Critters

I'm not sure why, but when the rains come the tarantulas start emerging from wherever they have been hiding. This gal was on the path to the pumphouse the other night. The females have a brown abdomen while in the males it is black. This one was about 4 1/2" across as she sits. The kids pick them up and let them crawl around but that has no appeal for me so I just took this pic and backed away. They are not aggressive at all.

Then yesterday I was watching the back yard and this guy came around. This is the closest I've been to a roadrunner and the first time I've seen one standing still. The light really wasn't good enough for a good picture but you can get the idea. Note the bunny watching him.

There is more slow progress on the bus. The fridge compartment now has its' vents and the fridge is on board but not in place.

The front bed has now been framed in. The platform of each of the beds is hinged to allow storage underneath the bed area.

I think this is supposed to be where I will sleep. We have cushions for seating and then a foam mattress to add to it for sleeping. No protection against the midnight sun. I brought a sleep mask.

The mid bathroom now has its' sink and the mirror cabinet installed.

The plumbing continues to be roughed in, including the added waste and fresh water tanks.

I still have no idea just when the trip will start. The upfitting is continuing in a methodical manner and we are not rushing to get done and on the road while at the same time we are trying to keep working steadily towards completion. I believe work on the wiring will commence tomorrow.

The horse transfer that was to have taken place on Sunday has been instead delayed until tomorrow. We will still have another horse to transfer after that, along with feed and sundry other items. We can't move them both at the same time for fear of them hurting each other on the way. The mare is very skittish and we are going to try to use lavender oil to try to calm her down for the trip. We're going in the morning to try to avoid the thunder and lightning which have been occuring every afternoon and which would upset her even more. Forget Trigger and Champion, these horses seem dumb as a box of rocks.

Change in the Weather

We have entered what is called the Monsoon Season out here. I'm told that it used to start on July 1st but now starts with some combination of temperature, humidity and dewpoint. On a practical basis, it means that we see high building cumulous clouds each day and they bring a good chance of rain. Phoenix got rain yesterday, their first in 122 days. We've had rain here the last two or three days but nothing significant so far. It takes about an inch of rain to put water back in the tank and so far we've had less than a quarter of an inch. The change in sunshine and the cloud cover are welcome but the higher humidity means that the swamp coolers don't work as dramaticallcy and so the heat feels stronger at times.

We are still preparing for the trip and part of that involves moving animals to other locations. Tomorrow, we move two horses up to Flagstaff so in anticipation of that we had to first take feed and the panels used to construct the pen up so we'd have a place to contain them when we get them there. It was quite the adventure.

We have a large horse trailer to use to carry the feed and panels and livestock. It has been parked next to the pasture for the last several months, so first we had to drag it out from where it was with the tractor. We got the tractor out and backed it up into place under the hitch only to discover that we had the wrong blade mounted on the tractor. The one with the hitch ball welded to it was still out back of the barn. So, change the blade. It's mounted with a three point hitch which means getting out two pins and a bolt. Do they the slip out and line up? No, of course not. There were four of us working at it and it was finally accomplished. Back to haul out the trailer. We pull it out and discover that it was concealing a large hole in the fence. The horse spotted it at about the same time we did so it was a mad dash to head her off and put a temporary patch in place with plywood, barrels, wire and whatever was at hand. Now we have the trailer to load but first we see that it has a flat tire on the left side. Well, we'll just haul it up to the barn and air it up. We get it up there and air it up and all is good. That is until we spot the large chunks of tread missing on our newly aired tire. Change to the spare. Good. Oh look, there's a tire on the other side with a six inch slash in the side wall. Well, the trip is off until we get new tires. Wait, we've got a very questionable tire but we also have a chunked out spare and a light load. Maybe we can make it after all. Ok, load the panels and hay and feed on the trailer. Thank God for grandsons and friends who are young and strong. Off we go down the road, keeping a carefull eye on the bad tire out of the window. We get about 15 miles down the road and are about to get on I17 North so I get out and check all of the tires when I hear a plaintive wailing coming from inside the trailer. We have a stow-away. It turns out to be gray kitty and we coax her out of the trailer and into the truck cab. We don't have anything to put her into so now we try to keep her somewhat calm and away from the driver. We drive on with no further mishap and reach our destination and unload. They have a cat carrier we can borrow, they feed us and we return  as the sun goes down. I tried a shot of the sun shining down through the clouds but it didn't show up nearly as gorgeous as it was in person.

