Friends, family, fellowship, excitement, and a dose of reality

It's funny sometimes, it takes an outside viewpoint to remind you of all the things you tend to take for granted.  We had a wonderful visit from friends John and Diane, who spent several days with us.  They were so impressed with our winter digs.  It took them to notice all the folks that went by with a hello for us to rerealize what a unique and pleasant place this is.  The friendliness and camaraderie is palpable.  Being nomads, most of our travel time is spent with just Jan and I, interspersed with a short chat, a smile or hello, and once in awhile an impromptu cocktail visit.  Here we are surrounded by a huge number of not only acquaintances, but friends.  And although Jan and I don't participate in a lot of activities, we still have that loner stigma, there is an absolute plethora of things to do.  We have been experiencing the profound enjoyment of friends, family, and fellowship. 

Our nephew Walker came in to visit his dad, BIL Tom for a few days.  It was nice to see him and catch up on his life, Tom got him playing bocce with us, and Walker even took first in one of Tom's poker games.  

As I said, John and Diane came to visit, we had a great time, introduced them to several friends, enjoyed many cocktail hours and meals together, and I even got John playing bocce.

Diane, Moi, John, and Jan

Nice spot for lunch with great friends

Having dessert around our fire

The park here has a huge competition every year called Senior Games, anyone can sign up to compete in an amazing number of activities, from shuffleboard, tennis, pickle ball, ping pong, putting, trivia, golf, etc, but the biggie is bocce.  First off there is mixed bocce competition, then men's bocce, and women's bocce.  But the event of the season is the face off between the Men's champions and the Women's champions.  We joined at least 175 other people watching the very hotly contested match!

Half of the audience

And the other side

Who won?  The women did, and it was quite a game, the score went back and forth several times, but the women won the match!  In the history of the men vs women match, the men have won 7 times and the women 6 times.  

Jan and I have been working on organizing and arranging all our fishing gear to be ready for next season, ordering supplies that were used up and I have been tying flies so we'll be ready for the summer.

A few hoppers, called Chubby Chernobyls I tied

All this really gets us excited about the upcoming fishing season!  And believe it or not we only have 5 weeks here left.

We even took time out to make homemade pizza, you know I had to get some food in here somewhere:-)

Yummy!

As you know, we really love our lifestyle, but as I have touched on before there are some disadvantages that go along with all the wonderful parts of it.  One of them concerns medical and dental issues.  We have addressed most of it by moving almost all our doctors to Florida.  We spend 4-5 months here so it makes it easier to have our exams and surprises taken care of here, and it has worked out very well.  Thankfully, even with my several issues, we have always been given the go-ahead to go a year between visits.  We still have one doctor, our dermatologist, and our wonderful dentist in the Atlanta area.  We keep our dermatologist there because we like him, he is familiar with us and we only need to see him once a year.  But our dentist, now that's another story, we love him!  When we moved to Atlanta 20 years ago we met him and have been going to him ever since, and when we've had challenges with our schedule, he has accommodated us.  But most important, we trust him, have had nothing but excellent results from all procedures, and chicken me is totally comfortable and trusting of his work.  Sooooooo.  I just broke a tooth.  When you travel and are far, far away from your doctors or dentist, obviously depending on the severity of the problem, you are going to have to get attention where you are, and over the years, there have been times we have had to seek medical help wherever we were.  In fact, many years ago, when we had first started full-timing, I broke a tooth, and at the time we were in L.A., that would be lower Alabama, near Fairhope.  We were 350 miles away from our dentist, and figured at the time the trip up there, trying to squeeze in, wouldn't be worth it, so I called around and found a local dentist that could see me.  It turned out I needed a crown, so I had the new dentist do it, with a very new technology where I had a permanent crown put in, in only a few hours.  Success.  But it was not to be, after a few months, my tooth was getting sorer and sorer, and I was miserable.  I made it work until we got back to Atlanta and our dentist removed the offending crown and replaced it with another, no problems since.  Now, I'm sure this was in fact a fluke, I don't think the new dentist did anything wrong, but it sure made me, a nervous dental patient think twice about what to do if anything would happen in the future.  Fast forward to my now broken tooth, suffice it to say, I have an appointment in Atlanta, and will drive up the 540 miles, get it taken care of and drive back, and it will coincide with our visit to Atlanta in early April to get my permanent crown.  Yes, Doctor Bill, me, is assuming I will need a new crown.

I am in no way saying this would be the solution for everyone, just saying this can be a real consideration when traveling and especially full-timing being in many faraway places.  Give some thought to how you will handle these unforeseen medical or dental events.

