R&R at BRRP

Saturday, April 7

Back to the BRRP Saturday post, which was pre-empted by the Easter bunny :-) … and also the fact that I had yet to process photos.

Woke up to 34F (1C) and a raging headache, which could have been the after effect of yesterday’s debacle with the levelers.  More likely, though, it was a light migraine, which I’m plagued with occasionally.  Once the meds kicked in, I was raring to go, but by then we were settled into our routine at BRRP, so we decided to spend the day at home instead.

Our mid-morning walk around the campground was surprisingly quiet.  In fact, I’m amazed at how many sites are still unoccupied this Easter weekend.  The FHU loop is reasonably well occupied, but the sites on the other loops are all but empty.  The cabins are all booked, though.  Perhaps it’s the cool temps that are keeping people away.  We reached 61F (16C) in the late afternoon.  However, the warmth of the sunshine was heavily tempered by the light, but near-constant breeze.

After our walk, we handled a few simple chores that took just minutes each to accomplish.  The replacement water pump Mui ordered arrived last week.  Since our existing pump has decided to come back to life, we’re going to keep the new one as a back up for now.  In the meantime, a lo-tech solution should keep the worst of any accidental spray/seepage from the water hose off the pump’s persnickety electrical connections.

A snip here and a snip there to fit it over the pipes, and we have an inexpensive pump cover.

A few weeks ago, we bought a table-top ironing board.  After looking around for a good place to store it, we decided the best solution would be to install a hook on the back wall of the closet where we have some dead space.

Now you see it; now you don’t!
When it’s not needed, the canvas shelves in the closet will hide the ironing board.

And finally, Mui installed one of those magnetic knife holders on the side wall next to the kitchen sink.  I’m not comfortable using the holder for its intended purpose — there’s just something about having knives on that thing while the motorhome is bouncing along the freeway that doesn’t sit well with me.  However, it will come in handy to hold less-lethal utensils.  We’ll bring the butcher block knife set we have at home when we move into the coach permanently.  It can be placed in the sink when we’re on the move.

Not for knives, but it will be good for ladles and serving spoons and whatnot.

With the chores for this week completed, we grabbed a bite to eat at the picnic table on our site.  The temps were a bit on the cool side, but we put on an extra layer for comfort and enjoyed eating under a blue canopy filled with sunshine.  Afterwards, we threw down the rug we bought to use under our tent shelter, unfurled the awning, and set out our comfy chairs.  Time for R&R.  The immediate area around the coach is covered by our CradlePoint wi-fi signal, so we soon had our laptops out to catch up on our web browsing.  In fact, it was a perfect set up for me to finish yesterday’s blog post and get a head start on today’s post.

Sorry, no photos of us sitting outside this afternoon — I was too deep into my R&R to even think about the camera, but here’s a scene from earlier in the day when I was contemplating retirement and what it has in store for us.

This was the scene overhead as I sat contemplating retirement.

Following an early evening ramble around the campground loops, we returned to the Phaeton and set about preparing dinner.  We had hoped to eat our grilled halibut dinner at the picnic table, but it was just too chilly to sit outside once the sun withdrew the warmth of its rays from our site.  That’s OK; we’ll see if we can find somewhere fun to have a picnic lunch Sunday to make up for having to eat inside this evening.  Speaking of which, I’d better scout out some trail/park suggestions to discuss with Mui at breakfast.

‘Amputation’ Successful

Friday, 6 April

We’re back at Bull Run Regional Park (for Russ and Donna — that’s BRRP) for another weekend stay through Sunday with a late check-out on Monday.  Once again, we’re in site 109 on the FHU loop.  Yes, Paul — we snagged your favorite site for the second time in a row, but we stacked the deck in our favor by making reservations several weeks in advance of our stay ;-).

It doesn’t look all too different from the picture I took last week.

