Day 82, 83, 84 - Gordonville, TX - TT

Monday (82) - We ran a few errands. The dogs needed some sort of shot. We found a vet in nearby Whitesboro. The state highway between the RV park and the town was really busy. Much busier than a few weeks ago. I think a lot more businesses are open these days. I contacted the glass shop in Phoenix and they are still doing mobile repairs. The Encore resort still doesn't know if they are allowed to have new arrivals yet. Our reservation is for next Monday and the repair is tentatively scheduled for the following Friday.

Tuesday (83) - It is 81°F this morning with thunderstorms in the forecast for this evening. I'll be glad to get out of this part of the country. Too many storms for comfort. We are still planning on leaving this coming Friday and, at the recommendation of some RV friends, we made a reservation at an RV park in eastern Arizona for Sunday. The park said that they have plenty of room in case the Encore park isn't accepting new arrivals and we'll be out of this storm area of TX/OK. It'll be three longish driving days (320 miles/day) to get there. Texas is a big state. I think I heard that El Paso is closer to San Diego than Houston. I've been looking at the diesel prices between here and Arizona and the EFS app has been showing prices around $1.20/gal. Amazing…

Packed up the bikes and pulled in the rear slide that we think might be leaking as there is a storm forecasted for tonight. I think the slide seals need to be replaced. 

Wednesday (84) - The storm ended up being about ten minutes of rain with lightning and thunder in the distance. But we needed to start putting things away anyway. I went ahead and added air again to the drivers-inside-rear tire. It seems to lose air very slowly. I used the 12VDC compressor that I had repaired to avoid running the engine. A month ago when we were originally planning to head out, I just ran the engine since there wasn’t anyone on either side of us. The neighbors on one side are here for a while so I didn’t want to run the engine.

When we get to OR, I plan on replacing four of the tires. The four rear tires are 7½ years old (date code 4912 or 49th week of 2012) which isn’t too old but getting there. The plan is to move the two front tires which are just under 3 years old (30th week of 2017) to the rear and put new tires on the front and two of the rear. I think that some of the rear tires also have those balancing beads in them as a couple of them have valve cores that no longer seal. Fortunately, I haven’t had to add any air to those tires. Also the older rear tires are “G” rated and the front ones are “H”. The specs call for “H” rated tires all around.

Fortunately, we aren’t anywhere near GVWR. The GVWR of this coach is 34,320 lbs with a cargo carrying capacity of 4,426 lbs. This is after a full water tank, full propane, full fuel, all engine fluids, and two people. One of these days, I’ll stop at a CAT scale after filling up the fuel tank to get actual axle weights and use those to determine the proper front and rear tire pressures. The decal on the rig just says 120psi for all tires, which is the max cold air pressure for “H” rated tires.

While messing around with the phone holder, I noticed that the little ball was about the same size as the Garmin GPS mount. So I switched them. The Garmin is now solidly screwed to the top of the dash. Before, I was using a mount that fitted in the CD slot on the radio. It wasn’t very convenient to see and it would fall out on bumpy roads as it was kind of heavy for the CD slot mount. So now the inductive charger for the iPhone is on the CD slot. They are all powered by the DC splitter just to the right of the Garmin. The TPMS display is mounted to the top of the splitter. I think that this may be a better setup. The red LCD shows the voltage of the chassis battery and is the power cord for the splitter. Plus, there are four USB ports for charging other devices.