Hello from Douglas, WY

Sunday evening August 23, 2009 (First travelogue of this trip)

We are here in Douglas to do an installation of one of my systems plus an installation of a SilverLeaf “Glass Dash”. The Glass Dash is a full dash replacement that costs $10, 000. It basically works like a modern aircraft display with very vivid digital/analog gages, several camera channels, and lots of coach information. I will be assisting and training with a SilverLeaf engineer who is flying in later this week.

During the week, we will be staying at the Holiday Inn Express (map). Obviously we do not have the bus running and will probably not have it running for at least another month.

We left Evergreen Saturday morning and arrived here about 3:00 PM We made a stop at the Cheyenne Cemetery (map) where my mother's relatives are buried. If you zoom in on the map, the point of the arrow is at the graves of my grandparents and four of my aunts/uncles. We visited that cometary in early July with my cousin and his wife. That was quite an experience, since I had not seen my cousin since the early '60s. It was a ton of fun catching up on old times and getting some information for Pat's genealogy efforts. When we visited the cemetery in July, I had forgotten to bring the battery for the camera, so we wanted to take the pictures on this trip.

When we were in Cheyenne in July, we stopped by the beautiful new city library. They have a great genealogy department. We had also wanted to take a picture of my grandmother's home, but it turned out it was torn down for the library construction and the location was almost exactly where the genealogy department was located!

Now, back to this trip. We drove the service truck (see attached picture). We had not intended for this truck to be a “touring” vehicle. Indeed, it is not the best highway vehicle. It has a very thirsty V10 engine (10 MPG). The engine makes the truck very peppy, considering the weight. It has four wheel drive and a five speed manual transmission. It is a fairly basic truck (did not want anything fancy). Because it was basic, it did not have cruise control and I have leg pain issues if I can't move around. I did a quick install of an after-market unit and it works like a champ. Made the drive almost pain free. I really like the Dodge suspension on this truck. We have oversize tires with rather high tire pressure, yet the ride is not all that bad.

Today I started the installation. This part is not fun as it involves working under the coach running the wires and tubing for the system. In this case, it was really difficult, as we could not get the coach very high and the surface was loose dirt and lots of sharp gravel rocks. The underside of these coaches are constructed such that it is very difficult to run the conduit in which the tubing and wires are run. At least the worst part is done.

It usually takes three days to do an install and I am probably going to have to hustle to get it done in the time alloted. The SilverLeaf install is scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday. We hope to head home on Friday.

That is all for now.

Our service truck at the Holiday Inn Express in Douglas, WY

Hello from Evergreen, CO

Wednesday evening August 12, 2009 (Second travelogue of this trip)

Well, we are home after a relatively short trip (for us). Saturday was the last day of Pat's Convention. I drove to Bonneville (a bit over 100 miles) for the first day of “Speed Week”. It has been about 5 years since I have been able to go and I have really missed it. This, to me, is “old time” racing where huge budgets and high dollar sponsors are almost non-existent. Don't get me wrong, the racers put a lot of money in their cars, but most do the majority of their own work. There is a huge variety of classes/cars/motorcycles and fascinating “backyard” engineering. When I say backyard I say it with a huge amount of respect.

I forgot to mention that after I went to the salvage yard, I spent the afternoon with a good friend. Kent is the one who found the engine for me and has been extremely helpful on many of my projects. We went to dinner with his wife and just had a great time.

Sunday we moved from the Marriott to the Airport Inn. That location was about 40% of the cost of the Marriott. It was not as fancy but still acceptable.

After we left the Marriott, we drove to Wendover where Pat could spend some time in the casino while I returned to the salt. We then had a great buffet dinner at the Rainbow Casino and then returned to Salt Lake City.

We later learned that a racer was killed in a crash Sunday after I left the track (http://www.sltrib.com/sports/ci_13030674). I am very disturbed by the fact we lost a race car driver, but even more so, because it appears that that racing community sort of buries the fact that there was a racing related death. I posted on one of the Bonneville boards after not seeing any report and was basically told that the salt racers choose not to publicly discuss the issue. Really sad!

