And nineteen new birds.
Trip28
Saturday.
The Bounder has landed. We’re home. We meant to do a lot of things we didn’t get to. We meant to read a few books. There wasn’t time. We meant to clean out and rearrange a couple cabinets. No time. We were going to explore more of the gulf coast west of the central panhandle. I was going to get a haircut. We were …… I’ve got a lot to say about diet. Not diet as in losing weight, but diet as in what works and makes sense as a way to eat. We’ve made serious progress on the food front. Didn’t get to it. I have a rant about prescriptions drugs. And blood pressure. …… I was going to tell you about the lady with the trash and the black vulture…. Next trip I guess. No trouble with the holding tanks last night. The water system works just fine this morning. This tow setup works so much better since I switched over to the portable jumper battery for the 12 volt outlet. The brakes are always there to help. The turn signals and brake lights always work. Now if I can just remember this setup for the next trip…. On the drive out we didn’t see any harrier hawks. This drive back, they’re all over like they should be. Good to see. I explored Stratton Colorado last night. I went for a run and explored the whole town. I ran from the freeway to the railroad tracks. It got pretty rural after that. I ran through downtown. I ran through residential. It was Friday night. My observation is: there are a lot of bored teenagers in Stratton Colorado on a Friday night. Zooming around in cars and pickup trucks. Wearing letter jackets. Pretty much going in circles. Driving home on the last day of a trip, the mind tends to wander off and reflect on the time spent and lessons learned. My mind did that. And I find I’ve been thinking a lot about God. Over the course of this trip, I’ve come to realize that people in the south are a lot closer to God than we are in other parts of the country. I know this because God talks to them. Not just talks, but God takes out billboards. All along the interstates and highways are billboards from God. God has a lot to say to the people of the south. There are a lot of suggestions about how we should spend our time, what we should and should not do, and where we should or shouldn’t do it. I’m not sure any of it was meant for me. That part was not really clear, but since God didn’t put up any of those billboards in my neighborhood, I might be exempt. At first, I thought it might be a trick. I thought these billboard might have been put up by someone who claims to know what God wants us to do and not do, and is just telling us for God. But no. That is clearly not the case. I’m a careful observer, so I read these billboards fully as they went past. The proof is right there in the bottom right corner. A signature. That’s right, a signature, and it’s not the signature of an individual or a group, they are all signed, “God”. I didn’t see any billboards from God in Eastern Colorado. I did see one that said “think moisture”, but it wasn’t signed by anyone. One hundred fifty miles for the day. 5,200 for the trip. The dog was good. The cat shedded. Lots of adventures. A great trip. We’re home. Back to the land of reality and racquetball.
Trip26
From: Steve Taylor [mailto:spt@thetaylorcompany.net]
Sent: Saturday, January 25, 2003 5:23 PM
To: Becky Alexander (E-mail); Christieaitken@Hotmail.Com (E-mail); Matthew Taylor (E-mail)
Subject: trip26
Thursday. Good night. Great park. Up and off early as usual. Judy was out walking Annie last night. Pitch dark forest. No moon yet. Guess who bounds out the darkness, startles Judy, and disappears again. Darned cat! Neither one of us knew Rags was outside. Ten minutes of messing around in the dark, and he was restored to captivity. Rags of the jungle. I have another question. Is it possible to have bumpy air even if it’s not windy? We’re used to wind buffeting, but this morning, we were driving down the highway in Texas, doing a lot of steering because of said buffeting, when we drove past a flag and noticed it was hanging limp. All the tree branches were still, all the grass alongside the road was still. There was just no wind, except it felt like I was driving in very puffy wind. Lots of steering required. The road surface was good, so it wasn’t that. Can air just be bumpy? Today, a tow car solution. This is one of those days that the battery in the tow car died within the first couple hours. So we’re driving along pulling a dead toad. The brake buddy can’t help, it can’t get any power. Inspiration struck. Not only that, but it missed Judy and hit me! The portable jumper battery! We’ve been using it to start the car, then taking it back into the motorhome to recharge. Then we let the car run to recharge that battery for awhile. Then the car battery drains dead again. Life can be simpler. Forget the car battery. Let it just stay dead. I took the portable jumper battery out, placed it between the car front seats, and plugged the brake buddy into it. It worked all day. The brake buddy was always there every time I stopped. Tonight I brought the portable battery back into the motorhome to recharge overnight. We’ll have functioning tow car brakes the rest of the way home. We have stopped for fuel in Alabama, Texas, and Oklahoma since we left Florida. We gas up once a day, about once per state while we’re on the move. Every gas stop in Florida involved disabled pump handles so the pump wouldn’t stay on unless you were right there holding it. Every gas stop since, has not had a single pump handle disabled. Whatever the explanation is, it only applies to Florida. And something else. We motorhome drivers know something the rest of you may not. You may never have had occasion to put $50 or more in your tank at one fueling. You pay at the pump. You put the gas in the tank. But the pumps are programmed to stop at $50. That’s about 35 gallons of gas. You can have Judy go inside and get them to override, but that can be complicated. The simpler solution is to just shut the pump off, replace the handle, and start over with the credit card. Two passes always takes care of it for me. So I wonder. What did that store just accomplish with its $50 limit? Was I safer? Was it at less risk for fraud or theft? Somebody knows. Anybody think the store employees know? Mystery clunk. We solved a motorhome mystery. Actually, we solved it our last January trip, but just didn’t get to it in our reports. We were driving along the highway in Texas, north south road, with a wind from the northwest, listing slightly to starboard. We had given the antenna an extra crank to eliminate the thumping from the roof. We had put a basket of potatoes on the dinette table to eliminate that creaking noise. We had closed all the drawers and doors that had popped open. The step was up. Everything was screwed down tight, but there was still one more noise. An irregular clacking noise that was coming