On the road to preparing for the road

The past week has been full of little improvements that will make our road trips more enjoyable. We got new license plates with the Michigan State Parks pass and have done some deeper cleaning.

Pat re-plumbed the LP gas connections and tested the water heater. I thought our water heater at home was hot, but this one is more like our instant-hot! Wow! While this would be a simple couple-of-hours task under ordinary circumstances, there was a lot of, er, uh, "creative engineering" that had to be corrected  modified. I just don't think a small propane leak is something I want to live with. I'm crazy paranoid that way. All of this was much more fun that it should have been because the LP tank is a regular gas grill tank located in the travel box on the bumper, NOT the original tank that lies sweetly in its own little compartment with its own little door. We wondered why this modification had been made and the original tank hadn't been replaced until we priced the new tank. 

A generator would make life on the road much easier. There was much weighing the advantages of a portable generator or an installed RV generator. We settled on finding the generator that would fit in the generator compartment behind the driver and get fuel from the gas tank. Yes, there is only one generator that will do that and it is bloody expensive. We'd been calling around to various Craigslist ads for generators and finally early Sunday evening we made arrangements to buy a gently used generator - a Onan Mircolite 2800 - on the east side of Cleveland! So the boys and I jumped in the minivan and took off.

By the time we got back home on Monday afternoon from the generator mission the new shocks were on the doorstep. It's always something.