How not to tour Texas

We missed Texas. We just sorta flew across, you know? Every time Jim would awaken from a catnap, Debbie would have moved the truck and trailer east another hundred miles or so. After one nap we were out of the desert and in grasslands with, get this, water in the river beds. What, not dry riverbeds? If you’ve spent any time in Arizona or west Texas, you know what we’re talking about.

Yesterday morning we drove 400 miles from Mesa, AZ, and entered Texas from below Las Cruces, NM. We then drove another almost 300 miles and were still in west Texas, in Ft Stockton. This morning we left the Wal-Mart in Ft Stockton, TX, at 06:00 a.m. and started our zoom eastward in the dark and cold morning. It stayed dark and cold all morning, too, aided by very nice cloud cover.

The cloud cover is great for easterly sunrise travel, no hour or two of driving into the bright light on the horizon. Unfortunately the lack of sunlight also meant the day didn’t warm up much. Jim checked Texas cities current temperatures at mid-morning — not a single reported city anywhere in Texas, among two or three dozen, had temperatures above 42 degrees. We would have enjoyed even 42 — we were driving through 25 to 30 degree zones all morning.

Every hour or two we stopped and checked the Airstream’s indoor thermometer. The temperature stayed above 40F, not too bad. We ran the furnace for five or ten minutes during two stops, just to warm the plumbing spaces in the cabinets and under the floors, and turned it off again before heading out onto the highway. Great news, no frozen pipes.

Again, we alternated driving a couple of hours at a time each. Interstate I-10 was great, again. And we schemed to zoom through San Antonio and Houston before their rush hours, morning and afternoon, respectively. It worked great, except for I-10 and I-45 ramps construction right downtown Houston. Small delay there and another one in the ‘burbs of Austin. No big deal, and we arrived almost without incident in Sulphur, Louisiana at 17:45 hours Central time. Zoooooom!

Almost without incident, you might ask? Well, there was this one moment in Austin, TX. . . You see, they also have a Clayton Homes i-House in Austin. And, like the others, they stage their iHouse in a prominent place on their lot. Everyone driving by can see it, stare (a replacement for texting while driving, we suppose), and hit the brakes to try and turn in and visit it.

So we have, as of today, seen the iHouse models in Everett, Washington; Mesa, Arizona; and Austin, Texas. Except for Clayton Homes staff, and possibly some support/install staff of Ikea, we think we might be the best visitors Clayton Homes has for iHouses. Unless, we suppose, they more highly regard the visitors who also purchase an iHouse. What do you think?

Back to missing Texas — we didn’t stop anywhere and eat Texas Barbecue. This isn’t actually much of a loss to most North Carolinians, since we have much better BBQ in NC anyway. We didn’t stop and visit the LBJ State Park, although it looked really nice. We would love to return to Johnson City and Fredericksburg some time when we can return. El Paso looked interesting. Tex-Mex food is one of Jim’s favorites, and how did we do sampling this while crossing Texas?

Let’s see, we stopped last night at a Sonic for a burger and fries. That’s it for Texas dining for us — all the other food consisted of snacks in the truck while driving. What would Ray LaHood, our federal Secretary of Transportation say? Well he already did, and we weren’t so much eating as snacking. The difference, we maintain, is the same as the difference between cell-phone talking and talking to each other in person.

We have only 1,000 miles remaining to arrive in Kannapolis. We’re only 150 miles ahead of schedule, not really a very big deal although it took part of three hours extra driving to attain. Before we hit the sack tonight we’ll check our distances to any rush-hour potentials between here and Montgomery, Alabama, and plan tomorrow’s drive accordingly.

Follow us next time, to tour Texas. We’ll take our time in Texas, and enjoy it. Next time we visit Texas, we want stopping time instead of driving time. There’s a lot to see, and a whole lot of it isn’t even on I-10. Don’t tour Texas on this schedule — too fast, too thin, nearly might as well have flown across.

Jim and Debbie
visit us at http://dreamstreamr.com

“The weather isn’t usually this _______.”

Our first week or two in Mesa, AZ, folks told us, “It’s not usually this hot in early November.” This past week the same folks told us, “This is much cooler weather than usual for Mesa.” All across Canada this past summer, locals told us “We don’t think we’ll have much summer this year — the weather is much cooler than usual, corn is late. We should go south.”

And tonight in Ft Stockton, TX, they tell us, “The weather here is usually warmer this time of year.” It is pretty cool, 39F. The forecast low temperature tonight is low 30s, which is okay with us — we’ll set the furnace on low and it will run a few times as sunrise approaches, just to keep the plumbing (and humans) from freezing.

We arrived this evening after thirteen hours very easy driving on as good an interstate highway as we’ve ever driven. Great pavement through Arizona, New Mexico, and our first quarter of Texas, and easy grades. Our plan was to drive 500 miles, sort of a break-in day into our 2,300 mile journey.

We left Mesa at 06:00 this morning, made it through Tucson’s rush hour without incident, slid across Las Cruces and El Paso, then discovered Texas has 880 miles of I-10. WOW! Did you know I-5, from San Diego, California, all the way to the Oregon border atop California above Mt Shasta, is less than 800 miles?

So Texas is wider than California is long. This realization may have been part of why we felt inspired to go beyond our planned 500 miles today. Everything went so well and traffic was so easy, especially after sunset, we just couldn’t stop for 681 miles. And we still have 620 miles of Texas I-10 before we get to Louisiana.

Tomorrow we will try to get through San Antonio just after morning rush hour so we can zip through Houston before their evening rush hour. This fine plan depends upon our getting up and out early tomorrow. The trailer is already all hitched up to the truck, so all we need to do is dress, brush teeth, wash faces, and climb into the truck to go.

A quick sandwich supper and showers tonight and we’re off to bed. We would write more, but really are ready to hit the sack.

And we hope we find out, when we get to North Carolina, the weather isn’t usually this NICE! A White Christmas would be fine, or an unusually warm week would be fine with us.

But whatever the weather, we suspect we’ll hear folks say, “The weather isn’t usually this ________.”

See You Down The Road!

Jim and Debbie
http://dreamstreamr.com
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Six weeks is a long time to stay

It hasn’t seemed so long, but we’d been in Mesa six weeks yesterday. We did have a feeling we’d been here awhile — we’ve both been getting itchy feet for the last week or two. So we started making lists to help get us ready for departure.

That’s right, we’re checking our list carefully before we head back East. We’d hate to get a couple of thousand miles down the road and then realize we left something behind, like the RV. These things are avoidable, you know?

We both are list-makers for any number of purposes. We’ve been accused of being extremely linear (I think it meant I always added 1 + 2 before I did anything to 3). You could, at any given time in our RV, find a couple of active to-do lists and a grocery list (for the things we didn’t find and the things we’ve since discovered we wanted).

We have a pre-flight list of things we’ll do before we leave Mesa. The big things are arranging the radio antennae for the trip, programming the amateur radios for enroute repeaters, setting tire pressures for all eight tires for highway driving, dumping the RV’s two holding tanks, securing all loose items in the RV, donating clothes to local Charity, and getting groceries for the 2,300 mile ride.

We have only a couple of loose ends with the resort park office, like turning in our mailbox key, paying our electric bill, submitting the mail forwarding request. Jim has one more tennis match tomorrow morning. Deb wants to play tennis one more time before we leave.

We’d love to get the truck (and maybe the Airstream) cleaned up before the drive. Clean windows, floor mats, and a clean hood are all we really need — we can’t see the rest of the truck from our truck’s seats anyway. And it’s nice to at least clean the windows and door on the Airstream, if we can’t get it all washed before we leave.

We’re facing a long four days, or we may take a fifth day, for the 2,300 miles from Mesa, TX, to Kannapolis, NC. Yet we’re looking forward to the drive, the scenery, the change. And we’re especially excited about returning to green North Carolina.

Mesa, and Towerpoint particularly, has been wonderful. We enjoyed so much here, from Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesen West to Scottsdale’s Old Town and the Sugar Bowl; desert hiking with friends from Towerpoint and visiting Tempe; finding our way around vast metropolitan Phoenix; playing tennis every day and having nice soaks in the park’s hot tubs.

We’ll miss the tennis club facilities and people, just 100 yards from our RV. We’ll miss the interesting and changing desert weather. We’ll miss our Towerpoint friends and our fun times with them. We’ll look forward to another season here, another time. Now it is time for us to go.

Let’s go somewhere. Six weeks is a long time to stay.

Another tired subject?

This is so important we want to run it now, although we just ran an entire article about nothing but maintenance and inspections. We hope you’re not too tired (so sorry for the pun) to read this one too. We think this is worth spending the several minutes it will take to read it.

We ran our trailer tires, Goodyear Marathons, five full years before we noticed a tread separation — in the width of the tread there was a clear edge where the under-plies had sort of allowed a herniation, if you know what I mean. You can see the article we wrote on it here. It wasn’t a big deal to me because we were due to replace the tires — five years is the recommended maximum life for trailer tires, by most accounts.

We bought trailer tires called Triangle. They are Chinese and the price was great. They are eight-ply rated, but don’t have eight plies. Go figure. We’ve had them most of a year and they look fine. Keeping good tires is good insurance against failures. Air pressure is extremely important, too.

When your tires are low or lose their pressure while towing, you need to know right away. A tire pressure monitoring system like Pressure Pro can tell you almost instantly when a tire has flatted. If you don’t know it and continue towing, the tire tread can become like a whip and destroy the inside of your trailer’s wheel well. We saw a Bambi in Bozeman, MT, with damaged wiring and plumbing in the wheel well. Pretty expensive, I’ve heard the repairs can reach $three thousand or more. You can find other tire pressure monitors at some tire dealers and on Amazon.com. These seem pricey at $400 but remember, you are likely to avert serious damage to your wheel and RV if you quickly detect loss of tire pressure.

I’d ONLY use trailer tires for my trailer. They are designed for the stresses a trailer places on the tires. Trailer tires ARE different. And I do NOT use maximum air pressure on my tires when towing. I use Goodyear’s tire pressure chart to match my trailer’s axles weight and tire to the recommended (by Goodyear, the tire’s manufacturer) tire pressure. Why wouldn’t I believe a huge successful company’s engineering?

