Evacuated to the Rolling Condo

Saturday, 30 June

We should be at home packing for our trip — we’re leaving on Tuesday for a non-Phaeton adventure.  Instead, we self-evacuated to Bull Run Regional Park (BRRP) this morning due to a power outage we’re experiencing — along with about a million other people in the DC area.

We’d normally stay home to ride out a power outage.  But with temps forecasted to reach into 100F (38C), being without A/C was not an option.  The funny thing is that Mui and I separately concluded that the Phaeton was the solution to our dilemma.  Great minds think alike!  So, bright and early, we called the BRRP campground office.  When they confirmed that the power was on, we reserved one of the 50A electric-only sites on the outer loop.

The wide-spread power outage that is plaguing the area is a result of a very scary storm that passed right over us around 11:00p last night.  We knew a severe storm was forecasted when we went to bed, so we weren’t surprised when the weather radio went off with an alert right on schedule.  Good thing that radio has battery back-up; the power was already out by then.

The storm was like nothing we’ve ever experienced before.  This article describes it as follows:

The severe storms, which began pushing through the area at about 10:30 p.m. Friday, is called a "derecho," which is a very strong, widespread and straight-line band of thunderstorms that mostly occur during the summer.

At the height of the storm, the rain was coming down in a thick sheet, driven and made worse by strong winds that shook the building.  Trees were swaying like crazy, making us glad that they were too far to cause damage to us should one — or more — topple.  To top it off, there was non-stop — and I mean non-stop — thunder and lightning for about 15-20 minutes.  The lightning was so strong, so constant, and so bright that one would have been excused for thinking it was mid-day instead of the middle of the night.

But that was last night; back to today.

We worked on chores at home until we could no longer stand the increasing temperature.  That was around 9:30a.  Throwing a few food items into one bag, and a toothbrush and comb into another, we headed out to BRRP around 10:00a.  Getting to the freeway was a bit of an adventure since there were no traffic lights operating, and people were driving like they’d never heard the rule about treating intersections as four-way stops under such circumstances.  Grrrrrrrrrrrr!!!

Anyway, we made it to BRRP safe and sound and settled into Site 21 for a quiet afternoon, with a run into nearby Manassas — unaffected by the storm, by the way — to take care of our pre-trip grooming needs.  I’m not one to just walk into any old place to get my hair cut, but I figured I needed to start practicing since that’s exactly what’s going to happen when we start full-timing.  I’m happy to report that the hairdresser did not scalp me!

The news tonight is filled with stories of damage to life and limb and property.  Nine people have lost their lives.  In the end, we got off easy.  From what’s been reported, seven major transmission lines are down, and the power companies that service the area are all affected.  We finally managed to get through to Dominion Power to report our outage around 7:00p.  They are unable to provide a repair forecast at this time.  According to the talking heads on the news, it might take as long as 7 days to get everyone back on the grid.  I hope not, but so be it if that turns out to be the case.  We’ll just have to make sure everything is unplugged if we’re still powerless when we leave for our trip Tuesday morning.

In the meantime, we’re sitting pretty at BRRP.   There was the potential for some severe storms tonight, but the warnings have been lifted.  One good thing, the park volunteers came around to the sites this afternoon with a note warning campers about the potential for storms.  The note included radio stations and local news stations to tune into, and a reminder to evacuate to the bathhouses if necessary.  Good to know that the campground management has an eye on the weather ball.

Wander No More

Friday, 29 June

Our Phaeton wanders no more!

Fear not; I don’t mean that we won’t be wandering around North America as planned.  We still intend to do that, but as we drive the highways and byways, we will be doing so with improved steering play and wander.  The SuperSteer SS100 Bell Crank will see to that.

I could enumerate all the reasons and explanations Mui gave me when he said he wanted to have this bell crank installed.  In all honesty, my eyes glazed over as he talked and I tuned him out.  So, I’ll refer you to the SuperSteer website instead.  All I know is that Mui was happy with the results of the install as he drove the backroads today to return the Phaeton to storage, and expects to see even better performance when we next roll down the highway.

