Thinking about where to wander

Waco Lake, April 2015

The S.O. and I have nailed down our spring campground hosting gig -- we're going to Johnson's Shut-Ins State Park in Missouri for the month of April -- but don't have anything solid lined up for the fall. We did apply for a couple parks for October, but are now having second thoughts. I'm not sure what we'll say if we get a phone call about hosting then. We're now thinking about staying up here on the tundra through October, maybe even into November, and then doing the snowbird thing, kind of wander across the southern tier of states until stuff melts up here. We had talked about doing something like that a couple years ago -- take off from here right after New Year's and stay gone until May -- but changed our minds.

There are a lot of places in the Southwest I'd like to see. Guadalupe Mountains National Park. Craters of the Moon National Monument. Carlsbad Caverns. Fort Davis. Taos, New Mexico. Bisbee, Arizona. Big Bend National Park. The Four Corners area. Various national wildlife refuges -- there are a few along the Gulf Coast that sound really interesting. Plus, of course, one of the newest additions to the National Park system, Mammoth National Monument, is in Waco. I could see spending a couple weeks camped on Waco Lake; we liked the Corps of Engineers campground we stayed at in April. It would be fairly easy to come up with a list that would be much too long to actually cover in just one winter. We shall see. . .

In the meantime, before we go anywhere, whether it's this Spring or next Fall, we need to do some minor tweaking to the Guppy. The S.O. has to install a shelf in a cabinet and we need to figure out a better place to stash the shop vac. Right now it's tucked into the space I want to use for stashing my sewing machine the next time we do a prolonged road trip. We also need to replace the charger for the RV battery (the one that runs the lights and water pump when camped at a basic site). The charger that's in the Guppy now doesn't seem to remember how to turn itself off so it keeps wanting to boil the RV battery. We should probably do that this month so we've got lots of time to figure out if the replacement works or not and can deal with returns if necessary. I'm not sure just what's involved in pulling out the old charger, but no doubt the S.O. knows what he's doing. Or I hope he does.

At least this time, assuming the weather behaves normally, I won't have to deal with trying to load supplies in the Guppy in subzero temperatures. When we head for Missouri this spring we'll be leaving a month later than last year. Conditions up here shouldn't be quite as harsh, and maybe, just maybe, I'll be a little better organized when it comes to packing stuff like groceries. Last year I wound up so frozen I couldn't think straight and left stuff at home I had meant to bring with us. I spent several weeks wondering why I couldn't find something -- a jar of pickles, a can of soup -- because the grocery bag I had meant to pack was still sitting empty back on the tundra.You know, maybe it's stuff like having to think about what's in the RV and what isn't and shuffling stuff back and forth that turns part-time RVers into fulltime: if you're in the RV 24/7 year-round there's never any question about just where that jar of green tomato pickles you thought you packed really is.

Intimations of mortality

Over the years, I've occasionally thought about various possibilities that could lead to my demise: car accident, insane co-worker, being shot full of penicillin by someone who ignored my "but I'm allergic" protests, . . . it's a lengthy list, and one that tends to grow even longer as one ages. After all, one rarely contemplates the possibility of a myocardial infarction or a cerebral hemorrhage in one's teens, but when you hit your golden years and old school chums start dropping from "cardiac events," your outlook changes.

One thing, however, never crossed my mind. Death by asphyxiation from breathing in the fumes of burning piss. What's that you say? Urine doesn't burn? Well, it does if an exhaust pipe shifts position and melts the bottom of the black water holding tank on a motorhome. To say it's a rather acrid aroma would be putting it mildly.

We were bouncing along merrily in the Guppy, a mere 5 or 6 miles from the truck stop where we planned to stop and refuel both the vehicle and ourselves. This was supposed to be the Last Night on the Road; we were going to live adventurously and boondock (aka dry camp). Our goal, more or less, was a Walmart parking lot near Plover, Wisconsin.

I could almost taste the country-fried steak at the Iron Skillet in the Petro truck stop when two things happened, more or less simultaneously. I thought I smelled something burning and the smoke alarm in the Guppy went off. We pulled on to the shoulder, I turned off the smoke alarm, and we started trying to figure out what was burning. By the time, we rolled to a stop and the engine was off, the Guppy was thoroughly full of smoke with fumes so thick I worried about the cat getting asphyxiated.

It is, incidentally, a rather strange experience to be cruising down the highway and have a smoke alarm start shrieking in your ear.

