Tuesday, April 5, 2022
This marks the start of a new kind of cruise- a Land Cruise, in our Land Yacht. We are taking our 2020 Winnebago View 24D on it’s first big cross country trip. We are the second owners of this RV, with the first owner having put just under 9000 miles on it in one cross country trip. One impetus for this trip was to look for possible viewing sites for the April 2024 total eclipse of the sun, which will cross a swath of North America from Texas to Maine. The duration of totality will be longest in the southern latitudes, so we will be looking for places between Ingram, TX and Killeen, TX. It just happens that Janet has an aunt and cousins that live in that part of Texas. Ben has also wanted to tour Death Valley and Joshua Tree National Parks in the Spring, before it gets too hot. Janet’s brother Jack then invited Ben to join him and a fellow log house builder to fish for Tarpon in late April, so we decided to make it a big RV trip. After the fishing trip in Florida, we plan on driving up the East Coast to visit Janet’s sister Terri in Delaware, and our son John in New Jersey. Janet has more cousins in Tennessee, Oklahoma and Missouri that we’ll plan on visiting, and Ben’s older brother Arthur lives in Rochester MN, so we’ll try to visit all these relatives.
Today, we drove to visit Janet’s brother Jack and his wife Sharon in Onalaska. Scattered storms were blowing their way through the region most of the day, but somehow we managed to dodge most of the rain, contending only with winds gusting to 45mph as we drove over the Deception Pass and Dwayne Berentsen bridges. Fortunately, our RV managed those with confidence.
We left home around 9:30am and made a detour to the Coupeville transfer station to weight our fully loaded RV to see where we were at. The scale weight was 12,040 pounds. The door sticker on our RV shows a GVWR of 11,030 pounds, so we are 1,010 pounds over. We are packing our old Hensley Arrow trailer hitch, which Ben is delivering to a buyer in Fairfield California on Friday, so that represents about 300# of our over weight budget. We are also packing an extra 30# propane cylinder mounted to our ladder on a modified bike rack in case we need to run our generator and air conditioner for extended periods of time. The propane capacity of this RV is only about 7 gallons, and that tends to be the most limiting resource for extended boondocking stays.
We also have a lot of canned goods in the pantry and full fuel and water tanks, but it’s hard to imagine that most RV’s aren’t in a chronically overloaded state. We will be monitoring the tire pressures and temperatures carefully, since those would be the first signs of an overloaded state problem, besides handling. Be did modify the RV by adding Sumo Springs to the front and rear suspensions, which have noticeably improved the RV’s handling characteristics.
We made a slight detour to stop for diesel at a Union 76 Station in Arlington that the Gas Buddy app showed was selling diesel for $4.99. Due to the war in Ukraine, diesel prices spiked to nearly $6.00/gal although in western WA, the average prices have been around $5.30/gal. This 76 Station took us a couple of miles east of I-5 and onto Hwy 9, which prior to the construction of I-5, was the main north/south thoroughfare in this part of Puget Sound. It turned out that the Gas Buddy price was wrong. With credit cards, the price was $5.199, but that was still a decent price for diesel.
We opted to follow HWY 9 south through the countryside and suburbs of Arlington, Marysville and Everett, which proved to be uncrowded, scenic and easy driving aside from many traffic circles. It surprised us how much farmland and woods are still around along this HWY 9 corridor between Arlington and Bothell. There were a lot of cute farms stands and nurseries along that route. It was certainly more enjoyable a drive than being stuck in I-5 traffic looking at light rail construction debris and homeless camps.
This linked up with I-405. There were areas of significant traffic between Bothell and Renton, but fortunately, our Good-To-Go pass allowed us to use the Express Toll lanes for free, bypassing all of the traffic backups. Usually driving straight down I-5 involves getting jammed up in traffic in Marysville, Lynnwood, Everett, U District, and Downtown Seattle, so this detour ended up being much preferable.
We made a second diesel stop at the Costco in Lacey WA, where the diesel was $5.159. We also picked up a pepperoni pizza and took a lunch break in the Costco parking lot.
We arrived at Jack City around 4:30pm, just in time to go for a walk up the hill to visit “Ruffie” a wild male grouse that has developed a close relationship with Jack since the Coronavirus pandemic broke out. This bird first started behaving aggressively towards Jack while he was out chainsawing trees for fire wood sales. Now they play nearly every day and Jack has Ruffie eating out of his hands.
Sharon treated us to a nice vegetarian lasagne, home baked bread and salad for dinner. We spent the evening catching up and spent the night “mooch-docking” in their driveway, plugged into a 20A 120V circuit for power overnight. This allowed us to conserve our propane by using a small electric space heater to stay comfortable as the temperatures dropped into the mid to upper 30’s overnight. Unfortunately their Wifi signal was not strong enough in the driveway to allow any video streaming and cellular signal was also very marginal. Ben did pack a small portable Wifi repeater, but after saying good night, we didn’t want to disturb Jack and Sharon again.
We racked up 227 miles today.
