Powerless!

I feel as though I have been neglecting the blog. But the truth is, we haven't had any power. On Wednesday, the major portion of the day was spent repairing the inverter. For those non-rvers, the inverter is the small piece of equipment in the basement that takes the power from the batteries and changes it into power that we can use inside the coach. And not just any kind of power, but the kind that runs normal things like the tv and computers and anything that runs on ac power. In order to work on it, all power to the coach had to be cut. All power....all day.


So, with the help of a couple of new friends, Ray and Louie, Doug spent the afternoon rewiring the inverter and voila.....we have power when we aren't hooked up to shore power. Ray took the time to answer all of my questions and explained volts and watts and amps in plain english. What was a black hole in my knowledge base has become quite light now. (Sorry about the fuzzy picture. But, I wanted you to see the wires that had to be replaced.)

That pretty much took up the whole day Wednesday, intermixed with some socializing. And yesterday, the rally exhibits opened officially. We didn't get a very early start as some of the coffee-and-doughnut people did. But by 10 am we were strolling through the exhibitor booths and thinking of ways to spend wads of money.

It didn't take long to realize that our wish list was a lot bigger than our wallets. So, we listed everything in a notebook that we thought we wanted and/or needed. Several hours later when we exited the tents, the list held over a dozen items. We had a cool drink (lovely day today) and went over the list carefully. A couple of items were laughed off the list immediately and a couple more just didn't make sense at this time. However, we were left with six items that we were truly interested in. So, Doug started talking to friends and neighbors about each item. Weighing the pros and cons of each, we eliminated three more. Hooray! That just leaves one expensive item, one mid range item and one not terribly expensive item. Two of them are necessary replacements for broken items in the coach and the last will be a quality-of-life improvement. Tomorrow, we will go back to the vendors and try to work some deals for the three things.

All of this important shopping was followed by a quick trip to the grocery store and another informal gathering to partake of snackies, beverage and conversation.

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