Day 5 - Oh My

Slept in and didn't get on the road until 8:30. We don't have to far to go today, plan on ending the day in Carlsbad New Mexico. Had a little trouble starting the RV, but got it fired up and running after a couple of minutes. This was fine until we bought gas in Brownfield TX. After filling up the ignition switch didn't switch anything and certainly didn't ignite anything either. Paul poked at some wires and it started after sitting at the gas station for 20 minutes blocking a couple of pumps. We moved it down the block to a church parking lot and enjoyed the slightly warmer weather without spotting any snow. Well, it took until 2 in the afternoon to replace a switch under the dash, but we still made it to Carlsbad NM by sunset. The weather forecast indicates tomorrow afternoon the cold weather is going to catch up with us once again and plunge us below freezing for high temps once again. The destination by the end of tomorrow is Deming, NM. We will tour the Carlsbad caverns in the morning and head west by noon. Will let you know if we beat the cold!

Not to crowded at this site

Of course everything is bigger in Texas. Here's the view of our campsite Monday night. Of course there is snow way down here...still working that homey thing for the people back in Wisconsin.

Tuesday Morning Heading West From Tulsa

Watching the local television in the evening gives us a good perspective of the culture in the area. Just an example, a news show reported a man running from police in Tennessee dragging a stolen Coca Cola machine behind his car at speeds of 80 miles an hour. They had good video footage from the pursuing police car showing the coke machine sparking and swaying back and forth behind the car as they raced down the highway. It finally broke away and slid into a ditch. WoW....WoW.

I think it's about 15 degrees this morning in Tulsa. The ice is encrusted on the windows, ground still covered with snow. Coffee is made by 7:30, windows are scraped, RV engine warmed up, breakfast eaten, power disconnected, side pullouts run in and we're on the road by 8:30. Day 3 powering across the frozen tundra called the lower 48 states. This is getting a little tedious considering I don't think we have gained even a degree in temperature. It gets a little warmer, than overnight drops back down to what we left the day before.

Roads are good and the RV seems to be running well. The roads stayed good, but the RV started acting up again 25 miles down the road. Ugly noise man, all I can say ugly noise from that engine.
We blast down I-40 from Tulsa toward Amarillo Texas in spite of the ugly noise. We added gas to the tank twice until finally the engine settled down, approx. 200 plus miles from when we took on the load of whatever semi flammable liquid they sold us under the name of gasoline. By the second half of the day the RV was running like a fine tuned highly mobile self contained house. We fly into Amarillo looking for I-26 south toward Lubbock TX but were only partially successful. So we continued down I-40 while we fumbled with maps and the finally turned on the GPS to figure out where we actually were. Twenty minutes later we were back tracking and heading to our day's destination of Plainefield TX. Which we made right at sunset.

Savior in Coveralls

Here's our mechanic from Macy's Mobile Service. We were told he goes by the name of Pumpkin, and that's the name painted on the front of his work van. He was very friendly considering he had to drive 20 miles on snow covered back roads to get to us on a Sunday. He suspected we had a tank of bum gas, and the older plugs didn't help the matter. New spark plugs, plug wires, and a special cocktail in the gas tank got us back on the road by the middle of the afternoon. Everything was fine until we were almost to Tulsa, OK., then some pinging started up again, although not as severe as earlier. At dusk we found a spot in an RV/Mobile home park in Tulsa. We'll start out in the morning and pick up some gas to see if that takes care of the problem.

Down (and out) in Missouri

We found a mechanic to come out in the snow on Sunday to help us out. Here we sit at a gas station waiting for the mechanic to get parts for the RV. I thought the snow bank adds a nice homey touch to the photo for everyone left at home. It's sort of like we're just down the block without leaving home yet. Enjoy these now, I'm really hoping I soon won't find any snow to take a picture of...really really hoping.

