Key West… A Small Hurdle! Nice End of the Day!



Helen and Sherry (who is traveling around the
country by her self in a Lance Truck Camper)

Monday night, during the night, we ran out of propane. That is in one tank. I wanted to see exactly on the gauge where empty was. When full, it read 3/4. In any event, it did run out and I switched tanks. Here starts the problem. The refrigerator was the only thing running when it ran out. I re-lit and it started, but it went off a few times during the day. Tuesday night, it wouldn’t stay lit on propane. It automatically switches to A/C, (if none, it switches to D/C). The situation here is that the camper battery will not sustain a long draw of current. Soon the battery was depleted! The only way to recharge the battery, other than solar panel is to run the truck. We went for a ride around Key West. After tapping the refrigerator gas valve, it was working  fine again. My neighbor Loren offered to let me plug into his generator. Boy, it is nice to have that full power! The fridge is now working “A One” and I have generator power. It was just another hurdle on the adventure.

State Park... Fort Zachary Taylor

I try to be positive in life, especially when I write the blog. We do have our stress moments as mentioned above. Today for example, I will be conducting a Berlin Water Works Board meeting at noon. That is done with the help of Skype. The problem here is with bandwidth. With my MiFi Verizon Jetpack 4G Lite, I use about 2Gigs an hour. The solution here is to buy time on the CampWiFi. That will solve the usage issue. The problem here is to stay online and do something on the internet until the meeting starts. If there is no activity for 5 minutes, it will disconnect. Once the meeting starts, Skype will take care of that issue. These little issues makes life interesting. It is not always “peaches and cream”. I am glad that I am knowledgeable in several different trades to handle what has come up so far for problems. The above was written before the noon board meeting. At the meeting everything went nearly according to plan. I did have to shut down the video portion because of (I think more people getting online after lunch. I was running on computer battery and truck camper battery and that ran low. I asked my friendly camper neighbor to start his generator and the meeting finished without further hiccups! So life is not always hunky dory, but we get over the hurdles.
I felt like unwinding after the meeting and off we went to the Navy side of the base to their private beach area. I like it here because I can park the camper literally on the beach. We took off our flip-flops and walked the edge of the water. We ran into this guy walking out of the water backwards. He was wearing fins with the rest of his snorkeling gear. I said to him “that's' the way to come out of the water”. He answered me in a deep foreign language. I could not make out his words. I than asked, “what country?  He said “Russia”. He had two Conch shells he found in his hands. He said in broken English “Cook?” We shook our shoulders. Now reflect a second and think! What is a guy doing on a US Navy base with snorkeling gear? Did he swim across from Cuba their country”s allies? Soon, he said “Sister” and pointed to a girl in a blue bikini. He than said “Stationed in Virginia Beach”. Boy I’d like to hear the rest of this story!
We had dinner in the camper on the beach. What a relaxing  afternoon! Paul Doucette, (Helen”s cousin) had told us to checkout “La Concha Hotel”. He said to go to the top at the bar and view the island from the tallest building in Key West. We did. Waiting for the sunset, we met another couple from NY. John and Giselle, the note worthy acquaintance here was that he, I think, bought the hydro electric dam from the demolition company that is tearing down the old Groveton Paper company mill in Groveton, just 30 miles from our home town. It truly is a small world! I did put a plug in for our two hydro rake manufacturing machine shops in Berlin. Got that Rod and Rick
That is what we saw and did!