Escaping Winter Once More!

So, as you might guess from the title, the work gig in Tucson got finalized and I hastily packed and readied the View for Season 2 of snowbirding in the Southwest.  I was able to make a quick appointment at the commercial truck tire shop to get my new Bilstein shocks installed, and decided to go ahead and get a set of new tires as well.  The View only had 32,000 miles, but the tread on the OEM Continental tires was looking so bald, I didn’t relish the thought of winter driving on them! 

By the way, the Bilsteins are indeed an improvement!  They don’t completely eliminate the “rock and roll” (when going over curbs slowly for example), but they considerably reduce it without making the ride feel stiff or harsh.  So, a very worthwhile upgrade for about $200 installed.

Millie and I finally got packed up and on the road late Saturday afternoon and made it to our familiar, trusty Wal-Mart parking lot in Litchfield, IL for our first evening of free overnight parking.  We had spent New Year’s Eve here last year on our way down to the Southwest, and an even more bitterly cold sub-zero night here back in 2007 in the T@B.  This year, thankfully, our travel coincided with a brief stretch of unseasonably warm and dry weather with overnight lows only into the low 30’s.

We divided our time between Wal-Marts and Flying J truck stops.  Sure love free overnight parking after a long day of traveling!  Last year, I had just about abandoned Flying J when their prices seemed much higher than local stations, and they began charging for more RV services.  Well, this year, it seems like they’re trying very hard to get back in “good graces” with the RVing community.  I got an email last week saying they’ll now be giving 6 cents off per gallon for Good Sam members and, following the example Wal-Mart started last year with it’s Murphy Oil promo, Flying J is offering 10 cents off per gallon when using their new Flying J credit card.

We stayed at the Joplin, MO Flying J the next night and I was eager to drive thru town the next morning to see how the recovery was progressing from last Spring’s deadly tornado. 

Joplin is a decent-sized town, so by no means was it entirely wiped off the map (like the small town of Greensburg, KS had been a few years ago from its deadly tornado), but the Joplin tornado was certainly quite large and ripped a path over a mile wide and a few miles long of complete destruction--

Some businesses, like this American Mattress store, seemed completely untouched from the day the tornado struck--

Yet, many others, like this Pizza Hut, were well on their way to recovery.  The people of Joplin are moving forward.

After another Flying J night in western Oklahoma, we made our way across the Texas panhandle.  It always feels like my gateway to the Southwest when I start seeing those big skies and wide-open vistas--

and magical skies of New Mexico!

After a quiet night at a Walmart east of Albuquerque, we headed south to Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge near San Antonio, NM.  No truck stops or WalMarts there, but a nice couple of nights at the Bosque Birdwatchers RV Park, run by a fun-loving, free-spirit elderly lady named Jackie, and her middle-aged son.  (more Bosque photos in the next post!)

I spent most of the next day catching up on work, and then hit the road again for the final leg into Tucson.  We crossed the border into Arizona greeted by the most amazing sunset… Home, sweet home for the next 2 months!

Wow, 2012 is off to a flying start!

I got an email earlier this week from my fellow View-owner friend Evelyn (of Travels with Evelyn and Steve) that both of our blogs managed to make it onto HitchItch.com (an excellent collection of notable and notorious RV travel blogs…guess WinnieViews falls into the latter!).

Well, what a thrill and an honor!  thank you very much HitchItch, and welcome to the new friends who are now finding us!

And, speaking of hitch itch…

After settling in for what I thought was going to be a long, cold quiet winter of “hitch envy” blog-reading here in Chicago, I may now be headed to the Southwest this winter after all (a work assignment that might lend itself perfectly to a snowbirding opportunity)!  Should know more tomorrow, but I may now be needing to get the View packed and ready to roll very quickly (within the next few days)!

Ever feel like someone just strapped a jetpack on your back and flipped the switch?!!   Hangin’ on tight for 2012’s ride!

What I did on my Winter Vacation

For a variety of reasons, rather than take off for a snowbird escape right after Christmas to a warm and sunny destination, I had to stay home for my winter vacation this year.  But I got a lot of miscellaneous stuff done and got to play with some new Tech toys in the process!