Snow, Looks Like Home

About 3 inches fell overnight. We decide to try the Interstate and head out around 10 am. We make it past Joplin to within 4 miles of the Misssouri and Oklahoma border. This is where the missing in the engine started up. We back track to a Petro Truck stop and here is where we sit waiting for a mechanic to take a look. Pretty sure there isn't going to be much progress made today. Word is the road sucks through Tulsa anyway. Glad I've got plenty of reading material.

Paul making friends? Or thinking of survival.

Didn't take Paul long after parking the RV to interact with the wildlife. Not quite sure if he's making friends or thinking about what we should have for supper.

Paul did mention he thought his 'friend' was a little thin. I'm thinking there won't be enough for three of us. Anyway, if we get snowed in tonight how are we ever going to find him against the snow. It will be tough searching for that little orange beak moving across the snow.

Few hundred miles and 16 more degrees

We had to scrape the ice off the windows this morning before we could get under way. Not the outside like you would think, no the inside of all the windows had a thick layer of ice. If I wasn't inside all night huddled under 5 blankets sleeping I'd wonder what the heck was going on in there! Hey it came from cooking up a storm. It took a lot of extra stove time to thaw our food we were having for supper. That and one of the water jugs sprung a leak and soaked the floor in the RV bathroom. At least that is what Shirley is claiming happened.

It was 4 or 5 degrees this morning when we left Southern Illinois. We are now near Joplin MO at a campsite and it's already up to 21 degrees. It's not going to drop to much tonight because of the snow moving in around midnight. So it will be warmer when we wake up tomorrow, we just don't know what the roads are going to look like. Tomorrow could get dicey. Of course I'll let you know since you are enjoying our struggle to reach some warmer weather.

Happy Freezing Fricking New Year!!

Today we began our trek south to warmer weather, or so we thought. We are now at the same campsite we were last year after the first day of driving south. Only difference this year is I still see snow on the ground and it's about the same temperature as when we left Wisconsin. The drive so far has been nicely uneventful. While driving the RV this year I did a lot better of a job keeping the beast between the lines on the road. It's like riding a bike, it comes back to you quickly. At least I think so, I never really rode a bike this damn big and heavy before.

The most interesting thing so far has been Shirley describing a movie she watched on cable a few weeks ago. It sounded like a slasher movie to me and I was surprised she watched the entire movie. It involved delinquents, grizzly bears, and Ranger Bob. These characters where involved growling, blood, decapitation, severed limbs and other macabre action. I don't think I could sit through it. Now knowing what Shirley's taste in movies is, I wonder what I'm getting into on this trip.

That Time of the Year

Yes, it's that time of the year when the rest of the old people head south to hopefully warmer weather. I'm again invited to drive down with Paul and Shirley to Arizona. We were suppose to leave right after Christmas, but the cold bug hit my camping buddies so we held off until now. The plan is to head out New Year's day and hope the camper warms up by the time we get to Oklahoma. I will post when I get a chance and let you know how the trip is going.

I've been busily prepping the household for my trip. Since my wife has to stay home and work while I'm gone, I've tried to anticipate anything that could possibly go wrong. I shoveled the snow this morning one last time, changed the batteries in the programmable thermostat..didn't even realize there were batteries in there. Of course a compact fluorescent burned out in the bathroom this morning, got that changed. The furnace is what I now am worried about. The burner blower is vibrating like crazy when the furnace runs, and I tried to stabilize it by tightening some mounts and adding some padding. It shouldn't be shaking like that. Happen to glance at when the thing was installed and low and behold, the poor thing is working through it's 23rd winter. January is not the time to assessing the capability of your furnace. Hope it keeps shaking away at least until I get home. I don't want to hear my wife tell me horror stories while I'm away. It just isn't good for my health and well being.

Well, it's time to hit the road and see what lies down the road.

This Machine Flys WIthout the Simulator!

