Our Wander Years

STS Hop 10: Madison GA to Cecil GA

Posted on November 7, 2015 by Sparky

STS Hop 10

190 miles, mostly via US 129 and I-75.

There was no epic GPS/Google battle on this one; it was a pretty simple trip down US 129 to Macon where we hooked up with I-75. The geography was mostly gently rolling hills and the weather, though overcast most of the way, didn’t produce much rain. Just a few sprinkles, which was a nice change after the wetness of the past week.

The biggest change was the temperature. The forecast high for Madison yesterday was 77, which was 10 degrees above normal. The high in Cecil was 89. And very humid.

I think we have arrived in the Deep South.

Country Boys RV Park

We stayed at Country Boys RV Park in Madison GA for 3 nights. My expectations of this place were low because it seemed to be the best of the bad bunch that were within driving distance of our friends, Steve and Elaine, who lived in Greensboro. I would say the park exceeded my low expectations. The roads were newly paved, the sites were gravel, but were large and level, and the hookups – including the 32-channel cable – were more than adequate.

But the park was trashy. It appeared that about 75% of the sites were occupied by permanent residents, some in RVs more than 20 years old.

I would rate this a 6 on a 10 scale. It would have been higher if not for all of the derelict RVs.

Categories: GA, Places, Routes, RV Parks, STS | Leave a comment

Charleston harbor tour

Posted on November 5, 2015 by Sparky

Ft Sumter

Arthur Ravenel Jr bridge

During our five days in Charleston we took two sightseeing tours – a combination bus tour of the city, a boat tour of the harbor and a walking tour of a historic mansion, and a “black history” bus tour that focused on the parts of the city that figured prominently in the slave trade and other major incidents in black history. This post is only about the harbor tour. Another post (or two) of the land tours will follow.

The harbor tour was a narrated 90-minute circuit of the harbor. The highlights were (1) Fort Sumter, (2) Fort Moultrie, (3) Patriots Point and (4) the striking Arthur J Ravenel Jr bridge. The bridge is beautiful and looks like the big brother of the Zakim bridge in Boston. It is an impressive entrance to the city, but is even more impressive from below.

Patriot’s Point is a tourist destination that includes hotels and various attractions, the most obvious of which is the USS Yorktown, a WWII aircraft carrier. It is now a floating museum which includes, on deck, numerous aircraft, most of which have nothing to do with naval warfare. We didn’t tour the Yorktown, but it is an impressive sight from the harbor.

USS Yorktown

To balance the Yorktown, the opposite (Charleston) side of the harbor has a passenger cruise terminal. The cruise ship in dock that day – the Carnival Fantasy – is as imposing as the Yorktown. In fact, it is both longer and has a much larger displacement than the Yorktown. Obviously, shipbuilding technology has come a long way in 60 years.

Fort Moutrie – which was difficult to see from the harbor – is more interesting for its role in the Revolutionary War (it kept the British out of Charleston) than in the Civil War (it was a fort abandoned by the federal troops before the shelling of Fort Sumter began, then was one of three place from which the shelling originated. It is interesting because it was, in the Revolutionary War, made of dirt and palmetto logs. This simple construction proved to be impervious to the British shelling and forced the British to attempt a landing behind the fort, which was also repelled. This was, arguably, the first American victory of the Revolutionary War.

The “highlight” of the tour, if you can call it that, was Fort Sumter which has an iconic place in American history as it was the site of the first shot of the Civil War. We could have taken a tour of the fort, but I assumed – correctly – that the structure there now bears almost no resemblance to the fort that was on the site in 1861. Three months of bombardment tends to destroy stone structures. Still, it was interesting to see the site and to get a feel for the geography (which has not changed).

It was a worthwhile investment of 90 minutes of our time. But not a “must do” if you go to Charleston.

Carnival Fantasy

Categories: Adventures, Places, SC, STS | Leave a comment

STS Hop 9: Charleston SC to Madison GA

Posted on November 4, 2015 by Sparky

STS Hop 9

270 miles via I-26, SC 6, SC 178, I-20 and US 441.

