We arrived in St. Louis last weekend after all of our maintenance in Chattanooga was completed. It took a bit longer than expected due to a slight shipping delay on parts and some difficulty reaching the areas that needed service.  Joel at Choo Choo Express Garage pulled a long day on Friday so that we could hit the road and not be delayed over the weekend.

And then we did our longest 1-day drive yet of 440 miles in the bus to make it to St. Louis – the bus drove great after her pampering treatment.

As is typical of our stays in St. Louis – we’ve been extremely busy. Between quality family time, moving our stuff aboard and trying to catch up on work.

I’ll bullet point some teasers of what else is up for us and what may become future posts when we next have time to write:

• Our costs to bring the bus up to date on maintenance (tires/wheels, air bags, fluids, filters, etc.) has now exceeded the purchase price of the bus. Which is actually on track with our expectations, and considering what we paid for the bus – ain’t bad.
• We are in process of procuring a vehicle to tow behind the bus to give us local transport. We’ll soon share what we’re getting, the story behind it and tales of life these past months being carless.
• As we spent last holiday season alone in the US Virgin Islands (I know.. woe is us), we’ve decided this holiday season will focus on quality time with family. So we’ll start heading towards Florida next week to be near my parents.  Chris’ folks are now full fledged snow birds, and will be joining us down there in month or so.
• We think we’ve found the name for our bus.

Otherwise, we’ve been busily working away on updating our tech while we have access to bandwidth, updating our Coverage? app, updating State Lines  and working through my busy time of year in my day job.

Hopefully that will all come together soon, and Chris can then re-focus on continuing his Lithium Ion battery series, which we know several of y’all are anxious to read.

State Lines eBook

Speaking of State Lines (which tracks over 70 state laws & regulations that affects travelers) – we’ve decided to discontinue the eBook version.

It will cost us a big wad of cash to purchase FileMaker Pro, which we used a trial version of to transform the database into eBook format.  The cost would be justifiable if sales of the eBook supported it. Unfortunately, to date – only a few copies have been purchased.

While we don’t create these eProducts to turn a profit, we also can’t take a cash loss to provide them.

So, if you’d like a copy of the eBook – we’re offering it for free.  This is with the explicit understanding that it will not be updated in the future, and is already a few months out of date.  If you were one of the few who purchased it – thank you.  If you’d like a refund, just let us know.

We will continue to maintain the iPhone version of State Lines for as long as we personally utilize the data.