With the price of diesel, this might be our only long trip this summer, but we’re still planning some short ones and a few medium length ones (like this year’s version of the Keystone Cougar 22MLS Great Lakes Regional Rally (Part 1?))
I’m writing this on Friday the 24th of April. Not sure exactly when it will post because we have to cell phone service or internet connection here.
Vicki and I have been enthusing about this first trip all winter long. The 22MLS group was planning a spring meet up in Michigan. You might remember that last year we planned our first trip to be about this time of year in Cowan’s Gap PA, and then the 22MLS group had a spring meet up in Ohio that we went to earlier, and afterwards we’d had to re-winterize the trailer while it was snowing, and then de-winterize it a week or two later to go to Cowan’s Gap. Well, this time the meetup was a little later, so it basically took the place of both trips.
We grabbed the trailer out of storage a few weeks ago for two reasons – to take it back to Meyers to do the annual safety inspection (and at the same time get the wheel bearings serviced so we had a baseline for them) and also to replace the factory mattress with a much more comfortable from rvmattress.com. We then put it back away after doing a few small maintenance tasks but without de-winterizing it.
Then last weekend, we grabbed it again. This time, we did the de-winterizing steps. It’s good we had an easy way to plug the trailer in because with the fresh tank full of chlorinated water for sanitizing the system, we were able to keep the tank heaters and the internal furnace on to make sure the tanks and the pipes didn’t freeze. The temperature while we had it home was barely above freezing most days, and got down to or below freezing a few nights. When we finally pulled the slider in to get ready to go, a sheet of solid ice came off the slider topper and shattered on the ground.
As well as de-winterizing, I also re-installed the batteries, got the solar system up and running (I bet you were wondering why the solar system hadn’t been working, right?) and did some other maintenance tasks. I’d intended to wash the outside of the trailer, but with the highest temperature that weekend barely above 41F, I didn’t feel like getting splashed.
Meanwhile, as we’re prepping for the 3 leg trip to get to Steamboat RV Park in Michigan, we’re hearing that the Grand River has flooded and they don’t know if our group’s spots were even going to be above water next weekend. Since it’s a 3 leg trip, we don’t really want to set off in that direction if the whole place is going to be underwater. The organizers of the group camp-out decided not to organize an alternative location, because evidently everything around that area was also experiencing flooding. Last year our destination had flooded out, but the park itself actually took care of changing our reservations to a different park on higher ground.
So Vicki and I decided, pretty much at the last minute, on Monday, to cancel our reservations at Steamboat as well as the places along the way, and head on down to Cowan’s Gap. We’d enjoyed the place last year, and it certainly seemed like it was going to have better weather.
One of the last things we did for packing up was finally taking the new Blackstone grill out of the box and assembling it. Due to bad planning (and not knowing how much assembling there was to do) we ended up doing a bunch of it on our next door neighbor’s lawn, or at least the strip of grass on his side of the driveway that officially belongs to us. We lost a few bolts in the grass, and I had to make a run to the local hardware store to buy a couple more. Another thing we made a hardware store run for was to buy a 100 foot long water hose – Cowan’s Gap doesn’t have water service at the campsite, but the spigots are pretty close together and I was betting with the 100 foot long hose, plus our existing two smaller hoses, we could refill from the nearest spigot without having to hitch up the trailer and drive over to one. Speaking of that, I also remembered to tie the pooper scooter to the back ladder, but I forgot to pack the little metal thingy that lets you easily tow it behind your truck. Oh well.
I don’t know why, after planning 3 legs of 3 hours each to get to Steamboat, we decided to just tough it out and do Cowan’s gap in one 7 hour push, but we did and it worked out ok. I guess we’d had enough of making reservations. I was pretty sore afterwards, but I was able to get through all the setup and stuff when we arrived. We also managed to make a very early start. Last year I think I’d told Vicki I wanted to be on the road by 10, and we didn’t put the truck into Drive until 11:15 or so. This time, we were actually not just out of our driveway, but I think we were at the Country Max getting our propane cylinders refilled before 10. Because of the early start, we got to Cowan’s Gap while it was still light, and setting up everything goes so much better when you can actually see.