A few projects, and finally the chair is fixed

After Jan got back from Colorado, her sister Karen came in for a visit.  We enjoyed catching up, having many lunches and dinners, and were able to plan a bit for some caravan traveling with her and Tom in their motorhome this year.  Yes, our plans are coming together and it looks like we'll be spanning the country once again this year.  We plan to spend almost 8 weeks in Maine to be followed by a week visiting our son Jason and Joanne in Buffalo, then westward bound we go, back to Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico.  Then a detour to Las Vegas where we will meet up with Karen and Tom to see a show, and then with a loop down into Arizona, back to Taos for Thanksgiving.  Pretty extensive trip, but we are always happiest when we are changing our surroundings.

As I said previously, we ended up ordering a whole new chair mechanism, a six pack, and a new memory and control box with harness for our inoperable driver's captain chair.  We had to dismantle it completely into 3 pieces to be able to access the guts, made much more difficult by the fact we couldn't move it.  So while waiting we accomplished another item on our list.

We have a 50 amp power cord that powers in and out.  When retracting it piles the cord in a "bucket", and after 12 years and going in and out who knows how many times the cord was showing signs of wear, abrasions, and internal twisting of the wires, time for a new one.  Now they come in several lengths, 36', 45', 50', so it was a simple affair to pull it out all the way, measure it, and then estimate how much wire was inside the coach running to our transfer switch.  Doing that we ordered a 36' power cord.  We wanted a longer cord but we didn't think there would be enough room in the bucket to hold that much.  A few challenges came up, of course, accessibility being the biggest.  Our transfer switch is fairly easy to get to as long as I contorted myself to get in the basement, keep from stabbing myself in the head with sharp corners, and turning, sitting mostly to get to it.  From there it was a piece of cake:-)

The big gray container is the "bucket"

The transfer switch.  The top big wire is the power cord,
the bottom comes from the generator

A contorted me after removing the cord

The other thing to consider is the cord comes in through a hole in the bottom of the coach, then goes up through a pvc pipe to the mechanism that moves the cord in and out, then into the bucket, out through the bottom of the bucket, up and around to the transfer switch.  I had estimated about 5 feet overall and added to our measured length made me order the 36' cord.  WRONG.  I came up with a great plan to tie a rope to the old cord, feed it through as we pulled out the old cord, than attach the rope to the new cord and pull it back through, a good plan as it turned out, except, we couldn't get the cord to come out?!?  Removing the bucket to see what the story was would be impossible, so we cut a hole in the bucket to see what was what.  We found a collar, which wasn't completely unexpected, but we also found a big tangle of maybe 3 feet or so jammed in there as well.

The hole in the bucket and most of the tangle

After we removed the collar and the tangle we were able to pull the cord with attached rope out to be able to run the new cord through, and we found that our new cord was perhaps 5' shorter than the old one!  We debated sending it back and getting a longer one, but at this point we had no power cord, as we had to cut it to get it out, would have to wait probably a week to get another one, so we agreed, hardly ever are we in a situation where we have trouble reaching the power receptacle in a campground, so we pressed on.

New cord almost in

Got it all installed, and found out we couldn't reach our power receptacle!  Short by about 2 feet.  So I quickly made an extension cord from a good section of the old cord and we were back in business.

Our extension cord

Later we found a 10' section of the old cord that looked good, so I made another extension cord we will carry with us if we run into problems in the future.

We had a rainy day to break things up so I took advantage of that time and was able to tie some more flies.

Pretty productive couple hours

Our seat parts arrive and we get right to it.  What a job.  Trying to fit the wiring harness and the control box into the six pack was challenging, but luckily Jan is great at puzzles, so eventually we got it all to fit, albeit with some rewiring of the new harness.

Our work station with the new six pack

Reworking the harness

All packed into the six pack

After we get the harness in we were able to power it up to see if it worked correctly.......and it didn't, no memory, intermittent movement, and a couple movements were backwards!  So back on the phone to the manufacturer, several phone calls back and forth, they found we needed a different memory box, so they graciously overnighted the new part in, and this time it worked like a champ.  Don't think we are quite done yet, though.  This six pack moves the seat forward, back, up and down.  The seat also has heat, lumbar support, and the seat cushion moves forward and back, so I have to splice into the brand new harness to power up the rat's nest of wires to make everything work.  A bit nerve-racking, but it all turned out fine.

Some of the wires in the seat itself

Jan helping to feed wires and bolts into position

All we had to do then was reassemble everything and all was good.  Now we have a movable seat again!

Jan working to get the last bolts in

This gives you an idea of the rat's nest of wires

So we celebrated our accomplishment with cocktail hour with friends, Debbie and Harold, and mother nature rewarded us with an awesome sunset!

Thanks for the help

I appreciate those of you that helped me out by posting comments.  It seems they are getting through, although it appears the posting of comments is slightly more difficult on mobile devices.  I have changed the formatting slightly to hopefully make it a bit easier.  Bottom line, please comment, they are very welcome!