This was supposed to be a 256 mile hop, but we got embroiled in a battle between Google and our Rand McNally GPS. Usually when I plan a route with Google the GPS agrees with it, more or less. Not this time. When we got underway and made it to I-26, the GPS told us that we would be exiting after 43 miles while the Google route had us staying on I-26 for over 80 miles. We decided to stay on I-26. In retrospect, this was probably a mistake.

Even after we exited I-26, onto SC 6, the GPS continued to disagree with Google. We tried to follow the map directions but got confused somewhere along the line, then switched to the GPS which routed us on a very roundabout path to I-20. The net result was that the route became 14 miles longer than planned.

In a driving rain.

This was not one of the more enjoyable hops in our journeys.

Fortunately, the rain pretty much stopped before we did, so we set up in a light drizzle rather than a downpour.

Categories: GA, Places, Routes, SC, STS | Leave a comment

The Campground at James Island County Park

Posted on November 3, 2015 by Sparky

Site 29 at James Island

We LOVE Charleston. We have already resolved to return for a longer stay. We need to invest at least another week to explore it to our satisfaction. I will follow this post with several more about the city. This one is focused on our home for the past 5 days: The Campground at James Island County Park. It is a relatively small campground – about 100 sites – on James Island, just over the Ashley River from downtown Charlston. It was about a 10-minute drive to the center of the city. Very convenient.

And very comfortable. The sites are HUGE. The photo on the right shows our site (#29). We not only had room for the RV and the truck, but could have parked about 7 more cars on the site (there is more room in front that you can’t see). This is possibly the largest campsite we have ever had.

The park itself is huge – probably over 500 acres. It has, besides the RV campground, a primitive (tenting) campground, at least four shelters which can be used for group activities, athletic fields, a fishing dock, a climbing wall, a meeting/game room with a lending library and a large office staffed by very friendly park employees.

Grace taking a dip

It also boasts one of the largest and nicest dog parks we have seen anywhere. It may rival the dog park at Balboa Park in San Diego in size. And, unlike, Balboa’s dog park, it has beaches where dogs may swim. Needless to say, Grace availed herself of the opportunity to take a dip. Multiple times. Rusty did not.

The dog park from the opposite shore

The park is also host to the “Festival of Lights”, a holiday tradition in Charleston. The park roads are lined with hundreds of figures outlined in lights. Some are animated. Most are relatively small, but some are huge – like the 25-foot tall owl that marks the entrance to the campground. The festival was just getting set up – it doesn’t official open until November 13 – but portions of it were lit every night we were in the campground, as the setup crew tested the lights. The owl was lit every night. It was impossible to miss the entrance to the campground.

This was a great place to stay. If you are coming to Charleston in an RV, this is the place!

Owl at the campground entrance

Categories: Places, RV Parks, SC, STS | Leave a comment

STS Hop 8: Myrtle Beach SC to Charleston SC

Posted on October 29, 2015 by Sparky

STS Hop 8

94 miles via mostly US 17.

The only thing difficult about this trip was ignoring the GPS when it told us to make a U-turn.

I don’t know what is going on with our (relatively) new Rand-McNally GPS, but on the last two hops it has insisted that we make a U-turn when none was needed. And the GPS was set to “avoid U-turns”. Makes no sense.

And there was a tight right turn about a mile short of The Campgound at James Island Park. We ran a tire over the curb, which seemed to be a better choice than colliding with the traffic waiting at the light. But the tires tolerated it well and we made it to our destination in just under 3 hours. That is an average of about 30 mph which is very slow for a trip with no stops. But US 17 has a lot of lights and about a dozen construction zones. About the only good thing about the route was that it was flat.

We will be in Charleston for 5 days. The weather promises to be good and James Island Park looks very interesting. Should be fun.