So, for my trailer and tire (if a Goodyear), here’s how it would work. I know, from weighing at Flying J or other truck stop’s CAT scales (costs $9.00) my trailer’s weight is 6,000 pounds (ignoring the hitch weight at the truck’s rear — just considering the weight on the tires). If that weight was equally distributed on my trailer’s four tires then I would have 1,500 pounds load on each tire. My tires are ST225 75R 15.

This, according to the chart, calls for at least 30 psi air pressure. BUT, my trailer’s weight distribution is probably not ideal and I’ve never had each tire’s load weighed separately (you can do it, but I’ve never encountered it). So let’s say I have half-again the weight on a pair of the tires (a high enough exaggeration since it means one side of the trailer weighs 4,500 pounds and the other side only 1,500 pounds). So 1,500 plus 750 is 2,250 pounds load on each tire.

The chart for my ST225 75R 15 tires now calls for at least 55 psi. Not the maximum pressure of 65 psi, which is required for the tires’ maximum rated load of 2,540 pounds each.

Okay, what difference does all this make? It impacts the ride harshness in your sweet little trailer and all it’s little storage areas. A hard (high inflation) tire rides harder. I don’t want to jar my trailer any more than necessary. Tires are rated for loads at specified pressures, why try to out-think generations of trained engineers regarding the proper air pressure?

Yet many Airstreamers recommend nothing less than maximum pressure. I don’t know, but I wonder if this might come from towing heavier loads than the rating for their tires, or perhaps their trailer’s tires don’t have as much spare capacity as ours. The proper tire pressure depends upon your tires’ rating and your tires’ manufacturer recommendation. Not what I say. For me, I run 55 psi (cold) air pressure in my trailer’s tires for all towing days. When it is colder outside, I increase the pressure to 55 psi. When it is hotter outside, I reduce the (cold) pressure to 55 psi.

My tire pressure monitoring system makes all this a lot easier, because I can see the tire pressures on display readily before every day of towing without walking to, and removing the cap on, each tire. I just check the tire monitor and scroll through the trailer’s tires. And I see the current pressures. By the way, the Pressure Pro alarm settings for my tires are also based upon 55 psi, the tire pressures when I initialized the control panel. I could change this nominal pressure setting by redoing the setup configuration for the sensors and monitor.

Tires for trailers aren’t permanent things. Trailer tires are damaged by road hazards but also by things you don’t see. And, age is not a friend to your tires. Take care of your RV trailer’s tires, they’ll take care of you. Simple enough!

What did we miss?

Our mail arrives to us approximately once every two weeks, depending upon our proximity to a U.S. Post Office. Anyone using our mail address sends our mail to Livingston, Texas. Our mail forwarder, Escapees Mail Service, receives and holds the mail for us. When we want mail we notify Escapees Mail Service and they forward a package of our mail to the address we provide.

A question we’re asked most frequently is, “How do you, as full-timers, get your mail?” This is pretty neat — we email Escapees and in two or three days we have a couple of new Time magazines, a few journals from our University, the Appalachian Trail Conference, and some shiny RV magazines, maybe a piece of personal correspondence. We’ve done this for all of 2008 and 2009 with almost perfect results.

Our mail travels via U.S. Priority Mail. The packages usually arrive in two and within no more than four business days. Once we waited an extra three or four business days near Charleston, S.C., for our package to arrive as General Delivery for us at the sleepy swamp woods rural post office. Apparently the package was in an unusually unhurried trip from Livingston, Texas, to Hollywood, South Carolina. Our mail forwarding has, with the Hollywood exception, worked so well almost fifty times in a row. Well, almost — but I’ll get back to that.

You sometimes never know what you miss. Sunrises you sleep through, places you don’t stop, parties you cannot make, meetings you skip, movies you don’t know about, meteor showers you sleep through, books you don’t read. These are just part of the journey and we become accustomed to missing some opportunities.

We expect to catch certain things, too. When we’re in North Carolina we WILL enjoy visits with family and friends and eat (and stock up on) Glenn’s BBQ. When we’re in Vancouver, BC, we WILL see our granddaughter (and her parents, you know), and stock up on green tea from Vancouver’s Chinatown. When it’s mealtime, Jim WILL expect to find food somehow. And you’d think missing a meal was a big deal — aren’t we so spoiled?

Let’s see, the milkman doesn’t deliver to our porch anymore. We don’t often find a newspaper on the porch — poor guys cannot locate our porch, it keeps moving. What else do we take so for granted? Oh yeah, the lights turn on and off, and the heat comes on when we’re cold. Water pours from the tap when we turn on the knob. Rain doesn’t leak into our RV. Pretty good.

We also take for granted our mail will arrive from you, and you, and you, and from the bank, and from our government, and from selected magazine publishers. You know when the mail will arrive daily at your house. You might even know your mail delivery person. And you go through your mail, looking at each piece.

You probably first sort between the junk and everything else, and file the junk in the wastepaper or recycling bin. Then you look for your Publishers Clearing House $10,000,000 Big Winner notification. Come on, you do, don’t you? Okay, back to earth. You visually scan the envelopes for bad news — anything from IRS, credit card bills, mortgage payment increases, property revaluations.

Let’s just stack all the new magazines and catalogs over here, a little to the right side on our countertop. These magazines and catalogs are almost all the same shape, all printed on that glossy coated paper, and they stack so well. We’ll enjoy poring through them later with a cup or two of tea.

Where are we now? Oh yeah, we looked through the mail and have absolutely no good news so far. Final pass, let’s look for the best part. Mail from family and friends. Pictures (yes, some people still print and send pictures), friendly notes, a holiday wish and other personals warm our hearts and give us something to look forward to in the mail.

But what didn’t arrive in our mail? Would you really notice if you didn’t have a bill from the hospital today? Or if your tax guy hasn’t sent you a friendly howdy in awhile, who’s waiting for that news? What didn’t arrive?

How would you know what’s missing from your mail? We regularly received a particular RVer magazine, and almost always it was partially shredded before it arrived. Not the other magazines, just this favorite subscription. But it arrived every scheduled month, in whatever condition.

A friend sent us a certified check earlier this year. Or, she attempted to. No, she did send it. It just didn’t arrive when expected. The certified check, sent via Registered Mail, was sent from Victoria, B.C. early in March 2009. Kate sent us an email heralding the check’s flight and providing us a tracking number.

Tracking your mail or packages can be entertaining. Once a day, sometimes twice, you can see your package’s progress from one postal scanner to another. Sometimes your package will disappear for a couple of days as it treks cross-country in one hop. Then you see it arrived on your side of the country, is in your city and, in a day or two, you have it on your kitchen counter.

Kate’s check left Victoria, B.C., readily passed customs, and “left Canada”. You can see how this looked according to Canada Post tracking:

2009/03/12 12:53 VICTORIA Item accepted at the Post Office
2009/03/13 13:42 International item has left Canada

At March’s end we notified Kate we hadn’t seen the package. She queried Canada Post and learned the check arrived in Los Angeles on 2009/03/14, or March 14. This is GREAT, two days from Victoria, B.C., to Los Angeles, California. However, two weeks and two days later we still haven’t received it.

Keep in mind, we wouldn’t know what we were missing but we harbored big anticipation for this piece of mail and maintained two-way communication about it with the sender. We expected to see it, the way you expect Santa to arrive with presents.

Time’s running out. Kate soon would be leaving Canada for the U.S., and we would soon be leaving Florida for Canada. We agreed to wait another four days for the item, then give up on it. Kate would then cancel the bank draft and send another.

A month after we left Florida the item arrived at our Florida park address. Two weeks later the U.S. Post Office sent it to our mail forwarding address. Our mail forwarder sent it to us the next week. This little piece of mail, sent from Victoria, B.C. on March 12, took eight weeks to arrive to its original destination. Pretty sorry, especially since it took only three days to get from Victoria, on Vancouver Island, B.C., to Los Angeles, California. Here’s the tracking information on the second part of the item’s journey:

2009/04/28 13:31 Item out for delivery
2009/05/05 12:14 Item out for delivery
2009/05/19 16:21 Item redirected to recipient’s new address

Had we not known Kate was sending us a check, we wouldn’t have been looking for it. Okay, it arrived eventually (over two months later) and without any sort of explanation for the delay. And maybe looking for mail every day is tantamount to watching a pot boil. Water never takes so long to boil, you know, as when you are waiting. But what about the other things sent to you? How do you know what doesn’t arrive?

As I said at the beginning, our mail forwarding system has worked almost perfectly. And we had great confidence in the Post Office until recently. We asked Escapees Mail Service to send us on November 12 our mail package. Like clockwork, our mail arrived Mesa, AZ two days later. Cool! But it hasn’t been seen since. We’ve had at least a half dozen conversations with the US Postal Service, exchanged several communiques with Escapees, and talked almost daily to our contract Postal Station at our park. What do they say? “We sent it.” “We delivered it.” “We never received it.” All together now, “Nope, not our fault.”

Here’s how the tracking information looks:

Detailed Results:
Bullet Electronic Shipping Info Received, November 12, 2009
Bullet Processed through Sort Facility, November 13, 2009, 12:34 am, NORTH HOUSTON, TX 77315
Bullet Processed through Sort Facility, November 13, 2009, 6:30 pm, PHOENIX, AZ 85043
Bullet Arrival at Post Office, November 14, 2009, 5:00 am, MESA, AZ 85215
Bullet Sorting Complete, November 14, 2009, 10:22 am, MESA, AZ 85215
Bullet Out for Delivery or Available at PO Box, November 14, 2009, 10:52 am, MESA, AZ 85215
Bullet Delivery status not updated as of November 15, 2009, 12:52 am

What happens when the system breaks? Because the package isn’t insured, we cannot file a claim with the Post Office. We don’t know the value (or our lost opportunity when we find out we’ve missed responding to the notification from Publishers Clearing House). Because we don’t know what was in the package we cannot very well tell people, “Would you resend, please”. We wonder if the package will show up, or if someone else needed the magazines more than we.