My recent posts have been filled with all the prep-work we’ve been doing for full-timing — our upgrades and changes, and the fun we’ve been having working on these projects.  Lest you think life is always rosy at our condo on wheels, during set up this week we ran into a snag.  One that could have been a major headache.  You see, the rear driver-side leveler leg overextended itself and then refused to budge despite all of our efforts to retract it.

Some of you might recall that we had electrical issues in November 2010 that ended up frying the controller board.  That problem was actually preceded by the same leg that was acting up today being uncooperative at times.  Once the controller board was replaced, we were back to business as usual with the levelers extending and retracting normally.  At the time, the tech did tell us that the leg in question looked slightly bent and cautioned us that it might present a problem again someday.

Well that someday turned out to be today.  Now bear in mind that we’re in the same site we were last week.  We have no idea why the leg decided to overextend itself this time and worked perfectly well last time.  Anyway, there the Phaeton sat, it’s rear driver-side tires off the ground by nearly two inches, and the leveler leg refusing to retract.  We tried all the emergency recommendations in the manual and some of the tips we’d gleaned from the internet last time.  No luck.

So we called Coach-Net for assistance.  I have to say that we were very impressed with the service.  After we spoke with a tech, he contacted a mobile service on our behalf.  But before dispatching the guy, he notified us of the hourly rate and how long it would take for the repairman to get to BRRP (one hour).  At the end of the hour, we received a status-check call from Coach-Net.  When we told the operator that the repair guy had not yet arrived, she called for an update and advised us of that conversation.  The guy was stuck in traffic, which came as no surprise to us as rush-hour traffic is notoriously bad on I-66.  At the end of the second allotted time for arrival, Coach-Net called back … just as the tech was pulling in.  Great customer service.

The tech guy had us try a couple of things — which we had already done on our own, but this time he was under the vehicle banging away at the leg, hoping to jiggle it back into alignment.  Nothing, nada, zip.  That leg wasn’t going anywhere.  So, Mui gave him the go ahead to jack us up a bit more so he could remove the leg.  I have to say, seeing the Phaeton at what looked like a precarious angle sent my stress level sky high.  But it worked out OK, and the amputated leg was soon lying on the ground next to the coach.

Too frustrated to take pictures of the removal process, but here’s the problematic leg.

Our gimpy leveling system (they are Atwood electric levelers, by the way) means that we won’t be using it until we get a replacement leg.  That was on the punch list anyway for when we go to Red Bay next year as we start out our full-timing life, so we’re going to just stick to that plan.  In the meantime, Mui will continue to research electric vs hydraulic levelers and we’ll make a decision to either do a full-blown system replacement or just get a new leg to replace the amputated one on our existing system.

With a sigh of relief that we were at least operational again, we paid the $178 for the two-hours the repair guy was here and sent him on his way.  Finishing up the rest of our set-up procedures, we had a quick dinner and settled in for a quiet evening to decompress from the stress of dealing with the levelers.  Now to enjoy the weekend.

Blogger’s Threaded Comments

Thursday, April 5

At some point this year, Blogger pushed out the threaded comments feature that allows the blog owner, or other commenters, to respond to a comment left on the blog by clicking a Reply link displayed immediately below the comment.  Readers/commenters can even reply to a reply and get a regular blogging conversation going!

I realize few readers return to a post to look at comments again.  So how useful is this feature really?  Where I think it will come in handy is if a commenter leaves a question, but s/he has not turned on the email reply feature and I can’t respond directly.  Or, even if s/he has email reply turned on, I might wish to also post the answer in the comments section for the benefit of other readers.

Not shown above is the delete link Blog owners will see next to the reply link.
Commenters will only see the delete link for their own comments.

Turning on threaded comments is supposedly easy.  Just set blog feed to full (simpler than messing with individual feed settings) and use embedded comments instead of the full page or pop-up window.  In reality, if you’ve customized the basic template you may have to take some additional steps — such as resetting your widget templates to default.  That’s a good solution if your customizations are minimal.  I did this with our Two to Travel’s Viewfinder blog and it worked as expected.

