and do exactly that.

While both models are on our short list, neither calls to us the way the larger, flush-deck boat in Seattle did -- the one we nearly made an offer on back in May. So unless another bargain comes along in excellent condition, our plan is to continue to look at other models. To that end we have lined up boats to see in Savannah, St. Mary's, and Jacksonville for next Monday. So from here we will work our way slowly to Savannah for the weekend, and Curtis will let us know whether to meet him there or Jacksonville. Once we are in Florida we will develop a route to look at boats in Stuart, Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale, and Sarasota, assuming we are not deployed to a disaster first.

Photo by frivolous_accumulation, used under a Creative Commons license.

Farewell, Tri-Cities

We are parked at the Tri-Cities Elks Lodge, in Kennewick, Washington (map). This is our "home" lodge, even though we've only been here twice. I checked in this morning at the office, and they were surprised to learn we were members, but grateful to be able to put a face with the name on the roster. This is likely our last visit to this lodge and the Tri-Cities area.

Yesterday, after a pleasant drive over the Snoqualmie pass, we continued south along the eastern bank of the Columbia, under the old Beverly Railroad Bridge of the Milwaukee Road, and into the community of Desert Aire, where we have property. We yanked our forlorn yet imposing over-sized mailbox off the shared pedestal, and tried to find anyone in either of the two real estate offices on site, to list our lot.

Not only was no one around, but our phone calls went unreturned as well, and so we continued here to Kennewick, stopping off at our mail receiving service, a UPS store, for the first time ever. We've already filed changes of address with most of our correspondents, so there was but a small handful of mail awaiting us.

Oddly, this was the quietest place we've stayed for weeks, even though we are in a fairly developed business and residential area. When I walked around the block last night, I discovered a real estate office just a half block away, and we walked over there this morning to get our property listed. If the folks up in Desert Aire ever call back, we'll have to tell them they missed the boat.

While driving around our "neighborhood" yesterday we noticed quite a few empty lots for sale. Since we bought in 2004, however, the development has "sold out," in the sense that the successors to the original 1969 developers finally sold off all the lots one way or another, back in 2006. Prices have been climbing ever since, and the least expensive lot we found on the listings was $25k. We thus listed ours just under $20k for a quick sale, at least as quick as anything happens in this area.

We also noted at least two lots with nothing but RVs on them, clearly occupied. This is in contravention of the law of the land, about which there had been a very big flap back when we were buying in. We got a steal on our lot, because that very year all the RVers were forced to vacate the development, thus dumping a huge number of under-developed lots on the market. Either the law has changed, or the finicky folks who filed the original complaints leading to the evictions have since left the area.

Now that our business here in the Tri-City area is concluded, we will head east out of town, bound for the Snake River route into Idaho. I suspect tonight will be our final night in Washington for the foreseeable future.

Home of the Pismo Clam

We are at the Elks lodge in Oceano, California (map), just south of Pismo Beach. Yesterday afternoon we backtracked the seven miles here from Spyglass Park in Shell beach, north of Pismo, where we watched the Delta-IV launch from Vandenberg. Even at a distance of 40 miles, the launch was pretty impressive. We could see the glow of the main engines well into the flight, and the rocket left a smoke trail miles high.

We've been here before, and while it is a bit cramped for our taste, it's the best deal in the Pismo Beach area. After getting settled in we pulled the scooters out and rode over to Giuseppe's Restaurant in downtown Pismo -- highly recommended. The lodge's RV area is only about half full, but the other parks we passed seemed pretty crowded, including the state park, the county park, and the three commercial RV resorts on the road into town.

Now that our batteries are fully charged and we have a half tank of clean fresh water, we'll head north. I had hoped to take the coast route, but the whole coast is under a high wind advisory, so we'll take the inland route along US-101 instead.

Photo by lili.chin, used under a Creative Commons license.

Closing in on a boat

We are at the Elks lodge in the Westchester neighborhood of Los Angeles, California (map). This is nothing more than a parking lot, and a not very level one at that, for $10 per night, but it is the closest legal parking space to Marina Del Rey, where we looked at a boat yesterday. We arrived Wednesday afternoon after a short drive from Dana Point, and we had a nice dinner at an excellent neighborhood Italian restaurant, The Good Pizza, a block away.

The trauma and associated anxiety of having the window blow out on the freeway has mostly receded, and we've resigned ourselves to just driving around with the remaining inside pane for the foreseeable future. NeoPart tells me they can get us a replacement window for $2,070, plus freight FOB Honey Brook, Pennsylvania which is probably around $300 to the west coast. The kicker is that it is on a 6-week lead time right now from Germany, and that's to PA -- figure another week for shipping.