from off on the right somewhere, but we couldn’t tell exactly where. We chased and chased that noise, and finally figured it out. The last unidentified motorhome noise. You know that hanging flap of metal on the outside by where the door opens? Do you know what it is for? Do you know what it is called? You might think it is for holding the door open when you don’t want the door to slam closed in the wind, but that’s not it, although that may be an incidental secondary use. That flap of metal is called a clapper. It’s primary function is to slap irregularly on the outside of the motorhome with the proper resonance so you will think that noise coming from the wall of the motorhome is actually coming from inside the motorhome. No State Park tonight. We stopped at a new private park alongside the highway, just inside Kansas for the night. I think last year, this park was a wheat field. Everything around it is still a wheat field. It was cold and clear all day. Tonight it is about ten degrees outside. It was a brief run tonight. To satisfy curiosity, we’ve been moving one of the temperature sensors around to different outside compartments to see if they stay warm in really cold weather. It’s sixty degrees on top of the holding tanks. It’s forty-five degrees inside the coldest compartment. Looks like everything is OK for the night. Four hundred miles plus. Tomorrow. Burlington Colorado. Mountain Standard Time.
Trip27
From: Steve Taylor [mailto:spt@thetaylorcompany.net]
Sent: Saturday, January 25, 2003 5:38 PM
To: Bill Taylor (E-mail); David Taylor (E-mail); Tom Taylor (E-mail)
Subject: trip27
Friday There are a lot of things I don’t know. Here’s one of them. Wait! Here is something I do know first. The Bounder has two furnaces. At least one of them blows heat into the storage compartments below, to keep them warm while it’s keeping the inside of the motorhome warm. OK. Here is the part I don’t know. Or didn’t know before last night. I didn’t know whether both furnaces heat the storage compartments and holding tanks, or just one did. I guessed one heater was enough. I was wrong. We carry a finite amount of propane. When we’re plugged in, we have an unlimited amount of electricity. I chose to let the electric heater take care of the front of the motorhome last night, and turned the front furnace way down. I set the rear furnace to keep the bedroom and compartments warm. The inside of the motorhome stayed just like I wanted. The water pipes in the cabinets underneath froze. We turned off the electric heater. We turned up the furnaces. We were still frozen. We waited. We turned on the hot water heater. It was still ten degrees outside. Nothing helped. We left the furnaces turned up, and drove off down the road, north into temperatures continuing in the teens. We turned left on Interstate 25, and drove across a couple temperature gradients. At two o’clock in the afternoon and fifty degrees outside, we got water. Finally, everything thawed. It’s going to be ten degrees again tonight. We’ll turn the electric heater off and leave both furnaces on. No way we could have any more trouble, given all we know now. When you drive a car, or a small motorhome, it doesn’t matter where you stop for gas. With a larger motorhome, it gets more difficult to make everything line up properly at the gas pump. When you have a larger motorhome, and are towing, it gets critical. You can’t afford to get into a situation where you have to back up to get out. The towing mechanism is designed to pull. It is not designed to back up. So what is the logical next step? You go to truck stops. Right? Bigger things go to bigger places. It’s odd, though. We go to truck stops to get more room, and we don’t necessarily get more room. At truck stops, there are all these diesel pumps with all these trucks lined up, but they’re only for diesel trucks. There are gas islands, but they tend to look a lot like traditional gas stations. The pumps can be aligned so the patrons drive parallel to the convenience store, or they can be lined up perpendicular to the store, so a car can make the turn to get out, but anything larger is stuck. We don’t know why, but it seems like truck stops tend to have the perpendicular pump alignment least favorable to us. Flying J truck stops have a separate island for RVs to fill up, but we often find them cluttered up with RVs, diesel pickup trucks, and boats. And it’s not pay-at-the-pump at the RV island. We find that even though we’re driving something the size of a truck, we’re better off cruising gas stations looking for the proper pump alignment rather than just stopping at a place designed for trucks. When we’re hooked up, and we’re in a dry climate, we tend to run a humidifier at night. It doesn’t take much to change this small dry space into something more humid. When we get up the next morning, the windows tend to be pretty foggy. We have to let the defroster run for awhile before we can see. When it’s really cold out, we have wonderful ice patterns all over the window insides. No problem. We start the motor and let the defroster run before we drive. No problem until we got to the toll booth for the Kansas Turnpike. I rolled up, unlatched the slide window next to me, and found it frozen shut. I struggled with it briefly, then Judy threw Annie off her lap, went out the door, around to the toll booth, and picked up the ticket. That took care of it. At least until we had to hand over the ticket and pay our toll at the other end. So down the toll road we went, generator running, electric hairdryer right behind my head, Judy thawing out the window frame so we would be able to get off the toll road when it was time. Russell Kansas. Post rock capitol of Kansas. Do we all know what post rocks are? Judy and I didn’t before we started driving through Kansas. There are miles and miles and miles of fence posts here made out of stone. They must just pop out of the quarry the right size and shape for barbed wire fence posts. They must have been more economical than wood posts, nice tall straight trees being in short supply here. Still, it is hard for me to imagine the weight of a wagonload of fence posts made out of stone. Or a distribution system that would economically get those posts very far from their origin. Know how, every time you’re driving the freeway on a trip, you run into that one car that doesn’t want to drive faster than you, it just wants to drive in front of you? You’re on cruise control and you catch them, so you pass them. Next thing you know, they’re passing you back. Inevitably, continuing at the same speed, you catch and pass them again and again. Somewhere, in a long trip, it always happens. Except this trip. Not once have we leapfrogged with a car or truck. Stopped at a private park we’ve been to before in Stratton Colorado. We’re three hours from home. It should be another cold one tonight. Four hundred miles plus. Tomorrow. Home.
