Monday night we went into Caacupé, ten minutes away to have dinner with Sonny and Mark. Mark, who lives at the campground in a cottage he had built drove us into town in his van so I got to be a passenger and I enjoyed the experience.
Mark waiting for his caipirinha, a sugar cane liquor drink similar to a mojito which he was inspired to order by Layne. Sonny and I had beer but we all ordered burgers as this place is famous for that and pizza. We had several drinks each and shared two orders of fries and our dinner cost us $17 total. This is not expensive Uruguay.
I have learned to like egg on my food which Layne doesn’t, but under the egg there was a very respectable burger. It was a convivial dinner and we felt we had earned it.
Sonny is a widower from Michigan and he has decided to travel alone in his retirement. We are the same age and share the same sense of humor possibly because we are both immigrants who came to the US as students and he has earned his retirement as a state employee.
Mark traveled by motorcycle and sidecar with his dog for four years, originally from London so we were all English speakers, not something that happens often on the road in a circuit filled with German and French speakers.
Sonny has three adult children and six grandchildren in Michigan and he’s planning to go home in a few weeks to spend time with them. He’s been on the road four years and marvels how few Americans he meets. Before he arrived at the campground his Toyota 4Runner’s alternator stopped working so he replaced it by the side of the road because he carries a spare. Thats the sort of manual dexterity I can only dream of and he is obviously well prepared to take in Africa his next planned continent. He lives in the tent:
Monday was the day we placed our order with Rock Auto which should be in Miami by Wednesday:
All across Latin America middle class residents use delivery services to order stuff online in the US and they get their orders delivered to a US address which simplifies everything. Stored RVs waiting for their owners:
Then the shipping companies in Miami fill a container and forward everyone’s packages to their countries where they are distributed to the recipients. Our parts are in their way to Paraguaybox, an office in Doral near the Miami airport and every Latin American country has a similar freight forwarder. It’s a clever system that doesn’t penalize people for living outside the US and wanting to place orders online.
So we are on track to repair the wear and tear of 130,000 very hard miles, and Chris may have a handle on what’s wrong with our new Victron electrical system. We fixed our lighting problem by discovering we had accidentally turned off the master switch. Bernie you see the Porch light, the mood light (neon colors) and the Cabin light master switches. Only the cabin light is on in the photo:
It’s easy enough to make an error but the fact it took us 18 hours to figure out why we had no cabin lighting is a measure of how stressed our electrical issues have rendered us. Not Rusty:
Chris talked with a German friend who showed up in his RV who told Chris (not me, my German is very basic) he had the same identical problem three years ago, the inverter registering low voltage when the Victron shunt shows a full charge and the suspicion is the inverter is correct and the shunt is over reading the power stored in the batteries. So on Tuesday Chris plans to actually test the power in our three Victron batteries and synchronizing them manually with the shunt and maybe thus solving the low voltage signal. It makes sense to me but I am a mere spectator. Fingers crossed.