Anyway, we stopped, opened a bunch of windows, and started trying to figure out where the smoke was coming from. No clue. The S.O. popped the hood -- everything looked perfectly normal in the engine compartment, at least the part he could see. Didn't seem to be a wiring problem on the RV side -- we had a DC-powered cooler plugged in; it was okay. All the lights functioned, too, and the RV battery wasn't hot. So we decided to see if we could make it to the truck stop. We start off, everything is fine. . . for maybe half a mile. The S.O. keeps driving; I go back and turn off the smoke detector and sit on the floor for the remaining mile or so to the parking lot. That's when I see smoke seeping out from under the engine cowling.

We decide to pull into the Day's Inn parking lot rather than the gas station. At this point I'm thinking we're going to be sleeping in a motel room instead of the Guppy. It was after 7, there wasn't much daylight left in which to solve the problem, and we were tired and hungry. After we're parked, the S.O. decided to pull the cowling off to see if we can figure out just what's going on. There is absolutely no sign of any problem with the engine itself, but we discover various snacks mice and squirrels have stashed on it: pine cones, spruce cones, chokecherry pits. So maybe the problem was that the engine got hot enough that some of that crap started smoldering? It's hard to see, the light is getting dim enough that we're not sure if anything looks scorched or not. I get us checked into the motel; the S.O. clears as much rodent food off the engine as he can find. We convince ourselves that was the problem: rodent leftovers trying to catch fire on the engine. After all, it doesn't take much material to create a lot of smoke, especially in an enclosed space.

Morning comes, we resume our travels. We're maybe five miles down the road when the smoke alarm goes off again. This time I move fast enough that I see a thick plume of smoke coming out from under the refrigerator. Brief moment of total panic -- that's where the furnace lives. No problem visible in the furnace compartment so obviously the problem is under the Guppy.

Mystery solved: approximately 3,000 miles of travel that included bouncing over some truly rough pavement led to the exhaust system loosening up and twisting. Instead of being directed away from the Guppy, hot exhaust was aimed right at the bottom of the black water tank. There's no way of knowing just when the twisting first happened, but by Monday evening after a full day of travel there was plastic dripping on to a hot exhaust pipe, followed by leakage from the tank. End result? Burning piss and some truly nasty fumes.

The good news, such as it was, is that there was nothing mechanically wrong with the Guppy. The S.O. was able to do a temporary repair with safety wire and sometime this summer will rehang the exhaust system, making sure all the hangers are solid and the tailpipe is aimed in the right direction. We were lucky in that there wasn't much in the holding tank -- we'd avoided using the Guppy's toilet after using the dump station at Fort Richardson. The bad news, of course, is that we have to replace that tank. I guess when we're complaining about the cost (approximately $300, depending on the size and dealer) we'll have to remind ourselves it could have been a lot worse.

Now to invest in massive amounts of Febreze and see if it's possible to get that odor out of the Guppy before the next time we go camping.

How did we manage before?

I was doing some wandering around the Intertubes, researching campgrounds that would fit into the tentative itinerary the S.O. and I have been contemplating for the month of April, and it hit me: How did people do this stuff before? The answer is obvious -- before the Internet, they relied on publications like the Good Sam guides and the telephone. And before that, they'd just show up at campgrounds and hope there was space available on a first come, first served basis.

There are still campers who do that. Every time I help in the fee booth I see a few campers who just show up hoping there's space available. Montauk State Park still has sites that are non-reservable; they're filled on a walk-in (drive-in?) basis. Not all campgrounds are like that; more and more are going to a 100% reservable status. Which means the odds of someone who's doing a spontaneous camping expedition finding a space on the spur of a moment are getting slimmer and slimmer. There were a couple weekends in October where we wound up putting out the No Vacancy sign at the fee booth pretty early in the afternoon, and I'm sure the same thing will happen this month. If the weather forecast hadn't included rain and a flash flood alert, we might have had to do it yesterday: every single reserveable site, with the exception of one or two handicapped accessible spaces, was reserved. For some reason, though, the first come sites filled up slowly. There were still quite a few available when our shift in the booth ended. This weekend, incidentally, is typical of most weekends during the "on season" here. From now through October, most Fridays and Saturdays the reservable sites are already sold out. Montauk is a popular park. But, as usual, I digress.