Categories: Places, Routes, RV Parks, SC | Leave a comment

Ocean Lakes Family Campground, Myrtle Beach SC

Posted on October 29, 2015 by Sparky

Campsite at Ocean Lakes

Our ocean view

We planned originally to stay 3 nights at Ocean Lakes Family Campground in South Myrtle Beach SC. But we lost a day due to our truck problems. Then the forecast turned bad – the day we were scheduled to travel to Charleston was to be windy, with heavy rain. It is never fun to tear down/set up in the rain. And since Charleston was a flat daily rate rather than a weekly rate, we didn’t lose any money by cutting the stay there short.

All of which is why we ended up staying 4 nights in Ocean Lakes.

This is a HUGE campground – nearly 4,000 sites total, with 863 campsites (the rest are houses that are individually owned, with many available for annual lease). Besides the beautiful beach, the campground has five small lakes (hence the name). Amenities include a take-out restaurant, a huge camp store, a laundromat with over 100 machines and wash-and-fold service, a recreation center, a video arcade, two pools – one indoor, one outdoor – and probably a lot of other stuff that we never saw because we did not tour the entire property.

This campground is top-rated by Good Sam and I can’t dispute that assessment. The sites are level, with large concrete pads and lots of room for slides. The cable is outstanding with over 100 channels. There is daily curbside trash pickup. If there is a dog park I didn’t see it, but there are many places to walk the dogs (including on the beach, off season) and biodegradable poop bags are provided. There is a playground and a beautiful elevated public deck, both right on the beach. The beach has soft sand and is swimmable. Overall, a very nice park. And we had an ocean view!

The only bad thing about the park: the water is terrible. It ruins a cup of coffee.

The Ocean Lakes beach

The elevated patio

The beach playground

The laundromat

One of the rental properties

The outdoor pool

The indoor pool

Beach grass

Categories: Places, RV Parks, SC, STS | 1 Comment

STS Hop 7: Stony Creek VA to Myrtle Beach SC

Posted on October 26, 2015 by Sparky

STS Hop 7

302 miles via I-95, US 117, I-795 (through Goldsboro NC), I-40 and US 17, with a refueling stop near Sharpsburg NC.

It is true: the night is darkest before the dawn.

The plan was to do a 20-mile test drive, hauling the RV, around 8am. If the check engine light came on we would book 2 nights at a campground in Emporia VA, near the GMC dealership, and put the truck in for repairs Monday morning. In that case we would have to cancel the entire 3-day stop in Myrtle Beach (one day of which was already canceled) and at least one day in Charleston.

If the check engine light remained off, we would head to Myrtle Beach, with fingers crossed.

The check engine light came on 3.5 miles into the test drive.

So we canceled Myrtle Beach, booked the stay in Emporia and, with very heavy hearts, loaded the RV, checked out of the Hampton Inn and headed out for the 15-mile trip south. I figured we could “limp” there at 40 mph on US 301. But when we left the Hampton Inn parking lot the truck exhibited a whole new level of sickness: I could not get it above 15 mph. We drove about a mile, then pulled over in a parking lot next to Chester’s other shop location (which we had visited briefly on the test drive Saturday). I opened the hood, pushed (ineffectively, I am sure) on some connectors, then sat back to wait for 10 minutes in the hope that the truck would recover enough to make it the 15 miles.

At that point I was more down than I have ever been in our years of travel. We were looking at a potentially extended stay in a small town in Virginia, without transportation, with expensive repairs likely and with Myrtle Beach – one of the stops I was most looking forward to – canceled. This was even worse than that awful, rainy weekend in Knoxville in 2012. I was in a black, curse-our-fates mood.

Then Chester pulled up.

Chester in the engine

He asked how the truck was behaving (stupid question, I thought), but told him that the truck was worse than ever. He offered to run the diagnostics again. I wasn’t wild about the idea, but because the truck was acting up in a different way I thought it might have a different code. So I said ok, realizing that this might boost the total diagnostic cost to over $400.

We limped to his shop less than 2 miles away. Jett took the dogs for a long walk. I watched Chester perform the diagnostics again (same code), then dig into the engine doing God-knows-what. Then we went on a test drive, hauling the RV. I was a bit nervous letting Chester haul our home, but he said he had a lot of truck driving experience and “this was nothing.”

20 miles. No check engine light.

