Technomadic Bus Warming

[technomadia]

We made it out of Yuma and up to our friends in Lake Havasu City last weekend - our maiden voyage!  

The bus drove great, the engine temp never climbed more than a few degrees above 190, and other than a few drawers sliding open on corners and getting used to the steering having more play than I was used to, driving the bus was a blast.

The IR thermometer noted no unusual hot spots on the hubs, but it did register that the gravel lot we are parked on had a afternoon surface temperature of 176 degrees!  HOT!  Fortunately our AC units are working perfectly and our friends have 30amp hookups.

We posted about the temperatures, and got a reply on Facebook from our technomadic bus nut friend Ben Willmore that "only a crazy person would go to a place that hot"...  

A few hours later, he proved himself to be a crazy person.  Ben and Karen Nace (See: www.creativecruiser.com) pulled up in front of us in their Prevost, totally surprising us.  Our Havasu friends had been keeping their planned arrival secret too!

So we ended up having an impromptu bus rally for the 4th of July weekend.  Ben offered up some bus driving lessons, we spent some time out on the lake, and Ben & Karen light painted our bus and made us a giant gallery-quality print as their "bus warming" gift to us.

Check out the light painting in our post here: http://www.technomadia.com/2011/07/best-bus-warming-ever/

(We are now also using it as our avatar for posting here!)

This week I've been fixing / upgrading the plumbing with immense help from our friend Andrew here in LHC.  We discovered the pump had been hooked up backwards, and some of the piping was a mess.  The previous owners clearly had never used the tanks, only city water.

But now we've crafted a multi-mode system that allows one outside faucet to serve as a hand-wash station, pump-assisted tank fill, or tank drain. I'll soon post some pictures of the plumbing magic box we built to do this.

Anyway, it has been a great week getting to know our bus, nesting after being 'homeless' for a couple months and hanging our with some awesome friends.

We hope to coordinate meeting up with Clifford soon so that we can learn a bit more about the mechanical side of our bus's systems.  We are really eager to learn from the "Yoda of buses" as he was referred to on these forums.

Lovin bus life,

  - Chris (and Cherie)