Motovational Change$

 No, not those kinds of changes.

Did you miss-read the title? That’s an ‘o’, not an ‘i’, because I’m taking about the hard facts of transportation, not the squishy stuff of mental attitudes.

Over the past couple years of radio silence our transportation platforms have morphed to more closely match our current needs.

First and foremost, when this medical crap started we quickly realized that if it (the medical crap) was going to be long-ish term, not a sure thing initially, we were going to need two daily drivers. I guess, technically, The Van can, in some cases, double as a daily driver, but there were two main factors against that. The Wife was never comfortable driving The Van and would only do so under duress, and frankly we already had more than enough duress in our lives at that point than we needed. Also, when 80% of the many – many – (so many –) medical trips were to a downtown location peppered with van-unfriendly parking garages and no street parking, The Van was not a viable option.

So, towards the end of 2023, when we knew I wasn’t going to croak in the next few months, well – not from the cancer anyway, we placed an order for a Ford Ranger Lauriat FX4. (A decision that was made easier in those uncertain times by the fact that when you order a new vehicle, at least from our Ford dealer, you don’t have to take delivery of it and they’ll give your deposit back.)

Because of supply-chain and other lingering COVID issues it took nearly 6 months to get the truck delivered to us. (for reference, it takes less than 24 hours to build a Ranger once it finally makes it to the assembly line.) But once it finally showed up, HOLY CRAP! I had no idea driving could be so easy!

Adaptive Cruise, Lane Keeping, Emergency Crash Mitigation, Cross Traffic Alert System, 360 Degree Cameras, real-time TPMS, Dual Climate Zones, 3 presets for seat and mirror positioning, a 12” Center Console Screen, Electronic Dash with proper gauges (coolant & trans temps and oil pressure). If I want to check on the truck’s location, how much fuel it has, the tire pressures, washer fluid level, how many miles before the next oil change, or lock/unlock the doors, start the engine, stop the engine – I just open an app on my phone. And I can use the same app to initiate a trailer-lights check sequence while standing behind the trailer(s). None of this stuff was available on my 15 year old van, nor on The Wife’s 9 year old car.

To give the car, a 2014 Escape Platinum, a rest, and because the Ranger is fun and easy for either of us to drive, we started using the Ranger as our daily driver for supply runs as well as all the medical crap, but turns out it was already too late to save the car.

At 9 years old It had a lot of miles on it, north of 120K, before the cancer stuff (for comparison, when we sold The 15 year old Van recently it had just under 100k on it), being our only daily driver, and with all the 4 to 6 hour round-trips for medical crap, sometimes up to three times a week, the miles continued to rack up at an alarming rate until one day, 30-40K miles before we were hoping, the car crapped out. (Of course it chose to do so right when I was 1300 miles away with the Ranger making what turned out to be the final visit with Mom.) Fortunately it happened in the driveway, throwing an overheat alarm within 20 seconds of starting the engine, but it still left The Wife stranded with nothing but The Van for a week and a half until I could get home again. And nobody delivers groceries this far out in the boonies, so it was a big deal!

During that week and half The Wife managed to get the car towed (via The Van’s freshly expired Good Sam Roadside policy which she had to sort out first) to the dealer, but it took them a month to finally admit they had no idea what was wrong with the engine and their next move would be to put a new one into it. Clearly not a financially viable option.

So this is how we ended up acquiring two brand new vehicles within the span of 5 months.

We ended up buying the car, another Escape, an STline version, out of the inventory on the lot, and it’s nice, a hell of a lot nicer than most vehicles we have owned in the past, but not Ranger nice. So in addition to being our medical ferry the Ranger is also our daily driver, (which in our case, once you subtract the medical trips, is a supply run once every week or week and a half), while the Escape gets used for short (40 to 70 miles round trip) runs once every couple weeks unless I have the Ranger out of town.