There was a time when the spontaneous aspect of just wandering aimlessly and hoping to find a decent place to park the Guppy for a few nights would have appealed to me. I must be getting old because now I prefer a little more structure. I want an itinerary that includes definite stops, places where I know when we get there, we won't find ourselves driving around a campground, circling like sharks hoping to spot a slow or stupid seal, looking for an open site that isn't too muddy, too out in the open or (alternatively) right under a hazard tree, or too close to the sites next to it. I want to be able to stop at a campground's fee booth/check station and say those magic words: "We have a reservation." I find myself getting really annoyed at the campgrounds that have web sites that are basically just glorified Yellow Pages advertisements -- no interactive features, no online ability to reserve a site, just an 800 number to call. I want to be able to do this stuff at a time that is convenient to me (5 a.m.?), not between the normal business hours of 8 and 5. I don't want to have to deal with humans. Humans make mistakes. They misspell names, transpose numbers, and sell people's credit card information to their shady acquaintances.

In short, what could end up determining the April itinerary is which state park systems and which private campgrounds have decent online reservation systems in place and which don't. At this point, avoiding burning up Tracfone minutes is trumping most other factors. The exceptions will come when (if?) it turns out the only campgrounds reasonably close to where we want to be in our ambles are still doing business using goose quills and parchment. I'm hoping I don't stumble across too many of them.

As for the itinerary, so far it's made it into Arkansas and Crater of Diamonds State Park. We've always been a little bit curious about a place where you can supposedly find actual diamonds in the dirt. I wasn't too impressed with the website -- it has only one photo of a campsite, and you don't get to pick a specific site yourself -- but it is an online reservation system so I won't complain too much about its flaws. The S.O. and I did kick around the idea of stopping in Hot Springs for a few days -- the National Park Service has a nice campground at Gulpha Gorge (first come, first served for every site, but I'll make exceptions to my preference for online reservations when it's an NPS campground) -- but we've decided to focus our amblings this Spring on places neither of us has been before.

And now back to the Internet and trying to figure out what looks good in Texas.

It has struck me that our amblings in the Guppy aim us in the opposite direction of most RVs with cold state plates in April. We're going South when most retirees will be heading North. The annual snowbird migration is beginning; we've already had a couple of retirees pass through here on their way north from Texas to Illinois. I guess the people going north now just don't realize that April is the best month of the year in Texas.

An odd experience

Note icicles hanging off the front of the Guppy. The snow did
start to melt yesterday.

I'm having trouble getting into a book I'm reading, Oscar and Lucinda. I'm not sure why. The writing is okay, and the underlying narrative is at least moderately interesting. I started it enough days ago that if I were breezing through it at my usual speed, I'd be done with it by now. Instead I haven't even made it to page 100 yet. For some reason, it's doing too good a job of mellowing me out when I crawl into bed.

My normal routine is to read for half an hour to an hour before going to sleep each evening. Seems like since we've been here at Montauk, that half an hour is more like 5 minutes. The only explanation that comes to mind is that dealing with the cold can be remarkably draining. We're staying warm, but there are a whole bunch of things that I tend to take for granted that involve extra work here. Because it's been so cold (well

The host's golf cart handles surprisingly well in snow. 

below freezing every night), we don't have the water connected to the Guppy. That means multiple trips throughout the course of the day to the frost-free faucet across the road (the one that would connect to the Guppy proved to be not frost-free after all and is frozen) to get water to make coffee, brush teeth, wash dishes, whatever. We hadn't planned on boondocking while sitting on a campground host's site so arrived here still in full winterization mode: the plumbing system was full of anti-freeze, not water.

I could be wrong, but it's one thing to go camping fully expecting to deal with "roughing it" and quite another to have it thrust upon one's self as a rude surprise. And, yes, my whining about being cold and inconvenienced definitely falls into the category of a first world problem. Somewhere in sub-Saharan Africa small children are trying to survive with no safe drinking water and praying UNICEF makes a food delivery soon while I whine about having to put on boots to walk to an outdoor faucet.

On the other hand, I bet those starving, thirsty kids are warm. . .

Photo taken before the snow started falling in earnest; by the time it stopped Saturday night there was probably 7 to 8 inches of fresh snow on top of what was already there. Yesterday temperatures hit the mid-30s and the snow started melting. It won't take long to vanish at this time of the year. 

Still a learning experience

View from our campsite yesterday. The first come, first served spots along
the river are filling quickly despite the cold. weather. And, yes, there are
some guys who are hardy (or drunk) enough to indulge in tent camping. 

Every time we do something with the Guppy, we discover something else it would have been nice to have but we don't. Sometimes it's been fairly minor stuff -- a bottle opener, for example, or a decent-sized mixing bowl -- and sometimes it's definitely more important. Like a carbon monoxide detector. The Guppy has a smoke alarm but no carbon monoxide detector.

