Trip26

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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.