Monday I returned to the salt and Pat relaxed in the room. As with the previous days on the salt, I enjoyed every minute. It was interesting to note that nothing was mentioned on the public radio broadcast at the track about the accident.

Tuesday we started our trip home. We stopped again at Green River, UT and then today we drove the rest of the way home.

We continue to realized how much we miss our bus. It looks like we might have two more trips before we get the bus back on the road. Both are to do system installations, and we will be driving the service truck. It is not really a good highway “cruiser”, so the trips will be arduous.

That is all for this trip.

Hello from Salt Lake City, UT

Hello from Salt Lake City, UT

Friday morning August 7, 2009 (First travelogue of this trip)

We are staying at the Marriott Downtown (map). We are here for Pat's Stampin' Up! convention. There are often 7000 demonstrators at the convention, but this year we think it is down considerably.

We left Evergreen on Monday and stopped in Green River, UT. We chose that as a stop, since my folks used to stop there when we traveled west and Pat and I have stopped there several times. We stayed in the Best Wester, which overlooks the Green River and ate at the adjoining Tamarisk restaurant. We have enjoyed that restaurant many times because of the view and the reasonably good food. The name of the restaurant is interesting. In Colorado (and many other places) it is considered a terrible invasive plant that uses huge amount of precious water.

We have a corner room at the Marriott and one window looks east onto a huge (and I do mean HUGE) construction project. The project is describe at: http://www.downtownrising.com/vision/. I can see 6 huge cranes directly to the east and on the north side, there are several more. The project spans several city blocks. And this is just the first stage. The project that we can see is City Creek Center: http://www.downtownrising.com/city_creek/index.php. I talked to a friend and he made the observation that the project was the vision of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons). This is their founding location and is the center of all church activity. Apparently the area was “decaying” and they wanted to make sure that the project resulted in a highly desirable location to live/work/worship/visit.

If you have been following our blog, you know that the engine in our bus needs to be rebuilt or replaced. A good friend told me about an engine at a truck salvage yard in Ogden (just north of here). I did some research on the engine and it looks like a good value, since it has been rebuilt recently. Wednesday I went up and put my computer on the engine ECM and read out all of the pertinent data. The engine appears to be what the salvage yard claimed. I ran the engine, but it is almost impossible to tell much since you can't put a load on it. Long story short, I bought the engine and will have it shipped to Denver.

Wednesday was a big day for Pat (lots of activities). I tried to do some catching up on various business (and some fun) activities. Of course, I had to spend some time being a “sidewalk superintendent”. I am having a ball watching all the construction activities from our 11^th floor window and from the street level as well.

That is all for this post.

Just a quick note on a couple of items:

1) I updated the previous post with a picture on my grandmother's (and her parent's) house in Greenville, OH. It was very hard to imagine walking in the house my grandmother grew up in!

2) I have added an option to become an email subscriber to our blog. My posting frequency is quite variable, and if you sign up for the email version, you will know when we post. You will get the post in an email a day or two after I post it.

We will start our next travelogue in a few days.

Jim

Hello from Evergreen, CO

Friday evening July 31, 2009 (fifth travelogue of this trip)

Well, as you can tell from the subject line, we are home. We made good time and got home Wednesday in the early afternoon.

Now let's finish our catching up on this trip. We mentioned that we did some fun things on our trip home. When I was doing a lot of traveling for Gates in a company van, we found a great little restaurant called the Blue Springs Cafe (http://www.foothipies.com/BSC_Main.htm) about 35 miles west of St. Louis on I 70. As you can tell from the link, they are famous for their “foot high pies”. Years ago, they used to have a billboard on the interstate that made it sound like their chicken was 100 years old. We remember hearing truckers on the CB talking about the “old chicken”. It is a fun restaurant with great pies. We also stopped in Topeka at Pat's Pig for lunch. This is a restaurant we used to eat at when we went to the races in Topeka. It has great barbecue and has quite a racing theme to it. Both brought back fun memories.