Trip24
Tuesday.
We left. This morning was Pelicans in the Mist. Sea fog, swamp fog, then forest fog. The drive from St James Island to Apalachicola was wonderful. The plan was to stop and visit with Shaffer in Ft Walton Beach. Problem is, we stalled so long with the birds, manatees, and pelicans, in lower Florida, we’re pretty much out of time. That and the fact that when we called from Ft Walton Beach, he and Jo answered from Panama City, an hour back to the east. We visited on the phone and drove on. We’re down to making miles. We’re not making miles like the Shaffers do. They drive this straight through in their motorhome. Come to think of it, why do they need a motorhome at all? We drove dark to dark. We covered a fair amount of miles, but there were a lot of stops. Not stops to goof off, stops to do stuff. We stopped for gas and moved on. We stopped for lunch and to send a few emails. We stopped to talk to the office. We stopped for propane. We stopped after a few more miles and turned the propane back on. We stopped at five minutes after five at our favorite Louisiana yard statuary place that closes at five o’clock. Couldn’t see what we wanted through the fence anyway. We stopped for dinner in a restaurant, but it was too smoky. We stopped for the night and Judy made dinner. We stopped a lot. Did I already rant about Florida being a tobacco state? Everywhere you go, seems like everyone is smoking. Either that, or it’s still 1950 here. Clearly, this is not Boulder. The non-smoking consciousness has had no impact here whatsoever. Well it’s not just in Florida. It’s everywhere down south. Go into a restaurant and ask for the nonsmoking section and you’re likely to get that Deliverance stare. Found a shortcoming for the Brake Buddy. It is not good for use with tow cars that have sissy batteries, or gremlins in their electrical systems. Cars like, say, a 1999 Ford Windstar. The Brake Buddy plugs into the cigarette lighter of the car, and draws current to replenish the compressor when it brakes. So you have the ignition key on, the brake lights and turn signals flashing as appropriate, and the compressor recharging after it mashes on the brake pedal (at appropriate times). The weenie battery in the Windstar fades by the second or third day, the entire electrical system conks out, and after that, you’re towing a dead toad. More than once, on other trips, we’ve ended up disconnecting, turning the motorhome around, and jumping the battery from the motorhome to the Windstar. That doesn’t feel quite right, turning the mother ship around to come back and fire up the dinghy. So we bought a Delco rechargeable jumper battery. It plugs into 120 volt, or 12 volt in the motorhome to recharge. When you need it, it delivers lots of amps for a quick start. So once a day, I’m out back, jumpstarting the dinghy, so everything will work right, at least for a while. I think I like the sound of brother Bill’s system better. The compressor resides on the motorhome with his setup. All it sends to the car is compressed air. The compressed air ties into the hydraulics for his tow-car brakes. Everything is under the hood or under the motorhome. Capitalism. Free enterprise. The American way. The billboards along the southern interstates are not our finest hour. There are, apparently, a lot of casinos along this southern corridor, and they are all, apparently, giving away free money. We’re getting closer to home. We’re out of the Eastern Time Zone. It was fun being there for awhile. We’re only one hour away now, on Central Time. I was surprised by a road sign today. It said turn on headlights when it’s raining. How could Florida take a chance like that? Just, turn on your headlights? Then I realized we were in Alabama, not Florida. I guess Alabama dares to live life on the edge. Four hundred fifty miles. Baton Rouge. Leaving. Driving. Stopping. Driving. Stopping. Driving. No new birds. No drugs. No drooling. Tomorrow. Louisiana, Texas, and Oklahoma.