Back on the Road!

After a month long stay in the San Antonio area to visit kids, spoil grandkids and do some maintenance on our rig as well as ourselves, BraysAway are back on the road and excited for our next trip! We are heading up to Utah, Wyoming, Nevada and California to visit 10 our nation's great national parks over the next two months! We are also visiting numerous national monuments along the way so stand by for new posts coming your way after we make our way to the first destination!

Additionally, now that we have retired fully and don't have the same level of income, we have to be more DIY in our maintenance items. When we were both working, we could afford to drop off our truck and RV to be repaired and maintained. Now, we have to be much more like I was as a poor farm kid who could barely afford the parts for my car and had no spare money to pay someone else to do the work! All things come around again! It's kind of enjoyable though tough on the back!

In terms of RV maintenance, we had some damage to one of the cabinets in the back of the RV that we had to repair and strengthen so we can actually store stuff in there while traveling. I added some legs to the thin bottom so it wouldn't be breaking the thin supports they use on these rigs to hold up the bottom board (and I use the word "board" loosely, 1 ply plywood at best).

Since it's been about 18 months since we had our RV bearings repacked, I took the opportunity to learn how to do that myself and researched the replacement bearings, races and seals. Upon inspection, the bearings and races all look great and even the grease didn't look worn but we repacked them anyway so we are ready for the road. While the tires and hubs were off, we inspected and adjusted the brakes also. Thankfully, they all looked good. We also noticed that one of the rear tires was wearing on the inside and rotated our tires to be sure to maximize the wear and hopefully extend their life safely. We'll have to watch that tire and the others to see if the odd wear continues.

In other maintenance related news, Kim and I decided to pull our mountain bikes out of storage and clean them up after way to many years of disuse! Hopefully, we can get some good trail rides in during our upcoming trip! Our poor bikes needed all new tubes and some TLC to get them working well again including all new hydraulic brakes for my old bike.

We also took some of our down time to extend our walks up to around 2 miles. On our last trip we did some short hikes and will need to take that up a notch or two on this next trip if we are going to see all the major sights we want to see!

Stand by for more updates as we explore southern Utah!