Cruisin’

Yesterday morning didn’t start out all that great. I woke up about 3 a.m. hearing a soft “thunk” every few seconds.  Jim was sleeping soundly, so I quietly got up to investigate.  I noticed our nightlight was going from dim to bright in time with the thunk, so I checked our power panel and sure enough, we were on the inverter.  Every few seconds, the shore power would try to engage, but tripped immediately, causing the thunking noise I heard.  I switched the fridge over to gas, turned off the water heater and fan, and woke Jim to let him know something was going on with the power.  He got up and checked our power management system outside, and found that Line 1 was coming in at 132 volts, the trip point.  Now I don’t understand much about electricity, but I do know that power comes from the campground outlet in 2 lines, each should be about 120 volts.  Our system trips the power if it errors low or high, and we were getting a high voltage trip from Line 1.  We simply unplugged from the campground power and went back to sleep, nothing else to do at that time.  When we got up around 6, Jim checked the voltage again, still got the high voltage trip.  So we turned on the generator long enough to make a cup of coffee and waited until we found the campground owner getting his day started a little before 8. 

His story is that the power company increases the voltage to compensate for people running air conditioners in the warm summer months.  Do any of my readers who are familiar with the east know if this is true, and something we can expect to be a repeat experience as we spend the rest of the summer in this part of the country?

After a while, the voltages equaled out and settled down and we haven’t had any more problem – so far anyway.

Now on to the scheduled event of the day – we had reservations to take a lunch cruise on Lake George:

We picked up our tickets,

Got ready to board the steamship:

Got seated in the dining area,

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Enjoyed the views while we were docked and ate our lunch:

 

 

 

 

 

And then we  were off:

There are some beautiful, privately owned mansions along the shore of this 32 mile long lake, but this hotel on Green Island is the grandest, it is the historic Sagamore, which reminded us of the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island:

There are a lot of islands in the lake, most of them are privately owned:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There were quite a few people along these cliffs, located along the deepest part (about 200 feet) of the lake.  Our guide told us they often dive from from here, but no one obliged us today as we passed:

Our two-hour cruise was over, and we headed back to our campground spot:

 

 

 

 

 

But before we got home, we made a quick trip into a truck stop along the way and purchased a Garmin truckers GPS that we’ll use in the Castle while we’re traveling and in the car when we’re exploring and running around town.  We have other GPS devices, but decided this would work better for us than our phones or Onstar directions in the car.  We’ll keep the emergency and phone portion of Onstar and cancel the navigation service.  This new GPS should be helpful in determining safe and adequate routes for us, which Microsoft Streets and Trips still doesn’t do. I’ll still work with S&T to plan routes, but not exclusively from here on out.  We did research a new offering from Magellan and Camping World that is supposed to be exclusive to RV’s, but after checking out both units, we found the Garmin to better meet our needs for a few dollars less.

From a shaky start to the morning, we ended up with a darn good day.