Well, I better get this blog going or I won't be able to finish it before we leave, which will possibly be tomorrow!
I really didn't have much to blog about all the time that we've been here. It was just too hot, and especially too humid, to do anything outside, so other than getting groceries and watching the Olympics, or taking a quick dip in the pool in between thunderstorms, I haven't done a thing noteworthy!
James, on the other hand, has worked hard, as usual, and has the store pretty much ready for the grand opening this coming Saturday.
This store got done mostly without any problems, other than that the air conditioner turned out to be too small to cool appropriately and had to be replaced with a larger one.
He's been waiting on one more part to arrive, so he can install it and we can leave.
Everything else went just fine:
At home, we also had a few small calamities that needed to be taken care off. The toilet sprung a leak, but after ordering the (small) part, James managed to fix it quickly.
And our washer and dryer didn't want to spin anymore, which turned out to be the lid switch, also a small part that could (fairly) easily be ordered and installed.
Voila, problems fixed!
That is, almost all problems, because the air conditioners are leaking, and we don't seem to be able to 'cure' that!
Most likely it is caused by the extreme humidity, the super-moist air just doesn't evaporate enough!
Especially the one above the bed leaks badly, so I have the bed covered up during the daytime when it runs. Fortunately we don't need it at night, when the one in the living room is able to take care of both rooms.
Time for Fall to arrive, so that humidity goes down!
My baking and cooking has been rather uninspired also these days, I'm too lazy and too hot to do much else than making a salad and grilling the meat on the BBQ.
The dish on the right is Nassi (fried rice), an Indonesian dish, very popular in Holland (Indonesia used to be a dutch colony), and served with saté, which are meat skewers with peanut sauce. Yummy!
The pineapples are 'in season', at $1 a piece, so we eat a lot of them! Does everybody have that handy little core-tool? Best invention since the paperclip!
And than there was that one major mishap we really could have done without ... the injectors of the truck went kaput! Again! After only 25.000 miles!
As you might remember we replaced them all in 2014, but during a call to Rush, the previous truck-shop that did the repairs, we learned that the warranty has already expired, being 1 year or 100.000 miles, whatever comes first. Of course!
Any-who, after searching the web we found a truck repair guy (Black's Automotive) in Columbus, about 21 miles from us, who, fortunately, could accommodate us right away.
We crawled, heavily smoking, our way to the shop, me following in a rental car, and after some diagnostics were done that confirmed the bad injectors, we left the truck there to be repaired.
During some Googling I did later that day, I found that Duramex advises the installation of a pre-filter, to avoid the fairly common problem with the injectors in this model and year of trucks!
We called our repair guy and arranged for a filter to be delivered at his shop, after which he will install it.
If everything goes well, everything will be done by tomorrow, which will give us just enough time to return the rental car within a week.
Phew! Always something.
So, we're keeping our fingers crossed that we'll be able to leave on Saturday. We'll be heading for the Gulf Coast, where we will be scouting out some of the areas and RV Parks where we would like to stay for the coming winter.
We will park the RV for a couple of days each in different areas, such as Mobile (AL), Biloxi (MS) and Bay St Louis (MS).
After that it's back to Hammond, since James has some equipment to return and to close of the job properly.
Hopefully, we can stay at Hidden Oaks again, where we have about 10 days left on a monthly rent we've paid for previously, but that all depends if they've recovered enough from the recent floods over there!
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| The 190 near Robert |
The Tangipahoa River, and many others, flooded again, this time to a record high of 27.4', the highest since 1928! Louisiana declared a State of Emergency, but southern Mississippi and Texas are in a very bad shape too.
'Our' campground, Hidden Oaks, flooded also (of course), and everybody had to evacuate. Poor people, they just had everything restored and up and running again ...
Anyways, I'm looking forward to be 'on the road again'! We'll see where we'll end up!