This episode probably wouldn’t have occurred if we had picked up our own mail as General Delivery from the US Post Office. Why? Because the U.S. Post Office mail tracking stops with the pickup from the Post Office. When an intermediary picks up the mail, the U.S. Post Office stops the tracking. The simplest unit to study in Quality Management is the hand-off. Reduce hand-offs and you can increase not only timeliness but also reliability (spelled, accountability). If we receive our mail directly from the Post Office, we eliminate a hand-off. We just might do this from now on.

The package might show up in another month or two. We may never know. What happened? A priority mail package with two weeks’ mail arrived in a Mesa, Arizona post office for us. This park’s contract postal staff picked up the day’s mail from the Mesa post office for over 1,000 park residents. We never received the package. Next time we’ll likely opt for General Delivery, a direct transaction between us and our U.S. Postal Service.

The US Post Office staff say, “We gave it to your park’s contract postal staff.” The contract postal staff say, “We didn’t get it or it would be in your box.” Escapees Mail Service says, “Talk to the US Post Office.” And we say, “Gee, we wonder what we missed.”

The fine print: This article requires 8 minutes for an average reader, No animals were killed in this research, and we missed two hours of tennis writing this.

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Check it out yourself?

A new (first time RVer) Airstreamer asked me a couple of weeks ago whether they should take their newly acquired 2006 Airstream trailer to a dealer to have it checked out. At first I said, “Do it yourself and don’t take it to someone else.” Then I thought about it and recast my opinion. There are definitely things it would be nice to have done for me, especially if I’ve never done them.

I’ve done some things I don’t really have a hankering to do again. There are people who do these things very frequently and are much more practiced, plus they have the right parts on hand. Later, when I gained more experience with my RV trailer, I was more willing to take on adventurous maintenance tasks like replacing the wheel bearing seals. This is an incredibly messy but rewarding job. I can take or leave it, provided I really trust the person I’d pay to do it.

Back to the question, Would I recommend a new Airstreamer take their trailer to an Airstream dealer to have it checked out? Yes, but not, “Please check everything out”. Rather, I would ask the service department to inspect specific things on my new (or proposed) acquisition.

If I was to take a newly acquired rv trailer to ODM for “inspection”, I would ask for the following:
leak test all propane connections
replace grease seals on both wheels
check brake lining thickness
check electric brakes operation, including break-away switch
check tires tread and condition
re-torque hitch ball to hitch head
check refrigerator for compliance with relevant recalls
re-torque weight distributing hitch attachments
tighten battery connections,
check battery condition

The above are the essential things to inspect for such a new trailer.

A couple of other essential things. Wouldn’t you hate for a wheel to fall off while towing? You need, if you don’t already have one, to get a torque wrench for the trailer wheels. I use an old Sears 150 ft-lb one I bought in 1970 for $19 — I think they might be $25 now.

Plus you’ll need a 3/4″ wheel lug socket (I use a deep socket) and a six-inch long 1/2″ drive extension. These are necessary for trailer owners because your wheels, after any removal/replacement (like grease seals replacement or brake service, for example) must be retorqued at the first 25 and 50 and 100 miles. And we check the torque on our wheels lug nuts at least weekly on driving days. This is very important.

Okay, back to inspection issues.

My opinion, aside from the first-time inspection items above:
Don’t take your trailer to any dealer. No disrespect toward your very good local dealer — we bought our first A/S from them and they performed all our warranty maintenance. We are glad they are in Colfax, NC, serving the Southeast since 1964. Way to go, ODM!

But to me, it is like asking a dealer to tell you if your car is any good after you bought it. You already are stuck with it, and you are asking them to try and find stuff wrong. They might be having a really excellent day and give it a careful review. Or they might be busy and only look over it cursorily. If the latter, then you think everything is hunky-dory and it might not be. If the former then, at the time they look at it, they might find stuff and make good recommendations.

But, it is your trailer and your project. Unlike a car you will be driving and depending upon daily for reliable (and safe) trips on the freeway to and fro work, this trailer is actually a lot simpler and you have rather less depending upon it. It seems complicated at first but it really is nothing compared to the intricacies of any late model (especially post-1992) car. You will become much more knowledgeable and self-reliant if you do the inspections yourself. Find something fishy, arrange for an Airstream friend to help you with looking deeper into and correcting it. Or make an appointment with ODM for the known problem.

I guess I will start building an experienced RVers maintenance checklist. It would include such arcane things as check tightness of sink drain connections, and periodically sanitize fresh water holding tank. There are many many things to include. Or, even better, see my friend Howard Lefkowitz’s expert guide. He has done a fabulous job on this maintenance manual for Airstream trailers.

There are tremendous guides for these self-inspections. One snapshot of such is to see the wire is intact to each drum brake. Crawl (or roll) under the trailer at the back of each wheel’s hub, where the backing plate mounts to the axle. There is a 12 volt wire through each wheel’s backing plate into the drum to power the brake (when you push the brake pedal or pull the emergency breakaway switch). I was peering underneath a year ago and found the wire hanging loose outside the backing plate — clearly not going in there. Easy to spot.

The trailer had just been into service for wheel service (new bearings and grease seals) and the Airstream technician didn’t look and spot this easy-to-find and very important disconnected wire. Not what he was there to work on, you could say. But he was right there, and if he’d been having a good day . . . You are in control of the quality if you do it yourself. And you become better prepared to identify and respond to problems if you learn to look for these simple things yourself.

Where to find the guides? One, for what equipment is recommended, is here. And go to AirForums and search all posts for “checklist”. You’ll get a lot of interesting anecdotes and some nice checklists. Your Airstream owner manual has inspection checklist and maintenance suggestions, as well.

Bottom line:
A great way for RVers to learn more about maintenance and safety with their motor home or trailer is through WBCCI (Airstream owner’s association) rallies, Escapees Boot Camp, FMCA rallies, Good Sam rallies and others. You will find a lot of people who know more than you do and they are very willing to help you.

If you are a first-time RVer (or don’t want to learn because you don’t plan to tow more than once or twice a year) then you may need and want a good mechanic to do all your routine inspections and work for you.

If you have any mechanical inclination at all then you should learn and do all you can about your RV’s inspections and maintenance.

And some states require an annual safety inspection performed and documented by a certified technician. We absolutely recommend you comply with all applicable regulations of your state or province.

We fix what we can. Our RV is our home, and we want to understand and be able to respond to at least 90 percent of what comes up. We cannot fix everything we face, but we assess whether we should or not. If we can fix it ourselves we almost always save money and usually only spend more time. But it is our time and we are willing to chalk it up to “education”. We wouldn’t trade anything for the ability to identify and attempt to correct problems we encounter.

Too early for last minute gifts?

Countdown time! We have only five more days in Arizona before we hitch up and head out. What to do, what to do? Getting ready for the trip, finishing what we want to see and do in Phoenix, Mesa, Tempe, Scottsdale, plus a little tennis every day, PLUS gift shopping — how can we get it all done? Can we possibly do all this and get ready for Christmas? Or, are we already at the point of “frantic last minute shopping”?

Someone said yesterday they are frantically doing last minute holiday shopping. What, did we miss a cue? This is our time for methodically minding wish lists and arranging timely shipping. Stores are currently offering great deals as discounts and free-shipping. And delivery from our shippers is still before December 16 — nine whole days before Christmas!!! As Alfred E Newman didn’t say, “What, me hurry?”

Full-timing offers another dimension to gift management. What if you see the perfect gift during travels to some interesting store in a far away place? Price is okay, and you love the item. When will you be back to Pendleton, Oregon, or Madison, Wisconsin, to this one-of-a-kind store? Okay, act assertively and get the gift six months ahead of time. Now you store it in the attic, or on the top shelf of your closet, or under your bed, right? This works to a limited degree for us in our RV.

We’ve bought a few gifts during travels before these most recent three Christmases. Gift considerations must include whether we can find a place for it for the ensuing time before delivery. Let’s review where we can stash the gifts — in the bin above our bed (great for soft and light-weight things), under the seats of the truck (one cubic foot unused), under the sofa (1/2 cubic foot unused?), on the truck’s back seat (not recommended, eh?), or in the truck’s bed (for heavy or longer items).

What about letting friends store gifts for us? Might work but this can be risky for Jim — he still turns up a gift in a clothes tote or one of his other hiding places, now and then, from birthdays or Christmases past. Bought it, stowed it, and forgot it. What if they leave before we do, or we leave before we remember to reclaim the gift? So we have to keep it simple and should keep a list of where things are. Okay, we have some choices about how to manage early purchases. But there’s so little space for gifts of any bulk.

Our favorite tip this year? We are, for our online shopping, shipping gifts to meet us at our family Christmas destination. We’re visiting with family over the holidays and so are shipping most of the presents to us at the house of Debbie’s parents. We’ll have almost a week to inspect, wrap, and label these presents and get them under the tree.

Lots to do, and we have plenty of time. It’s not too early to shop, never too early for that. But we think it is too early for frantic last minute shopping.

We’re on Holiday, we’ll write when we return

Yeah, we’ve been on vacation for weeks — can’t you tell? Upon arriving at Towerpoint Resort in Mesa, AZ, our life suddenly took a busy turn. So busy, in fact, we quickly resorted to Google Calendar to organize and track our plans. We still get Sundays off after church service, although it’s fun to play ping-pong Sunday evenings at the resort pavilion. The other eight days a week we are playing tennis, hiking, walking, touring the area — almost anything except sitting around.

We’re sightseeing more than we anticipated in our short visit to this area. We thought a month would pass so quickly we would just get a little orientation to Mesa and not really spread our wings at all. Close to true but we’ve done more than we expected. First, we extended our stay from four weeks to six weeks. Second, Jim’s brother, Chuck, flew in from North Carolina and invited us to join him and our nephew, Tom, for our first visit to Taliesen. I’ll talk more about this in a minute.

