Archive for July, 2006
July 18, 2006 at 7:23 pm · Filed under Maintenance, Mobile technology
If problems come in threes, I’m afraid I’m in for a two-fer. And you’re in for a long blog entry, because I’m going to tell you the whole story right now.
Modern full-timers rely on technology to get things done. In my case, I rely on it more than most, because I’m running a business from my trailer. So when things fail, backup plans are needed. But what do you do when the entire support system starts to collapse?
It started with our Garmin GPS. A couple of weeks ago while in Glacier we noticed that the internal battery was no longer holding a charge. This means the GPS has to do a “cold start” every time we use it, which takes a long time. We’ve come to depend on “Garminita” (as we call the British voice programmed into our unit). Having to wait five minutes or so before she woke up and started telling us where to go, has been a nuisance.
I contacted Garmin support yesterday from Jackson WY via email, and they’ve advised me that they’ll fix Garminita under warranty, but we need to ship her back to the factory and have a UPS-shippable address for the return in 7 to 10 days. I will notify them that we’ll pick Garminita up in Denver. The trick here is knowing where we’re going to be in 7 to 10 days “¦
As I mentioned earlier this week, my Mac’s hard drive failed during our stay in Yellowstone last week. I had a full system backup from 10 days earlier, and since I recognized the symptoms of hard disk failure, I was able to retrieve nearly all of my intervening work before the drive completely died. In just an hour I was able to move to the backup laptop (Eleanor’s) and resume working as if nothing had happened. So that’s OK for now, but we’ll need to find a Mac Service Center, and it seems the closest one along our route is again in Denver.
We weren’t planning to be in Denver for more than a day, but it looks like things could be changing.
Two days later, we picked up a screw in one of the trailer tires. Fortunately, we had a spare, because the screw punctured the tire in a place where patches are not advisable, and we were 60 miles from a tire dealer. OK. We’ll probably replace the spare in Rock Springs WY.
Lately, my Verizon cell phone has been performing poorly. I’ve been missing a lot of calls, and it has been roaming to analog when other phones nearby are making digital calls with no trouble. Right now, it reporting “No Service” but Rich C’s Verizon phone is happily placing digital calls everywhere in the campground. Admittedly this is not a huge surprise, since the phone got, uh, “damp” when Brett and I were jetskiing on Lake Mead last month.
I checked the Verizon website at the public library today and found that there was an authorized outlet in the Radio Shack up in Driggs. Perfect ““ only a few miles up the road. I got my opportunity to go check it out around 2 pm. There was a small fire across the street near the Market & Café, and the whole downtown was blacked out, which eliminated all the free wi-fi in town. So Rich C and I headed up to Driggs.
No luck. Verizon apparently has an east-west division, and authorized re-sellers from the west can’t sell me an upgrade phone since we’re from the east. I was advised to try the Verizon store in Idaho Falls, an hour away.
OK, but before I drive an hour, I’m going to call and make sure they can help me. Hmmm”¦ how to call Verizon? I would dial 611 from my phone, but it’s saying it doesn’t feel like placing a call. So I borrow Rich C’s Verizon phone and try 611.
No dice. We’re on an extended network and 611 doesn’t work. So I borrow a Yellow Pages from the campground and find the number for the Idaho Falls store. After a long wait, the tech support rep comes on and tells me that comparing two phones side-by-side isn’t really a reliable way to know if my phone isn’t working well. “One phone may be tri-mode, while another is pure digital, and you have different manufacturers, ages, etc,” she explains.
Well, that’s all nice, but I want the phone that works! I explain this concept to the friendly tech, who then tells me that my phone is out of warranty, and if I can just hang on to my malfunctioning phone for two more months, I’ll get a cheap “upgrade” to a phone that works, whereas if I insist on a replacement now, it will cost me the full retail price.
Two months with my phone only working when I’m standing directly under a cell tower? No thanks. Rich C, who used to work in the cell phone industry (as did I), calls this “standard service.”
So we have a dead tire, a dead computer, a faulty GPS, and a deeply traumatized phone. But we’re standing tall nonetheless. Yes, my technology is collapsing around me, and I need my technology, but we’re just going to be flexible.
