Terry and I have been busy the last couple of days with some projects around the motorhome that we really wanted to get out of the way while we’re sitting still for a while.

One project was building a couple of kayak caddies to make moving our hard shell kayaks from the Explorer to the water’s edge easier. We got the idea from our friends Denny and Cindy Henderson, when we watched how easy it was for them to move their kayaks around.

We made the racks out of PVC, two threaded rods for axles, and some tires we bought at Harbor Freight. Putting them together was easy, and the entire project took about two hours over two days. We could have finished it in one step, except it was late in the day when we started on Thursday, and we had to run to Lowes for some nuts.

Here I am using a power tool! Everybody stand back! We have a couple of electric drills, a power saw, a miter saw, and some other neat goodies left over from our bus conversion days, but my Dremel tool is the only power tool Miss Terry lets me near. And there’s a very good reason for that! I’m the world’s biggest klutz.

Here are the caddies, all finished and ready to use. The upright sections go through the scupper holes in our Manta Ray kayaks, and make it easy to to move them around. Believe me, after a few hours of paddling, lugging a 65 pound kayak back to the truck is a lot of work! You can buy a kayak caddy for anywhere from $60 to $150, but these two cost us about $45 to build.

Of course, if it were up to me, we’d sell those heavy things and get Miss Terry a Sea Eagle inflatable kayak too. Don’t be too surprised if she comes around once she test paddles the model Tim from Inflatable Boats 4 Less has picked out for her!

While we were dragging tools out of the storage bays under our motorhome, we decided it would be a good time to get rid of some stuff we’ve been carrying around for way too long. We were ruthless, and by the time we were finished we had made a big dent in our load, and made a lot of free space in our bays.

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I put some stuff on eBay, mostly books on converting a bus, and there is a “yard sale” tomorrow morning here in the campground. Maybe I can sell some things there. If not, I’ll be listing more on eBay.

Speaking of selling things, the auxiliary brake I mentioned a couple of days ago has been sold and is on its way to the buyer in Oregon.

Somebody asked me how much the base plate connections show on the Explorer, and if it sticks out very far. Not far at all. Here are a couple of pictures of the front end of the Explorer. The guys at Camping Connection did an excellent job on the installation, and I would recommend them to anybody.

Hopefully, today at the yard sale I can unload some of the things I want to see go away, including a battery charger, a brand new electric buffer, two Malone rooftop kayak racks, and some other stuff. I’d much rather sell them, and carry around some nice folding money, than to have to spend time listing them on eBay.

Thought For The Day – It takes a long time to grow an old friend.

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Yesterday was a “fix-it” day. I had a couple of things that needed done around the motorhome, and with only a few days left before the Eastern Gypsy Gathering rally starts, it seemed liked a good day to get them out of the way.

So, I stood back and let  Mr. Fix-It, aka/Greg White, do his thing. What, you expected me to pick up a tool? Are you nuts? Do you have any idea how much havoc I can wreak with something as simple as a Phillips screwdriver, or a crescent wrench? Before I’m allowed to even walk past something like a Dremel Tool or an electric pencil sharpener, we have to file three dozen different forms with the government, a couple of insurance companies, and the Environmental Protection Agency.

The first order of business was to fix the brake lights and turn signals on the van, which work fine except when hooked up to the motorhome while we’re towing.Then they weren’t working at all.  Greg said we needed to start at the source, the motorhome, and work our way back toward the van. Since my total involvement in this project was basically saying “Uh huh” and nodding like I knew what was going on, I said “Uh huh” and nodded, just like I knew what was going on.

Fortunately, Greg did know what was going on, and he discovered that a couple of wires had come loose inside the plug that fits into a receptacle on the bumper of the van. The whole plug looked pretty funky, so we (Greg) decided to get a new one.