So Tuesday was pretty much a driving day. The weather was nice, maybe a little cool, but way warmer than it had been at home when we were prepping the trailer. Wednesday was extremely pleasant weather, and we went for a very long hike with the dogs that tired all of us out. I’m not sure the dogs have recovered yet, here on Friday. We tried to connect up the Blackstone to the plumbed in propane line on the trailer, but something was amiss and it didn’t work out, so we went back to using the 1 pound bottles that we’d had for our Coleman stove.
Thursday, we ignored Gizmo’s whining first thing in the morning, so he paid us back by peeing on the comforter. So we spent most of the morning in the nearby town washing the comforter in the laundry, and doing a bit of “digital re-toxing”. There’s no cell phone signal or provided wifi in Cowan’s Gap, which means I’m ripping through my backlog of unread Analog magazines at a tremendous rate. But I had to bring my iPad into town so I could maintain my NYTimes crossword streak and catch up on my 82 unread emails. I also nipped into the Tractor Supply to pick up some more 1 pound propane bottles and look at their Blackstone display and see if there’s anything I’m missing. I posted something to the 22MLS group about my problems with the hose I’d bought to hook up the propane, but while I was posting it I looked up the order on Amazon where I’d bought that hose, and noticed that it had come with a brass piece with a 90 degree bend and some plumbers teflon tape. I didn’t remember the brass piece, but later on, as we were driving back to the campsite I remembered seeing the plumbers tape in the Ramboxes, and wondered if that piece was there too. After we got back, I had a root around in the Ramboxes and found it, and that was the missing link in getting the hose to hookup to the quick release on the camper and the nozzle opening on the Blackstone. So now we have 6 1 pound bottles of propane that we don’t need, but we no longer need to swap out bottles in the middle of cooking.
And after that, we went for a paddle around Cowan’s Gap pond. It’s not a very big pond, and even at a very gentle pace we circled it twice. But it was really nice to get out with Vicki – we haven’t paddled together in a number of years. Friday morning I dumped both tanks – the grey tank was making blooping noises that tell you it’s nearly time, and I did the black was well because why not? I improvised a connection between the pooper scooter and the tow hitch using a compression strap. I drove very slowly and watched it through the backup camera and it seemed to work ok, except one trip where the handle got kind of caught up with the tow ball and I had to drop the hitch to get it free.
After that I tested out my theory about the 100 foot hose and the nearest spigot, and found out we were about 20 feet short. So I borrowed a hose from a nearby camper and completed the circuit. Didn’t get the tank filled because it came over very dark and we could hear thunder. The tank gauge says it’s only 1/3 full, but I don’t trust tank gauges. But I thought I had to get the borrowed hose back before it started pelting down, and I took it back in a very light rain. And that was it, as soon as the light rain ended, we stopped hearing thunder and the black cloud above us stopped looking so black. So mostly we’ve been hanging around and enjoying the wonderful weather. But here it is a few hours later and it just started raining again. But it’s not pelting down and it’s not windy, so we’re not all buttoned up like there’s going to be a thunderstorm.
A couple of days of being in a site with no cell phone service and consequently no internet has taken Vicki and I from “there’s no way I’d give Elon Musk a penny if I could help it” to “maybe we need Starlink” pretty quickly. We’ve got a big loop around Northern Ontario planned for later in the year and we could run up some big data charges if we could even get data out there. Certainly we need to do some research, both on the costs and how to run it on the trailer – I’ve heard there’s some DC adaptors that would run it off the batteries with the inverter losses. I also wonder how well it work down here deep in a valley. Vicki’s been using the T-Mobile/Starlink connection to send text messages, but it seems to only connect to one Starlink satellite at a time and you have to hold it in alignment as it moves across the sky.