Gone Triking Again

Saturday, 23 June

We should have been packing for our upcoming trip, but that’s not what we were doing this morning.  After consecutive days of ‘this is how it must be inside a furnace’ temps that felt like 105F (41C) thanks to the humidex, we could not resist going out for another trike ride.  We needed to pick up my CamelBak hydration pack from the Phaeton, so we headed to Bull Run Regional Park to kill two birds with one stone :-)

After parking near the entrance, unfolding our bikes, and gearing up, we had a bit of fun on the deserted side road before heading off for a longer ride on the main road.

A 43-second video of us goofing around.

A nice breeze and plenty of shade made for perfect trike riding conditions.  The flapping of our colorful ‘we’re here; don’t run us over’ flags was the only sound to break the morning’s silence until we came upon two hawks calling to each other.  We watched them for a while from our trike seats, our quiet approach allowing us to get surprisingly close to the base of the tree where one was perched.  No photos; I’m afraid — too many branches in the way.

Except for the occasional car heading out from the campground towards town, traffic was nil.  The campers were still fast asleep, and we were the only ones out and about to enjoy the sun streaming through the trees, burning off the light fog.

There’s a small pond not far from the campground store.  At first, we planned to stop there to eat our breakfast bars, but there were too many gnat-like bugs.  Pedaling back towards whence we came, we found another spot instead.  Bugs there, too.  So, we just munched away at our breakfast while sitting in our trikes and quickly high-tailed it out of there.

All in all, I did somewhere around 4-5 miles (6.5-8 km) on this run.  Mui wanted to do a high-speed pedal on our second time around the park, so he got in more mileage today than I did.  By 9:30a, with the temps starting to reach into the 80F (27C) range, we were ready to call it quits.  Not only was there work to do at home, but it also didn’t make sense to over-tire our muscles and pay the piper later!  (So far, no aches or pains — that’s a good thing!)

A bit of biking humor to end this post :-)))

Alert, Alert!  the aliens abducted a triker at bull run.  Only her shoes were left behind :-)

(For those who are not bikers: these shoes snap onto the pedals so that we can pedal at speed without worrying about our feet slipping off.  They also make for a smoother, more comfortable pedaling experience.  With the shoes on our feet, we sit down and snap the shoes onto the pedals.  A slight twist of the ankle frees the foot from the pedal — shoe and all.)

Comment Notification … You Don’t Have to Moderate

Thursday, June 21

In a comment on my Spam post, Sherry (of In the Direction of Our Dreams fame) noted:

… I get almost no spam AND blogger doesn't catch any either but I do leave comment moderation on because I love having the comments come in my email. Without those I wouldn't get any email. :-))

Comment moderation doesn’t bother me.  In fact, I have it turned on for posts that are 14 days or older as those seem to be spammed the most often.

That said, if getting comment notifications in email is the only reason bloggers have their moderation turned on, there is another way to do that.  I get ALL of my comments — legitimate and otherwise — sent to my email.  That way, I don’t have to go back to my blog to read them.

If you’d like to have your comments sent to email, here’s what you need to do (using the new Blogger interface):

• Go to your Dashboard
• Click Settings from the sidebar
• Click Mobile and Email
• Enter your email address where it says Comment Notification Email
• Click the orange Save Settings button in the top right of the screen

Once you’ve completed the steps, all of your comments will go to your email.  No worries; they’ll be published in your blog too :-)

At this point, if you want to leave moderation on, you can do so.  The email you receive will have the usual options to publish, delete, etc.  If you want to change your moderation settings, however, here’s what you need to do:

• Click Posts and Comments in the sidebar (still in Settings)
• Click Never to turn off moderation completely — you’ll have to go to your blog to delete any comments that are not legitimate; or
• Click Sometimes to moderate comments on older posts and enter a number to specify the time frame (as noted above, I’ve got mine set for 14 days) — you will have links in the email to manage these comments as they won’t be automatically published
• Click the orange Save Settings button in the top right of the screen

Have fun blogging!

