I Am A Complete Idiot!

 OK, maybe not a complete idiot.

True, I am a man, and we all know man-brains can sometimes be - well, pretty idiotic. But on the plus side, as a kid I was often told I only had half a brain. So I guess that makes me a half idiot!

Anyway - this particular incident started out innocent enough, if a little unexpected. Then things went caddywampus in a hurry!

Within days of getting home from the family reunion the Wife got a feeling that she really needed to go see her Missouri based sisters. Which was pretty noteworthy since this would be the first time in nearly 20 years that she went anywhere more than a couple-three hours away from the property.

In a moment of stupidity, or was it idiocy?, I offered to, with barely a pause, turn right around from the last trip and drive her back up to near where I just was.

She quickly pointed out, in that all too familiar 'don't be an idiot' tone, that I needed to stay here and once a day toss some food out for the two cats that still hang around the property and water the toad that's living in the barn. (Can't put a stash of food out for the cats to live on because all the other critters swoop in and clean it up within hours.)

 Whew! Dodged a bullet there!

So that lead to me teaching her how to use Google Maps to plot her route, find hotels, and most importantly, locate restaurants. (I think I've said before that she's a food oriented person.)

Well, the Wife is not particularly tech-savvy so it was tough going, involving much repetition and taking lots of notes because she's not any better at remembering tech-stuff than she is at doing it. On top of that she has zombie-fingers so working with the phone can be chalanging. So, to steal a line from Harry Chapin's Taxi, 'the lesson hadn't gone too far'.

Frustrated and completely loosing confidence in her ability to make the drive on her own, not to mention the crippling anxiety she was already putting herself through just thinking about wandering unfamiliar roads on her own, she reached out to the Daughter (her stepdaughter), who runs her own pet-care business in Tucson. Offering to pay her way to and from Texas to spend a week visiting with her mom, siblings, and niece/nephew, as well as rent her a car and pay double her going rate to have the Daughter make the 4 hour round trip from family home to the property daily to kibble the cats and water the toad.

The Daughter could do it, but was already booked up until early October. Well, the trip to see the sisters was too urgent to wait that long (Hey, I've learned that when the Wife gets these feelings the best thing to do is just get out of the way!), which is what lead to discovering that there's a Rover living only a few miles away that was willing to come over once a day and refill the plates

and even water the toad. 

BTW, if you knew the Wife you'd realize just how important this trip must be if she's willing to let a stranger on the property!

So that’s how my idiocy came right back and bit me on the ass in the form of setting out at dawn one morning with the Wife in the passenger seat as I basicly retraced my route of a few days ago back up Texas, across Arkansas, and, by noon the next day, to a destination in Missouri.

The Wife is food oriented and it used to be, decades ago when we still did stuff like this, travel with the Wife wasn't about going from here to there, it was about going from restaurant to restaurant until we eventually got there. - It still is - Only now it's all take-away since she hasn't been able to tolerate sitting in a restaurant among people since about 2020. (We're  a good match in that way.)

I got her as far as a hotel in St. Charles, just west of St. Louis, where her sister from Columbia was going to pick her up the next morning, collect the other sister that lives near St. Charles, and head back to Columbia in the middle of the state for a few days.

It was a little after noon on a Friday when, after several trips, we got the Wife’s stuff shlepped up to her room (Crap! There was a lot of stuff!). Without even closing the door behind us the Wife tossed the last bag on the rented bed, turned around, and told me to go away and come back Tuesday to pick her up.  To be fair, she said this with gratitude and in a loving way as she shoved me back out into the hall and shut the door in my face.

Which is how I ended up, an additional three hours of driving later (the Ranger is 18 months old and already has 30k miles on it!), right back at the Lake Glenwood National Forest campground I had stayed at barely a week before. Different campsite this time, but one I've used before.

(Not sure this video of my firepit-in-a-box will work)

I did some other stuff while I was waiting for Tuesday to roll around, which I'll get to in another post, but on Sunday I transfered the bike rack from trailer to Ranger

and drove over to the tiny little village of New Burnside where there's an access point on the Tunnel Hill State Trail.

You might remember that this is where I turned around on a ride up from Viena along the trail a week or so ago.

My plan was, as is befitting for a person of my - um, accumulated wisdom, to take a leisurely ride on this, virgin to me, northern section of the trail up as far as Carrier Mills and back. A 20+ mile trip.

Just a mile north of New Burnside, tucked into the woods, sits this unexpected little trailside oasis accessible only from the trail.

The little village of Stonefort, named for a nearby stone defensive wall built some 1500 years ago, turned up right where it was supposed to be.

