Tag Archives: RV

Just Because It’s Free Doesn’t Mean You Should Waste It

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I’ve become the power police.

My Neighbor's TrailerThis photo shows the trailer parked in the spot next to mine. It’s been here longer than me and I suspect it isn’t going anywhere soon.

For a while, a family of four and dog lived in it. They kept weird hours. They’d come home between 9 PM and 11 PM, make a bunch of noise, and then go inside and (I assume) sleep. Occasionally, before turning in, one of them would do something in the car with the key in the ignition and the door open so it would beep-beep-beep for 20 minutes at a time. In the morning, around 10 AM to 11 AM, the door would open and they’d begin spilling out in their pajamas. After screwing around at the trailer for a while, they’d leave. The whole process would start again that night.

About a month ago, they started leaving the “porch” light on. This makes sense when you know you’re going to get in late, but what bugged me is that they never turned it off. And while this isn’t a huge deal if they’re parked all by themselves, their porch light is about 10 feet from one of my bedroom windows. It’s so bright outside at night that I actually woke up in the middle of the night last week and thought it was morning.

It was morning. One o’clock in the morning.

I considered asking them to turn if off at night when they got in, but I was too embarrassed. They were a family of four in a 20-year-old 22-foot travel trailer with a dog. I was a family of one in a brand new 36-foot fifth wheel trailer with a parrot. I had no right to whine.

About two weeks ago, they started leaving the air conditioning on all day long, even when they — and their little dog — were out. They also left the two top vents and one of the windows open. Air conditioning on, windows closed isn’t bad. Air conditioning off, windows open is good. But air conditioning on, windows open is wasteful — especially when no one is home.

The campground we’re in is dirt cheap: $200 per month for a full hookup! There’s no electric meter, so you can suck as much power as you want. But that doesn’t mean you should suck power when you don’t need to. Or blatantly waste it.

About a week ago, they stopped coming home. I don’t know where the hell they are. For all I know, they’ve been deported.

So now there’s a vacant trailer next door with its porch light on, shining into my bedroom window, and the air conditioning blowing cold air out the open vents and windows. 24/7.

It gets cool here at night — in the 60s most nights. The kind of night you want to leave your windows open to feel the fresh breeze and hear the wind in the trees.

Of course, with windows and blinds open, I get to hear the air conditioning from next door and have that damn light shining on me.

I mentioned the light to some folks I had dinner with last night. They all told me to pull the bulb out.

But last night, I did something better. I snuck around to their electrical box and turned off their circuit breaker. Instant silence, instant dark.

I slept very well last night.

They didn’t come home. Although I was tempted to leave everything turned off, I know they have an electric refrigerator — the kind you buy for a dorm room; I saw them bring it in the day I moved in — and I was worried that the food inside it (if there was any) would spoil. So before taking my walk this morning, I flicked everything back on.

Tonight, I’ll flick it off again.

I figure that if they show up, they’ll just assume the circuit breaker popped. Maybe they’ll even get the idea that they shouldn’t leave the air conditioning on when they’re not around.

RV Living

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A quick look at my current RV living experience.

I’m back in Quincy, WA for the third consecutive year, gearing up for cherry drying season. On Saturday, when my first contract starts, I’ll be literally stuck here in town, waiting for it to rain so I can spring into action and fly for my clients. And if the weather stays the way it has been for the past week, I’ll be doing an awful lot of flying.

The previous two years, I lived in a 22-foot “hybrid” RV that included a hard-sided camper shell with a single slide out and two pop-up camper type beds. When I first bought this camper, I thought it would be perfect for this kind of mission. But I didn’t foresee the need to write three books in it or an excruciating back problem that would last a month. I realized that when you have to live in an RV for three to four months out of the year — with a parrot, no less — you’d better have a pretty damn comfortable RV.

So I bought what I considered to be “the perfect RV.” While I don’t really think it’s “perfect,” I still believe that it’s as close as I’m likely to get unless I have one built to my exact specifications — which is not an option. This RV has plenty of space, as well as comfortable places to sit. Best of all, I don’t have to work in the same space where I try to take my meals.

But I’m getting ahead of myself here. @Miraz wanted to know more about my setup here, so let me go into that a bit.

