Wednesday February 8th, Departure Day
I woke up this morning and busted my butt trying to get kubernetes installed on all the CSS workstations before I left. My fingers were flying through the Ansible scripts and checking that I didn’t mess things up more than I fixed them. I finally got everything squared away around noon and started packing the camper. I already had hooked the camper up to the truck this morning, so mostly it was just getting my clothes and antenna stuff and food loaded up. ShinyBoo and Jess showed up around 2, and Shiny took Dottie to his place for the weekend. Jess and I scrambled around and packed everything up and we were on the road in drizzling rain around 230.
Camping and POTA at Atlanta State Park K-2984
Despite its name, Atlanta State Park is indeed in Texas. The drive in from New Boston, also in Texas, was gorgeous. Towering pine trees lined the road into the park and we drove through the beautiful small Texas town of Maud. While we were stopped waiting for the freight train to pass, Jess and I remarried how nice it would be to live in a city big enough to have a gas station and a Family Dollar. My little town of Campbell only has a gas station, and even that is out by the interstate, not in town.
Jess set up the Buddistick Pro and we had a little trouble keeping it in tune on 40. It would tune up fine, then the swr dip would shift higher, up to ~7.8 MHz. Turns out the 20 Meter coil tap was a little loose or misaligned and was shorting out between two adjacent coil windings and effectively shortening the coil by one turn. Once we had that sorted Jess blasted through 40 SSB contacts in about 30 minutes and then I cranked out 17 CW contacts in about the same 30 minutes. I’m starting to notice I’m catching more and more of each QSO and there were also a few contacts tonight that I caught the whole callsign on the first time. Monday night in CW Academy class Dallas K1DW shotgunned me and Nick with dozens of call signs at 20wpm. I guess it helped.
For dinner Jess made turkey tacos and since we had full water hookups we cleaned the camper up quite a bit. I scrubbed the sinks and countertops and wiped down most of the overhead tambour doors. Then we swept up a huge mound of dirt from the camper floor. Then I mopped the floor with hot water. Who knew 75 square feet of floor could get so dirty. I’m falling back in Love with Miss Daisy again. I want to make some improvements in the way the kitchen counter is laid out and I have some new ideas for storage. I also want to get a dedicated camper Keurig so I can always have coffee on tap.
It’s my bedtime. As I write this, Jess is back there churning away making FT8 contacts and all is well with the world. Tomorrow is going to be a long day of driving.
Thursday February 9th, Driving Day
Jess and I woke up at 545 and got ready for the day. Just a quick breakfast of scrambled eggs and cheese, and a cup of Dunkins Donut Keurig coffee and we were on the road. We covered about 820 miles before we would close our eyes tonight.
We drove pretty much straight through minus a stop for lunch in the sketchy-est Walmart parking lot in the world for lunch in the trailer. We’re talking armed roving full time parking lot security at 12 noon on a Thursday with 2 cop cars parked bracketing the entrance with lights flashing levels of Sketch, Lunch was Bologna and cheese and pickles, paired with a desperately needed Diet Coke for me and a Strawberry and creme Sugar free Dr Pepper for Jess.
Stephen Foster Folk Culture Center State Park, FL K-1919 – We arrived at the park around 11pm after stopping for dinner (letover tacos from last night) in the I-10 Mile Marker 133 rest area in Marianna Florida. We set up the camper and had the buddistick Pro up tuned up and on the air in about 15 minutes. I started with CW tonight and I had my 10 for the activtion in a little over 40 minutes. Jess activated the park using ft8, and we talked until 2am before finally heading to bed.
