Even though I knew it was going to work, and even though the folks at the Ford dealer who reprogrammed our Explorer’s computer brain so the four wheel drive transfer case would go into neutral for towing assured me it would, I still wanted to be sure everything was working properly before we took off, towing the SUV behind the motorhome for the first time.

So, once we pulled off of our site at the Orlando Thousand Trails yesterday morning, we hooked the Blue Ox tow bar to the Explorer, I went through the steps to put the transmission and transfer case in neutral, then had Miss Terry sit in the front passenger seat while I drove through the RV park, so she could let me know if the Explorer was making any nasty noises, or if the rear view mirror or wheels fell off.

Everything went fine, though Terry said some people we passed acted like they had never seen a guy stick his wife back in the dinghy when he hit the road. Don’t those people have any appreciation for peace and quiet? (You just know I’m going to pay for that one, don’t you?)

We pulled out of the  campground a few minutes before 10 a.m. and followed U.S. Highway 27 south down the state, passing through the small towns of Avon Park, Sebring, and Lake Placid.

As we passed the M RV Resort, just north of Moore Haven, I told Miss Terry that the place sounded familiar for some reason. A mile or two down the road it hit me – that’s where our good friends Stu and Donna McNicol are spending the month of December! Well, duh! By then it was too late to turn around and go back, and we didn’t know if they were home or out riding their motorcycles anyway. I guess we’ll have to catch them next time around.

We battled a very strong wind all the way south, that alternated between hitting us head on, to slamming us broadside. The wind really took a toll on our fuel mileage; according to our Silverleaf VMSpc engine monitor, we were only averaging about 5.8 miles per gallon.

We passed through mile after mile of sugarcane fields on both sides of the highway, which is a major crop in this region.

There were canals alongside the highway most of the way, turning off here and there at right angles back into the cane fields. I told Terry they might be fun to kayak in. Shortly afterward we noticed several cars pulled off the road on the other side of the highway, their drivers and passengers all out and looking down over the guardrail. Terry said they were probably checking out the alligators that surely live in the canals. Here in Florida, any body of water bigger than a kid’s backyard wading pool probably holds a gator or two.

In different areas, we noticed several huge plumes of smoke off in the distance, and when we passed by close to one, it looked like the farmers were burning off their fields. As windy as it was, I sure hope they were being careful, because if one of those fires got away from them, it probably wouldn’t have stopped until it hit the Atlantic beaches!

Eventually we reached Interstate 75 and tuned east for a few miles, and then got onto Interstate 595. Traffic was noticeably heavier, and by the time we reached Interstate 95 it was really hectic. We pulled into Paradise Island RV Resort in Fort Lauderdale about 2:30 p.m., with 220 miles behind us. I sure was glad to be off the road after our windy drive south!

When I got out of the Winnebago and headed for the office to check in, I was met by Gypsy Journal subscriber J.C. Webber, whom we had spoken to briefly at the Thousand Trails last week. Once we were in our site, J.C. and his wife Beverly came by to check out the custom desk units that Carlyle Lehman from Focal Wood Products made for us a while back.

Later in the evening, Jim and Chris Guld from Geeks on Tour also came by to visit. It’s nice having friends everywhere we go!

We’ll be here a week or so, and then, depending on the weather, we hope to get down to the Keys. But if it stays windy and cold, like it has so far this winter, we may scratch that idea and go to Plan B, whatever the heck that is.

Thought For The Day – Even when I have pains, I don’t have to be one.

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Yeah, I know, you watch TV in your RV all the time. I do, too. In fact, I have for over twelve years now. But according to the dweebs at Dish Network, you can’t watch TV in an RV. Who knew?

In Monday’s blog, titled You Win Some, You Lose Some, I wrote that Dish Network had agreed to send somebody out to install a new DVR receiver in our motorhome. Since we already have an automatic Dish high definition receiver on our motorhome, “installing basically means plugging the receiver in and hooking up the input and output coax cables. The installation was supposed to happen yesterday afternoon. It didn’t.

About 8 a.m. the installer called, asked where we were, and I gave him the campground’s address and our site number. “Hey, you can’t put a TV dish on an RV,” the guy told me. “I have to mount a pole to the side of it to hold the dish. That won’t work.” I assured him that he didn’t have to “mount a pole” to the side of my motorhome, all he had to do was hand me the receiver and go on his way. He said he’d have to have his supervisor call me back.