The Campground

I’m living at the Colockum Ridge Golf Course. A weird thing about golf courses out here is that they often include a limited number of RV parking spaces. Colockum Ridge (formerly Quincy Golf Course), which is now owned and operated by the Port of Quincy, is one of those places. It has five or six full hookup sites — that means sites with water, electricity, and sewer hookups. The sites are not far from the main office, between a wide driveway area and a narrow path out to the golf course. One of the greens is about 50 yards from the last spot. The golf course also has a handful of water and electric only spots. Those are on the other side of the wide driveway, near a well-trafficked road.

For the first two years I was here, the monthly rate for a full hookup spot was $300. I thought that was a pretty good deal. The first year, all the full hookup spots were occupied by me and construction workers for a pair of data centers being built in Quincy. Last year, I was the only long term occupant. This year, in an effort to attract more long term occupants, they dropped the monthly rate to only $200. This is a steal. (Oddly, I was worried the rate might go up; never expected it to go down.) The only drawback to the lower rate is that they’ve apparently attracted the owner of a junky old trailer who seems to be using his site as a weekend getaway. (Sometimes a higher rate is good to keep the riffraff out.)

My RVAlthough the spots are small, they do have well-kept lawns. Parking is on a gravel spot that you need to back into; that gravel area is surrounded by railroad ties on three sides to keep it separate from the grass. The spots aren’t exactly level — as I found out this year — but they’re not far off. I surprised myself with my ability to get the trailer into the spot; it was the first time I’d every done any serious backing up and it didn’t take more than a few tries to get it into place.

There are a few drawbacks of living here:

  • They start tending to the grass not long after dawn. That means there are lawn mowers running as early as 5:30 AM. This doesn’t bother me because I’m usually awake by then.
  • Because the RV spots are near the office and the office is at the intersection of two major roads, traffic noise — especially trucks slowing down to make one of the stop signs — can be a bother. In my old camper, it actually kept me up at night. In my new one, I don’t hear much unless the windows are open.
  • Golf carts and the odd piece of maintenance equipment drive right past the back window of my RV all day long every day. Before I moved the trailer 2 feet forward to get the left wheels on blocks (for leveling), they’d be within arm’s reach of my back window. Now they’re 2 feet farther away.
  • The sites really are tiny — although I suppose they’re about the same as the standard RV parking lots selling themselves as RV parks or “campgrounds” these days. My front slide-out actually hangs over into the parking spot next to mine, which is on a weird angle. There’s nothing I can do about it.

But there’s plenty good about living here:

  • They allow me to have my mail delivered to their address. So I can get mail and packages delivered to me here. I’m also the one who collects the mail daily; apparently no one else ever checks it. The first time I checked it, the box was absolutely stuffed. The mail carrier must like me.
  • This year, I have a picnic table, which will come in handy (if it ever stops raining for more than a few hours) for using my new barbecue grill, eating out, and getting Alex the bird outside for a while.
  • After the RainI have some nice views. My “office” window looks out on an idyllic view of trees, a picnic table, and the golf course. There are also birds — primarily robins — digging in the grass for worms throughout the day. Soon they’ll bring their chicks.
  • My helicopter is parked at an ag strip right across the street. In fact, I can see it from my back window. That means I can hang out here until I’m called out to dry. Definitely beats sitting in the truck at an airport for hours, waiting for a call that might not come. An added bonus: watching the crop dusters fly by.
  • I can get wireless Internet that works just well enough to pay for it. (I’d be very happy if it worked reliably all the time.)
  • The golf course has a restaurant where I can get breakfast or lunch if I get too lazy to cook. It’s not a great restaurant, but I’m not complaining.
  • The golf course is only five miles from town, where there’s a supermarket, coin-op laundry, post office, and other conveniences.
  • The area, being a farming community, is relatively safe and secure, so I don’t have to worry about my personal safety or the security of my belongings. It’s unlikely, for example, that anyone will break into my truck or trailer or walk off with my barbecue grill.
  • The golf course is in the middle of a farmland grid, offering lots of easy bicycling for me to get exercise.
  • Yellow-Headed BlackbirdThe golf course is only a few miles away from the Quincy Lakes area, which offers hiking, fishing, camping, and wildlife photography opportunities. Over the past two years, I spent a lot of time with my camera at Quincy Lakes, photographing birds.

