Hornswoggled, and Farther South

I'll start out quoting myself in my last post  >> 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.<<

As it turned out nothing could be further from the truth:-(

We left Nashville and made one overnight stop in Alabama at a kind of nondescript place, fine for the one night, then on to Sun Outdoors-Orange Beach Resort in Gulf Shores.  A very, very nice place!  We had a nice evening with a fire.

We were very impressed by this place, first of all it is absolutely enormous, with huge sites with good spacing, everything is paved, the sites are concrete and all have patios, fire pits, and chairs.  The grounds are beautiful, groomed and clean.  Lots of amenities, several pools, and the price is reasonable.  Very, very nice.

We had several things we wanted to do in the area, one of which was to go buy shrimp and fish at a local boat to market place called, Billy's Seafood that Jan's parents, Vern and Viv showed us many, many years ago, and we wanted to go out and eat some oysters and seafood.

So we went to bed, feeling good about the AquaHot, and when we got up in the morning, if it's cold, we usually flip the diesel burner on to give it some added heat, it was 40, so we flipped it on and didn't think much more about it, until I came out to get our second cup of coffee and noticed it was still a little cool??  I looked out at the AquaHot exhaust and OMG, it was just spewing black, black dense smoke like we were fumigating all of Alabama, what?!?  So I flipped the diesel back off, now what?

Once it got completely light we went out to see what we could see, flipped it back on, same awful smoke and we could hear a chattering that didn't seem right.  My go-to AquaHot guy is Rudy in Texas, so I gave him a call.  I said I planned to do a complete service and see if a new filter and nozzle wouldn't fix it up, he told me a little chatter was okay, probably the clutch vibrating a bit.  So after the full service we tried it again and if anything the smoke was even worse, back to Rudy.  He explained black smoke can be caused by several things, the burner not mounted correctly, sealing grommets not seated properly, blocked air intake, bad bearings, or a bad motor that won't spin up fast enough.  I knew everything was fine except for the bearings or motor, so he told me to take it apart and spin it by hand to check the bearings, and I could adjust the clutch a little bit when I had it apart.  So out came the burner again.

Then we had to get the cover off.

The motor is right below my thumb, and the clutch is the 
intermeshed plastic gear just below the motor

I spun it by hand and it turned smoothly and easily, back on the phone to Rudy.  He said the next thing was to check the motor speed, with either an infrared tachometer, or by an experienced ear.  Well, I had neither, so it was time for a professional, and Rudy had a guy just up the road from us in Foley, Mike, Mobile RV Hydronic Service, who he had trained, in fact, and was very good.  I tried calling and calling with no answer, uh oh, back to Rudy.  He had another guy near Tampa if it came to that.  I sent out an email to Mike as well and tried his phone 5-6 more times with no luck.  Rudy called and said he found out Mike was on a cruise:-)  So maybe that was out.  

So in the meantime what to do, go have lunch and buy some fish.  We had a great lunch at the Shrimp Basket.

We ate the oysters so fast I never got a picture:-)

Fried shrimp, hush puppies, and onion strings

Then to Billy's for some shrimp and fish, grouper and red snapper.  Crab stuffed shrimp was on the menu for dinner.

So, so good!

We had a pretty evening.

Jan and I get up early, anywhere from 0445am to 0515am, I know, I know, but it is what it is, and it was my birthday, so when my phone rang at 0540am I figured it was one of our kids calling, but it only rang once?  Caller ID said it was Mike, so I called right back, he said he went to call and since he was on a cruise ship in a different time zone it occurred to him a little late that he was calling at a really early hour, no worries.  He explained he'd not be back until Saturday night, so I figured that was that until he said he'd be happy to come over on Sunday, our last day. WooHoo!  So now all we had to do was wait until Sunday, and since the worst of the really cold weather seemed over we would be fine with just the electric on the AquaHot.

So that nights dinner was baked red snapper with garlic shrimp on top.  It was yummy too.

We went out to lunch a few more times, and unfortunately didn't do too well, but we did go back to Billy's and bought a lot of shrimp and grouper for the freezer.  We had a really welcome warm day and evening which we really enjoyed, nice cocktails and cigars by the fire.

No, I didn't get any pictures, but Mike showed up right on time with a helper Sunday morning, his experienced ear said the motor was shot, so he replaced the motor and I had him put in a new clutch to boot, and I can say in no time at all our AquaHot is purring along now, producing all kinds of heat with no smoke:-)

We left the next morning and arrived in Port St Joe, FL for another week, for, what else, more oysters and seafood, of course!

Presnell's 

Sunset from our site

I wish we could really recommend this park, and the one site we got is really pretty special, but truth be told, the sites are sandy and muddy, very tight together, and the entrance caused us to drag getting in here.

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.

Started with a pound of crawfish

followed by fried catfish and oysters, yummy

and awesome gumbo,
perfect on a cold, rainy day

So we bid Nashville goodbye, and are now enroute to Gulf Shores, AL for some more seafood and oysters, then easing over to Florida.