This was a serious oversight on our part. It doesn't make much difference when you're camping in warm weather and really don't care about heat, but when the temperature outside is in single digits? It would be kind of nice then to be able to run the furnace at night without worrying about waking up dead. We run the furnace during the day, get things reasonably toasty in here, and then it's time to retire for the night. The last thing we do before turning off the bedroom light is shut off the furnace -- and turning it on is the first thing we do when we crawl out of bed in the morning. I may have mentioned before that the Guppy tends to leak heat rather rapidly. Got up this morning and the bedroom thermometer read a balmy 35.9 degrees.

When I was in the fee booth yesterday and we were all chatting about the cold weather, I got asked how we were doing here in the Guppy. So I mentioned our carbon monoxide paranoia. The park superintendent suggested we invest in an electric blanket. Not a bad idea, I agreed, but the way things go, as soon as we spend the money on one the weather will turn warm. Exactly, was the response. Go buy one and make Spring happen.

It may get chilly in the Guppy, but it's got to be downright freezing in this
pop-up. The giant woodpile won't help much. They must be planning one
heck of a campfire to celebrate Opening Day.

I have actually thought about getting an electric blanket -- it would be nice when we're camping at places that do have electric service -- but neither the S.O. nor I are too keen on electric blankets since the time he almost burnt his house down. Back in his bachelor days, he had an electric blanket. He left for work one day not realizing he'd forgotten to turn the blanket off when he got up. It was wadded up on the bed, and by the time he got home it was starting to smolder. There were definite scorch marks. That was the last time there was an electric blanket in use any place he lived.

In any case, carbon monoxide detector is now on the shopping list. We'll be heading into Springfield on one of our days off next week and will pick one up then. Of course, by then the temperatures are supposed to have climbed back out of the Arctic and we won't need the furnace much anymore. The weather forecast for today actually has highs predicted in the 30s (above freezing), and by Tuesday it could be pushing 60. Still, a carbon monoxide detector is something we should have thought about right after we bought the Guppy, not almost 18 months later.

The view from the other end of Loop 2. If you enlarge the photo, the Guppy
is in the extreme background in line with a picnic table to the right of
the 5th wheel in the leftof the photo. 

In other news, the park is filling up despite the cold and the snow. Some of the regulars have been coming here for opening day since they were kids. One fellow told me yesterday he'd been here for every opening day since he was 16 -- and he qualifies for the senior discount now. I wonder if he saves his tags? Apparently there are some bragging rights involved in being able to have an extremely low number on the daily tag for opening day. The primo tag, of course, is number 1. We plan to do some fishing ourselves this month, but won't be part of the mob fighting for river bank space on Sunday. Things will thin out considerably during the week so we'll do our fishing when the pressure on the fish slacks off a little.  

No more photo ops

I'm going to miss seeing this machine in our driveway.

We had enough snow build up that the grader operator decided it was worth coming in here the other day. It was perfect timing on his part -- we hadn't dug the Guppy out of the snowbank yet so it was out of the way, and now the weather forecast is such that there probably won't be a reason for him to come in here again until sometime next week. And by then we'll be gone in search of Spring. 

The grader turning around by the barn. 

In the photo above, the Guppy is kind of hiding behind the grader, still securely tucked into the snow. In the photo below, the Guppy has (obviously) moved.

I thought taking that tarp off would be a real pain, but it turned out to be surprisingly easy. The S.O. had used old Chevy hubcaps to cover the plumbing vents on the roof; because they were rounded, there was nothing for the tarp to get hung up on once we started pulling it off. The worst part was getting hit with solidified chunks of snow that tended to slide right down the tarp and up my jacket sleeves.

Pictured above is the space the Guppy emerged from. The tow dolly had been parked right behind it, truly buried in the snow close to the storage shed. The S.O. wound up doing a fair amount of shoveling to get to the point where he'd be able to drag the dolly out with his POS Dodge plow truck once the Guppy was out of the way. 

With the Guppy out of the way, the Dodge is now parked in that space for the foreseeable future. Unless something dramatic changes in the next 24 hours, the S.O. will not be plowing any snow again until, oh, maybe October. November if we're lucky. 

The Guppy is now positioned for loading, the tow dolly is directly behind it although not yet attached. 

The above is my last grader photo for this year and probably forever, at least on our driveway. As of November 1, 2015, we'll be solely responsible for snow removal on our property. If I want to take grader photos next winter, I'll have to chase Billy around Herman hoping to get some decent photos as he's clearing county roads. I don't think I'm that ambitious. Or obsessed. 

