Sunday July 10, 2016 Guerneville CA.
Discussing vans and engines
My friend Marty was coming by this morning to help me work on the van, well, supervise anyway. I putzed around until he showed up. Since I did most of the work yesterday, there wasn’t much to do today and besides I needed a break to think about things before I take the next step and cut the engine housing in half at the appropriate place.
Marty also has one of these old vans with four wheel drive and with a six 292 in it, and has followed the van parts stuff a lot more than I have so we had a lot to discuss
We sat around the van discussing the problems I found and how to seal and hold down the engine compartment once I cut it off. He’s also eyeing the engine parts I won’t need anymore to have spares for his van. So far, he got away with my almost new water pump.
We sat here and walked around looking at parts and things until we were talked out on it.
Headed over to Armstrong Valley Farm strawberry patch
I suggested we go for a little walk over to my brother’s strawberry patch and he thought that was a good idea.
We walked across this creek over the bridge on the way. There’s still a little water in the creek, but it will soon dry up.
Through the gate and hung a left to the strawberry patch.
Seventh heaven
Here’s Marty in seventh heaven in the strawberry patch. Yummmmmm.
Piggy wiggies
We could hear the pigs from the garden so on the way out we went over to have a look. Marty’s talking with them as he likes pigs.
This is one of the larger ones.
Jeep ride up to the top of the hill
We went back to the van and sat around and discussed some more van stuff when I suggested we take his jeep and go for a ride up the hill and see if we can get to the top. We decided to take it easy and leave the chain saw at home taking our chances with downed trees that may be blocking the road.
We went through this pipe gate and headed up the hill to our water tanks.
We stopped at the water tanks so I could check things out. Unfortunately I found the tank water level device off the track, so I don’t know how much water is in the tanks and I’ll have to get a big ladder to fix the measuring device at the to of the tank. Oh well as long as there is enough water, there’s no problem.
We continued on up the road past the tank hoping we wouldn’t run into any down trees blocking the road going through here.
Good thing we didn’t bring the chain saw
We were following the main road up when we ran into these down trees. Someone cut enough for a little four wheeler to get by, but not enough for us. We could of moved it, but we are supposed to be lazy so Marty backed down the road to turn around and try another road.
He backed down to here for an easy turn around and we tried another road.
We were able to drive over some of it, but just up ahead was an even bigger tree down, so we turned around again and tried yet another road and made it up to the top of the hill. Lucky Marty doesn’t mind a few scratches as he’s used to rock jeeping in the southern states.
View from the top
We stopped at the top for a look and a break. This is over looking the town of Guerneville down past the green grape field of Korbels.
On the way up Marty jumped his jeep over this log and now on the way down he climbed over it like it was a rock, up and over.
When we made it back to my house Marty went on home and I went in for a nap and some thinking about engines of course.
About an hour before dark I started removing the few last things from the engine compartment and checked things out some more. I think it’s all going to work out.
Nice day.