The more I stay here, the more I like it. I’m even thinking of blowing off an aerial photo gig in Nevada in August so I can spend another month here.

The RV

The RV is amazingly comfortable. Comparing it to my old RV is almost silly, but here are a few examples:

  • There is a ton of storage. Enough storage to put everything away and still have space for more. That includes inside storage for indoor things and underneath storage for outdoor things. I even have enough room to store the old muffler for my helicopter, which I need to get repaired so it’s available as a spare. (They cost $2K new.)
  • The kitchen area has counter space for my coffee maker and grinder and enough cabinet space to store all my food, pots and pans, and dishes. And it even has drawers for storing silverware, napkins, and utensils. The stove is self-lighting so I don’t need to have a lighter or matches handy all the time to use it. The sink is a decent size, too.
  • The table and chairs is a hell of a lot more comfortable than the booth I had in the old camper. And with lots of windows, its bright and airy.
  • The sofa may not be as comfortable as the one in front of our TV at home (which is the most comfortable sofa in the world), but it sure beats the sofa in our last trailer. And rather than covert into a short, narrow “bed” for guests, this one has a queen-sized air mattress that two can sleep on comfortably.
  • Alex's Cage in my RVThere’s a La-Z-Boy style rocker/recliner. (There were actually two, but we pulled one out to have room for Alex the Bird’s cage.) I never thought I’d like one, but I spend a lot of time in it. I sit here and blog or read in the morning with my coffee and sometimes do the same after I’ve covered Alex for the night. It’s right beside the big back window, so I can watch the world — or at least this part of it — go by.
  • The RV has not one, but two flat panel televisions. They’re kind of wasted on me — I don’t watch much TV so I don’t have a satellite receiver. But I can pick up about 6 channels, including Fox and PBS. The 32-inch TV in the main room has a DVD player, so I can watch my Netflix videos on something larger than my computer monitor.
  • My RV OfficeI have an “office.” It’s a slide out with a desk and room for a chair. I’ve got drawers and cabinets to store my office stuff, so there’s not a lot of junk lying around. I brought along my 24″ iMac so I have all the same computing capabilities I have at home. And I managed to bring my color laser printer (what was I thinking?) and store it out of sight in a cabinet. There’s even a spot for my scanner. The office area even has two windows that look out over the golf course.
  • The bedroom has a nice bed with a dresser and closet. So I can store all my clothes neatly and accessibly. There’s a window on either side of the bed. I can even walk around the bed. The only thing I wish it had was a night table or storage area for the kinds of things you like to keep beside you at night. (And yes, I will be buying a new mattress for it; the mattress it came with is a real piece of crap. Just not sure how I’m going to get it through the doorway by myself.)
  • The shower has enough hot water for me to take a shower without turning off the water during the wash cycle. Yes, I can bask under hot water for the entire time I’m in the shower. Like a normal person. In my old RV, it was typical to run out of hot water during a shower; in fact, when I camped at a campground with a shower facility, I used their shower. Those days are over.
  • The toilet has a food pedal for flushing. The old trailer had a hand lever. That meant I needed to bend over the toilet every time I wanted to flush. Gross. It’s simple things like this that really make a difference in your life.

So I’m not exactly suffering out here in Quincy, WA. Sure, it’s not as nice as the house my buddy Jim rented in Chelan last season when he had contracts up there, but it’s very pleasant. And unlike Jim, I don’t have to share my space with another pilot — or anyone else other than Alex the Bird.

In a way, it’s a bad thing that the RV is so comfortable and pleasant to live in. Combined with my relatively pleasant surroundings and cheap living costs, I feel that I’d rather stay here than go home. I never felt that way in the old RV — especially when the temperature started rising and the horrendously loud air conditioning couldn’t keep up. This is my home away from home and I’m really enjoying it.

What It’s Like to Tow a 15,000-lb Fifth Wheel Trailer 1,500 miles

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Or why I’ll never be a long-haul trucker.

