Well, we’ve come full circle again for our second year.

Back to the Philadelphia area with family and friends, where there is ample water and vegetation.

We were lucky to get a site right on a duck pond where we can watch the ducks and geese…

…and the occasional turkey.

Good times seeing all the kids…

…and spending time together.  We saw Chad and Katie also but I forgot my camera.  🙁

Angie and Toby are having fun being together again.  Nice to be able to take walks in an area that is free of rattlesnakes, scorpions, bears and coyotes.

The turbo on our Ford diesel is finally fixed.  We opted to have it rebuilt with new parts rather than have the whole unit replaced.  So far it has been running great and purring like a kitten.  We had a nice reunion with our ace mechanics, Kevin, Mike and Kenny at All Phase Auto in Aston who checked our brakes.  We were surprised that they were good to go.

The other issue we’ve been dealing with is our Norcold 1210 fridge (double door model).  As you can imagine, being full time RVers, this is something on which we are heavily dependent.  Diagnosing the problem can be tricky at best, maddening at worst.  It could be the thermistor inside the unit, or the sensor outside that senses the outdoor temperature and tells it how hard it needs to work to bring it to temp.  It could be the cooling unit (ouch!) or the entire fridge needing to be replaced (yikes!).  As with most modern appliances, it is controlled by a mother board and a maze of electronics that give us all those wonderful bells and whistles we’ve all come to expect.  After our Norcold seemingly died, and needing to throw out all the food in it (ugh), we borrowed a mini-fridge from my son and turned it off for a couple of days.  We sent the down payment to the repairman for a new fridge.  Then, in a moment of sheer genius, we decided to turn it on and see what happened.  The dang thing is working like a champ!  So, our repair guy came over again today to see it for himself and was standing there looking at it scratching his head.  And so on goes more testing to see if we can narrow down the problem.  He still suspects the fridge is on its last legs, but we are cautiously optimistic.  After the turbo rebuild, it would be nice to have a lucky break.  Wouldn’t be good to be in east Timbuktu in need of a new fridge.

Since we’re near our storage unit, we’ve been able to go through everything we’ve been carrying to throw out, give away and store.  Went and got the six boxes of rocks I sent to my son to hold for me and got them to storage.  I’ve been going through my rocks and picking what I will be working and what gets saved for later projects.  It’s good to free up a little work space.  My small 4″saw went into storage as I plan to continue to use my 7″ saw.  I’m contemplating whether to store my silver working equipment or not.  Just haven’t had much luck with soldering in outdoor conditions.  We brought our big vacuum and steam cleaner from storage to do the rugs again (they needed it!).  RV washing is prohibited here at the campground but we signed up for a mobile pressure wash.  Then we’ll wax the rig and go through all our checks on the roof and recaulk and treat the seals and gaskets on our slides.  We had all the screws tightened in Winslow AZ, but we’ll probably go around and check and tighten what is needed anyway.  We gave our drains a good cleaning with our water gun (the one we would be using to wash the outside if allowed), and will clean the desert dust out of our A/C filters.

I’m sure we’ll find some more maintenance to do, but for now it’s good to be in one spot to be able to get all this done.