Yes, it’s miserably cold here in central Florida. Yes, I am chilled to the bone. Yes, it sucks. But I shall not snivel. Yesterday evening we watched news coverage of the blizzard that is blanketing the east coast, and all of those folks stranded in airports, and others who were busy shoveling snow, or getting stuck. Compared to them, we have it good.

But just because I’m not going to snivel doesn’t mean I have to like it! If my fingers ever thaw out enough that I can type again, I plan to write a strongly worded editorial!

We knew the weather was going to be ugly yesterday, and we had no place to go and nothing to do, so we slept in, then stayed in bed snuggling for a long time, because neither of us was in a hurry to get out from under the covers. When we finally did get up, we wore our sweats all day long, and put on our warm Teepee Creepers sheepskin slippers. While Miss Terry has to have her morning kick start, I don’t drink coffee. But I sure didn’t turn down the cup of hot chocolate she made me for breakfast!

I spent the day catching up on a backlog of paperwork I had let pile up, and managed to make a big dent in it. Terry kept busy doing some laundry, puttering around the kitchen, and working on some other chores she needed to get out of the way.

It never got much above 50 degrees all day long, and the wind kept gusting up. Looking out the windows, we saw very little activity most of the day, except for a few people bundled up, walking their dogs. That’s another reason I don’t have a pet. I love dogs, but I’ll go play with theirs when it warms up, and leave the dog walking in the cold to them.

We love our Winnebago Ultimate Advantage motorhome, and it has so many nice features we didn’t have in our MCI bus conversion. The one place where it is lacking is in insulation. When we built the bus, we put several layers of different kinds of insulation in the floor, ceiling, and walls. We didn’t have a furnace in the bus, but with an Olympian catalytic heater, or a small electric heater, we  stayed warm and toasty even when outside temperatures got  down below freezing several times.

The Winnebago has two furnaces, a heat pump, and we use space heaters as needed, but it was still cold inside it yesterday. But I’m not sniveling!

Since the overnight temperatures were going to be in the mid-20s for the next few days, I went out in the late afternoon and disconnected our water hose to keep it from freezing.

Today and tomorrow look like more of the same thing. Terry has been saying that she needed a few days of down time to spend at home, and it looks like she’s getting her wish. but I’m not sniveling!

Thought For The Day – I used to be lost in the shuffle. Now I just shuffle along with the lost.

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We had a lot to get done yesterday, and accomplished very little of it. Some days are just like that, I guess.

We had quite a bit of stuff that we had been carrying around in the van that we decided had to go away, so I loaded it into the Explorer to drop off at a Goodwill or Salvation Army. It’s amazing what you discover that you had forgotten you own!

A little after noon we drove back to the car dealer in Winter Haven, where we bought the Explorer, to pick up the the SMI auxiliary brake that they had agreed to disconnect from the van, and to drop off the van’s title, which we had forgotten the day before. Along the way, we stopped at a Salvation Army store and unloaded the items we had to donate.

We had noticed a squealing noise coming from the Explorer, that I suspected was a fan belt or something like that. It wasn’t a big deal, just irritating. So I asked their service department to take a look, and they decided that a serpentine belt and a pulley were glazed, which was causing the noise.

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They pulled the vehicle into the shop to change them, and said it would take  a couple of hours to get the parts and do the job. Okay, we were there, they were paying for it under warranty, so we’d get it out of the way.

Well, we all know that no job ever gets done in the time allocated, right? The two hours stretched out to almost three before they were done, but they did a good job. This was supposed to be a quick trip, so I had not taken my iPad with me, so I spent the time reading old magazines about topics I had no interest in, while Miss Terry, always better prepared, had a book to read.

We needed to find a Fed Ex drop box to send the loan paperwork back to Alliant Credit Union, and we thought we had seen one in a shopping center we would pass on the way out of town. As it turned out, we were wrong, so we stopped at a hotel to ask if they knew of one nearby. They didn’t.

