jcfiala

Kuma Bear has announced his travel plans for this summer. He and his Girl are going to Europe again, once again with a two-month first-class Eurail pass. (Fortunately, Bear doesn't need a separate pass.) Last year's trip was badly disrupted at the start due to my utter misunderstanding of how to read AirBnB listings. This year, we started planning far enough in advance that we could get Lisa and Bear into the same extended-stay hotel (essentially a studio apartment) for the full two months. (While it did not actually come to it, what we did last year was multiple reservations end-to-end, with the possibility that she would have to move from one room to another, or move out for one day into a hotel and then come back the next day, or similar disruptions, and that made planning almost impossible.)

Lisa now knows the area better, and she will be able to base herself out of Munich, made a lot of day trips from there to visit a bunch of places she has lined up, and also make some multi-day excursions where she can travel more lightly while leaving much of her stuff in the "home base" in Munich. We have some of those trips lined up already, and hope to get the rest of them booked by the time she leaves for Europe. Some of those plans may have to wait until she's already there, though. Fortunately, having that Eurail pass gives her a fair bit of travel flexibility, as she's not generally tied to any specific train.

While Kayla and I are at Westercon, Lisa and Kuma will be packing for their trip. I'm scheduled to take her to the airport in Reno on the Wednesday after Westercon.

Kayla thought she had a meeting at 10 AM today, so off she went to breakfast and then did some errands. When she got home she discovered that that thanks to misreading a time (we're usually very good at this thanks to so many meetings we attend taking place in lots of different places online) the meeting was actually at 2 PM Pacific Time.

The issue here was that I had a $20 discount coupon from Jiffy Lube for air conditioning service, which the minivan needed, and it was good today only. The original plan was for Kayla to take her meeting and then I'd take the minivan to Sparks. Jiffy Lube is only open until 4 PM on Sunday, and an AC job takes a lot longer than an oil change, so if I was going to take advantage of this offer, it had to happen sooner, not later.

I got to JL and after confirming that the Astro has had its AC upgraded to the modern coolant (that we did years ago up in Oregon), they said they could do it, but that it would take a little while. I wish I'd know just how long it would have taken, because had I known, I might have tried to get some lunch. Instead, as I typically do when going to that JL, I ordered a coffee from Starbucks, which was ready (albeit under Kayla's name, but nobody ever checks) by the time I walked across the shopping center parking lot. For an oil change, they often are done by the time I get back, but an AC recharge involves purging the system (sucking out all the coolant), which turned out to be harder than usual, they said, because the coolant was sort of goopy. That's odd because I had the system completely repaired last year, but okay. Fortunately for me, I had a new issue of Trains to read.

I had assumed that some of the coolant had leaked out of the system, but they said that the biggest problem was that there was too much coolant in it, which was part of why it took so long to purge. They also were concerned that even after recharging, it wasn't putting out as much cool air on Max AC, but I reassured them that this older vehicle and older system doesn't work that well at slow engine speeds. I rarely turn on Max AC except at freeway speeds because it needs more power to run the compressor than works at slower speeds.

After stopping to grab a sandwich and soda, I set out on I-80 east for home, and to my relief (in multiple ways, as it was pretty hot out there), I got the level of of air conditioning I would expect from a properly functioning system.

I wanted to get this done before Westercon because it is a long drive (around 500 km each way) from Fernley to Santa Clara, and much of it will be in hot places including the Central Valley of California. Here's hoping that this recharge holds for a while.