After leaving Ely, I headed due North on US93 with a destination of Glenns Ferry, Idaho. I’ve visited this town before, years ago, and always remembered it fondly for some reason. It’s not very big but it was pretty friendly last visit. This time I had a plan…rent a space large enough for a shop and design and build a level system that would operate my propane injection system on 5% grade hills. So I wouldn’t have to do it using the Off/On switch on hills. So, with nice weather, not to hot, not to cold, off I went.
Lonely roads here in Northern Nevada…
It didn’t take long to get to a road block. Traffic was down to 1 lane and we had to wait for the guide truck.
Around 60 miles from Ely.
Local sites.
This area is, as you can see, kind of a desert. Not much to look at. Wonder how the immigrants heading to Oregon took this place. Doesn’t look like many of them stayed. I didn’t see all the deserted homesteads like I see in a similar area in Eastern Oregon. Falling down farm homes that look 100’s of years old.
Off to the South.
Ah, there’s some farm fences. Must be a cattle range or something. Or a mystery government installation of some kind. They are all over this area.
Getting crowded.
After around 45 minutes, the pilot truck finally showed up and lead us on our way.
Beautiful skies.
I love these lonely roads. Not to much traffic, but not allot of places to stop either.
Mountains!
Off in the distance a few hours later and we’re seeing snow.
Stopped for a rest.
Took a late lunch break just before the Idaho border. Note the glacier scar on that rock mesa.
Some river. Name escapes me.
It’s only a day trip from Ely to Glenns Ferry so I made it there by early afternoon. I have stayed at Trail Break RV Park in the past and it has these beautiful mature trees but this time I was looking for someplace where I could rent a shop and I knew that the RV Camp & Cabins had, well, cabins. Maybe I’d be able to rent one to set up a shop.
All set up in Glenns Ferry, ID.
Turned out, the owner was very amenable to the idea of renting me a cabin (what else would you expect). Couldn’t move in for a couple weeks since someone was occupying the cabin I wanted, but, no big deal. I could wait. Meanwhile, I rode my bike around the town every day and enjoyed the friendly bars in the evenings just a short bike ride away. While downtown, found that the theater has two comedy shows they perform on the weekends. With a steak dinner! So I bought my ticket for the dinner show the next weekend.
If you’ve been a patron of small theaters and community theaters like I am, this one would rank as a 3 on a scale of 10. The play was written by someone in the community and was intended to be a comedy. Apparently, they didn’t check the dictionary for the meaning of the word. But, there were lots of cute kiddies in the play and being a frustrated grandpa (no grand kids yet!), I enjoyed it none-the-less. Had a pretty good steak dinner before the show, and then slipped away from the table of strangers to the balcony for a great view. The history of the theater was interesting too.
Anyway, a couple weeks later, the cabin was empty and the park owner cleaned out the furniture I wouldn’t be using and added some things that I could use. There wasn’t any WiFi in the cabin so he was happy when I volunteered to fix the broken system. Found that whoever had wired it had reversed some wires, then found that a wire connection to the modem had corroded out. After fixing those problems, I had 100MBPS speed in the cabin and a private WiFi setup to link to my RV using my own router.
The cabin – shop.
The shop was just a few steps away from my RV and I’d head there every morning to start work. The first thing I had to do was get all my parts and equipment over there. I carry pretty much an entire electronics shop in my RV. Since I don’t need much as far as large equipment for electronics engineering, my stuff didn’t come close to filling the shop.
My stuff!
As soon as I got the shop set up I knew that I had to fix my oscilloscope. Wouldn’t display anything other then a dot instead of a line across the screen. So, with the new high speed internet connection, I found the service manual for it on-line and printed out the schematic. I’ve been retired for 8 years so my skills are weakening and it surprised me when I found a shorted Zener Diode buried deep in the scopes circuitry and fixed the problem within an hour. Yea me! Now with a working scope, I went to work designing a ‘Tilt’ sensor. I carry a laser level so I set it up to give me an idea of when I was at 5% grade and the like. I’d anticipated this project so I had already purchased some parts that I thought would work. Many hours of substituting parts to get the best operation followed. Along with hours of testing changes and trying to anticipate issues that might cause strange operation at inappropriate times.
More parts.
It was a pretty nice shop and as it grew hotter, I appreciated the fact that there was a nice AC in the room.
After a week, I had a working circuit, built the prototype and installed it in my RV. And since it had grown so hot in Glenns Ferry, I felt it was a good time to test it out on my trip to Arlington, Oregon, and a visit with my friend, TJ. I’d spent over a month in Glenns Ferry but, wow, it can get hot here. It was in the 70°F range when I arrived, and had hit 90°F by the time I left. If I didn’t get my AC running early enough, it would be 108°F in there.
And, back on the road, I adjusted the grade detector and it seemed to work fairly well. But I could see some power supply flakiness that I didn’t like so there was still some work to do. More on the grade detector in the future.
Traveling West on I-84, I didn’t bother with pictures since I’ve traveled this route so very often and posted hundreds of pictures of the Columbia gorge in the past…and I don’t want to bore you folks by being too repetitive (or is it to late for that?).
Arriving in Arlington, Oregon in the late afternoon, immediately called TJ and we met at the best pizza parlor there. Happy Canyon Pizza. Gary was working in the window as always and we settled in to enjoy ourselves with a few beers and great pizza.
Gary works the pizza counter.
It was before the dinner rush so we didn’t have to fight for a seat at the bar.
Happy Canyon Pizza.
Here’s Gary being pensive…
Not many guests yet, but the place was jumping around 8pm.
Before all that fun, of course I had to find an RV park and settle in. There’s only two parks in Arlington, so I chose the one where TJ was staying…
All settled in.
Not the best RV site I’ve ever stayed at, but it’ll do. Besides, I was spending most of my time in the Happy Canyon Pizza place and at TJ and Lee’s RV.
The neighborhood.
Spent a few days in Arlington then on to Portland. More on that in the next post. See ya!