Later today we'll finish loading the Guppy, getting the beast ready to head South toward slightly warmer weather tomorrow. I did get the new curtains done, both the ones to block the cab from the rest of the interior and the "kitchen" curtains for the living/dining area. I'm not sure what era that fabric is from, probably the 1960s, but once again I'm thinking my aunt Thelma had odd taste. I must confess, though, that those curtains are growing on me. I started off thinking it was some of the ugliest stuff I'd ever seen, but it's amazing how attractive fabric can become when it's Free. And it is a cheerful pattern. 

We still have a bit of a curtain problem in the bedroom. The ones that came with the Guppy were in sad shape, adequate but just barely, so I replaced them with some curtains that had been in the guest cabin when we bought it. Turned out they work fine on two of the windows but are about half an inch short on the third. Not a big deal, but still something I'm going to want to deal with eventually. Now that the ugly, filthy valances are gone, we need to move the drapery rods up a couple inches anyway. I'll just plan on doing new curtains that are custom-fitted to each window so I can be sure each set is exactly the right length. It'll be a good project for this summer. Although who knows? Maybe I'll get lucky and find something ready-made and easily adaptable at a Home Goods or other store in our travels. I didn't have any luck when I looked around here, but when the retail options are Family Dollar and Shopko Hometown I wasn't expecting to. 

One week to go

And then we hit the road in search of Spring. Over the past couple of months we've managed to check off a few items on the To Do list for the Guppy, we've added a few items to the household stuff stashed in the cabinets and pulled a few things out, and in general things are looking good. The S.O. has been busy shoveling, trying to find the tow dolly. Well, not exactly find it -- we know where it is -- he's been working on cleaning out around it so it'll be easier to pull out of the snowbank.

I was hoping we'd have a few warmish days this coming week so it would be a little easier to be in the Guppy getting the new curtains hung, supplies loaded, and everything securely stashed. It doesn't look like we're going to be that lucky. According to the 10-day forecast, the next 7 days are going to be Cold, as in single digit cold, or worse (tomorrow's predicted high is a balmy 2 below). If we're lucky, by late afternoon some days we may experience highs in the teens. It's not going to a whole lot of fun trying to get the Guppy ready to go with mittens on my hands.

The hardest part, though, may not be anything that's actually going into the Guppy. It's going to be fun getting the tarp off. That sucker is going to be frozen stiff, it's probably got ice on it under the snow (there's more snow on it now than there was when that picture was taken), and it's going to be a real joy to try to get folded. Of course, we don't have to do a perfect job of folding it; we just need to turn it into a small enough bundle to get it into the barn.

I was looking at my car yesterday, which has the usual U.P. accumulation of ice built up in the wheel wells and elsewhere, and wondering (a) how much of a pain is that mess going to be for the S.O. when he's trying to secure the car on the tow dolly, and (b) just how long we'll have to be in Missouri before it all melts off. Guess I'll have the answers in a week or so.

Preparations

I spent some time yesterday in the Woman Cave working on curtains for the Guppy. We're going back to Montauk State Park in March; curtains are on the To Do list of chores that should get done before we hit the road.

I've got two sets of curtains to make: some new ones for the windows in the kitchen/living area. The existing curtains are a little too transparent. Being a campground host generally entails living on a stage: the host's site is always right up front, the first thing you see when you pull into a camping loop, and is often positioned so everyone gets to walk past it on the way to the showerhouse. I don't mind the life on a stage aspect too much during the day, but once it gets to be late enough that it's flannel nightie time, I'd rather not make it easy for people to see me. Ditto first thing in the morning -- I don't want anyone seeing me while I'm working on that first cup of coffee and still trying to decide if it's worth being awake. I know I'm being a little too sensitive -- most people walking by the Guppy aren't looking at it, they're focused on wherever it is they're going and what they're going to do there -- but nonetheless new curtains are on the list.

The Guppy on stage at Montauk State Park

The other set of curtains is a heavy pair to block off the cab part of the Guppy from the rest of the interior. It's to help reduce cold drafts and heat loss. They're probably going to look a little strange (once again I'm dipping into the Thelma stash of yard goods) but if they help reduce heat loss, it won't matter much just what they look like, which in this case is going to be hot pink corduroy. Why my aunt Thelma purchased 7+ yards of extremely pink corduroy is a mystery; I'm just happy to have it (free material!) and pleased that there's almost exactly the right amount of yardage. I think a previous Guppy owner had done something similar at some point because there are closet rod brackets in addition to the normal RV drapery hardware -- the Guppy came from the factory with a privacy curtain for the bunk over the cab, but those curtains just block off the bunk, not the cab. We have some left over plastic pipe from a plumbing project that's just the right size for a drapery rod. Hopefully, cold drafts from the cab won't be an issue anymore.

