Mischief’s Travelblog

A friend wants to borrow the Engine of Mischief for a few days, so we’ve been getting it ready. Last time we went down to Bellingham for mail I spent a half hour or so getting her uncovered, checking the oil & coolant (especially since we’d had to have the radiator replaced over our Christmas run) and finding out (as I expected) that her batteries were dead, dead, dead.

Yesterday Ben (the friend) and I went down to fix the one remaining coolant leak I was aware of and give him the nickel tour. In the course of it (when we couldn’t get the genny to kick over) he looked at the batteries and suggested that we check the water levels in them.

Water levels?

Understand, I’m an information age technologist. LiOn and NiMH batteries do not take water in them. In fact, if you add water to your typical laptop, bad shit happens.

Every one of the batteries (we carry 4: 1 chassis (starting( battery, 2 house (deep cycle marine) batteries, and 1 extra (deep cycle marine) battery exclusively for emergency CPAP use) was down. All but the chassis battery were almost bone dry. Just adding water (no additional charge, no nothing else) made the genny start up like she was new (instead of taking a lot of cranking). I’m betting we are much better set up for boondocking now.

It’s embarrassing that I didn’t know this, or didn’t remember it, or didn’t think about it, or something. But I guess shit happens. And now things are better, and I think the lesson will stick.

I’m setting up some new software here. Everything should be back to normal in a day or so.

update:
software is in, old posts are updated. Whether or not I’ll change the graphics is something to think about — although I think I miss the picture of The Engine at the top. Links are for some other time.
Talk among yourselves.

update2:
it appears that archived posts:
1) don’t display pictures;
2) don’t allow you to see the entire text, just a teaser;
the solution is to click on the title of the post, which then takes you to the individual post, which shows you all the good stuff.

We’d noticed on our run from California that the black tank appeared to be leaking. That is, Sara seemed to be getting a lot of unpleasant material on her windshield as she followed me in her Explorer.

We’d had indications (odor, small amounts of liquid) before that there might be a problem with the tank.

We arranged to have the transmission place drop the Engine off at the RV repair place (Al’s I-5 RV in Bellingham, WA). They were confident that they could handle anything from a simple plastic weld to fabricating an entirely new tank if they couldn’t order one. Of course we gave them Jim’s number for any questions they had or parts they might need.

They pulled the toilet in case the center of the tank had just dropped or the plumbing had separated. Then they dropped the tank.

Imagine their surprise when they discovered that there were two connections on top of the tank which were completely unplumbed. They plumbed them, put the tank back up and the toilet back on, and we were good to go.

When we dumped after our stay on VI, I noticed that the tank drained better and the macerator didn’t start pulsing until much later in the process. The sensor actually showed a better drain as well. I suspect that the openings at the top of the tank were allowing liquids to evaporate and concentrating the solids, making for a more difficult dump.

Time will tell.

We’d had some small problems with the tranny slipping when the vehicle is cold. Only briefly, and only first thing in the morning, and it always worked itself out quickly, usually with a manual shift to first and back to drive.

When we’d had brake work done in Santa Barbara (there’s no entry on this, but I should write one) last spring, we had identified a leak in the tranny cooler. So I made sure before driving that we had enough tranny oil and coolant every time we fired her up.

Sara had requested information on the tranny issues from the GMC list and so we planned to have the tranny looked at. We found a place in Bellingham that could handle the Engine and left it with them.

When they prescribed a rebuild, we made them call Jim Bounds and asked him to evaluate their decision and procedures. He said they knew what they were doing.

It took them a couple of weeks. When we went to pick the Engine up they told us they were concerned about the brakes. They had her jacked up in order to get bubbles out of the lines. I asked the (by now usual) question
“Did you bleed the brakes?” “yup”.
“Did you do it according to the manual I gave you?” “Yup”
“Because if you did it according to the manual, her brakes should be tight now. Did you do it according to the manual?” “Nope. I know how to bleed brakes.”

I would not mind if people just said at the beginning, “no, I didn’t follow the manual”, but it does annoy me when they say “yes” and they haven’t. So I reasoned with him.

The next day they delivered the Engine (with tight brakes, I might add) to Al’s I-5 RV for some black tank work.

I know that it’s been a long time. Some of you (Hi Kerry!) have even written to ask what’s going on.

We haven’t done a lot of GMC travel since my last entry (although I suspect there were entries that should have been written for that trip). We have, however, moved our home base from Half Moon Bay, CA to North Vancouver, BC.

And now we’ve taken our first GMC trip from here. So there will be an entry or two coming up.

I have disabled comments on all entries before 1 February. As time goes on, I will periodically disable comments on entries over a certain age. I’m getting too much comment spam to deal with, and I don’t get all that many comments anyway.

