Still in Florida and the 2024 Travel Plan
March 2, 2024
It's been a while since our last post. Since we are at the same RV park as last year, there haven't been a lot of new and interesting things to write about lately. We enjoyed our annual Christmas/New Years trip up North to visit friends and family (a lot warmer this year!), visited doctors and dentists, and then we mostly did regular life things. Of course, for us, "regular life things" include maintenance and repairs on our mobile palace (Rick) as well as extensive planning where to take the palace next year (Julie). So we both kept busy and enjoyed the warmer-than-up-north weather. A little comment about the weather--while it has indeed been warmer here than up north, it has also been cooler and rainier compared with last year. (This is not a complaint--it is merely an observation 😉.) But, now that it is March, we are finally getting into the 80s--yay!
Speaking of March, this time last year we had already left our RV park to tour the South and Southwest. We decided to stay an extra month in Florida this year since we are planning on heading northward (more on this below), and we wanted to wait for the weather to warm a bit first. This year, we will "set sail" on April 1. We are looking forward to it!
One noteworthy thing we did this winter was to go down to Sarasota for our anniversary in February. While there, we visited the Wringling Circus Museum. It was really interesting, and we highly recommend it. Julie decided to forgo inside pictures of the museum, but here's a few pictures of the day:
Anniversary brunch at a cute outdoor French cafe in Sarasota (We're a little squinty from the sun shining in our eyes)
The grounds of the circus museum are on the former estate of John Wringling
Some impressive banyan trees
Mr. Wringling built himself quite the nice little cottage on the bay
We were impressed with floor of the grand terrace
Look around the waterfront
The touring plan for 2024 is mostly set in stone now. This year, we plan to spend most of our time in the East, only (briefly) crossing the Mississippi River a few times. It will be quite different from last year, but we are looking forward to new scenery and the new-to-us Atlantic time zone. We aren't so much looking forward to the new blood-sucking insect life that we will undoubtedly encounter, but that kind of goes along with the territory. The last two years we were spoiled with the relative lack of mosquitos, biting flies, noseums, ticks, etc. during our Western travels.
Here is a map of this year's travel route:
April: Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia
May: Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire
June: New Hampshire, Maine, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia
July: Nova Scotia, Maine, Quebec, Ontario
August: Ontario, Michigan, Wisconsin
September: Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois
October: Illinois, Missouri, Tennessee, Mississippi
November: Mississippi, Alabama, Florida
December-March: Florida
As always, if anyone would like to meet up with us, let us know!
A couple of parting shots:
Found in a roadside ditch during one of our walks
Egret on truck
These black-bellied whistling ducks visit us almost every evening We just call them "duck-birds" because they look like ducks but act like birds
Our neighbor feeds them (which is probably why they visit so frequently)
Barring any unforeseen circumstances (like our camper falls apart the moment we try to haul it out of the RV park), our next post should be from Jekyll Island next month!
But wait, there's more...
As usual, I spent quite a bit of time either upgrading or repairing things around the trailer. I can now confirm that these trailers (and the parts they are made from) are not very good quality. I don't really have great pictures for all of this - but then again I am listing it all here mostly so I can keep historical records for myself!
We had some solar-challenged sites last year when parked in deep shade last year, so this was a good time to add as much solar as I could fit on the roof. I found a place in Ft. Myers that sells used solar panels, so I was able to get 3 panels that electrically match my existing ones. For $190 I got one 315-watt panel to put with the existing back set, and two 175-watt panels to put next to the air conditioner with the front set (only $0.285 a watt!). So, this adds around 665 watts which should increase our solar from 1320 watts up to 1953 watts (those numbers don't add up exactly because of finicky stuff that happens when matching panels of slightly different voltages). Because I am just adding this to our existing controllers, they will top out at their maximum output. So, the most we can ever see in full sun is around 1400 watts (100 amps of battery charging), but this "over paneling" should give us a considerable gain under cloudy or tree covered conditions, and that is what we are most interested in.
This is all that I did:
Added three new solar panels
Moved one back existing panel farther towards the back of the camper to make space for the new panels
Cut a bunch of aluminum angle pieces to support the panels and attached them to the roof
Replaced some dual combiners with triple combiners along with some new solar cables to get them wired in
Caulked all the new mountings
Added new tie down points on the roof (and caulked them) for the new solar wiring
Tidied and tie wrapped all the new wiring down
New panel sizes are in green - existing panel sizes in yellow. And this is about all the space we have for solar!
