Stargazer's Garage

I found a great iPhone/iPod Touch app at the iTunes store for keeping track of fuel consumption and automobile expenses called Road Trip. One of the best things I like about it is that I can enter either gallons or litres and whether or not I fill the tank and it will keep track of all sorts of stats and show me my fuel consumption in either mpg or L/100 km. You can then export all of this data into a spreadsheet through email. I find it easier to simply take a screenshot on my Touch and upload it here, which I plan on doing on a monthly basis from now on. This particular screen shows all the accumulative data since I first bought the Denali back in August 2008. Click the thumbnail above to see the full stats. You can see that the fuel consumption is not great. On the highway I was able to get an average of around 14 mpg, but in the city where I do most of my driving I get around 10 mpg. Such is the cost of living at the top of a mountain. You can also see that on my last fill-up I ave

Concrete/Grandy KOA : 2 nights, Site #91   Coming back from Everett, I had the urge to get out on the road again and thought it would be nice to go for a couple of nights before the weekend. There was nothing available at Sunnyside so we took a chance calling the KOA campground in Concrete, WA . It's only about 2 hours away from our home and we had heard good things about it.... This trip started out a bit differently because the trailer was actually in storage. Since the trailer was already equipped with just about everything we needed, we thought it would be simple to just pack the clothes and food we wanted into the Denali, load up at the storage yard and leave from there. It didn't go quite that smoothly though, because that morning after stopping at the Costco in Port Coquitlam for fuel, I realized that I had forgotten the RV keys at home. Luckily, we were only 15-minutes away. In the end, we wereg only 30-minutes behind our original schedule. There was a 90-minute wait at

VPD Motorcycles Originally uploaded by istargazer . My wife and I went on this charity bike ride at the end of June. It was a great day and marred only because I thought I had lost one of my memory cards. Luckily, I found it just the other day and have been busily uploading the pictures. This is a picture of the Vancouver Police motorcycles. The VPD were really great because they gave a police escort for the group of riders all the way through Vancouver, onto Highway #1 and across the Golden Ears Bridge. It was a weird feeling not stopping for red lights!

Lakeside RV Park: 3 Nights 12321 Hwy 99, Everett, WA 98204 Talk about contrasts! From our very first camping trip into the lush forests around Cultus Lake, BC we went to our next destination of urban pavement: Lakeside RV Park off of Highway 99 in Everett, Washington. To be fair, after first impressions of the "neighborhood", the place was quite livable and suited our goal of being close to shopping. In fact, we got a water-view "lake" side spot right next to the fishing pond. We did lots of time at Camping World, Walmart, and Target as well as doing a little shopping at an outlet mall, and I was able to install and setup a few more things on our travel trailer. Click the thumbnail below to see more photos. 2009 Everett I got to climb up on top of the roof of the travel trailer for the first time to install the MaxxAir II vent cover. It allows us to keep the vent open without letting water come in through the opening. I'll need to get up there a few more times b

Sunnyside Campground : 2 Nights The maiden voyage in our Tango RV travel trailer was a great success. There were a lot of "firsts" for us and the kids, but we all had great fun--despite my returning home with a minor concussion and whiplash! More on that later. We left home on July 1st, Canada Day holiday morning. It took me a while to get hitched up again after only doing for the first time over a week earlier. We finally got on the road around 10:30-ish and went over the Port Mann Bridge to the commercial truck scales to weigh ourselves. After a brief stop in the empty parking lot of an Abbotsford church for lunch, we arrived at Sunnyside Campground in Cultus Lake early in the afternoon. Despite waiting an hour so that we could get "Twilight" admission to the Cultus Lake Water Slides (4 hours of playtime from 2:30 to closing) it still cost our whole family over $90 to get in. To me, it wasn't worth it because most of the time is spent waiting in lines, but the