So for those of you who wish to leave comments, I guess you’ll have to track down my email address and send me email instead.

Here’s a map:

create your own visited states map
or write about it on the open travel guide

I promised pictures on this one.

Coming in to Salt Lake City (we’ve had trouble here before) from the east, I lost accelerator function, although the cruise control still worked (until we dropped below 35 mph). Fortunately it was on a relatively gentle slope (up) and we could make it to the side of the freeway before we stopped. I called Jim (of course), but I had a pretty good idea we were talking about a broken cable.
Read the rest of this entry »

Loooooong trip, but we’re home, and we all survived.

As we recover slowly, there are things to fix on The Engine, including:

* the ZipDee awning, which bent some as it collected rainwater. There are instructions on the ZipDee site at http://www.zipdeeinc.com/StraightenBowedRoller.html to fix it, but I need three people.

* the auxilliary shower, which had those same blasted plastic fittings on it as the bathroom shower, needs compression fittings put on it.

* we have a field-expedient fix on the accelerator linkage at the carb, where the bushing disintegrated. I’ll post pictures on this one, because it’s funny.

* back bedroom cabinets have to come down and go back up a little higher.

* gotta put a good thumb hole in the new bed deck hatch and shore up a little back there.

I think that’s it. Nothing really big, except for the cabinets, but it’ll be a bit before I get to all of them (heck, it’ll probably be a bit before I get to *any* of them).

We saw only one other GMC in almost 7800 miles, and we’re not sure if anyone on the GMCnet saw us at all. Hmmmm.

The Cracker Barrel in Dickson, TN, may never be the same. At breakfast (we spent the night boondocking in their parking lot) we were immediately identified as “not from around here” when Sara took her laptop in with her. Not only that, she used it to read email while in the restroom! Certainly not the usual activity here, I’m sure.

…

Between Memphis & Little Rock

It’s Florida all over again. The outside temperature is in the 90s, and so is the humidity, I think. Thank goodness for A/C, but it’s still hot and muggy. The soundtrack from “The Big Easy”, though, goes well with the weather and the terrain.

Somewhere ahead of us there must have been some kind of old car show, because northbound 71 is full of them. (later) Turns out the Street Rod Nationals was in Louisville and ended today.

…

They say the grass is blue, but I gotta say that I think it looks pretty green to me.

…

I can tell I’m in the south. I went in to pay for some gas, and I got “sweetie”‘d, “sugar”‘d, and “sweetheart”‘d within about 90 seconds. She did, though, ask what kind of motorhome that was, and that always gets points from us.

We got our ping looked at and the oil changed. They checked our timing and it’s fine. Their suggestion is that we try a tank or two of premium and see if that makes a difference.

We’ve spent a couple days in the driveway of Sara’s Aunt Suzanne and Uncle Dick. Very nice people. They took us out to the Genesee Country museum (a 19th century “village” and living history museum). We rested. We’ll probably be off on a family mission of mercy to bring Grandma Ruth home to Collinsville, IL, from Sherman, TX, where she was in an auto accident several months ago. Good thing we didn’t have serious plans for the next week or so. We’re taking it easy today on the assumption that tomorrow we leave for a 3-4 day trip to Sherman and one long d*mn day from Sherman to Collinsville with Ruth and another adult to help take care of her on board. Robinson Ambulance Service, that’s us!

Wegman’s. Wow.

In the Bay Area we have some nice grocery stores. We have Petrini’s. We have Molly Stone’s.

In the Northeast there is something better. Wegman’s.

This is a food museum that is to our best stores as the Smithsonian is to the museum in Golden Gate Park. It’s big. It’s beautiful. It’s just down the road. And it’s not hideously expensive.

It’s possible that a Wegman’s within driving distance will be a requirement for my next house.

After soaking overnight with WD-40 on it, the clamp holding the exhaust pipes together was ready to let go. I put on an coverall, set the airbags to “Raise”, and, once there was room, crawled under the basement to fix it.

Aside from getting crud in my eyes when it flaked off the frame and nuts, it was a pretty easy fix. I loosed the clamp, went back out behind the rig, pushed and twisted and generally rammed the tailpipe back in, and got under to tighten the nuts.

One thing I wondered about, though. There’s something (exhaust gases) flowing through these pipes from front to back. At a joint, shouldn’t the downstream pipe wrap around the upstream one (instead of being inside it, providing a shoulder for the flow to hit)? Wouldn’t that make for a smoother flow, without pressure from the gas or liquid to try and unseat the downstream pipe.

Mind you, I’m sure that it was the under construction road we were traveling on that made this problem, but I was just wondering….

