Road Trips

Journey to Capitol Reef National Park

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16 July 2024 Trip day 107

As we get ready to head out from Bryce Canyon, the kids help me check the torque on the lug nuts. A few years back, we had an incident with broken lug nuts when moving the trailer. Ever since then, I’ve made it part of my habit pattern to check them each time before we move the trailer.

While I proceeded to the next campground, Meagan and the kids went to the Escalante Petrified Forest State Park.

Jarek and Arya stand amongst the petrified logs.

They earned their Junior Ranger badges at the Interagency Visitor Center. Then it was off to the ‘Hole in the Rock.’

Hole in the Rock is the place where Mormon pioneers carved a passage through rock to a very steep descent.

 Painting of the wagons going down through “the hole in the rock.”

“The Last Wagon”

 

 Jarek and Evan pose for a picture with the Escalante Valley behind them.

A view of the Escalante Valley. You can see the road on the right.

Another view of the Escalante Valley.

 Meanwhile, I arrived at our campsite outside of Capitol Reef National Park and set up. The views were not disappointing.

 It was a little interesting getting situated, but I managed to get tucked in. The site was a bit narrower than I would have liked, but it was a quiet campground and the kids were happy to have lots of gravel to dig and play in. They are big on making roads and other vast construction projects at our sites!

 Thanks for reading!

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2024 Road Trip

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I was looking at the blog, and noticed that I needed to update our pinned post. So while a day late, hopefully not a dollar short with this!

Above you can see the route planned out for our 2024 road trip. The primary emphasis is a lot of the western National Parks and National Monuments. This trip began 1 April 2024 and we expect to be done in November 2024.

Our previous trip covered the Midwest pretty well, with an emphasis on the Little House on the Prairie historical sites. You can read about that trip in the 2022 Year in Review post.

I’ve mentioned it elsewhere on the blog, but WordPress user management sucks, and with the trip I haven’t had time to fix it so the bots and spammers don’t clobber the site. To that end, I’ve enabled the Patreon linkage. The posts from Patreon will (or should) replicate here as well, if you’d rather read them here and not on Patreon.

Certain things, like videos, I intend to require a user login to view, and for such you will need a Patreon account and to be a free member.

At this time, we don’t anticipate any of the posts being a ‘paid’ thing, but any donations are always welcome.

Thanks for reading and we hope you enjoy following along our adventure!

The Mailing of the Post Cards

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May 4, 2024 – Trip Day 34

Today was a relaxed recovery day, which we might call a slack day or rest day. These days have no activities planned, but allow us to rest and recover from having too much fun.

Here is a selection of postcards that we sent to friends and family from Roswell, with a couple from Guadalupe Mountains National Park. The bottom left card is a holographic card.

If you would like to get on our list, please see the Patreon membership for tiers and we’ll add you. The higher tiers have the option to receive something else instead, such a magnet, sticker, or patch from the parks we visit. We will need a mailing address, of course.

I will have to work on my photography game, but it was very windy today due to a massive thunderstorm brewing to the south east.

I took care of the kids this morning, so that Meagan could sleep in. They had a fun time playing Stardew Valley, a game I like and they really took to.

I made a shopping run to get a few things before our drive tomorrow and to put more boom liquid into the cars. Tomorrow, we head out west towards Alamogordo and White Sands National Park.

The kids had a nice time swimming with Meagan at the campground pool.

 

Fixing all the things! (April 2024 edition)

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The Slide

Once we arrived in Texas, I ran over to my brother’s house and picked up the replacement slide motors that I’d ordered. I’d looked up how to replace the motor and it seemed fairly straight forward.

I had already removed the retention screw on the outside and popped it up out of the drive socket to push the slide in. I had Meagan drive the slide out while I pushed on the dead side about halfway out, to facilitate access to where the motor was, at the top right corner of the slide.

Slide Motor locatoin
The dead DC slide motor.

It took a little finagling, but I did get the motor out. I got the new motor in, but was having some trouble getting it lined up and seated. I had Meagan pulse the drive switch briefly. The motor spun and seated itself and then we were able to operate the slide normally!

I put in the retention screw on the outside and fixed the bulb seals and we were back in business!

The dead slide motor
The dead slide motor.

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So it begins… 2024 RV Trip Florida to Texas

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1 April – Day 1 – Departure (Jacksonville, FL to Lake City, FL)

Prior to leaving, my laptop had broken its hinges, and I had sent it back for RMA. I wasn’t sure that it would make it back in time, but, lo and behold, it was supposed to arrive in the morning on 1 April between 9 and 2. That would have been fine, as it allowed us to clean up and finish packing everything up. However, it didn’t show up until 6 pm, at which point we were discussing not leaving that evening. We decided to push, and started to bring the slides in.

As we brought in the slides, we found the front left slide would not go in. After some research, we found that there was a way to push in the slide manually. Meagan and I decided to give it a shot and stay on schedule. I popped the Schwintek motor, disengaged it and pushed in the slide. Had I been a bit more experienced with the procedure, I would have gotten the motor out and figured out which model it was.

On Saturday, I greased the bearings and discovered that one of them had some very dark grease. I came to the conclusion the bearing was running rough. Due to the holiday weekend, I wasn’t able to get parts for it. We made the decision to address the problem in Texas.

All in all, we got to the Lake City campground late that night, around 2230. The kids were exhausted and quickly fell asleep. We were going to be short on sleep and tomorrow we had a full five hours of driving. That’s not much if only adults are in the car, but for us, with all the kids and babies, we’ll be spending at least eight hours on the road.

Our spot at Lake City RV Resort.
Our spot at Lake City RV Resort.

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