Life on the Road

This week’s hard drive failure did teach me a couple of valuable things about why I’m glad to have a Mac computer, living on the road. For one thing, when they work, they really do work. Effortlessly and seamlessly.

For another thing, they have good, built-in encryption in the File Vault program. My husband and I share our concerns about laptop theft on the road frequently. In an ideal situation, someone breaking in and stealing our computers will get… a computer. They won’t also get our hard drives of data, our passwords, our bank accounts, our browsing history, or anything more valuable than a couple of machines.

But there’s another reason to use a Mac, a really big reason, and it has to do with the times when it doesn’t work.

When a PC breaks, you have to fix it yourself or take it to some computer repair person to fix it. Most of the time, we fix these things ourselves, because finding someone to fix a computer is… not easy, to say the least. For most people, the “computer guy” is a friend or a relative, your neighbor’s nephew– basically, some kid with a lot of know-how and an ability to dig right in and tackle it.

When a Mac breaks, you can try to fix it yourself, but you’re going to end up calling Apple for parts anyway. In my case, I have AppleCare on my computer. The couple hundred bucks it cost me was more than worth it the first time I took it in for service, over a year ago. Because Apple is one company, when you take your machine to an Apple Store’s Genius Bar in New York, and then take it to another Genius Bar in Las Vegas, you end up with the same level of service. The technicians (sorry, Geniuses) have a repair history on file, based on your computer’s serial number.

Now, because of the uniformity of service, you can’t really count on someone going the extra mile for you. After all, they don’t really know you that well. They just know you came in with a dead hard drive (or battery, or DVD drive, or logic board…. yes, I’ve had a lot of computer problems.) You’re not building an ongoing relationship with the individual Genius who helps you with your machine. But you do have an ongoing service record, so the next Genius can be interchangeable with the last Genius.

We are here, in beautiful Anthony, Texas. In a parking lot. OK, it’s a glorified parking lot– we have hookups, after all. But our rig spent 2 days at the local Camping World service center getting a few repairs done, and it’s probably going to be back in the shop all next week. With two major mechanical repairs still waiting because the shop “doesn’t do that.”This is the complicated part about RV ownership. Part of the rig is automotive, part is living quarters. The parts that are automotive might be engine and might be chassis– and a service center that will work on the chassis might not do work on the engine and vice versa.To add to the complexity, some service centers won’t work on diesel engines (ours is diesel). And our hot water heater is a diesel-fueled AquaHot system which stopped working properly last November. Now, there are two water heating systems– one is powered by electricity, and the other is powered by the AquaHot (and there’s a third which heats the water as part of the engine cooling system, sow when we stop after driving for a day, we have lots of hot water). As a result, we have gone for a year with only the engine and electrical hot water systems. With the full system including the diesel, we never run out of hot water. Ever.Many of these repairs we can do ourselves. I defrosted the fridge and John fixed the ice maker using a service bulletin from the manufacturer. He’s been able to fix and replace lights and electrical components all over the place.But some are not so easy. Like the bedroom lights, which mysteriously stopped working after flickering for a while. Replacing the bulbs didn’t work– it seems that the ballasts had gone bad. The problem? Each ballast costs over $80 and has to be special ordered– and we were unable to find them when we took the lamps apart. Yes, it seems like a ripoff to me, too.Every day that the RV is in the service center, we go hole up at a local hotel. We didn’t used to do this, but last year we sat in a service center for 5 hours before they even touched the rig, and then another 3 or 4 while they discovered that replacing the big awning was not a 30 minute job. I was ticked off, but more than that, my cat had been inside his carrier for that whole time, without access to a litter box (and subsequently, he triggered a urinary tract infection), while we were told repeatedly “it’ll just be another 20 minutes.” We have yet to find a service center that will let us leave the cat in the RV until they’re ready to actually get someone in the rig, so now we take the cat and his litter box to a hotel room until all the repairs are done and we’re ready to go home. The hotel has Internet access, so I can work while the cat hides under the bed (or behind the microwave in this case), and we’re generally pretty content with the arrangement.Most people who own motorhomes and have service repairs done are doing so under warranty. When you buy an “as is” RV like we did, you end up paying out of pocket any time something breaks, so a lot of times, you find a way to get by without it. Whether it’s the fuel pump or the shower, entropy does occur and parts do fail eventually. This is true in stationary homes, too– you can buy an old home and spend your life fixing stuff, or you can buy a new home and spend your life fixing stuff. A home is, like a garden, a constant source of activities and chores to do. 