I’m writing this from the relative comfort of the desk in my RV. I just completed a 3-1/2 day drive from Arizona to Washington State and am parked alongside a very large garage adjacent to a private heliport at a friend’s house in Auburn.

I’m resting.

The drive was a lot more difficult than I imagined. Difficult enough for me to blog about it. In detail.

No, I’m not going to give you turn-by-turn driving instructions and list the sights I saw along the way. No one really wants to read stuff like that. If you’re at all interested, you can read about the first two days of the drive here. I wrote that two days ago when I was still relatively fresh.

Instead, I’ll tell you why I’m exhausted and why I’m glad I don’t have to drive again tomorrow.

Towing: the Basics

My RV is a 36-foot long Montana Mountaineer fifth wheel. Because our 2001 Chevy Silverado 3/4 ton pickup already had a gooseneck hitch receptor on it, I converted the RV’s hitch to a gooseneck. Well, I didn’t do it. The folks I bought the RV from did it. It makes it a bit tricky to hook up — still not sure how I’m going to line it up when I need to hitch it alone — but it does keep the pickup’s bed free of a bunch of extra hardware.

The trailer is 15,000 pounds max gross weight. I didn’t weigh it before this trip — I wanted to, but didn’t get around to it. (There’s a scale at the local dump in Wickenburg, so it wouldn’t have been so tough. Weigh the truck alone, then weigh the truck with the trailer and do the math.) I don’t think it’s fully loaded, but I bet it still close enough to 15,000 pounds to make the weight debate moot.

The truck can pull the weight. Its manual says it can and it can. I push a button on the gear shift lever to turn on the towing package feature and the Duramax diesel and Allison transmission do the rest. It stays in a lower gear so I can get it up to highway speed and then shifts back down into a lower gear when I brake for engine braking.

It takes a while for the truck to get up to highway speed. Normally, the truck is remarkably peppy for a diesel. That’s one of the things I like about it. But add 15,000 pounds and it’s working hard. 0 to 60 takes about 30 seconds. If I’m on flat road. Add an uphill climb and I might not even get it up to 60.

Add a downhill coast and I’ll have trouble keeping it below 60. And that’s the problem.

The Trick is to Avoid Using the Brakes

Imagine a freight train barreling along at 50 miles an hour. Now imagine some idiot stalled at a crossing on the tracks. He’d better get his ass out of the car and hope his insurance is up-to-date.

I once spoke to a train engineer for Conrail in New Jersey. He told me that if there’s something on the tracks, they don’t even bother trying to stop. Why? Because they won’t be able to stop in time anyway. It could take over a mile for a freight train moving at cruising speed to come to a complete stop. Why? Because of the inertia of all that weight moving at cruise speed.

As I gained experience at the helm of my own personal freight train, I quickly learned that my main goal should be to drive in such a way that I minimized the use of the brakes. There are three reasons for this:

  • It takes a long time to stop — or even to slow down. The less often you need to stop or slow down, the better off you are.
  • Using the brakes wastes fuel. Look at it this way: you pump a lot of fuel through the engine at high RPMs in a lower gear to get the damn thing moving. If you hit the brakes, not only are you throwing away all the stored energy in your weight and speed, but the engine is going to downshift again and use more fuel at high RPMs to slow you back down. May as well punch a hole in the fuel tank and let it drain out.
  • Using the brakes wears down the brakes and works the engine. You have to press harder on the brakes to get a reaction out of them. That means you’re wearing them down more. And with engine braking, the poor engine is working hard even when you’re slowing down. Is that fair?

It’s the Stress that Exhausted Me

The difficulty in slowing down or stopping is where all the stress comes in.

The entire time I was driving, I was on alert. I needed to know that I had to stop or slow down before I had to stop or slow down. So I looked at every other vehicle around me — as well as traffic lights and stop signs when I wasn’t on the freeway — with a critical eye. Is that guy in front of me going to hit his brakes? Is the idiot next to him going to cut me off? Is that traffic light up ahead going to turn yellow before I get to it? Is that school bus up ahead going to stop?