Another electrical issue was one of our batteries which was misbehaving. We have four 200Ah lithium batteries of which three have always worked properly. The fourth one was not balancing properly from the get-go, so one of the internal cells had a higher voltage than the other cells which caused the battery to never get fully charged. I tried taking the battery apart but it was completely glued together. So, I ended up just carving holes in the case with a rotary tool until I could get to the posts of the high cell and put a 3ohm 5W resistor across it until its voltage dropped down to the voltage of the other cells. Turns out, I had to take out around 40Ah from that cell to get it balanced. After putting the battery back in place, it seemed to work pretty well, but then it became apparent that another cell in that battery was also not balanced. This time, I went to Amazon and got a small active balancing board (inductive) and carved more holes in the battery to connect the board to all of the internal cells. I couldn't really get inside the battery to properly connect the wires, so I ended up using some solid core wire and just wrapping it around the metal posts and then putting a tie wrap over the wire to hold it in place . . . not great but should work. There wasn't really space to put the new board inside the battery - so there are just wires hanging out of the battery and the board is taped to the top of the battery. Kindy of janky. After putting the battery back in the second time, the active balancing board did its thing and brought all the cells into balance and should continue to do so. I don't think this battery is really providing the 200Ah it is supposed to anymore, but I am guessing it probably still provides at least 180Ah which will do fine for us, and with the addition of the active balancing, it should still provide value for quite a while.
Hmmm - what I need is in here somewhere . . .
This was only round one! I had even more holes by the time the active balance board was wired in.
Poking around in the guts to find the posts I need.
End of round one with wires sticking out to balance by hand Sorry - no photos of the final product with the balance board.
Another upgrade we have photos for is adding a new shelf to the truck. I keep collecting more bits and pieces that need to go somewhere (including a new fairly large sewer hose support), so adding a shelf seemed like the best option.
New shelf at the back above where the bikes go in. The bin was moved from the big shelf to the left of where it is now. The new box on the right is the sewer hose support we bought for this years winter stay.
The bikes still fit!
One of the most annoying fixes involved our slide out which contains our stove and refrigerator. The slide had been making more and more straining noises last year so it was time to tackle that problem.
Roller on right side of slide (looking from outside)
As you can see from the picture - the roller is quite wide and is supposed to ride entirely on the black floor of the slide out room. This particular roller was mis-installed because part of it was riding on a nearby aluminum strip, resulting in the the roller getting ground down over time. This had two bad effects:
Bad Effect #1: The roller didn't roll very well on that aluminum strip, as these rollers don't have bearings (just a sleeve riding on plastic). This was creating a lot of friction between the roller and the aluminum, making the motors work harder and groan whenever the slide moved. To fix this, the existing roller (which was screwed in from the top by now completely inaccessible screws) was removed using a rotary tool to destroy the roller and then pry the screws out of the wood. After removing the old roller, a new roller was installed a couple of inches to the left so it fully supported the bottom of the slide and was not rolling on the aluminum edging. I also added two additional rollers under the slide to more fully support the slide by the bottom in the hopes it would make the slide move in and out more smoothly and take more load off the motor mechanism.
Bad Effect #2 wasn't clear until after the rollers were fixed and I looked at the rest of the mechanism to make sure everything was ok . . . .
Things were not ok.
On the sides of the slides (Schwintek is the brand of the slide mechanism) there are rack and pinion blocks that are attached to toothed side rails with some "V" rollers which hold the gears in the right place. The top "V" roller had completely self destructed - I think because the bottom roller had worn down and put all the weight of the slide on those "V" rollers. The "V" rollers are made out of a hard plastic that has bearings pressed into it. The plastic had squished out and elongated so the bearings were no longer a press fit. This also had the effect of making the gears move away from the track and chew up the track.
So, we had to support the slide with some cinder blocks and a bottle jack to take out the entire mechanism then take the rails off and replace the "V" roller and finally put it all back together again with a new track. Not a lot of fun, but it turned out to be a single day job. When we put it together we also had to mount the entire mechanism a little lower as the slide was now sitting on the properly mounted bottom rollers so we drilled some new holes in the camper and mounted the right side mechanism where it was supposed to be.