What was unexpected and  pleasantly surprising was the well preserved combo freight and passenger station from the railroad days still standing there.

If you sit and listen long enough, you can hear the faint echos of waiting passengers chatting, the crunch of steel-rimed wagon-wheels on gravel and the clank of the beam-scale as teamsters arrive to drop off goods to be shipped by the railroad, the barely perceptible tapping of the telegraph key at the station master's desk, the creak & squeal of the semaphor signal mechanism as the 'clear' aspect is changed to 'stop' -

Ah-hem! Oops! Kinda got lost there for a moment.

Back to the present - Each trail access point has bike-racks, a water-point, a picnic table or two and pit toilets. So let's top up the water bottle and use the toilet before getting back on the trail again.

Ok, so New Burnside, my start point today, seemed like a nice little village as I got the bike down off the rack and readied it. A few cars coasting down the narrow streets, a teenage couple walking by to stop at the swingset, swing for a while, then head back the way they came, a handfull of dogs running over to bark at me, backing down when I ignored them.

And maybe I was bribed by the presence of the station, but Stonefort seemed a pleasent, if quite, place.

But my next stop, and intended turnaround point, Carrier Mills, had a different kinda vibe.

Maybe because the State supplied watering point and pit toilets at the trail access point were, according to the tattered sign, turned off and locked up due to vandalism, although none was visible. Maybe because I never saw another person, or even moving car, while I was there. But that was not a town that invited me to linger! I didn't even snap a quick photo.

OK, here's where the idiocy really kicked in. After being thwarted by the dry water spigot, locked bathroom doors and the 'deliverance' sort of vibe of Carrier Mills, instead of the packed lunch I had planned on kicking back and eating there before heading back to the Ranger, I checked my map of the trail, squinting at my tiny screen in the bright sunlight, and thought,

'You know what!? I've been to the southern end of this 45 mile long trail a couple of times now, and from here the northern end, at Harrisburg, is just up the way. As long as I'm here I should just go ahead and knock that off too.'

- - - Yep, definitly a 'here, hold my beer.' kinda moment - - -  (que a hearty rendition of the Dennis Steven Wright song 'You're a Dumbass')

Seven and a half miles later, a fact I somehow managed to ignore when making the ill-conceived decision to ride on - but not as I was actually riding it - I gasped and wobbled my way into Henderson.

On top of everything else, the nicely shaded trailside bench on the south side of town, perfect for a half-dead old man who still thinks he's 33, was occupied when I creaked and huffed on by it.

The arrow is pointing at the trail.

Harrisburg is a good sized town of about 8000, much larger than the other stops along the trail, with a Walmart across the way and a whole string of businesses squeezed in between the trail and the main road.

I managed to avoid the temptation of the Dairy Queen and didn't quite need the Urgent Care facility, though it was good to know it was there.

There used to be a long siding here at Harrisburg. Because the city wanted more space for tax-generating businesses between the trail and the road, at least that’s my assumption, south of town there's a sudden jog in the trail as it switches, over the course of a road crossing, from what used to be the main line over to the siding which is a little farther from the highway.

Well into town, past the Dairy Queen but almost still within sight of it, I finally found an unocupied, shaded bench where I belatedly partook of my delayed lunch while trying not to slide off my seat and congeal on the ground like overcooked spaghetti.

Lunch even came with entertaimnent!

Just 20 yards away, tucked up under a tree, a guy was on his feet and head-first into the depths of a large yellow drybag, the kind you see on rafting trips. At first I thought he was just vigorously repacking his bag as he repeatedly attacked the contents with pistoning arms, but I don't care how big it is, it doesn't take that long to squash the contents down into a drybag.

My suspicions that this was not 'main stream' behavior were confirmed when he suddenly pulled a Freddy style goalie mask out of his abused yellow bag and put it on. Whenever someone went by on the trail he would lift his head up out of the bag and stare at them before diving back in. It was funny to watch some of the startled passerby's reactions!

On the map, the trail between New Burnside and Harrisburg appears to be right alongside the highway the whole way. And it is. But not the way you might think.

There's a nice, tree-lined buffer between the trail and the highway, so it's not like you're riding down the shoulder of a state highway. In fact it's actually quite a pleasant ride.

Well, it would have been if I hadn't bit off so much of a ride all in one mouthful.

You know how, when you're about to run out of gas and you start driving faster so you get there sooner even though that's the worst thing you can do vis-a-vis fuel conservation?

Yep, that’s me.

After lunch I reset Gaia to zero and headed back towards the Ranger which was eighteen and a quarter miles away and over 400 feet higher. And somehow I managed to do it in just two and a half hours!

