The Trip - Out of Touch

We got to Seeley Lake, Montana, on Saturday night, and we've been out of touch with the rest of the world since. Both my mom and I have Cingular (now AT&T) cell phones, but Cingular hasn't seen fit to put up any cell towers around here. This area has Verizon service, and they're not on speaking terms with Cingular.

Without Cingular, I can't get to the internet either, so we've been incommunicado, and it's been making me crazy.

We went to church Sunday at the church my mom used to attend before she moved down to Texas. Everyone was thrilled to see her again, and they're nice to me too. We're parked in front of the pastor's house.


He got us all set up with our water and electric hookups and helped us figure out the complicated water system in the motorhome. Most RVs have very simple water hookups. You plug the hose into the spout that says, "City Water System," or to fill up the fresh water tank, you plug it into the other spout, which says, "Fresh Water Tank."

But not on our fancy motorhome. Ours has one spout and a bunch of pipes with valves, and if you want to fill up the fresh water tank, you have to open one of the valves (or maybe two), but the diagram in the owner's manual doesn't match the actual pipes and valves that stare us in the face. So we had to punt.

And this was important, because there was a foul smell coming from the water that was in the "fresh" water tank, so we needed to drain it. It took a long time to probably figure out the right combination of open and closed valves to get the water drained so it stopped smelling bad and started being wonderful Montana water. I think we got it.

And then this morning, my mom got hold of the RV dealer she knows in Missoula and asked about the hot water heater (which we had some trouble figuring out), and he said we drain that by opening the hot water faucets inside the motorhome and keep them running until the water stops smelling like sulfer, so we did that, and now I think all our water-stink problems may be over.

But all of this is to say that we've been out of touch with the rest of the world for days, and now we're momentarily back (in Missoula for the afternoon). I've got posts ready to go with some of the other things we've been up to, and I'll post them with the proper dates for when they would have been posted if only we had the internet working at the right time.

We may be out of touch for a while again, because we're going back into the Cingular-Free-Zone for a while longer.

Update (08/01/2007):

Two new posts below...