Waiting For The Storm
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.
Eventually I wandered outside, where I took a few pictures of the campground at Neuseway Nature Park. Our RV site backs up to some trees, and I wasn’t sure our rooftop automatic television dish would be able to pick up a signal, but after a couple of false starts, it managed to lock onto a weak signal. If we were parked across the road, facing our present site, we’d have had no problem, but since those sites back up to the Neuseway River, they are in demand and were all taken when we arrived.
hookups were mounted on tall poles that my stubby little legs barely allowed me to reach. When our friend Patti Ivey came by to visit, I mentioned the strange electrical hookups, and she explained that they are that way to keep them above the high water level when the river floods. I made a mental note to myself not to be anywhere near here if the water starts rising!