Here's what the tire we rode on looked like. It went 175 miles without any problem at all.

And here's the spare. We went to a local tire service and had them both replaced today in advance of our trip with the horses tomorrow.

For dinner tonight we had steak and stuffed zucchini and beets. We had gone into the local Sprouts, a produce store, for regular beets but next to them were bunches of Golden Beets so we decided to give them a try. We cooked them just like we would the red ones and they tasted just about the same, maybe a touch milder. I'd never seen them before but they were good.

On the bus front, the latest news is that a badly leaking wheel bearing seal has been found. A new one will be sourced on Monday. The brakes will simply be cleaned with brake cleaner and re-installed.

We are now informed that the bus conversion will take somewhat longer than planned. None of us here are surprised nor dismayed by this news. Our starting date will be pushed back but how much remains to be seen.

A Quick Update

The reconstruction of the bus continues apace. I got a quick look at it this morning. The change is gradual rather than dramatic. For those curious about the melding of the low profile toilet with the existing stainless steel unit, here's an attempt to show it:

It's interesting to note that the original installation did not include a sink. Of course, the new one doesn't either but there will be others on board.

Here's a view looking to the rear showing the tub installed to the left rear and to the left front is the box for the fridge. The fridge box still needs its' vents installed.

Here's the view from the other direction, standing in front of the old toilet looking toward the front of the bus. behind the wall on the right is the tub and you can see the other toilet installed just past the partition on the left. The silver loooking thing past the toilet is a corner mirror cabinet that will be installed high on that wall. A smaller, bar type, sink will also be installed on that wall.

Here's a better look at the tub/shower area. For those concerned about the window, the tub will have a surround type shower curtain. It is also anticipated to have outside shower capabilities for times when that will be possible.

Here's a better look at the enclosure for the fridge:

It seems now that we will have a separate, dedicated 12 volt power system for the coach area. It will be deep cycle batteries charged by solar, backed up by a generator. We will take advantage of some of the lefover wiring runs that go the length of the bus to carry 12v to where it will be used. An inverter may emerge later.

We have yet to see the sinks, countertops, kitchen storage, couch or forward bunk area.

Tomorrow is the big parade in town and John is driving his team in the parade. Following their participation in that, they will need to be moved to a temporary home for the duration of the trip. We still have at least two trips to make up to Flagstaff to relocate horses and build a corral and supply them with feed. So there are some distractions in the next few days. It remains to be seen if we will make our scheduled departure.

A View of the Old West

Last night we went to the Prescott Rodeo, billed as the Worlds Oldest Rodeo. I can't remember the last time I went to a live rodeo performance. It was loads of fun. This whole week is Frontier Days in Prescott and the rodeo runs all week. The contestents enter their events on each day during the week accumulating points to detemine the winner on the last day. This is one of the qualifying rodeos on the way to the championship held in Las Vegas each year. Then on Saturday is a huge parade and the town square hosts music performances and renactors demonstrate old time gunfights in the main street. It's all great fun and very colorful. The parade is interesting to me in that the high school kids who would normally be in a marching band are instead members of horse clubs and they all ride in the parade.

The rodeo starts with a grand en-trance parade with 50 riders each holding flag. There's one flag for each of the sponsors of the rodeo. All but three of the riders were women. The theme of the night was "Tough enough to wear pink" in support of breast cancer awareness.

The first event was something called "the wild horse race" in which several unbroken horses were released at once into the arena and teams of cowboys tried to be first to saddle one and ride it across a finish line. The horses truly went wild when they were released and I think only one team wound up getting a saddle on one. And one unfortunate cowboy wound up with a broken leg.