Even when I was on straight, flat freeway with no other vehicles around me, I couldn’t relax. At one point, a dog ran into the freeway in front of me. A dog! Like that freight train engineer, I knew I wouldn’t be able to stop in time. If he didn’t get out of the road, I’d run right over him, just like a freight train. There’s no way I’d try to swerve at 60 MPH with all that weight behind me. I leaned on the truck’s horn. Fortunately for the dog, he ran back where he came from without becoming my victim.

So all day long, hour after hour, I was tensed up, fully alert and ready to react before I needed to. It exhausted me.

Now Add Some Mountains

The route I chose was mountainous. In Death Valley, I was 230 feet below sea level. Near Mammoth Lakes, CA, I was at over 8,000 feet above sea level. For three days, it seemed like all I did was climb up and down mountains.

Up wasn’t a big deal. Press the pedal and burn fuel in second or third gear, trying to maintain a decent speed so as not to annoy the people behind me. It didn’t matter if there was a curve up ahead — I probably wasn’t going fast enough to make negotiating it a problem.

But down…well, that’s another story entirely. The Chevy has never been a good coaster — my 1994 Ford F150 is far better at that — but add 15,000 pounds and gravity can turn anything into a coaster. I had to use the brakes going downhill just to prevent the speed from climbing higher than I could handle. The transmission did its part, of course, but that wasn’t enough on the 9% grade (not a typo) coming down into the Panamint Valley in Death Valley National Park. In second gear, with the engine red-lining, I was still pumping the brakes to keep the speed below 50 miles per hour as I negotiated curves on a two-lane road that hugged the side of a cliff.

You want to talk stress? I can’t imagine anything more stressful than that.

Add Rain

Actually, I can: wet pavement on those curvy downhill stretches.

The rain started on Day 3 and haunted me for the whole day. That’s the day I descended from the mountains in Northern California into southern Oregon. There was this one stretch just south of Ashland on I-5…a lengthy downhill ride hugging the side of a mountain with curves marked for 50 mph. Bad enough dry, but nightmarish when wet and surrounded by tractor-trailer trucks. Who the hell designs highways like that?

I’m an Arizonan. I don’t drive in rain because it doesn’t rain. When it does rain, the roads are slick because of oil accumulation. It’s terrifying. How slick were these roads? I didn’t know and I didn’t want to find out. I just struggled to keep my speed down, imagining the horrific crash if the trailer decided to slide a different direction than the truck was going.

Overreacting? Perhaps.

Reading this, you probably think I’m a sissy. But I have a lot of miles under my belt — I’ve driven clear across the country more times than I can count and have made 3-1/2 round trips from Arizona to Washington since 2005. I’ve driven everything from motorcycles to this rig, including hundreds of different rental cars.

But driving this rig was unlike anything else I’d ever driven. It wasn’t like my Ducati, which I could whip around curves by tossing my weight around. It wasn’t like my Honda S2000, which red-lines at 9,000 RPM and has just the tiniest bit of body roll in curves. It wasn’t even like the Chevy without its load, able to accelerate or stop quicker than you’d think a truck should.

Just the knowledge that slowing down or stopping was going to be so tough had me on edge the entire time.

And that’s what kept me safe.

But when it’s time to return to Arizona, I know one thing for sure: I’ll be planning the route with the straightest, flattest roads I can find.

Congratulations! You’ve made it to the end of yet another lengthy blog post here on An Eclectic Mind. If you got this far, you must have gotten something out of what you read. And isn’t it nice to read Web content that isn’t full of annoying ads?

How about doing something to show your appreciation? I’d love it if you’d add a comment at the end of this post to share your feedback with me and others. But I’d really love it if you’d visit my Support page and chip in a few dollars to help cover the cost of hosting this blog and motivate me to keep writing new, interesting content. It’ll only take a moment and I really would appreciate it!

 

On the Road Again

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Notes from halfway down the long drive from Wickenburg to Seattle.

I’m writing this from a Walmart parking lot. I’m propped up in a queen sized bed with three pillows behind my back and my laptop on my lap. It’s 3:30 in the morning and I’m pretty much wide awake after just over five hours of sleep. It isn’t noise that woke me — this Susanville, CA parking lot is remarkably quiet. I guess I’m just done sleeping for the night. But it’s too early to continue my travels along winding mountain roads, so I figured I’d share an update on my blog.