Alright! Alright! I'll concede that, now that I've got the bike back on the rack and the Ranger pointed back towards camp, I just may be a complete idiot! -

Now, if only I could get Dennis Wright to stop singing in my head - - 

Ghosts Of Stickers Past

 

This is how the teardrop came. With large vinyl advertising stickers all over it. Well, at least o. Both sides and a small sticker on the front - you know what? That’s pretty much all over it, so I stand by my first statement.

Now I'm not anti-Timberleaf, they build a great product at a reasonable cost, but I am adverse to advertising for anybody, especially when I'm expected to do it for free.

So this is how the trailer looks after I removed all that vinyl.

But with a coating of dust and under the right lighting conditions, the ghosts of stickers past come out to play.

My trailer is haunted!

Cool!

I Broke My New Bike!

 

Got home from the family reunion, unloaded the still practicly new bike off the rack on the front of the teardrop, removed the protective handlebar cover - and found a handfull of loose shifter parts dropping out of it.

Well that's not right!

The tailpiece of the 1Up bike rack has this fancy ball & wedge setup for a rattle-free connection into the hitch reciever.

The wedge is tightened with this security-hex fitting. Only thing is, no matter how hard I crank on this thing, it has a habit of loosening up again. Sometimes as quicly as within a hundred miles of driving.

Not disasterous, except that a couple of photos ago you may have noticed that instead of a hole for the locking pin that prevents unauthorized separation of rack and reciever, the rack's tailpiece has a slot instead. This allows for adjusting the in&out position of the rack relative to the vehicle before tightening said ball & wedge.

All pretty nifty. But after a few hundred miles of driving, when ball isn't wedged anymore, the looseness combined with slot allows the rack to slide in or out the full length of that slot.

Out is no big deal, but when it slides in, like in this photo, the shifter bashes itself to bits against the front of the trailer.

Which kinda sucks!

Fortunately I still had the cut-off bit of the reciever tube I added to the teardrop, so I sliced off a 2" section of that,

Slapped some paint on the raw edges so nothing rusts too bad,

and slipped this spacer-sleeve over the rack's tailpiece before stabbing it into the reciever. This didn't fix the loosening ball & wedge issue, but now, because of the spacer, the rack can't work its way back into reviever far enough to bash the bike-bits against the trailer.

But I'm  still stuck with an inoperable shifter - which ain't good!

Now I'm not a bike repair guy and was expecting some serious wallet pain to be involved in rectifying the shifter issue, so was somewhat taken aback when I found out a replacement shifter costs less than $20.

It wasn't untill I cut the little nibby-thing that keeps the cable from unraveling off the end of the original shifter and unthreaded it from the tube, that I discovered the new cable was way too short so I had to swap it out and put the old cable in the new shifter.

Fortunately I had made the cut right up tight to the nibby-thing so there was still enough length to get the job done. But note to self, next time make sure to check cable lengths before punching the "add to cart" button!

The cable-adjuster on the rear derailer has a range of about 60 quarter-turns. Since cables never get any shorter during use, I ran the adjuster all the way in then backed off 10 quarter-turns before snugging everything up and clamping the cable down. 

To fine-tune everything after all was said and done I probably backed it off another 3 - 5 quarter-turns.

In case I ever have to do this again, rather than crush the fresh nibby-thing that came with the new shifter down on the exposed end of the cable and risk having to cut it off even shorter someday,

I put a bit of shrink-wrap on the end of the cable instead. Something I can remove without shortening the cable again.

I even managed to get all the bits and pieces back on the handlebar in functioning order! - Well, I'm not 100% on the throttle since I have the ebike configured as a class 1 so the throttle is disabled. For now I'm just assuming it still works.

I've put a fair-few miles on the bike since this repair and so far everything is good.

Now - what the hell am I going to break next?

Projects

 

This is Friday's delivery from Amazon, and all is right with the world!

(Actually this was several Friday's ago but I have been on the road and camping out of cell service range so am just now getting around to posting it.)

 Around our house completion of projects and chores was expected and pretty much the only praise and positive feedback we got most of the time for that was more along the lines of negative feedback if we fell short of expectations. I don't know how much of it is me and how much is the result of the environment I was raised in. Either way, I tend to measure my worth, and worthiness, based on the chores and projects I've completed. 

If I don't have at least a couple of projects on my list to prove my worthiness - well, that's too unbearable to even think about!

They don't have to be big projects, like building our house, though that was a great one! Little projects, like the half-hour it took to remove the manufacture's vinyl-stickers off the sides of the teardrop trailer, count too.