Same day we joined Chuck and Tom for a visit to In-N-Out Burger, a sort of southwest hamburger chain with maybe two hundred locations. We are proud of them, they only do hamburgers, cheeseburgers, fries, pop, and shakes. No extended menus here — way to go! A big however, however, we were disappointed they don’t even talk chili (did you ask for chili peppers, ma’am?) and slaw (slaw? what?). Okay, we’re still from back east or, as they say around here, “out east”.

Debbie outside Los Olivos Restaurant

We next toured downtown old Scottsdale. Old is a funny term for something invented in the 1950’s, don’t you think? I know, I know, Scottsdale was supposedly founded by Hohokam as early as 800 AD. They left around 600 years later, and Frank Lloyd Wright next showed up in the nearby McDowell Mountains almost 530 years later. And still Scottsdale was almost nothing before the 1950s.

The Sugar Bowl

One “early” institution of Scottsdale is The Sugar Bowl. We had scarcely exhausted our burgers and fries but had to treat ourselves to a visit to The Sugar Bowl. If you’re like us you’ve been introduced to The Sugar Bowl in Scottsdale without realizing it. Bil Keane somewhat regularly includes it in his comic strip, Family Circus. We enjoyed sundaes and a great cup of coffee before striking out again for our walking tour of “old Scottsdale”. But we could have spent this time writing on our blog, eh?

Canyon Lakes hike

We’ve had two great hikes in the Superstition Mountains area with another planned for this weekend. Towerpoint Resort has several hiking clubs and it’s easy to hook up with a group for one day or another of hikes. We appreciate Bill and Diana leading the hikes on Saturdays, we wouldn’t know where to go without them. The hikes have been approximately seven miles at a fairly easy pace, and the weather has been fabulous.

FLLW's office

Our visit to Taliesen was so nice we decided to go again a few days ago. We took a longer tour, for three hours, for more details on the campus, the architectural school, and the history. This was fabulous for us. Some of the information was a repeat of our “Insights” 90 minute tour. The “Behind The Scenes” tour was better all around. We like our tour leader’s presentation better. She seemed to understand her information and deliver it better. And we enjoyed sitting in the Taliesen dining room for tea and pastries as we listened to a Taliesen Senior Fellow, Polly, describe life and work under Frank Lloyd Wright’s direction.

When we’re sitting around, not reading, we’re playing home designer. Our second visit to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesen West included a fun and lengthy visit to the bookstore. We pored for two hours over the large array of books and awarded ourselves an early Christmas present of the Frank Lloyd Wright Companion in cd format. This is perfect for us in several ways.

The book is a collection of a huge number of FLLW’s works. His works are described in text, portrayed in pictures, and defined in graphic floorplan. We sit for hours sifting through many of his house plans.
“What do you like about this one?” “
Could we build this one, and with what changes?”
“Do you like anything about this one?”
“Is this one too large?”

We’re enjoying pretending we’re designing our home, and enjoying the amazing possibilities for a 1,000 SF home. But we could have spent this time writing on our blog, eh?

The Sprites

Who knew George Vanderbilt had a hotel in Arizona? Actually he didn’t, but it is named the Biltmore nonetheless. We had a nice time visiting one evening on our own. Pretty nice place, even if you aren’t spending any money. Frank Lloyd Wright was the consulting architect on this project, and his influence shines through delightfully. It was fun to learn of his use of Sprites in some projects, and we enjoyed a relaxing evening walking the grounds and the lobbies.

iHouse interior

Clayton Homes has recently added an iHouse model in Mesa, AZ. You may remember we wrote two months ago about our first visit to an iHouse, in Everett, Washington. We could have described it as “the house we’re looking for, if we’re looking for one.” But we’re not ready to buy a house since we don’t know where to put it. Shopping is all the fun anyway, and we had a lot of fun visiting the iHouse in Mesa a few weeks ago and again yesterday.

Thanksgiving dinner

What else have we been up to? We had a great Thanksgiving with Jim’s brother’s brother-in-law. David put on a huge spread for family and friends and we are fortunate we could celebrate Thanksgiving with them. We left David’s to drive back to our home and couldn’t find a single game on television. You already know this but we didn’t realize Monday night football (and Thanksgiving football too, it seemed) aren’t on network broadcast television any longer. Is this correct? And if it is, why is it right? Okay, I’m done ranting.

Finally, we’re catching up on our periodicals, a little, in between visits to the tennis courts. You can never really get ahead of them. Hundreds of people are at work all day and night, somewhere, putting together and publishing magazines full of junk. We pay to have almost a dozen magazines sent to us every month. Read one every two days and we’re staying even. But it takes us each a day or two, at least, to get through them because we don’t read magazines for more than a couple of hours a day. Every week we read the entire Sunday newspaper after church and don’t even get to a magazine. And we were behind to start with — so we’re packing a couple dozen magazines at all times around here.

As Barry pointed out in a comment yesterday, we’ve obviously not been putting the needed time into writing. And not because there is a dearth of material here. We could write two times a day, there’s so much to tell. We could write about the variety of Christmas decorations going up on the little park models (mobile homes) throughout the Resort. We can write about the sharp increase in population in the resort as December starts. Or we could write about our resistance to the holiday music starting already at the Resort’s pavilion since Thanksgiving.

Better, we could write about the sweet sights and sounds of life in Paradise. The sun is setting and from our house we can see pink clouds and skies all around us, punctuated with fifty feet tall palm trees softly swaying in the breeze. We have an almost constant symphony of small aircraft softly humming their distinctive notes overhead enroute to or from Falcon Field nearby. Throughout every day we have the clearly sensible temperature rise, peak, and decline as the temperature follows closely the sun’s effect on our little neighborhood.

No promises about any writing. Although we greatly enjoy writing and have a lot of fun reading your comments, we’ve hit a temporary new Mesa mode. We’re thoroughly sucked into the Resort’s tennis club and enjoying every minute of it. We’re enjoying fantastic (if very dry — can you spell dewpoint of 7 degrees F?) weather and new friends, and a very different place. We’re tasting some new foods, or perhaps just old foods much hotter than we’ve experienced before. And we’re making the most of this before we head back east for Christmas and then down to south Florida for Q1 2010.

Sunny greetings from Mesa — We’re on Holiday, and will write when we return. Thanks for waiting patiently as we think about (and experience) what to write. Or, maybe we’re just on the tennis courts . . .

See you down the blog!

Jim and Debbie
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Heavy RFI in Mesa

Radio Frequency Interference, or RFI, is a well-known and much documented problem. RFI hopefully is less common and disruptive than in the old days of amateur radio. Modern amateur radio equipment stays more tightly on frequency and is easier to tune. Modern television and radios are superior to the old ones at discriminating unwanted signal and receiving the desired stations. Why, then, an article now about RFI in Mesa?

We have discovered a pervasive source of RFI in TowerPoint Community in Mesa. The effect seems very strong and widespread throughout this community of over 1,000 people. We wonder it hasn’t been reported, but our research shows no notices on the RFI from in or near this Resort.

N4RTG Debbie and N5RTG Jim have been here eight days. These eight days have seen no (absolutely ZERO) participation by either of us on the regional or national ham radio nets. The week before we arrived to TowerPoint we were daily checking in on the 20 meter RV Service Nets (networks of home-based and mobile ham radio operators checking in and reporting on location, weather, health, and travel plans) out of Minnesota and Tennessee, and the 40 meter Pacific RV Service Nets from Longview, Washington and points in California. We cannot get on the nets due to the interference.

We were able, after just a little consideration and without any fox-hunting, to locate the source of the radio frequency interference. The answer should not have surprised us. Our good friend, W7IRY Bob, warned us of the likely interference problem before we arrived. Some things don’t go away even if you ignore them.

We have spent time, every morning and afternoon, at the TowerPoint Tennis Club. Our morning starts there before breakfast at 0700 hours when we hit for part of an hour before the Club activities consume all the courts. After breakfast we return to the courts to watch competition or team practices.

Monday (yesterday) we spent from 0645 hours until almost 1300 hours (over six hours) playing and watching. It was Jim’s first competition in two decades. He was paired with John H, a classy and very experienced player. They were facing a dynamic duo from a neighboring Resort and, the word was, the duo were undefeated last year. At least Jim would have some good experience from the match, even with the loss.

Jim and John played great together and hit a lot of good shots. Their very worthy opponents lost despite their good play and great chip lobs. Jim and John are looking forward to another match next week and many more over the next winters here. After their match, they grabbed some snacks from the Club kitchen and we watched the remainder of the Men’s and Women’s 3.5 League matches (our team won 12-5 against ViewPoint Resort).

Jim walked back to the courts yesterday late and watched another of the Resort’s teams practicing. He helped shag balls for the team captain and instructor so they could spend more time coaching. We are parked so close to the courts it is hard not to wander over and pick up a game or just watch.

This is a great tennis community with wonderful facilities and people. We’re enjoying more tennis at TowerPoint than we’ve had in many years. Which brings us back to the radio frequency interference.

Our ham radios are mobile, which means they are in our truck and rolling home. We can’t operate HF to reach the regional and national RV Service radio Nets from the tennis courts. Even if we could, we shouldn’t. All this great tennis is interfering considerably and frequently with our ham radio receiving and transmitting. If this isn’t a clear case of radio frequency interference, I’ll eat my hat with the callsign on it.

W7IRY calls the effect “the great sucking sound” of an activity pulling someone in completely. We were duly warned and have no one to blame. Nor would we. We’re having a great time, meeting lots of wonderful people, and getting much more physical activity than we might otherwise have taken. Thanks to the TowerPoint Tennis Club!

How much can you stand?

Tennis twice (or more) a day, swimming and ping-pong every day, lots of good walks, and more Vitamin D sunshine than a person deserves. We’re in paradise. Really! We were chilling out for a few minutes this evening, watching the end of a great sunset, and thinking aloud, “we’ll get used to this level of physical activity in another week”.

