Went through my standard morning routine faster than usual today, as I wanted to finish up doing all of my chores and get on to doing fun things once again. To that end it was back to Wally World to trade in the batteries I had picked up yesterday, as they were to long for the boxes and for the room I had on the front of my trailer. Two new batteries and then it was back to the trailer to get them installed.

    Nothing hard about swapping them out, just a matter of taking one out at a time, scrubbing the copper fittings clean with a couple finger nail files and then putting it all back together again. I ended up having to swap out a couple of old lead battery clamps on one of the batteries, but lucky for me I had a spare pair of those in the tool box. Also made sure to install a set of those green and red felt disc's that fit under the cable clamps and fittings. They are suppose to help prevent corrosion from forming so I always like to use them. The new ones also came with a little spray bottle of corrosion inhibitor with each package, so I liberally sprayed everything with that stuff before putting it all back together and turning the shore power back on. Nothing blew up, so I took that as a good sign that I got it all hooked back together correctly.

   Once that was all done it was time to go play for a little bit. Headed north on the highway and stopped at the visitor's center for the New River Gorge Bridge. The highest, 878' ?, steel arch bridge in the country, it is a beautiful piece of construction/sculpture that spans the New River just north of town. Took lots of photo's and hope to get a few posted in the next week or two.

    Once done there I was off to see the old grist mill I had visited last year. It is located in a state park about 30 miles from town but it was worth going to see it again. A beautiful day to be out taking pictures. I think there are a few that will turn out to be pretty nice and I want to compare them to ones I took last year when I was there while it was raining.

   I wanted to eventually end up in the old railroad town of Thurmond, but had my eye on a back road that I had never driven before. To actually call it a road would be giving it more credit than it is due. It actually turned out to be this dirt and mud trail up through the trees and along side the cliffs on the north side of the New River. Actually, it was very pretty in most places, but was thinking it might not of been a good idea several times as I realized that there were times when I drove more than a mile with nary a turnout to pull over in or to turn around in if a rock or tree was to be encountered, or god forbid, another vehicle. Indeed at one spot there was a small, 8" dia, tree laying across the road, but by going clear out to one side of the road and taking it slow, I managed to bump the truck over it with no real damage. There was probably a lot more damage being done by all the tree branch's and vines hanging down across the road. But it finally came out on a more decent road and eventually wound its way across the river and on to Thurmond.

    An old coal town, Thurmond was once the high revenue spot of the old C & O line, having more than 20 passenger trains alone stopping there every day. A large steam engine shop and engine house was also located there so it has tons of old railroad history. Not much left of it though. The original station is still there and still being used by Amtrak, but there are only 3 original stone or brick buildings left as well as the remains of the huge poured concrete coaling tower where the steam engines would load up on fuel. There is also the remains of the post office, but I don't think it is all that old, just based on materials. Anyway, I wandered around for more than an hour taking pictures and looking at everything that is left and wondering what it would of been like to stand there 60-70 years ago during the heyday's of steam power. I know it's just the romantic in me, but I would of loved to have seen those old 2-6-6-2 Mallets and 4-6-6-6 Allegheny's chuffing out of the yard with a load of coal cars, headed for the mills in Pittsburgh, or a 4-8-4 Hudson pulling a string of Pullman cars along the mainline. It would of been an amazing sight.

    Finished up the day by dropping my old battery cores back off and getting my refund for them before filling the truck up and heading back to the trailer for some dinner. Just been working on pictures and reading this evening. Not sure what I'm doing tomorrow yet. Am suppose to meet up with a friend and do some goofing off during the day, but so far I'm coming up blank for things to do. Will have to go on line I guess and see what else there is to see in this area. Otherwise the weekend dance starts tomorrow night out at the county park. Perpetual e-Motion and the Contrarians are playing with Gaye and Shawn doing the calling. Should be another wonderful weekend of music and dance.

