On our way with a little detour

Our time here has come to an end and our traveling time of the year will begin, with one small detour.  As I mentioned before our son Jason lives on the southwest side of Atlanta and our campground and old stomping grounds are on the northwest side.  Doesn't sound like much, but it's a little over 70 miles each way for us to visit.  He's been great and made many trips up here, but we've been looking for years to try to find a campground a little closer to him.  We found one of Georgia's newest state parks, Chattahoochee Bend State Park, and it's only 20 miles from Jason all on back roads.  Oh yeah did I mention the traffic in the Atlanta area??  That 70 miles can take anywhere from 1 hour to 2 hours each way...  So we went down to visit Jason at his work and went over to check it out.  It looks really nice, the online info said there was a max size of 40' allowed in their campground, but they assured us that if we fit we were welcome.  We went to see for ourselves, and I don't know how they measure down here, but we can easily fit on virtually every one of their sites, they are huge!  So we figured the best way to check it out was to spend a couple nights there and see, so our first leg of our summer trip is the 90 miles to the state park.

Also I believe our wiper problem is solved.  I picked up the special lock and flat washers on Monday and Jan and I remounted and reinforced the wiper system.  First we took it all apart.

Here you can see the slight gap around the stem

I wanted to fill that small gap with silicone, reinforce the metal backing plate, then reinstall and torque the stems in place using our new washers.  The metal backing plate goes between and is in back of the stems inside the front cap and we wanted to make sure it was securely fastened to the fiberglass, so I mixed up a couple balls of JB Weld epoxy and pulled the plate away from the fiberglass, slipped the wad in underneath between the plate and front cap, then pushed the plate down into the epoxy, and tightened the nuts compressing the epoxy.  We tried to use enough to secure it, but not so much that we'd have to destroy the front cap to get it out:)

One end with the epoxy in place

And the other

The new set of washers with one of the nuts
There is also a flat washer, lock washer, and a nut on the inside
behind the backing plate

I made the rubber washer to protect the newly painted front cap when we torqued it down.  I tried after we got the stems in place to push in as much silicone as I could around the stems, then we torqued them down.  And it worked beautifully, very secure now.  We waited 24 hours before we mounted the wipers to be sure.

With the washers and nuts on

Then the boot

And the wipers

Final product!

Also I did a service on our generator, an oil and filter change, an air filter and fuel filter change.  I like to do it every 250 hours.  It's an easy job, takes about an hour, and saves a lot of money and I know it's been done right.

Our generator

We like to put a placard on to keep track 

So after several more lunches, dinners, and into the night discussions and visits we're off tomorrow.