This isn’t a pleasure trip — although parts of it have been very pleasant. It’s for work; I’m repositioning a truck and my new RV from Arizona to Washington State for the summer. The RV will be my home away from home as I work on cherry drying contracts for central Washington growers. The truck is needed not only to pull this massive fifth wheel trailer but to carry the refueling system I need to meet my contractual obligations.

The Truck

I’ve written about my new RV elsewhere in this blog, so I won’t repeat that here. But I’ve probably neglected the truck. It’s my husband’s truck: a 2001 Chevy Silverado 3/4 ton pickup. It has a Duramax Diesel engine with towing package and an Allison transmission. A “man’s” truck, capable of towing more than 15,000 pounds. (We bought it new in 2001 to tow a horse trailer with living quarters that I’ve since sold.) Inside, it has many creature comforts, including heated leather seats, power windows, and stereo system with iPod connection. The truck runs well and is up to the task of towing my home away from home over 1,000 miles.

I’ve mounted my old Garmin 60c GPS over the dash and have it wired into one of the DC power outlets. I’d loaded in topo maps (my preferred map type) for my entire route and then some. I’m using it mostly as a trip computer, to calculate distance driven, average speed, etc. I’m keeping close track of fuel consumption so I can calculate burn rates.

I’ve also clipped my cell phone case to the visor and connected it to another DC outlet. I’m wearing my Bluetooth earpiece for most of the trip for safer hands-free communication — when I can get a signal. Verizon has the best network — which is why I use it — but even Verizon doesn’t cover some of the places I’ve driven through on this trip. I can hear the signal fade in and out with beeps in my right ear as I drive.

The Route and Stops

Track Me!
If I’m traveling — whether by helicopter or on a long drive — you can usually follow my SPOT Messenger track online at tinyurl.com/FindMaria

Every year I choose a different route for this drive, shunning freeways as much as possible. This year, the route included stops to visit with friends in Las Vegas and Reno, NV, and Ashland, OR. The route began in Wickenburg, AZ and headed west on route 60. What followed was a numeric alphabet soup of route numbers: 72 and 95 to Parker, 62 and 95 to Needles, 40 and 95 to Boulder City, 95 and 215 to Las Vegas, etc. You get the idea.

In Vegas, I visited with my friends Jim and Judith. Jim is a helicopter pilot who flies a Hughes 500c. He and his wife, Judith, lived in Wickenburg for quite a while but, like most of our other friends, bailed out when the saw the reality of the situation there. They moved to the San Diego area for a while, then various places in California, and finally in Las Vegas.

Jim, an airline pilot who took early retirement years ago — luckily, before the airline went belly up — is an inventor. He designs, manufactures, and sells power external aircraft power units called StartPacs. They’re used primarily for starting turbine engines, although he has a whole range of power products now, from power sources a pilot can use while fiddling with his avionics on the ground to big, self-propelled APUs for bizjets. When they left Wickenburg, they took their business with them. They now employ a handful of people in their Las Vegas office and manufacturing facility. Jim gave me a tour after lunch on Monday and showed me some of the new designs he’s gotten patents for.

I left Vegas and headed west and then north through Pahrump. Another road took me west again. By 4 PM, I was in Death Valley. Although the temperatures should have been topping 100°F there this time of year, it was unseasonably cool, in the high 80s, with plenty of cloud cover. There were also signs of rain coming from the clouds, but the ranger at the Visitor Center assured me that it was unlikely for any drops to reach the ground.

On one ranger’s suggestion, I made my way to Panamint Springs. After a long, slow climb up over the mountains, I experienced a harrowing descent down a 9% grade. The truck’s tow package really helped out, downshifting to 2nd gear automatically to reduce my need to ride the brakes. Note to self: avoid Route 190 between Stovepipe Wells and Panamint Springs when towing a 36-foot RV.