Today there's six waiting projects there on top of the tablesaw and I'm as happy as a pig in Valhalla - or something like that.

Starting at the top-left corner and working around counter-clockwise, there's a box of 6 ramkens.

I carry a small 1.5 liter presure-cooker in my trailer(s) which, in addition to cooking up 5 cents worth of real rice instead of using one of those $2 packages of highly processed gunk in about the same amount of prep-time, also does the warming-up job of a microwave without that pesky neccessity to be plugged into shore-power. 

I have been fashioning small 'pans' out of tinfoil to heat/cook things in it that I don't want laying directly in the water (presure-cooker + no water = explosion!), but that's awkward, fiddly, and heavy on resources, so I figured I'd try using an oven-safe ramken instead. (On-line you can only buy these in six-packs, so I now have two in each of my trailers as well as a couple spares.)

Next are 4 small mesh bags.

One is to be used as a more hygienic way of corralling my tooth-stuff than the plastic ziplock which kept everything perpetually wet. Another will keep my four perscription drugs under control while rattling around inside the food box. (The food box because it lives inside the cab of the truck when on the road - or at night when it's cooler and bears may be wandering - and inside the trailer, which stays cooler than the parked truck during the day)

I took the sewing machine to the other two mesh bags and made them even smaller to keep the ramkens snug and secure with the handy draw-cords when slamming down the road.

The next item is a new remote for our ceiling-fan because the old one lost the ability to turn the fan's light on or off. (I had to get the 8' ladder out and remove the bulb because it got stuck on 'on' and we can't live in our small space without the fan turning, so shutting the whole damn thing off at the wall-switch was not an option.

BTW, the new remote didn't help, so now replacing both the reciever up inside the fan as well as the remote to operate it has been added to the project list. (Oh goody! More projects to look forward to!)

Now we come to a couple of 14" soft-close drawer slides.

The slides that came on the two drawers of the teardrop work perfectly well. Except that they are hard-close. And when I say close, they really close.

So much so that I had to add handles to the drawers in order to get them open again without physicly damaging myself on the puney little cutouts provided as handles.

But they also close with a bang, no matter how careful I try to be, and unnecessary noise is just one more thing I'm sensitive to.

But the soft-close slides didn't work any better than that remote for the ceiling fan.

The drawers are square, the cabinet is square, but no matter how much shimming and fiddling I did, I could not get those slides to consistently shut all the way,

so I ended up putting the original slides, which work perfectly every time, back on and gluing a 'bumper' of open-cell foam to the back of the drawers to help deaden the 'slam'.

Two for four so far. Batting 500. Good for baseball, sucks for projects!

The next item is sports tape

for the Wife's 20 year old self-defense bat who's original wrap had turned into a sticky black goo.

After a lot of slicing, scraping, and sanding, the bat is ready for a new wrap.

The sock on the end of the bat is so that if your assailant trys grabbing it away from you they are left with a handfull of empty sock and you have more time for a low, knee-shattering swing to put them on the ground. Also, I'm not, by nature, comfortable with violence, but this is not the movies or TV. Once they're on the ground keep swinging until there is no longer any posibility that they will get up again. (Here in Texas it's a lot simpler to have a dead intruder on your property than a badly injured one.)

That final item is a Shimano 7 speed index shifter, but that's worth a post of it's own. For now let's just say the project-to-success rate has improved to 4 for 6. I've had better, but that will have to do.

32 Mile Bike Ride @ 98 Degrees!

Well - OK, it wasn't 98 degrees when I started the ride, but it was by the time I finished.

But let me back up a bit here.

I've been making the trip between Texas and the clan-home for 44 years now, and in that time I've marked up my map with a few spots for hiking, camping, and biking (And the general location of a fellow blogger's domicile!).

When heading back to Texas I often linger along the way (Maybe because the Wife doesn't always seem that enthused about me coming home?!), taking advantage of one or two of these spots or seeing if I can find new ones.

This year was no different.

Initially I had my eye on the Blackwell Horse Camp (you don't actually need a horse to stay there) between Bloomington and Bedford Indiana in the middle of the Charles C Deam Wilderness section of the Hoosier National Forest. Free, easy access, and a few nearby trailheads.

But other than the narrow corridor of the FS road, no engines, powered tools, or wheeled conveyances of any kind are allowed (even trail maintenance must be done on foot and by hand in all nationally designated wilderness areas) and the Lectric 3.0 on the rack was burning a hole in my pocket,

so, with apologies to a fellow blogger that I bypassed without so much as a long-distance wave, instead I headed further southwest of there to the Tunnel Hill State Trail, a rails-to-trails project in Illinois.

