Whizzing Westward

Saturday

Despite our need to get west as quickly as possible, we did take some to enjoy the roses, so to speak. While researching the top parks in the US, I saw the name “Dinosaur National Monument” and the picture associated with it was a fossil in a rock. I immediately wanted to go there and scope it out. The chance to see fossils in the earth was a totally awesome opportunity in my mind. So, as we made our way west, we detoured through the mountains to northwest Colorado and northeast Utah to the monument. To make things interesting, when looking for a camping space, we got a bit stuck. We had to air down our tires and place sticks in the way for the tires to grab.



Turns out, they do actually have a “quarry” of dinosaur fossils that they have preserved for future generations. it was pretty sweet. I felt like a child again, getting excited about dinosaurs. I even made Jonathan go on the Fossil Discovery Trail, where we could discover small fossils on our own. Quite enjoyable, at least for me.

Most of the bones are in a jumble in this rock face, but there were a few that remained intact with their connecting bones.

This thigh bone is nearly bigger than me.

Finding fossils on the trail. You can the see the vertebrae of a dinosaur here. 

There were also petroglyphs in other parts of the park. I think the peoples who did these were awfully bored or showing off to a female, as they had to climb up and hang on for dear life to draw some of these.

Sunday

We decided to visit our transmission-mission saviors from last year. We pulled in Sunday afternoon and hijacked the remainder of their day. Then it was decided that we should go camp at the Big Eddy outside of town. On the way there, we ran into a thunderstorm complete with hail and lightning. The storm shortly passed however, and we were treated to a double rainbow and a lovely sunset.

Hail.

It is apparently really difficult to get all of a rainbow in a picture.

 Breakfast.

Monday

After our departure from Driggs, we decided to do a quick tour of Craters of the Moon National Park (after driving half of Idaho). Apparently, the US has a dormant cinder cone volcano similar to what we boarded down in Nicaragua. This one didn’t have enough loose ash or steep-enough sides, but it did look a bit similar, despite the age difference.

The dormant cinder cone volcano.

The splatter cones, which are mini volcanoes, were pretty cool. Surprisingly, the walls were really fragile. They were almost like a wall of bricks without mortar. Well, you know, minus the size and and shape… Only the friction and shape was keeping the chunks of the walls together.

Small volcanoes (that is a trail, not a road).

By the time we had done the tour, we were tired, so we decided to camp there for the night.

Garage-Bound Days

While most of the time that we spend camped up in someone’s garage is spent working on Chuck, we do get to do some other things on occasion. This month of August, we had several things on the list.

First was a wedding of one of Jonathan’s college friends. This was one of the reasons why we had hurried back to Tulsa. They had a beautiful wedding in the Philbrook Museum.



Then, the next week, my mother’s family had their annual reunion. We hadn’t realized we would be back and near enough to go, but my grandmother called me up and gave me the details. I talked Jonathan into going with me and I had a grand time. I even got play (several games of) volleyball, which was just icing on the cake.

Voting to kill someone off while playing Mafia.

We occasionally help out around the Luth house. This time around, they were refinishing their fireplace. I decided to help with the sides. I soon became best friends with the tile cutter, which helped me cut the one-inch tiles thinner so they wouldn’t show from the front.



Then, right before we left, Jonathan’s family threw a surprise birthday party for him. I was probably as much excited about his gifts as he was: an HD Radio with satellite tuner and a pepper grinder! Jonathan installed the radio and we were able to listen to commercial-free radio on our travels. It is amazing how much clearer HD Radio is. You can actually hear the individual words! I actually learned the words to songs that I had never been sure what they said. Jonathan really likes the remote feature, which allows for less distraction to change channels and volume while driving.





Before we started off to the West Coast, we decided to give my family a visit. It was hard to say no, since my siblings and parents were all going to be in the same place (hasn’t happened since last Christmas, I think). So, off we went to the lake, where I got to spend time with family. We even managed to go skiing and wakeboarding a bit.





After spending Labor Day weekend with my family, we decided to start heading west with a stop in Sublette to visit my grandparents. They had fattened up my cat so much you would think they were planning on eating her! :D

I  am pretty sure she is twice the weight she was than when we dropped her off there a year ago.

We had a good time with family and are now ready to hit the road traveling again. We only have a month before we have to be back in Kansas for weddings. I have quite the list of places I would like to visit between now and then. So be ready for some more whirlwind traveling and blogging.

Chuck’s ICU Internment (or Maybe TLC)

I know you are dying to hear of what we did to Chuck during the month of August. We have been calling this his ICU visit, but perhaps tender-loving-care would be a better term. After talking to lots of people, it seems like most people simply get used to the small annoyances that occur in life and just live with it. Not Jonathan and I. We will discover an annoyance then rack our brains to determine how we might fix it. Now, not to say we fix it right away. In fact, this ICU internment for Chuck was mainly to fix minor or major annoyances that were hard to fix while on the road. So, we just dealt with it for a while, which led to the mentality of “it just has to make it to Tulsa” for our return trip.
Jonathan’s half (or more than half) of the repairs consisted of:

• replacing the exhaust. Yay for no more backfiring or hear-for-a-mile rumble! He got the new exhaust kit from Foreign Auto Supply and added a catalytic converter and muffler that actually works. When we started the van for the first time after the swap, you could barely hear it inside. Fantastic!