If I order it in the next few days, at least I can predict with fairly high confidence that we will be in the Puget Sound area in 7 weeks, and we could have it shipped to Infinity Coach and hire someone in the area to install it. I would estimate the whole project to cost us in the neighborhood of $4,000, and with working glass still in that frame, I'm reluctant to invest that much without exhausting other options first.

At least two people have contacted me with single-pane take-outs, which is always an option, but removing the one pane we have left to install a different single pane of glass seems like a lot of money for not a lot of benefit. One person has contacted me to say he might have the correct window but will not know for sure until he digs it out of his warehouse. And I am continuing to ask around for any other possibilities.

On Wednesday our focus shifted as we arrived at the Nordhavn docks at the Dana Point Marina. We spent an hour aboard a 2002 Nordhavn 46, a later example (hull 76 out of 82 built) of Norhavn's venerable original model. The listing broker hinted that the boat might sell for a good 10% or so below asking, which would make it a good deal, and we liked the layout and feel of this particular boat. We've been aboard perhaps ten of these boats over the last six years, and of all of them, this one comes closest to being the right boat for us, when all factors are considered.



Still, there were some issues with it. It had what we've come to call the "Nordy 46 smell" -- some combination of permeating sanitation hose, bilge residue, and hull outgassing that we have noticed in every example of this model (all of which are at least a decade in age, and some twice that). The rigging is very tall and not easily brought down, making a Great Loop trip an expensive challenge if not entirely out of the question with this boat. It has paravanes instead of active fins. The engine room is cramped. And, while ready-to-cruise, it is at the very top end of our budget, leaving very little to put into changes to make the boat more livable for us. Nevertheless, we had to see it, and it remains a consideration.

Yesterday's boat spoke much more clearly to us. It is a 1983 steel trawler designed by renowned Dutch naval architect Pieter Beeldsnijder and built by the Lowland yard in Holland. It was extensively refitted in 2007 by the previous owner, and today has a nice couple living aboard. It is immaculately kept, and we found the boat open, spacious, and well laid-out. It seems very seaworthy and we like steel-hulled boats. We could easily see ourselves living aboard this vessel, and we are always happy when the boats we look at are current liveaboards, because it means they are constantly in use and maintained, and usually all of the live-aboard issues have been solved in one way or another.



All boats are compromises. This one, too, has some issues for us. For one, the previous owner eliminated the guest accommodations, including the second head, in favor of an office. While we could cram perhaps one guest, two in a pinch, into that office, or perhaps modify the dinette to convert into a berth, our guests would have to come through the master stateroom to use the potty, which is less than ideal, especially on passage. If we buy this boat we will need to spend some money to restore the head and some kind of guest berth.

This boat also has paravanes rather than active fins, but they appear to be much easier to deploy and retrieve, and the rigging also appears easier to lower for either the Loop or the canals of Europe. And with a full canoe stern and high gunwales and transom, it has no swim platform of any kind. Lastly, it had no get-home system, although that did not stop it from coming across the pond on its own bottom. Oh, and it's priced far and above the other four examples of this model currently on the market, all of the same vintage.

Still, there was lots more to like. The canoe stern means she'll weather following seas much better, and we liked the pilothouse and afterdeck arrangement. The master suite is enormous and well laid out. Engine room access is very good. The smooth narrow hull and efficient propulsion give her excellent fuel mileage and range. And she looks, well, "shippy."

We also liked spending time with the current owners. At least, half of them, as the husband was away on business. They are in the market for a larger boat, to accommodate family visits. We enjoyed meeting the wife and hope we stay in touch regardless of whether this ends up being the boat for us or not.

This was the first boat of this kind that we've seen, and so we owe it to ourselves to go and look at one or two of the others on the market. One of those is in the Seattle area, and so it will be a slam-dunk for us to see it when we are up that way in May for Trawler Fest. Another example is in NJ, and if we are going to make an offer on a Lowland, we'll probably want to go look at that one, too, the lowest-priced of the current market. We already have our broker working on setting those up. (Being a Dutch marque, the other two are, unsurprisingly, in Holland.)

We spent so much time on board that we did not arrive back here until past 3, including a quick stop at the West Marine to pick up some rubber-boat cement to repair a leak in our hot tub. So we decided to just spend another night right here. Readers, fellow busnuts, and good friends Tom and Donna, who live just down the coast past the airport, dropped by last night and we all drove back to Marina Del Rey for dinner at El Torito, right on the water.