What do you do in this situation? There are two basic options: (1) flee to a major city and get everything fixed; (2) extend your stay and try to work things out via Internet and UPS/FedEx. We like it here, so we’ve booked another two nights. I’ll take a few hours to make the arrangements for repairing everything.
Duelling Macs on the picnic table in Victor, Idaho
UPDATE: Rich C and I went back to the park beside the Library on this fine evening and found power restored. We’re both blogging and doing other work from a picnic table. Eleanor and Emma are off at the shoppe across the street getting ice cream sodas. It’s another gorgeous evening in Victor ID.
July 18, 2006 at 11:50 am · Filed under Places to go
Now I have to take back a lot of what I said yesterday. I said Victor doesn’t have any Internet — but in fact there’s a lot of free wi-fi all over town. I’m in the public library now, which has the fastest public Internet I’ve ever experienced. And everyone in the downtown area has an open wireless network, so there’s plenty to borrow. Rich C asked around and nobody seems to worry about it.
I also put my blog entry in the category of “Places to Avoid”, but I was really thinking of the Teton Pass. Avoid that with a trailer. But Victor ID, and the nearby town of Driggs, are really wonderful places to visit. We are in the midst of a huge valley, on the west side of the Tetons. Here the jagged peaks of the Tetons are mostly hidden behind rounder green foothills. The view is vast and gorgeous, with dry clear air and lovely sunsets over the low mountains to the west.
The people are friendly, there are no mosquitoes, and there seems to be little pollen this time of year. Eleanor and Rich C are loving it. Emma likes the swimming pool and the foosball table (we all had a foosball tournament last night.) So we’ve decided to stay a few more days to catch up on work and enjoy the fine weather.
But everywhere there are the subtle signs of a place with a real estate boom ready to happen. There’s a Sotheby’s Real Estate office in both Victor and Driggs. The highway has been widened in the towns. New development is happening everywhere, with large parcels of land already sprouting golf courses and huge “rustic-style” log homes. The tourist atmosphere of Jackson seems ready to spread to this side of the mountains.
We’d consider buying some land here if it were a place with a warm winter, but they get plenty of snow here and snow no longer interests me. This won’t be a place we settle down, but it is a peaceful spot to hang out in the summer. I hope Victor and Driggs can remain quiet little western towns for a long time, but I think the folks at the Highway Department, Sotheby’s, and the two log home companies on Rt 33, are all working to change that.
Last night, after I finished working in Jackson at the music/tattoo/Internet/cafe, we drove around the Victor/Driggs area to explore. One of our “finds” was the local Spud Drive-In Movie Theater, with the biggest potato we’ve ever seen.
I also dropped in our neighbors who work-camp here. Spencer was a lawyer for 40 years in Minneapolis, but retired and re-trained as a barber. Once he had his Master Barber’s License, he and his wife Ingrid hit the road in their fifth wheel. They spend every winter in Mazatlan Mexico, and summers here in Victor. Ingrid works in the office and Spencer does other duties, in addition to providing good haircuts for $10. It was a unique experience for me to get a haircut under the awning of an RV on a warm summer afternoon, and chatting with Spencer about his winters in Mexico made it even better.
July 17, 2006 at 2:37 pm · Filed under Places to avoid
OK, there’s one really good reason why people don’t make the 20-mile drive from Jackson, WY to much cheaper campgrounds in Victor, ID: the Teton Pass.
Rich C went over first, yesterday afternoon. He came down trembling, and called us to warn us. The pass is a monster — easily the worst one we’ve seen yet. 10% grade up and down, with lots of twists. In the winter, it’s basically impassable many times due to heavy snow (it tops out around 8500 feet).
It did turn out to be an interesting test of the Nissan Titan/Armada. Rich C has the Titan, we have the Armada. Both are identical engines, transmissions, and nearly identical towing capacities. But Rich C has an advantage going up: his trailer weighs about 6500 lbs loaded and ours weighs about 8000 lbs loaded. So he got up in second gear, occasionally slowing to 25 MPH. That wasn’t bad because the speed limit was 25 most of the way.