They serve breakfast in a barn at the Holiday Trav-L Park at Niagara Falls, and the sole server (cook, waiter, and cashier) is very nice when I ask for extra Canadian change for Kiernan’s collection. We get a Loonie and some Toonies (Twonie?) and we trade a Toonie for another eight quarters. They seem to have money that changes more rapidly over time than we do, or they are doing some sort of Provincial or otherwise commemorative quarters, rather like the US is doing State quarters.

Niagara Falls from the Canadian side is wonderful, but they could do with a little more signage telling you where to park your RV. They have a place, they just don’t tell you that you are going the right way until you’re almost there (whereupon there is a sign that says [roughly] “You’re Not Lost! RV Parking Ahead”). The people mover system is clean and efficient (not that you can’t walk most of it). The grounds are spectacular and well maintained, the staff polite and knowledgeable. I have pictures, but I don’t know if I’m ready to upload them. Well worth the trip into Canada. The buffet at the Table Rock restaurant (our first real sit-down nice meal out since the trip started) was excellent.

The rest of the day did not go so well for us. Maybe we’re just tired. In any case, we pulled over at a tractor supply place to get a new hitch pin for the toad. Someone apparantly decided they needed one of our hitch pins (they fasten the tow arms to the toad) more than we did. We got a near-substitute at the hardware store in Sherman, but we’d like to have the real thing in the right size. They have what we want, and I get it, but we also seem to have water flowing from behind the fridge. I correctly diagnose it as something having to do with the auxilliary shower and open the panel. One of the plastic “pressure fittings” like those we had so much trouble with on the main shower has come loose. AND the other one is leaking. I do the quick fix by folding them over and fastening with a hose clamp. We’ll get real compression fittings next time we can park in a Home Depot or Lowe’s or Menard’s parking lot for an hour or two (to make sure they’re just right and get the fix done).

Several miles later, we hear the most godawful high pitched clanging. I’m driving, so I ask “is that us”? Affirmative. Sounds like we’re dragging, oh, say, a piece of 3″ exhaust pipe. And we are. We turn off the main road, put our emergency flashers on, and I don gloves and look. Sure enough, the last joint of the tailpipe has slipped out of its clamp. I ram it back in.

But our external access panel, behind which are the auxilliary shower, power outlets, and speakers, isn’t there. Either I didn’t fasten it or I didn’t fasten it right, and it’s somewhere on the road between here and the tractor place. Sara takes the toad to try and retrieve it while I go on in the Engine to the park. Just not a good day.

Fortunately, Sara finds the panel right where we were parked at the tractor place, suggesting that, although I remember replacing it, I didn’t. She’s very gracious about it.

I get under the rig and try to loosen the last clamp on the exhaust so I can get the pipe back in, but it’s frozen, so I soak it in WD-40 and let it sit overnight.

Sherman, NY -> Niagara Falls, ONT, Canada

We were 5 minutes from leaving when the last deluge dropped almost 2 inches of rain onto the field on which we had parked. 24 hours later we still could not move. We didn’t get stuck, exactly — the Engine didn’t dig in — but we couldn’t get any traction. We had 6 feet of motion, then the combination of lack of traction and slope left us motionless.

We could wait for the field to dry some more, or we could let the nice man with the big diesel John Deere hook a chain harness to the front frame (under the shrouds, behind the bumper) and ease us out at a slow walk. To give you an idea of just how “not a good off-road vehicle” the GMC is, he stopped when we were on the downslope, 10 feet from the road. The ground under us was solid, and we were pointed gently downhill. The tires still spun — the effort required to move 12,000 pounds was just too much for them to bite. He re-attached and pulled us the last 10 feet or so. We were out.

But we are Not a Good Off-Road Vehicle.

Maybe some tire chains are in order for our next trip here in the summer….

Crossing into Canada (the Engine’s first non-US country! — unless you include Native American reservations) was slightly amusing. I was not happy with the idea of crossing late in the day. We didn’t bring birth certs or other absolute proof of citizenship. We didn’t have notarized papers from Kiernan’s father authorizing us to take him into another country. But the best parks were over there, and we wanted to see Niagara from the Canadian side, so what else are we going to do?

The nice Canadian lady at the border asked if we had any firearms. I said no. She asked if I understood their firearms laws. Having tried to cross once with a CAR-15, I’d had extensive discussions with the border guards before. I recited what I remembered, and she looked taken aback. She then explained that the way it worked was that she asked if we had any illegal weapons, and we said no, and then if she searched the coach and found any, we went to jail. We were good with that, but when she mentioned switchblades, I said “no, but we do have a sword”. That taken aback look again. Kiernan ran and got his newly purchased sword and we offered it out the window to her. “Do you want to look at it?” No she did not. Then she got to asking about Kiernan. Sara and my last names are Robinson. Kiernan’s is Hite. He has a different address on his California ID card. We explain about custody and she asks Kiernan if his father knows he’s going to Canada, and if he can call his father whenever he wants to, and things like that. Kiernan answers like a trooper, including the probable mendacity that his father knows he’s going into Canada today (we don’t think we told Dan that). The nice Canadian lady is satisfied. We move on.