John and I both enjoy observing nature in various ways. John is a hiker and backpacker, and he’s most at home among redwood trees. I enjoy looking at stuff– creepy crawlies in the desert, deer wandering past our campsite, the thousand ways a prickly pear cactus can grow, the stars circling above us. We’re also keenly aware that, while we can enjoy a good deal of this on our own, having a skilled guide is invaluable for really getting to know the world around us.

Last night, we had an excellent opportunity for star-gazing as we move north from Big Bend towards Carlsbad Caverns and Roswell, New Mexico.  Not far from Big Bend is Fort Davis, Texas, home of the McDonald Observatory (which produces the StarDate magazine and popular radio show/podcast) and one of the largest optical telescopes in the world. On Tuesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, the observatory hosts “Star Parties,” where visitors are treated to some guided stargazing, both with the naked eye, and through the smaller telescopes. Star Party start times vary by season: right now, they start at 7:30 PM, after the sun has fully set.

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After I got back from my trip, we traveled to Niagara Falls and lost our Internet connection! So, we’ve been in the land of no-net for about a week. Doubly frustrating, because our backup connectivity (my cell phone) failed, and the backup-backup (park WiFi) failed! I’ve been able to check email, and get online for work for a couple of hours one day, but that’s about it.

Meanwhile, Niagara Falls was beautiful, and I’ll post a better trip write-up later this weekend, when all is well in Internet Land. We are currently in Ohio, heading to Michigan, where I hope to get a lot of maintenance tasks done on my computer and on the RV. Also, visiting my dad, who lives out there.

Have a happy and safe Labor Day, everyone. Take pictures. Leave footprints!

Ah, inventory management. I never thought of myself as the kind of person who would enjoy entering, cataloging, and maintaining an inventory, and yet…

There is something infinitely satisfying about pulling up a site like LibraryThing, or opening Delicious Library to see, at a glance, whether or not I have a particular book I’m looking at, or whether I’ve already bought a particular James Bond movie. I use Delicious Library for books, movies, and video games. iTunes for music and audiobooks. And Ravelry for yarn inventory. Because the bulk of my yarn is tucked away in the storage bay beneath the RV, having a site where I can peruse it photographically really helps when I’m thinking about starting a new project and buying a bunch of yarn to support it.

It should come as no surprise tha my husband and I inventory the food in our cabinets before we head out to the grocery store. We don’t fill in a list as we finish things off– doing that means not noticing until you get back from the store if your produce is starting to look a little “iffy.” Instead, we take 20 minutes before heading out to look through the cabinets (there are 4 of them) and the fridge to decide what we need and what we didn’t use last week.

Over the past couple of days, as part of the book purge to find space for the books I inherited from my grandmother, I’ve updated my book inventory to reflect what books are in the RV and where they are. I currently have about a dozen books I can’t account for– they’re not in the rig, and they’re labeled as being in “storage.” My stored books are labeled by the box they were stored in, so any book labeled “Storage” is effectively lost.

I’m anxious about those books, but not as much as I am about the 4 lost little books labeled “Uknown” in my inventory. Sure, they’re not terribly crucial. And I’m pretty sure one of them isn’t missing, it just got wedged behind something. But I am not ashamed to admit that, having lost these four in such a haphazard way, my greatest hope is that they accidentally found themselves in a box heading to Goodwill. To think of them lost, truly lost, breaks my heart more than just a little.

The result: 40 books are heading to the Salvation Army today. I am keeping 120 books in the RV, of which about 27 belong to my husband; the rest are mine and include grandma’s books, some music books, and my knitting and writing book collections.

I also updated my catalog of ebooks, including audiobooks, which now weigh in at a whopping 154 books in electronic format. That means my library is half the size and weight it could have been, if I was confined to the limits of a physical book.

Now isn’t that a reason to be glad for the digital age?

Last Fall, we had planned to go to Arizona to meet up with my dad and stepmom during their vacation, and visit Sedona and the Grand Canyon. We’d been to Sedona  in 1999 for our 1-year wedding anniversary, and were looking forward to a return visit.