We are in Mesa, one of a dozen or so “towns” in Phoenix, AZ. Friends Bob and Faith dragged us down here, carefully warning us it might be noisy, polluted, crowded, and hot or cold. And, they have been coming here six or seven years because they like it so much. They clearly were trying to undersell so we would not have our expectations set too high. Okay, we’ve got to try this for ourselves.

The southwest has been enigmatic for us, something we hear about and read about but never experience. Taliesen West (the Frank Lloyd Wright place), Tempe, Scottsdale, Glendale, Mesa, and many more names and places have twinkled out there for us. Until now. We’re here and don’t notice the noisy, polluted, crowded, or cold. Well, the grocery store this morning was pretty dangerous with little old ladies on electric shopping carts pushing “go” instead of “stop”. And it is definitely on the hot side. But we’re not counting these things, we so many blessings.

No problems with our level of expectations, this place is pretty great. Today, for example, Jim hit tennis balls against a ball machine an hour, we had breakfast, he played one and one-half hours mixed doubles tennis, we picked up some groceries, had a snack lunch, and walked the short distance to the pools complex.

Sunset over Mesa

We played in the pool’s cool water a little while, read awhile, played ping-pong, swam laps, sunbathed under cloudy skies, showered and walked home. Have a drink, listen to a little music, watch the sunset and WHOA! Look at that sunrise, aren’t the clouds beautiful and the tall palms swaying very gently as the wind kisses through them? This is our first outstanding Mesa sunset, and we’ll appreciate additional ones if they are anywhere near this.

We don’t need to go anywhere, we’ve done plenty today, but Debbie wants to practice hitting the tennis ball. We walk the short distance to the tennis complex, turn on the court lights, find a bucket of practice balls. Jim tells Debbie where to start dropping balls and hitting them against the fence. Then she practices her forehand and backhand swings toward the net and hits Jim several times as he tosses her balls to hit. This is great stuff!

Back to our home and we watch the temperature drop, two hours after sunset, to 80F degrees from 92F earlier. Debbie fixed us a wonderful dinner of barbecue from Glenn’s in Kannapolis, NC (with Glenn’s bbq sauce, not Texas-style). Darn, this is the end of our North Carolina BBQ and we won’t be home for five or six weeks yet to reload. Oh well, worse things have happened.

But not in Paradise! Yeah, it’s a little warm and pretty dry. We aren’t spending much on electricity because the heat doesn’t really feel bad if we are in the 5-10mph breezes outside our home. We see 75 degrees twice a day, briefly, and see a whole lot more hotter than cooler.

The resort has a wonderful tennis complex with two or three illuminated courts, a huge practice board, ball machines, shaded grandstand, and teaching programs for all levels players. Jim has readily gained acceptance in the tennis crowd. They have recruited him to play number 1 doubles. The first match, against a neighboring resort, is Monday (hopefully they still like him after the match). Debbie has her first lesson Friday and will be playing as frequently very soon.

We’re going on a 5 mile hike Saturday with another couple, both tennis players too. We want to visit the Ham Radio Outlet (HRO) store in Phoenix, Taliesen West, and Arizona State University, and check out the dancing lessons in the resort and locally, just for starters. We’re going to do all this in just two months, somehow. And, we sense, we’ll be back to Mesa again. We think we can stand this and more.

Mesa is hot!

We arrived Mesa yesterday after a week two hours north, in Congress, AZ. Boy is it hot here, too. Today has been 90F degrees since mid-morning when it was 65F. Jim scurried over to the tennis courts at 0730 hrs, he was the first one today. He hit the backboard a little while before a charitable tennis club member suggested Jim might use the ball machine instead. Dale didn’t say it, but probably the backboard is a little too loud at 0730?

They’re going to rank Jim for league tennis play this week by playing him a couple of times and seeing how he does. He hasn’t played in leagues nor had a ranking since 1992, back in Greensboro, NC, so this will be interesting and fun for him. And Dale did a real sales job on Debbie this morning when he visited us.

Dale had talked Debbie, in just a few minutes, into starting playing tennis this Friday. This afternoon we hit the local sports supply store and found her a pair of court shoes, so she’s ready. We laughed afterward, Dale was a very successful salesman in his previous lifetime and doesn’t seem to have lost any of it.

a little oasis for full-timers

Congress, AZ, was an interesting layover. We were there to await Bob S on his way down from chilly, rainy and snowy Boise, Idaho. We had a few days on our own to explore, and didn’t need a single day more. We spent one half-day cruising the hills around Wickenburg and shopping the Safeway grocery store. The only two things to check out are Wickenburg and Congress and, from what we heard, we missed nothing in Congress.

Wickenburg is surrounded by ranch estates, so to speak. We didn’t see much resembling ranches although there were a few. Mostly we saw very high end houses tucked against the hills on about ten or more acres each. Very nice looking, and they must have very very deep wells. Even the cacti look thirsty.

The green area is all brown

Back to Congress — this is our first Escapees Park to visit and we would be happy to visit again. The rates are low, people are very interesting, and did we mention the rates are low? Campers must be members of Escapees, and willing to camp miles away from anything at all. This park is thirteen miles north of Wickenburg and Wickenburg isn’t much. We met no homeowners who stay year-round in North Ranch Escapees Campground, they mostly stay through the winter months.

Still, there doesn’t seem so much to do here — no tennis, no ping pong, no golf, no swimming pool. Jim asked several homeowners in the development, “What do you do while you stay here?” Several times we heard about panning for gold, four wheeling, beading, quilting, and ham radio. Okay, we like ham radio and traveling. And we really like the folks we met at North Ranch. Maybe we will visit and not stay very long.

So we’re in Mesa — Jim today bought a soft rubber-faced ping pong paddle and played tennis twice, we enjoyed a grilled stuffed chicken breast and salad supper, and we spent an hour at the pools. Yep, pools — four of them. A 25 meter lap pool is maintained at 75F, a conversation pool is 85F, one hot tub is maintained at 98F, and one hot tub is at 104F. We checked out all four pools tonight before hitting the showers then home and getting ready for tomorrow.

Tomorrow is forecast for 94F — we’ll try to hit the pools much earlier and perhaps for longer. Take a good book and a big ice water, and stay awhile. And work a little on our tennis basics, eh?

See ya later,

Jim and Debbie
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Sitting in 75, At Last

We finally found the right latitude

We found this excellent temperature when we parked in Cottonwood, AZ, this afternoon. We have ARRIVED, finally.

Hated to skip through so much beautiful country between Salt Lake City, UT and Cottonwood, AZ. But we had finally reached our limit. We left Vancouver, B.C. and really nice weather approx Sep 12. We enjoyed a week of excellent weather in Washington state. Then we hit Idaho. The temperatures just kept getting colder and colder, day and night.

We had committed to working at the Sun Valley Jazz Festival. We would have fled south earlier, upon encountering unrelenting chilly weather. Instead we stayed in Ketchum for ten days. The place is gorgeous and nice and interesting. We’re glad we stayed despite snow showers, rain, and chilly weather. The music alone was worthwhile, and we enjoyed the music and much more.

A couple of days later we pulled into North Salt Lake City. We found a really excellent RV park, Pony Express, just off I-215. Very well run and nicely designed, this park is a great one and was reasonably priced (for the proximity to SLC) at $28.50. Nice showers, clubhouse, laundry, management, appearance, and location.

SLC was interesting to visit. We spent all our day in the Temple Square, listening to an organ recital on the world’s fifth (?) largest organ in the Tabernacle, touring one of Brigham Young’s houses, the Beehive House, peering up at the Temple, and visiting the Joseph Smith Memorial Center (apparently a very grand hotel from 1910 until 1970). We spent almost three hours on the LDS Church’s computers peering into our past. Very interesting, the information they have collected on us all.

But still it was darned cold. So south we headed. Don’t get me wrong, we understand many of you love your home location whether it becomes cold or not. We both grew up in western North Carolina and experienced a wide range of temperatures. But our present home has wheels. We choose warm weather.

So we thought, anyway. We haven’t done a superb job of attaining 75 degrees. Then again, we would limit our venue terribly if we first sought 75 degrees. Our goal of helping at the Jazz Festival interfered with getting south in time to avoid freezing weather. And the Jazz Festival is totally worth it.

This morning, with the windows frosty on the inside, we decided 24 degrees is just a little cooler than we have to tolerate. So southward we headed, and not by any small measure. The first hour of our drive the outside thermometer varied between 24 and 25 F degrees. We quickly decided to drive until we were in a warmer clime. We found it — Cottonwood, AZ.

We could have felt disappointed to have skipped so much great territory as Zion Canyon, Glen Canyon, Bryce Canyon, and Grand Canyon. Instead, we are expecting to haunt these same areas thoroughly next April and May with the WBCCI Southwest Caravan, led by Jay and Elna Thompson and Winston and Carol Montague. The excitement of seeing all these wonders is still in store for us. And tonight we can sleep at 3,500 feet above sea level instead of 7,000 feet. It will be warmer, thank you.

We’re wearing shorts again for the first time in almost a month. 75 degrees feels good!

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Ya don’ hafta chill the beer

This morning, at 35 F degrees, is our seventh chilly morning yet the warmest. Our nine day stay in Ketchum has been remarkable for several things and outstanding among these is the weather. Sun Valley and Ketchum are beautiful, yes, but pretty darned chilly too. Our standard operating temperature has decreased to the same winter standard we maintained in our sticks and bricks home. A couple of nights ago we were playing cards in our aluminum home and thinking, “68 F feels pretty warm”.

It has rained on us only once, and later the same night we listened to the soft luffing sound of snow landing on our roof. The days have all warmed nicely, the sun has shone brightly, and we’ve enjoyed the nice weather. We’ve stopped our mutinous rumblings about pulling stakes early, hitching the wagon, and heading for Phoenix. Definitely we are looking forward to warm weather but we’ve adapted to this cool autumn setting.

You might be asking, “What about the Jazz Festival? Aren’t they in Ketchum and Sun Valley to attend a jazz festival? Wow! The music is soooooo good, the bands are great, the performances have all been outstanding. We’ve attended one other music fest, the Galax Fiddlers Convention. The Fiddlers Convention sucked us in quickly, giving us a feel of connection with the musicians and their music. Same thing in Sun Valley, maybe more so.

