Ohio Update

Here’s a quick update on what’s been happening, and where we’re headed for the next week or so.

We spent a few nights in the campground at Winton Woods Park. It’s a very nice campground, and very conveniently located for us. On Wednesday, we had a number of my former coworkers over for a get-together. On Thursday, Cathy spent a few hours seeing former students and coworkers at her school, then had dinner with one of her friends. In between all of this, we fit in doctor’s appointments, a vet appointment, picking up prescriptions, groceries, and various other items.

Unfortunately, Winton Woods was booked full over the weekend, so we had to vacate on Friday. We moved up the road a few miles to Caesar Creek State Park. This was our favorite campground in Ohio. It’s only abut 45 minutes from where we lived in Liberty Township. It’s a quiet, spacious campground with lots of hiking trails and easy access to the lake for the dogs. We’ll be here through Monday, leaving Tuesday AM.

We’ve been having trouble with our living room slideout for some time. When we had it in the shop in CA, they looked at it and pronounced it fixed. It did work properly for a few days, but is now acting up again. Fortunately, it is something that we can live with; it didn’t upset any of our travel plans.

It still needs to be fixed. So, on Friday I called the manufacturer of the slide. They talked me through some diagnostics and we concluded that one of the motors is likely shorted out. I then contacted Heartland for advice on where we might get it looked at in a timely manner. More importantly, we want some assurance that the repair place will look at it quickly. We spent 19 days out of our trailer when it was in the shop in CA, and we don’t want a repeat!

Long story short, Heartland strongly recommended a place in Goshen, Indiana, close to their headquarters in Elkhart. I contacted them; they committed to ordering a motor and will schedule the repair as soon as the motor comes in, hopefully in 3-4 days. The timing on the motor is up to Heartland, which doesn’t exactly fill me with joy. However, the repair place did state that if it’s just a motor replacement they can have the trailer in and out in one day! That’s exactly what we wanted to hear.

So, we want to stay in the general proximity of Elkhart, Indiana, waiting for the call. We’re in the midst of making reservations right now, but our short-term plans are to spend Tuesday and Wednesday in Maumee Bay State Park, outside of Toledo, then stay at an RV park in Elkhart while we’re waiting for the call.

It looks like there’s quite a bit to do and see in the Elkhart area, at least for an RVer. It’s the heart of the US RV industry. I’ve signed us up for a factory tour at Heartland. Also, there’s an RV museum there that’s supposed to be well worth visiting. Last, there’s an Amish farm/store/restaurant complex called Amish Acres that we’ll probably visit while we’re there.

So, we’ve got a short-term plan, contingent on parts and repairs all going smoothly. Beyond that… no real long-term plans just yet. Our only deadline is to meet our reservation to get on the ferry to Orcas Island on November 19. Before then, we’ll see where the road takes us.

More on The Beast

Here’s some other stuff that we ordered on the Beast, a couple of things we passed on, and the adds we made afterward.

Running Boards - if you look at the picture on my previous post, you can see the running boards we ordered; they run from wheel to wheel, rather than just under the cabUIKeyInputDownArrow. They are a little-known option from Ford; even our sales guy didn’t know about them! Having a running board to stand on to grab something from the front of the bed is pretty useful; this truck stands WAY off the ground. Even I, at 6’1” tall, need the running boards to get in and out of The Beast.

Bed Liner - Ford offers this, for the exact same price as an aftermarket liner. I consider a sprayed-in bed liner a necessity for a truck. I had a Line-X liner in my old truck, and loved it. I went with the factory liner for convenience; it saved me the trip to an aftermarket dealer to get it installed. You can see it, along with some other aftermarket adds, in the photo below.

Not visible, but present - we ordered the truck with the prep package for a 5th-wheel and gooseneck hitch. This buys you the underframe goodies as well as pre-drilled holes in the bed (capped with rubber plugs) for a standard 5th-wheel hitch or for a gooseneck hitch. We needed the latter for our hitch (see below). The various pieces are all covered by the hitch.