That was followed by bareback bronc riding and then steer wrestling, saddle bronc riding, calf roping and whole host of other events. The program moved right along lasting about two hours with no intermission. It was a perfect night because heavy cloud cover and rain in the area had brought down the 101 daytime temperature to a much more comfortable temp in the 80's.

As we left the stands to make our way to the car, I spotted this spectacular cecropia moth.

She was resting one the sidewalk and had a wingspan of a little over 4 inches. Because the antennae on this one are smaller, it can be identified as a female. They have no mouthparts or digestive system and only live about two weeks after emerging.

Since the location of the bus is about two miles from where I am staying and we didn't stop by yesterday or today, I don't know exactly how far along it is. I know that yesterday there were at least three men working on it and some of the framing had been done.

This a view at the rear of the living area with the existing bathroom at the far left. On the near left, leaning against the wall is the platform for the full size bed and to the right is the base of the twin bunks. The wall being framed in will form the rear wall of the tub/shower area. You can just make out the rear bench seat which is being left in place. It will function as seating and perhaps as a bunk for one of the kids.

John, the owner of the bus, had asked me to see if I could put together a solar array to help charge the batteries so I spent today working on that. We had some surplus solar panels that had formerly been used to power a couple of well pumps. The pumps went bad and the wells were converted to conventional power leaving the solar arrays as surplus. I took the various parts and built up a two hundred watt array by using two 55 watt panel and two 45 watt panels. Each pair was connected in series and then the pairs were connected in parallel. This let us use the most number of panels that we could while staying within the limits of the MPPT controller that was donated to us. It has yet to be mounted to the bus but I tested it after assembly and was pleased to see a steady 38 volt ouput.

The pile to the left in the photo are the seats that were stripped out of the bus awaiting dismantling prior to being carted to the metal recycling center.

Tomorrow it's another trip to Phoenix, this time for a load of hay. I should have a chance to review the current state of the bus so I can update that.

Our present anticipated date to leave is July 8th. We hope to get to Salmon, Utah by the weekend so that we can attend a Bluegrass music festival. We need to be in Anchorage by July 28th. It's about 3600 miles away.

We had originally planned to cruise back to Vancouver, leaving on August 25th., ferry to Seattle and take the train down the West coast. That has now been changed to cruise, then ferry to Seattle on September 1 where we will pick up a 25' class C motorhome from Cruise America. This will allow us the greatest degree of flexibility in our stateside return. In order to enable this, I've extended my stay in the West by a week.

Great Expectations

I don't know what kind of flower this is but it's a bush that is used for landscaping all over Phoenix.

We went to Phoenix this morning to get horse feed. While we were there we went over to Cabela's and I got a pair of slippers and a shirt, both out of the discount room. With coupons and promotions, I got the slippers for nothing. Then we went back to Gordon Biersch for lunch, and beer for me. Great place. It was 109 degrees when we left Phoenix. Back here it was 95.

This is the bus that we are getting ready for the trip. It is a 1997 MCI bus with a Cummins M11 engine. It has air ride suspension and lots of power, or so I'm told. Right now it is a shell. Nearly all of the seats have been stripped out of it as well as the overhead compartments. At this point we are gathering the components to upfit for the journey. We have a very nice Dometic two fridge that runs on propane. The fridge will be hoisted up and slid through one of the windows to get it inside the bus. All of the windows are also escape hatches and they each can open and swing up like the one in the picture.

 

You can also see some of a couch that is going in. Here is another shot. It folds out to make a bed.

Then we have three bowl stainless steel sink. We're all set for cleaning salmon.

In what I thought was a clever move, we have this Husky roll around tool cabinet to serve as kitchen storage. I assume it will be modified somewhat. There may wind up being two of them.

The bus came with a toilet built in that looks something like the ones in an airplane but it has no valve on the bottom so it's basicly a stainless steel outhouse. We've got a low profile RV toilet to mount over the hole where the seat would go to convert it into something more reasonable. It works better than it sounds. There is also another full size RV toilet that will located in the bath/shower area to be built amidships. We will also have a tub and shower.

