Current Location: Kentucky Horse Park Campground, Georgetown, Kentucky

Counting on iPhone apps is not always ideal. For example, our Weather Channel app, when set to detect where we are, shows us in Lexington, Kentucky (we probably are, mailing address-wise). Accordingly, it told us last night’s low should be 38. Since we had been running on our water tank prior to yesterday, we had run it dry. Malcolm hooked up the regular white (non-heated) hose to the trailer yesterday afternoon and called it a night.

This morning, Malcolm went to wash his hands in the bathroom sink and the water slowly crawled to a trickle. Thinking that odd, he went to check the “Official Big Country Weather Station”. Sure enough, it was 28 degrees outside. The water hose was apparently frozen. (Thankfully, nothing else appeared to have frozen). Within about 30 minutes, the temperature had risen above freezing and the water started flowing again.

Malcolm called in to the Brian’s Truck Shop, the place that had rebuilt our transmission in January, to talk to the owner regarding the transmission not wanting to shift to 2nd gear automatically. After telling Brian the codes that were shown on the computer, Brian indicated that we had a bad shift solenoid. He offered to send a new solenoid pack to wherever we wanted, or we could drop by on Monday and he’d fix it himself.

We decided to do the latter after being assured that, other than having to manually shift the transmission, no other issues should arise from pulling the trailer. Having the truck fixed at home would be inconvenient at best, as our most trusted source for such repairs is always so over-booked, it would be in there a week at least. So, we’ll head west from here, stopping overnight in the St. Louis area Saturday night, then on to north Arkansas for Sunday night. Monday, we’ll get the truck repaired then decide whether to move on Monday or wait until Tuesday to head towards home.

Malcolm also had his yearly performance review for his employer via email and phone this morning. He got an excellent review. Also, he found out during the review discussion that there may be a possibility of him being an onsite “goodwill ambassador” for his company assisting our sister company’s employees in deploying our systems. This would allow Malcolm to work at different sites aside from our two corporate offices in Alabama and Texas.

Two particular areas mentioned were San Diego, California and Albuquerque, New Mexico. One nice thing about traveling to job sites is that the company would pick up many of the expenses, especially when we are on-site and Malcolm is working.

Aside from all that “excitement”, we had a great time today attending the opening day horse races at Keeneland. We met Malcolm’s aunt and uncle and had a fun time people-watching, making a few bets on the horses and generally enjoying the first spring-like day we’ve had on this whole trip (temperature in the upper-60’s, finally).

Here are a few pictures from today.

Walking the horses.

Racing action.

Time to go.

Once back at the trailer, Malcolm checked a few things on the truck to make sure the transmission problem wasn’t a simple electrical issue (it wasn’t), then started tidying up things outside and partially filled the water tank. We also put lunch items in the outdoor refrigerator so we can eat our own food while traveling the next couple of days. Val started her pack-up inside. We’ll get rolling as soon as we can in the morning.