Fun times with the slide mechanism
After that, we took a closer look at the left side and found that the top "V" roller on that side was just starting to fail (probably because the slide had tipped slightly when the bottom roller was self destructing). So, we then also had to do the same things and take apart the entire mechanism on the left side of the slide as well.
Overall, the Schwintek mechanism seems poorly designed. There is no freedom in the system for things to be misaligned; so when the bottom roller failed, there was no way for the gear blocks to move, and instead the components just broke. The good news is that the slide did continue to move in and out, just with an awful grinding noise. We thought it better to be proactive and replace parts here in Florida than to have a suddenly non-functioning slide somewhere in the middle of nowhere Canada or someplace this summer. At least now we have a slide that seems to work better than when it was new (at least for now).
And just for my records - here is all the other stuff I ended up doing this winter:
Replaced the dead front dash camera in the truck
Fixed skylight bezels with tape and foam weather stripping so bugs can't climb through and get stuck in our ceiling
Polished the skylights with some plastic polish, as they were getting cloudy
Added a breaker to the breaker box so we can run two electric cube heaters at the same time (bathroom and living room) without kicking out the existing breaker. One of the outlets was moved to the new breaker.
Tidied up the back of the truck
Moved pop rivet stuff into bag and ditched bin
Made space for a new larger grease gun
Changed locations of tool boxes and stuff near the tailgate
Added rails around tool boxes to hold them in place better while we drive
Moved existing hard to reach bin (on big shelf) to new small shelf
Ran generator for 20 minutes and checked oil level (we still have not had to use the generator)
Took apart our 3 roof/ceiling fans and washed all the collected dirt off of them
Caulked outside of camper - including a drip rail that was leaking and getting water into the camper
A mushroom was growing out of our wall paper. The leak was on the outside of the camper right here.
Replaced water pump in camper, as it had started to make noise and leak water
Replaced propane regulator, as it had started to leak propane out of the regulator
Fixed small chip in the truck windshield
While doing the new chip, also re-filled the existing chip as the last fill job had worn down a bit
Added an inch and a half aluminum angle to the end beam on the deck roof (water was getting into the wood and it cracked!)
The aluminum angle was just screwed into the existing wood, as only the center portion was a bit rotted out -- the rest of the wood was good
Put new velcro back over the aluminum angle to hold our privacy curtains
Caulked the top of the aluminum to keep water out from the wood
Added an aluminum drip cover over the wood and underneath the plastic roof to further stop water
Removed all the edge roof screws and caulked under them to really try to stop any water from getting in to the wood
Fixed roof ladder part that is on top of the roof. The caulk seemed squishy so I poked it and some water came out. Turns out that the way they attached the rungs to the roof portion allowed the pipe to fill up with water - so all this had to be fixed and re-caulked.
Removed some of the existing caulk
Drilled hole in tubing near the roof to let the collected water out
Re-caulked the roof attachment
Caulked the rungs where the water was getting in
Added some small loops to the edge of the deck roof to hold the top of the sun screen panels better
Extended our roof gutters at the front of the camper using some black heat shrink and tie wraps to hold it on.
There were extensions already on there, but they didn't get the water far enough away from the camper and sometimes the water hit the side of the camper and made an irritating noise.
Replaced a flooring plank in the kitchen that was damaged
Added a permanent wood spacer to the water softener (replacing the card board one that has been in there for months)
Added a wooden support to the box holding the induction cooktop (used a paint stick cut to length)
Took apart small air pump used to inflate the suspension air bags before we move each time. It has been acting up and sometimes doesn't start the first time. Turns out the brushes were dirty so some brake cleaner sprayed into the motor cleaned it right up and it works like new again.
Things still to do before we leave:
Sanitize the fresh water system
Replace all the water filters
Back-flush the water softener
Flush the water heater and replace the anode
Replace the camper tires. This time, we are trying new, more expensive tires to see if they wear more evenly and last longer. We got 17,000 miles out of the current ones, and they would almost make it another year but not quite.
Grease the camper wheel bearings, adjust brakes, grease suspension
Give the black tank a good cleaning with the cleaning wand through the toilet
And a bunch of little fixes, cleaning, tidying, paint touch-ups, battery changing, etc. around the truck and camper
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