Spam … On the Rise Once More

Wednesday, 20 June

It’s been a while since I turned off word verification and comment moderation on my various blog sites.  After the change, I was averaging 5-10 spam comments per week.  Most of them were on my ‘original’ blog, Two to Travel.  This is the blog where I recount our non-Phaeton travels.  It has an international readership, which, I believe exponentially increases the chances of receiving spam comments.  The good news, all of the spam comments were caught by the Blogger filter.

The spam comments tapered off to almost nothing for a while, but now they seem to be on the rise again.  And this time, Phaeton Journeys seems to be the target.  Why?  Who knows; my mind doesn’t work like a spammer’s mind works.  Maybe it has something to do with the fact that Two to Travel has been on hiatus for a while.  That’s about to change, however, so we’ll see what happens then.

All spam comments are being caught by the filter, and I have comment moderation turned on for any post that is older than 14 days.  Overall, I’m a happy camper — though I can’t help but wish that spammers had something better to do than to flood the www with meaningless words.

If you don’t have comment notification turned on, you might consider checking your spam box every once in a while.  To do so (in the new Blogger interface):

1. Go to your Dashboard.
2. From the list on the left, select Comments.
3. Click the Awaiting Moderation and Spam boxes individually to see if there are any comments in either box and take action accordingly.  (I usually report them to Blogger as spam and then delete them.)

By the way, a more important reason to occasionally check your spam box — to make sure legitimate comments have not been filtered as spam by Blogger.  I’ve fished quite a few out of the spam box and restored them to their rightful place in the blog world.

Gekkos Are Fun

Sunday, 17 June

No, that’s not a typo in the title of this blog post.  Why?  Because the Gekkos I’m referring to are not the ones you find in the wild.  Scratch that.  You might find them in the wild, but it is more likely that you’ll encounter them on paved paths!

Our Gekkos are not to be confused with Gecko, the famed actor of advertisements.

We’ve been looking at wheels to add variety to our ‘active retirement’ days.  No matter which brand or what kind of bike I tried, I didn’t feel comfortable on any of them.  I am not talking about the comfort of the seats.  I just didn’t feel safe enough to ride them for any distance.  Let alone when I might find myself on a bike path along a busy road.

Enter into the scene — the Gekko trike!  I immediately fell in love with these fun wheels.  Our initial plan was to buy a trike for me and a bike for Mui.  But then he made the mistake of test driving a Gekko.  The rest is history and we now have his-and-her wheels to go triking (is that a word?).

We picked up our trikes yesterday.  The adjustments to custom fit them took about three hours.  No surprise, I guess; the shaft on mine had to be sawed-off several inches and reassembled so I could reach the pedals :-)

Plans to go triking at Bull Run this morning didn’t work out as expected, but we did get to take our wheels out for a spin at the nearby county government complex in the afternoon to test the gears and get familiar with our trikes in general.

Here’s an 11-second video that shows me in action!

More on the trikes will be coming soon.

P.S.  For those wondering how on earth we’ll be transporting the Gekkos — they fold and fit into the trunk of the toad!

Video: The Smokies in 15 Minutes

Tuesday, June 12

We're counting down to our next adventure, which will be a non-Phaeton trip and will be published in our Two to Travel blog, but that's still three weeks away.

In the meantime, Mui has finished editing his footage of our trip to the “quiet side” of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee.  For those who might be on a limited data plan, be aware that the finished movie is 15 minutes long.

Enjoy your virtual trip!

Another Lens … Another Zoo

Saturday, 2 June

I tried.  I really tried to get some ‘wildlife in the wild’ photos with my new Canon 70-200 f2.8 lens, but our recent trip to the Mason Neck NWR was a bust.  There were no birds, and the few deer we saw were hidden in the thickets.  So, I had to resort to another zoo trip to test my lens.