In fact, after ten months in our hands the Escape has a grand total of 2466 miles on it while the Ranger has racked up 22,641 miles in 15 months. (I just stood right here at the keyboard and used the Ford Pass app to reach into each vehicle to get the current mileage.) Now to be fair, in that 15 months the Ranger has been through hell millage wise.  In addition to our supply runs and the medical trips the Ranger has also been to Michigan and back twice (Once for a visit and once more a month later for Mom’s memorial service), Vegas for a wedding (Not my choice, but what could I do? It was The Daughter’s), Bell Buckle TN for another memorial (cousin’s wife this time), and just this month, Grand Junction CO to pick up a trailer.

The Michigan visit to see Mom was the first long road trip after the cancer shit started and I wasn’t sure what sort of stamina I would have for the drive (nope, still not getting on a plane!), so I left a few days early. But it turned out I was up for my usual driving stamina and made it to the I-55 welcome center in the boot heel of Missouri the first night with no problems. (why stop early? It's not like I have anything else to do so might as well keep driving.)

Obviously, a change in vehicles like this also meant a change in camping rig(s), but that’s for another post – actually probably two posts – maybe more.

Speaking Of Elmer - -

 

Two years ago, shortly before he died, Elmer was trying to message The Wife but his old, fat fingers were having a tough time of it, so she asked him to call her instead. (Elmer could not multi-task so wouldn't answer his phone if trying to do something else on it at the same time.)

This morning, Father's day 2025, The Wife went out to her barn, laid her phone down, and a few minutes later came back to find this on it.

(Not me! I don't go in her barn unless invited, and I wasn't invited this morning.)

Cha – Cha – Cha – Changes

 I hope I don’t have to pay royalties to the David Bowie estate for that title!

Anyway - as much as I felt the whole world should have stopped right along with me when I embarked on my cancer journey – it didn’t.

Life went on and things moved forward.

A couple of the more momentous changes for us were the loss of The Wife’s father and my mother. Not unexpected in either case, but still, a loss to be felt.

Elmer, The Wife's dad (and not his real name), spent his last few years living with his middle daughter in Missouri and died under hospice care in his room at her house.

Elmer was a good source of amusing and outrageous stories, some of which have turned up in this blog. And while he was sometimes exasperating, his antics are missed. (Although, much to thier horror, certain traits of his are becoming evident in his daughters!)

He was an avid fisherman (Once his car rolled down the boat-ramp into the Missouri River [typical Elmer stunt] but when bystanders tried to save it he hollered “To hell with the car, it’s insured – save the boat!”) and often said that when he died it would only be fair to feed him back to the fish that he had eaten so many of.

Well it turns out the nosey parkers in various government offices didn’t like the idea of us chucking his body into the Missouri River at all! So we ended up dumping some of his ashes into the Gulf Coast off of Palacoius Tx where he spent so many winters fishing. A lot of his fishing buddies turned up on the chilly, blustery day to see him off.  In typical Elmer fashion, he thanked us all by wipping around in the wind and getting little bits of himself all over everybody.

My mom also died during those two years.

She was the daughter of Irish immigrants who worked as a taxi driver and upstairs maid in Belfast for around 10 years to pay for thier passage to Halifax, and then on to Detroit, around 1920-something before finally marrying and starting a family.

Lucky for us - her kids - Mom got our grandmothers gentleness and tolerance and not her father's unbending hardheadedness. Also lucky for us kids, though she grew up a city girl, she quickly took to dad's country outdoors lifestyle. (There's a family story that the first time I, the oldest of three, went camping was in a borrowed tent when I was two months old.)

Mom did inherit a touch of the old-world pessimism and for her, aging wasn't an adventure or even a part of the trip to be accomodated, it was an inevitable evil. Don't  get me wrong. She, a gregarious, outgoing, greatful, and generous person, fully enjoyed most of the 7 or so years she lived in a very nice senior comunity but she was wore out and frustrated by aging and more than once commented that she hoped she didn't live to be 90.