Again, if I had my iPad, I could have gone online and found one quickly, but we figured we’d pass a Staples or Office Depot, which usually does Fed Ex shipping. No such luck.

Miss Terry was driving, so I got online with my Droid Incredible and looked up Fed Ex, called them, and they gave me the location of the nearest Fed Ex drop box. Isn’t technology a wonderful thing? I entered the address into our Garmin GPS, which directed us a mile north, only to then tell us to make a U-turn and drive two miles back south to the drop box! Isn’t technology a wonderful thing?

Eventually we found the drop box, deposited the envelope, and headed back to the Thousand Trails campground. We stopped along the way for a bite to eat, made a stop at Lowes, and got back to our motorhome just after dark.

We’re due to leave here tomorrow, and we still have to pack the Explorer, get our hard kayaks onto the roof, and get some other chores done. All the stuff we had planned to accomplish yesterday!

Thought For The Day – Friendship isn’t a big thing, it’s a million little things.

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Well, it took a while, some trial and error, and my blood pressure was in the stratosphere for a couple of days, but it was worth it. Well, it was worth it to me. Miss Terry had to live with the grouchy bear I become when I get too stressed out from dealing with thieves and idiots, and I’m not sure she’d agree that anything is worth that! But, it all came together, and yesterday we resolved the issue with towing the Ford Explorer, and took delivery of it.

Actually, we already had it, because the folks at Dodge Chrysler Jeep of Winter Haven allowed me to keep it overnight Wednesday while we tried to figure out a way to get it set up to tow behind our motorhome.

As I wrote in yesterday’s blog, the Explorer requires a Neutral Tow Kit, which is basically an LED light that plugs in under the dashboard, and a simple computer procedure from a Ford dealer to set up the transfer case for towing. However, the company that made the kit for Ford has gone out of business, and a dealer in Oregon bought up every kit available and was charging $375 plus $30 shipping, for an item that originally retailed for about $30. What a rip off!

A lot of internet research, and repeated phone calls to my two most reliable technical guys, Greg White and Ron Speidel, confirmed my belief that any LED light would complete the circuit and work. Thanks for all of your help and patience with my repeated phone calls, guys.

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The next step was finding a Ford dealer that would “flash” the computer for me. Jarrett Gordon Ford, in Davenport, Florida was willing to try it, and it worked like a charm! A $2 LED light beats the heck out of over $400 to accomplish the same thing!

Once we knew that we could tow the Explorer, the next job was to unload our Ford van so we could drop it off at the dealer as our trade in, and do the paperwork. Do you have any idea how much stuff you can cram into an extended length Ford cargo van? A lot! We are going to have to get ruthless about what to keep and what to dispose of, because while the Explorer will carry the newspapers we take to RV parks and rallies, and our kayaks on a roof rack, it’s no cargo van.

What it is is a very nice ride, maybe the nicest we’ve ever owned. The previous owner was a Ford executive who special ordered the Explorer as his retirement present, and it has every option that was available that year. Leather interior, power seats, power windows and door locks, power sunroof, zoned climate control, molded in running boards, and more than I can remember. These pictures are from the dealer’s web site, and are not great, but hopefully they will give you an idea of what it looks like. It’s tan with a tan interior.

In fact, I was driving it home and playing around with all of the buttons and knobs, and suddenly I started feeling uncomfortably hot, even though the air conditioner was on. I told Miss Terry later that if I had been a woman, I would have sworn I was having a massive hot flash. As it turns out, I had turned on the seat heater, an option I never hope to be in cold enough weather to need!

The base plate for towing the Explorer is on order, and it will be a couple of weeks before we get it installed. In the meantime, I’ll drive the motorhome and Terry will drive the Explorer for the little bit of running around we’ll be doing between now and then.