• replacing the damaged engine mounts. Probably as a result of the damaged exhaust, which leaked, the front and left engine mounts were broken again. The other issue was that one was a bit undersized for the larger engine that had been installed. So Jonathan purchased better mounts and installed them.

The new left engine mount (after a few hundred miles).

The front mount bushings.

• converting to a serpentine belt for the alternator. Remember our battery dying on us in Honduras? Well, part of the issue may have been a weak alternator that wasn’t quite capable of charging the batteries fully. Even if it wasn’t a cause, every time we started the vehicle, we had to press the gas a little to get the alternator light to turn off. Jonathan had been wanting to install a serpentine belt setup for a while, but hadn’t had the appropriate supplies or space. He got the kit off a guy in the Vanagon I4 Google group, did some finagling, and installed it.

• replacing plywood with plastic in the ceiling. The piece of plywood that holds our vent fan in the roof was rotting and leaking (nasty-smelling water when it rained). We decided to avoid any such rotting possibilities in the future by installing a piece of HDPE plastic instead.

Interestingly (whether good or bad), this plastic lets in a lot of light.

• installing another set of lights. Our lights are fantastic, but as we traveled this time around, we discovered a weak point in our setup: there wasn’t any lights in our pop-top. So, we took our remaining length of LED lights and installed them along the pop-top and added a switch so that we could enjoy the pop-top, even when it is dark.

• replacing the driver’s door.

• adding insulation to the fridge door. In humid Central America, our fridge door would collect quite a bit of condensation overnight, which would then cause our oven mitt to collect mildew. So, we had to remove everything off the fridge at night and wipe it off in the morning. While docked, Jonathan took the door off the fridge, removed the decorative cover and added some insulation to it. So far, that has fixed the condensation issue, but we aren’t in Central America anymore, either.
• swap out the windshield fluid squirters. Our current squirters were sub-par as they kept getting plugged, and we thought it would be sweet to install Porsche ones that have dual outlets. They are better, but they are difficult to adjust.

• create pop-top bar bushings. Our pop top has always been difficult with which to deal. It got better after we installed Jack Bombay’s pop-top shocks, but they were still wobbly. Turns out, our pop-top bar bushings had been worn out, well technically, there are no bushings, so the bar was worn out, but eh. Jonathan repaired them and, voila!, oh-so-easy pop-top movement!

That cut into the metal—not supposed to be there.

• prevent the cup holder from losing drinks. My cute little cup holder that I made developed a bit of an issue. The passenger-side holder’s retainer arms had lost their stiffness (or friction, if your prefer) and would no longer snugly hold my drink anymore. So, very often on those bouncy roads, my drink would tip over and try to bathe the floor for me. While traveling, we tried to fix this problem with a rubber band, but that broke pretty quickly. With more time and tools and ease of access available, we drilled holes into the retainer arms and tied an elastic band between them, which has worked so far.

I actually worked on several projects as well. The list included:

• deep cleaning. Between several months of the hot and humid environment of Central America combined with living in a van, our seats and everything had developed a nice funk. So, I emptied almost everything out of the van and deep-cleaned, including a steam clean of the seats.
• reattaching the sliding door panel. The panel had kept trying to fall off and cause us problems. I finally gave in and decided to screw it in instead of going for the screw-less look.
• creating shoe storage. While I had the sliding door panel off, I also worked on creating some shoe (flip-flop) storage in the door. I cut holes into the panel and created pockets out of rip-stop nylon, which I attached to the panel before I screwed on the panel again. Now I won’t be tripping over shower shoes anymore!

• finding a new place for the knives. I was having trouble with my cooking utensils being hard to get when needed, and my knives were just piled on top of each other, taking up a lot of space in the drawer. It was beginning to drive me crazy, so I decided I would put my cooking utensils in the drawer where the knives were and move the knives elsewhere. We had an idea of putting them on the kitchen cover over the sink using a magnet bar, but I couldn’t find a magnet strong enough to hold the knives securely through their covers (and I didn’t want to remove the covers for safety reasons). With that idea shot down, I considered making a sort of knife block. Eventually, I came up with an idea that would use a thin piece of plywood and some of the faux leather I used on my seats. I think it is gorgeous and masterfully utilizes the space of the forward side of the kitchenette behind the driver’s seat.

• make a rear bug screen. We had a rear bug screen, but it was hard to deploy. So, I wanted a new one that 1) was easily deployed and 2) could be deployed from the inside as well as the outside. I used the mosquito net from Jo-Ann’s, ironed on a brown ribbon using no-sew fusible bonding material for the borders, and Velcro-ed the net to the cabinet and the wall. Magnets hold the top part to the van, and a block of foam keeps bugs from going from the shower faucet area into the upper shelf and into the van.

• repack. As mentioned earlier, our previous organization was beginning to stop working well for us, so we needed to repack everything (except our clothes) to better fit our current needs and supplies (we got rid of several items and gained others).

All these changes have made for an even more pleasant experience of daily life with Chuck. It had definitely been time to give Chuck some TLC, and we definitely accomplished a lot in the month we had him holed up.