The bus has been modified with a combination tank that holds 100 gallons of fresh water, 100 gallons of gray water and 35 gallons of black water. It rests in one of the bottom storage compartments and is currently being plumbed in.

Another modification has been the installation of a cabinet in another underneath compartment that will hold 2 30 lb. propane cylinders, much like you would find on a travel trailer. The fridge actually uses very little propane so we can expect to run it continuously on propane for the whole trip on just one tank.

Since the main AC is driven from the engine, we needed a source of cool for the times when the engine was not running. We have a Coleman Duotherm 15,000 btu unit to be installed in the roof.

A lot of the design is being done on the fly so I don't have details about the whole layout. There will probably be two couches because we need to seat eight people. We also need a place to sleep and one full size bed platform will be built and at least one set of bunks but after that more sleeping room has to be developed. I think I'm getting the couch but if that has to serve as seating during the day, it looks like napping will be tough.

Of course we will also need a way to cook but that riddle is yet to be solved. Plywood has been bought for walls and platforms but no sawdust yet. I'll report on other aspects of the build in a future post.

Settling In

                 This is yesterday's sunset. It gets real pretty if there some clouds to catch the setting sun.

I had thought we might be working on the bus by now but that has yet to commence. Instead, I’m trying to get my body to acclimate to the time and the climate.

The weather has been pretty comfortable so far but it’s going to get warmer. It’s been in the low 90’s but by Tuesday it’s supposed to go to 100. I get up each day between 5:30 and 6 local time. My watch is one of those atomic watch things that’s supposed to reset itself each day from a low frequency time signal in Colorado but so far it has refused to do so. So each time I look at my watch I see Eastern Time. I just subtract the 3 hours and don’t fret about it.

                                                This is the view off the porch in the morning.

The coffee pot is on a timer and the coffee is ready to go when I get up. I get a cup and go out to the entry porch that’s in the shade and sit in a chair and watch and listen to the day opening up. There’s a rooster down the valley that greets the dawn and I can hear the quail in the bush calling out their territory. Sometimes there’s a cottontail or two getting a last bite before heading back into the shade of a bush for the day.

We have three cats out here and they don’t want to be petted. They’re “barn cats”. But they always come around in the morning and they’ll follow us around the yard as we go to feed the horses.

There’s usually not any breeze in the morning and it seems so still. There are few trees and the hills just sit there covered with rocks and brush. There’s no traffic in sight and almost none in earshot so it is very quiet and peaceful.

                                                     This the view I watch in the evening.

We all go to bed at night at 9:00 and by then I’m good and ready. So basically, we follow the sun. We have Dish, but I’m not a TV person so I go out on the back deck at night and watch the shadows overtake the land. The deck looks out over the valley and the tank (pond). I’m staring at perhaps 40 acres of brush and hill with neighbors a quarter mile away or so.

I like watching the wildlife come out at the close of the day. There’re lots of rabbits, both jackrabbits and cottontails. I probably see about a dozen per night. This time I’ve seen quite a few roadrunners. They don’t go Beep-Beep but they do run like the wind. I’ve seen coyotes every night so far. The first night three of them came down the hill through the yard and on to the tank for a drink. There’s only just a puddle left and it will be gone in a couple of days. The other night there were two mule deer does that ventured out very nervously. I think they knew the coyotes were around.

We’re several miles from town and none of the neighbors have those large outside lights right now so it is very dark after the sun goes down. The night sky is brilliant through the dry air. We keep binoculars handy for the wildlife and I can look up and see limitless stars. I ought to see if I can find the schedule for the passing of the space station. I hear about it at home but can never see it there, but here it should be easy.

Under Way Again

Well, it's time to fire up this blog again as another trip is starting. This time will be a little different, though. As most followers of this blog already know, I lost my dear wife, Diane, last November. This past May I journeyed North to hold a memorial service for her. After that, I visited my sister and she and Curley really hit it off. She volunteered to have Curley for the summer and I decided to take her up on the offer. So, Curley is vacationing in upstate New York and I'm traveling solo.