So now it’s Friday evening. I’ve done a bunch of stuff around the trailer, but mostly just relaxed and enjoyed the scenery and the weather. We still haven’t used our bikes, which I brought along, but the place is pretty hilly so we might not get to them. We also discussed maybe spending a full day at Gettysburg at some point in the next few days. I wish we could check the weather forecast. But you know, just hanging out at the trailer with Vicki and the dogs is pretty awesome too.
The process I started with For my sins and documented my progress with Progress and Regress is now officially (probably) done. Mailman is up and running, mail is being delivered (although as usual, only one of my lists is getting much traffic). The new archives are very cool, with full text and all. I actually had to deal with a Y2K bug – some of the mail in the old archives had the year as “number of years after 1990” instead of “number of years after 0”, which meant I had to fix a bunch of dates with years 100, 101, and in the case of one person who refused to upgrade, 102 and 103. And I even put the websites behind https using the brilliant mod_md, which is even easier to use that certbot, which is what I’d used on some other domains.
I shut down my old linode, but just in case I need to recover something from it in the near future, I haven’t deleted it yet. Linode.com still charges the same rate for shut down servers as active ones, but it’s only by shutting it down I can make sure there isn’t something still relying on it that I forgot.
So a little under 5 years ago, I was taking a paddle and I had a pain in the area of my left sit bone so bad I had to stop paddling, get out of the boat, do some stretches, and continue on. The previous year had been lockdown and in spite of the fact that I only had one race that year I had been training hard and working on Strava segment CRs and virtual races. But 2021 was going to be my best year ever, and so I started out the year with a bang. Most years I had been lucky to get more than a few 10 mile plus paddles in before the Round the Mountain race, but this year I’d started out with a plan to really ramp up my mileage, and maybe take a shot at the 90 Miler the following year. So there I was, a month to go before the race season started, and I was already doing 25-30 kilometer long paddles. And feeling an annoying nagging pain. I was also doing 3-4 hour long bike rides on days I wasn’t paddling.
The pain kept increasing as the season went on, but rather than cutting back on training, I kept going. I did end up having an amazingly good season, in spite of the fact that towards the end of the season I would need to push my butt out of the seat for a few seconds to get some momentary relief, then continue on. I couldn’t wait for the end of the season, and when it finished I put my boat away and didn’t touch it until much later than I usually start the following year. And when I did, I went for an easy paddle but was in agony after 15 minutes, and spent another 30 minutes getting back to the dock because I had to keep stopping because it hurt too much. Much later in the year I discovered that with a thermarest pad placed exactly right, I could stand slightly longer paddles, but with much reduced stability so I only paddled my more stable boat on the most wave free segment of the canal.
Now the problem with the sit bone area of your body is that there’s a lot going on there. Basically near your sit bone (your Ischial Tuberosity), you’ve got a bunch of muscles anchored there, like your Performis, and your Quadralatis, as well as your Sciatic nerve, your Hamstring tendon, and there’s a Ischial Bursa there as well. So during the last 5 years I’ve had a lot of conflicting diagnoses, a lot of different therapies, and a lot of medical interventions.
As an aside, is there such a thing as being immune to cortisone shots? I’ve had a bunch of them over the years, including in my knee, in my shoulder, in my carpal tunnel, and in the last 5 years, in various nerves and tendons etc. And I’ve never gotten a smidgen of relief from any of them. The closest I’ve gotten is sometimes an hour of relief from the anesthetic they inject before the cortisone.
Anyway, after trying everything from stretching routines to spinal implants, my local pain doctor suggested I need an Ischial Bursectomy. I asked him who could do it, and he cut and pasted a Google search into an email and sent it to me. Basically no local doctor does it. And if you do the search, you find several doctors around the country whose websites say they do it, but when you contact them they say they don’t do it any more. Oh, and maybe a few doctor’s offices who think you’re saying something different – I didn’t catch on until a few of them said “we only do hip operations”. I tried saying it like “iskeal” to see if that helped with the understanding.