By the way, if you are a fulltime RVer who is having trouble obtaining financing on an RV or tow vehicle because the bean counters at your bank don’t understand our lifestyle, call my friend Eileen Gilmore at Alliant Credit Union at (773) 462-2200, extension 3621, and tell her I sent you. Eileen will go the extra mile for you. She handled the purchase of our motorhome last year, and the Explorer now, and she has always been great to work with.

While I was busy with all of the details of the Explorer purchase, Bad Nick stayed out of the line of fire, and wrote a new Bad Nick Blog titled Coloring Outside The Lines. Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – Adversity introduces a man to himself.

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I have had a very frustrating couple of days, and if I had any hair left, I’d probably be pulling it out about now.

Our Ford van has 163,000 miles on the odometer, not counting many thousands more being towed behind our motorhome, and behind our bus conversion before that. It’s reached the point where it’s beginning to nickel and dime us to death. So we have been shopping around for something to replace it.

We found an absolutely beautiful low mileage 2005 Ford Explorer Limited 4×4 at a nearby dealer, and according to Motorhome magazine’s 2005 Dinghy Towing Guide,  the Explorer can be flat towed after the installation of a Neutral Tow Kit, which is about a $30 part. Cool, let’s do it!

Before we signed the papers, I wanted to double check on the procedure for setting up the vehicle for towing. Since the dealer selling the Explorer is not a Ford dealer, I went down the road to the Ford garage and told them what I wanted to do. They told me that basically the dealer plugs the Neutral Tow Kit into a socket under the dashboard, and then they ”flash” the vehicle’s computer to tell the 4 wheel drive transfer case to shift into neutral when I step on the brake pedal and push the 4×4 button, with the transmission in neutral.

However (you knew there was a “however” coming, didn’t you?), it’s not quite that simple. Ford no longer carries the Neutral Tow Kit, and the dealer can’t order one. I found one dealer in Oregon who has several of them in stock, for $375 each plus $30 shipping, and I found one on eBay for $500. Several websites list them, but nobody actually has one, they all want to take your money and put it on backorder.

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From what I understand, the tow kit is nothing more than an LED light, a plug, a template for mounting the gizmo, and three safety stickers.

I have spent the last two days online and on the phone, calling dealers all over the country, talking to a Ford district rep, and getting a different story from everybody I talk to. Some insist that I have to have the tow kit to make things work, some say all a dealer has to do is flash the computer program with or without the tow kit, and some say they have made their own replacement for the tow kit by simply wiring a 12 volt LED light into the circuit where the other tow kit would go. If you can find a dealer to flash it with a homebuilt replacement. Many won’t do it for liability reasons.

It’s a pain, but I understand the liability part of things. Years ago, when we first went on the road, we bought a new Toyota pickup to pull, and Toyota insisted it could not be towed. It was a manual transmission 4×4, so all I did was put the transmission and transfer case in neutral and we towed it for years with no problems. But the bean counters are all programmed to say no to anything, because “what if?”

Now, I think that Ford builds some very fine automobiles and trucks, and I also think that they have some very dumb and/or greedy employees. Three dealers immediately wanted to sell me a new vehicle, and when I told them I wasn’t going to do that, they had no time for me. Several service departments told me that an Explorer can’t be towed in any configuration, and others just scratched their heads and had no advice at all.

The very nice folks at Camper Connection pointed me toward a local Ford dealer’s garage, and the service manager agreed that the tow kit is nothing more than an LED light, a plug, a template for mounting the gizmo, and the safety stickers. Yesterday, the selling dealer let me take the vehicle to the Ford dealer, so he could try flashing the computer without the LED light in place. It didn’t work, so he told me to get an LED light, and we’re going to try again this morning.

Keep your fingers crossed for us. We love the Explorer, it meets all of our needs, the price is right, the financing is in place, but for want of a silly $30 part, the whole deal may fall through. Can you say frustrating?

