"Waiting to exhale...."

We're kind of in a holding pattern right now as you have probably surmised.....TLE has been devoting parts of the past few days to doing a deep cleaning of the coach with her favorite cleaning solution....water and vinegar.....I think that's just her way of keeping me out of the coach for a while.....nothing like the smell of vinegar in the morning, huh?

While there was the semblance of coolness still in the air I headed out to the trailer to repair the pull cord on the Honda 1000 watt generator......if you follow me on a daily basis you will recall that I broke the rope trying to start it our last morning in Goosenecks, but was able to re-string it well enough to get it started.  When we were in Flagstaff I braved the frigid 7,000 foot temperatures to ride my bike over to Home Depot to purchase the replacement nylon rope.  I have never taken the mechanism completely apart before, and I should have been more cautious as I unscrewed the bolt that held the coiled spring in place, but not as focused as I should have been.....the result of my lack of 'focus' was that as I removed the bolt the spring 'exploded' out of the housing......I wish I would have taken a picture of the tangled mess.....here is a 'file' picture of this spring properly coiled.....

Once again the 'Hockwald Way' rears its ugly head.....:-).....so, before I could worry about installing the new pull rope I had to first untangle, and then re-coil the spring.  Fortunately once I got the spring completely untangled it was very easy to re-coil it and then move to installing the starter rope.  

After that I continued assisting Tom in pulling wire for his 'man cave' in the new garage for about an hour until we ran out of wire, and then early afternoon TLE and I took a drive into Surprise to do some shopping......sometime between our time in Camp Verde and our arrival in Wittmann our 'All In One' HP wireless printer/copier/scanner bit the dust.  We've had it for over 3 years, and considering the nature its existence in our 'home on wheels' it was not too surprising.  Printers are not very expensive, so it's really just more practical to buy a new one, which was part of our shopping mission.  Our first stop was Walmart where we settled in pretty quickly on the HP Envy 'All In One' wireless printer/copier/scanner for $79.  As you can imagine the wireless technology continues to improve, and this new printer was significantly easier to install and begin using than the old one.  With the now 'dead' printer we had to plug in a USB printer cable connecting it to my laptop in order to 'pair' them and set up the wireless connection.  With the new one none of that is necessary, and it just took a few minutes before we were able to use it.

Our drive into Surprise was also the first time we have driven the VW any distance since the replacement of fuel pump......whenever I do a DIY repair I'm always a little antsy about how successful my efforts were, but after driving some 40 miles without incident I a feeling more comfortable with my effort.

After buying the printer we headed over to Home Depot to pick up some more wire for Tom, then to the local Goodwill store which we like (we did pick up a replacement butter dish), and finally to Trader Joe's for a wine resupply run.

It looks like the next 5 days will see a slight cooling trend with temps here in Wittmann settling into the high 70's and low 80's.

Thanks for stopping by!