site

Website enhancements.

Follow Sinclair Trails on Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, Micro.blog, Facebook, YouTube, and more

Sinclair Trails is now on the Mastodon and Bluesky social networks, joining Micro.blog, Threads, Facebook, YouTube, and of course the blog and its RSS feed.

On Mastodon, follow @sinclairtrails@mastodon.social.

On Bluesky, follow @sinclairtrails.com.

On Micro.blog, follow @sinclairtrails.

On Threads, follow @sinclairtrails.

On Facebook, follow @dejal (my personal account, where I cross-post Sinclair Trails posts).

On YouTube, follow @SinclairTrails for travel timelapse videos.

Of course, the Sinclair Trails blog

In a RSS reader (like the excellent NewsBlur, that I work on), follow sinclairtrails.com/feed.

New posts appear first on the Sinclair Trails blog and RSS feed, then on Micro.blog, which cross-posts them to Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads.

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Modification Mondays, Travel Tuesdays, Whereabouts Wednesdays, To and Fro Thursdays and Fridays

Looking at the blog posts I have scheduled for the coming weeks and months (!), I’ve decided to bring a little more uniformity to the posting schedule.

So starting next week, you can look forward to regular features on each day:

  • Modification Mondays: where I post about some improvement I did to our coach, e.g. this coming Monday will be documenting replacing the bedroom ceiling fan motor (again). These will continue to be organized in the blog category modifications.
  • Travel Tuesdays: a post with photos from our travel day, followed by the YouTube timelapse video. Blog category travel.
  • Whereabouts Wednesdays: a post reviewing the RV park where we stayed. Blog category campsite.
  • To and Fro Thursdays and Fridays: posts about things we did while staying there; parks, food, and other attractions. Blog category exploring.
  • If I need more than two days of posts for our activities, they’ll continue into the weekend, but not beyond.

I’ve edited my upcoming posts to follow this schedule. We’ll see how this goes, but I like more predictability in my posts, and hopefully you’ll enjoy knowing what kinds of things to expect. If you only care about RV modifications, you can just read Monday’s posts and ignore the others, and conversely if you only care about things we do and see, Thursdays onwards are for you. You can even filter the blog via the modifications, travel, campsite, and exploring categories, amongst others. (If you’re reading this on the Sinclair Trails site, see the sidebar via the hamburger menu for a complete list.)

Paladin

Taking a break: heading to the US Virgin Islands

I won’t be posting on this blog for a week or so, as Jenn and I will be dropping off our coach for servicing, Paladin for boarding, and will be catching flights for the first time in years, heading to the US Virgin Islands to celebrate Jenn’s milestone birthday.

Paladin

No doubt I’ll take lots of photos and will do some blog posts once we’re back, so you can look forward to that.

Next post on the 17th. See you then!

Moving to thrice-weekly posts

Jenn and I have been homebodies over winter, what with having colds, and not feeling like exploring much. So I’m running low on blog posts.

Therefore, I’ve decided to switch from an everyday posting schedule to three times a week, on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

Don’t look so shocked:

Paladin

I may do extra posts occasionally, and of course may increase the frequency again if I start to accumulate too many posts, but for now this seems a good pace.

Taking a break; happy Thanksgiving

We’ve been taking it easy recently, not doing many interesting things, so I’ve caught up with scheduled blog posts; the next post will be travel to our current location, which I don’t like to publish until after we leave.

So, after doing a new post every day for the past year or so, I’m going to take a break for a week, ostensibly to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday week. See you on Monday the 28th!

(I will still do single-picture daily posts on my personal blog, if only for the Micro.blog challenge going on this month.)

I’ll leave you with this picture of a roadside attraction from that travel day:

Selfie at Prada Marfa

Sinclair Trails logo

Sinclair Trails now has a professionally-designed logo, crafted by Gert van Duinen of Cresk, based on our design ideas (so credit to them if you like it, blame to us if you don’t).

