This isn’t an RV fix, but it was interesting anyway.  The house A/C air handler’s condensate drain line became clogged.  The installer of the line installed a handy cleanout location at the top of the tee, but the first junction is a 90 degree bend so I couldn’t get a snake past it to clear the clog:

The solution was to modify the drain line by adding a ball valve so that the line could be isolated from the air handler.  I also added a fitting to the cleanout that allows for the attachment of a garden hose:

With the new drain line assembled, I flushed out the clog using water pressure from the adjacent water heater’s drain spigot.  With the ball valve closed, all the water had to flow through the clogged line, not back through the air handler.  After 30 seconds of flushing the line with slowly increasing pressure, I removed the hose, opened the ball valve, and capped my new cleanout:

Back in April, I mentioned that our three-year RV trip is over, and we plan to settle in Phoenix, Arizona.  For a variety of real estate, income tax, and personal reasons, we’ve now decided to move back into our house and re-settle here in New York.  It seems that there are always decisions to be made, and sometimes you plan to turn one way but in the end turn the other way:

While finishing up our homeschooling year, I’ve found time to get back into riding with my old crew.  We rode up to the top of Bear Mountain last week:

School schedules are such that we’re hoping to be able to do short fall and spring trips, as well as longer trips in the summers.  Stay tuned!

Back in the late 60s, Tricia’s family purchased a 1961 Starcraft speedboat outfitted with a pair of Mercury “Merc 400” 45 horsepower engines.  We’ve had the boat since the late 90s.  A few years ago, I tracked down a copy of the engine service manual and got the boat working almost like new after replacing the distributer caps, re-gapping the magnetos, replacing the starters, fixing the control units, etc.

Even before we left on our 2013 RV trip, the port engine was difficult to turn.  I tried loosening up the grease inside the mount with a heat gun:

Checking out the engines:

Today, after getting the engines running in our driveway, we hitched up the boat trailer and made our way to the Hudson River:

55 years old and still running like a champ:

After anchoring off of Stony Point and having a picnic dinner, we peeked into the Haverstraw Marina where the Tallship Unicorn is docked.  This sailing ship, built in the late 40s from German U-Boat scrap metal, was used for all-female sailing trips by Sisters Under Sail, a “New Jersey based non-profit corporation established in 2005 dedicated to helping teen girls and women build confidence, develop leadership skills, and witness first-hand what women can do together when focused on a common goal.”  The ship is for sale, and can be yours for only $375,000:

This boat is a little bigger than ours:

Not bad for a boat and engines built at the tail end of the Eisenhower administration:

For the last couple of weeks, we’ve been getting our house ready for sale and going through all our belongings to figure out what to keep and what to throw away.

Since we’ve returned to New York, I’ve been trying to get back to the same level of fitness I had before we started the trip.  Ironically, I was able to do more cycling as a full time office worker than as a full time traveller.

I’m struggling to keep up with my biking buddies, but I’m getting stronger with every ride.  Today we passed by Lake Tiorati up in Harriman State Park:

While I was out biking, Trish and the kids went ice skating: