This year we're making a point of visiting inland California, in contrast to our usual dash to the Pacific Coast Highway, which we have done for six of our eight years of fulltiming, missing only the summer we spent at the Roadtrek factory helping build this Roadtrek, and our summer in Europe. This year we […]Read More
Well this is exciting – as we have moved north up the eastern side of the Sierras past Yosemite, we have entered the Long Valley Caldera, the remnants of a supervolcano eruption 760,000 years ago that blanketed the entire region with pyroclastic flows and volcanic ash as far east as Kansas. Yellowstone gets all the […]Read More
Whenever I get somewhere interesting in my travels, I start Googling around to look for information on the local situation in terms of history, geology, and whatnot. With the Internet at our disposal, there just isn't much excuse for seeing places and not knowing what you're looking at. Sometimes this Googling around leads me down […]Read More
We finally ended our month-long stay in New Mexico when faced with the prospect of multiple days of rain. Trouble was, it was also raining in Arizona, so we had to keep heading west across the Colorado Plateau in the on-and-off drizzle, past the meteor crater and Flagstaff, refueling in Kingman because we knew the […]Read More
We started out for the year in late March, which allowed us to take the more northerly I-40 route across the country instead of the southern border hugging I-10 route. We angled up through Texas, stopping in Crockett to locate the grave of my long-lost great-grandmother, and spent the night in the rich cultural milieu […]Read More
I know many of you Roadtrek owners are feeling a bit apprehensive now that the company is no longer in business, worried about getting repairs done, but take heart. There's a surprising amount of things you can puzzle out yourself and save big bucks on repairs. Let me walk you through a problem I just […]Read More
Over the holidays, I talked with my father about his family and early memories he had, and rummaged around online to find corroborating information to share with him. We got interested in his grandmother and whatever happened to her. His father and grandfather are buried in the family plot in Mississippi, but his grandmother Nannie […]Read More
I tended to “accumulate” things as I swung by the factory periodically, and one of the things I got was a new set of seat upholstery for my two (and only) seats. A year ago I bought some aftermarket foam-backed cloth covers that go over the original seat upholstery, so the need wasn't pressing, but […]Read More
I finally broke down and renewed my Sirius XM satellite radio subscription, which I hadn't had since 2014 when I was driving my Chevy. The Chevy was blessed with a fiberglass top, so you could just throw the antenna in the storage area over the front seats and get great reception. Sprinters have metal roofs […]Read More
I had an eventful day solving a problem I always dreaded – a water leak in my Class B Sprinter campervan. The water pump was coming on briefly every 15-20 seconds, no matter how much I tried to get all the air out of my system. It could have been just a bit of debris […]Read More
OK, I admit it. I am just too rough on these plastic faucets that come with the SMEV/Dometic sinks in some Sprinter galleys. I've just broken my third one in four and a half years of fulltiming in my 2014 CS Adventurous. The last plastic one I put in came courtesy of Amazon since I […]Read More
This is an easy repair that I did as part of my over-the-winter maintenance work while I'm driveway camping in Florida. I had ordered the motor last July so it was sitting here waiting for me when I arrived. I had been having problems with the original fan motor since shortly after I got my […]Read More
We have been back in Florida for a few weeks now, driveway camping at my sister Anne's as usual. My father is two blocks away in a suite in my other sister's house, my other other sister is a couple of miles away, my other other other sister (I have too many sisters) is also […]Read More
After leaving the Roadtrek factory last week, we headed east down the St Lawrence, crossed southern Quebec, and entered Maine through a one-man border crossing far up in the hills on Highway 27. We came down the valleys through beautiful fall foliage, heading for the coast, because we wanted to go back to Pleasant River […]Read More
Well, I succumbed to Jim Hammill's charms again, and I've been in Kitchener for the past couple of weeks. I was getting a check engine light that indicated a bad pressure sensor on the DEF pump, so I called up the factory to see if we could pull the fresh water tank to get to […]Read More
We have been killing a few days in the Ottawa area, waiting for a service appointment with the local Mercedes dealership, and have been following the Ottawa River downstream and southeast for the last few days as we approached the city. The Ottawa is a large river which goes north and west from the St. […]Read More
We just finished a week and a half up in the Bighorn Mountains at 9,000 feet, part of our plan to work our way east in preparation for our trek across the top of the country from the Rockies to the Maritimes to come down the east coast this fall. We had been up on […]Read More
After over two weeks up on the Beartooth Plateau getting snowed on, I needed to find a new spot to camp. Montana is very generous in its dispersed camping rules, allowing you 16 days in any one spot, and then you have to relocate at least five miles away. I decided we'd head downhill and […]Read More
THIS is what I have labored long and hard for – extended boondocking capability in a beautiful setting. We first discovered this pullout along the Beartooth Highway, the 1930s road constructed as the northeast entrance to Yellowstone back in 2013, and spent a week or so camping here. I had a copy of the Custer […]Read More
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