Doing anything in the Woman Cave is always a bit of a challenge at this time of the year. When I went up to get a fire going in the woodstove, the temperature in the Cave was the same as outdoors: 8. It took about an hour to get it all the way up to 40, but once it got past 40 it didn't take much longer to reach the point where it felt comfortable without a jacket and mittens. The curtains to block off the cab are now basically done, but I need to do some more measuring in the Guppy before I make the other set. They won't be hot pink, which is a bit of relief when they're something we'll be seeing every time we use the Guppy and not just when the weather is cold. Maybe I should do some before and after photos. . . or maybe not, not unless I decide to use the odd retro 1950s fabric with the bizarre coffee pot pattern.

Home, sweet snow-covered home

We've been home for a few days now. Travel was uneventful, although coming up through Illinois we had a pretty good tailwind and actually got the Guppy up to around 9 miles per gallon. That was exciting, just cruising along and not seeing the needle gas gauge plummet as soon as we pulled away from the pump. Even better was seeing the prices plummet, although the lowest price we saw -- $2.54 -- didn't help us at all at the time. We know we'd get better mileage if we weren't dragging a car behind us on a tow dolly, but we're not willing to give up that anchor yet.

The weirdest part with watching the gas prices was realizing that gas was selling for more in Wisconsin than in Illinois. Usually the reverse is true. And of course Missouri is always much, much cheaper than any of the other states -- I have no idea why, although it probably has to do with state sales taxes and fees. Missouri makes up for having cheap gas, though, by taxing food. That definitely startled me the first time we grocery-shopped. Granted, the sales tax on food is lower than the sales tax on nonedible items, but even so. . . taxing food always feels wrong to me. But, as usual, I digress.

We're home. It feels good to be home, back in a truly warm house with a large, dry bed. After a month in that 3/4 size bed in the Guppy, it feels good to be able to sprawl again. Sprawl, heck. It feels good just to be able to turn over in the bed without worrying about either falling out or nailing the S.O. with an elbow or a knee. It also feels good to be able to walk around the house like a normal person with no sidling sideways like a crab to negotiate tiny spaces. I don't know how people who are full-time RV-ers do it. Not everyone who's given up living in a real house to be on the road permanently has a Class A leviathan or a 5th wheel 40 feet long with multiple slide-outs. Does all that sidling eventually start to feel normal? I don't know. . .  I do know that right about the time we finally seemed to have figured things out and had more or less adapted to life in a small space, our month at the park ended.

Now that we're home, I need to get back into my usual routine of spending a couple days a week at the museum sorting through the mystery boxes in the attic and the storage building and then cataloging the good stuff. I have found some nifty things over the past year or two. Of course, I've also found some truly weird and useless items, which isn't surprising. Too often people will donate stuff that's actually pretty useless, like stacks of ancient magazines. I tend to joke that we get the stuff that people are stuck with after the estate sale is over. It's old, it's not worth anything, and the St. Vincent de Paul store won't take it. But, hey, it's OLD, so you know the museum is going to want it. Besides, the museum won't charge a garbage disposal fee like Waste Management or Arvon Trash and Transit do.

You know, a few old Life or McCall's magazines are nice to have. If nothing else, they can be used as part of exhibits that highlight a specific time period, e.g., a 1953 Saturday Evening Post might be interesting as part of a display about the Eisenhower era. But there are limits, especially when there are duplicates. On the other hand, when someone does show up with boxes of old magazines, we can't just say no because you never know what gems might be hiding in the trash. This open-handed acceptance policy would not have been a bad thing if someone had been sorting through all the boxes as they came in, but apparently no one was. Too much came in too fast when the museum first opened. Box after box got shoved up in the attic or out into the storage building, all without much in the way of labeling. I can understand why it happened, much as I might wish it hadn't. End result? A gazillion mystery boxes.

Or worse. One of the little gems I found the last time I went up the ships ladder to the attic was a box labeled "Curwood books for resale." The box did indeed contain a couple dozen books by James Oliver Curwood. I could be wrong, but my instinct is that it's real hard to re-sell anything when it's hiding under a pile of other stuff in an attic instead of being shelved in the used book section of the gift shop. I'd call it a head*desk moment, but I'm not sure that term applies when you're not actually sitting at the desk. Would those books have sold if they'd been sitting in the gift shop for the past 20 years instead of up in the attic? Who knows, but for sure they were never going to sell where they were.

