Race day!

10:00am
It totally poured with rain all yesterday evening. It wasn’t very cold though, which is a good thing because the last time we went to put the furnace on at about 9:30pm, there was no hot air! The fan was blowing, but you could hear that the flame wasn’t lighting. Not much that you can do about it in the dark and the pouring rain, so we just went to bed.

But this morning, the rain had stopped. In fact it even looks like a few patches of blue sky out there now. I have the full maintenance manual for the furnace on the laptop, so the first thing I did was read up on things. Then I went out with the tool box and the circuit tester, and checked a few things. Everything checked out, right to the electronic circuit board..which I removed to find that it was soaking wet! So I took it apart and used Mike’s hairdryer (actually, probably Jen’s hairdryer!) and generator to dry it out. I put everything back together, and the flame fires up now, but shuts off a few seconds later. It doesn’t help that our propane is low, and that could be causing part of the problem. But I still think it’s related to the dampness. We’ll fill up the propane before doing any further diagnosis, and rule out that as a possible problem.

Race starts at 12 noon, so we’ll have something to eat and get over to the track. The weather looks decent, so hopefully they’ll get racing today!

9:15pm
Well they did manage to get the whole race finished today. It actually got quite warm, especially when the sun was shining. Warm enough that it was nice to sit with just a t-shirt on. It was a good race, with lots of exciting moments, and quite a few lead changes.

Martinsville Speedway

Kevin listening to the radio broadcast of the race

Ruth and I sat in the motorhome for about an hour and watched the traffic dissipate. Mike and his buddies had headed out right away, and planned on driving all night to make it back to Ontario.

I turned on the furnace again just for fun, and it fired up and ran perfectly. So I have to figure that the whole problem was caused by the rainstorm, and now I’ll figure out how to seal that compartment better so that it doesn’t happen again.

Around 5:30pm we left Martinsville, figuring that we’d get a couple of hours of driving in. We stopped for gas, but never did see a place to fill up with propane. Not to worry, the guage still shows ¼ full, and it’s not that cold out. Anyhow, we headed north on the 220 towards Roanoke, and took the turn off to the Blue Ridge Parkway. It’s only got a 45 mph (74 kmh) speed limit, but it’s very scenic and I was pretty sure I had read somewhere that the camping was cheap or free. We didn’t take the turnoff to the first campground because it seemed too close to Roanoke. I was using some co-ordinates that I had put in the GPS a couple of years ago, and when we came to the second campground, it was only a maintenance station and was locked. So we continued on, but it was quickly getting dark and starting to spit with rain. The road is very curvy with lots of hills and then we found out there was also lots of deer. Almost every corner we turned there was a stupid deer in the headlights. So the 14 miles to the next campground were done at about 25 mph, although there were no other cars around anyhow.

Blur Ridge Parkway view. But getting too dark to drive!

We saw the sign for the campground at Peaks of Otter. But we never did find the campground. It was dark, and I had enough driving. So we pulled into a lodge here and are parked in their parking lot for the night. It’s not busy, it’s very quiet, and I’m sure we won’t be bothered.