update???

As you can tell we are still in Mich at Hawkins and it still is a "tech black hole"
were no cell or air card works. Internet access is a slow dialup or a trip to town for wifi hotspot or the aircard. We are thinking about a trip in Mid-August around Lake Huron and Lake Superior in Canada. Meanwhile we are just putting up with the rainy weather and going to some of the free local music shows and visiting friends and family.

For those of you that have emailed and asked if we had heard from the person that was going to tell us how to get information on updates on blogs, without having to check them only to find they have not been updated. Here's his comment from our blog.
1 comments:
Anonymous said...
We (Bruce & Linda) enjoyed meeting the two of you at the Tin Can Tourists open house on Sat. May 16 at Camp Dearborn in MIlford, Michigan and getting to see the Little Green Truck in person. Bruce follows your blog and said he would e-mail you about the aggregator he uses, but we can't find an e-mail address, so here's the info. Point your browser to http://www.bloglines.com and create a free account. Once you have that, you can visit various blogs and "add" the ones you want to follow to your Bloglines account. There are various ways to do this, but copying and pasting the URL is straigtforward. From then on, you only have to log in to your Bloglines account to view/visit all of these blogs. Bloglines automatically captures new entries as they are posted There are other aggregators available; Bloglines is the one we know how to use.

May 21, 2009

Michigan Lighthouses

We are back...sort of, as you may know we are in Hawkins, Mi for a couple of months so that Jan can fulfill her jury duty requirements that she learned about when we were in AZ. We are staying in an area that it seems that nothing technical works..no cell phones, landline phone took 4 days for them to find us and get us hooked up,dialup internet rather poor until I found this free one, Dialinfree that works fairly good, stays connected about a 1/2 hr at a time. Anyway, this weekend we went to a free Cajun music concert in Reed City and had a great time. We met a guy from LA who now lives in Traverse City and does LA Cajun dance, food and music as a business,, very fun person... good dancer too! Last weekend my brother Harry and his wife Shirley stopped in after they had spent a few days in the upper pennisula. The visited a few different lighthouses that we haven't been to which reminded us off our favorite ones.... Big Sable Point, Little Sable Point and Ludington Pierhead. We have worked at these three giving tours and have loved every minute at the lights. Michigan has about 115 lighthouses, depending on who's counting. Around 20 or so are open to the public, so we enjoy doing our part to help keep some of them open.If you are interested in working and staying at the lighthouse the splka.org has more info. We are leaving tomorrow for an ATHS truck show and are planning on leaving the first part of July for Canada .....Nova Scotia, P.E.I. and Newfoundland so maybe we will find better connections along the way.

TCT Saturday open house.

Yup, we can tell we are back in Michigan. Not quite 60 degrees, drizzling rain, turning to a heavier rain, just in time for the Tin Can Tourists open house, scheduled from 11am thru 4pm. Oh, well, it could have been worse. We could have BOUGHT tickets for an outdoor concert or something like that. I'm not sure how many campers are here, but the space reserved for the Tin Canners is full. There is usually such a variety of trailers and always a brand of trailer or something that we have never seen before. The imagination involved in decorating the interior is always inspiring.
We have a friend, Helena from the Grand Rapids area (now), who is visiting us this weekend. We are hoping to find a motorcoach for her to travel in so she can visit us in our wanderings. She had one years ago, but with work and all, she gave up the camping for awhile. I think the "bug" was just resting. Now the "bug" has revived and she's ready to travel again. Once a gypsy always a gypsy???
We will try to add some pictures when we get better connections.
I was talking to one guy who said he was following our blog. I mentioned that he must be upset looking for updates. He said he has a link to the blogs, that he watches, that lets him know when there has been an update. He was going to email me the info but have not heard from him, yet. Does anybody reading this know how that works??? If so could you email me at grandmabob2@hotmail.com and tell me what I have to do to set it up on our computer.
Let's see I started this blog about 2 weeks ago and am now going to post it. That is what retired means, right? No pressure!!

WE have NOT died!

