Stargazer's Garage

These are my July fuel consumption stats for our 2007 GMC Yukon XL Denali. Sorry it's late. Click the thumbnail to see the full view.

It's hard to buy local when Gordon Campbell's BC Liberals continue to deceive its citizens and increase taxes with things like the proposed HST . Because of that, I will be spending my tourist dollars outside of BC. We took an extended trip down to Oregon and took advantage of no sales tax to save a lot of money on a basic TV for our travel trailer RV . I originally bought one locally here at a Best Buy in Canada. It was a 19" Insignia (another Best Buy brand) LCD TV that was $200, which I thought was reasonable. Plus, I had some Reward Dollars saved up that would have made it cheaper to buy up north. However, after trying it out on our next camping trip in Washington state, I discovered that it lacked a digital tuner. Having no digital tuner made it useless to me because the US switched over to digital-only broadcasts earlier this year. I checked the other products in stores in Canada and anything with a digital tuner cost significantly more. On top of that the BC governm...

One of the first things I changed on my R was the stock antenna -- it reminded me of those long metal wires sticking out the top of old trains and buses that connect to overhead electric cables. The problem with installing a different antenna, though, was that most that caught my eye ended up touching the rear spoiler when the hatch was open. For a little more than 5 years I made do with a S2000 antenna lookalike and an angle adapter . Still, in addition to being difficult to line up properly, with time the adapter became floppy and no longer performed the purpose for which it was intended -- preventing the antenna from touching the spoiler. See below the fold for more and pics. Back in the day I'd considered the VW Sharan antenna, but it was always out of stock at Hillside Imports. Why not order it from a dealership? First, the Sharan isn't sold in the U.S. or Canada. Second, I believe there's some sort of modification required with the threads to make the Sharan ant...

I decided it's much cheaper to install clear sticker on the R than having to have it repainted . I had some VentureShield clear sticker installed on the front of the R. It covers the front part of the hood, the HIDs, front bumper, and part of the front fenders. So far I'm pretty happy with it. As a bonus, the sticker makes washing off bugs pretty easy. I like how the HIDs look with sticker, removing the need for the Lexan covers ; I'm still not entirely comfortable with it, though. I just have some slight difficulty wrapping my mind around the notion that a piece of flexible plastic sticking directly to the HIDs is as or even more protective than solid plastic sitting in front, not against, the HIDs. Click below the fold for pictures. The arrows in this first pic indicate the edges of the clear sticker. The VentureShield is invisible a short distance away.

A short while back the cornucopia of rock chips on the R's front reached my personal I-will-pay-good-money threshold. Being new to the area, I went with a local dealership's recommendation for a good paint shop. My entire front bumper was like this: This OEM spotted bumper was painted and installed at Karen Radley VW ( under warranty , which was another issue) in Virginia. Actually, the dealership sent the bumper to a local shop to be painted. I still blame Karen Radley VW, though, for using a shop that produces such pitiable work. See below the fold for the "after" pic. I think everyone would agree it looks much better, now, after the paint job at Ontario Auto Collision CARSTAR:

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...