Jillapalooza

IM IN UR OCEAN. EATIN UR CARDZ.

Adventures in RVing

A lot sure has happened since I had an internet connection capable of posting my blog.

Saturday was a fun filled day. Everything was going smoothly until Dad noticed we had a leak. At first he thought it was a hydraulic leak, but it turned out to be a leak in the fuel line. We spent a good couple of hours at a truck and RV repair shop, which was conveniently located very close to where we were. Fortunately the weather was nice enough to open a window and get a breeze going through. Some random facts that I feel like sharing: we were waiting behind a semi truck hauling honey bees, so there were bees flying all about; and there are celebrity type RVs that have gotten fixed there, most recently Lee Ann Womac.

After getting repaired we were on the road again. We made it all the way to Grants, NM… where it was cold and snowing. We had dinner at the Iron Skillet where we over heard someone say Flagstaff would be getting 2 feet of snow by the end of Sunday. Not the type of thing one wants to hear. After dinner we hit the hay for the evening.

When Gena got up this morning she checked the weather. The forcast called for 18″ of snow to hit Flagstaff, so we decided to head out right away. Flagstaff was 200 miles from where we were. After a bit of driving the clouds broke. The sky was blue and the sun was hot. Around 1:00 the wind became brutal. We pulled off the side of the road to make chili for lunch and see if the winds would let up. Right after stopping some angry truckers came through on the CB radio complaining about the whitewash in Flagstaff and warning each other to not stop if they wanted to make it through. Our hungry bellies would have to wait, we were traveling on.

We hadn’t traveled very far onward when the awning on the drivers side started flapping around. With the nearest exit 9 miles ahead, Dad drove halfway on the shoulder with the hazards on until we could pull into an emergency vehicle turn around in the middle of the freeway. The situation was dire, as metal bar was broken off one side of the RV and the awning itself was torn halfway off. Since there was no way to fix it or bring it with, we ripped it off and Dad tossed it in the ditch. On we went again.

Soon it was snowing pretty badly, the plows were out and people were pulled off to the side of the road. We went down the windy hills of Sedona in the same fashion. The painted hills were now painted with snow, and the tops of the mountains hidden in the fog. Not quite the same view of the red rocks on the background of a Robin’s egg blue sky that I’m used to. Lani hid under a blanket through the hills, while Gena and I hovered over the dash and took pictures. We came around a hairpin turn and saw a car over the guard rail in nose down position. It was a great photo op, but we were traveling too fast to capture it.

Now we are at our campground. Fortunately they have wireless internet here, because my Sprint card isn’t working well. Unfortunately we can’t slide out the side of the RV because of the awning missing, so things will be quite crammed tonight. At least we have showers.

More pics in the gallery.

In the middle of BFK

The driving portion of day two is finally over. We were on the road for about 13, less grocery store time. Dad is feeling much better today. I’ve had a bit of motion sickness, but nothing too terrible. Lani took a wicked digger. Broken nails, skinned toes, beaten and bruised, but still emotionally stable.

We’re spending the night at a Shell Station in Liberal, Kansas (home of Dorothy). I’ve got no complaints, as my wireless connection here is going strong. No pigs. No cows (we were joined by cows last night as well).

I’m going to do some web surfing for now and read all the love emails from my husband. Oh wait, Nick hasn’t sent me any emails all day :(. I wonder how Boo is doing. I hope she was fed a can of cat food today… chopped up all nice like she likes it. A little top off of her dry food perhaps. Fresh water. Clean box.

On the road again…

… just can’t wait to get on the road again…

Day one of our annual RV trip to Arizona. Gena flew in to Mpls this morning and I picked her up from the airport a little after noon. My dad and Lani showed up in the RV and we were on the road by 3:30. Unfortunately Dad wasn’t feeling so great and got struck with the flu. Our original plans were to make it to Cameron, but we feel about 400 miles short and stopped in some rinky dink town in Iowa around 6:00. Fortunately there is a Subway and a Kum & Go gas station that sells giant cups of coffee. So we’re still in freezing weather, but it beats Dad having to pay a visit to the porcelain goddess (aka garbage can) while driving.

Hopefully he’ll get some rest and be in tip top shape in the morning. Until then it’s computing, books and sudoku puzzles for us gals.

Oh great, a semi full of screaming pigs just pilled in next to us. I’m serious. Completely serious. If I smell then, I’ll be vomiting.