The Holiday Trav-L Park at Niagara Falls is very nice.

We spent 11 days boondocking in The Engine. We learned a few things about doing that.

1) Our whole-house inverter wastes WAY too much power. We need to figure that out. In the meantime, we leave it off except when the genny is on. Our CPAPs can run off a small inverter we keep in the headboard.

2) Camping with a big metal tent and a microwave is so much easier than the old way that we’re not going back. Especially in the rain.

3) a 5 gallon drywall cement bucket can be used to carry black water tank output to a PortaPotty(tm). Maceraters must have been invented by some black water tank God.

4) the genny is quiet enough that people around us won’t complain if we run it for a few minutes to make lunch or an hour to recharge our batteries.

5) Do not, repeat, do not, get up on top of your GMC, spread your arms wide, and shout “I am a Golden God”. Unless you are.

Re-attaching the cabinets was a two-person job. Sara used the power driver to fasten metal screws up through the top of the cabinet into the ceiling rib while I acted as “Jack” and pushed the cabinets as high as I could. I need to take them down when we get home and replace them in just the right spots (they’re not quite even, and the screws through the back of the cabinet still don’t go to the right place), but they are good enough to use for now.

This was a day of “make & mend”, errands, laundry, shopping, and so forth. Sara woke to the sight of our neighbors out in their Ren Faire garb, presumably working on a routine, since the nearby Ren Faire is only open on weekends.

We did laundry at the RV park, got the Engine washed across the highway at a truck wash, and went into Ashtabula to shop (we needed groceries & some repair supplies & plywood to put under the Engine’s wheels where we plan to park, since if it rains during our 10 day stay we might sink).

I also took the opportunity to call Darren Paget of TZE Plus. Darren made our cabinets (but he didn’t install them). If you remember, our rear (bedroom) cabinets are empty because we’re afraid that they will come down on us if we increase the load on them. Darren called me back within a few minutes and we traded descriptions (me of how the cabinets were installed, Darren of how they should be installed). I also called Jim Bounds, who was deeply embarrassed when I described how his crew had installed our cabinets. Jim offered to pay for any tools I needed to fix the problem, which I thought was very decent of him.

In any case, the cabinets were installed…badly. They should be screwed to the aluminum strip at the top side of the coach and then through the ceiling to the rib 12″ from the side wall (a specific location is necessary to know 12″ from where of course) with a total of 4 1 1/2″ metal screws. They are in fact fastened to the ceiling not at all and to the wooden (plywood, I think) strip immediately below the aluminum strip using 2 metal screws (1″, I think). No wonder they aren’t happy.

At some point after we stop I’ll manhandle them back into place and attach them the way they should be. I’ve got 1 1/2″ & 1 1/4″ hex-head metal screws for fastening to the ceiling and I’ll use the existing metal screws for the side wall connection. I’ll need to do both sides, and while it’ll be a struggle in the confined space, I have no doubt that I can get it done.

This morning we woke up early and I set to work on fixing the water problem. First order of business was to cut the new hatch. Since there was already a hatch in the bed panel, I just needed to cut across one side of a square to get a new one. I started my cut at the back and worked forward. My initial cut wasn’t quite deep enough, so I added about 1/4″ to the saw depth and ran over it again. And Lo! and Behold! there was a new hatch, and it was good.

Once I got a pair of wrenches on the old fittings re-connecting to the water pump was no problem. I had Sara turn it on, and I saw it quiver a little bit and we got some water flow in the kitchen! But then the flow stopped. I hooked us up to shore water and had Sara watch while I turned it on. No leaks. So we tried water in the bathroom and it all worked, but the kitchen sink was still no-go. I remembered that someone (probably Steve Simms, our plumber at home) had told me that if there was a flow problem at a kitchen sink, it was probably the grid/nozzle at the end of the faucet. I took it off and tried again, and we got full flow. A quick backward rinse of the grid, and we are fully water functional again!

Sometimes I actually feel like I know what I’m doing with this stuff.

I vacuumed up my mess, fastened the hose under the bed to one of the 2 x 4 supports (there had been a fastener around the hose, but it wasn’t fastened to anything — there was even a 1 1/2″ wood screw lying on top of the propane tank enclosure that I used to attach it), put the new hatch back down & screwed it in place (eventually we’ll clean that space out and use it for more storage, and then we’ll put a thumb hole in the hatch and keep it unfastened, but for now let’s keep it solid), and we’re ready to start our day, and we have water!

We drove the day through to Geneva, OH, a total of about 600 miles today. Sara did a lot of it. We landed late at a little place just south of Geneva and slept really really hard.