The View is finally home!
And, thankfully, not covered in snow like it was two years ago when it spent the holidays in the driveway.  For most of the past 3 months, the View had been in  the shop for a nagging and mysterious generator problem.

This past summer, the generator began “acting up” by not starting.  The starter panel would always come on like normal, but when the start button was pushed, some days it would start right up just fine, and other days it would completely ignore the request (absolutely no engine sound or attempt to start).

The dealer’s first fix was a new Control Board (“only” $800 installed, yippee!).  On my next camping trip, when the generator began it’s tricks again, back we went to the dealer for a second fix—this time, a new Remote Start Panel, which was looking like it’d be another $800 fix until the nightmare got worse.

The new starter panel still didn’t fix the issue (thankfully, the View never left the shop when they realized this). So, it then took another 2 months of back and forth between the dealer, the Onan distributor, and Cummins Onan themselves to figure out problem and who would pay for it.

Thankfully, all ended well.  Cummins Onan offered to pay ALL generator-related repair costs…even the initial $800 repair I had already paid!  The culprit was a $5 set of wires deep within the engine assembly that had been misrouted and badly crimped when initially assembled at the factory. Over time, the crimping had corroded the wires to where they’d no longer transfer 12v power to the starter properly.

Of course, in the meantime, my electric step motor decided to conk out and my fridge went into a blinkedy fit again, so I ended up paying some repair bills afterall, but thankfully, the really expensive generator work was covered.  So, fingers are now crossed that the View’s “terrible twos” are behind us and 2012 will be a better year.

I finally ditched my PC for a Mac!
Speaking of “terrible twos”, the fancy Sony Vaio PC I bought 2 years ago had been slowly frying out for the past few months as well.  When it started continuously pretending to press keyboard keys, I had had enough…time for a new laptop!  Off I went to the local electronics store to look at the current crop.  The thought of spending another princely sum to get just “more of the same” low quality plastic parts, and a desktop loaded up with “bloatware,” was not winning me over though.  So I headed over to the Apple Store to check out the Macbook Pros again.  Previously, when I’d looked at them, I guess they hadn’t been configured the way I would have wanted (screens could never go “full-screen”, and mouse clicks always required pressing down and clicking the trackpad rather than just tapping).  But after spending a bit more time with the new Lion OS, I saw that it now could do all those things and much more.  So, I decided to go for a 15” model with the high-res anti-glare screen (better for photo editing).

Macs are still a lot more expensive than PCs, but with a bit of online shopping and simple DIY installations, I managed to save $850 vs. the local Apple Store!  I’ve used B&H Photo for my photo gear purchases for years, and now that they sell Apple, they were a no-brainer to go with.  While their laptop prices were the same as the Apple Store, B&H also threw in Parallels 7 (the software that lets you run Windows from a Mac) for free, and a 3-yr Apple Care warranty for less than 1/2 price.

I knew I wanted a faster “solid state drive” (my work laptop has one and they are AMAZING!) and wanted more RAM, but rather than pay the inflated Apple prices to get these pre-installed, I bought the components from OWC and Newegg and installed them myself.  If you can use a screwdriver and watch a few videos, you too can easily do these kinds of upgrades as well! 

The OWC website has excellent videos and even provides the tiny magnetic screwdrivers that make the process simple.  OWC will even let you send back the original components for a small rebate if desired.  I decided to buy their Data Doubler, so that I could move the original 500GB drive over to DVD’s drive bay, and then put the DVD drive in a USB external enclosure should I ever need it again.

The new Mac is amazingly fast and yet, built like a tank.  The Lion OS has obviously taken some getting used to, but just about everything I could do in Windows 7, I can do with Lion and more.  And if I ever get stuck, a quick internet search usually finds me the solution (and if all else fails, flipping over to my Windows 7 instance running on Parallels will bring me right back to my comfort zone). 

Best of all, the new Mac works seamlessly with my iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV.  Steve Jobs might have been a real SOB to deal with as a person, but I’m so glad he stood his ground and pushed so hard for product quality and integration.  I can’t believe I waited so long to finally make this jump!

A Gift of Faith

My post today has nothing to do with RVing, but celebrates the 100th anniversary birth date of my grandmother, Lockie, and the gift she ultimately gave me of finding everlasting Faith. 