That noteworthy individual called back a few minutes later to tell me that you can’t have a TV in a motorhome. Okay, here we go. We batted that one back and forth for a while, and he said that there was no way they were delivering my receiver to me. End of story.

I called Dish Network back and spent the next three hours on the telephone, mostly on hold, while a series of people who could barely speak English told me that it was illegal to install a TV in a motorhome, put me on hold, never came back, or eventually hung up.

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Finally I got to a Customer Retention Representative in the United States, who assured me that the only way it was legal for me to have a TV in my RV was to park it permanently on a lot and never move it again.

I asked her to stop reading off her cue card, and look at my account and note my RV waiver, and asked her what the RV waiver was for. She said it was to allow me to receive east and west coast networks while traveling in my RV. “Okay, if I can’t have a TV in my RV, why do I have an RV waiver on file so I can receive those distant networks while I’m traveling?” I asked her. She told me that the waiver was to allow me to receive east and west coast networks while traveling in my RV. (Yeah, I heard it before too.)

Finally the light seemed to go on, and she had a solution to my problem! She told me that I was a valued customer, and all I had to do was park my RV and not move it anymore, and I could get my free receiver. But if I did that, I couldn’t keep my distant networks, because then I wouldn’t be traveling anymore.  Okay, next nitwit please.

Then that nitwit’s boss came on the line, who was another nitwit,  and explained that only Standard Definition receivers would work in an RV. Not High Definition, and not DVR receivers.

Aha! So I can watch TV in my RV, just not HD TV?  He said yes you can have an SD receiver, but no, you can’t watch TV in an RV, because every time you move, somebody would have to come out and reinstall it. Huh? Are you getting a headache yet? I was getting chest pains by then!

I told him that I know many, many RVers who have HD DVRs. I even called Bill Adams from Internet Anywhere to be sure I wasn’t missing something. Bill is the recognized expert when it comes to mobile TV and satellite dish systems. He assured me that I could use the HD receiver in my RV, with my automatic Dish HD antenna.

But when I called Dish back, after talking to Bill, they assured me that Bill was wrong, you can’t have a TV in an RV.

If it weren’t for the fact that my Winegard Trav’ler automatic rooftop dish can’t be reprogrammed to DirecTV, I’d switch today. As it is, I’ll just sit here and remember the good old days, when gas was $2 a gallon, and I could watch TV in my RV.

Thought For The Day – Politics has taught us that it is not necessary to understand things in order to argue about them.

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By 7:20 yesterday morning I was pulling out of the Orlando Thousand Trails, taking the Explorer to Camping Connection to have the Blue Ox base plate and SMI auxiliary brake system installed so we can tow it behind our Winnebago motorhome.

I actually got there a few minutes before their staff did, but once Tim, the tech who was doing the work arrived, it only took him a minute or two to check me in, and then he dropped me off back at the Thousand Trails. Tim said he’d call me by noon to have us bring the motorhome in, so they could set up the air line for the SMI brake, and then test to be sure everything was working properly.

Back at the campground, I snoozed for a little while, then Pat McFall from PressurePro called and we talked for a few minutes. Pat told me that they had just left the Escapees Dream Catcher RV Park in Deming, New Mexico, where it was fourteen degrees! Okay, so tell me all about global warming!

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About 11:30 Tim called and said he was ready for us to bring the motorhome in, and when we did, it took a couple of hours to hook up the airline on the motorhome, test everything out, make a couple of fine tuning adjustments, and we’re good to go. Tim did an excellent job, all of the work was tidy, and it’s obviously a very professional installation.

We had an older SMI Duo auxiliary brake on the Ford van, which gave us excellent service, but we decided to upgrade to their Air Force One, which provides proportional braking, is very user friendly, and installs under the hood, out of the way. An air line runs from the Winnebago’s air brake system to a hookup on the back of the coach, and I plug in an air cable to that and to a hookup on the Explorer, and every time I step on the motorhome’s brakes, it also activates the brakes on the Explorer, with the same amount of pressure. If anybody is looking for a used auxiliary brake, send me an e-mail. I’m selling our older unit cheap.

When we’re ready to go, all we have to do is hook up our Blue Ox tow bar and safety cables, clip on the breakaway cord that stops the dinghy if it were to come loose for any reason, put the Explorer’s transfer case in neutral, and off we go. Quick and easy.

