Today was the perfect down day, we went to the grocery store where I packed in the fuel to the tune of 69.241 gallons or $329.52 worth of diesel and shopped for food. Went for a hike on the coal trail then came back and did laundry. Made pizza subs but they burnt in the RV oven, I don’t think I’ve ever had anything come out right from that thing. It’s gotten colder out so it’ll be a chilly ride to Seattle tomorrow but only about 3 hours so easy time.

Lastly, for some reason, the park put us right next to the white trash of the park, if you have a new RV and you have the bright new LCD’s just know you don’t have to actually run them all night…

As we make our approach to Seattle, we cut the drive from Idaho in half by stopping for a few nights in Whispering Pines RV park. It was found on a Google search and was rated 4.2 which was higher than the others. The trip in was probably the windiest I’ve pulled the RV through and even without stabilizer bars on it pulled like a champ. The truck is hard to push around. We saw some beautiful areas but eastern Washington state is pretty desolate.

Got in and set up, the internet is fabulous and the park is sparsely populated. Not much to the town, tried to find a historical cemetery, didn’t work out. Was going to do dinner but couldn’t figure out what we wanted so it was grilled cheese and soup at the camper. Tomorrow will be a R&R day before a short jaunt to Seattle.

Farragut state park is a 4000 acre park in northern Idaho at the southern tip of Lake Pend Oreille in the Coeur d’Alene Mountains. It was used in WW2 as a training campus for the navy due to the size and depth of the lake. 300k sailors trained there over the course of it’s 30 months in operation. It was very pretty.

While the park was nice, I do have some complains with the costs. So Idaho is one of those ‘screw you’ to visitors charging double to enter the parks over what residents pay, $14 per day vs. $7. And they charge an additional fee for out of state for camping fees. So the cost for one night at an electric only (water shut off) came to something like $77. We can say we’ve been to Idaho and can also say we won’t be coming back.

We made a trip into Wichita today to do some exploring. Had an amazing time and got to see lots of sights, including Keeper of the Plains botanical gardens and the veterans park. We had lunch at Bite Me BBQ.

Left out at 6:15am and everything was good, damn brakes broke loose again but we’re in Kansas so not a big deal, need to do something about that before we get into the mountains, or at least trying to get out of them, it was good for the first 4 hours and then on and off, grrr. We got off I35 before the toll road, we were going to be early to the campground anyways and wanted to kill some time. So the last 60 miles to the campground were on a 2 lane blacktop through farm country. It was one of the nicest drives that I’ve had in a while. No one behind me and no one in front, and farmland all around. It was beautiful.

Another part of the RV that’s automotive is the car wash, and you don’t really know how big your RV is until it’s time to scrub it down. I bought a auto scrubber for this and the results were great. It’s good to get all the road grime off so you can apply another layer during your travels. Also did a video walk through so we know what it looked like before we left.

Took the RV out to the Isle of DuBois state park up on Ray Roberts to see how everything is working or not working on the RV and what we do have and what we’re missing. The brakes are still giving issues but I’ll replace the aft connectors. Everything seems to be working well and the park was amazing.

So having an RV requires maintenance skills that span several disciplines and specialties. The automotive portion include brakes and bearings but to keep things interesting the breaks are drum and electric. We’ve been getting errors about the trailer break system when towing the RV and it is a really annoying repeating beep. And as we’re heading into the mountains (and back down), it seems like a good time to inspect and maintain the braking system and repack the bearings while I had everything apart. While this is my first look at electric trailer brakes, it’s nice that you get two on each side to compare. We’ll be heading to Isle of DuBois tomorrow to shake down everything prior to leaving out.

We’re camped out in San Angelo state park in San Angelo, TX. It’s a desolate area that’s next to what used to be a reservoir (O C Fisher lake) named after Ovie Clark Fisher who was a US representative for these parts for 31 years. The lake is at 2.8% capacity. Yes that is a dot in there and yes it’s under 3 percent full. This is what the boat ramp looks like:

So water sports would appear to be out but that’s okay, we left the kayak’s at home anyways. We also left the bikes which I wasn’t super happy about forgetting especially as this is a biking state park, really spread out and no traffic because there’s no lake.

I’m not sure if I shared this before but I’ve been having a devil of a time with the electronic break on the RV and it all has to do with the connection to the truck. I saw it with the Chevy, drove the damn thing back from Ohio with the truck beeping at me about, and even had the same issue with our first outing in the new truck to Sulpher Springs.

What’s happened is the trailer side connection is corroded and the pins have separated and there wasn’t an electrical signal between the truck and the break. I thought I had fixed it but I picked the wrong side to shim up and well, still had the issue.

So I don’t have to look for it again, here is the wiring diagram for a 7-pin