Going North

We leave tomorrow to go “up north”.  Generally following our pattern of: if it’s cold, go south, if it’s hot, go north.  It’s hot, so we’re going north.  Around Lake Superior, to be precise, a journey of approximately 1300 miles.

We have no reservations and no agenda, just two and a half weeks blocked out on the calendar.  We will be stopping at places that interest us and just being spontaneous.  We’ll see how this goes.

It was a bit of a scramble to ready the RV as we had Alex on a camping trip over the last few days.  Come home, return him to his parents, do a small mountain of laundry, pack 3 weeks of food into a distressingly small fridge, make sure everything still works, all in the space of about a day.

Unfortunately not everything works.  Our fridge has taken to spontaneously shutting itself off at times.  It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, most of our food supply is at risk.  Especially on these very hot days.  Usually it’s a few hours before the turn-off is noticed, and these fridges take a long time to get the cooling action going again, so we’ve had some pretty soupy ice cream.

I do have some connections.  I texted my buddy, Dave, who keeps a supply of spare controller boards for his fleet of RVs.  He graciously met me at his shop this afternoon and we pawed through his collection.  No dice.  Several controller boards but none for my fridge.

Dave had the idea of calling Camping World, which is open on Sunday.  Yes, they had a few in stock and they were open until 4pm.  It was now 3pm and I was across town, so I drove down there, arriving just before closing and came home with a new controller board and $200 poorer.  Probably could have found it on the Internet for less, but we are leaving early tomorrow.  How is that for last-minute?

We’ll see whether this works.  It’s a bit of a long shot since I really have no idea why things keep turning off, but we’ll see...

I suppose that, even with a $200 controller board, the fridge doesn’t owe us anything.  This is the same fridge that, five years ago, a week after we bought this RV, I set on fire when I was attempting to repair it.  I nearly burned the RV down.  It took some doing to convince the insurance company that my claim was not fraudulent since I submitted a claim a week after I bought the RV.  In the end, they paid for a new fridge, and I fixed this one with a can of expanding foam to replace burned insulation and a few lengths of wire for a scorched section of a wiring harness.  It has operated flawlessly until now.

We took the RV to top off on fuel and to have some ice cream at Culvers; our parting Concrete Mixer, so to speak.  Probably not many Culver’s restaurants on our 1300-mile trek, so we enjoyed this while we could.

And, last, but not least, a picture of our home for the next few weeks.  I probably have dozens of similar pictures, but this one is from now.