TTool Box - I bought a Husky tool box from Lowes. It’s a useful place to store my tools and some emergency supplies. There’s nothing special about this specific tool box, but it meets my needs.

Also visible is our hitch, an Anderson Ultimate 5th Wheel Hitch. Our dealer recommended it; after some research, I was sold. It is about ⅓ the weight of a standard 5th-wheel hitch, weighing about 40 lbs. It clamps and bolts onto a standard gooseneck hitch ball. It takes less than five minutes to put the thing in place, or to remove it. Although I’ve never towed a 5th-wheel trailer with a standard hitch, I love how easy this thing is to hitch up, and how well the whole trailer pulls. Highly recommended.

Stuff we did NOT buy:

A nav system - anybody buying a new car would be a fool to buy a navUIKeyInputDownArrow system. New cars today come with Apple Car Play (and the corresponding Android system) standard pretty much across the board. Using my iPhone, we can get directions from either the Apple Maps app, Google Maps, or Waze - all on the built-in touchscreen. This was a $1700 dollar option we avoided.

Sun roof - we’ve had them on a couple of cars, but it’s a $2000 option. Pass.

LED headlights - These look really cool, and are a lot (2x?) brighter than the standard headlamps, but they’re a $1000 option. I’m a little pissed off that Ford has better headlamps and won’t make them standard. Regardless, I couldn’t justify the extra cost.

That’s about it for The Beast. We just finished a 2200-mile trip from SoCal to Cincinnati, and The Beast didn’t miss a lick.

Back in the Buckeye State

We arrived back in Cincinnati earlier today. We’re in town for the next week, primarily to hit a few doctor’s appointments. While we’re here we’ll be catching up on some chores and visiting with friends.

We’re staying for a few days in the campground in Winton Woods park. In an astonishing coincidence, we are staying in the exact campsite that we rolled in to when we moved out of our house - exactly three months ago, on June 25th.

It’s nice to be off the road. Driving every day gets monotonous, specially since we’ve been over a road (I-70) that we’ve driven several times before.

It’s also nice to be back in Ohio. We knew all along that we’d be moving from Ohio when we retired. When we decided to move here - 13 years ago this month - we knew that we’d be moving on. Why would we stay? We grew up in California, lived there most of our lives, and all of our children still live there.

When we moved here, we thought it’d be fun to live in a different part of the country, see some different stuff, and make some new friends. On the latter, we certainly weren’t disappointed. The best thing about living in the Midwest is the people.

I’ve told others this before. When you say to someone in the Midwest, “How ya doin’?”, it’s not interpreted as a greeting; it’s a bona fide question. I love to visit with people, and I’ve had 10- and 15-minute conversations with guys at hardware stores and auto part stores, and cashiers at gas stations my whole time living here. Everyone’s got all the time in the world to talk with you.

The Beast

While we wend our way across the Great Plains (last night in Strasburg, CO, tonight and tomorrow night in Russell, KS, Sunday in Odessa, MO and Monday in Vandalia, IL) I thought I’d post something a little different and talk about our truck - The Beast.

The Beast is our 2017 Ford F-350 truck. It’s just a year old this month; we’ve managed to put nearly 19,000 miles on it so far. It is by far the longest, tallest, heaviest, most powerful and most expensive vehicle we’ve ever owned. We could not be more pleased with our purchase.

We ordered it from the factory, which is the only way to ensure you have a vehicle that will do the job you need it to do. Ford has a bunch of info available, including tables that show the various options you need to tow a certain weight. Since we had already decided on our trailer, and knew its maximum weight (16,500 lbs) we knew how the truck had to be equipped. Here are some of the specific choices we made.