There are a number of places to jump on this 45 mile long trail. I chose the Viena city park about an hour south of where I spent the night before, because it has a large parking area with plenty of room for my diminutive, but larger than just a car, setup.

Where I'm standing used to be part of the tunnel too, but after a cave-in in the 1920's about 300 feet of the tunnel was opened to the sky (it's technically called daylighting, not an uncommon occurrence with old railroad tunnels) and a new portal constructed.

From there it's about 9 miles of peddling, generally uphill, to the trail's namesake tunnel. 

Just on the other side of the tunnel is the remnants of  the 'town' of Tunnel Hill created by the people that were digging the tunnel in the first place. There's also a parking area, water, pit-toilet, and picnic tables for those using the trail.

In the past this has generally been my turnaround spot since continuing on is to head downhill, which, for those of us without access to shuttle-rides, means an uphill slog to get back to this point before we can start the final 9 miles back to where the vehicle waits, but bolstered by the confidence of battery power this trip I continued on

towards the next access, and amenities, point at New Burnside

But before getting that far there's the offset remnants of a bridge over the trail where, back in the day, two railroads crossed each other at an oblique angle.

These were the days of rail-travel and here the town of Parker, with hotels, restaurants, and barbershops thrived on servicing those travelers.

But once the passenger cars quit running Parker completely disapeared back into the woods and is now known on maps as he Parker Site

By the way, the beaver dams that used to be between Tunnel Hill and the Parker Site are gone now,

but the scenery alongside the trail is still there.

 Next stop, Burnside, and

another trail-access point with amenities.

At this point I was pleased with how the ebike was working out on a long-ish ride and was tempted to  continue on another 4.5 miles to the next access point at Stonefort. But I didn't want to do something stupid (OK - even more stupid than being out here in this heat in the first place!), so forced myself to make this my turnaround spot.

But first, time for a bit of lunch to keep a growing boy going!

With that done, and nothing much else to do (you know - since I was being sensible - ohhh maaann, what a drag!) I headed on back to Viena.

By this point, around mid day, things were seriously heating up and I hadn't seen anyone else out on the trail in quite some time.

I guess I was the only idiot in the county that day. But I'm an idiot that lives in Texas and spends most every day year round outside and has learned how not to die in the heat - at least so far.

So, while the heat wasn't all that great, the ride was. First longish ride on the new ebike and I wasn’t disappointed.

I'll go into more detail on how the bike is working out in a future post.

But now that I didn't have the breeze of motion tempering the heat, it was HOT!

By the time I had the bike loaded back up on the rack it was still only mid-afternoon. I didn't  want to get too much further south before stopping for the night, and in this heat (it was 98 inside the trailer at that time and 104 when I crossed Arkansas the next day) I really didn't want to stop until sundown, which was a long ways away.

I knew of a State Forest Recreation site, Lake Glendale, about 15 miles east of where I was so my plan was to head on over there and kill the rest of the afternoon hanging around in shade of the day-use area.

I've stayed in the campground over there in the past, but it's a FCFS campground not that far from several medium-sized cities and this was a Friday, but just for grins, when I got there I thought I'd drive through the non-electric loops to see what was up before heading to one of the day-use areas to chill (metaphorically, not actually).

This recreation area is run by a vendor that gets a healthy percentage of the revenue. I was here close to Labor Day one year and not only were the designated campsites full, the vendor, with thier eye on profits, had campers scattered all over the place. In the day-use areas, the group site, out in the field next to the swimming beach, around the edges of parking areas, even in little clearings just barely off the roads. So I didn't expect much in the way of empty campsites on this summer Friday.

Well, as it turns out, I was wrong. In fact out of the 30 or more non-electric campsites not a single one was taken. 

So change of plans. Damn-fool idea or not, $10 with my geezer card got me a decent, though sweltering, campsite with nearby flush toilets and hot-ish showers tucked into the quiet of the trees.

Come morning, a Saturday, I was still the solitary idiot camping out there, but it wasn't getting any cooler so it was time to head on home where I could at least sleep in air-conditioned space..

That night's stop would be another rest area not too far into Texas, but I certainly didn't want to get there until the sun had been down for an hour or so, so I slow-played the drive. Taking the 'scenic' route down to the southern end of Illinois on State road 37 (I quoted scenic because by the time you get down close to Cairo there's not much scenic about it), then working my way across Arkansas on its smaller roads.

Yes, by pushing it I could have made it all the way home in one shot, but the Wife really doesn't like late-night visitors, even me. (Especially me?)