HAPPY HOUR!!!!

Enjoying a Happy Hour with friends & currently neighbors - Diane & Ray

Ray's new hat!  It's a beauty to be sure...

Wyoming here we are!

Well, every shot is not perfect.  A bump in the road at the worst time means the photo is cut off.  I think there is enough here that you can see we are entering Wyoming!

Aha... our favorite season - "Construction".   NOT!

Our "home" for the next 3 nights.  This is a beautiful little campground in Fort Bridger Wyoming.  It appears to be an old mobile home park - large grassy sites.  We will be very comfortable here for a few nights and will likely return whenever we might be in this neck of the woods again.

You just never know who you might be camping next to!  Our good friends Diane and Ray Brehm decided to join us here in this wonderful campground.  We had a very enjoyable Happy Hour this afternoon with lots of "catching up".  The next two days should be interesting as we check out the area and again have some wonderful Happy Hours.  We are so happy to have friends close.

 

Another day - Another new "home"....

Our Home for the night - Fillmore Utah KOA.  This is a beautiful campground.  It wasn't easy to get the satellite signal from the roof of the coach, but we managed after a bunch of trial an error.  It is much cooler here and the breeze is absolutely wonderful.  The rustle of the leaves and the song of the birds is very relaxing.  Tonight should be great sleeping weather - no air conditioning or fans for sure.

Our first look at snow - in a long time.  Don't have any of this in the Desert Southwest!

Next stop in our Northward trek...Hurricane Utah!

We made it safely to the "St. George RV Resort"- never could quite understand how they could call it a "resort".  In any case, we used to come here under ROD - this time the reservations were made under Coast 2 Coast.  To our surprise it is now the St. George KOA!  Still the same place - a good stopping place on our way North or South.  An excellent base for exploring Zion National Park - no time this time, but I am sure we will be back.

Finally on the road again!!!!

The latest update on our recent problems is that we are waiting to get a new inverter until we can get to Oregon and the Monaco Service Center.  Our broken inverter has been bypassed.  This lets us use any A/C devices and outlets in the coach while we are hooked to electricity.  The 12 Volt things like lights, fans, water pump, etc can be used with caution.  Fortunately our solar panels are doing a great job of keeping our batteries charged.  While we are underway, the alternator also charges the batteries.  Our problem is running them down at night - so we are very careful and have our trusty little battery charger close by.

We finally got back on the road today.  Just in time cause the temps will be 108 or higher!  Won't get out of the heat today, but tomorrow we should be far enough North to be in cooler climes.

The roads can be long and lonely in the Desert Southwest.

Yea - we are in Nevada!!!

This is a neat little campground about 12 miles South of Searchlight called Cal-Nev-Ari.  We have passed this way many times and never thought to check it out.  It is about 220 miles from our lot in Yuma being a good "get away" night stop when we head out going North.  We will remember this spot!

Well, Well, Well ..... Guess who is back in Yuma????

After a "not so good" night, we were determined this morning to continue moving North.  As we got underway there was another alarm beeping at us telling us of a problem with the batteries.  Got a little scared and decided to return to Yuma and get the problems solved before we got stranded somewhere we didn't want to be.

We kind of resemble "trailer trash" now.  In order to stay in the coach, we have extension cords running in the driver side to power the front TV, Satellite Dish, and VCR - got to have our Soaps you know!  Cords running into the bedroom window for the rear TV - hard to go to sleep without Jay Leno!  And a cord running to the side window to power our computers, air card for Internet and a lamp.  We have the use of the Casita for the microwave and shower (so much easier than running another extension cord and if you have a big shower why not use it!) - Life could be a lot worse.  We will have to hook the coach batteries up to a charger each day to keep them up - difficult if not impossible if we were not here on the lot.

Stay tuned for more updates.  I am keeping Facebook updated just about as soon as we know anything, so check us out there.



First day out on our "Summer Travels" - not such a great start!!!!

Left Casa Clarkson at just about 1pm as anticipated - everything secured for our 3-4 month travel adventure.  First stop - Fry's fuel station to top off our diesel.  All is well until we try to leave!!!  The coach will not start - now what???  A call to Coach-Net and we are connected to a technician - he has us to a couple things (that don't work) and then says he will have someone come out and try to give us a "jump start".  Well long story short - about an hour later a guy came and was able to "jump start" us and we were on our way.  Since our starter battery was quite old (November of 2004) we decided that perhaps that was the problem now.  Without resources, we went back to the lot to retrieve the local phone books.

Next step was to go to the local Interstate Batteries - upon getting there it was decided to not get another 8D battery but two AGM batteries.  Interstate doesn't do installations, but I guess they thought that helping out was a better idea than us blocking their lot for too long.  The batteries were installed and the coach started great. 

Long story short - the decision was made to head North at all costs.  The Inverter was beeping an error, but the coach started and seemed to be running well.  We ended up stopping in Quartzsite Arizona for the night - not quite Parker, but close enough.  We got a good site with 50 amp full-hookups.  oops ... that pesky Inverter still had more trials for us this day.  We have good ac power to the coach (the Progressive unit says so), but there is no electricity to any of the outlets!  Tried to reproduce the magic that Al's RV did a few weeks ago when the same thing happened, but no luck.  At least the air conditioners work!  And thank goodness we have the old RV refigerator that runs from propane.  A power cord from the 20 amp plug on the pedistal is providing us with power for the computers and air card.  We are in the dark, but we are cool and safe.  Hopefully we will make it further North tomorrow - to Mesquite Nevada - and be able to figure out this mess!

It has not been a great start to our travel season - to say the least.  Stay tuned to follow our "adventure"!!!!