Iowa - Hudson - Hansen Dairy / Harvest Hosts

Night three was our first Harvest Hosts stop. We were in Hudson, Iowa at the Hansen Dairy. This is a same family owned 155 year old farm starting their seventh generation of owners. Wow. Beautiful spot and even better people. We enjoyed a peaceful night next to a small pond & ate wonderful ice cream fresh from the dairy. We also bought milk and cheese curds that Cindy pronounced “delicious.” The site  had showers in the tour building available. Nice, hot, longer shower! In the morning we took a neat tour of the dairy.

All in all an amazing stop making Harvest Hosts a great investment. 

Kentucky - Lexington - Cabela's

We stayed here on Wednesday night. It is easy access from I-75 and very close to I-64. Large parking lot and we were told park anywhere. There are a few dedicated sites on the east side of the building but we did not want to use up one of those large sites. They have a pay dump station. It was quiet with 5 others in the lot. There are a multitude of restaurants on the other side of the interstate, maybe 1/2 mile away. We left in the morning about 8. Very good stop.

Fashion Sense

These are my brand new Tundra Trooper Trekkers. I bought them for $19 at Tractor Supply, a place I never bought anything before. And maybe not again given what they primarily sell. Nice place though and they had these great boots. I expect to set new fashion treads that will last for a decade or more once the photos reach the lower 48 sometime this summer. Get yours now before they are $24.99 with all the demand. Cindy has actual cute ones!

Nuts!

We have been told to find some protective effort for the front of the trailer to prevent rocks from the highways in Alaska from causing damage to the finish. It was not an easy assignment. First there are no great solutions. Some people cover the front of the trailer with material, others do big “mud” flaps, some use chemical coatings for the trailer, some use elaborate slings between truck and trailer and no one is completely satisfied. So I explored several and decided on the 3-M protective spray. When I went to buy it had been discontinued because it did not always come off, problem avoided. So next was something called Rock Tamers, giant mud flaps that extend across the back of your vehicle. Studying them on line, talks with the company, gave them my truck and pertinent information, they said, would work great. Finally bought them and they came Friday. Spent yesterday morning installing. There are a LOT of bolts. Got it to the photo below and they blocked -completely blocked - access to the plug in where the truck and trailer connect. Not that the connection is important just lights, brakes, turn signals - that sort of stuff. I was frustrated. Packed up the whole thing today to return. No good third options, of course, not really any good first or second options in the actual world. Guess I will try some other thing or plan on filling holes!

Three hours to no where! This is as far as I got.

Short

I went out to the trailer at the storage unit last week and the running lights were on and nothing was connected. So I asked the question on the Oliver Forum and got excellent help. The plug that connects to the truck when you ought to have lights (and brakes!) had a short and I had to take the end off the plug, clean the connections and then sprayed it with electric connection cleaner. I could have replaced it but It cleaned up well so I don’t think that is needed now. Just another maintenance type of job I did not even know you needed to do. Always learning something. Anyway, no ghost lights. Yay.

Planning to Eat (Well) (3 photos)

Cindy has been figuring out how and what to cook in our very tiny kitchen. Often when we travel eating in is a sideline to our main activity - finding good restaurants. But not this time. Lots of areas with few services and being gone a long time and the expense of restaurants v home cooking are some of the reasons we are expanding our effort this trip. Cindy has been trying some new recipes like this Taco Soup, all dried and spiced well - just add chicken. Easy to do with our little grill. This by the way was a wonderful dish. It came from the Savory Spice Shop here in Raleigh. Why would you shop there when it is less expensive at the grocery store? Because the personnel and the products are excellent & fresh -buying stale spices is counterproductive no matter how cheap they are. It is always clean, always staffed well, they have what you need in the size you need it and they are just nice people. In fact, we may just declare that Savory Spice Shop is now the Official Spice Purveyor of Two Lane Touring. Kind of like royalty, I’ll bet they are thrilled:)

Lafayette Village
8470 Honeycutt Road
Raleigh, North Carolina 27615

Our Spice Chest for the trailer

Power

Our Oliver trailer has a shore electric hookup so when we have access to a plug we have full power. We also have 200 watts of solar cells that assist in keeping the batteries charged and that is the second system for power, the deep cycle batteries. We have an inverter but it rarely works. But 12 volt only and occasional 110 power is not always sufficient for us. We do a lot of camping with no power hook-ups and we can easily run the battery down as these lead acid batteries only are usable for a little less than half of the rated power. So we also have a generator. It is a Honda 2200i that is fully capable of being used for lots of power needs even more specialized equipment like a laptop. This unit is easy to start and is really pretty quiet. When we are inside the trailer you can barely hear it running. I keep it in the very back of the truck and it is secured with a strong cable that allows me to move it about 10 feet with out disconnecting. I just serviced and checked everything out for the upcoming trip and it works well. Glad to have the extra power because two or three days of rain in a row you a pretty much out of juice. So far well worth the investment. Maybe next year I will add lithium batteries to the trailer but not this year.

