Walking around the bus in the morning
The main activity of this day's trip was the climb from near sea level in the morning, to above 7500 feet around Flagstaff. This adventure was an absolute joy and made us very happy with the new coach. Our bus has an aircraft altimeter in it; it was a lot of fun to watch the big needle bobbing up and down over a short run, though ever upward overall. Our surroundings changed from sweltering stark desert sand and rocks to crisp, cool Alpine forests of dense green pine trees.
The bus performed superbly - the engine never strained or complained. We kept the speed between 45 and 55 (which is still second gear for this coach) during the hill climbing because we wanted to keep from heating the engine by making it work harder to go faster. Also, the cooling for this engine is proportional to engine speed - by keeping it in a lower gear, the engine spun faster, turning the fan faster, which cooled the engine even more.
Because the engine is pushing from the back, there's very little noise up front when driving; it was eerily quiet through all this hill-climbing. This was especially pronounced in the woods near Flagstaff - they absorbed all sound. Keeping the engine at a constant speed, everything was so smooth and quiet that the effect was like we were running up the hills in an electric vehicle, or riding a ride at a theme-park. A day-to-night difference from hill-climbing in our previous RV. A very joyous experience and fulfilling day, following all we'd gone through to get into this coach.
We pulled off the highway and into a WalMart parking lot at dusk. This was a new experience for us. WM overnight parking is a huge mainstay of RVing today - this social phenomenon didn't exist back when we had our previous RV.
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