Bill & Jan's Excellent Adventure: Detour to Nashville, Now Southbound

After spending the night we left John and Diane's the next morning after a wonderful breakfast and headed to the dermatologist for Jan. He believes he was able to get all the cancer, so maybe she will escape another Moh's surgery. It's been just shy of 2 weeks now and her lip is almost healed.

We had a quiet small T-Day, just the two of us, and as we were eating we made some new plans.

First of all Talona Ridge has a policy that if you book a future reservation with them while staying there they give you a 10% discount, doesn't sound like much but with the stays so expensive these days it's considerable. Secondly we cancelled our last week there, we were supposed to stay 3 weeks, and went back to Nashville instead to a new campground, Four Corners. We felt a need to go back there to look around and explore some more.

Four Corners exceeded our expectations, a good sized resort, all paved with huge concrete sites right on Percy Priest lake, easy wide roads to maneuver, and a very friendly staff, and the kicker quite a bit less money than the last place we stayed on the lake.

Per our T-Day discussions and tentative planning we also, while there, scoped out the sites we liked and made reservations for a few weeks in April, and a month in July into August. Maybe some kind of trend? We'll see. We did a lot of exploring, which of course had to include food, imagine!

Jan kicked off the menu with awesome Kung Pao chicken wings.

The first place on our list was Fin Fusion, a sushi place that we enjoyed, we hadn't had sushi in quite awhile:-)

Our friend Keith, who lives nearby mentioned a cigar store called the Humidor in downtown Murfreesboro that we wanted to check out, wow! One of the largest, with an incredible inventory, friendly informative staff, and a spot to have a smoke, amazing.

We met Keith for a very enjoyable lunch and visit, and then he took us on a tour of the area. Learned a lot and got a real feel for the surroundings.

Although the weather wasn't completely cooperative we enjoyed our sunsets.

Next on the agenda was a Thai place with great reviews, Pad Thai. We went there and had a delicious lunch!

Flavorful Tom Kha soup

The only ding in the list, although this Wonton soup looks great,
it was kinda tasteless

The salt and pepper calamari and shrimp was scrumptious

The spicy Thai beef salad was superb!

Got our Costco fix and took a long drive around the area. Very pretty, rolling, lots of woods and lots of pasture and fields, a great mix.

Then on our second to last night, Murphy struck..... A little background. We have an AquaHot system to provide hot water and 3 zones of heating to our coach, I've spoken of it many times, very effective and comfortable. It can run on either electric or diesel or both. This entire spring and summer and fall has been much, much cooler than normal, regardless of what you read, maybe it was just where we spent our time, but nonetheless our AquaHot has run more this season than any other we can remember, and of course since all had been so good so long, you get fat, dumb, and happy. We also have programmable thermostats that we set to go down at night for cool sleeping and then ramp up in the morning before we get up. At 0245am I got up to make a visit to the bathroom and as I came out the door I could hear the fans running in the main living area, but it felt too cool to me. So I came out checked the thermostat, it was calling for heat, then I reached down to check the outlets and they were stone cold!! Now remember this is in the middle of the night so I don't think my brain was operating at 100%, not that it does that much anymore:-) I checked the electric panel and neither electric element was on, and neither was the diesel burner, I cycled the switches, no change, then decided since it was only going down to the low 40's that night I would shut the thermostats off and deal with it in the morning light. And then I laid there in bed not sleeping trying to contemplate what was wrong with the AquaHot..... Jan, thankfully stayed asleep. I thought I heard the AH kick on at one point but when I jumped up it had stopped, did I imagine it? I didn't know so I turned it all off until I could deal with it. The AH electric and diesel are controlled by the internal temperature of the unit, it holds about 16 gallons of fluid. We do have a backup way of heating though, each of our 3 rooftop AC's is also a heat pump, so when Jan got up at 0500am I told her what had happened and turned on the heat pumps for some warmth. But we don't have back up for hot water other than an instant hot spigot in the galley sink, hard to get in there to shower and besides it would burn you:-) Now normally our heat would come back on at 0445am, yeah, I know, but we get up early, but since I had shut down everything, nothing happened. So as we were talking I reminded her we had no hot water. After we finished our 2 cups of coffee, did our emails and read the paper we came out to make breakfast, and Jan ran the water without thinking and announced, funny, it still is quite warm???

I was going crazy, researching everything I could find on why our AH would just quit, but her announcement of warm water stymied me. Finally the sun came up and out we went in the rain to see what we could see, nothing obvious so we turned on the electric and diesel and what, it came right on? Weird, so we let it run a bit, came back inside, turned on the main thermostat, the fans started, and blew freezing cold air, what? Back out to take another look, back in and turned on the other thermostat and each zone had nice warm air coming out, but the front still cold, finally I banged on the pump and it started up reluctantly and soon after nice warm air to the main area, but wow, the pump was screaming and wobbling so we shut it back down. Good news is the AH was just fine, it was only one of the circulation pumps.

There are 4 circulation pumps

The culprit

More research and finally found a place in Nashville that had a pump, I wanted 2 because I believe they all are going to fail in turn, but they only had one. It was a half hour or so away so since it was rainy and cold and we weren't going to replace it immediately, we might as well get a couple Guinnesses and an Irish lunch on the way over:-)

We split scotch eggs and a rueben, not great so I won't share the name

So the next challenge will be installing the new replacement pump which is way different since the original ones have been discontinued, that story will be forthcoming when we get it done.

So one more day, another cold and rainy day so off for yet another lunch, this time a Asian/Cajun inspired seafood place, very good, Street Brothers.