I made reservations very early for September, but failed (in my way) to record them in any meaningful way. So the day after my reservation was supposed to start, I called the LoLo Mai Springs campground in a panic– we were about a week away from being able to get there, and they were very understanding and accommodating about changing the reservation to a date we would actually be able to make.

When we finally arrived at LoLo Mai, we were startled by what a long and windy and out-of-the-way path our directions told us to take to get there, considering there was a straight shot from a wider, non-windy highway just a mile up the road. But we pulled in and checked in. During checkin, I was amused by the presence of many animals in the office. What I was not amused by was the clerk’s inability to do simple math on a calculator. By the time we were checked in, I just let her overcharge me by $2 because I didn’t want her to make yet another mistake and this time come up with a $90 overcharge like she’d done before.

We went to the campsite and quickly learned that the satellite dish was not going to work– too many trees (they were brushing the top of the RV!) We were right next to the bathroom building, and I immediately saw that our side yard was being used as the pathway. Not cool.

We asked at the office about alternative sites, and they said they had none. We said “but you have wifi, right?” remembering the ad. “Yes, but the signal up at your site is broken.”

Uh, okay. That was probably not going to work for us. I had already tried using my cell phone with no luck– the signal strength was 0 and had been for about 3 miles before reaching the campground.  No satellite, no internet, and no phone mean no working!

We said we would have to think seriously about this. After conferring, John went down to the office to have them refund all but the first night’s charge (since we would be staying for the night). On his way back, he was startled by a family of skunks. It turns out their fondness for animals is not limited to the dogs and rats in the office. They feed several families of skunks and raccoons in a “habitat.”

We had a bit of culture shock at that one. After my meltdown, we went out to dinner and I lost my credit card– it fell right out of my pocket. We returned to the campground to ask at the office if anyone had turned it in. We had to wait at the office for someone to come back, and in the course of talking with them about it (and the fact that I couldn’t call out on my cell phone), I said that we would use the pay phone, which was at least up at the bathroom building next to our RV.

“Oh, that phone’s gone. There’s no phone there.”

I was really glad I was talking to someone with keys to the office, because she was at least able to let me use the office phone to call my bank and put my card on hold until I could call back with the complete information to cancel it.  I can imagine a scenario where I went back to the RV and found the phone gone, and no way at all to call and cancel my credit card that night. What a pain!

Understand: if we had been “trying to get away from it all,” LoLo Mai would have been an oasis of escape. As it was, we were trying to live our normal daily lives, just in a different place. We weren’t on vacation or retirement, so the disconnectedness of the park made it really unsuitable to our needs. They were also above-and-beyond understanding about our rapidly-changing travel plans, and did a great job of making it painless to escape their escape!

In the morning, we went scouting for a new campground and found an oversized parking lot across the highway from an Indian casino, called Distant Drums RV Resort. It had a pool and hot tub. It had wifi at the sites, but there were no trees to speak of, so satellite reception was exceptional.

It had some of the most beautiful desert sunsets I’ve ever seen. We would go out for a walk and just stand on the edge of the park, staring as the sky shifted through hues of gold and yellow and purple. It was sparse and surprisingly simple, given that it had the appearance of yet another overgrown parking lot.

It’s possible that Distant Drums is where I learned to love the desert. Certainly, it’s where I learned to love parking lot-style RV parks, where the park gives you the space to do what you need to do, the room to spread out just a little bit, while still enjoying your lifestyle.

Travel Details:

LoLoMai Campground
PO Box 3169, West Sedona, AZ
(928)634-4700
Distant Drums RV Resort
583 W. Middle Verde Rd., Camp Verde, AZ
(877) 577-5507

There are certainly many travelers who don’t need an electronic map or funny GPS thingie at all. They are dedicated map-readers who have no trouble plotting a course from point A to point B and knowing exactly where they are when a new road suddenly appears in between A and B and you don’t know which way to turn.

I am not one of them. I have been known to get lost inside my own home. If I tell you to turn left, it’s a good money bet that turning right is the correct way to go.

We have a GPS in the RV. And it works mostly well, most of the time. The GPS has a built in database of places, so if we’re looking for a restaurant, we can find one.