I’ve never been a very religious church-goer in my life, but like many others drawn to the outdoors, I often experience the greatest sense of spirituality when out in nature.  I feel much more connected to God on a Sunday morning when paddling a quiet pond or watching a magical sunrise, than praying from a church pew.  But it wasn’t always that way.

My grandmother was born in 1911, the youngest of 4 girls in a deeply religious Baptist family.  They moved to Augusta, Kansas when she was still a child, and it was there in the 1930s, at the height of the Great Depression, that she met my grandfather, Ray, who ran the portrait photography studio in town and preached at a small church out in the country.

They were an inseparable team for nearly 50 years, spending much of that time in Kansas City, where they raised my mother (their only child) and grew a large congregation at the Hyde Park Christian Church.  He was the inspirational preacher, and she, the devoted preacher’s wife who sang in the choir, taught Sunday School classes, and organized countless church socials and pot luck suppers.

My earliest memories were of the summers with my grandparents in the late 1960s and early ‘70’s.  My grandmother would often sing and play hymns and Broadway show tunes on the piano. When I was old enough to learn, she first taught me one of her favorites, “Edelweiss” from The Sound of Music. For years afterwards, whenever we’d hear that song on the radio or TV, she’d say “they’re playing our song, honey!”

After my grandfather died in 1979, I had a hard time finding as meaningful a connection with any church or minister as I had felt when listening to him preach.  My grandmother tried relentlessly to get me to attend church more otten—“You can meet a nice young man there!” she’d often say.  But, by then, I was a young adult with my own ideas, and being an obedient young church girl was not one of them!

 

By 2000, when my grandmother was nearly 90, I moved her up to a retirement home near my mom’s house in Chicago.  By then, dementia had began ravaging her mind, and the religious pleadings had subsided.  Despite the circumstances, we had some wonderful times together in those final years and I got to see my grandmother much more often than I had in years past.

I also started ever so slowly to re-examine my skepticism towards Faith. There had been a couple of small coincidences and little miracles that my logical secular brain simply could not provide a rational explanation.  I was drifting closer towards God, but wasn’t 100% convinced just yet. 

Then, on one sunny December morning in 2005, my grandmother helped provide the final leap of Faith that I’d been needing.  My mother and I had been at the nursing home all night long holding my grandmother’s hands as she peacefully slept in her last few hours of life.  Christmas music blared over the loudspeaker continuously, and it honestly got a bit annoying at times.

About 30 minutes after my grandmother passed, my mom and I began gathering a few of her things to take to the car.  As I walked down a long hallway of the nursing home, I suddenly heard music over the loudspeaker that could not have been more crystal clear a message to me—this song was no ordinary Christmas Muzak from the night before.  Out of the millions of songs to be playing that morning, it was “Edelweiss,” indeed, our song!

My Faith has never waivered again since that day. It was my grandmother’s last and most precious gift to me.

Holiday Happenings

Millie the Jingle Dog in 2008

I posted these photos on my T@B blog a few years ago, but they're still some of my favorites of Millie celebrating the first snowfall of 2008 out in the backyard.

This winter has been a bit more challenging for Millie.  She had surgery last week to take care of some minor things, and the vet discovered a cancerous tumor on her rear paw that could not be completely removed.

So, it looks like Millie will have to endure a few more visits to the vet in the coming months as we figure out the best treatment plan.  The good news is that it doesn't appear to be the very worst kind of cancer, so the odds look promising.

In the meantime, Millie is enjoying all the extra treats and toys she's been getting lately, and is looking forward to this season's first big snowfall in the backyard!















While I may not have any travel posts for the next few months, I do plan to get more tech and general RVing posts completed.  Tech changes so quickly, that the posts I did last winter on Mobile Productivity are now getting pretty outdated, so lots of new toy and app discoveries to share with you soon!

Just noticed today that we're now up to 50 friends following this blog...wow!  My deepest thanks to everyone for all the kind and helpful comments you've made.  It was also great fun to finally meet some of you in-person this year and I hope more of us can meet up next year as our travels align.

Wishing everyone a very enjoyable holiday season & a joyous new year!