Eventually I found one doctor on Park Avenue in New York who, when you call to ask, the front desk says “sure, we do it” and makes an appointment, but when you fly down there at great personal expense, the doctor says that they don’t do it, but have you thought about PRP? To say I was pissed off at his clinic was an understatement. Ok, I had thought about it, but it seems pretty dubious, since all it is is that they take some blood out, centrifuge it down, and inject parts of it back into you. There’s a similar therapy going around but instead of your blood platelets, they inject sugar or something like that. I think the theory behind both of them is to stimulate an immune/inflamation reaction. But I did know that one of the doctors I’d used in Rochester does PRP, so I went back and tried that, and it was ineffectual. (Oh, and not covered by medical insurance.)
Eventually somebody on Reddit’s r/ChronicPain subreddit got in touch with me to say that they’d had an Ischial Bursectomy from a Doctor Harris in Houston and it had done them a world of good. So I got in touch with Doctor Harris’s office and after jumping through a lot of hoops I got an appointment to fly down there so he could examine me. And he agreed to do the procedure! I was so happy! Doctor Harris exudes confidence and healing.
So eight days ago, I went under the knife (or the arthroscope) and got exactly what I’d spent the last couple of years dreaming about. He gave me some photos taken through the arthroscope, showing all these fibers growing out of my bursa and preventing my sciatic nerve and my posterior femoral cutaneous (PFC) nerve from moving the way they’re supposed to be. And after photos showing the bursa gone, the fibers gone, and both nerves free of entanglements. He said that in normal conditions, that bursa is about 1mm thick, but mine was swollen up to about 6mm. He also said that while he was in there, he was moving my leg around and practically had me doing the splits to make sure there was no impingement between the bones in there, which can be a problem. No wonder orthopedic surgeons look so fit, when they have to move my fat ass around like that.
What a mess!Nerves all clean and moving
So like I said, it’s been 8 days and of course I’ve got post-op pain. It’s really hard to judge whether the pain I’m feeling right now is the same old pain from the last 5 years, or it’s because somebody inserted a metal object and stared scraping away parts of my body. But considering that a lot of the pain I’m feeling is from different places than the old pain, I’m hopeful. I think the doctor suggested I might not know for sure how much difference it has made until 5 weeks go by, so I’m trying to be patient about this. And mostly succeeding, but not 100%.
Oh one other thing – Doctor Harris suggested I get a DEXA bone density scan because he felt my sit bone was a little soft. How shit would it be after all this to find out that the pain was actually my sit bone collapsing under the pressure of sitting on it 18 hours a day?
So where do we go from here? Well, I promised myself a new camera to celebrate this milestone. The question I’m waiting to find out is do I buy a new drone (the Avata 360 when it comes out) for filming other people’s kayak races, or do I buy an action camera (the Insta360 X5) to mount on my kayak for filming my own.
Obviously I’m hoping for a return to kayaking, but I’m thinking I’m not going to be as fanatic about it – no more 6 days of kayak work outs and a 4 hour bike ride on the off day. I believe that piling on more and more workouts didn’t really improve my speed that much any way. Plus it’d be hard to maintain a consistent workout regime when I’m trying to do more with Vicki. I think the goal now will be to get in such workouts as I can, go to races when I can, but work them in around my life instead of working my life in around the kayaking.
And what if the surgery didn’t fix the problems? Well, then life will be pretty much like it’s been for the last year – RV trips with the “rule of 3”, and videoing some kayak races. It’s not awesome, but it’s good enough to tide me over until I find the next thing to try.
The rule of three is “travel no more than 3 hours a day, get to your destination by 3pm, and spend 3 days at each campground”. We’ve kind of modified it to have a couple of 3 hour days in a row before recovering my pain levels by having a 3 day or more stay at a campground. But we’ve been thinking about longer trips, like across the country, and there’s no way we’d want to do that unless we can manage a few 5+ hour days between the major stops. Doing it 3 hours at a time would take more than a whole summer.
