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"Bring Your House To Work Week"

    Austin, TX

    March 10-16, 2003

Story by Carey  [Debbie's comments in italics]

Upon returning from our maiden voyage picking up the rig in Portland, we parked the new-to-us RV behind my office for a while until our houses sold and we otherwise got our lives in order to be able to hit the road.  The first week was fun, with friends, family, and co-workers all dropping by for tours.

We also set about the task of learning the ins-and-outs of our new rolling home by living in it several days a week.  All the various systems and appliances in an RV really like to get exercised on a regular basis, to keep their seals fresh, lubrications circulated, and whatnot.  So this all worked out nicely, with us learning about things while keeping the things themselves happy.

Finally, I had a covered parking spot!

Here's a gratuitous shot showing the living-room configuration, for those of you who haven't had a chance to see it in the flesh, so to speak:

And here's the big basement storage bays, awaiting being loaded down with our junk:

I immediately started tracking down a variety of little maintenance items to keep the rig in good running order, such as fixing a little coolant leak by tightening a hose clamp.  Note that engine is right beneath the bed, which is perfect for a post-wrenching nap.

Out of curiosity, for a while I had us hooked up to an old power meter I had inherited from my grandfather.  I knew there was a reason I'd kept that all those years!  [Yeah--when Carey said he'd hooked up a power meter, I pictured something like the little yellow voltmeter he's so fond of.  My eyes bugged out when I opened up that back compartment one day and this POWER METER was whirring away in there.] The other picture is of the wiring to the passenger chair being repaired after it got pinched by not being quite long enough when the chair was rotated into "living room" position.  Not nearly as bad as it looks, but typical of the sort of little niggles one faces on a fairly regular basis with such a rig.

So that's the start of what we hoped would be a couple of months of transition period before we could "move in" and really start traveling.  Eight months later, that finally happened...but in the meantime, at least we had a home base with a blissfully short commute to work.

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