Well, after a reasonably miserable period in May, I decided to hang out a little bit with my son in Nashville. I shot an incredible amount of video footage there, but I’m not really one of those people who likes to do videos about running around town. Of the 2 days that we ran around together, one day we spent driving down to Alabama to look at puppies. The puppies looked very nice, but they were definitely part of a fairly nasty puppy mill breeder. I took some video down there and probably will use it in a future video about “Picking Your Puppy”. I looked at a lot of  puppies and a lot of them were definitely in puppy mills. And how do I categorize a puppy mill? Well, first of all the parents are not house pets. Second of all there is usually 3 or 4 females and 2 males. Third the dogs are not socialized so you can’t really meet the parents of the puppies. In fact the puppy mill we met in Alabama the female actually ran out and bit my son in the behind. ((According to him, although it scared him a bit, he thinks it just got his wallet. Which I guess he should get used to,  having a dog take a bite out of his wallet.))

So we haven’t published any of that video about going to puppy mills, but we did publish the first video about the Nashville attractions of the Pantheon, the eclectic bathroom, the capital building and the conference center and grand old Opry in “Nashville part 1”. And the 2nd movie, “Nashville part 2”, was mostly about going to the zoo. The Nashville zoo was a pretty nice zoo, but I would recommend going on a day that was slightly cooler than when we went,  above 90°F.

“Percy Priest Lake and Poole Knobs COE Camping”   is a quick review of that campground.  I wasn’t really impressed. The campground had a lot of people who were there for the full 14 days and didn’t keep up their campsites.  Also the bathrooms were so far away from the Lake loop that you HAD to drive to them (except maybe 5 or 6 sites).  and there seem to be a lower ratio of toilets and showers than I prefer with that many people.  Though I will say that MOST people were in large trailers or motorhomes and so they probably weren’t using the restroom facilities much.  It did have electric and water hookups at most of the sites.  And it had these cool “parallel park” sites that were nice pull through sites.  The road and trailer pads were in pretty good shape, though not as level as could be, they were not so bad you couldn’t level a trailer.   I would stay there again now that I know to reserve the upper middle road instead of the outer lake loop (Unless I wanted to swim of course !)

My latest video is getting the trailer ready for another season. “Getting ready for Camping and Greasing the Wheel Bearings”.   When I used the trailer last, I did not put it away in very good shape. I forgot to  clean the refrigerator and leave it open, so it was quite moldy and disgusting inside. So I had to take a 3:1 mix of Clorox and spray and clean the inside. And then I went on to add grease to the axles which I do about every 3 to 5000 miles, basically once a year. My trailer may be a little unique than most people’s because I do not have brakes. Electric trailer brakes tend to cause the axles to run much hotter than just roller bearings on a axle spindle. But I don’t believe you would need to do much different than I do. I pump Greece into the axle port, and I as the old grease comes out I check it for degradation or contamination. It’s a really good system since the fresh grease pushes the old grease out the front of the axle you can see how the bearings are holding up. Just keep adding fresh grease until  good clean grease comes out.  Also grease these days is either Red, or Green, or Purple.  So make sure you match the color (they are different) and when the color is no longer grey or brown, you have done the job.

I am not a proponent of taking bearings apart and cleaning them and repacking them. My father was an engineer at Chrysler and we worked on cars constantly for fun. You can never pack a bearing by hand has good is they can do it in the factory. And bearing grease doesn’t really go bad unless the axle so overheats that the bearings fall apart. And repacking your bearings isn’t going to stop that from happening, it’s just gonna make you think you did something wrong. The other thing is that torqueing bearings is extremely sensitive and is often either overdone or underdone. So again, if your trailer has gone 1000 miles without any problems and the grease hasn’t degraded why would you want to risk screwing that system up. But again, these are just my opinions and it’s okay for you to do what you think is best. After all it’s your trailer.  🙂

Also, a very nice subscriber to my channel sent me a neat little switch that allows you to have your regular trailer driving lights on when you are parked.  It does use the power from your battery, or if your plugged in, then that power. But if you like to have your trailer looking Lite up like a Christmas tree.. this might be for you…  Check out my RV Essentials page here on the website.