Besides getting back into some sort of routine at the museum, I need to get this winter's quilt project(s) started. For the first time in many years, I have no quilts in progress. Nada. That feels weird. Usually I've got at least one project going, even if it's just at the cutting pieces stage. Right now I haven't even picked out a pattern for whatever is next. I do have other sewing to do -- I'm making new curtains for the Guppy -- but that's not quite the same. I need to pick a quilt pattern and start cutting pieces soon.  

There are other things I need to do, too, like locate The Hat. I have a cap I knitted many, many years ago (acrylic yarn lasts forever) that still drives my kids crazy. It can't be winter unless I'm wearing The Hat. Along with locating The Hat, I should also track down mittens, scarves, and other items necessary now that temperatures have dropped below freezing and there's sloppy white stuff (about two inches as of this morning) on the ground. And the S.O. needs to remember where we stashed some snow shovels. There's two inches of slush on the front porch at the moment and nothing handy to remove it with.

The S.O. claimed he wanted to spend most of the winter here on the tundra so he could watch snow slide off the barn's new metal roof. If today's weather is any indication, he's going to have a lot of opportunities to do that.

On the road again

The Guppy has now been thoroughly road-tested. We loaded it up a couple days ago and hit the road. The trickiest part in loading things up turned out to be something we'd never considered in the past: emptying the refrigerator in the house. We've had two refrigerators get fried by power surges in the past two years so even though there is now surge protection on the outlet, we decided not to take any chances. We did not want to come home in a few weeks to a freezer full of melted ice cubes and fermenting condiments. It's amazing how much stuff can be in a refrigerator even when it's is a small one.

The Guppy performed about as expected, right down to producing a number of annoying or mysterious noises. A few things that we didn't expect to slide around did, stuff we were worried about shifting stayed right where it had to been stashed weeks ago. I did figure out we need to invest in another roll of nonslip shelf liner. It worked great in the cabinets, but I think I want some for padding between things like the pizza pan and a cookie sheet. Metal pans aren't going to break if they bounce around, but they definitely made a lot of noise when the Guppy was rolling over rough pavement. Other than odd bangings and clankings from the kitchen area, though, the only worrisome noise seemed to come from the right front tire. The S.O. thinks that tire might be permanently out of round, i.e., it's got a flat spot because the Guppy spends so much time just sitting in one spot. He's going to swap that tire with the spare and see if the noise goes away. That's assuming the spare still holds air, of course.

Heading south on US-45 south of Bruce Crossing, Michigan

In any case, we've been talking about tires in general being an issue since we bought the Guppy last year. The tread still looks good on all of them, but we also know they're all real old. The previous owner put so few miles on the Guppy that he never felt the need to replace any tires; he put less than 1,000 miles on it in six years. Our concern, of course, is that even though the tires look good there's dry rot. We're not seeing any, but you never know.

Until we hit the road, we weren't real sure just how terrible the fuel economy would be. It was, as it turned out, every bit as bad as predicted. Dragging my car behind no doubt hurt. We did not stop at every gas station we passed, but it was beginning to feel that way. It probably didn't help that I'm used to doing long drives in the Focus. Its fuel tank is about 1/3 the size of the one on the Guppy but it can go about three times as far on that one-third the fuel. Every time we had to stop to refuel, I'd have a "What?! But we just did that!" reaction.

On I-39 near Mendota, Illinois

And now we're in Missouri spending a few days annoying the Younger Daughter.We start our first campground hosting gig on Wednesday. It should be interesting, although from what the Kid says, the most interesting part might be just getting to the park. I've driven the roads in Missouri, I've been fairly close to where Montauk State Park is located, I know that in general Missouri has remarkably good roads, but the Kid keeps looking at the Guppy and making dubious noises. She's making state highway 32 sound like a goat trail barely wide enough for a Vespa to handle. We shall see. . . .

I do not know how much time I'll spend in the blogosphere once we're at the park. I'm hoping hosting duties keep me busy enough that I can ignore the Internet a lot more than I do now.

And, yes, for those of you who worry, we will check all the gas fittings before turning on the propane when we reach the park. From the way things were bouncing around on the way down here, it's easy to see how fittings could work their way loose over not many miles on the road.