The problem is, the database is at least a year old, and about 70% of the time, what we’re looking for isn’t in the database, or the database says something’s there and it’s not.  We need a system that’s updated all the time. Like a search engine. Like the search engine.

Did you know you can get Google Maps on your cell phone? You can. Go to Google Maps to have the Google Maps application sent to your phone. When you open the application, Google Maps will try to figure out where you are, based on which cell phone tower you are nearby. It’s not true GPS unless your cell phone is GPS-enabled. But it’ll do its best.

And then, you can search for restaurants nearby, get directions based on your current location (or on any other location), zoom in and out on your route, get the street address and phone number of the business you’re looking for, and generally be able to get around town just a little faster, more smoothly, and without having to remember to bring yet another electronic device along in the car.

I’ll add the standard disclaimer about digital use and cell phones. Obviously, if you have no signal on your phone, Google Maps is not going to be able to help you. Also, the maps are pictures, and there is a lot of data going back and forth. If you don’t already have an unlimited data plan on your phone, you should get one. It’s a crucial backup plan for Internet access on the road.

Today is a busy day. We packed up everything this morning, emptied all the tanks (including the freshwater tank, in hopes of being able to flush/chlorinate it– that did not work, but the tank’s empty anyway), loaded up the bikes, pulled out and hit the  road. We drove about 10 miles to our new campsite in Lake George– preparation for my sister’s visit, and also time for a change of scenery. Plus, it would be nice to have more reliable/less frustrating Internet access and cell phone coverage.

Anyway, in the process of moving, the GPS, which recently came back from Garmin after being repaired, steered us to a road with a bridge and a 12′ clearance.  We’re in a motorhome. Clearance for us is 13′6″. Since we did not want to lose the enormous satellite dish strapped to our roof, we turned around. As it turns out, Lola was taking us in the complete opposite direction of the campground, and, in fact, we could have already been there if we’d made a right turn instead of a left. What was she thinking?

Astrology buffs sometimes say things like “Mercury is in retrograde,” which is the star-crossed version of saying “there’s gremlins in the machines.”

The cat is totally sacked out on the carpet right now– poor guy got all tired from riding in a moving vehicle for an hour.

And we have some new “visitors.” Having finally escaped Warrensburg with only donating about 2 pints of blood to the local mosquito population, we pulled in and started setting up– only to have five wasps descend on our RV like it was the latest offering from Sherman & Boone. No, you horrid bugs, this is not an Open House! Don’t you critters know by now that this is not a good time to invest in real estate? Go away!

We anticipate at least one, if not more nests will be hidden about our rig by the time we leave, in 8 days.

It’s not exactly news about travel around the U.S., except for the hundreds of people who, like me, live in their RVs and travel the U.S. Many have noticed recently that there’s been some “connectivity trouble.” We’ve been suffering with it for almost a month, but in our case, we thought the satellite was below the tree line.

As it turns out, the satellite we normally connect with (Galaxy 26) has moved out of is orbital position. One of the solar power panels failed, and the satellite has shifted. Our satellite Internet service provider, MobileSat, contacted us last week to let us know about the disruption in service.

This, as well as the connectivity problems we’d been having with the treeline, highlight the importance of having multiple plans for mobile Internet access if you work from the road. Here are just a few chains you can have in your connectivity plan:

• Satellite Internet service: Reliable unless you’re in a nice, tree-covered campground.
• Cell phones: usually less reliable than the satellite, especially in remote, tree-covered campgrounds (but it works well on the Interstate). I connect my phone via Bluetooth to my laptop for access, or many RVers have a cell phone computer card that plugs into their laptops.
• Local WiFi: terribly unreliable; usually only available at the camp store or office, and because it’s free, it tends to go up and down without warning or recourse. In our current site, the local wifi is all right, but it is very spotty for me from 9 AM until 6 PM, and it doesn’t work when the microwave is running.
• HotSpot WiFi: This requires you to put clothes on and drive to Starbucks for a cup of coffee and their T-Mobile service. We’ve only had to go this far once or twice.
• Dial-up backup: This is impractical for us. We don’t even have a land line phone service or dialup account. I’d love to hear if others are still using dial-up. Many campgrounds seem to think this is still a viable way to offer “Internet access,” but they’re incorrect. Viable Internet access means there’s a wireless router in your office.