10,000,000 to 1

I was enjoying a leisurely drive home from work on Monday when I thought someone started honking at me. I was just merging on the freeway, I took a glance around but didn’t see anyone near me. Then the honking happened again. I thought someone must have really been in blind spot because I still didn’t see anyone. Suddenly a car went racing by me, laying on the horn. I was pretty sure I didn’t cut them off, so I just chalked it up to them being rude and/or crazy. Down the road I started hearing it again, then I realized it was me!! My horn was malfunctioning and going on and off by itself. Soon it became mostly on. There was a little bit of traffic and I was trying to hang back so I could drive alone, but that backfired and I ended up the first car at a stoplight, honking at everyone who drove through the intersection. I didn’t want to drive another 20 minutes to my dealership, so I went to the Ford dealership by my house. I thought getting out of my constant horn honking car (think old rickety Mustang on the Road to Hana… it even started sounding a bit “horse”) would relieve a bit of stress, but the stressful night was just beginning.

I stood in the Ford service area for 30 minutes before getting to talk to anyone. I don’t know what the hell takes so long at that place, but I was second in line and there were two service managers on duty. Anyway, the guy takes one look at my car and says he can’t fix it because he doesn’t have an electrical manual for it. I just said screw it and told him to disconnect it. I can’t be driving about town honking like a jackass. I get checked in, grab my phone which is about dead and give Nick a call to come pick me up.

The first words out of his mouth were “I can’t pick you up because the truck is at Ford.” Apparently he was upset that I left for work in the morning without helping him drop it off (in my defense, I forgot). Of course he probably deserved me forgetting about it because he had the audacity to ask me to drive it to my work to have Dave look at why the window wouldn’t go up. Let me state that again. Nick wanted me to drive the truck 20 miles, in 10 degree weather, with a window that was stuck down. Also in my defense, we never set up a game plan of getting the truck to Ford. I told him I wasn’t driving it anywhere, and that was the end of the conversation.

So after proceeding to tell me that he had no way to pick me up I hear Big 6 in the background. He’s got 4 friends over… and he has no way of picking me up? WTF? Did they all walk over? Get dropped off, perhaps? And his concern was that if we’re both home we’d have no way to pick up the vehicles later that night. As if everyone wasn’t going to be at our house until 1:00 am. I told him I wasn’t about to sit at Ford all night and someone had better come pick me up.

And of course when he gets there he asks, why didn’t I just bring the car to my dealer? Especially since Ford can’t fix it anyway. In retrospect that sounds like a fantastic idea. Had I known I’d have to wait for a half hour and then pay $60 to have it disconnected, I probably would have kept on driving. But I think people underestimate what a stressful situation a broken horn is. I’m sure you’re reading this right now thinking, “yeah, that would suck.” Let me tell you… you don’t know.

So, what are the odds that both our vehicles end up in the repair shop on the same day?

Arch nemesis

Not that anyone has probably noticed, but I just got Nick’s site up and running like a well oiled machine. It was having a bit of problems for awhile. First the gallery broke down, which was in no way related to me upgrading the site. Unless of course there was some sort of ticking time bomb that wasn’t to go off until a week later that somehow didn’t affect jillapalooza.com since I used the same files. Which would be perfectly logical.

Anyway, one day the WPG2 plugin broke, causing the random pictures not to display. I tried to fix it, only to end up upgrading the gallery, only to have it malfunction with the theme and cause the website not to display. I found an upgraded version of the same theme Nick was using which seemed to work, but something went awry in the plugin installation. I ended up reinstalling the plugin and it seemed to work fine. I will not admit to an error in the initial installation of the plugin because I didn’t read the instructions. Nope. Then I edited his sidebar so it looked the same as before.

What I don’t like about the newest version of WPG2 is that it actually uses a page to embed the gallery. So the link the the gallery is “/page id/name/etc.” as opposed to “/wp-gallery2.php”. I like the look of the latter. I’m sure it has it’s benefits which I have not thoroughly thought through. I guess since it’s an actual page it shows up in a page list as opposed to editing the code. And I guess if I could get my permalinks to display without the /index.php/[…] it would look nice. All right, so maybe this is a better option.

Anyway, the point of this story is that it was jilly to the rescue once again. Funny how the hobbyist-webmaster is the one fixing the my-business-card-says-webmaster’s website.

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