Thirty Days!

We are in the final stages of preparation for the Alaska trip but while lots has been done we still have a bit to go. The truck is ready, new tires, new other stuff and the bed is reconfigured and largely packed. The generator has been serviced, tested and reinstalled in the back. Reservations for a bear adventure, Sitka, some campgrounds, contact with a couple of churches in Alaska and notes to friends along the way have been sent. We are packing up on Sunday night the food we have been buying along this winter and will make a new list out of what else we need. The trailer is clean inside, bed made and lots of extras stored. We will add two new storage areas on Tuesday. I ordered material you spray on the front to prevent rock chips - from 3M and will take care of that next weekend. Clothes are now being sorted and cool weather stuff stored. Our friend, Tom, is joining us for part of the trip so we are setting up more reservations and adventures.

Yay for new tires.

The Shirts Have Arrived

We Have Reservations...

…for not about the Alaska trip. So far we have three days at a campground 31 miles into Denali where once you park you cannot move your vehicle for your stay. We have the night in Wrangle I wrote about last week and we have the trip to Sitka finally planned. It was an interesting process. Sitka has a National Park site, so it is a must visit. Access to Sitka is by boat or plane. But reasonably priced transportation is rare. Only the Alaska Marine Highway would really qualify but it goes once a week to Sitka and returns once a week - all at odd hours and lengthy travel times. Plus there is a funding challenge in Alaska for the ferry and they are not sure yet which routes will be cut. So that seemed sketchy. We finally figured out that we could take a seaplane from Haines AK, to Juneau at 7:00 AM and get there for a 10:00 commercial flight to Sitka with no over night in Juneau. Then on the return a 6 AM flight back to Juneau (only one that day) and get a touring ferry back to Haines at 4:30 that evening. So we have three nights on the island in a small cottage a short distance from the park and from downtown. Not sure yet how we will get back to the airport at 5AM. The red on the map is the whole island, Sitka has 18 miles of paved roads and would be a dot among the red. Should be cool - I never was on a float plane before! We are now working on a bear tour plan.

Little Adjustment

My truck has chrome trim rings on the dash and that was not comfortable for me as bright flashes of light can trigger migraines and avoiding that was difficult at times. So my grandson, Kellen, and I added changing that to our list of projects yesterday. And this is the result!

I now have nice, non-reflective white (matches truck) trim in the cab. Kellen is adapt and figuring out how things work and we were able to remove and, after painting, install these again.

Also if you are tracking the issue with the truck I wrote about twice already, the transmission to the fan clutch motor became a radiator that was leaking and causing the fan motor to act oddly. So new radiator, new hoses et al, tune-up (overdue) and new filters and the truck is ready except for new tires next month and an oil change. Hope that service will provide us with reasonably reliable transportation to and from the 49th state.

It is BIG

Wrangell–St. Elias National Park and Preserve is in south central Alaska. The park and preserve form the largest area managed by the National Park Service with a total of 13,175,799 acres an area that would swallow six Yellowstone National Parks. It also has the second highest mountain in North America as well as 9 of the 16 highest in NA. The Bagley Icefield covers much of the interior. The boomtown of Kennecott exploited one of the world's richest deposits of copper a century ago and the abandoned mine buildings are a National Historic Landmark. The park has two rough gravel roads, one about 11 miles on the very north and one of 68 reaching into a small village and the mine area. We have scheduled a night in a lodge near the mine as the 68 mile road takes a long time to drive IF you don’t get a flat tire. So we plan to drive in one day, stay the night and drive back the next. Ought to be a spectacular place. Last year this vast park had fewer than 80,000 people enjoy the space.

The long, long agonizing wait is over!

Tens of thousands of you have asked “When will Two Lane Touring get some T-shirts?” Actually no one ever asked that question but we can dream, right?

I however did ask my creative granddaughter, Addie, to design a t-shirt that CJH and I could wear on our trip to Alaska, or at least on the two warm summer days in Alaska. And she designed this:

I am just thrilled with how it turned out, Addie did a great job and Kellen did the technical stuff to get it all online etc. So we ordered a few in different colors and now all we have to do is wait for that warm Alaska summer. We are set. Here is a closer view of the art work.

The design on the front of the shirt is the tire/ camera aperture that is the wheel in our TLT logo.

