Update: Mom, Hummingbird and Travels

Lots of response to my Facebook posting last Sunday about mom being in the hospital.  Family and friends from all over gave “likes” and made “comments” about mom.  I am sure the “likes” were that they ‘liked the fact she was ok’, and not that they ‘liked the idea of her going to the hospital’.  It’s that “facebook” thing you know….  However, one set of comments seemed to be a bit amusing, and I will share that with you in a bit.

But just so everyone could see mom in her normal condition, the two pictures above were snapped this afternoon when mom came over to read to Euleda, who is Arny’s mom. 

My brother Bob has two children, Jennifer and Jared.  I have talked about the story when I took both of them, along with my oldest brother Jim’s daughter to the park here in Sacramento around 1978 and Jennifer pushed Jared into a duck pond….anyway, I did not realize that the effects of not being able to breath air for those few seconds would have such a devastating effect on little Jared who made this comment in Facebook about his grandmother who was taken to the hospital with chest pains, just to find out it was Gastritis.

Don’t know what got into his head thinking that someone died, let alone his Gma, but his response to my response is just darn funny!

    

The resident Hummingbird, the one which rules the feeder, likes to perch himself up on a twig where he can watch for intruders.  A couple of days ago I saw him up there grooming himself, and got these shots…the last of which included a rare picture of his tongue. 

A couple of weeks ago while in Oregon we realized we were not charging the house batteries (the ones that all the 12v lights and other electrical items run off of in the motorhome).  Took it to a shop and we could not figure out where the battery isolator was located.  Well, there it is, right there in the main cargo bin by the front door.

A bit easier to see now that I removed a few things.

When I removed the door guess what I found?   It was the biggest RATS NEST that I had ever seen.  That entire compartment behind that pull-off door was full of leaves, tissue paper, droppings, AND, the most important thing, NOT ONE CHEWED UP WIRE!!!!

But this one red wire, the one with the white arrow pointing to it above, was very loose.  The rat was long gone, the nest is long gone and I filled the hole where he easily got in from the frame at the top, marked by a blue arrow.  Now this was definitely a Florida mouse because all the leafs were Florida trees and not California trees…and they were very, very dry and thank goodness there had not been a spark in there!

As I said before, we have only had the motorhome for under a year, just at a year now…and we are still learning about all the little hiding places.  YES, I had looked behind that door once last year, made a mental note about which quickly got lost in the quicksand of my mind  (Jared is thinking that my brain didn’t get oxygen when I jumped in to save him, but it only came up to my knees, so I can’t use that excuse).  Never gave it a thought when we had it in the shop up in Oregon even though I kept running through my brain all the places I had seen “large wires” at during the previous year.

So after Father’s Day, we are going to do our first minor trip up to the Sierras, to get out of the heat down here in the valley.  I have a few National Forest Campgrounds and a few Full-hookup Campgrounds which I want to visit over a ten day period.  Overall it is a little over 300 miles, but at any given time we will be no more than 100 miles away, and it will give us some non-hookup time to try out the solar panel and the generator, and some full-hookup time too. If all goes well, than after the 4th of July we will expand a larger loop further north.

Alaska Trip....Not this year...Motorhome is just not ready for it...

 

Here is where we camped last night, at McKay Truck and RV Center.   It was a fairly peaceful place to spend the night…along Old Salem Road, this once busy road is fairly peaceful now.  There is also a bit of a buffer between the road and the lot where we were gated in, but with a pass code in case we had an emergency and needed to take the car somewhere.

Service Tech Paul got right on it at 8:45.  All of the fuses checked out.  All of the relays that dealt with “auxiliary batteries” checked out.  After 2+ hours of looking and looking all over the place, what couldn’t be found was the battery isolator. 

A battery isolator (or split charge relay) allows an auxiliary battery to be charged by the vehicle's system, yet not participate in engine starting.  It also prevents the starting battery from being run down by your equipment when the engine is off.

 

Paul, who has been working as a RV Tech since 1977, told me that the better thing to get now days is this Sure Power 1314 Uni-Directional Battery Separator (for a 30 amp system).  It is easy to install….one end to a line coming off the alternator, and the other on house battery, and then ground it when you mount it.  This device also has a Start Assist Feature.   An optional input from the key switch or a manual switch will program the Battery Separator to parallel the batteries during starting. This feature will only engage if the auxiliary battery has sufficient power available to assist in starting.  We already have the switch in place, and Paul was not sure it was working either.

Now one would think that we were disappointed with McKay Truck and RV Center.  That would be farthest from the truth. Paul spent 2 1/2 hours working on this project…even Buddy, the head of the RV division, came out to look things over.  It is not there fault that Dynamax hid it so well.  Paul thinks it might be above a bunch of sprayed on insulation. They asked me for more time so that they could call Dynamax…but we had already felt that heading back was the right thing to do…that a smaller trial run was what we should have done.  I complement them on their effort…and oh, by the way…they only charged us $60.  When I showed that to Marcia, she could not believe it….she thought for sure we had blown a couple hundred bucks. And remember, we stayed the night…that could have cost $30-$40 at an RV park!

 

So essentially, it is time to punt….time to regroup.  As many of you know, we bought this motorhome a year ago after our previous class C burned up in a storage fire in Tarpon Springs.  We thought after a year we would be ready to travel the 8,000 mile round trip from California to Alaska and back.  But since we left in mid April from Florida, just too many things show us that we are just not there yet.  We need to have a few good trial runs with everything working right…and we are not there yet.

I will be planning a few minor trips…if they go well, we will plan a major trip with options to call it off if needed.  For instance, the major trip might be to go to Utah to visit Stephanie.  From there, if things go well, we can go up to the Tetons, and Yellowstone again, or return back to Sacramento if needed.  “If” things are going well at the Tetons and Yellowstone, we can head up to Glacier, and go over the boarder…and if it is still going well, go to Banff and Jasper.  If things are still going well, we might even head over to Hyder and see the bears feed…and feel good because we did make it to a small portion of Alaska.  After that, we would head south…spend time in Washington…and then back to Sacramento.  I think “that”, if we decide to do that, would be the extent of our travels this year.  But there are other major trips we can do without going too far from Sacramento…and that is also an option. First thing first…get the battery situation fixed…and a few other minor items too.  Then we will decide what to do from there.

 

 

So here we are near Roseburg Oregon, at a Passport America park for two nights at $12 per night.  It is a lovely little RV park and Golf Course along a river.  It is called, On the River Golf and RV Resort.  We plan to be here two or three nights…if a third, it is full price of $24.  We went into Roseburg tonight to a Greek Restaurant called Alexander's Greek Cuisine.  Not bad for a Greek Restaurant in a little town in Oregon, but would never make it in a Greek Community like Tarpon Springs.  We plan to stay out until Tuesday or Wednesday, see if any more bugs pop out before we make it to the safety of my sister's backyard.  Besides, we have to be sure we have time to finish off all that Moose Munch!