Our stop in Russell was also planned based on fond memories. They have a neat oil field museum that I really enjoy touring. It is pretty run down and basic, but it brings back memories of working on experimental belt drives in the “oil patch”.

When I talked about bus vs “normal” travel, one of the main issue for me is the coffee. I am a coffee “snob” and I really don't like the brown water that they call coffee in most of the hotels. I would stop at McDonalds and get coffee that at least has some taste to it {grin}

Let finish this travelogue with discussion about our genealogy research in Greenville, OH. Pat has been doing a lot of work on our family tree, but was not able to learn much about my father's family. I am an only child of an only child and that seems to make it difficult to get much information on that line of the family. We knew that my dad was born in Greenville, so we went to the Garst Museum which has a great genealogy section. We were able to trace quite a few relatives and get some leads for additional research.

The two biggest finds were my grandfather Orion Shepherd's grave (map) . Even more exciting was that we found out quite a bit about my grandmothers family. We were able to learn that her mother lived in a house at 420 Elm street (map) for most of her 96 years. We are sure that my grandmother was born in the house. We were able to contact the folks who own the house (Becky and Terry). Becky showed us the part of the house that she thinks was the original house. In addition to our documentation, they have some documentation that it was the Culbertson house (my grandmothers maiden name). They are the third owners and were excited to find out more history about the house. It turns out that Becky's grandfather built the house adjacent to their house, so they have a lot of family history in that area as well.

I have posted a photo of the house below. We suspect that the front part of the house is the original house (obviously remodeled).

The Original Culbertson house at 420 Elm Street

As a note to our newer readers, I post a link to Google Maps that shows the satellite view. You can zoom in several times to get significant detail. For example, we can see my grandfather's grave stone when we zoom in on that map.

Pat has been able to do some more research on the Internet based on the information we found and now we will have see if our travels will permit us to return to Greenville.

That is all for this trip. We will leave for Salt Lake (Pat: convention; and Jim: Bonneville) next Monday. I will start that travelogue sometime next week.

Hello from Russell, KS

Hello from Russell, KS

Tuesday evening July 28, 2009 (fourth travelogue of this trip)

Our main purpose for this trip was to be vendors at the FMCA International Convention in Bowling Green, OH. The facilities were great, albeit spread out over a large area. The vendor building (map) was a great building. The official coach count at 2,725. That is up a bit from the past few rallies but far short of the “good old days” of over 7,000 coaches. The attendees seemed quite upbeat and were buying at a reasonable pace. Our expectations for the rally were not good. We are SilverLeaf dealers, but the company had a booth and did the seminar. In addition, our major fire suppression competitor was there. The main reason we attended was “defensive”, so that folks did not think we were out of business.

We were pleasantly surprised in that we sold out of an admittedly limited inventory of most items. The profit did not pay for the trip, but it sure helped.

When we finally made the decision to make this trip, we said that we were going to be tourists as well as vendors. In this post and at least one additional post, we will detail some of the fun things that we have done.

One of the thing we wondered about was what it would be like to travel without our bus. Most bus conversion folks call themselves “Bus Nuts”. Indeed, there are various organizations with that phrase as a part of their title. What would it be like to travel like “normal folks”?

Well, we can tell you that we really miss the old girl!!! Bus folks often say that traveling in a bus is the most economical way to travel. Tonight we went over some preliminary numbers and it looks like this trip cost about twice as much as it would in the bus. Certainly the fuel is much less, but motels and meals really add up!

