With essentially everything done, today was going to be a day of leisure.  I was going to get caught up on writing my posts, this being the third one today, and do some reading.  But instead I get a call that my hitch has arrived.  Excellent!  We get in the truck and head about four miles down the road to West RV.  These are the folks that agreed to accept the motor freight for me.  As I pull in, they are lifting the pallet with the hitch on it down off the back of the eighteen-wheeler.

I pulled the two clevis pins that hold the head on the old hitch and lift it off.  Then one of the mechanics and I pull the two pins each that hold the hitch to the mounting rails.  Then we lift and slide about 150 lbs of iron out to the tailgate where two other guys lift the old one down and the new one up.  Ten minutes later the new hitch is pinned in and the head is on.  I am in and out of West RV in less than thirty minutes.

Old, tired hitch
Shiny, new hitch
Click any picture to enlarge
I guess I should probably wash the bed of the truck and use some ArmorAll or something so that the bed looks as good as the hitch.

I asked the folks at West RV what I owed them for my trouble and they just waved me off.  They said since I was leaving all the old iron with them it was worth more as scrap than the thirty minute shop rate they would charge.  Now I don't have to dispose of anything and they get a nice little check for the scrap iron.  A good deal for everybody.

I have also spent some quality time on the phone with the technicians at SolidSignal.  They are the ones that are getting me hooked up with DirecTV satellite service.  The technician and I agreed on the best equipment for the job and they got it boxed up and headed to Kansas for me.  We will be getting what they call a Genie HR-44 receiver and a wireless client.  I wrote about the amazing things the Genie can do in a previous post.  Plus, there will be a wireless client sitting in the cabinet above the TV in the bedroom.  The Genie will stream the satellite signal to the client and the client will feed the signal to the bedroom TV via an HDMI connection.  And to top it off, the remote will be an RF (radio frequency) transmitter.  We will be able to use all the remote features with the client, even though it is closed up in the cabinet.  Really cool. 

We have not had even the slightest hint of a TV signal since we got to Livingston.  Cyndee and I both are jonesing for some mindless TV, Fox News and Leno.  We should be able to get two or three channels once we get to the panhandle but we'll really be set once we get to Kansas.




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