Panamint Springs is still inside Death Valley National Park, but it overlooks the Panamint Valley, which is one valley west. It consists of a motel-like lodge, restaurant, and dirt lot dressed up as a campground. I paid $15 for a water-only hookup for my RV for the night. (I didn’t bother hooking up; I didn’t need water.) I had a heck of a time getting the RV into its pull-through spot. Although it was plenty long enough, the campground designers had placed large boulders at either side of the driveway. Making the turn without damaging the RV’s underside was tough. But I eventually managed and Alex the Bird and I settled in for the evening. I watched the changing light on the mountainsides from a patio table at the restaurant. At night, it was dead quiet and very dark. I stepped outside to admire a sky full of stars with a crescent moon before turning in for the night.

The next morning, I was on the road at 7 AM, continuing west on Route 190. After fueling up just outside of Lone Pine, I continued north on Route 395. I didn’t realize that route was so mountainous. After leaving Bishop, the truck did a lot of climbing, eventually reaching over 8,000 feet elevation. (This was the day after descending to -230 feet in Death Valley.)

On the urging of my friend, Rod, I detoured to the Ghost Town of Bodie. That required me to negotiate 14 miles of narrow, windy road, the last three of which were unpaved. I was extremely pleased to see that the parking area was large enough to make a U-turn in without having to back up. I put Alex in the camper while I went to explore the townsite on foot with my camera. I’ll likely write about that in another blog post, when I get the photos off my camera.

I met Rod for lunch in the Reno area, not far from where route 395 intersects with I-80. Rod lives in Georgetown, CA; I’d visited him and his wife, Liz, there by helicopter several times in the past. This time, I was on the other side of the Sierra Nevada mountains and wasn’t planning on crossing. But Rod made the 2+ hour drive from Georgetown to Reno to meet with me. Rod’s also a helicopter pilot — he flies fires in twin-engine helicopters like Hueys — in the summer. The rest of the year, he does odd jobs around home. We had a very late lunch in a Chinese restaurant in Sparks, NV.

Then I continued my drive north on route 395, ending up here in Susanville.

Highlights of the Trip

I’ve driven through some beautiful scenery over the past two days. Snow-capped mountains, sheer granite cliffs, dry lake beds, sand dunes, layered rock thrust up on an angle and eroded to expose lines of color. Blue lakes, rushing rivers, puffy white clouds in otherwise clear blue skies. Herds of wild burros, pastures full of horses and cattle, deer. The ruins of a town in the middle of nowhere that once was home to over 10,000 people.

It’s all a blur. A trip like this on a route like this shouldn’t be crammed into a few days. It should be slowed down and savored, with stops here and there to take in the sights and sounds and smells. This isn’t quality sightseeing — it’s motoring. I may as well be on a freeway.

Later today, I’ll drop down from the mountains to I-5 near the Oregon border. From there, I’ll follow the Interstate north into Oregon. After another lunch with another helicopter pilot friend, I’ll make my way north to the Seattle area. I’ll camp out in yet another helicopter pilot friend’s yard. Whether I can get there today depends on how twisty and mountainous the roads between Susanville and I-5 are; I’ll know by lunchtime.

Off-the-Grid Camping in the New RV

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Working out the kinks.

One of the improvements I made on my old RV was to add a solar panel to the roof. It was connected to a battery charger which, in turn, was connected to the camper’s batteries. When the sun was out — which is during most daylight hours here in Arizona — the batteries were charged. This made the camper extremely useful for off-the-grid camping. My husband and I did a lot of that last year on our way back from Washington to Arizona. We never ran low on power, which was a good thing because we didn’t have a generator.

There are a few things that won’t work in an RV without a connection to A/C power:

  • A/C power outlets. This means you can’t plug in and use any device with a standard plug.
  • Certain light fixtures. Some lights are A/C while some are D/C. A/C fixtures won’t work without an A/C connection.
  • Microwave. Even if it’s standard equipment on an RV, it’s plugged into an A/C outlet.
  • Air Conditioning. It’s A/C and it sucks a ton of power when it is plugged in and running. That means that even if you have a generator, you need a pretty powerful one to run the A/C when you’re not hooked up to campground or city power.

