Saturday, August 21, 2010

Almost Out of Here

[Mount Whitney, seen from highway 395]

I will be leaving later this week initially for northeastern California. I love loafing around on the lightly traveled parts of highway 395 on the east side of the Sierra. Good scenery, few tourists, few people generally.

But I will have to come back for a few days to set up the house for a wedding party, and then for the return of the longer term tenants. Then I will finally be free to leave for the rest of the Fall.

I finally got the bus back from the Camping World. Those guys are expensive and a little too eager to run up the bill.

But I have the steps installed and working at long last. The damaged one was a three step model that went down so far it pressed the curb whenever the bus was parked on a street. That was what bent the actuator arm in the first place. One has to step up pretty high to get onto the bottom step now but that is better than it not retracting properly.

Also, though the mechanics were unable to find the persistent electrical problem that has dogged me and the bus since I got it, I figured it out on the way home from there.

I had not understood how the battery isolator switch on the dashboard works. When both the chassis battery and the house batteries were good it didn't seem to do anything. But now with a good chassis battery and completely dead house batteries, the effect of the isolator switch was apparent. Nothing electrical inside the bus works with the connection broken by the switch.

That had been the problem all along. The switch had been ON so the two batteries were connected even after the engine was off. The chassis battery drained into the deep cycle house batteries and was dead in the morning. Every morning. The problem went away with the flick of a switch. Sigh.

The heater-doesn't-work problem turned out to be a similar idiocy. The bus has an air conditioner, the control of which has a HEAT setting which never did anything. For good reason. There is a separate control which, being next to the sink, I thought was for the water. It too has a HEAT setting. The air conditioner does not include a heater because there is a propane furnace. So the air conditioner HEAT control doesn't work because it doesn't connect to anything. The switch by the sink does. It connects to the furnace.

The furnace control has a tiny on-off lever on the bottom that one can easily see if one happens to be lying on the floor directly under it. The inscription on it showing which direction is ON can be read without difficulty with an ordinary hand magnifying glass. Yet I somehow missed it.

So many serious problems are just problems of not understanding.

It occurs to me to wonder whether wandering US395 makes me a later incarnation of Duncan Steele. Maybe I'll meet him.

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3 comments:

  1. So, have you got a copy of Willie Nelson ready to pop into your RV's CD player? It seems like leaving your driveway with "On the Road Again" playing at full volume is just the way to start your trip....corny, but point on...

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  2. Hi Tootsie, That sounds like a great idea. There is a triple album of his live performances called 'On the Road Again'.

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  3. Anonymous11:24 AM

    Is there a Owners Manual for your RV? Maybe you could get one online. I bet alot of you problems could have been solved earlier if you had access to a manual.

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