The short version of this trip outline is that I've traveled back to Arizona to join my cousin and her husband and five others of the family in driving a converted bus up to Alaska. We will tour some of the sights in Alaska, headquartered in Anchorage, and then head back via cruise ship and train and whatever else it takes.

I'll try to describe the bus preparation and the trip as it unfolds.

I spent yesterday traveling to Arizona via Delta airways. It's been 10 or 12 years since I've flown and I've learned to view air travel as a giant uncomfortable hassle and I don't look forwrd to it. That being said, yesterday's version was not too bad but still did have its' moments.

I should have anticipated the extent to which technology has invaded travel but I was surprised to receive an email from Delta 24 hours in advance of my departure inviting me to check in on-line. OK, I can do without standing in along line at the airport, so off I went to check in. Then I was surprised to see that I could have my boarding pass in electronic form to be accessed from my cell phone. Good thing, as my printer chose that exact time to run out of black ink. So electronic it is. I had misgivings about the process but it worked like a charm. I used my phone to get to my e-mail pass which had an embedded Q-code that was scanned at security and the gate. Easy-peasy.

I had allowed plenty of time to work things out at the airport so I was left with lots of people watching time. At my gate there was a young family with 3 very young boys. The youngest looked to be maybe 18 months or so. His mother had him in a stroller or in her arms but every time he wanted something he started screaming at the top of his lungs. He wanted something a lot. I figure that my luck would have him seated next to me but then I saw that only he and his mother and the next older boy acutally boarded and they were seated at the extreme rear of the plane, while I sat at about the midsection, next to the engine. Between the engine's roar and the cabin noise and the fact that I removed my hearing aids, he really didn't bother me at all. Even though he screamed all the way to Atlanta.

Those of us who have reduced hearing know that background noise severly reduces our capacity to effectively hear with any discernment. Thus my hearing aids were pretty much of no real use for the whole trip and they rested in my pocket most of the time.

I had a three hour layover in Atlanta so I got some lunch and then settled in for the wait. The noise level in a busy airport like Atlanta is so overwheming. It's kind of ironic that there are so many systems that are trying at the same time to convey some piece of information that nearly none of it gets through. Multiple topics and monitors and languages and volumes and constant paging just present a wall of sound. It reminds me of viewing a Jackson Pollack painting with its' mix of colors. I relied on watching the actions of the people at the gate to get a sense of what to do.

The flight West was pretty good. I was reminded of the downfall of scheduling a flight that departs on a summer afternoon. The high temperatures and building cumulous clouds mean turbulence when climbing or descending and sometimes along the way. We flew at 36,000 feet and still passed some storm cells that were higher yet. I had the window seat just inside the entrance door so I lots of legroom and a view of the passing landscape down below. Although I have been across the nation several times by plane, car, motorhome or motorcycle, I'm always amazed at the variety of landscape as we move West. The lush green of the East gives way to the spare landscape of the West over the miles. The vast areas where there just seems to nothing or next to it. Not roads nor trees nor people. Don't bother to put in cell towers when there's no one to use them. Finally we break over a strip of mountains and there is greater Phoenix laid out below enveloped in a cloud of brown smog.

My cousin and her husband were there to meet me. After a quick potty stop we were off to find dinner. It was 5:30 in Arizona but my body was telling me it was 8:30 so I was ready to eat. A cold beer sounded like a good idea so I suggested a local brewery that I had remembered from being there before. It's called Gordon Biersch and they have several locations around the country. They have great German style beer and great food to boot. So we had a good dinner and then headed back to home base. The trip had a combination purpose for them. They had come to Phoenix to buy horse feed so they had brought their pickup. On the way, they got a call to postpone the feed and transport RV supplies instead. So we wound up bringing back a two door refrigerator, a tub, a toilet and a generator. With all the delays we didn't get home until 12:30 NC time and I was beat. Off to bed.

Now the project is to equip a 1997 MCI bus to serve as an RV for the trip North. Right now it is a virtual shell, waiting for the modifications to make it a livable unit for the duration. That will be the next part of the story. And that will mean pictures.