I asked Chester what he had done. He said he had tightened the #7 fuel injector connection – the same thing he had done on Saturday – but was “more aggressive” this time.

I wasn’t completely convinced that the problem was fixed, but as we had just successfully completed the same test drive that I had failed at in the morning, we decided to push for Myrtle Beach. As Chester put it, if we made it to Exit 11 (the Emporia exit) without the light going on, we should “put the hammer down” and keep going.

I waited until we reached North Carolina (over 30 miles) before calling to cancel our Emporia reservation and to un-cancel our Myrtle Beach reservation. Then we put the hammer down and kept going.

We made the entire 300-mile trip without incident (which I regarded as a minor miracle), set up at our site at Ocean Lakes Family Campground just a few feet from the beach (we have an ocean view!), then sat back and lifted a toast to Chester Carter, who saved not only the day but the entire week.

And, hard to believe, his additional charge for fixing the problem? Zero. Free. Gratis.

Chester – you are my new hero.

Categories: Adventures, NC, Places, Routes, SC, STS, VA | 1 Comment

STS Hop 6: Petersburg VA to Stony Creek VA

Posted on October 25, 2015 by Sparky

STS Hop 6

27 miles via I-85 and I-95.

Well, you guys obviously did not wish hard enough. We made it just over 10 miles into our planned 300-mile trip before the “check engine” light reappeared. We limped (which turns out to be exactly the right word – more on that later) to a truck stop just north of Stony Creek VA. I phoned Good Sam Roadside Assistance and they were almost no help at all. What I needed was a diesel mechanic and all they could offer was a tow.

We quickly concluded that we were going to be stuck in rural Virginia for the weekend unless we could find a mechanic. So we decided to check into the nearby Hampton Inn and use that as a base of operations. We parked the RV in the corner of the parking lot, checked in for 2 nights and set about finding help for the truck. We quickly determined that the nearest GMC dealer was about 15 miles away and arranged an appointment for Monday morning. Then I started calling around, hoping to find a local mechanic who could at least diagnose the problem. I figured if I arrived at the dealer with a diagnosis in hand it would speed things along.

The truck at Carter’s

I found a tow/repair company about 6 miles away that claimed to offer 24/7 roadside assistance. A call to that number wasn’t answered but I thought it might be worth a trip to the address to see if I could scare up some help (driving the truck without the RV was no problem at all – the truck ran fine when not stressed). I had a bit of difficulty locating the company and in fact stopped first at a place across the street. There was a mechanic there working on a diesel truck – a good sign – but he said he dropped his diagnostic computer and would be unable to determine my engine code. He sent me to Johnny’s Tow Service across the street. Which was closed. But a call to the number on the tow truck there yielded a referral to Chester, down in Stony Creek. I called Chester and he told me to come down and he would take a look.

Chester Carter is the proprietor of Carter’s 1 Stop towing service and truck repair emporium in Stony Creek, Virginia which was a town of 202 souls in 2000. And it looks like it may have gone downhill since then. The tiny town is littered with vacant and crumbling buildings. It had a creepy feel, to be honest. With Halloween approaching and the truck very unwell, I began to wonder if there was any escape. Even the Hampton Inn was empty. Would Jack Nicholson appear?

Abandoned grain storage near Carter’s

Chester was a man of few words. And when he spoke it was in a quiet, mumbled Southern drawl which my Northern ears had to strain to understand. He went straight to work and pretty quickly diagnosed the engine code: P1295 which suggested that one of the fuel injectors had lost electrical connectivity. He poked around the engine for an hour, cleaned some connections and, after interrupting work on my truck to change a tire on an RV – which I didn’t mind since he was helping a fellow RVer in need – we took the truck on a 30-mile test drive during which the “check engine” light stayed off.