We are experiencing technical difficulty here in the boonies! We have landed near Reed City, MI. We, sometimes, get service on our cell phone and on a really GOOD day we even can get online on the computer with the air card. Yeah!! We have checked with ALLTEL to see why our service is so bad this year, since it was do-able last year. Their reasoning was that we are in a "weak service area". Apparently an area can change over the winter, duh! Not sure how that works. Must be connected to "global warming"??
We did try to get a "land line" but AT&T cannot find our street. We are checking with neighbors to see who their phone carrier is. We would be on the road except for jury duty that I managed to get postponed but not canceled. Are they desperate for jurors, or what. While I'm playing with the juryduty issue, Bob is doing some maintenance on the truck and trailer.
So bear with us, we will be back online to bore you with more of our travels SOON!

Museums

I(Bob) usually don't like museums. It seems I get bored after a very short while. In Borger, TX we went to a neat little county museum that told the history of the area and I found it very interesting. Saturday Jan & I went to the Ralph Foster Museum at The College of the Ozarks in Point Lookout, MO. What a neat place. The campus is on a very neat setting in the hills just outside of Branson. The museum is three floors of the history of the Ozarks and the people who lived and live here starting with the original Beverly Hillbillies truck (built from a 1921 Oldsmobile)from the tv show. The first floor has a couple of showcases devoted to Rose O'Neill and her art including her Kewpies which was one of the reasons for the visit. One whole room was devoted to Ralph Foster,a pioneer radio station owner who started his first station in 1924 in St. Joseph, MO. There is more about him on the website here. Another first floor room has primative Americana, a log cabin, many tools, steam engines and many other things used in settling the area. Another room was art of the area. The second floor is a huge collection of any kind of gun that you can imagine. Many guns and the stories of their help in settling the Missouri and Arkansas area. There are also, displays of the many prominent figures from the college that served in the armed forces and in the government. The third floor is a natural history floor with rocks and minerals, many mounted birds,butterflies, deer and many other animals from all over the world. All in all a very enjoyable place to spend an afternoon. Another impressive little museum is David O'Neill's (grand-nephew of Rose O'Neill). David opened his museum wth his and some of Janet's (his deceased sister) collection of Rose's original art and the Kewpies that she created. David has one large display case of just metal Kewpie radiator caps, which were used on old cars. Another case displays some of the various dishes, and there's several other display cases with other items. As extensive as his museum is, I would have to guess he has only managed to get part of his collection on display. If you are any where near it, I would suggest that you check it out for yourself. His museum is in Springfield MO. in a former general store located in Galloway Center, mingled in an area of other old buildings with some housing antique stores and art galleries.