• The engine - The Heart of The Beast - According to Ford, one needs their PowerStroke diesel to tow more than 12,000 lbs. I couldn’t agree more. This engine puts out 440 horsepower and an incredible  925 ft-lbs of torque. In 2017, this was the highest torque rating of any passenger car or light truck sold in the USA. Horsepower tells you how fast you can move a weight, but torque simply tells you how much weight you can move. It is THE critical value for towing. Yesterday, we pulled our 15,000 lb trailer up to the Eisenhower tunnel on I-70 - at 11,100 feet elevation - at a steady 45 miles an hour. We could have gone faster, but the speed limit is only 50 right there.

• Single rear wheels - We thought long and hard on this choice. When we ordered The Beast, we of course told the sales guy that we were planning on towing a fifth-wheel trailer; the first words out of his mouth were “Then you need a dually”. I patiently explained to him that Ford’s own recommendation shows that a single-rear-wheel (SRW) truck can tow up to 16,500 lbs - exactly what we need. While a dually might offer a little more stability while towing, a SRW truck is a lot more maneuverable and easily parked. Since this is our only vehicle, this was highly desirable. Carrying a lot of weight for us was the recommendation of Cathy’s brother Steve, who has owned heavy-duty trucks for decades and towed fifth-wheel and horse trailers for about that long. He said we’d have no trouble with an SRW truck. Our experience has borne that out. We drove most of the day yesterday in winds that were reported as 20 mph with gusts to 40. They were right out of the north, or just about at right angle to our direction of travel. While we could feel the wind, I never felt shaky at all. Most of that is because this is a fifth-wheel trailer, and not a straight pull trailer. There’s simply no comparison in towing stability between the two; a fifth-wheel is far more stable.

• Short-bed - Ford pickups come in two bed lengths, 6.5 and 8 feet. An eight-foot bed is recommended for fifth-wheel trailer towing; the longer length bed ensures that the front of the trailer will not hit the back of the truck cab in very tight turns. Most trailers with an eight-foot bed can be turned a full 90 degrees without contact. In the interest of practicality and maneuverability, we wanted the shorter bed. It turns out that the hitch we are using, an Andersen Ultimate Hitch, has an 8” offset backward,, which helps considerably. Also, our trailer, like many new ones, is designed with rounded front corners to minimize the likelihood of impact. One of the first things we did when we picked up the trailer was to take it to a parking lot and see how far we could turn it without impacting the truck cab. It turns out that we can get to almost 90 degrees - maybe 85 degrees or so. So far, the shorter bed hasn’t been a problem, and I don’t think it will be going forward.

This post has run pretty long, so I think I’ll wrap this up now. I might write a subsequent post to talk about some of the other options we chose, as well as some of the things we’ve added.

The Great Basin

First of all, some procedural stuff: I am a little frustrated with Blogger, the free Google app that provides the structure for this blog. I struggle with a number of very awkward features, specifically how it handles pictures and videos. I can readily insert pictures from my iPad, but have great difficulties in resizing them. For videos, Blogger insists that one must post the videos to YouTube first! Really?

So, I will still occasionally insert photos here, but will post more stuff on Instagram. You can find me there as shook.rick. Also, Cathy posts frequently on Instagram (cathyshook) and Facebook, as Cathy Shook.

We left Reno on Monday (9/17) and headed east on US 50. The stretch from Fallon NV is billed as the “The Loneliest Road in America”. That’s no hyperbole. We’d go tens of minutes at a time without being passed by a vehicle going west.

Cathy and I were both raised in Lancaster, CA, which is on the western edge of the Mojave Desert. I guess we’re just a couple of old desert rats, but we both found the drive through the Great Basin to show spectacular scenery. We saw hemispheres of deep blue skies, unmarred by clouds, their perfection marred only by the jagged purple horizons generated by distant mountain ranges.

Great Basin National Park lies in eastern Nevada, not too far from the Utah border. It is largely a single mountain range, rising above the surrounding basins. Ecologists call these isolated ranges islands in the sky; they posses unique biomes, housing very different wildlife than the surrounding lowlands.