For my two primary blogs, however, I didn’t want to do any resetting of widgets and risk losing my customizations.  So I looked for and found some html code suggestions.  I applied those to Two to Travel and Phaeton Journeys, and voilà — threaded comments.

HTML — four small letters, but they can be scary.  And they should be.  A lot of damage can be done if you don’t use html coding correctly.  Am I an html guru?  No.  Do I use html?  Yes.  I know some very basic stuff to manipulate my posts, but for complicated changes, I use code written by someone who knows what they’re doing.  And I take precautions.  I ALWAYS — repeat, ALWAYS — back up my template before adding or removing any html code.  I’ve yet to mess up and have to revert to my saved template copy — KNOCK ON WOOD!!!!

If you want to see if you can easily convert to threaded comments, here are the SIMPLE STEPS.  Proceed at your own risk :-)

These steps are based on the new dashboard interface.  If you are still using the old interface, you can temporarily switch to the new one by clicking the Try the Updated Blogger Interface link in the top right corner (see screenshot below).  By the way, Blogger is going to switch everyone to the new dashboard sometime in April, so you might as well make the switch now and get familiar with the lay of the land, so to speak.

• To set your per-post comments feed to full (for most, this is probably already set to full):

Note: If you prefer, you can use the custom option from the drop-down to tweak blog post and comment feeds individually, but it’s easiest to just set it all to full from the drop-down.

• To set your comments location to embedded:

Note: When I switched to embedded comments, Blogger defaulted word verification to Yes; you’ll want to change that to No if you don’t use word verification.

As noted above, these steps are supposed to work if you have not customized your template.  (For existing post comments, you might have to refresh your screen before the Reply link becomes visible.)  If it, didn’t work and you want to go back to the way things were, just reverse the steps above, and choose something other than embedded for your comment location.

If you don’t see the Reply link after following these simple steps, and want to pursue it further, you can read up on suggestions that I found in this blog.  (There are a lot of other blogs/forums out there with thoughts and suggestions.)  It was from this blog that I got the idea to revert my widget templates, and that did the trick.  Again, I did that on a template on which I had made relatively few customizations and I didn’t care if I lost them.

If you have a heavily customized template, and the simple steps above don’t cut it for you, here’s one of the many solutions I found when I searched for how to enable threaded comments.  Scroll down to the Tweaks to Get the Threaded Comments section for the html code I used in the template for this blog and the steps I followed.

Whatever you do – remember to BACK-UP YOUR TEMPLATE before you ever make any html changes or you default your widget templates.  And, it goes without saying — know where on your computer the template is saved to so you can find the file if you need to revert to it.

BRRP Wrapped Up

Monday, 2 April

Not much to write about our last day, so just a quick wrap up.

As today was a workday, that’s what we did — work on work.  We did manage to sneak out before the campground ‘woke up’ for an early morning walk just after the sun had risen to bathe the scene with a nice, soft light.

Looking up … and looking down … from site 109 on a quiet Monday morning.

It was a chilly 49F when we stepped out, with a stiff breeze that required an extra layer for comfort.  The brisk pace we set soon warmed us up.  Despite the impression the two photos above might give, the FHU loop is at only about 50% occupancy.  And the rest of the campground is vacant except for an occasional camper here and there.  The main reason for that is the time of year and the day of the week.  I’m curious to see how the occupancy might change over Easter weekend.

I forgot to mention that on an earlier walk we noticed an RV with a horse trailer camping out on the outer loop.  The horses were out in a corral of sorts, and the owner was grooming one of them.  Didn’t want to be rude and take a picture, but a photo op presented itself later in the day.  We’ve seen horses on the trails in the area, but this is the first time we’ve seen them promenading around the campground loops, or camping here for that matter.  I have no particular objection, except that the owners should be required to clean up after their horses.  Yes — we did come across a few unpleasant piles of doo-doo this morning!