I paid him about $250, which I thought was fair, and went on my way. I had spent nearly 4 hours watching Chester work (and learning quite a bit about my diesel engine). Chester said that Chevy/GMC diesels were prone to loose connections on certain fuel injectors – especially injectors 2 and 7 (my problem injector). The clip holding the electrical connection to the injector could corrode and work loose, causing the kind of problem I was seeing. Specifically, as soon as the computer detects a problem it puts the engine into “limp mode” which somehow protects it from severe damage, but severely diminishes the power, which lets the truck “limp” to a place to be repaired. He said he had tightened the clip on #7. All of which sounded plausible, but I had very little confidence that he had actually fixed the problem. But I figured that the diagnosis alone was worth the price.

The plan is to do a test drive with the RV in tow Sunday morning and, if successful, head to Myrtle Beach. If unsuccessful, we will move to a campground, deliver the truck to the GMC dealership Monday morning and then cool our heels until they are done with it. In the latter case we could be stuck in Stony Creek for days.

Maybe until Halloween.

Categories: Adventures, Places, Routes, STS, VA | Leave a comment

STS Hop 5: Lorton VA to Petersburg VA

Posted on October 24, 2015 by Sparky

STS Hop 5

128 miles, mostly via I-95.

This was not the hop that was planned. We had to abort about 100 miles short of our intended destination (Wilson NC) when the “check engine” light came on just north of Petersburg VA. Accompanying the light was an alarming loss of power: I had difficulty maintaining 45 mph going uphill.

As I had experienced similar symptoms just prior to the start of the STS, I was pretty sure it was an emissions control problem. I was also pretty sure that I could continue for a short distance. I was also totally sure that I had to get the problem diagnosed immediately. As the time was 2pm on a Friday, I knew I didn’t have much time to make that happen.

So, a quick rerouting. We found a campground about 14 miles away, called them to make sure they had a spot for us and gently, gingerly, made our way there. The 15-minute rest did the engine some good and we made it about halfway before the symptoms reappeared. Another 10-minute rest fixed the problem again and we made it without further difficulty.

We checked in, quickly unhitched, got a recommendation from the office for a local shop that could take a look and ran the truck over. Unfortunately, the shop did not have diesel experience. But in the short (less than a quarter mile) trip to the shop, the “check engine” light turned itself off. The shop gave me the number of the local GMC dealer and I called them but they said they couldn’t diagnose anything if the check engine light was not on.

So I returned to the RV park with good news/bad news for Jett: the “check engine” light was off and no one knows why. She insisted that I take a test drive and stress the engine (as much as it can be stressed when not hauling). I drove 25 miles and the truck performed flawlessly.

So Hop 6 is now 300 miles, with a truck of dubious health. Should be an “interesting” day.

When we first had the problem, I read the manual and it suggested that I check the fuel cap. Apparently a not-tight-enough fuel cap can cause emissions control problems. So I tightened the cap and it is just barely possible that that caused the light to turn off. Wishful thinking? Probably.

Anyway, wish us luck.

Picture Lake Campground

Our site at Picture Lake

Picture Lake Campground was an emergency destination, but it has high ratings from Good Sam. From our limited experience, it is overrated. The sites are bare dirt and not level and the facilities (playground, volleyball court, restrooms) are ordinary at best. It does have a somewhat picturesque lake (which looked even better in the sunset – see below), but the ambiance is marred by the presence of the Virginia Motorsports Park on the opposite shore. If there were loons in the area, their calls were completely lost amid the roar of the drag racing engines. Apparently the speedway has racing only on weekends. But it was Friday.

Lucky us.

Picture Lake at sunset

Categories: Adventures, Places, Routes, RV Parks, STS, VA | Leave a comment

Gunshots, acorns and drag racers

Posted on October 23, 2015 by Sparky

Answer: gunshots, acorns and drag racers.

Question: what noises have kept us awake in the last 3 campsites?

Explanation: I told you about the shooting range near us at Pinch Pond. That was followed by 7 nights of staccato acorn explosions (at least they sounded like explosions) on the roof of the RV at Pohick. Now we are at Picture Lake Campground in Petersburg VA (more on that later) and we are adjacent to a drag racing speedway.

They say the racing will be over by midnight.

Good, because I need some sleep.

Categories: Adventures, Places, QTS, RV Living, RV Parks, VA | 1 Comment