Great Basin National Park encompasses several groves of bristlecone pine trees, which are found only in isolated mountain ranges throughout the Great Basin. They are the oldest known living organisms, with some specimens proven to be more than 4,000 years old.

On Tuesday, we took a very pleasant three-mile hike to a grove of bristlecone pines. The National Park Service put together a very nice interpretative trail showcasing the bristlecone; here’s an example:

The tree behind us here is 2100 years old.

Although GBNP is really out in the middle of nowhere, it’s well worth visiting.

Reno Air Races

Greetings to all. It’s been a few days since I last posted. That’s a combination of not wanting to post about the Reno Air Races until they were finished, and then being on the road. We spent the last two nights in Baker, NV, visiting Great Basin National Park. I’ll have more to say about GBNP in a separate post, but you should know that Baker NV is on the back end of nowhere. It is the epitome of BFE.

Anyhow, we had a great time at the air races, even though none of us are huge aviation fans. I’m just enough of an aviation fan, and aviation history buff, that I probably knew a little bit more about what’s going on.

I took a bunch of photos on my Canon. Unfortunately, I did not pack the cable that I need to upload photos to our computer. I also don’t have a card reader, so I can’t just take the card out of the camera. Although I had hoped to post (or link to) a bunch of photos from the Canon, that won’t happen. I’ll eventually get the photos off the camera and post or link them at that time.

I did take a few photos and videos with my iPhone; a few of them are below.

This is the start of one of the races. During the races, the planes aren’t nearly this close together. Some of the races just look like parades.

 On Saturday the weather turned windy and they only ran a race or two in the morning. We bailed out and went hiking in the foothills along the Truckee River....

That’s Scott and Dodger in the picture below.

I’m not at all sure I’m a huge fan of the Unlimited class of racers. These are mostly WWII-era P-51 Mustangs and similar fighter aircraft. All have heavily modified engines. The announcer told us that a Merlin’s V-12 engine used in the Mustang can cost nearly one million dollars to be rebuilt and reinstalled in a Mustang. That’s a lot of coin. There can’t be that many races for them to compete in. I suppose some of them do air shows (for a fee) and similar events. However, the announcer was pretty candid: racing the Unlimiteds is a rich man’s sport. I also kind of have a problem with using 80-year-old airplanes in this manner. They have immense historical value.

There are several other classes that appear to me to offer competitive racing at much lower costs. The best racing that we saw occurred with some of the smaller airplanes, along with the T-6 class. Although the T-6 is also a wwII-era aircraft, there are zillions of them still flying. 

Reno

Just a quick update. We are at the Reno National Air Races through the weekend, with our son Scott. We’re having a great time; the races are well worth seeing, even for casual aviation buffs like us. Things are very well-run, and there’s quite a bit of non-racing activities going on. I’ll post more in a few days and either include a bunch of photos or, more likely, simply provide a link to a Google Drive folder. Right now, photos are scattered between my iPhone and my Canon DSLR.

We left SoCal on 9/12 and spent that night in Bishop. I love Bishop. It’s nestled against the eastern slope of the Sierras, surrounded by stunning high desert country. I’m disappointed we couldn’t spend a week there; we will, eventually!

Our son Scott works for Tesla, and just purchased a new Model 3. I don’t know exactly everything that it’s equipped with, but I know it’s got the dual motors. He let me drive it yesterday. It is absolutely without a doubt the fastest accelerating automobile I have ever driven. It is simply scary fast. Being electric, it’s also very quiet, with only wind and tired noise to accompany the teary-eyed acceleration. If you ever have a chance to drive a Tesla, do so!

We’re planning on leaving Reno on Monday 9/17, heading east on US 50. We’re planing on hitting Great Basin National Park on Tuesday. Beyond that, we need to look at the map and see how we want to wend our way to Cincinnati; we’re currently scheduled to arrive on 9/26.

On the Road Again!

Yes, we are back on the road - sort of. We’re really back on the road tomorrow.

