Fairholme to Blyn

May 1 - 60 miles - 5.5. hours of seat time.

I had taken the van on a couple of shakedown trips last year so I kind of knew what it was like to sleep in it, although during those trips I was sleeping on an inflatable mattress. This was the first night that the entire Poodle, Buddy, Squid team would be sharing the bed and I'm pleased to say that we all slept well.

The Poodle is still suspicious of the van in general. She doesn't mind being in it when it's sitting still, but when it's moving she can't really seem to relax. She's panting a lot and sometimes her legs are shivering. We aren't sure why this is. She travels well in the Bunny's 'buru and the Squid's truck, popping up to watch scenery when the vehicle slows down, and warbling/yodeling when she knows where she is about to arrive. But in the van, she's clearly got some concerns.

The morning progressed normally, I made tea for myself and the Bunny. I opened the laptop and spent some time composing a post. I started getting the bike and gear ready for a ride and then things got a little exciting. While making the second cuppa for the Bunny I also had the space heater running to warm the van up a little. I'd decided to try to go all electric for the house build mostly because I'm lead to believe that Wabasto heaters are temperamental, but also becasue I didn't want to run a fuel line and drill another hole through the floor. It only takes a 5-10 minutes to warm up the van and the space heater only used 5-10% of the battery to do so.

If you've looked at the electrical build out for the van you will note that the Victron inverter and Epoch batteries are speced to be able to run 3000 watts of devices simultaneously. It's not something that will happen every day, all the time, but it's not out of the realm of possibilities that we might want to microwave and induction cook simultaneously. Or warm up the van and boil water for a second cuppa. Which worked for a while. I was even looking at the Victron Cerbo GX screen noting 2400 watts flowing from the battery and being inverted from DC to AC power, when a small hit my nostrils. My first inclination was to accuse the Poodle of farting, but then the lights went out and I had a small panic attack.

I knew instantly that we'd had an electrical failure, and I also knew what had caused the failure, but it wasn't clear to me why the failure had occurred, and to be honest, I'm still not sure.

These things failing through out the day would become tiresome.

After a quick investigation, I would determine that the smell was the ANL fuse pictured above, with some other foreshadowing for the day, getting all hot and bothered about having to flow electrons for 2 simultaneous alternating current devices. This is concerning because the system components, as built.....should be handling this level of current, and further, that's a 400amp fuse. We weren't using anything like 400 amps of power at the time of the failure, so....not sure what's going on here. But it bears more investigation.

So, the morning got a little more exciting. After determining what had gone wrong, we set about figuring out if it could be fixed, and where parts might be. This was another shakedown trip, and I was not as well prepared with spare parts/tools. I proposed just getting loaded into the Ellie and driving to Port Angeles to buy things, and work get the electrical working again, but the Bunny insisted that the world was not ending (despite the Air Conditioner chirping repeatedly about a lack of power), and that she would be fine with things 'as is' until they could be fixed.

So I hopped on the bike and headed north along Camp David Junior Road. This road exists Fairholme campground and parallels the Olympic discovery trail. The views are spectacular.

There are several opportunities to walk your bike up the hill and get back onto the Olympic Discovery Trail, but if you do, you might miss the bathroom at the last and official intersection between the two paths through the forest.

You don't really need a headlamp for this tunnel, but it helps if you are filming.

On the other side of the tunnel, forest friends await.

At the town of Crescent, WA I ended up missing the return to the Olympic Discovery Trail and followed Beach Rd, back to Hwy 101 instead of making my way up to Hwy 112.

As I got onto 101 I noticed my rear tire feeling soft. For those of you following along who do not ride bicycles regularly, flats are rarely 'catastrophic' or violent. Usually, it's a pinhole leak and you can feel the tire getting softer and the ride getting 'squishy'. So I called the Bunny and asked her where she was, because while I did have a pump in my pack, the full size pump would make getting the tube install easier/faster. It turned out she was near Elwha and we eventually met up there. With a new tube in the plan was to meet in Port Angeles to have lunch and fix the van.

Except that I got a second flat on the way into Port Angeles. And there was some miscommunication on my part because I said we'd blown a Mega fuse, not an ANL fuse. Mega fuses are pretty common at auto parts stores. ANL fuses.....not so much. Long story short, all the things we needed for the Ellie the van, were not in Port Angeles, but they were in Sequim (that's pronounced 'skwim'). So after buying a couple more tubes AND a tire at The Bike Garage, we both made tracks for Sequim. The Bunny, Poodle, Van team stopped at Sequim Electric, a vestigial Radio Shack that had a 300A ANL fuse in stock, and then met me at the Home Depot after I rode another 20 or so miles from Port Angeles without any more popped innertubes.

The electrical system was repaired in the Home Depot parking lot and then there was a final 10 mile ride to the 7 Cedars Casino, where, if you are willing to join their players club, you can camp in their RV lot for free....at least the first night.

And after all the drama, we finally got to here:

Now here it is.....your 'Moment of Van'. Apologies to John Stewart and the old Daily Show.