Comments (2)

By Jonathan, April 7, 2010 7:10 am

The shuttle video is uploaded… It’s not very good, I’m still a complete n00b at video. Even with a tri-pod, I’m close to useless. 😉

Feel free to open the video directly in YouTube for HD and other options.

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By Jonathan, August 20, 2009 12:01 pm

The day we arrived in Gatlinburg, we went zip lining with the family at Zip Gatlinburg.  I had the camcorder and got some decent shots of everyone on the lines.  I had to strap it to my wrist, so I didn’t get any good shots of me zipping, but I tossed in one very jerky clip just for kicks.  The video is about 5 minutes, shot at various resolutions.  I’m still figuring out how my camera, video software and Youtube interact, so there it’s letterboxed.  I think it’s actually YouTube that’s doing that, as the rendered video is fine.  I may swap this out for the Blip.Tv player if it’s any better once this is uploaded.

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By Jonathan, August 18, 2009 1:01 pm

If you’re curious what it’s like to drive a 30-foot RV up and down a mountain road, I made a short video of our trip down the mountain from the cabin in Tennessee.  It’s shaky, as the camera was being hand-held, but it’ll give you some idea of what you can do with an RV if there isn’t anyone in the way. 😉

If the player doesn’t show up properly here, you can go here to access the original on blip.tv.

Comments (4)

By Jonathan, August 17, 2009 2:52 am

First, a quick update…  we’re in Christiansburg, VA, about 4 hours from home.  We stopped for the evening because we didn’t feel like rolling in to our neighborhood and having to do 12-point turns to get parked at 11 o’clock at night. 😉  We’re not impressed with the campground, but it was there and fairly cheap.  It’s got power and water and we can dump our waste tanks in the morning before we leave.

The trip down the mountain in Gatlinburg was relatively uneventful, except that Dasy hadn’t fastened the front curtain very well and it came loose.  I had to do a quick stop for that, as it was near impossible to concentrate on not falling off the mountain while getting smacked in the face with a floppy curtain.  Otherwise, the RV handled it just fine.  I think our brake issues may finally be behind us, as we’ve noticed no other oddities in that department since leaving Waynesboro a few days ago.

The family reunion was fine, but we didn’t actually do much other than the zip-lining.  That was fine by us and we got to spend a fair amount of time with a bunch of the family we don’t see too much of usually.

Since I’m awake and harvesting various pictures from several of my digital cameras, I figured I’d give you a really short tour of the inside of the RV.  Basically, I wanted a couple of reference pictures before we did too much to change anything.  They’re not great shots, but they show the inside fairly well.

The first view here is from the “hallway” looking forward into the main living room area (click on it for a larger view).  It’s a bit messy, as this was taken after the brake issues on the Blue Ridge Parkway and we were just kind of shuffling stuff around while we waited.  About the only things you can see here that we’ve already changed are the speakers and stereo.  They’re all relatively cheap (on special at Crutchfield), but they’re WAY better than the junker system that came with it.  The rear speakers (you can see one laying on the couch) aren’t mounted into anything.  They’re just boxes with long wires.  I can run them to the bedroom, stick them outside for patio listening, or stick them in the cabinets above for movies.  I just wanted some flexibility instead of cutting dedicated spaces for them.  The next major changes are going to involve the TV system.  It’s an older tube TV, so it doesn’t accept the digital signals and it takes a lot of power.  I’m going to switch it out with a small LCD.  The mounting kit arrived right before we left and I didn’t feel like dealing with it.

This next shot is from the main living area looking backwards towards the bedroom (I’m standing next to the living room table).  The main door is on the left, followed by the small pantry, the fridge, a closet, the bathroom sink, then the bedroom as you look towards the back.  The kitchen is on the right, although it’s not pictured very well.  It has two steel sinks, a microwave, a three-burner stove, an oven and a ton of little cabinets.  The black box on the wall is the main sensor panel that tells us when our various water and waste tanks are full or empty, plus the status of our water pump, propane supply, battery voltage, and a few other things about the RV’s current state.  Behind that wall is the shower and the toilet, which is separate from the bedroom.  I’ll diagram or photograph the whole bathroom area eventually.  It’s kind of neat how it was designed and is one of the things we really liked about the RV when we were looking at it.

I’ll probably do a video walkthrough of the RV eventually.  I found out that my laptop doesn’t have enough guts to handle the video from my camera, so all video will have to wait until I can get time on the home system to do some editing.  I may also have some decent footage of the zip-line stuff, but I haven’t gone through it all yet, so I’m not entirely sure. I’ll let you know when I get some editing done.