What’s so good about the music at the Sun Valley Jazz Festival? First, the great majority of the music is pre-1950s. The bands are playing compositions from Fats Waller, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, and many many others. Second, many of the best jazz musicians performed here this week.

We’ve listened to, and watched, jazz bands from The Netherlands, New Jersey, Connecticut, Louisiana, California, and Idaho. Today, the last day of the event, we must rank the bands on our eval forms. This is tough but fortunately they allow us to have more than one favorite band.

It might be even tougher if they required us to force-rank the musicians. There are so many outstanding ones on each instrument. We think we heard the best couple of drummers (John Gillick, Danny Coots), several incredible clarinetists (Bob Draga, Louis Ford, Joe Midiri), amazing trumpeters (Brian Casserly, Flip Oakes, Bria Skonberg, and too many others to name), and many other fine musicians and singers.

The only thing to do is to go again. We’ll be in Arizona next month and so will the Jazz Festival in Chandler — is that near us? We’ll be finding out soon. We are also making tentative plans for Mammoth Lakes and Sun Valley for 2010. Who knows, maybe they will be as great as this was?

Our dry-camping experience has increased nicely with the past ten days. We stayed in Camping World’s lot the night before we arrived here. That night and tonight total eleven nights and our batteries and tanks are in great shape for more days yet.

We started with 40 gallons fresh water, and we still have over ten gallons remaining. Our rinse water tank registers empty, because we only have washed and rinsed some pans and utensils, and have used paper plates. We have showered daily at the ski lodges’ excellent facilities instead of using our hot water and rinse water tank. Our black water tank registers half-full after ten days.

Finally, our batteries have restored daily from solar power. We have run the generator once, for two hours, in the past five days and only for a couple of hours the nights before that. Our solar panels have been working great in maintaining our batteries. We haven’t had much extra power for things like charging the laptops or iPod. Instead we have plugged in the rechargeables while the generator is running and gotten everything charged at once.

We’re encouraged by this dry-camping experience because we enjoyed these good results in very cool temperatures. Remember, our byline is Chasing 75 Degrees. We could have, and considered it, left when we found out how cool it was to be. Instead we decided this would be a great adventure. It has been. And we have learned we can do much better much longer than we thought. We’ll stretch further another time, to find our limits on dry camping.

Tomorrow we head for Mesa, Az. We have only fourteen days to get there — we’ll just have to stop along the way and see what we can see. And we’ll need to put the beer in the cooler when we’re there. But until then the beer is cool enough sitting in the carton on the floor. Ya don’ hafta chill it in Sun Valley in October.

See ya down the road!

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Idyllic (and Icy) Idaho

We spent our first night in Ketchum, Id. The high yesterday was in the forties and our low temperature was 22.5 F last night. This morning all our windows are frosty, we heated the interior to a balmy 60 degrees for our Sunday brunch. Deb baked some tender and scrumptious muffins to accompany our eggs and hot tea. We’re basking in the warmth from our Wave6 catalytic heater.

Several times we’ve wondered if we should have installed a Wave4 heater instead. This Wave6, even on low, can drive us outta here with its heat. Not today — sure am glad we have the 6 instead. It’s been on high all morning and feels just fine, thank you.

Funny, our Club’s literature for this Jazz Festival Rally advertised warm Indian Summer week in Ketchum and Sun Valley. Apparently the copy (especially the warm part) is recycled, and they update the particulars as needed each year. A couple of people we’ve met here say they remember it was sometimes warm for the week, they think . . . No harm done — we’re glad we’re here and trying out cool weather camping.

Last night we turned off the catalytic heater and set our furnace thermostat to 45 F, it’s lowest setting, to try and prevent frozen (=burst) water lines. We played cards then Rummikub after 10pm and went to bed. The furnace came on at 2am, then approx once an hour. The plumbing all works this morning! The sun is shining brightly and we’ll turn the furnace off for the day.

We’re off to some of the Trailing of the Sheep activities — we’ll talk to you later. Oh, how about some pictures?

Yesterday we posted text only to catch up a little on where we are. Today let’s see some Idaho pictures from our last week or so. . .

It was only a dusting of snow but we still get pretty excited when we see it

The peaks near Garden Valley had a little more snow than we did

We are going into the Wood River Valley yonder

Sunrise on the ski slopes in Ketchum at River Run, where we are parked

Hemingway Memorial sits at the end of Trail Creek Golf Course

One of the hundred or so striking Sun Valley homes. One (at least) of these had 3 bdrms, 4.5 baths, 4,200 sf, and asking $2.5 million

Just before sunrise in Ketchum, Id

Kold in Ketchum, Id

We camped at Camping World in Meridian (a few miles east of Boise) last night. They have 30amp electric at the sites, the police patrol it a few times per night, and this time (I guess it was just too cold) the irrigation sprinklers didn’t irrigate the side of our trailer.

Yesterday we left Garden Valley and Bob and Faith in the mid-afternoon. It was a wonderful stay, their park is so peaceful and nice, right against a fork of the Payette River. Bob gave us a nice tour of the surrounding areas before we left. Then we drove to Boise and Meridian for the night, hoping Camping World might have our refrigerator part (a lower control board) by now.

Alas, the part is not in and they don’t really know when it will arrive. They will allow Bob to pick it up if it arrives before he heads for Phoenix. Or they can forward it to one of the six dozen Camping Worlds in the Phoenix area if it is too late.

Since we already are there, we back into a spot and hook up our electrical cord to use their electricity and turn on our small ceramic heater. Then we head for our errands. These were alot of fun, to get as many errands done Friday evening as we can. Then we can awake Saturday morning and head for Ketchum.

It seemed like more but we, in less than two hours, bought an air filter for the truck from Schucks, a slate tile for the oven from Lowes, foodsaver (seal-a-meal) bags from Wal-Mart, gas from Fred Meyers for the truck, and groceries from Fred Meyers. Way to go!

We’ve been in Idaho for almost two weeks and haven’t been warm yet. So much for chasin’ 75 degrees, eh? Our exit plan is to hitch up and head south, toward Phoenix, Az. It’s warm there, right?

But we’re looking fwd to attending the Trailing of the Sheep tomorrow downtown Ketchum and the Sun Valley Jazz Festival next week. So let’s give this slightly cooler environment a chance.

We are parked in a big ski resort parking lot — sort of gravel/asphalt and slightly inclined for drainage. Today there are a dozen RVs, seven of them Airstreams. We’ve met some new people both in Airstreams and in other brands. You know, you just cannot tell the difference once they step away from their RV. . .

Drove about Sun Valley and Ketchum today, just to orient and find important stuff. Found the showers and, although we didn’t have our clean clothes with us, took advantage of free availability. Wow, resort showers are just a shade nicer than national park showers. Free warm towels, body wash and shampoo, hot water without putting quarters into a slot, and really nice lotion for post-shower.

Pictures after tomorrow — just wanted to get a leg up on our posts since it has been awhile. See ya down the road!

Jim and Deb
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Backpacking REI in Spokane Wa

That’s right, we took our backpacks to Spokane. The backpacking trip in Cascades North National Park was our first in several years. It went wonderfully but for one thing. Deb’s new backpack just didn’t work.

Her backpack wasn’t entirely new — Jim bought it for her for Christmas 2006. We were already in our full-timing preparations mode, so the backpack went into the camping box with other gear. Tags still on it, the pack never filled with weight, we didn’t imagine it wouldn’t work perfectly. Hey, it was on sale and weighed almost nothing.

One mile into the backpacking trip Deb’s pack straps weren’t comfortable and the adjustments just weren’t going to help enough. Whoops, we should have checked this thing out once or twice. We could have stopped in any of several REIs along the way and traded it in before we ever used it. Lucky we still have the tags, eh?

Full-timing we have get lucky to time our store visits to our routes. We were on our way to Lewiston ID/Clarkston Wa from Grand Coulee. REI in Spokane looked accessible for our combined length of 45 feet (truck plus trailer). And, worst case, we could drive to a nearby Wal-Mart and drop the trailer for an hour while we visit REI.

Luckily, REI’s parking lot was easy to navigate and had seven sequential parking spaces vacant. Into REI’s customer service desk we go with the errant pack. They asked what problem we had with it, accepted it very graciously, and called a staff member to help us with backpacks.

Kit showed up almost instantly and ushered us into her domain. She is very knowledgeable about packs, understood well the problem with Deb’s pack, and helped Deb evaluate several new ones. Kit readily recognized Deb’s pack was wrong from the get-go — it was an oversized daypack. Yeah, a 45 liter daypack? Yep, that’s a big day, too.

The problem was, the pack had pretty good capacity for overnighting but lacked decent suspension, padding, and adjustments. Kit quickly steered Debbie to three excellent choices. Debbie walked the store with twenty or twenty-five pounds of sandbags in first one, then another pack. We ended up with a 65 liter REI pack costing twice what the 45 liter one did. The new pack feels ten times better, Deb says.

The entire experience was superb. Spokane was easy to navigate and, while some on-street parking made for narrow lanes downtown in places, easy to negotiate. REI’s twenty year-old store is not huge but is well laid out and nice inside. The parking lot is very easy to use, even with our 25′ trailer.

Best of all, REI was wonderful about the return. Sure they have this 100% satisfaction guarantee. Seeing is believing — they didn’t fuss, harangue, or in any way make us feel more stupid for having waited three years to return a pack that wouldn’t fit. They were very welcoming and hospitable and helpful. We want to go back.

What in the world is that noise?

Supper just ended, we were enjoying the warm glow from great home dining. Sit and talk a while, and relax before we start the things we need to do next. We can do dishes, update the blog, play a few hands of cards, maybe enjoy ice cream and fresh-baked oatmeal-raisin cookies. But first let’s just sit awhile and talk.

