Archive for April, 2006
Yesterday I traveled to Fort Worth to hang out with my brother and his family. When I walked out of my RV to start preparing it for the road, I saw that it was literally covered by thousands of some kind of mosquito looking bug. Thankfully they weren’t mosquitoes and didn’t bite. If I shooed them away to pull in the slide outs on the trailer, they’d land again before I could run inside and hit the switch to pull the slide out in. I wound up bringing several hundred into the trailer with the side outs and by the time I arrived in Ft. Worth (after driving through a torrential downpour) the inside ceiling of the trailer was covered with the things. We wound up getting rid of most of them by sucking them up with a vacuum cleaner attachment but I was still finding them for another week. Oh well…
April 30th, 2006
Yesterday I played at Washington School (hey, that was the name of my old grade school in Villa Park, Il as well!!) in Sherman, Texas. It’s a bilingual school or, more accurately, a 50% bilingual school because only half of the 450 kids are in the bilingual program. A friend of mine, Chuck Umsted, who I met while studying Spanish in Mexico in 2002, invited me to come and play a concert at the school. Since I planned on passing right through Sherman on my trip it was easy to say yes. I played in an outside courtyard on a beautiful day with blue skies stretching from horizon to horizon. The concert was for the bilingual kids and a good portion of the 250 showed up to listen. I talked about how music is a kind of language that musicians speak amongst themselves as well as with the audience
After the concert portion (during which we all spoke Spanish), there was a question/answer session in English for the older kids to practice and I was amazed at the quality of their questions. I’ve sat through Q&A sessions after concerts by artists like Steve Reich and Pat Metheny and the questions were, for the most part, fairly banal at best. Reich and Metheny did all they could to maintain their composure and politeness but, let’s face it, stupidity is stupidity. Here I had a group of 10 and 11 year olds asking probing questions like “do you think a lot about your compositions before you write them, or do you write them fast?”
After the concert I went back to the campground, hopped on my bike and took off onto some country roads. Although some of the roads were a little beat up, I saw only 2 cars in 30 miles of riding and got a taste of the north Texas countryside including some wild geese flying 3 feet over my head and a several cows that seemed completely puzzled by this guy pedaling by on his bicycle.
Ok, so they didn’t pay attention every second…
but they were actually a wonderful audience!
Playing some blues with Chuck Umsted
April 29th, 2006
The campground in Sherman, Texas turned out to be quite nice and very cheap to boot. I got to park right on the shore of Lake Texoma with a pleasant view. There’s only one other rv camped here so I kind have to place to myself… The second photo is the view out my picture window.
Home Sweet Home
The view from my living room window
April 28th, 2006
Once I got to my mother’s house in Ozark Mo. I started the cleanup in earnest. She and her husband Joe got me set up with a fan, a shop vac and a dehumidifier unit and after a day or two everything was fairly dry and there was only a slight mildew smell to contend with. A little carpet cleaner and an air-freshener helped clear that up pretty quickly. I called Kevin the mobile rv tech to come and assess the damage and repair whatever was necessary. I was fearing a number in the thousands to redo the plumbing system. He spent a long time inspecting all things plumbing on the unit and declared everything sound and without leaks. I said, “then why did everything flood???” and he, after further analysis, decided that the water pump had a 50 lb pressure limit and the campground probably had 80 lbs of water pressure. The pump has a built in safety valve that just opens up when the internal pressure goes over 50 lbs. It seems like he was right because I haven’t had any trouble since. (Yes, I bought a pressure regulator!) This information cost me $110 but I didn’t mind paying it because it kept me from fearing that my water systems were faulty, plus Kevin gave me some quick rv lessons and tips before he left which have proved very useful. I spent several pleasant days with my mom and Joe before taking off for Sherman Tx.
