We were finally able to get out and 'explore' the local area now that the George Washington and Jefferson National Forest is back open! I put 'explore' in quotes because of course we grew up here so we're not exploring anything new...still, it was nice to get in some real hiking. Two local favorites in the national forest, Pandapas Pond and the Cascades, opened in the past few weeks, and we went to both! We'd been to the easy Pandapas Pond hike a few times in the past couple years, but we hadn't been to the Cascades in quite a long time...possibly since we moved to England.
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Cascades Waterfall
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The weather continued to be mostly hit or miss, but when we had a few hours Aaron worked on some repairs on my parents' house - replacing a broken motion sensor light, patching a wall, and fixing the carburetor on a snowblower.
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Replacing the motion sensor light
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Helping my dad patch a hole on the outside wall
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Working on the snowblower
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When the weather WAS looking reliably nice for a full day, we headed up to the farm to work on the RV. Aaron has been working on two major projects: fixing the fiberglass that I re-broke (oops!) and straightening the front hydraulic jack that seemed to have been damaged by the previous owners.
First the broken fiberglass...so, way back when we purchased the RV, we noticed a patched crack under the corner of the bedroom slide. It was patched with some kind of glue. We thought it was an odd place for a crack, but the glue was holding, so we didn't worry too much about it. Then one day I brought the bedroom slide in...not checking the area carefully enough. A curtain rod that I use to dry clothes was on the floor and managed to lodge itself between the incoming slide and the opposite wall. Then...craaaaack! So then we knew how the initial crack happened...and I had reopened it and broken the glue seal. Aaron tried to re-glue/caulk it before we got on the road in the fall, but it didn't stick with the changing temperatures over the coming months. So, he's working on a permanent solution that will be more resilient to shrinking and swelling.
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| First step: insert metal beneath the fiberglass |
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Screw the fiberglass to the metal and
file down the bolt heads |
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Add lots of epoxy
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He still needs to fill in the hole and add a fiberglass cover, but each of these stages needs to dry at least overnight so it is slow going. He also worked on some minor fiberglass repairs on the rear bumper.
The other big project was straightening the front hydraulic jack that supports the RV. This was a bit crooked when we purchased the RV and has been on Aaron's list for a while. My dad helped with fabricating a bracket to pull the jack forward and stabilize it against the frame. Now that they're finished, the jack is completely straight!
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Sizing the bracket
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The finished bracket my dad made
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Nice and straight!
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Close up from under the RV.
You can see the bracket, the pipe they
attached to keep the bracket in place,
and the rods that stabilize the whole
shebang against the frame. |
We're keeping an eye on national park, state park, and RV campground re-openings and we hope we'll be able to get back on the road soon-ish. After these repairs, mostly all the must-do things we have left on the RV are retouching paint in various places, so conveniently we're nearly ready to go from a repair standpoint as well.
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