This was when we were in Bigelow, AR the other day.

Here we are set up in Texarkana at the Quadrangle Festival.

On the road again

It's been a couple of weeks since my last post, so let me update you guys. We had a tedious and educational trip up to Mountain Home. By tedious I mean agonizing. By educational I mean we learned to never take directions from that wretched GPS device again. It thought sending us through a "shortcut" in a 40' long truck was a grand idea. I know we had trouble near Magnolia, but this was ridiculous. Additionally, while going down a major 4 lane highway it got very confused and said we were on the "Old Dump Road" and needed evasive maneuvers immediately! We just turned it off and looked at our highly detailed Arkansas map from then on.

The trip up aside, the young explorers at Flippin were having a blast on board. The same was the case for Perryville and Bigelow the subsequent days. Perryville however, provided us our next big.... "adventure." We went to set up the truck in the standard procedure, but all of a sudden half the truck's power went out. We swapped generators and thought that solved the issue. I went in to talk to the class for their pre-trip pep-talk and got a ring from Derrick with bad news. The same thing was happening with the other generator also. This is where Thomas the History major gets to play electrician for over two hours!

With Derrick's watchful eye right by me making sure I did not kill myself and Marty from the exhibit fabrication place guiding me through step by step, we trudged along through a lengthy series of troubleshooting. I even had a fan club; three employees of the school stood as an audience for me during my interim as an electrician. After a while we were able to narrow down where the source of the problem might have been, but were unable to access or test it with our basic tools. A pro was needed.

This is where Diane and Derrick shift into "get important people that know how to do stuff here" mode and were hitting the phone lines. Diane, with her unwavering persona of authority, was able to get just the kind of guy we needed in just a couple hours. Mind you, this is a company that does not generally do emergency calls, so props to her. However, during Diane and Derrick's search for a professional electrician, Marty called me back and asked me to do one last thing to see if that was the problem. When he said it, it sounded so ludicrous it was probably going to work for some reason.

He told me to pull out about 6' of our shore power cable and then reel it back in. Why not? Afterward I turned the generator back on and boom, full power. I then informed Diane of the unexpected resolution and that we were good to go.

On a more brief note, Derrick and I were in Texarkana this past weekend at the Quadrangle Festival, which went well. Later this week we're headed out to Philli for career development!