Today we'll load the scooters back up and head northwest to Ventura. There we will see our final boat of or SoCal excursion, another steel trawler. This one is a one-off custom built by the renowned yard Metalcraft Marine. The asking price is near the top of our budget, but I suspect the boat will sell for considerably less. Custom boats are like custom bus conversions -- perfect for the person who ordered it, and therefore overvalued by same, but just another boat (or bus) to the shopper looking for one, and worth what other similar boats in the market are worth.

Ventura is pretty far from the bulk of LA, and on our route to the bay area. So once we are done there, we'll be heading north along the coast, and done with the LA area. It would have been nice to have a few more days here to see some more folks, perhaps eat at one of our clubs, and maybe take in some of the sights. But boat viewing was the real purpose of the detour, and it does not really make sense to backtrack once we are as far as Ventura.

With all the scheduled visits out of the way, we'll be free to return to our "normal" pace, which means around two hours of driving per day. Slow-rolling up the coast will put us in the bay area towards the end of next week. That should give us plenty of time to visit friends and get some projects done before continuing north to Washington for more boats.

Photos courtesy of YachtWorld

Sierra Vista stopover

We are at the Elks lodge in Sierra Vista, Arizona (map), a familiar stop for us. Since last we were here, the price has gone up to $12 per night, but that includes water and 30 amps of power. After six straight days of boondocking it was nice to be able to top up the batteries (three hours of driving each day is not enough to fully charge them), and we really needed the water.

We had a beautiful drive yesterday past the Animas mountains and Chiricahua Peak in the Coronado National Forest. We did not have enough room in the fuel tank to justify darting across the border in Douglas for $2.90 diesel. Bisbee was its usual self, with loads of folks in the center of town on a nice weekend day, and plenty of motorcycles coming and going on AZ-80. Our approach to Sierra Vista could be gauged by the enormous Tethered Aerostat hovering over the city.

After getting squared away here at the lodge, our friend Julie picked us up and we had a wonderful evening at the house, where she served us a delicious meal and we just sat and conversed for nearly five hours. Early in the evening Glen called in on Skype from his International Red Cross assignment in Liberia, and so we had a chance to catch up with him as well. Glen and Julie were liveaboard cruisers for quite a number of years, and we met them through the Red Cross, so the conversation naturally focused on boats, cruising, and disaster relief.

This morning we mostly caught up on chores while we have the power outlet. At some point I took the dog out for a walk, and no sooner had I opened the door than a group of Elks walking to the lodge from their rigs started barking questions at me about the bus. Not even a "hello," "good morning," or introduction first. I'm more or less used to this treatment now (although one would hope that Elks, as a group, would be more congenial than the random strangers at, say, Walmart), but it usually offends Louise, who Tweeted it, eliciting a number of humorous replies that ultimately led to today's post photo.

After lunch we will get back on the road, heading north and west through Sonoita to Tucson, where we need a few items at Camping World. Depending on how that goes, we'll either end up at one of the Tucson area casinos, or a bit further along near Red Rock.

Burning electrons

We are at the Elks lodge in Perry, Florida (map). The place is hauntingly familiar, as if we've stayed here before, but I could find no record of it in the blog. (We blog to remember; we drink to forget...) Just a couple blocks away is a Walmart where we might have stayed for free, but we opted for the lodge with its 50 amps of power for $15.

That's because it got down to a chilly 21° last night, and we would have spent at least that much in Webasto and generator run time to keep warm. With the 50 amps we were able to run all three electric heaters as well as the water heater. We also needed to top up the fresh water, and before we leave here we will use their dump station, making it a very cost-effective stop.

The lodge also has a full dinner menu many nights, and we opted to have dinner there last night. It was really too cold to walk to town, and we were not really prepared for cooking. Today Louise is making Pasta e Fagioli in the crock pot for tonight, since we've already got the electric power for half of the cooking. The other half will come from the alternator under way.

Today will be our last day in Florida for this visit, as we expect to be in Bainbridge, Georgia tonight. It should be a bit warmer tonight than last, so a Walmart stop will be fine, but I had scoped out a Corps of Engineers park in Chattahochee just in case. The decision point is just west of Tallahassee.

Our apologies to all our Florida friends whom we missed on this visit. We had planned on lingering in the state till the beginning of February to catch Trawler Fest in Fort Lauderdale, but the Red Cross work in Montgomery needs to get done, and we were really the right folks for it. The upshot is that we never made it all the way to Southeast Florida, missing some folks down there, nor did we make it to the northern part of the state east of the panhandle, missing folks there as well. To paraphrase a famous cyborg, though, we'll be back.

