Apr 21 - on the road again

I think that this is not a new blog title for me ... or at least we're undergoing a common activity.

I talked to George Cederholm as we were driving and he asked how it felt to be driving vs riding -- I had to confess that I had less patience with driving 12 hours and more with riding 12 hours. However, it was a great day for driving with only one spot of rain. We left home about 6:15 a.m. and arrived at Linda & Alec's almost exactly 12 hours later.

I lost track of how many times we stopped. I was well hydrated :) and it was going right through me. It takes a few days after one of these rides to stop drinking, drinking and drinking, and of course you don't sweat much of it out driving a car ... so it has to go somewhere ...

We did have one problem that has still not been solved. We stopped at Publix to drop the small bag of residual kitchen garbage that we had leaving and on a walk-round the trailer I checked the trailer lights. Not all of the LED tail-lights were fully lit and the turn/stop signals were faint flickers. I played around with them at a couple of rest stops to see if there was some issue with the contacts ... but couldn't solve the problem. I won't be able to do anything about it until we get to Jeffrey's. Traffic was light and I was very careful to leave lots and lots of room with any lane changes. It was almost like the ground connection wasn't good enough to support the current draw and there was a drop in voltage.

Later on, at a gas station, I checked the engine oil and found that it needed a quart. The last time I added oil was up north, so it's been 2500 miles. That's not too bad but it is burning a little. It has always burned a little oil -- the engine has had a lot of hard driving. On one hand you might think that highway miles are easy miles, but we travel fairly loaded and pulling a trailer is hard on the little engine in that car. All the short trips in FL are also hard on the car. It's got 131,000 miles on it now .... the plan is to run it into the ground. How long that will take is anyone's guess - that all depends on whether there is some catastrophic expensive failure at some point or an accumulation of small annoyance maintenance work. When it occurs ... I hope that we're not loaded down, towing a boat ... knock on wood !

As we drove up the driveway Abby was bouncing around in the back seat -- she knew where we were. Alec walked down to meet us and I backed the car and boat down to the barn, since there is not turnaround space up at the house. A couple of suitcases, my laptop, Abby's food and we'd unloaded as much as we intended. It will be more complicated at Jeffrey's since I'm taking one of the bikes out. I intend to hit a Home Depot or something at his place and pickup another bin that I can put into the boat for some of the small stuff that is now in the back of the car piled on top of the bikes.

As I walked back up to the house it struck me how understated the house is from the driveway side, which was their intent. From the driveway it looks like a small one-story bungalow. From the hill-side, however, the upper and lower stories look out on the view. It has now lost that "just completed" look, and the landscaping has matured blending in with the surroundings. It all looks and feels very natural in the setting. We need to do more work on our landscaping up north to achieve the same effect. That will take a while !

We ate well -- steaks on the barbie -- and yacked until close to 10:30. I think that the rest of them could have kept going but I was tired. No one seemed inclined to say "goodnight dave" and let me go by myself, however, so perhaps it was time for everyone. We had stuffed ourselves, but I had no trouble sleeping.

I hear sounds upstairs, probably Linda cleaning up from our feast. I'm downstairs with my first coffee ... I think that I'll make another, have a shower and go upstairs too ...

Today we'll leave before noon to travel to Reading. It's 300 miles -- piece of cake -- 5 hours. We'll aim to be in Reading by 4pm or so.