On the Road Again!

This morning we slept in until 8:00 a.m. Jeffrey had said he would send Will by to check our SeeLevel tank monitors at 9:00 a.m., but Jeffrey was busy working on Jack’s rig. He and Danielle are leaving in the morning to go to their job in Colorado, where they manage Diamond Campground for five months in the summer.

When Will came by and inspected the sensor strips, he said that he didn’t see anything wrong. Ken had to remove everything from the cargo bay for Will to access the tanks, so we had another chance to reorganize. We are starting to fine tune rather than just worry about packing it all in. We’re able to do that at least partly because we got rid of lots of stuff.

Jeffrey measured five gallons of water from the fresh water tank and poured it down the drain. The response of the gray water readout was in the right ballpark. They can’t be expected to be exact, because of differences in the shape and size of the tanks. We decided to get some experience with the monitors and see how they do. If there’s still a problem, we can get it corrected when we come back in September.

That cleared the decks for us to prepare to leave. After closing up and hitching up, I pulled out the front drive again, very slowly. This time Jeffrey was watching the skirting and the skid wheels. Ken was watching the gap between the truck bed rails and the overhang. Jeffrey reported that the skid rails worked, and the skirting missed touching the pavement by an inch and a half. Whew! We’d sure like more margin of error than that. Ken reported that there was no danger of hitting the rails.

After dumping and saying goodbye to everyone, we went to the nearby truck stop to weigh the whole shebang with all our stuff and over 60 gallons of fresh water: the grand total was 30,500 pounds—over fifteen tons! Wow.

Our first crisis occurred when we made our lunch stop—and couldn’t get our door open. Ken had locked both the deadbolt and the keyless entry lock. The deadbolt had been giving us trouble before, and this time it seemed that we would need a locksmith to get into our home. I called Phil, and while I was talking with him, Ken said that he had the door open. He had sprayed the key with silicone spray and worked it into the lock.

How you know you are in Kansas: 1. Every town has a grain elevator that is the most prominent building. 2. Cattle gather in stock ponds along the interstate, along with some bison. 3. Instead of trees, there are wind turbines and oil pumpers. 4. At the truck stop, the “fresh country air” (aka barn odor) wafts from nearby cattle trucks. 5. You can see the horizon for 360 degrees.

We drove to a rest area at mile marker 49 on I-70, near Colby, KS, arriving a bit later than we had hoped. It was after 9:00 p.m. and dark, but we were soon setup and cozy.

We didn't get much in the way of walking today. We walked once around the sidewalks at the rest area and called it a night. We still had to fix supper and eat, late again.