I’ve not done much blogging for the past week, mainly because I’ve been working with some pictures from our trip around the International Selkirk Loop. Navigate to the picture album and I’ve put up several picture collections from the trip. I’ve at least one more set that I want to do of miscellaneous pictures. Maybe that’ll get done tonight and maybe not! I’ve got a new blog to get started for a favorite family member. More on that in a future post.

While we were on the trip, Nina remarked several times that the fridge didn’t seem to be keeping things very cold. We had a thermometer in the fridge that was registering between 40 and 50 degrees, in the acceptable range, but Nina’s temperature sense told her that wasn’t right. I tend to believe devices and gadgets. She tends to go on experience and in this case, the experience was right. When we got home, she brought the temperature gauge from the motor home fridge and put it in the house refrigerator. It said that our refrigerator was set at 20 degrees, definitely incorrect. So, I took the motor home in for service. They called to say that the control unit was not working correctly and a new replacement was about $1,000. I asked if they could please look to find a reconditioned unit. They’ve located one which is about half the price of the new unit. We will get the motor home back sometime late this coming week. That means we won’t be going anywhere in the motor home for another week or so.

The first camping trip of the year always brings out a list of things we should have brought with us on the trip. This one was no exception with the screen tent topping the list. When the motor home gets back, we’ll do some repacking to make sure the items we want to have with us are packed.

Also on the trip we were checking out gas mileage. Driving on the freeway around 55 mph towing the Tracker yielded mileage of around 9.2 miles per gallon. Based on the gasoline prices, that came out to be about $0.47 a mile just for gasoline. As I remember, we get about a half-mile more to the gallon without towing the tracker (we’ll be checking that out in a couple of weeks). Most of the time when we’re on long trips, we just tow the tracker without really using it except when we get to our destination. The plan is to take a couple of somewhat local trips without towing the tracker and see how that works as well as what mileage we get. It may be we can leave the tracker home and if necessary, rent a car at our destination. We’ll see how all that works out.

Future planned trips include going up to Spencer, Idaho (probably taking granddaughter Danielle with us) to an opal mine, a few days in Yellowstone Nat’l Park, a trip to Craters of the Moon Nat’l Monument, and perhaps fossil hunting near Delta, Utah or geode hunting near Dugway, Utah (we’ll probably want the Tracker with us for that one).