Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Easy Riding!

We drove the coach down to Orlando today. We were supposed to leave last night and spend the night in Crooked River State Park just inside Georgia. I called that portion of the trip off.
Micky and I and have a long-standing agreement when diving that either one of us can call the dive off without ever offering an explanation. The psychology behind the lack of explanantion is that there is no embarassment involved. Most men are reluctant to admit fear and women will allow themselves to be dragged into bad situations in an effort to acommodate their partner. This policy removes all the mind games and forces acceptance of the reality that any reason for abandoning a recreational activity is good enough.
Fear, fatigue, lack of preparation, or any other reason can take all the fun out of it and make a pleasure dive into an ordeal. And safety is always compromised when that happens.
So I was able to go through the entire process of departure right up to the point of locking the house, and then say "Sorry, I don't want to do this." Micky immediately understood and did not press me or even show disappointment. I did offer the explanation aand she agreed with my logic, but it was not required. How many arguments and scary situations would such an understanding have helped you with?
The trip this morning was really very pretty. It was a crisp, middle thirties, sunrise on the road rolling through farmland. Very light traffic and a very fun responsive rig amke for the best sort of RV'ing.
We had one problem. After hitting a small bump in the road, the auto-leveling control panel lit up and set off it's alarm horn. Repeatedly. Almost every bump.
The purpose of the alarm is to prevent you from driving off with a leveler jack not fully retracted. Believe me, that would be very expensive and time-consuming. I put up with the problem until we got to Statesboro and then pulled into the parking lot of an AgSupply store and cycled the levelers down and back up. That did not work, but I did visually confirm full retraction of the jacks. My plan was to continue the trip and then call LazyDays for advice on disabling the system to stop the horn. But then I noticed the frequency of the alarm going off was changing. Eventually the problem stopped and now the alarm doesn't go off with road bumps. The problem is either an intermittent up switch (most likely) or an intermittent connector some where in the wiring (vedry difficult to find), so I'm glad the problem just stopped. And if it comes back, that's what we paid extra for the extended warranties for.
The campsite at Thousand Trails is more than adequate. Good power and sewer and level. Not scenic, or even pretty, but absolutely free makes up for it.
Be sure to follow along on the SPOT shared page at http://share.findmespot.com/shared/faces/viewspots.jsp?glId=0YGVEARyz58yYfP6WWJRxezsrv67JhLMZ
Even though it didn't get a fix and report position until Statesboro, it still did a good job after that. I need to find a better position on the dashboard to allow it to see satellites.
Tomorrow, we're going to poke around locally, but Thursday, we're going to see ICE at the Gaylord Center. They brought in forty Chinese ice sculptors from Harbin in northern China and created a show that's amazing. That night I may finally be able to see a rocket launch if the Delta IV makes it.

More later.

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