Much-needed downtime

We are at the Elks lodge in Pinellas Park, Florida (map). This is a familiar stop for us, as we spent several days here about a year ago. It's a great spot, within walking distance of several nice restaurants, a Target, a Marshall's, and a massage school with $20 practice massages.

We spent Saturday night at the Elks lodge in Sarasota, Florida (map), also a familiar stop. Since the last time we were there, they've turned the shack where the RV pedestals are located into a nice outdoor Tiki Bar, and we enjoyed a cocktail when we arrived Saturday afternoon after leaving our friends' house in Punta Gorda. The lodge charges $20 per night for camping, but that includes 30 amps of power, which we did not really need since we had just charged our batteries. Nevertheless it was a secure place to leave the bus while we were out all day Sunday.

Our friends Maria and James came down from St. Pete Saturday evening and we had a nice dinner at an upscale sushi place in downtown Sarasota. It was great to see them and catch up, and they brought our mail with them as well. Sunday morning, our broker Curtis and his wife picked us up at the bus, and we went straight back to downtown Sarasota to look at a boat, an Ocean Alexander with a pair of beefy engines.

The OA was a great layout and in excellent condition, but this sort of high-power motor yacht is not really what we are looking for. We only added it to the list since we were in the area, and Curtis had to come out anyway to show us the other boat, in St. Pete. That boat, a Hatteras 48 LRC, turned out to be much more up our alley, and we've been noodling on it ever since seeing it. After touring the LRC we had a nice lunch in St. Pete before heading back to the Sarasota Elks and the bus. The Tiki Bar was again in full swing when we pulled out of the lodge late Sunday afternoon to head here.

Out of all the boats we have seen so far, this Hatteras LRC came closest to our magic combination of size, layout, equipment, and price. It has a pair of Detroit two-strokes -- a powerplant with which we have more than a passing familiarity -- a Kubota-powered generator much like the one we have now, enormous fuel tanks, stabilizers, and a full complement of electronics and safety equipment. The engine room is capacious, if a bit low-headroom. And the salon is completely open with no fixed furniture, allowing for a layout of our choosing.

The boat did have a few downsides, though. For starters, it is a 1976 model, and 35 years is really much older than we'd like -- we would not even have bothered if not for the Hatteras LRC reputation. Some of the layout, woodwork, and other facets of the boat seem very dated, and I suspect a good deal of the plumbing is original, as are many of the bathroom fixtures. There are no walk-around decks -- behind the pilothouse, the side decks are unenclosed and only accessible from the cockpit, which is in turn only accessible from the salon. The flybridge is perched squarely atop the pilothouse, a configuration which adds to the air draft, and, to my eye, detracts from the appearance. And the stabilizers are pneumatic rather than hydraulic.

All of that said, this boat has to be a serious contender for us. We would still prefer a Selene 43 or 47 in our price range, which would suit us much better, and we have yet to even look at some of the other options such as a Seahorse 52, a Neville 44, or a later model DeFever 49. We'll probably ruminate about this one for a while yet, and Curtis is looking into how hard it is to access the cranks on the 453 Detroits, which is really a requisite. What that means is that if we do decide to make an offer on it, we'll probably be on the other side of the country when we do -- c'est la vie.

Tonight makes our third night in this spot. When we first arrived I hard harbored thoughts of perhaps getting together with some of our other friends in the area, and possibly another meetup with James and Maria. The reality, though, turned out to be that we both needed the downtime. Other than a single spare day, spent at a truck stop in Punta Gorda, we've basically been either on the move, or at engagements on the calendar, since we left Cocoa Beach three weeks ago.

So since arriving here we have kept to ourselves, and other than going to dinner each night, I've hardly left the bus. I did walk over to the massage school today and had an OK massage from a first-time student. For $15, the special new-customer rate, it's hard to complain, and it did help my sore shoulder at least a little bit.

Tomorrow we will get an early start, leaving the lodge here no later than 9:30 so I can drop Louise off at the University of Tampa for her choral workshop. I'll either head over to the big RV show which opens tomorrow, or, more likely, find a quiet place to park while I try to get some Red Cross work done. We'll try to catch dinner at the Centre Club before heading to a friendly Walmart for our final night in the Tampa Bay area. Thursday we will head north, towards Montgomery.

Photo by paulcole, used under a Creative Commons license.