THE REST OF THE STORY

I see the LITTLE GREEN TRUCK got to tell his story already. I have always thought Mister Bob likes him better. BUT I suppose it is only right since he was part of the family long before me. AND if you think about it, Mister Bob would not have needed me if he didn't have the LITTLE GREEN TRUCK to pull me
After Mister Bob got his truck, he started looking for a trailer to go with it. He advertised in the American Truck Historical Society magazine for a low deck, moving van type trailer. It was almost 6 weeks before he got a response. He had given up hope of finding one through the ad. When a guy from Jolliet, IL called and said he thought he had what Mister Bob was looking for ( that would have been ME!). I was in the far corner of this guy's lot, surrounded by his working trailers. This guy was closing his business and needed to clear out everything. I had been in the back corner for so long (over 5 years), that I thought I would never get to travel again. I had heard talk of scrap yards and knew I really did NOT want to go there! Anyway Mister Bob came to see me, managed to get into the corner and check me out. I heard Mister Bob tell the guy he was interested if I could still go down the road ok. I started to exercise right then. So by the time the guy could get to me, I would not have stiff joints and would roll down the road ok. It worked. So I moved to Michigan and became part of the family. I was pretty secure in being the one to be pulled by the Little Green Truck, that's what he used to take me home. But then about a month later a bigger trailer(40 foot) moved in with us. There was some discussion about which one of us was going to become their home. Miss Jan wanted me because Mister Bob had never driven big trucks pulling trailers before, and she thought I would fit in campgrounds easier. Mister Bob thought my running gear was the better of the two of us. So sure enough I was the one!!! The other trailer became a storage trailer for now. They would like to convert that one now, but they are having too much fun traveling all over with me to take the time to convert it.
In the fall of 2006, they started working on me. Miss Jan sand-blasted all the bottom trim to get off all of the several layers of paint. I had been working for the carival at my last job. There was faint lines where you could see Complete Carnival written on my sides. They had left boxes of baseballs and two tracks that one would throw the balls down to knock something over to win a prize. Mister Bob was going to just replace my skin at the bottom where I was really rusty and holey, but decided to pull all that old stuff off and give me a complete face lift with all new galva-steel. I felt pretty naked for awhile there because he had stripped me down to just my doors and ribs. Wow!! It was getting to be winter time and I was still naked. My boards were put back on inside but they were waiting for foam insulation to be sprayed in before they could cover me up again. The guys doing that were deer hunting which is a couple weeks or more. After I got foamed then , the family proceeded to re-skin me. The new skin was cut, then glued, put in place and then screwed. Hopefully with the glue on, it woild be placed in the right spot because they could not move it once it made contact without causing dents and creases. Once that was done then my windows had to be put in place. Miss Jan stained my tongue-n-groove ceiling boards. Then Mister Bob started putting me together. They had an old cabinet that Miss Jan had bought 25 years ago and refinished. He used that for a wall dividing the living area from the bathroom/bedroom area. He turned the bottom shelves of the cabinet towards the bathroom for storage in there. The top of the cabinet hold dishes and basic items. Under the sink he made sliding shelves to make it easier to find the stored food. He hung a drop space to store their hot-plates (gas and electric) and then a drop leaf counter on the front of the cabinet. He put an old '76 Hotpoint refrigerator next to the counter and bolted that down. Then on top of that he put a wooden box (that he had built to store their electric oven)that is hooked to the wall. The only major thing she wanted to take with us was her MIGUN massage bed, so he turned that into a murphy bed in the living area. So it can be used when needed. They used a water bed frame ( for storage underneath) and have their own queen size mattress on it. There are a couple closets in the living area ( one for hanging clothes and the other for the extra food etc). In the back doors is an area about 3 feet deep. He has shelves for tools, sewing machine, 2 inflatable kayaks, Grizz's cage, the blue box, ladder etc. So that is how we travel for now. One happy family!




ps.. there are more pics in the trailer album in our Picasa web albums.

My Story

HI, I'm the Little Green Truck and the tall guy said that I should tell people my story,so here goes.....I am a 1965 White 3000 cabover bought in June of 1965 by a guy named, Harold in Pennsylvania. He ordered me with a White Mustang 6 cylinder, 466 cubic inch, 185 horsepower flathead gasoline engine and an 8 speed RoadRanger transmission. My green paint is very close to the original color so I think I still look pretty good. We hauled stuff like empty cigar boxes and things in Pennsylvania until he sold me ( in about 1986) to another good guy named Gerald who lived in Tennessee. Mister Gerald and I hauled freight like pvc pipe and other light stuff around the southeast part of the USA until he got very sick. He sold me to another good guy named Jake (in about 1988)who also lived in Tennessee. Mister Jake was an old time trucker who had another old truck ( a 1950 Mack LJT)that he had driven since 1954. He really liked old trucks, so he wanted me to look good and when his wife Miss Ruth said he should freshen up my paint he thought that was a good idea. After the paint job I became her truck and we went to truck shows together and had a lot of fun. When Mister Jake got sick he thought he should find someone else to take care of me, so he put a for sale sign in my window when we went to shows and that is how the tall guy (Mister Bob) found me... from a picture at a truck show that was posted on the internet.
Mister Bob and Miss Jan put new tires on me and took me to Michigan where they lived. They took good care of me but, about a year later my engine blew a head gasket and Mister Bob couldn't find any new gaskets so he found a nice C8.3 liter Cummins diesel engine(215 horsepower) and a nice Allison 4 speed automatic transmission in a BlueBird school bus and fixed me up so that I could pull things again. Mister Bob joined The American Truck Historical Society and found a neat 1946 Trailmobile trailer, but thats another story that I will let him tell.

ps.. the color on the picture by the old schoolhouse in TN. is the closest to the right color. Every picture we take of the truck it shows a different color. Bob