She didn't quite make 92.

The senior center she lived in was one of those where you pay a healthy up-front fee plus monthly rent, like buying into an exclusive club then paying regular dues. Once you're in (and you have to interview and pass muster first), they will never throw you out for financial reasons, and the facility offers any level of support you require.

Fortunately, for her and for my sisters who bore the brunt of her daily familial care, especially onerous towards the end, Mom went from independent living, to assisted living, to memory care, to hospice in the short space of about 5 months.

I was fit enough to travel in August of 2024 (road trip since I'm even more adverse to flying in a tube full of [shudder] people now than I was when I first retired) and was able to visit with her for several days, before returning in September to bury her.

With the loss of Mom, the last of our parents, my generation are now the atriarchs (be that M or P) of the family.

Something to ponder. (Holy Crap! I'm not near grown up enough to be an atriarch!)

When I was a boy and young man, the job of making the family reunion communal stew in a very large pot over a fire, something that takes all Saturday morning, was taken care of by our fathers. Eventually the job was passed on to my generation, who have since passed the tradition on to our kids, and the grandkids are standing by. 

Time moves on even if you don't.

There's been a few other changes around here over the past two years (I guess technically the blog title of "Travels of a Rambling Van" is a lie now) but this post is longer than it should be already, so that will have to wait.

It's Been 16 Years But It's Time to Break Up with Viasat

OK, let's try this. - I wrote this a couple years ago but never posted it because - well, you know - I was being a shit. After reading through it again the other day it still seems relevant. So instead of wasting it I thought I'd throw it out here now with an update tacked onto it.

Those antennas have been up there on the barn for sixteen years now.

The further one is DirectTV while the one closest started out as Exceed then they were bought out by the current service, Viasat. (satellite internet service)

Well we just got a pleasant little communication from Viasat couched in celebratory terms designed to make us feel special while we're getting screwed (Damn marketing people!), essentially saying, though our relationship is and has been working just fine on the current Ford-Pinto basis for a decade and a half, they, with no input from us, have unilaterally decided to take our relationship to a Cadillac Escalade level.

That’s right. They jerked our plan out from under us and tossed it in the trash with one slimy hand while with the other jeweled and bedazzled hand presented us (Ta-Da!) with the new alternative.

How exciting!

Wait! What?

You see that Liberty 25 bit on our current plan? That’s 25 GB of data and in 16 years there have only been a handful of months when we received the “we’re about to throttle your speed” notice for getting to close to the limit, and then only within days of the limit resetting anyway. (that Free-Zone crap is 3 hours per day of data-usage that doesn’t count against our 25 GB, Of course it’s between 0200 and 0500, hours when normal people [yeah, one of you readers out there knows who I’m NOT talking about!] are not much interested in browsing the Amazon shelves, reading the Yahoo news-feed, or researching the latest – unnecessary – updates.) So why in the hell would we suddenly be interested in the 60 GB of data they are so gleefully offering us in the new plan? (And that 12 Mbps claim -yeah right! If that was really the case why all that small print telling us all the reasons it might - will - be slower?)

Oh, and as an added bonus we have to foot the 25% increase in cost out of our own pockets for the privilege.

Well, unfortunately for Viasat their timing SUCKS.

Just last month we were without Viasat services for nearly two weeks waiting on a simple replacement power-puck for the modem. During that blackout period The Wife and I started playing around with the 5 GB of hot-spot data that comes with each of our T-Mobile basic Magenta accounts, (That’s 5 GB per phone for a total of 10 GB.) and could see no discernable difference in data-speed between the cell and the existing Viasat services.

THEN, a few weeks after getting Viasat up and running again, (We, of course received no credit for the lost time.) it cratered all over again. This time the modem was powered up and working but it looks like the transmitter/receiver up on the antenna has crapped out. So now we have the added privilege of paying for another call-out plus parts just to get back on air again with our new, and more costly plan.