April 27th, 2006
The trip started out on a less than perfect note. The Elmhurst police, contrary to what a nice lady at city hall code enforcement promised me, won’t allow overnight parking of an RV on city streets. They said that they don’t want Elmhurst to turn into a trailer park. Gimme a break. Because I have a corner house, my driveway is very short and my RV doesn’t even come close to fitting. Anyway, somehow I talked them into 2 nights on the street, which is a day less than one really needs to load up a new RV… especially a mega-novice like me. I didn’t do too badly but I certainly did forget a few things in my haste. Plus, I left Elmhurst 3 hours later than I wanted to since I was so behind in my packing. This made me arrive in Springfield, Il right at dusk which is something I really wanted to avoid on my first night of trying to set up camp. I arrived at the campground a few miles south of Springfield after the office had closed and I was almost the only person in the campground, so I had to figure out everything on my own. I couldn’t get the hitch to release easily so I pulled like crazy and when it finall released my elbows flew into the bed of the pickup and I smashed both funny bones…aaahhhh!! I then walked into the trailer and proceeded to close my thumb in the door. Although in pain, I knew it was time to stop, drop and roll before I continued trying to set up camp. I hooked up the electric easily enough but when I went to hook up the water I discovered the dealer had failed to give me a hose - they didn’t even try to sell me one. Well, no water until morning I guess. I went to the local grocery store and bought stuff to make for dinner that wouldn’t require water and wound up having a very pleasant dinner after all.
Special thanks to my dad for helping me caulk up the roof of my rv before leaving to prevent water leaks and to Mike Ortiz for hooking me up with the plastic milk crates I needed to build my desk/workstation/recording rig where I am currently sitting and writing this.
The next day was beautiful and I decided that rather than drive on south into stormy weather, I’d stay and go for a bike ride. Good decision. I asked at the park office and the woman told me about a trail starting in the nearby town that lead into Springfield. The trail was paved and very pleasant and once I got to Springfield I saw that it connected to another trail heading west out of town which I took to it’s end. That evening a cooked a meal (with water this time!) and had a few beers. Good day all in all.
Friday morning I headed towards my mom’s house but decided to stop half way at a state park - in part to avoid a long day of trailer pulling and in part to check out what it’s like to camp in a state park, which I had heard is a beautiful thing to do. Well, the park was beautiful but boy did I have problems all of which were all caused by my own ignorance. Problem #1 was that I didn’t notice that I was running on fumes until I pulled into the campground, which was 10 miles off the highway, which is where the nearest gas station is. Problem #2 was that I found a nice easy pull-through camping spot. That certainly wouldn’t be a problem, except a campground host came by and informed me that it was a reserved spot and I’d have to move - all of this after I’d already set up camp. Plus, the only available spots were back-ins and I was really hoping to avoid having to back in without help. I explained to him my gas problem and as I was doing so another elderly host came by and she said that her husband Earl that worked at the campground would be glad to give me ride to the gas station so I wouldn’t risk running out of gas on the way. I said that would be great. It turns out that Earl is a self-declared redneck and proceeded to pontificate on several subjects including how those f#@%in’ Mexicans are destroying the US economy. He is sure that his buddies would be working for $20 an hour if their jobs weren’t taken by Mexicans willing to work for $6 an hour. I chose not to suggest to him that he consider the possibility that the factory just might move to Mexico if they were forced to pay $20 an hour to Americans and then his buddies wouldn’t have a job at all. Actually Earl was very kind to me and that’s the irony of it all - some of the most close minded people are very good folk if things fall within the scope of their limited view. Apparently Earl decided I fit inside his worldview, so I was OK. He decided to take me to his house to get a gas can and then go to a good cheap station near his home. We wound up getting caught in a major construction traffic jam and it wound up taking us an hour to get back to the campground.
When we finally returned, the true owner of the site had arrived and was waiting, somewhat impatiently (but understandably), for their spot. I moved my rig as quickly as I could into another vacant spot (by this time I’d figured out how to interpret the vacancy signs, although the campground host confessed he barely understood the system himself). I walked up the host station to tell them where I’d moved to and to pay for the spot. That took about 20 minutes and when I returned to my site I noticed that water was gushing out of the bottom of my rv. I ran and shut off the water connection and crawled underneath to see what I could see. I could see where it was pouring out but that didn’t tell me much about why it was doing it. I went inside to see what I could see and as soon as I walk in I stepped into a flood. It was like someone had put a hose into the trailer and let it run for 20 minutes. I figured I’d blown out the plumbing with the super high water pressure at the campground. No one, not the rv dealer or the folks that sold me the connecter hose told me that I’d need a pressure regulator to protect the rig from high-pressure water supplies. They both knew I was a super-novice and could have (or should have) made a sale of a regulator. Failing to buy the $8 part cost me $110 and a lot of grief. Fortunately the bedroom area wasn’t affected so I could sleep dry. I sat outside, drank some wine, went to bed and headed on to mom’s house in the morning.
April 23rd, 2006