Speaking of motels, we have had some experiences! We decided to try “lower cost” motels when possible. We have stayed in several Super 8 motels with mixed results. The difference in cost between the Super 8s and Holiday Inn Express (our favorite) is $30-40 per night. Some of the Super 8 motels were just plain bad. The so called “Super Start” breakfasts were a joke. In many cases we had to stop and get something with a bit of protein and that offset our “savings”. A couple seem to be less than sparking clean. Another hotel we stopped at in Greenville, OH had a nice enough room, but the Internet connection was terrible. The night clerk told us it was something with our computers. However, we found the room where the router was and had them let us work in that room – no further problems. Tonight we are at the Russell's Inn, a hotel that has seen better days. The room is OK, but we have seen several bugs that we hope are not cockroaches.

Speaking of Greenville, OH, that is where my dad was born. We decided to spend quite a bit of time doing genealogy research and we hit the jackpot. More in the next blog.

On Sunday 7/26, we toured the US Air Force Museum at Wright Patterson AFB in Dayton, OH (http://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/). This should be on everyone's must do list. I had on my pedometer and it said I walked 4.7 miles. I am not sure how calibrated the unit is, but I suspect it is close. There are four huge hanger type buildings with at least 100 planes, many of which are one of a kind experimental planes. A separate hanger has 9 presidential planes including 4 that you can tour. One is the retired Air Force One (a Boeing 707) that carried Kennedy's body home and where Lyndon Johnson was sworn in. The facility also has a great IMAX theater and we took in two great movies.

That evening we were completely worn out and only drove a short distance to Richmond IN.

While we will be home tomorrow, I will try to finish catching up with another post (hopefully in the next few days).

Hello from Boonville, MO

Monday evening July 27, 2009 (third travelogue of this trip)

We are at a Super 8 hotel in this fun little town. We have stayed here a few times, but we were always in the bus and stayed in the parking lot of the Isle of Capri Casino.

I feel like a race horse trying to catch up on all that has happened since we started this interrupted trip. So let's start with the days leading up to this leg of the trip. As I noted in the last blog, we had to return to Evergreen to work on the bus. I got the engine out and delivered it to the local Detroit Diesel Dealer on Tuesday (7/7). I discussed the terrible findings in our last post to this blog. For the next several days, we went through just about every emotion you can think of. We were dealing with what to do on the bus and trying to make a decision about the major FMCA rally in Bowling Green, OH.

We finally decided to drive to Bowling Green in one of our cars. We had paid for the booth and it would look bad to have an empty booth with our name on it.

We departed Evergreen Friday (7/17) at 7:00 AM with almost 1300 miles to cover in 3 days. Everything went well for the first 100 miles. We stopped at a rest stop and during the stop I got a call from a potential customer that was quite intriguing. I decided to start driving while still on the phone with the customer. After we got on the road, I hit the cruise control and the Durango seemed to struggle getting up to speed. I did not pay attention and kept talking to the customer. As it turns out, I had the transmission selector in probably second gear and when I looked down the engine was quite a ways into the red region on the tach. I knew that was not good. We made it another 20 miles and the engine started knocking. We called AAA and had them pick us up on a wrecker. We got the Durango back to the house about 2:00 PM and quickly packed the PT Cruiser with a downsized load and left at 2:45. By this time we were completely numb, but determined to not let a silly thing like blowing up an engine stop us.

That night we make it to North Platte, NE and stayed in a Super 8 motel. Plain ,but it did not matter. This seemed a bit strange to us, since we often stop in North Platte and stay at the Wal Mart in the bus (great parking).

The next day we drove to Davenport, IA and again stayed in a Super 8. We had a great time, as there was a huge car show at the local mall. We even had a great dinner at a local restaurant.

We made it to Bowling Green in the late afternoon on Sunday (7/19 my birthday). We had reservations at what turned out to be the “hotel from hell”. The two rooms they tried to put us in did not have the fridge and microwave we asked for and were very dirty. I don't think many of the “guests” spoke English. We quickly got on the phone with the Holiday Inn folks and found a great Holiday Inn Express in Perrysburg, OH (map), about 15 miles from Bowling Green. Pat negotiated a pretty good rate and we crashed for the night.

I will stop here and we will continue to try to catch up in the next few posts.