Breakdown

[kevin_standlee]

This is a continuation about which I hinted in my post yesterday about bringing the Astro home. Our luck ran out on the Rolling Stone. As I mentioned yesterday, we started the RV in Fernley and did not turn it off, as the problem had appeared to be just getting the vehicle started in the first place. Until yesterday, once the RV started, it would

Comments

[cmarble]

Sorry to hear (read) that your vehicle problems are continuing. Is the Rolling Stone Lisa's hot weather retreat or is that a separate trailer?

[kevin_standlee]

Lisa has a travel trailer, not an RV. The Rolling Stone is a vehicle we bought during the period of time when I was working for (usually) a week per month in the Bay Area. I would live out of the RV while working there, saving me so much money versus cheap motels and such that the RV paid for itself in about 18 months. When the pandemic hit and the "you should come to the office more often" turned into "Stay away unless requested" and then "I guess you're full time work from home," the RV stayed parked most of the time. (One year I logged less than one mile.) But it was the "spare car" when the Astro needed repairs.

[msconduct]

I don't think I've ever seen the RS from quite that angle before, and now I understand what you mean when you say it's doesn't have a lot of interior space. I had thought it was a much larger vehicle (which would be even more unwieldy and hard on gas).

[kevin_standlee]

Yep. I say RV and people think it's a big Winnebago or something like the Madden Cruiser buses. It is a Ford E350 (a large full-size van) that Chinook converted to a small RV. It will fit into full-size (not compact) parking spaces, but just barely. I can stand up in the cabin, but only in the forward section. The rear portion requires me to watch my head, except for one spot in the kitchen where there's an overhead vent. For its intended use (a place to sleep with an attached toilet, mainly for either overnight camping), which for me was supplemented by using the shower and kitchen at my office in the Bay Area, it works fine. It does, however, make the Astro look very nimble by comparison.

For actually hauling things around, the Astro (with the rear seats removed and stored away, which is what we almsot always do) probably has more usable interior space.

[kalimac]

Can you still phone AAA road service? I read somewhere that they're transitioning to an app which leads to a form you fill out. My phone can't deal with that.

I've had other administrative problems with AAA like the time, many years ago, that they refused to send a truck because the location I was calling from didn't have a street address.

[kevin_standlee]

I called them on my work phone, which is a smartphone and could handle their online system. However, had I called on my personal phone (a non-smart flip phone), I would have tried to speak to an agent. The main advantage of the smartphone-based system is that I could give them the exact location through the map app. And indeed, there was no street address here: It was US-95A just north of a certain road crossing.