There are a few things that will run on propane or battery (D/C) power if you’re camping off-the-grid:

  • Refrigerator. Setting the refrigerator on “Auto” tells it to look for A/C power first; if that’s not available, it uses propane from the onboard tanks (assuming the valves have been opened).
  • Stove/Oven. Obviously, they’re propane. It would be dumb to put an electric stove in an RV.
  • Water pump. If you’re not connected to a pressurized water line, a D/C pump activates when you run the water to pump the water from the onboard fresh water tanks.
  • D/C devices. Some RVs include D/C outlets — think of power ports or cigarette lighters on a car. My old RV had one and I added a second; my new RV had three and I added a fourth. These are handy for charging cell phones or plugging in low wattage inverters to plug in low wattage A/C devices like laptops.

Other appliances use D/C power all the time, but if you’re plugged in, your battery is being charged all the time, so it’s no big deal. The heater, stereo, and certain light fixtures are good examples.

As you can see, RVs are pretty much designed to be self-sufficient when you’re off-the-grid. There’s a limit, of course, to how long you can live in an RV without a hookup, though. The solar power (or a generator) helps take care of electrical needs. Eventually, however, you’ll run out of water or fill up your black water sewer tank. There are ways to get around these issues — for example, minimize toilet use by using public toilets whenever possible, carry extra water in external tanks, etc. — so two people can easily live in a well-equipped RV off-the-grid for several weeks if they need to.

Oddly, however, most RV owners do not live in the RV off-the-grid. Instead, many of them tend to pull their RVs from one parking lot-like RV park to the next, cram them into narrow spaces between other RVs, hook up power, water, and sewer lines, and retreat inside their luxury boxes to watch television.

I’m not like most RV owners.

Before trading in the old camper, I pulled the 135-watt solar panel off the roof. This past week, I had it installed, with a new battery charger and controller, on the roof of my new RV.

This weekend, my husband and I are out in the desert about 25 miles west of our Wickenburg home, testing the trailer’s off-the-grid setup. I’m out in Aguila, at a private “resort” where my clients are testing some wireless networking equipment. The test requires me to fly their equipment around in the helicopter to see how well it works with ground-based mobile and stationary equipment. There’s more to it than that, but for the sake of my client’s privacy, that’s really all I’m willing to say.

At Robson'sThe job has a lot of down time — time when I’m just waiting around for them to be ready to fly. It made sense to bring the RV out here for the weekend. It gives Mike and I a chance to get away and relax away from home and we can bring along Jack the Dog and Alex the Bird. And, of course, we can test the off-the-grid setup of the RV close enough to home so that if there’s a serious problem, we’re not suffering. So the RV is currently parked about 100 yards from the helicopter’s landing zone out in the desert.

We’ve discovered a few things:

  • When the refrigerator works off propane, it makes a noise that sounds like a fan running inside it. We’re not sure if it should be doing that. It seems to work fine and the fan noise does stop when the refrigerator reaches the correct temperature. But my last two RVs had silent refrigerators, so we’re a bit concerned.
  • The fresh water in the tanks smells like shit. I do mean that literally. We’re not drinking it, but we are washing with it. It’s making the RV stink a bit on the inside, so we have a lot of windows open to keep the air cleared out. This is our fault. We should have flushed out the system before using it. We’ll do that after this trip and likely run at least one tankful of clean water through it, too.
  • The new solar setup works great. It had the batteries fully charged before 10 AM. While it was doing that, we were using the lights, stereo, cell phone chargers (all D/C) and a 300-watt A/C inverter to charge my MacBook Pro and some aviation radios.
  • The 2000-watt Honda generator I bought so I could run A/C devices if I wanted to works great. It’s easy to start and can be very quiet. We gave it a good test on Saturday night when we ran it to see if we could watch a DVD (Up) on the 32-inch (or thereabouts) flat screen TV the RV came with. It ran hard when we first started it — likely to recharge the batteries we’d run down a bit after sunset while giving us A/C power — then settled down to a lower, quieter power setting. I don’t think I’d run it in the future just to watch TV, though.

Everything else works exactly as expected.

At this point, I consider this second test a success. It proves to me that the new RV can be at least as comfortable — more so, of course — than the old one when camping off-the-grid. Even though I didn’t get the solar power system I wanted, I think my less expensive solution — one solar panel to charge the batteries and a portable generator for more power when needed — will work fine.

One thing’s for sure: having a portable house along on these weekend long gigs is very nice indeed — even if I’m not plugged in.