UPDATE: We’re in luck! Jarrett Gordon Ford installed the LED light I got, and everything works fine for towing!

Thought For The Day – Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.

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None of us like wasting money, and in today’s economy, a lot of people are finding ways to save every penny they can. But when does thrift become less advantageous than the effort or inconvenience required to achieve it?

One example is an RVer I know who never purchases fuel at stations near an interstate exit, because he says that more often than not, he can save two to three cents per gallon by driving an extra mile or two into town. Okay, so let’s say he has a 100 gallon fuel tank, and he waits until the gauge is at the 1/4 tank level. He puts in 75 gallons of fuel, and saves $2.25 (based on 3 cents per gallon savings). But how much fuel did he burn driving the mile or two into town and back to the highway? Not to mention the hassles of dealing with surface street traffic in a big rig. And again, he tells me that more often than not he saves money. That means there are times when he doesn’t pay any less. Then those extra miles actually cost him more than if he filled up at the exit!

When it’s convenient, we usually fill up at Flying J truck stops, because they traditionally give RVers a penny a gallon discount on fuel, most have dedicated RV fuel islands, an RV dump station, and allow RVers to park overnight. I don‘t go to Flying J because of the discount, although I am happy to get it. I go because I appreciate their RV friendly-attitude.

However, there are some Flying J locations, such as Kingman, Arizona, that I will bypass to pay a little more somewhere else, because the layout of that particular Flying J makes it extremely difficult to get in and out with a big rig. Since we have a 100 gallon tank, and I seldom let our fuel level get below half, saving 50 cents is just not worth the hassle.

We all know that we can save fuel driving at 55 miles per hour, as opposed to 65 or faster. But just how much fuel can we save, and is it really worth it? A few days ago, while driving along Interstate 95 in southern Georgia, I did a test. I set our cruise control at 65 miles per hour and carefully monitored our Silverleaf VMSpc engine monitor. Over a 20 mile distance, we averaged 7.3 miles per gallon.

Then I dropped our speed down to 55 miles per hour, and reset the cruise control. Over the same flat terrain, we averaged 7.7 miles per gallon. So yes, at 55 miles per hour, we can save fuel. (By the way, ignore the 101 MPG rolling MPG on the readout, that was because I coasted into the rest area where Terry took this picture. Also ignore the 0% coolant level, my rig doesn’t have a sending unit for that, and I need to reconfigure the Silverleaf display to remove it.)

I’m terrible at math, but if I punched the right buttons on my calculator, that means that on a 1000 mile trip, on all flat terrain, we could save just over 7 gallons of fuel. Let’s assume that fuel is $3 per gallon. That’s a saving of about $21.

However, at 65 miles per hour, we were keeping up with traffic on the busy freeway. At 55 miles per hour, we had traffic piling up behind us waiting for an opportunity to get into the left lane and pass, and several times eighteen wheelers rushed up on our rear end and tailgated until they could get past. We did not feel safe driving at 55 in that kind of traffic.

Dry camping is another example.  We often pull into a WalMart, truck stop, or highway rest area to spend the night when we’re on the road. But we do it for the convenience more so than the economy. I don’t want to have to get off the highway and drive two or three miles to an RV park, unhook our tow vehicle, and back into an RV site, then hook up the campground utilities. And then in the morning I have to reverse the entire process.

When we dry camp like that, we usually run our generator for an hour or two while we watch TV and I use my desktop computer to check e-mail. That’s a couple of bucks worth of fuel, and worth it to me. However, if there is a convenient Passport America campground with pull-thru sites for $10 to $12 a night just off the highway, I’d as soon go there and have hookups.

If there is no handy WalMart or truck stop, I know RVers who will drive past that $10 or $12 campground and drive as much as five for six miles into town to dry camp at an Elks or Moose lodge. Again, is the effort worth the savings?

So what about you? What will you do to save a buck?

Thought For The Day – Everything is funny as long as it is happening to somebody else.

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