Instead of revisiting the Smithsonian Zoo in DC, we took advantage of a beautiful early summer day to drive the 55 miles (88 km) to The Maryland Zoo in Baltimore — aka, the Baltimore Zoo.  Getting there was a piece of cake; the return trip not so much.  The seemingly endless road construction projects around the area backed traffic up for miles.  With even alternate routes not providing any relief, that part of the day goes into the books as “best forgotten.”

1 hour and 15 minutes to get there; 3 hours and 30 minutes to get back.

We arrived at the zoo just minutes before they opened the doors to the public at 10:00a.  That’s a little late, IMHO; but I guess it works for the general populace.  Luckily, we’d purchased our tickets online ($16.50/person) so we didn’t have to stand in the long line to gain admittance.

Zoo layout; map scanned from brochure.

Once inside, we made a quick stop at Prairie Dog Town to see the young pups before heading over to the main area of the zoo to check out the other animals.

Black-Tailed Prairie Dog pup and sow.
The pups open their eyes around 5 weeks and leave the burrow a week later.
by my calculations, this pup is 6+ weeks old.

Before I get to the rest of the pictures, let me just say that the lens performed beautifully despite operator error.  Lest you’re under the misguided impression that I never make a misstep, the blunder I made today was a doozy — I neglected to check and correct the ISO setting on the camera.  I knew there was something wrong, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.  Maybe I need better glasses to differentiate between ISO 100 and 1000!!!!  Duh, Erin — you know better … grrrr!

I saved the best of the photos from the shoot, as well as a few of the not-so-technically-good ones that captured ‘behavior’ and deleted over 500 of the photos I took.  Here are a couple of the keepers for your viewing pleasure.

Arctic Fox
Probably my favorite photo from this shoot.  You can see it in B&W here.

Arctic Fox
This young fox is just starting to change from its winter coat into its summer coat.

scarlet Macaw
Because she’s a ‘quacker’, the keepers have named her Ritz.

Demoiselle Crane

Addra Gazelle & Lesser Kudu
This young Gazelle apparently didn’t get the memo that he’s supposed to mate
with his own kind.  The kudu was remarkably patient with him; but just after I took this
photo, she turned around to nip at him, thus ending his amorous attempts to mount her. 
[one of those technically not good photos I kept because of the ‘unexpected’ behavior.]

Plains Zebra
This zebra wasn’t braying, so I can only assume that it was scenting the air.

Cattle Egret (left) showing breeding plumage & Little Blue Heron in the free-flight aviary.

One of my favorite areas turned out to be the Warthog pen.  Kumari was out with the four piglets she gave birth to in April — three females and one male.  The dappled light in this area made for difficult light conditions, so I decided to try the 7Ds monochrome setting.  I like how these pictures turned out.

Warthog
Kumari — a face that only a mother could love!

Kumari Suckling her Piglets.
warthog Sows have four teats, which limits a litter to at most that number of piglets.
Each piglet has its 'own' teat and nurses exclusively from it.  Even if one piglet dies,
the others do not suckle from the available teat.

I can’t visit a place that has a mural and not take pictures of it.  So here are segments from the Wall of the Wild, a 150-foot (46 m) mural I came across at the zoo today. (You can read more about the mural, and the artist who painted it, in this article.)

Wall of the Wild

After handling the 70-200 all day, my main problem with the 300 mm lens I returned became quite apparent.  It wasn’t the weight (5.17 pounds [2.3 kg] vs 3.28 pounds [1.49 kg]), but rather the diameter of the prime lens that made handholding it difficult for me.  At 3.5 inches (9 cm), the 70-200 fits my hands much better than the 5-inch (13 cm) round 300 mm lens.

There’s no question that a prime lens is superior too a zoom, but I am very happy with this next best option, which is going to go a long ways towards simplifying my camera bag.  The 70-200 lens is a keeper :-)

And now for my pièce de résistance …

The End!