As I wrote about in Drone My Roof and Drone My Roof Part 2, I was getting my roof redone at great expense, and I was determined to get a good time lapse of the whole process. As I said in Part 2, I made a circular waypoint track. At semi-regular intervals I went out and flew it twice. My intention was that for each time I flew, I’d use some non-integer number of circles. I wasn’t sure if I’d use 7/8ths of a circle or 9/8ths of a circle, but I thought it would be more interesting that doing one full circle each time. Which is why I did two circles, and also why I had the circles start at the back of the house instead of the front. (Actually, I forget why I chose starting at the back, but because I was going to do a non-integer number of circles I didn’t think it would matter).
For about a day and a half I didn’t think to put starting and stopping the camera into the waypoint file, so there was a bit of a bobble around the back of the house as the drone decided that it needed to turn 45 degrees and possibly move a bit while moving from the end waypoint to the beginning of the next, even though they had the exact same latitude and longitude. I had to edit those bobbles out, to greater or lesser success each time. The last 3 or 4 missions didn’t have the bobble, which was a great relief.
I sped up each clip by 4x, so that it was obvious it was a time lapse. I also added the start time of each clip as a caption.
The other thing I discovered is that even though the drone is tracking 20-odd GPS satellites at once, there were significant differences between different circles. Usually not much between the two circles in one go, but between one mission and the next, sometimes 5 or more meters difference. Which I find a bit odd, because my first gps, a Garmin GPSMAP 195 which only tracked 12 satellites at once, could quite consistently show you which lane you were in when you used it in the car (in spite of it being an aviation GPS). And my Garmin Forerunner 920XT fitness watch could show which side of the river you were on.
As well as the problem with the circles being offset, the center point also meandered around – I had to save a new one several times. Unfortunately the KMZ file only saves center points that are in-use, so you can’t go back to an old one if you save a new one. It’s confusing, because during the session, you can have multiple center points saved, but after you come back to the waypoint file, all the ones that aren’t actually in use are gone.
I did some messing around in Final Cut Pro trying to get something usable out of this. A while ago I used a weird trick I’d found on Reddit’s r/finalcutpro sub-reddit to center a tracked object on the screen, involving inverting the clip, tracking the object, and then applying that to the non-inverted clip. Unfortunately there wasn’t a trackable object in the middle of the roof, so I was wondering if there was a way I could track the four corners of the house and do some sort of geometric mean on that. r/finalcutpro was not much help with that, but suggested I ask in r/vfx but they used a lot of terminology that I didn’t understand. Something about a gaussian splat or something like that.
So I decided on two things. First is that I’d do a single circle each time, starting from the more logical front of the house. Second is that I’d try to hide how badly the waypoint moved around from time to time by using a transition that had a lot of movement in it.
First attempt at editing
Then as a second attempt, I zoomed in 25 percent, and tried to use the slop to center the images a bit better. I did that by using some guide lines on the screen and setting a keyframe at each cardinal point and moving it as close to centered at each point. But there wasn’t enough leeway in the video – many of the positions I couldn’t get the roof centered without having black bars on the outside.
Second attempt at editing
Not perfect, but I think it’s better than the first attempt.
So lessons learned:
Make the waypoint file go full circle or maybe two circles without stopping, starting at the front of the house.
Make the circle further out or use a wide angle lens so there’s more slop on the edges for cutting in.
I think I’d fly slower and speed it up more – I like the frenetic movements. I know I said in Part 2 that I didn’t like it that way, but I’m having second thoughts.
Be more careful about launching the drone at exactly the same place each time – some of the worst offsets were the times I had to launch at somewhere other than the exact spot on the sidewalk I’d chosen for most of them. In one extreme case I had to take off the screen window and fly it out the door.
