Schellhase 2024 New England and Appalachian RV Travels: 21 May 2024

While we travel the United States we are well-connected with home. We have extensive telemetry, cameras and sensors throughout our "sticks and bricks" house, plus our son is the deputy fire chief in our town. He stops over regularly to check on the house and we are very appreciative of that. He also keeps us appraised of impending weather that might impact our house.

So today we had a wild weather day at home in Iowa. There were a series of storms that moved through this morning and then another cell that moved through later this afternoon. I lowered my flag to half staff to lessen the load on the flag pole and that makes a big difference. My flag pole is not a commercial pole but rather a lighter weight consumer-grade aluminum pole. Lowering it saved the pole without a doubt. Even lowering it, the pole still took a beating. Check out this video!:

Communities in Iowa were really impacted by the storms. We watched some storm chasers travel into Greenfield Iowa where there was widespread devastation with at least four deaths. We heard that the hospital was taken offline also. Western central Iowa where Greenfield is also has a lot of wind generators. The videos showed many of them laying in a pile burning!

The same storm that clobbered Greenfield made it's way across to central Iowa and hit our town of Ankeny. We watched live video as storm chasers reported. My neighbors help keep an eye on our place when we are gone and we got a phone call from my neighbor Scott that our neighborhood had been hit pretty hard. He walked around our house and it seemed OK, but other neighbors had downed trees and damage. Our street was blocked with trees.

Our adjacent street blocked by downed trees

More downed trees

So we dodged a bullet again. No damage to our house. Sounds like no damage to my son's house. With all the rain we have received my sump pump is running once every minutes, but that keeps our basement dry so that is a good thing!

Sense monitor show how frequently all of our electrical devices run, how long they runs,

and whether they are increasing or decreasing. This is the primary sump pump.

Back at the Elkhart Campground this was day two of the repair teams. One team came back and worked on my front cap decal with a heat gun. Another team from Dexter Axle came and analyzed some unusual tire wear I was having on my front axle. They verified the axles and spindles were not bent and my frame camber was good. They determined it was likely due to the original tires being out of balance. I replaced my tires with a new set before we departed this spring, since this would have been season five on them and they had over 25,000 miles on them. The new ones are balanced!

Tonight we had a huge gathering around the campfire where we met and talked with Ally's from all over the United States. Today Doreen and I walked all around the campground and we counted 74 Alliance coaches here, and more rolling in every day. Keep in mind this is the "pre-rally"! The actual Alliance Rally does not start until Wednesday of next week! What a blast!

Tomorrow I have an appointment at the RAM dealer at 0700 hrs to get my fuel filters changed due to some water in the fuel along the way somewhere. Later we will be assembling the 400+ welcome bags for the Rally. Tomorrow night we will meet our daughter Jennifer, her husband James and our grandkids Lucas and Lindsey at a restaurant in Three Rivers Michigan. It will be great to see them!

So speaking of weather, here is a report from my Weatherflow Tempest weather device here on my RV of the freak storm we had that took out my flagpole, and the resulting damage. I temporarily patched it up with some epoxy, but a replacement will be here tomorrow via Amazon!