We had more difficulty. The engine got hot about halfway up and we had to climb in 1st gear to keep it under control. Thanks to keeping the engine revolutions high (over 3,000 RPM), the transmission never got hot, but about 2.5 miles from the top, we were forced to pull over and rev the engine in neutral to let it cool. It was 87 degrees when we did this, so we also pulled out some of our other tricks, including turning off the A/C and turning on the heat, full blast. This is the first time in 25,000 miles of towing that we’ve needed to go to such extremes.
Downhill, we had the advantage. Rich C has the factory drum brakes, but we have discs. Even with a much heavier trailer, we have more than double his braking capacity. It was no big deal for us to modulate the speed all the way down the 10% grade. Rich C’s ride wasn’t so pleasant …
Rich C stated what we all felt: “There’s NO WAY I’m going over that pass again with the trailer!” We’ll use a lower pass about an hour south of Victor to get to Colorado, when we go.
The campground and the little town of Victor are nice, in a western style. We’re all loving the dry climate and beautiful weather. Emma and I spent the early evening in the pool diving for sticks, and just relaxing.
However, there’s no Internet in Victor. Sprint doesn’t cover the area. The campground wi-fi, predictably, doesn’t work. So today we all drove over the pass again (without trailers!) to Jackson and I settled in here at the local cybercafe/tattoo shop/jazz cafe to get a day’s work done. We may stay another night or two to get caught up on things, then we’ll head into Colorado for more adventures.
I’m still catching up with blog entries and photos too, so look for more backfilled stuff as I get time.
July 16, 2006 at 2:41 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
We are back in contact with the world. At this moment, we are making an afternoon camp in the parking lot of the Menor Historical Site, just 1/2 mile north of Moose, in the Grand Tetons National Park. The mountains are looming to our west, just out the dinette window where I am sitting catching up on work.
The past four days have been great, and there’s much to tell. I will try to backfill some blog entries tonight and tomorrow. In short:
1) I took over 500 photos, of which some are now in our Flickr album.
2) Yellowstone was crowded and, although a terrific place to visit, will not be on our top ten list of national parks we most like to go. Yes, we saw geysers, bison, pronghorns, and many other creatures. The park is so big (size of Connecticut) that we were only able to see a tiny fraction in three nights. But in that short time we managed to get caught in a couple of huge traffic jams, the parking lots were all overflowing, and even the 7 a.m. ranger walk was attended by over 50 people. We got up every day at 5:30 to beat the crowds, and it was a drag to find full parking lots everywhere by 8 a.m. If we come back, it will be in the off-season.
3) My Mac’s internal hard drive died on Friday, but fortunately I had a full backup made on July 4, and I had enough warning of the problem to save most of the intervening work as well. It’s now completely un-bootable, but I am fine, working off Eleanor’s laptop with all my data on the external backup drive. However, I was not able to retrieve about 100 great photos from Glacier National Park before the main drive died. I still hope to do that when we reach a service center in Denver. Have you remembered to backup your data lately?
4) Jackson WY campgrounds are incredibly expensive ($52 per night with Good Sam discount) so we are going to head to Idaho today to get cheaper camping in Victor.
5) We managed to run over a 1″ drywall screw in a campground in Grand Tetons, which meant an emergency trip to the service center in the park. The tire is unrepairable, so we are on the spare at the moment. How did a drywall screw end up in the center of a huge National Park?
July 13, 2006 at 7:15 pm · Filed under Places to go
I have to admit that I arrived in Yellowstone with less than the appropriate attitude. Part of it was my fault: I never took the time to research the park before we arrived, and so I was repeatedly surprised by things that I should have expected.
As we passed through the North Entrance, I was expecting to drive a few miles to our campground and settle in before the thunderstorms arrived. But Yellowstone is a park the size of Connecticut, and so I should not have been surprised to see a sign advising us that the drive to Bridge Bay Campground was 62 miles further down a twisting road with a speed limit of 35-45 MPH.