So let’s review here. For a 25% percent price increase to $100 per month Viasat is offering us more data that we don’t need and didn't ask for, but by adding a $10 rider to each of our phone-plans we can bump our combined hot-spot data from 10 GB to 30 GB, which past history says is at least 5 more than we need, and the hot-spot speeds are comparable to the Viasat speeds we're used to.

Oh, and if that’s not enough hot-spot data it only takes $5 more per phone to bump us up to a combined 80 GB of hot-spot data! That’s 20 GB more than the “upgrade” at Viasat for significantly less cost!

Humm – carry the one – subtract the – Yep! Pay $70 less per month/$840 less per year and get sufficient data at the same speeds we're used to without worrying about cloud-cover issues?

I’m callin’ that terminate number right now!

And before you ask – no. I’m not allowed to cancel my service on line like any civilized person would want to. Instead I have to go through the recording at the call center and two different agents to actually break-up with Viasat. (And I SUCK at phone!)

And I’m not sure how this fits into a good business model, but they made it clear that if I go through with this I can’t come back for 180 days. (Yes ma'am, I understand and my hand feels properly smacked - and not in the good way!)

Oh yeah, and that line up there about no termination fees if I leave? Well I suppose that technically it’s true, but not actually.

You see, they are so pissed off about us leaving they want their old, broke, and obsolete equipment back, and if I want someone to come out and remove the transmitter/receiver from the actual dish - which they will graciously let me keep (The dish part) as a souvenir - it will cost me a $95 call-out. And if I don’t return the equipment to them within 30 days they will bill me $300 or so all over again for stuff I’ve long since paid for.

Yeah, we’ll skip the callout fee’s thank you very much.

But now the fun starts!

My longest ladder is still 4 feet short of tall enough so I have to get up on top of the roof to remove the transmitter/receiver from above.

But first a zoom-shot to see if I can figure out what tools to take up there with me, because I’m not Spiderman and this is a one-trip deal damnit!

I do have a platform on the side of the building that my ladder can reach.

And from there

I can step, very carefully, onto the roof.

And make my way, one short, shuffling step at a time, along the peak

Until I get to the end

 And the antenna

OK. Let’s see if, among all the stuff I brought with me in the stuff-sack tied off to my belt, I have what it takes to remove the transmitter/receiver.

Well Crap!

Simple philips-head screws but stainless isn’t always the hardest of metals and this screw has clearly been over-gorillaed in the past.

Even with a perfectly fitting bit I just couldn’t get it to back out.

So plan B.

Fortunately, anticipating something like this I brought a couple adjustable wrenchs up here with me so now I’m just going to take the entire carrier/trans-receiver assembly off the arms

And separate them from each other at the safety of my workbench

Where I had to drill way down into that one screw, obviously not quite as straight as I would hope, to get enough purchase for my screw-extractor to overcome the torque and corrosion.

 UPDATE June 2025: (I originally wrote this post sometime in late 2022 or early 2023)

We've been without a sat connection, and any sort of traditional internet, for over two years now and it's working out just fine.

In my case, I immediately started using my phone for everything and and typically only turn my aging laptop on once a month to update my spreadsheets and run backups, for which I don't need to go out on the internet.

The Wife has zombie-fingers making it difficult for her to use touchscreens so she uses her hot-spot to connect her laptop to the world, where she (especially during the hot months because she loves airconditioning!) trolls the Yahoo news-feed, watches funny videos with dogs, window shops, and orders groceries/houshold goods for curbside pickup.

For a portion of that two years I wasn't very active, or even very ambulatory, so The Wife spent more time inside than usual keeping an eye on me while using her laptop for entertainment, using more data than in the past.

The result being, we upped her hotspot to 40 GB (for a total bump of $15 per month) while leaving mine at the 5 GB that comes with the basic Magenta plan. So now we pay $150 per year for internet access through a hot-spot, verses $1200 a year for access through a satellite connection.

Kind of a no brainer!