We know a lot of RVers who don’t use an auxiliary braking system, and I was just as foolish for many years. I learned my lesson when some fool ran a red light in front of me a couple of years ago, and I had to make a panic stop. The front wheels of our Toyota pickup ended up sitting on top of the motorcycle rack on the back of our bus conversion. Fortunately, we didn’t have a bike on the rack at the time, so the only things destroyed were the rack and our tow bar. But it could have been a lot worse.

Before we left, we also told the nice folks at Camping Connection to schedule us for our Norcold refrigerator recall. Yes, we did have the Norcold recall done at RV Renovators in Mesa, Arizona back in May. They did an excellent job and there was nothing wrong with their work. This recall is because Norcold’s fix in the first recall apparently isn’t working. There have been a number of RV fires that have originated in the refrigerator compartment, and some people have watched their RVs burn to the ground. If you have a Norcold refrigerator in your RV, check the Norcold Recall Website to see if yours is included in the recall of the recall.

Be prepared to wait at least a month before you can get the work done. Just as with the last recall, the shops I have talked to all said Norcold is very slow in sending out the units needed to get the problem fixed. Maybe if it were their homes that were in danger of burning up, they might move a little faster!

Thought For The Day – I carry a gun because a cop is too heavy.

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I had a conversation with some friends the other day about the benefits of towing a car behind their motorhome, and if they were to do so, what type of car to buy, as well as whether or not to use a tow dolly, as opposed to towing all four wheels down.

I don’t see how any fulltimer, or even an extended time RVer, can handle not having a tow car, sometimes called a dinghy, especially if they have a very large motorhome. I have known several that tried it, and all of them have eventually decided that the hassles of renting a car wherever they stop are just too much to deal with.

Several years ago, one of our students at Life on Wheels was convinced that he could save money by not towing a car, while his wife couldn’t understand why they should leave their perfectly good car behind and rely on rental companies. This man is a retired accountant, who by his own admission is “anal” when it comes to keeping track of every penny spent.

They are subscribers to the Gypsy Journal, and we have kept in touch over the years. They towed their Saturn during their first year on the road, and the second year the wife gave in, and they left their car with their son, so their granddaughter could use it to go to college. Bill told me that at the end of their second year, they had traveled 274 miles more than the first year, and they had saved $300 by not towing. This included fuel mileage, the difference in tolls between their two axle motorhome and the two extra axles on a tow car, insurance and registration on the car (which the son paid while his daughter used it), and two annual oil changes on the car. They decided that for less than $1 a day, it just made sense to tow their car.

We have known some fulltimers who used tow dollies, and again, after a year or so, most of them have switched to towing all four wheels on the ground, with a tow bar instead of the dolly. At a big RV park like Elkhart Campground, it’s no problem finding a place to stash a dolly during your stay. But at a lot of the smaller places we frequent, such as Tra-Tel RV Park in Tucson, it’s pretty tight, and most RV sites will not accommodate a tow dolly.

As to what kind of car to tow, the choices are wide, and a lot of personal preference comes into play. For years we towed a Toyota 4×4 extended cab pickup with a five speed manual transmission and a camper shell, and it was a great vehicle. A couple of years ago we switched to an extended length cargo van with an automatic transmission, to carry our toys, and to make loading the papers easier when we get a new issue printed.

We use a Remco driveshaft disconnect, which can be a real problem occasionally. You have to lubricate the linkage three or four times a year, and if you forget, it will lock up and you can’t get it to engage. This necessitates crawling under the van, disconnecting the locking pin on the driveshaft disconnect, manually rotating it into place, and then putting the locking pin back in. We’ve also had the driveshaft disconnect get fouled and lock up after towing the van down dirt or gravel roads. It was a lot easier to simply put the Toyota’s gearshift and transfer case in neutral and take off.

We know fulltimers who pull  fifth wheel trailers with huge medium or heavy duty trucks, who also tow a car behind the trailer. They look like a freight train going down the road, and I would probably run over a mailbox or a fire hydrant the first time I tried to turn a corner in a rig that big. But the folks who have them seem to be able to handle them just fine.

We’ve also seen RVers who carry small cars, or Smart cars, on the bed of their trucks, between the cab and the front of their trailer. I just know I could do thousands of dollars worth of damage trying to load a combination like that up before I hit the road! But again, the people who have them seem to have it down to a science.

I’m curious, what do you tow, and how? Have you tried RVing without a tow car?

Thought For The Day – If you worry about what might be, and wonder what might have been, you will ignore what is.

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As I wrote in yesterday’s blog, Wednesday was a long, hard day on the road. We covered over 440 miles, and some of those roads were narrow, rough, and uncomfortable.