Along the way, we passed through Mammoth Hot Springs, the northernmost of several “villages” that exist inside the park. To visit a park the size of Yellowstone (we belatedly discovered) you need to pick an area you want to explore and then choose a village nearby. Otherwise, you’ll spend all day driving around the park. It is typically 35-50 miles between villages, and traffic sometimes moves slowly in the peak months of July and August.
Bison can cause huge backups in the summer
It moves even slower when a bison crosses the road. We got caught in a series of thunderstorms, with small hail — which always strikes fear into the heart of an Airstream owner — and then of course, a bison showed up somewhere, and all traffic stopped dead. There’s nothing like watching hail hit your trailer in a mile-long traffic jam with no way to escape. So we arrived much later than we expected, and I was not feeling very upbeat about it.
We found Susan and Adam in their campground, 2 miles from ours, but they had decided to depart in the morning, so that was the last we saw of them. We were sorry to see them go, but glad they felt they had a great adventure with us the past ten days.
Knowing that crowds and traffic were going to be problems, we woke at 5:30 the next morning so we could get to a Ranger-guided hike at 7:00, about ten miles away. We figured the early start time would allow us to see lots of wildlife, and it would keep the crowds away. We were wrong on both counts. Over fifty people showed up, and the fog was so dense we couldn’t see anything most of the time. There’s no chance of spotting much wildlife with fifty people tromping around anyway …
Dropping in on the other roadside sights worked better for us. We hit the Sulphur Cauldron, the Mud Pots, and a few geysers, did a little more hiking, and then we started to feel that you can only look at so much belching mud in one day. We collapsed in the trailer for lunch and a nap (for me).
In the afternoon we were surprised by Wendimere “The Health Chic” and Bill, who we had met in Salem just a couple of weeks ago. We spent an hour chatting with them and talked about meeting up again in Florida, where they live. From here the plan is a quiet evening in, some movies, and early bedtime … because tomorrow will be another early day.
July 12, 2006 at 10:00 am · Filed under Uncategorized
We are heading out this morning to Yellowstone National Park, 100 miles south of here. We’ll probably be unable to blog for a couple of days, because we are staying in the center of the park where only analog phone service exists. Yellowstone has been the subject of a few well-publicized cell phone towers, but in reality it is unlikely we’ll find any coverage (except at Old Faithful).
Rich C is heading to Bozeman for maintenance. We’ll meet Adam and Susan in the park and report back when we emerge, probably by Friday.
July 11, 2006 at 5:25 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
It’s a fine day here in southern Montana. This really is a beautiful state and worthy of many weeks of exploration, if not months. I’m sorry we aren’t taking more time here, but we will just need to come back again later.
Us, and Rich C, parked in the otherwise empty campground
Our drive today has taken us to Lewis and Creek Caverns State Park ($18, no hookups), which was once a National Monument. It was transferred to the state of Montana in 1932 when Congress was looking for ways to pare down the National Parks budget. The caves are three miles up a twisting road from the campground. The area is very scenic and remarkably quiet.
We’ve decided to skip the cavern tour, even though Adam and Susan reported it to be a good one, because it is two hours long. Emma’s attention span in a cave is not quite that long, and we’ve seen a lot of caves in the past six months, including Oregon Caves, Mammoth Cave, Lehman Cave, and Kartchner Cavern. Instead, we’re taking a quiet afternoon around the Airstream.
I’ve been meaning to share a small tip for camping this time of year: be careful for wasps at your campsite. Last week at the Corps of Engineers campground in Pasco, WA, I opened the cover to the electrical hookup in campsite #46, and was immediately stung twice by wasps. We retreated to another site.
Even though the stings hurt, I was sort of happy to be the recipient of them. Rich C is allergic to insect stings and it would have been much worse for him. I didn’t want to have to inject him with an Epi-Pen. Carol gave me some topical pain reliever (benzocaine or something similar) and it worked very quickly.
This experience actually paid off just a couple of days later when Rich C opened another electrical hookup cover at another campground. Just before opening it, he thought, “Hmmm…. maybe there are wasps in here, too.” So he opened it cautiously, and sure enough, there were unhappy wasps. He ran fast and was lucky not to be stung.
Photo by Scott Fassett
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