We are parked in a Camping World, Boise, service/sales courtesy area. Pretty nice, this “camping” area. We have 30/50 amp service (much more than we can use), a level site, cannot see the Interstate I-84 and are a block away from the city street accessing this lot. Our RV is tucked between a slightly taller and longer trailer for horses and a much taller motor home.

This feels alright. Chalk up another courtesy camping experience — Wal-Mart, Cracker Barrel, and now Camping World. We’ll take Camping World as the best of the three judging on three hours experience (hmm, maybe you should check back with us for an update after a full night experience here?). We have this full power and a protected parking slip, this is pretty nice.

But then a couple of pickup trucks pull into this parking lot — we see them zip across our front window toward the Camping World gated sales lot. We were finishing supper and ignored them. But as we were relishing the remains of the moment, admiring our empty plates, one of the trucks zooms past again toward the street.

Then we hear a sort of roaring noise. Only from the back of our trailer comes this enveloping sort of whooshing noise. Jim runs back (yeah, two whole steps) and tries to catch what just flew by. Maybe the truck was spinning tires on the wet pavement and we, oddly, heard it? Oddly because we aren’t hearing cars driving by otherwise. Oh well, it’s over.

In a minute or so here comes the noise again. Okay, we both rush to the back of the trailer to investigate. Good thing we aren’t a Bambi 16 footer or a 13′ Casita or Boler — we would surely have tipped it. Just about the time we arrive at the bedroom, the noise subsides. We return to the kitchen and then we hear it go by again. Is it interference in our XM radio station? We aren’t hearing it from the front speakers, so unlikely.

We are in Boise, Idaho, for at least tonight and hopefully no more than two nights in hopes Camping World can remedy our refrigerator malfunction. You might remember our experience at Bucars RV near Calgary to have our refrigerator checked out. The RV refrigerator will operate flawlessly on propane but doesn’t know when to quit when on shore power.

This turned out to be no big deal for our summer’s camping — we stayed in Canadian Provincial and National Parks throughout almost our entire Canadian experience except when a horrific storm drove us from Canada’s Glacier National Park into a nearby private park and when we visited Vancouver, BC, for a week. Our fridge stayed on gas our entire Tim Horton’s TransCanada Tour and would have anyway except for the two brief stays in private RV parks.

We stayed in beautiful Bay View State Park near Mt Vernon, Wa, and in a pair of Washington state national recreation area’s campgrounds, one in the Cascades North and one near Coulee Dam. In the latter two we had no hookups and so no choice but to run the fridge on propane. What we’re saying is, this hasn’t been much of an imposition to have a fridge operating only on propane and not on 110v electric.

Our friends, Bob and Faith Simms, invited us to visit them in Garden Valley, Idaho. We arrived at their house Friday after a very nice and beneficial drive through Spokane (I’ll get back to that) and an interesting couple of days in Clarkston, Idaho (and I want to tell you later about this too).

We have enjoyed a couple of very relaxing, if much cooler than anticipated, days in their small riverside RV park. Both nights have been close to 31 degrees, and today’s high was 45 degrees (Bea, I have now stopped dual (F and C) temperatures :-) And we awoke to snowfall gently and wetly falling on our RV. If it was dryer it would have been a dusting — it wasn’t dry at all.

Jim and Bob spent a good part of the day sitting by, and feeding, Bob’s outdoor fireplace and talking. Debbie made oatmeal-raisin cookies in our little oven, and caught up on our bookkeeping. And we hitched up and left for Boise a little after 1600 hours so we could locate our spot and set up in Camping World’s courtesy spots before dark.

Our service appointment is tomorrow morning and we are full of hopes they will detect the problem promptly and accurately and have the parts on hand and repair our fridge. If not, we’re still on propane — no problem.

What about the mystery noise emanating from our bedroom? A noise like this could drive us batty. We hear little noises from time to time. We recognize most of them soon if not at first. Some noises we don’t perceive until the radio is off, the lights are down, and we are putting our heads on the pillows. The quietest time of the day — and then a clicking noise, or a drip, or a rattle or squeak starts. And Jim will listen a minute or two and hop out of bed to track it down.

Luckily this noise continued long enough for us to resolve before bedtime. Jim was staring out the upper porthole window in our washroom and spots Camping World’s lawn sprinklers irrigating the lush grass behind the adjacent motor home. He quickly realizes the water spray from the revolving irrigation sprinkler is periodically and regularly cycling the rear exterior of our Airstream’s aluminum skin and resonating with a smooth whoosh sound. Mystery solved!

Come home to a hot shower and a cold beer . . .

28 Sep Monday
Six and seven years ago we were backpacking every opportunity we had, doing 30-35 mile sections of the Appalachian Trail in Virginia or North Carolina, and hiking into state parks throughout North Carolina. We were going out two weeks plus odd weekends each year. We would drive three or four hours to a motel, meet a trail shuttle the next morning and leave our car at the trail terminus. The shuttle driver would drop us off thirty or so miles distant and we hike back to our car.

We aren’t fast hikers, despite being very fast walkers. A thirty pound backpack and up/down trails tend to slow us down a lot. So we have a lot of time to dream and talk when backpacking. March 2004 we were bopping down the trail, having a great day, when one of us starts theorizing aloud about another way to stage our backpacking trips. Just idle talk, sort of, about how far we’ll drive to get home after a three or four day hike back to the car.

Our reason for buying our first (of three) Airstreams was, we rationalized, “If we had a camper we could extend our range. A mobile base would allow us, once we retire, to avoid motel fees and we could work any number of new trails from an entirely new section of the country.” And, Jim said, we would return from hiking to a hot shower and a cold beer.

For Jim, the cold beer and hot shower might have been the top selling points. We would hike 30 miles over four or five days and return, elated, to our car at a trail head. We would change into dry (and much fresher) clothes, dig our snack bag from the car’s trunk, and head for home. An hour or three later of driving we would arrive home, grab a cold beer, unpack the car, spread out the gear, start the washing machine, and finally get a hot shower.

The difference with having an RV is in our supposed ability to park the RV in a campground or RV Park close to the trail head. Then, getting “home” to the cold beer and hot shower would be much, much sooner. Oh man, backpacking will be so great if we buy an RV. Let’s do it!

Fast Forward five and one-half years:
We drove from Bay View State Park, near Mt Vernon, to Colonial Creek Cmpgrd in North Cascades National Park. After visiting the dams at Diablo Lake and Gorge Creek, we drove to Newhalem to the Cascades NP Visitors Center. Almost as one, we looked at each other and said, “Let’s get a backcountry permit and do an overnighter.” It made perfect sense, the trail head is 100 yards from our camp site, the truck and trailer seem pretty safe here, and we have all our gear.

The same afternoon Boy Scouts arrived in our campground, two troops full. Campground is now noisy and busy. Welcome to the weekend. Let’s get outta here. We spent the first part of the afternoon digging our gear out of the various storage places in the truck and the trailer’s cargo compartments. The remainder of the afternoon we packed, picked our hiking clothes, and had a nice home-cooked meal.

We hiked from the campground Saturday morning, hiking four hours to McAllister cmpgrd. The trail followed Thunder Creek East-Southeast but changed elevation a lot more than the creek did. We were along the creek for the first fifteen minutes and well above it for all but the last five minutes of the hike.

Old growth cedar and fir trees are magnificent

The size and number of huge ponderosa pines, western red cedars, hemlocks, and Douglas Firs is just astounding. One after another, maybe 150 feet tall, arrow straight most of them, and the bases over six feet diameter. This is so neat, to stand at the bases of these trees and stare upward at the crowns so high above us.

We saw a wild variety of mushrooms — purple, brown on brown, pink, black, red, yellow, white. Some of the purple, with curly lobes, looked like tiny cabbages, others yellow and looked like little coral with their many tiny fingers. Huge flat-topped round ones pushed out of the packed trail dirt, lifting a three inch diameter crown of earth still on top of them, like Atlas holding the earth on his shoulders.

And everywhere, moss covering the ground, the rocks, the fallen trees, extending in all directions up the hill from the trail. This place is wet! The trail is carpeted with fine little evergreen needles and very well maintained. You’d never guess this trail was opened by the prospectors in the 1800s, or improved in the early 1900s by mining developers. It is a simple, clean, narrow trail, very nicely built and while not challenging it is great exercise going up and down the short grades.

McAllister Camp is along Thunder Creek, with a couple of sites fifty or sixty feet above the creek. We chose an upper site. From our campfire ring area we had a gorgeous view of Thunder Creek thundering down toward camp, then around and past.

We had a nice campfire ring, and a mossy bed for tent floor, and Jim hung our food between a couple of trees in his best bear bag job ever. It took a few throws with rope tied around a baseball-size rock, but he had the food bag twenty feet above ground suspended between, and twenty feet from either, tree. But they say New York bears are untying the food bag suspension ropes. So we used a different color rope :-)

Nice campfire at McAllister Camp

Sunday morning we started our campfire from the last night’s fire’s banked coals to warm us a little — it was 41 degrees F when we climbed out of our sleeping bags. After a nice breakfast we broke camp, hiked to Colonial Crk Cmpgrd; made much better time. Apparently we just hiked faster because the trail was net downhill back to Colonial Crk and we didn’t gawk at mushrooms and trees as much. And we were packs off only once, compared to three times on the way in.

Okay, we’re back home without a long drive ahead. Cool. What’s the first thing we need to do? A cold beer for Jim, you betcha! We unpacked, dried and stowed gear, and Jim built a nice campfire with “store-bought” firewood from Newhalem. This was a really hot fire, relaxing to sit outside in the now-quiet cmpgrd (the weekend is over, all the Scouts departed, all the working folks have returned to their jobs), poke at the fire and enjoy talking about the trip. “Hey, this was great, let’s do it again.”

And now for the hot shower — ahhhhhh. A great plan comes together, more than five years after its conception.

We found our permanent home!

22 Tuesday –
Yes, dear friends, Jim and Deb have found the perfect house, and it isn’t our Airstream. We have studied on this since we stumbled onto it on the web in May of this year. Clayton Homes has a very nice website on which we have spent a lot of time poring over this. We extensively played on-line with the options, comparing the different layouts and pondering, to Flex or not to Flex. And now we have a chance to see a built model.