The central concept of the logo is an S-shaped road, which is contained within compass points inspired by the Tiffin logo, and decorated with trees and mountains, and surrounded by the name:

Sinclair Trails logo

We also have an edition of the logo without the encircling name:

Sinclair Trails logo

And for smaller icons like the website favicon, there’s a simplified edition, with just the core elements:

Sinclair Trails simplified

I’ve updated the website, YouTube channel, Twitter account, and Facebook page to use the logo. (I think that’s everything.)

We will get a large sticker to put on our coach, and make some cards, too. Unfortunately not in time for the Tiffin rally, which starts tomorrow.

Introducing the Tiffin Allegro Bus 2016-2018 Owners group on Facebook

There are several groups on Facebook for RVers, from general topics like Full Time RV Living and RV Boondocking, to ones specific to our brand of motorhome like Tiffin Motorhome Owners Group, Tiffin Motorhome Lifestyle, Tiffin Motorhomes Technical Forum, and several more… to ones specific to a model, like Tiffin Allegro Bus Owners, Tiffin Phaeton Owners, Tiffin Open Roaders, etc. And even some specific to model and year or floorplan, like Tiffin Phaeton Owners 2002-2012 and Tiffin Phaeton 40IH & 44OH Owners.

We have a 2017 Tiffin Allegro Bus 40SP. While the Tiffin Allegro Bus Owners group covers that model, there have been a wide range of features and changes over the years. So I thought that a more tightly focused group could be useful. While I was tempted to create a group for our specific year and floorplan, that seemed a bit too narrow. And there is a lot of commonality between the coaches released in years either side of ours in the various floorplans, e.g. they all have similar Spyder control panels, furnishings, appliances, finishes, etc.

So, without further ado, I’m pleased to introduce the Tiffin Allegro Bus 2016-2018 Owners group on Facebook.

This new community is focused, as the name indicates, on the Allegro Bus released between 2016 and 2018 (inclusive) by Tiffin Motorhomes, including the 37AP, 40AP, 40SP, 45OP, 45OPP, and other floorplans in those model years.

It’s difficult to start a new community, but I’m seeding it with cross-posts to the Sinclair Trails blog, on topics related to modifications and repairs of our 2017 40SP coach. Hopefully those will be of interest and use to others, and hopefully other Allegro Bus owners will find this group and join, and add their own posts on relevant topics.

Eventually, I hope this community will be a useful resource for discussions of repairs, enhancements, and other topics specific to these coaches. Time will tell!

If you have an eligible coach, or are interested in them, please join the group!

2017 Tiffin Allegro Bus 40SP

Making a multi-year route map

On January 1st I published a post on 2021 travel, that included a map of our travel stops and route for last year. A month later I followed up with an update on our planned route for 2022.

I recently had the idea to combine the maps into one, overlaying the routes from 2021 and 2022, so we can see everywhere we’ve traveled in our coach, plus last year’s Yellowstone trip in a rental trailer. To keep them from being too confusing, I changed the colors for each of the three routes.

I made the combined image wide, to use as the header on the Sinclair Trails Facebook page:

Route map

Here’s a cropped edition:

Route map cropped

And cropped some more, to only show the parts of the country we’ve explored so far, or plan to this year:

Route map cropped more

I made this by taking screenshots of the excellent RV Life Trip Wizard web app, which we use to plan our routes, then combined them in Acorn, my favorite image editor for macOS:

Route map in Acorn

Here’s the base map of the US, obtained from the Trip Wizard by combining multiple screenshots:

Route map USA

Each route is in a separate layer, with extraneous content lassoed out, and the hue altered to give each one a unique color; here’s 2021:

Route map 2021

The Yellowstone trip:

Route map 2021 Yellowstone

2022:

Route map 2022

The combined result again:

Route map cropped more

I think this is fascinating to look at, and a useful reference. I plan to update it as we plan future stops (the 2022 route only covers till October). What do you think? Interesting?