Summer Travel Map

Saturday, May 5, 2007

Nearing the goal line

May 5, 2007
McKinney, TX

Yesterday's progress was significant compared to the prior few days. Starting from the rear of the coach, all the blinds in the bedroom, bathroom, dining area, kitchen, and living space are done and working. The windshield blind is installed but not fully finished off. The blinds for the cockpit side windows are fabricated and ready to go. Barring any resource diversions, we should be wrapped up on Monday.

It's been fascinating to watch the installation and learn about how things are put together in these motorhomes. It makes me realize how much more we really can do ourselves once we know how to access things and get beyond the bad decisions made during initial construction. For example, every overhead cabinet has embedded 12v halogen lights in the lower surface. That means that every overhead cabinet has a false floor where the wires run. Once you're in there, you can tap into a "hot" 12v line (not exceeding amperage capacity, of course) from a switch or other source, and wire in anything you like. The "bad decision" part: during construction, all the false floors were stapled in, making them hard to remove without risking damage to the floor and/or surrounding cabinet. Needless to say, they're going back in with small screws for future access.

The new blinds mount pretty easily with steel clips just like residential blinds. Once the clips are secured to the overhead, the blinds just snap in place. The motors are mounted to a side bracket, and actually slide inside the roller tube and connect with a spline to allow the tube to roll. It's a pretty clever design.

We hung around the coach most of the day yesterday. Geri brought the pups to Doggie Day Camp and I emptied all of the overhead cabinets (the false floor access is neat, but the down-side is that the cabinets need to be empty). Of course, we always seem to have more stuff than we need, or know what to do with. Finding space for all the stuff outside the cabinets was a bit of a challenge, but we made it. The good part was that I was able to re-pack everything with better organization than it had. There's nothing like applying some good organization to things to make you feel like you've accomplished something.

In the afternoon, we drove over to the McKinney "downtown" area, which is very different from the strip mall clusters we've seen along the Central Expressway and other major streets in town. The area is a historical district with a lot of shops and a few eateries, spreading out about 4-5 blocks from a central square that holds an imposing municipal building. Many of the shops sell antiques (aka "junk" to me -- rusting metal and distressed paint do not an antique make), or are non-chain specialty stores, which was refreshing to see.

We had lunch at the Spoon Cafe, where the "estrogen factor" was pretty high. Since it was a weekday afternoon, there were very few males to be seen anywhere in town. This place was not a "greasy spoon"; I had a sandwich of lettuce, tomato, avocado and cheese on wheat and a cup of tomato basil soup almost as good as Geri's. After lunch, we stopped for a taste (actually 6 red wine tastes) at Landon Winery, one of two tasting rooms in town. The wines were good but not great, with all of them being made from a mixture of local and California fruit. Although the prices seemed high to me ($24-$48/bottle), we picked up one bottle of their unfiltered Cabernet Sauvignon to take with us. I feel a steak in our future at some point. ;-)

Because the blind installation is so far behind, work continued until well after 6:00 PM, so we ordered a pizza and had a low-stress bite. The weather forecast isn't too great for the weekend, so we'll probably just use the time to do some laundry, clean the coach (now that the majority of the work traffic is gone), and chill. It was good to not have the alarm going off this morning.

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