Several things are going on here.  We married the old 40 hp Yamaha that used to push our pontoon boat with the Whaler this time around.  I decided that meant we needed a new transom, partly because I was worried that the old '60's transom would just fall off the boat with the bigger motor and partly because this is a long-shaft motor and the transom needed to be higher in order for things to work right.

All of the interior wood was shot, so I ran off to Teh Internets and bought new wood that Jim installed (abandoning my long-procrastinated original plan of refinishing the old wood).

Then there was the job of Getting The Goo Off The Boat.  You can see from the "before" pictures that I took a half-hearted run at washing that stuff off in a few places, but none of the stuff I used really worked worth a darn.  Jim and his gang acid-washed the boat and presto! it's nifty.

Meanwhile the motor went off to Jim's favorite mechanic (pictured below) and got the once-over, since it hadn't been run in 10 years and wasn't put away very carefully.  Then Jim and the gang rerigged all the wiring and controls, threw in a bilge pump and a depth-sounder, rewired/repaired the trailer and today Marcie and I dropped by to pick it up.  These pictures tell the story.

Pretty nifty huh??  I think we'll wait 'til Monday to put it in the Mississippi (down by Alma, Wi) to avoid the weekend-boater crazies.  Then we'll see how fast an old 13 foot Boston Whaler goes with a 40 on it.  I'm sure it'll be fast enough for me.  I'll add an update and some more pictures after the maiden voyage.

Nice river scum!

Old transom - pretty rotten, pretty nasty

Mike's lame attempt at cleaning

Note the out-of-whack trailer

Detail of new transom, under construction

New transom

Rewiring the trailer

Jim (left) and Steve fixing the trailer

Cleaning carbs on the motor

Poor motor -- lotsa gunk!

Check out the new tonneau top!

Steve and Jim in front of the boat they repaired. Way to go!

Back home. Big difference!

New transom, and trailer straps

New console, steering, switches, depth-gauge (on top, behind steering wheel). Nice rigging, eh?

Transom's not so nasty now. See that gas tank under the front seat?

New gas tank, under front seat

Detail of the new bilge pump. Never had one before.

Another transom shot

I love this transom

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

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!

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.

This is a shot of the beautiful botanic garden at the top of the hill, right as we got off the cable car. A great walk back down to the hotel for us jet-lagged travellers.

The next day we took a walk in a restoration area (I'll have to get Marcie's help to fill in the name). While New Zealand is well known as the place where the Lord of the Rings trilogy was filmed, I found it more like settings from Myst. This picture is the best example of that.

An early morning scene in Wellington, close to where the conference was held

A better shot of Wellington harbor -- a nice sunny day -- but also from the top of the cable car (Marcie got a little bored in the meetings and decided to take a walk one afternoon)

After the conference ended, we headed a little further afield. This "Mike's bench" shot was taken overlooking Upper Hutt Valley, from the park/preserve where the Rivendell scenes were shot in LOTR. We didn't make it to the actual film site, but had a great hike. See that lake down there? We'd walked about a mile to get to that lake, and had to return, so we decided this was far enough for one day.

Here's another shot on that same hike -- about half way down the ridge on our way back.

The next day we headed up the west coast (of the north island -- we never made it to the south island) to a regional park. Much different. Really nice walk through sand dunes and sea-side.

The next day we took a city bus to the southern tip of the north island, only about 10 miles from our hotel in Wellington, and explored this rocky point. We wiped ourselves out with about a 15 mile walk that day due to a map-reading error by yours truly. This is the start of the journey. See that point way off int the distance? We walked well past that point and back.

Along the way we found lots of great tide-pools in the rocks. Reminded me of Carmel, California. Here's Marcie peering at cool creatures. A close-up of the creatures follows...

Here's a shot Marcie took of the stuff she was looking at. I'm not sure whether she's figured out what the Trilobite-like thingys are yet.

Here I am, also checking out the creatures. Doesn't this look like another scene out of Myst??

When we got all the way out to the final point, we got lucky. The seals weren't supposed to be there but we found a gaggle of them hanging out on the rocks. I aspire to the repose of this character.

There were four or five seals in the gaggle we saw -- here's another.

Marcie and I shot lots of pictures of birds, butterflies and plants along the way. I liked this little guy's attitude.

Then, we looked up on the horizon and said "holy cow, we have to walk all the way back there???. Who's going to carry us?" We were really whipped that night.