After a quick trip to a nearby trailer supply shop and the purchase of  a new plug,  we (Greg) discovered that wasn’t the only problem. There was still no power at the plug. After some testing and some head scratching, we (Greg) decided that the actual converter box, which feeds the signal from the Winnebago’s wiring to the van, was also bad. We (Greg) think that the loose wires in the plug caused some kind of short that fried the converter box. It was too late in the day to get another box, so we (Greg) will finish that job today.

But we (Greg) weren’t done yet! A few days ago we (Miss Terry and I) bought a new Winegard Wingman TV antenna upgrade to go on the crank-up batwing antenna on our roof for better digital signal reception. So we (Greg) climbed up on the roof of the motorhome and installed it. “We” sure had a busy day!

But “we’re” not done yet! Today “we” will get the new tail light converter box and we (Greg) will get that job finished.

A couple of months ago, the original television that came with our motorhome died, and we (Miss Terry and I), bought a new Samsung LED model to replace it. We like the new high definition TV, but there was a problem. Late last year we (Miss Terry and our pal Mark Didelot) installed a digital converter box in the motorhome, to pick up local TV stations with our crank-up  batwing antenna. This was necessary because after all “air” broadcasts went digital, our old TV could not pick up their programming without the converter box.

Now that box isn’t needed, and may be causing problems getting the digital signals over the air from local stations. So we (Greg) will take it out.

I sure hope all this gets done without any hassle, because we (me) needs a nap after just reading all of this! 

Thought For The Day – Why is it called tourist season if we can’t shoot them?

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With Hurricane Ida downgraded to a tropical storm, we were not too worried about it up here in North Carolina. The weather reports are predicting heavy rain and wind on Wednesday, but nothing we can’t handle.

However, I wanted to get out of our campsite at Neuseway Nature Park in Kinston, because the high water markers from previous floods were over my head, and in Saturday’s blog I included a picture of the electric boxes mounted high on poles at the campground. One of the locals told me that the river carries a lot water from the mountains in the western part of the state east to the Atlantic Ocean. I don’t tread water well, and our Winnebago probably wouldn’t float very well either, so yesterday we hit the road.

We pulled out of the campground shortly after noon and drove 67 miles east on U.S. Highway 70 to Morehead City, where we are now parked on a paved lot at the Elks lodge, waiting for the storm to pass. Our route ranged from divided four lane highway with a 70 mile per hour speed limit, to small towns with more traffic and a lot of stoplights to deal with. But overall, it was an easy trip.

The lodge has one 30 amp electric outlet on the back of the building, but I couldn’t plug into it, because the outlet is in a plastic box about two inches deep, and my 30 amp cord would not clear the bottom of the box. One of the lodge members came out to check on us, saw the problem, and said we were welcome to cut the bottom of the box out if that would help.

I drug my Dremel tool and extension cord out of the bay, to plug into a nearby 15 amp outlet on the side of the building. Unfortunately, the extension cord wasn’t quite long enough, so we went to Plan B. We ran the cord in the driver’s window of our motorhome and plugged it in inside, then Miss Terry fired up our Onan 7.5 Quiet Diesel generator to power the Dremel tool. In less than a minute I had cut a wedge out of the bottom of the box large enough to accommodate our power cord, and we were plugged into shore power. RVers are resourceful, if nothing else! 

If you ever wondered just how much difference driving 55 miles per hour saves you, here are the results of a quick informal experiment I did yesterday.

The Silverleaf engine monitoring system can be configured to monitor both instantaneous miles per hour and your rolling miles per hour over a given distance. With our Winnebago’s cruise control set at 55 miles per hour, on flat terrain yesterday, the Silverleaf showed us getting 8.5 to 9.25 miles per gallon. When I bumped it up to 63 miles per hour, in the same terrain and with the cruise control on, we dropped to 7.5 to 7.75 mpg.

That’s not a huge variation, but if my calculator is working correctly, on a 1,000 mile trip it could make a difference in your cost of about $50, depending on fuel prices along the way. This wasn’t a scientific experiment, but it was interesting to see the difference.

