We originally planned Reno as just a quick one-night stay to meet up with some friends. The winter weather coupled with the water leak in our trailer convinced us to spend an extra day here. When we drove into town yesterday morning, the mountains from Lake Tahoe to Reno were very different than the snow-covered scenery we now see on the horizon. It’s really awesome to see the change.

With only a few things planned today, we slept in. (We being Tanya & I, while the twins woke up early and entertained themselves.) When the fun the kids were having was finally keeping me from sleeping any more, I got up and went to Lowe’s to get the parts I needed to fix the trailer.

Super glamorous stuff: one of the Lowes items I bought was a new toilet seat. We had planned to upgrade the trailer’s throne to a shiny new no-slam seat. Turns out that RV toilets (at least ours) are a different size than home toilets. So, I bought an amazing new toilet seat…then returned it. Tanya found one to order instead.

I couldn’t find a replacement hose with drinking-safe water line and the plastic 3/8″ NPT hand-tighten fittings on each end, so I picked up a stainless steel braided hose. The gotcha here is the metal on the new hose is way stronger than the plastic parts it’s connecting to on the trailer. Without the hand-tighten grip things along with the awkward/cramped area around the leaking hose, it would have been super easy to over torque the new water line. I TLAR’d it and we’re now leak free. Easy stuff.

I did quite a bit of weather planning (aviation weather sites are definitely the way to plan your RV trip…and holy smokes, I miss the weather shop at work). I also spent some time working on a new iOS app designed for RV’ers. We did some food shopping to get stocked up again. It’s still really easy to buy too much stuff – every cubic millimeter of our freezer is filled with something right now. It’s also easy to buy the wrong stuff. I said yes to the twins today when they wanted to buy some frozen waffles. Those waffles are, of course, not individually wrapped. So, their freezer footprint is pretty messy. Learning in progress.

I’m now somewhere over 3 weeks of not being at work. I realized today that I pretty much no longer know what day it is. I barely know what month it is. I think about my old job every now & then, but it’s pretty rare. I definitely didn’t expect that – nor could I even fathom it. Not to get all touchy-feeling, but reflecting on that generates some pretty strange feelings. Not too terribly long ago, I was away for work 12+ hours a day and got texts & phone calls 24/7. This new road trip life is about as opposite as I could imagine. My big event today was replacing a hose.

I’m also really bad at paying attention to my phone & email. I just noticed that my mom called earlier today. (Sorry, Mom.)

For the last month or so I’ve been using up my vacation days before my official USAF retirement. Since I only have a couple days left, I spent some time tonight logging into all the USAF websites I’ll need access to after my retirement. Comically, many of the government sites I need have recently expired certificates so when I tried to log in, they generated piles & piles of warnings. (No comment.)

For future stuff, I did hear some interesting news about the future job start dates. I don’t plan on sharing future job stuff until it happens though. I’ll leave you with: things are still in flux, but however it ends up, everything will be great.