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Arriving at: Salt Springs Recreation Area Salt Springs, FL |
TRAVEL DAY - 85 miles
RAINBOW SPRINGS STATE PARKto
SALT SPRINGS RECREATION AREA (USFS)
Today's drive was a breeze compared to our previous travel day through the St. Pete/Tampa Bay area. We are headed for the Ocala National Forest were we have been several times before. Once we made the turn north on to SR19 at Altoona we were traveling on a portion of the Florida Black Bear National Scenic Byway.
We were well aware the the cell phone coverage inside the forest is spotty at best. For this reason I spent three hours on Saturday learning how to program our new Garmin GPS unit we purchased before leaving on our journey. Up until this point we have been using our cell phones and Google or Apple maps to navigate THE POD to it's new home. The GPS performed flawlessly and we arrived safely at Salt Springs Recreation Area for a three day visit.
After checking in at the ranger station I suddenly realized that our usual practice of Tricia getting out of the truck and guiding me in backing up the trailer into our site was not going to work today. We planned for this before our trip started by purchasing a pair of Midland 2-way Radios to use for just this scenario and for use while hiking out in the woods. Of course these were buried in the back seat of the truck somewhere and were still new in the box and not charged up. In other words, useless to us today. Once parked and set up they were the first thing we located and put on the charger for next time.
You may be wondering, didn't we order THE POD with the fancy bluetooth wireless backup camera option? Well yes we did. It worked perfectly at the dealership when they were demonstrating everything to us on our walk through just before taking delivery on the trailer. That was the last time it worked. To be fair I won't mention the brand of the backup camera just yet, I mailed the monitor portion of the system back to manufacturer and they are sending me a new one based on my describing the symptoms I was experiencing. Time will tell if that fixes the problem.
While we are on the topic of failures. We also purchased a TPMS (tire pressure monitoring system) unit for the trailer tires. The little remote sensors screw onto each valve stem and report the air pressure and temperature for each tire as you roll down the road, critical information when tires get older or you roll over something and puncture a tire. Each sensor has to be programmed separately and while the first two went fine the third one just won't work, and you can't program the fourth one until the third one is done. This will be my next project to straighten out with the manufacturer.
Also on the list of failures is my little weather station I purchased. It has guess what, wireless sensors to report to a wireless base station, that has to connect to your computer though an ethernet connection. So while I could set it up and collect all the data into the base station, I have no way at the present time to get the data out of the base station. I future trip to Best Buy to purchase a small router should solve this problem fairly easily.
With all theses problems I still have not tried to set up our wireless leveling system we purchased for the trailer. Just not ready for another failure right now.
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