As I said, this is pretty flat country here on the coastal plains, and the Silverleaf showed we averaged 8.5 miles per gallon yesterday.

There are several places we want to visit in this area to gather stories for the Gypsy Journal, and I need to tweak Carlyle Lehman’s Focal Wood website, so we’ll have plenty to keep us busy for a while.

Bad Nick has been busy already, posting a new Bad Nick Blog titled I’d Put Down A Vicious Dog. Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – I’m not a complete idiot, some parts are missing.

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After reading my blog about repairing a broken radiator hose on our MCI bus conversion earlier this week, a soon to be fulltimer e-mailed to ask me what basic tools I carry in our rig to keep us out of trouble.

Obviously this is a brand new reader, because anybody who knows much about me at all knows that in my case, the more tools I have available, the greater the opportunity for me to create disaster. For me, less is better.

Keep in mind that when we were in the early stages of converting our bus, I set fire to it with sparks from an angle grinder. That I once fried our inverter when I fired up the big air compressor we carry in one of our bays while we were dry camping and overloaded the circuit. And then there was the time I decided to polish our stainless steel with a rotary buffer. The pad flew off and hit me in the mouth, I stumbled backward and tripped over a toolbox, and knocked a nasty hole in my skull on a rock. I think the rock fared even worse.

That being said, the only power tool Miss Terry allows me to play with is a small Dremel tool, but she hides all of the cutting wheels and wire brushes that come with it, and only lets me have access to tiny little cotton buffing wheels.  

As for hand tools, forget it! Saws and screwdrivers have sharp edges, I would probably snap a pair of vise grips on some part of my anatomy that wouldn’t respond well to the sudden intrusion, and I can scrape several layers of skin off my knuckles trying to use the wrong size wrench on a stubborn bolt.

Even something as simple as an aerosol can is a tool of destruction and mayhem in my hands. Our old bus has an oil bath air cleaner, which means that the metal air filter sits in a big canister of motor oil, and the oil is supposed to catch the dust and grit that would otherwise get into the engine. Periodically, the oil needs changed and the air filter needs washed out. In an RV environment, this should be done about once a year. It’s actually a pretty simple job. Yeah, right.

A couple of years ago I decided to tackle that chore, and in the process, I discovered a thick layer of crud and gunk that had built up on the inside of the big canister. By the time I scraped it all out with a putty knife, I was black from head to toe. I knew Miss Terry would have my hide if I tracked that mess through the bus, so I looked in the bay and found a can of engine starting fluid. I thought that should cut the grease and get me cleaned up in no time at all, so I pulled off my shirt and commenced to spraying.

Have you ever been on fire? I never have, but I think I came damned close to it that day! A minute or two after that stuff hit my skin, I felt a burning sensation that cannot be described. It was like a million fire ants were eating me alive. So there I am, outside the bus screaming my head off, Terry ran outside and grabbed a water hose and sprayed me down, which did little to dilute the chemical burning its way through my skin, but did help to spread this homemade napalm to other places on my body it had not yet reached, by way of the trickle down effect, if you get my drift. It was not my finest hour.  

But, I have finally found a tool that even I can master, and so far, I have not been able to get into any mischief with it. And I have my pal Rick Lang from the Recreational Vehicle Safety Education Foundation (RVSEF) to thank for telling me about it.

My new Blackberry Storm smart phone has hundreds of applications, called apps, that can be downloaded, many of them for free. One Rick showed me is an electronic level, just like the levels many RVers use to be sure they have their jacks down properly and their refrigerators will work okay. Except now, instead of having to use some mechanical device to check our level, I just hit a button on my Blackberry and there I go. Isn’t technology a wonderful thing?

I just checked, and according to my Blackberry, I’m at least half a bubble off.

Thought For The Day – You can’t leave a footprint that lasts if you’re always walking on tiptoe.

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