    Right now though; a few people have expressed an interest in all things RVing so I thought I'd throw out a couple pictures of some of what I've been doing these past couple of days with long winded explanations for each of them. Not terribly exciting, but life on the road isn't always fun, fun, fun..... just most of the time. Take a look if it interests you, I'll be posting others periodically, but not all that often.

Trailer Maintenance and Use Photo's 

A look at my trailer hitch and how it attaches to my truck. The 'A-frame' of the trailer has the hitch cup built into it and it fits over and down onto the ball on top of the trailer hitch. It then has an internal tongue that slides down and locks it into place. The two crossed safety chains go from the trailer frame to two attachment points on the bottom of the hitch, and prevent the trailer from becoming a runaway missile if it was to somehow come unhitched. I imagine that would be quite some ride being attached to the front end of a 5 ton out of control 'rock'. What makes this hitch better than a stock hitch are the two large spring steel bars that run from the bottom of the hitch on my truck, to the chain attachment plates on each side of the A-frame. In this photo you can only see one of the bars. The chains allow you to tension these bars based on how heavy the trailer is. As they are 'tightened ' up they act as huge leaf springs that span the 'hinge' between the back of the truck and the front of the trailer. This causes this hinge to flex upward and level out this hinge causing the back of truck and front of the trailer to rise or equalize. In addition to the two bars, there is also a short metal piece that attaches to the right side of the A-frame at one end and the top of the truck hitch at the other. You can just make it out in the photo if you look close. Inside this metal enclosure is a friction plate similar to what you would find on a car or truck brake shoe. You can tighten this enclosure down and increase the friction on it with a large screw on the side of the metal piece.  The whole thing works to help dampen any sway that should occur because of the wind or a passing truck. Without it the trailer would have a tendency to whip back and forth behind the truck at times. Not a fun thing to have happen. Also on the A-frame, under the plastic shroud, are two 30 lb propane tanks. I find that I can pretty much do a whole year of touring on one fill up of these tanks, or at the most having to fill up one of them. If I cooked more, or went off line more often I would end up using much more propane than I do. In front of the propane bottles is my front trailer jack. I had a motorized one installed a couple of years ago and it works off of my batteries as needed. It use to be one of those you had to crank up and down by hand, but after needing to do that 3-4 times each time I hitched up or down it was time to find a better way. It is one piece of motorized gear I have never regretted getting.  

A look at the pipe repair I ended up doing to my front grey tank drain line. In the background you can see the bottom of the tank and the fitting that comes out of the bottom of it. I ended up pulling that fitting out of the 3" dia outlet in the tank and replacing it with a new 3" to 1 1/2" bushing. A short piece of new pipe then a standard long sweep 90 degree elbow. A really short piece of new pipe and then a new coupling fitting that attaches all the new stuff back up to the rest of the old piping.

The new work on the left with all the old stuff on the right. The grey water continues down its own pipe to a slide gate that keeps it either in the tank or lets it out through the cap you can see, and then into a flexible hose to some type of sewer system. In my case this week it will be a dump station here in the RV park that probably runs over to some type of septic system. The 'black' sewer tank on the trailer is right behind the grey tank and it has a 3" outlet with its own slide gate. When emptying the system I usually let the sewer tank go first and pretty much empty it before closing it back off and letting the grey tank loose to flush most of the flexible hose out before its final rinse.

The other major project these last two days was to replace the batteries that run every thing in the trailer when it isn't hooked up to shore power. By everything, that means it has the power to run the 12v DC system which includes lights, the gas controls on the fridge, it actually switches to propane for most of its cooling power, the water pump, a small electrical heater and the car style radio/CD player. It also keeps my propane gas detector from 'screaming' at 5:00 in the morning when the batteries have no more juice in them because they no longer hold a charge.

One last look. Besides new batteries I also really cleaned all of the copper or lead wire connectors as well as installing new anti corrosion disks under all the connections. The red color is from this battery spray stuff that they now include with the little red and green disc thing's. It is suppose to help prevent corrosion from forming. I hope this set of batteries with work for as many years as the last set did. They went for at least 5 years that I know of and maybe more than that.