We had to want it. We did.
The Road2PAX completed it’s inaugural journey. As you might imagine, it was a week-long blur, and every bit as fun as anticipated. Sadly, we didn’t document the journey itself as well as, in retrospect, we should have. Fortunately, the plan, the project, and the experience worked well enough that our inaugural journey is likely to have been only the first of many.
A couple of follow-ups on Brian’s previous post:
“The RV survived for the most part…”
Less than an hour into our trip, and before we’d even picked up our fifth and sixth PAXers, Brian reported from the helm that he had very little in the way of brakes. This, obviously, smelled like doom. We were just arriving at the Martinsville, IN Subway, where we were planning on picking up dinner, and what should have been a fifteen minute stop got stretched and stretched as we tried to figure out what had happened. The owner’s manual for the RV was just one of several fairly important items that Brian had forgotten / neglected to bring, and as such we were flailing in the dark as to the cause. Fortunately, Brian has an extremely understanding wife who was willing to pack their kids (already in their PJs) into their car with the manual, and drive up to meet us. Mel: you rock.
Meanwhile, we had – after an exhaustive search – finally located the brake fluid reservoir. This was greeted by enthusiastic cheering all around until we discovered that it was nicely topped off, and thus not the cause of our trouble. I began openly contemplating our shrinking chances of making it even as far as Indianapolis, let alone Boston.
Brian, undaunted, came through in the end. A fuse had shaken itself loose from the leads. This fuse was designed to engage the emergency brake in the unlikely event that the main brakes failed. Our brakes had not, though, failed at all – in fact the mechanism designed to protect us in the event of their failure actually caused their failure. Once located, the problem was as easily fixed as pushing in a fifty-cent fuse until secure.
We made a couple of laps around the parking lot, testing the brakes at increasing speeds, until Brian was quite certain that there was absolutely nothing wrong with them. We all then thanked Melanie (though not nearly enough), and continued North.
This first crisis was awful while underway. I honestly had begun to think that all our work, all our careful planning was going to be for nothing. Brian had concocted some interesting schemes that would have potentially allowed us to at least attend PAX East, but I had my doubts as to their viability. That said, once over, the whole thing had several not-to-be-neglected benefits. First, it made us all better drivers – once you lose braking power once, you drive the next thousand miles very defensively. It also gave us a bit of a confidence boost, to know that we had hurdled a major unplanned obstacle and continued, delayed and shaken, but ultimately undaunted.
“The sleeping situation did not work out as well as I hoped…”
The plan: put sleepers on the main bed, the bunk bed we built, the couch, the dining table (which converts into a couch), across the captains’ chairs, and in the rented minivan. We decided that Brian should get the queen bed, as he shouldered a lot of the expense and work of getting this whole plan together. I volunteered for the (unheated) minivan, as I generally scoff at the cold. The bunk bed worked fairly well, and the sleepers on the couch were generally comfortable.
The real problems were the dining bed and the captains’ chairs…
Who thought this was a good idea?
The dining area is set up with two faced bench seats and a table in the middle. The table can be removed and dropped into place between the two bench seats, onto thin ledges on either side. The rear cushions from the bench seats then fit onto the table perfectly, forming a continuous bed area. That’s the theory anyway. However, whoever designed the seats probably wasn’t talking to whoever designed the table. The table, see, has a rubber half-round edge that goes around the whole table. This edging is fully a half-inch thick, which is roughly the width of those ledges supposedly designed to support it. The end result is that when you put a human-sized object on top of it, the edging just rips out of the table and the whole thing falls through to the floor. This tends to disrupt the sleep cycle of aforementioned human-sized objects. Obviously, the fix here is simple: we replace the table with one of our own design, which is wide enough to actually be supported by the ledges.
Not suitable for human occupation
The captains’-chairs idea sounded crazy from the start to me, but Brian sounded certain so I shrugged and dropped it. Ultimately, though, it has been thoroughly demonstrated that even an ex-infantryman who can literally sleep while marching doesn’t get a whole lot of rest when draped across two bucket seats with a beanbag chair stuffed between them. This situation will be largely moot on any further trips, for reasons I will explain in an upcoming post. Bottom line, the cockpit is not a bed, and won’t be used as one again.
The importance of the propane safety switch…
You really want this set to "on"
Brian didn’t mention this, but there was one last hiccough that bears mentioning. If you’re sleeping in an RV which has its own heating system, and if you’re using that heating system because just outside the RV, 33-degree sleet is drumming diagonally into the RV due to some wicked East-coast winds, it is of paramount importance that nothing (like, for example, a toiletries bag) be placed near or, worse, directly on the switch for the propane safety. This will cause the heating system to shut itself off. You might even spend the next morning believing that you had, very prematurely, run out of propane and try desperately to get it filled only to discover that this does not, in fact, restore heat. The only thing, in fact, that will restore heat is to flip that switch back.
I was snug and comfy in the sleeping bag in the minivan. The other five PAXers were pretty uncomfortable. Sorry doods!