My rebate slips are mailed off for my new computer parts, and now it's time to load up the free game that came with it; S.T.A.L.K.E.R-Clear Sky. Now I'm not one to get into first person shooters, but hey, it was free. Loaded it up and am learning the keyboard controls so I can live at least a couple minutes. The graphics are awesome, frame rates are just flying, very happy with my new machine. I'm a few hours into this game when I noticed a secondary use for this snappy machine. With winter coming, one can always use an extra space heater! I thought I was getting warm from the intense game action, well it turned out to be from the increase in room temperature being cranked out by my new creation. Wow, this thing really spews the heat when the shooting starts! Time to save the game and go over my cooling fan configuration. Scrounged up an additional fan to install in the case to see if I can keep it from glowing.

Later:

Seems to run a little cooler now, but on those cold winter days, expect me to be heavy into the battle. One must do what he needs to do to stay warm.

I thought I wasn't on the Bleeding Edge!

The last few weeks I've been working on building a new desktop computer with enough horsepower to run Flight Simulator with as much detail as the machine is capable of. I never buy leading edge because it's just not worth the markup put on the best stuff. Last week I spent a few hours shopping and figuring out what I wanted. I ended up purchased an AMD Phenom II X4, motherboard, 4 GB memory, a pair of Radeon graphics boards I configured in CrossfireX mode, and a couple of drives to configure in RAID zero for read performance. I gutted one of my existing cases, ordered a new 24" LCD monitor, then waited for the UPS guy to deliver it all.

Four days later the adventure begins. Assembly went very smooth, everything actually fit in the case and I had all the parts I needed to finish the build. Usually the tense moment is when you flip the power switch and you look for smoke. There is nothing more exciting than to watch your brand new creation power up for the first time knowing the warranty doesn't cover the smokey and melted parts that you would try to return. This time it came to life and threw me into the BIOS where I prepared it for the Operating System install.

Ok, I'm going to install XP, since the new happy word and snappy reliable Seven isn't out until next month. When you install XP on a RAID configured machine you must install a driver first so XP can see your hard drives. Ya, right, hit F8 and put your floppy containing the driver in your floppy drive........floppy drive?????...what floppy drive???? This motherboard doesn't even have a connector for one. But, have no fear, you can stick it on a USB flashdrive and get it to work. There is even a supplied utility to create this for you. Well, maybe not. It didn't work. There is still one more thing to try: the BIOS has a feature to fool the install into believing the USB drive is a floppy. No, that didn't work either. After a couple hours of playing around I decided I didn't need a RAID configuration anyway since this install is only for a month, until that snappy happy OS comes out.

Home free, the Operating System install is complete with drivers loaded, Flight Simulator installed, and ready to fly. Fired up Flight Sim, picked my plane, 'fly now'. Up, Up, and away, man, this is beautiful, bank toward the high res Chicago skyline...Oh Oh, what are all these words plastered on the blue sky, where's my plane! OHHH NOOO, it's a Blue Screen of Death!!

After repeating the above scenario a half dozen more times to eliminate any feeling of disbelief, I narrow the problem down to the sound driver. OK, now it gets ugly. Find out the two graphics cards I installed have sound chips to handle sound for the HDMI interface. These babies are capable of delivering HDMI HD movie signals, including sound, to whatever I want to attach to them. Well, I wasn't using that interface anyway, so after fooling around for a few more hours I reinstalled XP from scratch, disabled the sound devices on the video cards, installed my sound drivers and I'm set for take off one again. Up Up and away, flying for a few hours without a problem. Fantastic.

Then the next day, I fire it all up again only this time pick a different plane. Taxi this thing out of the gate and POW! Blue screen visits me once again. After again repeating this several times, to purge the disbelief from my system, I start the troubleshooting process. Sound driver, same error.

This is where I find out this motherboard was finalized the end of July. With only two months of history, I had all the latest drivers on the included CD. After more hours swearing at the beast, I again went out to the motherboard manufacturer's web site and low and behold, a new set of sound drivers put on the website yesterday. Guess what? The new drivers fixed the problem as of yesterday.

I'm flying high now!