Summer's over

We had our first Fall frost yesterday. As what seems to be becoming typical of the weather, which no longer does anything in half-way measures, it was a doozy. There was a time when Summer would kind of amble out gently, subtly hinting that it was leaving by toying with a few "light" frosts, the kind that would nip a few leaves in the garden and remind you that, hey, it's time to pick the tomatoes before they turn into ice cubes on the vine. Not this year. Moderate temperatures one day, definitely below freezing the next. There was none of that hovering coyly right around 32 and gently hinting -- it was barely 30 degrees and a total zapping of everything except the broccoli and aptly named snow peas. There wasn't so much frost coating everything as there was ice, thanks to the day or two of rain that preceded the cold snap.

So now it's September, we're having to put a fire going in the woodstove each morning, and I find myself thinking I need to start buying the L'Anse Sentinel again. Unless you're a big fan of local high school sports, the Sentinel is good for maybe three things: lining bird cages, housebreaking puppies, and starting fires. We don't need it for the first two so we only buy it during the cold months. But that's a digression.

What's actually on my mind is prepping the Guppy for travel. We're scheduled to spend the month of October as campground hosts at Montauk State Park in Missouri so need to finish a few minor things we've realized we needed (e.g., curtains for the cab) and make sure we've got everything stashed that we want to bring with us. It does help that the weather turned cold -- it'll make it a lot easier to remember to carry cold weather gear with us if we're wearing it. And we definitely need cold weather gear because we'll be back here in early November. I do not want to arrive home in a snowstorm dressed in high water pants and Teva sandals.

Earlier this week the S.O. took care of what was probably the most important part of prepping for hitting the road. He took the Guppy down to the local propane dealer and had the regulator replaced. We have now checked out all the systems on the Guppy when it comes to what we need to live in it, the Guppy itself is mechanically sound (tuned up and raring to go), the tow dolly is in good shape, and things in general are looking good. The S.O. picked up a bunch of cheap DVDs at a rummage sale recently so we'll even have some new (to us) movies to watch in the evening. At this point, we could take off tomorrow if we didn't have stuff we need to get done around here before we leave. Here's hoping the weather stays dry for a few days so we can get it all done without feeling rushed.

Vision problem solved

We've been working on enhancing the Guppy, tweaking it to make more comfortable for when we hit the road for a prolonged period of time. Yesterday the S.O. fixed my vision problem.

I can now see into the cabinets instead of just groping blindly and hoping I can find what I want by feel.

While he was playing around with scraps of wood, he also came up with this, a holder to keep stacked plates from sliding when the Guppy is moving.

And, yes, I plan to keep right on using real dishes regardless of where we are and what we're living in. When it's just the two of us, washing actual dishes is not that big a deal. 

The migrant life draws closer

We now have a tow dolly to drag behind the RV. One of the difficulties in planning for an itinerant life style, at least one that may include stays of several weeks or months at a campground, is figuring out how you're going to do stuff like shop for groceries. Most campgrounds are not located within walking (or even easy biking) distance of a Publix. This is one reason you see a lot of RVs with cars in tow. If you're going to be parked somewhere for more than a couple days, it's a lot easier to run to the supermarket using a car than it is to go through the hassle of moving a motorhome.

We'd been looking for a used tow dolly since last fall. We'd figured out pretty quickly that a brand-new one was out of the question. As I have noted before, the S.O. and I are frugal people. More so the S.O. than myself -- I tend to see myself as relatively frugal while he's one cheap son of a bitch -- but both of us flinch in psychic pain at the thought of paying full price for anything if we can avoid it. Which means we've been spending a fair amount of time perusing Craigslist. Every so often a tow dolly in our price range (really, really cheap) would come up, but the timing was off or it was being sold by someone who lived just a little too far away. The U.P. Craigslist covers a fairly large territory; I wouldn't have been too thrilled with having to drive 280 miles to Drummond Island just to save a few bucks on anything.

I was, however, willing to drive 190 miles to Hayward, Wisconsin, yesterday. Hayward is less than 4 hours driving time away and has the added advantages of being home to both giant fiberglass fish and the original Famous Dave's. Neither of which we actually saw (although we did drive by the Grand Pines Resort on County B), but that's irrelevant. We came home with a tow dolly. Open road, here we come.

A side note: as part of the expedition to buy the tow dolly, we drove past the LCO casino operated by the Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwa. The parking lot was full. It was early afternoon on a gorgeous July day -- and people would rather be inside gambling than outside enjoying our much too brief northwoods summer. People are strange.