NOT the Transmission (2 photos)

So, what a relief. It is still needing a repair, two actually, but the transmission is not only ok, it is in good condition. The whirring noise was not a slippage in the transmission but a faulty fan motor clutch that was intermittent. There was also three cylinders that were miss firing. So, now we are off to a different repair center where I leave the truck on Wednesday.

MANY thanks to Roy at Cottman Transmission. He not only diagnosed the problem he did so in the time promised and for no charge. Really! The shop is highly recommended on social media platforms and I can see why. He also patiently explained all of the process and answered all of my questions. So, a big thank you to Roy and his staff and a high recommendation for their shop if you are in Raleigh (or North Carolina for that matter) and need someone to replace a clutch or ascertain an issue in your transmission call Roy. Stellar job.

South Carolina - Columbia & Charleston

We stayed at two campgrounds, one near Columbia SC and one near Charleston SC that were marginal at best. The first was a small campground -cash only - with full hook-ups and semi-working wifi in a rather unfinished setting. Wood Smoke Family Campground was not much of a place to enjoy the outdoors but, it was close to where we needed to be on Sunday morning and it was inexpensive. I would stay here again in similar circumstances if there were no other options.
The second was a KOA in Ladson about 15 miles west of Charleston. This, too, had full hook ups but very poorly maintained. No covers on the sewer connections, for example. Our water spigot did not work correctly and there were high weedy patches and low standing water places on our site that backed up to the fence that separated the KOA from a rough looking trailer park. The KOA had lots of seasonal workers using it while they were in town for construction or other jobs. Then there were the military jets all night which would be fine if they had mentioned that in the park information.I wonder how they keep the KOA rating as it was not one that I have found typical of a KOA. I would not stay here again.

Eek!

So, we did a short trip to make sure everything was working well in the trailer. Good news, it was. However, we did uncover a huge problem, the official truck of TLT started to experience slippage in the transmission. It occurred both with and without the trailer and grew slightly worse from the onset of the issue until we got home. I stopped on the way to see if it was fluid and the Ford mechanic said it is a sealed unit, cannot add fluid. He thought it was the 1, 2 and R module (4, 5 and OD are separate) but I doubt that as it twice did the whirring noise at highway speed with no apparent reason to shift or change gears. So, thanks to a lot of time on the internet I have dropped the truck off at a transmission specialist this afternoon. Waiting on his call Monday early afternoon.

South Carolina - Huntington State Park

We are in the newer campground with concrete slabs to park on, water, sewer and electric and a very iffy wifi. We can hear the surf a very short distance away. The older “north” campground has more space and trees but fewer services. I had made an error in registrations but the staff were very patient and helpful (Thank you, Deb & Don!) and we got settled yesterday afternoon. We camped here is a tent in 1974 and in 198? with two kids and a large cumbersome trailer and that time for Thanksgiving. It was my favorite camping spot. Still pretty close call. Beautiful beach, nice ponds with alligators and lots of birds and a very unique old estate to tour. We took a 2 mile beach walk late afternoon between rain. Lovely. Brookgreen Gardens is across the street. Cost was about $60 with full hookups.

60 Days Out

The bed of the truck is being repacked. Tires were ordered today for first of May install. The trailer is just back from the hospital. A successful operation for a leak was done and water system checked, all is well. Also two minor recalls from Oliver were inspected but did not require repairs. We are restocking the Oliver as well and plan a short trip to Columbia SC for a new church opening Sunday and then a couple days at the beach to check over everything. We are also making specific plans for six of the National Park sites including Arctic Ocean, Bears, Abandoned Mine Town, More Bears and Glaciers on land and sea. I am also starting to look at specific birding locations for my “really want to see” list. It numbers 26 species. Not that all of them are realistic.

Scope

This is more than just the Alaska journey but it fits here. The yellow pins are places visited and photographed. The red pins are places not visited - the majority, or places visited and not photographed, ie pre-camera days. So all of the red pins are in our plans. The trip to Alaska will also include the parks in S/W South Dakota, one on the edge of Wyoming, two in North Dakota (and one revisit), as many as possible in Alaska and as many as 10 on the way home through Washington, Idaho etc.

Sorting, Cleaning, Testing and Packing

I was going to post this in Alaska but it is really the every spring task and some it it each time we travel as well. These are all things that go in the truck. I have just started to sort and replace, clean and repack things. We carry water, tools, generator, fuel, grill, hiking boots, air compressor, dirty laundry, spare parts, trailer hook up stuff - hose, power cord, blocks, and extras, like sleeping bag if it gets really cold, hiking sticks - lots of things that can get dirty. We store most things in clear boxes with lids.

First box nearly done, two things are here temporarily and a couple are missing. We do have extensive check lists to keep track. This is the shallow box that slides in a frame and is under the water hose, power cord, filter and electric surge protector.