but I don’t have a regular DSL connection now so my posts will be delayed. I’m planning on getting back on the road at the end of August or mid-Sept. Plan is to head on down stateside and hang around, maybe go to Portland, OR, to visit friends or to Idaho and a little town I went through before that I liked.
Here in Fairbanks, I’ve been busy helping to tear down the Ice Alaska installation on our leased property and moving it to a new property that Ice Alaska bought. The RR really wanted us off the old property for some reason. But they have been very kind since we have a new property to move to. They are providing Conex’s (big metal boxes that look like RR boxcars without wheels) for our use free and I think they are paying for the movers to move our buildings…not sure about that though.
Since we’re moving the buildings, the DSL was shut off and they haven’t got it installed at the new site yet. I am living there on-site as the site guard and manager but there’s not much for me to do. I do have electric and a nice cement pad to park on but there’s no water or sewer. I just had to dump and fill yesterday and it’s a hassle. I even got a sewage shower a little at the public dump. It was just coming out so forcefully, the connector jumped out of the hole. Yes, I should have been using the rubber ring…but I’ve never had to before. And there was no big rock to put on top like at most dumps.
I have to go to my favorite bar, the Big I, to get online, and my new-to-me laptop is slowwwwww. I’ve ordered more memory for it and I hope that will help but it’s a crappy Intel Celeron CPU so that’s doubtful. Going from 256MB RAM to 1GB should do something to help speed things up but even then the Celeron will be a bottleneck.
Meanwhile, I’ve done a little work on the RV, like fixing a couple window shades that are falling apart, getting the faucets tightened (winter temps loosened them up), trashed a bunch of stuff I hadn’t used in years, etc. Now I have to more projects to finish and I’ll be ready to roll. I’ve got to replace or fix my bad oil pressure sending unit, then I have the vacuum pump problem. It runs my cruise control and dash heater assembly and being without it is a big problem. I really depend on cruise control to make the trip less dull since I can spend more time gawking at the view along the way with it. And having dash heat, other then just defrost, makes it more comfortable. I believe that the pump is back in the engine compartment, but at this point I have no idea where it is. I’m on RV.net and I’ve posted the question of where it might be in my rig a couple times but so far no one can tell me exactly. It’ll be a treasure hunt. Then have to figure out how to fix it or replace it with something I can find locally as there’s probably not enough time to have a new one shipped up before I leave.
Then I did a bunch of work on my Subaru. It’s not towable so I wanted to find someone to drive it down to the states for me but before that, I had to fix the bad shaking I was getting from it. Turned out that the CV joints were bad. Found a guy to replace them for me for $70 so I was pleased with that. Now I have AWD again. While I was working on it, I checked the AC. The belt had been removed before I bought it in ’07 so I went and bought a new belt. Started to put it on and found that the idler pulley was bad. A quick trip to the junk yard and $15 bucks later it’s working fine. I could have had AC since the summer of ’08 if I’d bothered to check the damn thing earlier. The car isn’t that important to me but it would be a fun project car. So I’ve been thinking of getting it down to my brothers house in Rosamond, CA for work. It really need struts but I think it’ll make it down there…if I can find someone to drive it for me. If I don’t, I’ll either sell it or have a friend store it for me.
In other news, I did go down to Seattle for a family reunion a couple weeks ago and got allot of pictures of the trip but I’m not ready to upload anything yet because of the lack of available WiFi at my RV site.
Talk to you all soon! Thanks for hanging around.
Glad to see you’re still around; haven’t heard from you for awhile.
We just got notice that our grandson is getting married in Rocky Mtn Natl Park east of Fort Collins next May, the day after his fiance graduates from Vet School. So now we have a real excuse to hit the road again in our forlorn Beaver coach, parked by the house these 3 long years. I won a guided fishing trip at the Ennis Flyfishing Festival in 2008, so if they’ll still honor it, we hope to hit SW Montana after the wedding. Then I figure on seeing my mother’s kin in Alberta, since they’re dying off and I haven’t been up there in 25 years. Seems logical that early in the season to mozy on up to Alaska from there, and finally get in our long dreamed of trip to that great land.
Wish I was there this year as bloggers from our Beaver club in a 3 coach “caravan” say there is a record run of sockeye off the Kenai, and the state just keeps upping the catch limit to compensate, but the fish are still choking the Kenai mouth I hear.
My luck, next year the runs will crash.
-Joel
Nice to hear from you again, Joel. Vet school? Very cool. Did you know that many vet school dropouts become people doctors? Takes a very large brain to be a vet. In other news, I’m jealous that you have grandkids. I still don’t have a one.
Mozzy on up here. The weather is certainly better here then down in the 48. I don’t care for the heat myself. It averages in the mid-seventies up here.