Our guy Dave Miner of American RV in Orange, CA, came through as promised. They received the motors, which were shipped by Pony Express from Heartland Industries, arrived yesterday (Monday 9/10) about mid-morning. Dave and his team had the motors installed and everything buttoned up by the end of the day.

Dave showed us the old motors, which were damaged by the factory installed metal molding. This molding was chewing up the side of each motor, with each cycle in or out. The motors have a small circuit board on top of them. One of these circuit boards was also getting chewed up; it would have only been a matter of time for this board to fail.

Dave’s team fabricated new, thinner molding to avoid this problem. His job looks thoroughly professional. We couldn’t be more pleased with the quality work done by American RV.

We picked up the trailer this AM and are ensconced for the evening at Orangeland RV Park, where we spent several weeks in August. We had some shopping, packing and prep work to take care of before we hit the road.

Our plans are largely unchanged. We leave tomorrow morning; we’ll spend tomorrow night in Bishop and hit Reno on Thursday - only a day late.

We leave Reno on Monday 9/17, headed for Cincinnati. I have doctor’s appointments there on the 27th. We’ll be SW Ohio for several days around that time. After that, our time is our own. We’re heading Northwest. The next thing on our calendar is Thanksgiving with Scott and Sara - at their cabin on Orcas Island.

I’ll have more posts in the next few days, about our time here, the air races in Reno, and life on the road - finally!

Update: Here’s a photo Cathy took, showing the slideout that was repaired. This was taken at American RV when we picked it up. The second photo is a closeup that shows the repaired molding versus the original style molding. The original molding is the black strip on the small slideout on the right. The upgraded molding is barely visible as a white strip along the top of the larger slide.

DELAY

As I recently wrote, our trailer is in the shop to have the slideout repaired. Within 24 hours of receiving it, our guy Dave at American RV diagnosed the problem and had a path forward. This was on Friday, 8/24. All that needed to happen was to get the manufacturer, Heartland, to agree to the repairs and to get the parts in.

Dave and Robert, the guy at Heartland, managed to take a whole week to actually talk and agree on the path forward. Neither party was particularly motivated to call the other one more than once a day.

When they finally did talk, on last Friday (8/31) they quickly agreed on a path forward. Further, in what seemed like some particularly good news, Heartland had the needed motors in stock and would ship them directly to American RV.

Dave gave me the good news; this was late morning here, or mid-afternoon in Elkhart, Indiana, which is where Heartland is located.  Shortly afterward, Robert called me to tell me the same thing. (Robert called me because I had talked with him earlier in the day and pleaded - I used that exact word - to call Dave at American RV that day.) I reminded Robert that we were paying for our own lodging out of pocket, and we wanted to get the trailer repaired ASAP. Robert committed to shipping the motors out on Friday and sending the tracking info out to Dave and I on Tuesday. He also informed us that he’d be on vacation this week.

You probably know where this is headed: we did not receive any emails on Tuesday, so I called Heartland this AM. At that time, Ryan informed me that: 1) the motors did not ship until Tuesday, and 2) UPS tracking showed they would not arrive until Monday, September 10.

We are so furious at Heartland that we can hardly think straight. They absolutely have the worst customer service in the world. I will NEVER buy anything else from Heartland Industries, and strongly recommend that anyone else would be a fool to do so. Once a sale is made, they care zero about satisfying existing customers.

I spent decades managing the technical service responsibilities for a large chemical company. Keeping customers happy was ingrained in every interaction with them. The reason is simple - customers have the money! Clearly, this lesson has not been imparted to Heartland Industries.

We reached out to the owners of our VRBO place, and they have graciously cut us a good deal on staying here for a few more days. We are cautiously optimistic on getting the trailer back on 9/11 or 9/12. Our next destination is Reno, for the Reno Air Races, which start on 9/13. We might be there for the start of the races but, realistically, we might miss the first day.

In the grand scheme of things, we recognize this isn’t really a major problem. We can afford to stay here a few more days, and we don’t have to be anyplace special right now - although we are ready to hit the road again.