Thanks to Ernie/Spare stuff to carry

[sfedeli3]

We're just wrapping up our 5K mile trip from Hershey out to Glacier
NP, Ernie's Camp-o-rama at the Livingston Fairgrounds and Teton NP. As
many of you know, last weekend, Ernie re-carpeted our PT with some
Mohawk designer grade stuff that we bought at Lowe's. Over the past
few days, we've really come to enjoy having nice carpet in the coach
and are very grateful to him for doing such a fantastic job. If you
are giving flooring installation a thought, he is quite the expert and
proved it to Kelly and I with his fine workmanship. I made a pretty
good try at restoring his exterior paint by using a mechanical buffer,
3M rubbing compound and Paint Guard Plus wax. The brown paint looks
almost new, but the cream is so thin that little could be done to
restore any shine to it. Given the great job that he did on our coach,
I really wish that I could have done better.

So far, we've traveled 4,746 miles. the ol' 6V92 has been running
great, averaging 5.88 MPG over the whole trip (mountains and all). We
used 7.5 qts of oil so far and have been running around 65-70 MPH.
We're on the Ohio turnpike tonight spending the evening at one of
their very nice travel plazas. 6 of them have hookups for $15, but we
opted for the boon docking corral since we DO have a Bluebird and all.
So far, we've had a need for the following items- Throttle return
spring (happens to match the one on an '85 Caprice 4 BBL carburetor);
A thrown belt on the alternator (I guess the wife's microwave-reheat
of the quesadilla's with the inverter on in Nebraska was just too much
for the brand spanking new Leece-Neville's Green Stripe belts to
handle); A rubber door hinge (only the mid-80's folks have to worry
about these- and they are still available from the school bus side of
bluebird). I'm glad that I had a mounted spare tire and my X-12 wrench
in Montana- there were places in there that had surely never seen a
bus, let alone changed a tire on one. If you don't leave the cities or
populated areas too much, then both are sort of overkill. My 220V fan
died on the Perkins Genset before we left, so I temporarily installed
a Hayden 12V fan on the outside of the radiator and it did just fine
at cooling the genset on our trip. I'll replace the old motor, but
having one of the Hayden fans in the roof pod is a thought!