Too pretty for words

We were pretty worried about leaving Whispering Pines. We've spent so many wonderful summers there. The whole area is just plain beautiful and we love the river for skiing and boarding in June and July. So coming out here the big risk was the unknown parks and finding a place to recreate. But we've pretty well scored a home run on both counts.

I wasn't wild about the Thousand Trails campground at Cultus Lake. It was OK but not even close to the quality of the two other TT campgrounds we have visited so far. And Cultus Lake was a big disappointment. Its pretty but it gets absolutely thrashed by weekend warriors and its really not big enough for more than about 4 or 5 boats to be on it without working it into a major frenzy.

The Holiday Trails campground at Bridal Falls however is another matter altogether. This place is seriously beautiful. We've lucked into a particularly large site which has room for the boat and truck and still leaves a guest parking spot. All of the sites have living privacy screens of carefully trimmed cedars. The campground is built onto the side of the mountain that Bridal Falls flows out of. That gives the sites vertical separation as well. We're near the back row so we don't hear any noise from the highway but even when I take Jorgito for his walk I don't notice a great difference in the noise levels as I approach the highway. I think a large part of that is due to the elevation of the campground relative to the highway.

During and after the move from Thousand Trails I spent a considerable amount of time doing bus repairs. We've had a lot of starter grief since we bought the bus. I think we're on #5 now in five years but the first 4 only lasted about 18 months in total and one of those puked in about 10 days. The one we are using now is an MT39 Delco gear reduction unit and it has been great by comparison to its predecessors. For the last month however I have been worried about it too. Occasionally when I turn the key to start nothing happens. Now from the driver's compartment its hard to say whether "nothing" is accurate because you certainly can't hear the solenoid click even when it is working. So in this case "nothing" means that the engine doesn't turn over for some reason.

Over time I have eliminated the front end of the bus (switch and relay) as potential causes for the problem. Its been a real bear to troubleshoot however because it is intermittent. There are a lot of solenoids and relays involved to get the starter to roll over but I had zeroed in on the solenoid mounted to the starter and was pretty certain it was somehow involved. I even pulled the starter while we were at Cultus Lake and looked for loose connections. I found a couple that might have been a little loose, tightened them and put everything back together but I didn't have enough tools to actually pull the solenoid. I was hoping I could nurse it back to Saskatoon and Quint's terrorist starter fixers but such was not to be. The morning we left Thousand Trails I got nothing but unlike previous occasions where a couple more tries would always yield a start, this time no matter how many times I tried I still got nothing.

So back under the engine I crawled and pulled the starter. The MT39 series are much smaller than the old 42MT starters but they are still heavy and awkward. Once I got the starter loose I left it connected to the cables and tried it from the rear switch. It was immediately apparent that the starter solenoid was drawing so heavily that it was tripping the breaker on the circuit that energizes it. So that meant that at the very least I needed to replace the solenoid and I was lucky enough to find an exceptional starter shop in Chilliwack where they don't just throw parts at a problem but can actually fix things. The bus started up right away with the new solenoid but then I had a couple of hard starts once it was warmed up. I'm hoping those were caused by a cube relay that got cooked by the heavy draw on the dying solenoid but I won't know until I have a chance to run it again on a really hot day. Some of that electronic crap likes to fail under heat and work fine when its cold so it is hard for an electronic piker such as myself to troubleshoot it. If it fails completely I can probably find where it has failed but when its just threatening to fail I'm not much use.

Some of you may be wondering about the outcome of the pink toenails. Probably most of you don't care to know but Jorgito's neck seems to have healed up completely. The last of the little pink rubber nails disappeared in the last week. He worked diligently at them for the first couple of weeks after we put them on but only managed to pull 2 or 3 off. That also seemed to keep his attention off his neck. I think we might have replaced a couple of them but no more than 2. All in all I'd say they were a total success and we've still got about 25 left - enough to do 2 more recurrences if necessary. It seems that treating him for fleas cured his auto-immune disease. Who'd a thunk it?