Summer Travel Map

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Getting ready to hit the road

July 22, 2008
Broad Brook, CT

I feel like this summer's activities have paralleled our winter stay in Arizona, which makes sense because there are some similarities.

First and foremost, very little of our activities are oriented toward travel, obviously. We've been doing projects around the house and cooking lots of interesting meals. One of the highlights has been Al's smoker. We've made brisket, pork roast, and ribs, and they've all come out great. We have another brisket and a pork roast left in the freezer - yum!

Second, the amount of stuff we need to do to get moving seems directly proportional to the amount of time we spend in one place. When we're "on the road", it seems like coach maintenance activities just fall into place easily. Since we knew we'd be in one place for half of this summer, we planned to do some of the more challenging tasks while we were here, and that's worked out quite well. Now that we're in the final countdown to departure, there's an enhanced sense of urgency to managing the to-do list, picking and choosing the things that "have to get done", "should get done", "can get done on the road" and "can wait until we get back to AZ". I will say, though, with Al's help, we got all of the "routine" maintenance done plus several other projects that will help in the future. Some of the maintenance doesn't really require two people but isn't quite designed for one, if that makes any sense.

One of the "unscheduled" projects we finished was a complete re-engineering of the fuel filtration for the generator. All modern diesel engines use at least one fuel filter (the coach has two - primary and secondary) to ensure that "gunk" (a technical term) doesn't clog the injectors. The original one in the generator is tucked inside the housing in a space where it's almost impossible to get hands and wrenches at the same time - and I have relatively small hands. Since paying someone to do something you can do yourself isn't the "retiree way", I've been thinking about how to improve this for a couple of years, picturing replacement of the solid fuel line with a flexible hose. When I changed the filter this year, I couldn't get the primary fitting to stop weeping fuel, so I knew something needed to be done. Fortunately, someone posted to one of our Internet groups about an "out of the box" (literally) solution involving a commercially-available filter system with spin-on replacement cartridges, mounted on the side of the generator. Talk about easy to maintain! One online shopping session and several trips to the hardware and auto parts stores later, we now have an external filter that's better than the original and will be a snap to change. Excellent!

Otherwise, things continue to be on the quiet side. The Bowers are away on vacation, cruising around the Mediterranean. Melisa and Paul have been busy (Paul's Dad is in relatively poor health), so we haven't seen them. We did catch up with Lew and Wes Goldfarb for dinner last night. Lew and Geri worked together years ago (early-70s) at Travelers and they live in South Windsor, so we generally catch up when we're in the area. We'll try to catch up with them, and everyone else, again before we head out.

In any event, we've only got a few remaining things on the "before we leave" list and I'll wrap up most of them this week. Next week, we'll do a thorough cleaning inside and out, finish up our stocking up for travel, and hit the road!

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