Mike O’Connor

Marcie and I have been planning to get an RV ever since we rented motorhomes to take Robert and Richard on trips during their spring breaks from school. The original target date was going to be April of next year (when we hit our 25th wedding anniversary) but the sale of haven.com sorta got me fired up about Changing Our Lives so I moved the schedule up a few months.

I’ve been researching RVs forever, so the decision-process was really more of an update than starting from scratch. I’m a big fan of the folks at The RV Consumer Group. They’re complete nut-cases about how unsafe most RVs are and I’m with them — especially after what happened on the way home from picking up our 5th wheel. We had what turned out to be a relatively minor crash when a deer ran in front of us on I-80 just outside of Des Moines. I attribute a lot of that happy outcome to the fact that we were running a rig that the RV Consumer Group folks would rate very high for safety — a relatively small 5th wheel trailer, pulled by a truck that can handle way more load than we’re putting on it.

Had we been running overloaded (the way lots of people do), or in a Class-A motorhome (where everything is in one bus-like vehicle), or if we’d had too little undercarriage protection on the truck (and hosed up the steering) we could have been in a lot of trouble when we hit Bambi at 70 mph. As it was, the deer is quite dead, the truck is in a plain-Jane Chevy dealer’s body shop for not-too-complicated repairs, and nobody got hurt. Can’t complain about that outcome at all, especially since this happened on a really busy freeway and there were lots of cars and semi’s I could have hit. ‘Course, the deer probably would argue with that assessment, but she be dead.

Anyway, on to the fun stuff. Pictures! Lotsa pictures. This first set is the saga of the truck and the RV — starting in Phoenix where we picked up the RV, and ending up in Des Moines yesterday;

Truck! RV!

And here are the classic tourist snapshots of the trip — includes the Grand Canyon and the Black River Canyon.

The Road West

And here are some videos (turn the sound down, it’s just camera noise)

Grand Canyon 1 

Grand Canyon 2

Gunneson Black River Canyon

Continental Divide

Sure, they’ve been around forever. Sure, most of you probably already know about this site. But just in case you don’t, here’s a pointer to GetHuman.com — a great site if you’re trying to get to a human-being customer-service type person.

Marcie was trying to find the path through Northwest Airline’s patented “Voice Prompts From Hell” system to book a seat for me on an existing reservation. She finally gave up. I remembered reading about GetHuman somewhere, Googled it, looked up NWA and tried it out. Tarnation! Worked perfectly.

I’m sold. It’s even got the incredibly-secret path to Amazon customer-service reps!

Marcie and I just got back from a trip to the ICANN meetings in Wellington, New Zealand. This is a post of a few of the many pictures we took.

Here’s one “above the fold” — read on to see the rest…

This is the cable car we rode up the hill behind our hotel on our first day there — quite the view of Wellington (a town that reminded us a lot of San Fransisco). Read on to see the rest of the pictures.

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