Then we had a hard day’s night at the city owned Leach Park Campground in Spencer, Iowa. It was humid and sticky hot, and the electric power was terrible, cutting out every few minutes. We finally decided to heck with it, turned off just about everything electrical in the motorhome, opened up our windows, and put our three roof vent fans on high sped, just to move some air.

About midnight it began to rain, and a few minutes later a strong thunderstorm hit us. We have been in some really nasty storms in our lives, and I even survived a tornado once, but this one was probably the worst storm either of us could remember. All night long the thunder boomed, lighting was hitting close all around us, and the rain just poured down. We had to close all of the windows and the roof vents, because rain was blowing in from every direction, which turned the motorhome into a sauna.

We also discovered that the leak around our living room slide, which Duncan RV in Elkhart had said was fixed, is still leaking, along with several new leaks that came from the driving rain. To be honest, it was coming down so hard, I think it would have even gotten wet inside a bank vault. We brought in the living room slide, both to try to minimize the leaking, and to present a smoother profile to the wind.

We were up most of the night, because it was impossible to sleep. Since we were parked on grass, near a river, we debated whether we should just unhook and drive to the nearby WalMart, where we’d at least be parked on pavement. But with so much lighting all around us, we were worried about going out to unhook the water and electrical connections.

We debated firing up the generator so we’d at least be able to run our air conditioner, but since we were plugged into shore power, I wasn’t sure if the automatic transfer switch would allow us to get power from the generator. At one point, I told Miss Terry that I had had worse nights in my life, but back then people were shooting at me!

Finally, dawn broke, and the rain stopped for a few minutes. I looked outside and we were surrounded by pools of water. I knew that every minute we stayed on the grass brought us closer to sinking, as more rain was on the way.

I started the Winnebago to let it air up, then went outside to unhook the water and electric connections, slogging through water over the tops of my shoes. While I was waiting for the leveling jacks to come up, I tried to move the van out of the way, and the rear wheels promptly sunk. Hmm… that’s not a good sign. If the van got stuck, I knew that there was no way our heavy diesel coach was going to get through the soft ground in front of us, to make it to the road.

The ground seemed a bit firmer behind the rig, so I had  Terry guide me as I very carefully backed across the grass to a gravel roadway. Once I got the RV moving, there was no way I was going to stop until I was on something solid. I left some deep ruts in the grass, but I made it, and I sure felt better once I had that hard packed road under me!

Then it was time to get the van free. With me pushing, and Terry gingerly using the throttle and transmission to rock it, we managed to get it moving and back onto firm ground.

We were lucky. These folks were parked in an RV site right in front of us, and this huge tree limb came down, narrowly missing their trailer, but taking the side view mirror off their truck! I guess they were lucky too, it could have been much worse!

We hooked the van up to our Blue Ox tow bar as it started to rain again, and set out eastward on U.S. Highway 18. We ran in scattered rain showers all the way to Forest City, 91 miles away, but at least the wind had died down.

We arrived at the Winnebago Visitors Center and were assigned a back-in site with good, reliable 30 amp electric, and then walked down the hill to the Customer Service building to put our name on the list for a time slot. It looks like our fast trip across the country will pay off, because we were given an 11:30 a.m. standby time for today. That means that as soon as another job gets finished, we’ll get called in. If we don’t get in today, I’m sure we will on Monday. Since we were originally told it might be Tuesday or Wednesday of next week before we got on the list, we’re glad we rushed to get here.

Once we were we parked and hooked up, our pals Ron and Brenda Speidel came by to give us much needed hugs, and to show us around the grounds. The annual Winnebago-Itasca Grand National Rally ends today, and they have 1,750 Winnebagos and Itascas of every model here for all of the fun. We have never seen so many Winnies, all in one place!

We even saw a rare vintage Winnebago fifth wheel!

Mike and Elaine Loscher, wonderful friends who have helped us so much with our Gypsy Gathering rallies over the years, are also here, and later in the afternoon we went to dinner with them. It was a treat to have some quiet time with this sweet couple, away from all the hustle and bustle of a rally.

Terry and I were worn out from the fast trip across the country, 950 miles in 2 1/2 days, combined with our long, scary night. Back at the motorhome, we felt like zombies. I wrote my blog post, downloaded some photos from our digital cameras, and Terry caught up on e-mail. We sure were looking forward to getting into that bed and getting some sleep!

Thought For The Day – Daughters hold your hand for a little while, but they hold your heart for a lifetime.

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