Good thing we didn’t put off our bluebell trail walk to today — after the soaking rains we got through the night, the path was a muddy-mess.  Instead, we walked only as far as the pond near the Occoquan-Bull Run trailhead.  Not a creature was stirring; not even a mouse. Well, there was a lone Canada goose, but it flew off shortly after we took a seat on the bench overlooking the area.  We’ve yet to see much activity at this pond; but it is a peaceful area that invites one to linger for a while.

About those rains.  They were strong and long-lasting.  But Mui’s hard work paid off.  The rain just glided down the sides of the Phaeton.  We’re still looking spiffy ;-)

And that’s really about all there is from today.  As I noted above, we focused on work and simply enjoyed being able to telecommute from our motorhome.  When our workday ended at 3:00p, we took our time breaking camp to delay the time of our departure.  The late check-out deadline at BRRP is 7:00p, but we still had things to do at home, so it seemed prudent to leave a little earlier.  It was 5:00p when we finally pulled into the garage.

The good news — we’ll be back at BRRP this upcoming weekend for our original ‘get ready for the season’ reservation.  With most of that work already done, we only have the basement to organize.  That’s good since the weather forecast is looking good; we’re going to want to play and not do chores.

Oh, and yes, we’ve already extended that stay through Monday :-)

More Work; Even More Fun

Sunday, April 1

I mentioned at the end of yesterday’s post that the electric heating element for the water tank was on the fritz.  The good news: easily replaceable without making a noticeable dent to the wallet — $16 for both the element and the wrench (after Mui’s military discount was applied).  The bad news: we had to drain the tank and waste more water before Mui could replace it.  You might ask why we didn’t do the job when we replaced the anode rod on Friday (post here).  Well, we didn’t know we had a problem, and since you can’t fire the element unless the tank is full, we had no way of testing it ahead of time.

After breakfast, we armed ourselves with all that we needed for the task at hand.  For me, that was the camera; for Mui, it was a whole bunch of tools as well as the new 1500 watt/short/110 volt element and the wrench he bought from Lowe’s last night.  At 49F (9C), it was warmer than yesterday at about the same time, but a light breeze added a chill factor to contend with today.  That’s OK; it’s still early spring and we’re not complaining.  The heat and humidity will be here soon enough.

With the water in the tank allowed to cool off, switches and water heater fuse in the off position, and the water heater bypass valve closed, it took just moments to drain the tank.

Make sure you stand off to the side if you don’t want to take an unexpected shower.

The tank empty, it was a matter of taking off the protective cover from the electric element; removing the old element with the new wrench; securing the replacement in place; filling the tank to check for leaks; reconnecting the wires to the element; and placing the protective cover over it.  The fuse back in the on position, Mui flipped the switches and we waited to see if we’d get hot water.  And we did.  There was a noticeable difference in how quickly the water heated up; didn’t have to use the propane heater to speed the process along.

It really is easy to replace the electric heating element.

Instead of turning the blog into a tutorial for this quick and easy task, I put together a photo-log of the steps Mui followed — both for this project as well as Friday’s anode rod replacement.  Those interested can click here to view the details and the full size photos I used in the collages.

Replacing the electric heater element was the last chore for this weekend.  With that taken care of, we ate a light lunch and headed off to have fun on the Bluebell Trail.  I’d walked just a small portion of the trail yesterday.  This time, we walked the entire length of the 1½-mile (~2½ km) u-loop ending at the Occoquan-Bull Run trailhead.  Unlike yesterday morning, there were quite a few people on the trail this afternoon, but everyone was dispersed and it didn’t feel crowded at all.

I focused on the 'big picture’ this time.
It's no use; one just can't capture the real beauty of the 'scape in a still shot.

The carpet of bluebells was more extensive on this end of the trail.  Even though there were obvious signs that the peak bloom period is quickly coming to an end, the scene was a delight to the visual senses.  The decline of the flowers will be quick I’m told.

Bluebells range as far as the eye can see.

the colorful blooms always delight me.

A quiet late afternoon and evening at home wrapped up our day.  One more day here before we have to go back to the stix & brix … sigh!