The Tim Horton’s Restaurants TransCanada Tour completed, we were plotting our course south from Vancouver, B.C. It’s high time we returned to the States. We’ve been in Canada for what seems like all summer, although less than two months. And what if, while we were away, President Obama succeeded in enacting universal health care for us but we didn’t return in time to meet the registration requirements? Should we cross the border then head sharply east through the Cascades, or head down through Seattle then east toward our next destination near Boise?

Then Debbie said, “Isn’t one of the Clayton Company facilities in Seattle? Let’s find out if we can tour and look at this thing.” We arranged an appointment to tour the home the next week. The home is in Everett, Wa, and we found an attractive Washington State Park near Mt. Vernon, Wa. Jim’s goal was to keep us well north of Seattle. This is made simpler because there aren’t any state or national park campgrounds near Seattle. The commercial RV park we tried two years ago, Issiquah RV Park, might as well be situated in the median of I-5 for the highway proximity and traffic noise. Let’s stay in Bay View State Park and drive in one day to Everett for this tour.

We drove an hour to Everett to see the Clayton I-house at Heritage Homes. The model we found is, according to sales rep Vic, the second ever built. They cannily have this looker sited on the lot front — Vic told us, “Yes, we’re getting an amazing number of visits because of it. Two busloads of DOE people dropped in the other day and toured through it.” This is not a mobile home, although it is mobilized to deliver from a factory to your site. The difference? A mobile home is lighter weight, and simply more portable. This modular home is wider, at sixteen feet, and much heavier at 67,000 pounds. And it seems, although factory built, just as sturdy and solid as a stick-built — maybe even more so.

Jim built modular homes in the 70’s in Asheville, NC with a local homebuilder, David Tenpenny. Tenpenny’s company prepared a masonry foundation and traditional subfloor system, typical of any modern sticks and bricks house. The crane and truck would deliver and place factory-fabricated wall sections in the proper place on the floor. The Tenpenny work crew plumbed and squared the sections and nailed them quickly, watching for another section lifted by the crane. One day’s work would see a 1,800 sf house framed completely with all exterior and interior walls and roof trusses placed.

The factory-built wall sections were as well-built, or better, than field-built wall sections. Some of the modular manufacturers included extras like notching or boring the wall studs for electrical wiring to speed (and reduce cost of) the field work. The delivered wall sections arrived with sheathing and siding installed, minus the lacing-in pieces to be applied in the field. Tenpenny Company arranged electrical and plumbing rough-in, insulation, then sheetrock and all finish work. The finished result was just as solid as any stick-built house but raised and dried-in in weeks instead of months.

Okay, back to the I-house. This modular house is completely assembled and finished in the factory. It differs from the modular houses we built in the 70’s because it is built to be transported (once) on the road. The I-house isn’t just a “Wide Load”. This is apparently called a “Super Load” in the DOT permitting jargon, because it is sixteen feet wide and sixty-seven feet long. The model we viewed was built in eastern Oregon and had a rough journey to Everett. The trailer under the modular home suffered a broken axle and three flat tires in Yakima, Wa. They stopped and fixed the axle and tires although they had ten more axles and nineteen more tires still good on the ground.

What about the model we saw? We didn’t take pictures because it is staged identically to brochures. All the rooms, wherever you view an I-house model, are supposedly staged almost exactly as the on-line pictures and the print brochures. Clayton Co decided it knew how to market these homes and wanted the “just right” appearance matched in the models everywhere. No problem for us, the uniformity kept the touring surprise-free. The house and the Flex were everything we expected, which is a nice surprise.

We entered the living room through a french door flanked by two fixed french doors, all Andersen with Low-E double pane glass. The bamboo flooring is very attractive. We found simple and nicely arranged IKEA furniture consisting of a comfortable dark brown leather sofa, a coffee table, a not-so-comfortable orange reading chair, and a twelve feet long entertainment center. The living room, dining room and kitchen are open plan and so create one attractive room of almost fifteen feet by thirty feet. Clerestory windows are in the wall above the entertainment center. The opposite wall has two large double Andersen Low-E windows facing the living room.

Upscale IKEA casework and Energy-Star stainless steel GE appliances create an attractive and very functional kitchen. The kitchen has a lot of natural light from a large Andersen Low-E casement window facing into the kitchen and two small windows along the kitchen counter. The wall cabinets have translucent glass panels and might be really cool with a little LED lighting behind. An island sports a large counter, the double bowl sink and a lot of storage below. A huge pantry flanks the refrigerator, opposite the sink island.

A hall connects from the great room, past the bathroom, guest bedroom, and two hall closets to the master bedroom. The hall has natural lighting from three clerestory windows and another two clerestory windows are in the alcove entering the master bedroom. WOW! Great natural light. All the windows plus the french doors on the ends admit a lot of light. A good idea would be to visit this house on a really dark day to see how it feels in articial lighting.

The bathroom much larger than we thought it would be and has water-saving fixtures including a dual flush toilet. One of the hall closets conceals a Rheem tankless water heater, capable of two gallons per minute at a temperature rise of 90 degrees (F). This is plenty of hot water since supply water temperature is around 58 degrees. You would use the 148 degree water (58 + 90=148) mixed with some cold water so 2gpm of hot water is plenty. The roof is heavy duty steel, insulated from the house with R-30 to R-40 insulation (depending upon your locale). The entire roof area is designed to collect rainwater to the two outboard roof leaders for storage and later use on the garden or washing.

The walls are framed with 2X6 studs and the floors with 2X10 floor joists. The owner provides a continuous foundation for this pre-assembled modular home. We want either a crawl space or a garage under the I-house, depending upon the lot. If we extend the garage foundation by the lengths of the two decks (12′X16′ at each end of the house) we can put a long garage underneath. The garage could be a very cool feature — consider an eighty feet long by sixteen feet wide enclosed space under the house. This is long enough to provide pull-through parking for the Airstream and attached truck, with room left for parking our Honda Civic at an end. If we don’t have a sloped lot to provide daylight basement for the garage entrances then we build an interesting garage above-ground somewhere.

I-house also can have a “Flex” addition. The Flex is a 16′ X 16′ room with a partition hiding the lavatory and door to the toilet and tub. The Flex was the most cozy portion — is it because we are used to our little “flex” home? Perhaps, and Jim changed his mind about whether he wanted I-house only or both I-house and Flex. He liked the Flex so much. It adds a guest efficiency/bedroom, a second story deck, a “ham shack” for our radios, maybe an office. You access the second story deck via outdoor steps, and 15′ X 15′ deck is a great space. Overall, the I-house and Flex seem very chic, well-built, solid, comfortable, affordable, and ecologically sound.

An internet search turns up a lot of articles for the I-house. Many (most?) seem to be from the manufacturer’s press releases early 2009. Some of these articles have blog comments following. The comments vary widely between favorable impressions and sharply negative criticisms. The more we re-read the literature, the more our positive impressions are solidified. The wildy critical posts we read about the I-house seem so far off-base it is clear the writers did not see the house first-hand and also apparently did not read the available literature.

We stayed at Heritage Homes almost four hours, including a very quick look at several Marlette homes on the lot. Vic, the sales representative, is very knowledgeable about the I-House and hopeful to start generating sales on these neat homes. We hope so too. We want them, or a good successor, to be available when we’re ready. Big question remains, where? And, when? The Clayton I-house really looks like a sweet answer for future permanent residence for us, whenever that is.

Farewell, O Canada

Our longest time out of the States draws to a close. We finished this visit with Eleanor (well, and with her mommy and daddy) this evening and tomorrow morning head for Mt Vernon, Wa. We entered Canada from northwest Minnesota (bound for Winnipeg) six weeks ago. Our Canada exploration and discoveries have been interesting and fun.

Did you know Canada is larger than the States? Not in population (only 33 million), certainly not in GDP (hey, gdp isn’t as important anymore, just ask Sarkozy) but in land area Canada is second only to Russia, and a little larger than the States. So we have barely scratched the surface, visiting only four of the thirteen provinces and territories (we need to stop sometime and count the states we’ve visited). We hope we can have many more exploration opportunities in Canada.

The most interesting part for Jim has been tracing the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) from its crossing of the Red River to its Pacific terminus in what the CPR General Manager in 1886 decided should be called Vancouver, named after the early European discoverer. Along the way Jim greatly enjoyed reading a book about CPR by Pierre Berton called The Last Spike. The CPR created a backbone for Canada’s western expansion and was instrumental in a variety of interesting social, political, and business developments.

Debbie’s favorite parts have been the Rockies, the gorgeous scenery and the time with Eleanor & Kelsey & Stephen. We’ve had Eleanor full-time this weekend and she has been a joy. She gets us to spend more time at playgrounds and parks than we would otherwise, and we play camping too.

We’ve both enjoyed looking for wifi at Tim Horton’s Restaurants across Canada. There is one more we’ll try before we quit Canada, the one in Aldergrove just above the border crossing at Lynden, Wa. The search may be fruitless but it is a lot of fun. We’d collect photos of our Tim Horton’s Restaurant visits but they all look almost identical. And the pastries and coffee are equally good at all of them.

We’ll stay a couple of nights in Mt Vernon then eastward to cross the Cascades and south to Coeur d’Alene and Boise. We’ll stay near Boise a week then attend the Sun Valley Jazz Festival before we head for Mesa, AZ for November. We’re looking fwd to Thanksgiving with Jim’s brother in Scottsdale before we turn east for the cross-country cruise to Charlotte for Christmas.

Check out our website if you haven’t recently — and check back here, we’re soon going to feature a recent analysis we did of another RV, a self-contained and self-powered class-C with four beds and more storage.

Jim and Debbie
–
locate us here: http://www.findu.com/cgi-bin/find.cgi?n5rtg-9
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visit our website: http://dreamstreamr.com

Jim and Debbie
locate us here: http://www.findu.com/cgi-bin/find.cgi?n5rtg-9
visit our website: http://dreamstreamr.com