Slide out Issues and RV Armor

Last week was an eventful week. We went to Casa Grande, AZ for the week. Broke a slide gearbox. Learned a lot.

Playing in the Desert

Ok, so it’s been 4 months since my last post. Sigh. Lots of plans, and never any writing.

Today we borrowed a side-by-side to go out into the desert and play. We wanted to see if we would get any enjoyment out of one before we considered buying one. Well, let’s just say we had fun.

Where Did the Summer Go?

Here we are, almost 7 months since my last post and it’s time to head south for the winter again. A lot has happened in the past 7 months. 

Free Camping in Florida During the Winter

We had almost a 3-week gap in our reservations between the time we left New Orleans and when we arrived at Fort Wilderness at Disney World for our wedding. Money was running low because the Canadian dollar decided to take a nose dive this winter, so we decided to see what we could do about boondocking in Florida in winter. Now that you have all stopped laughing and cleaned the coffee off your monitor, I can tell you we found 3, yes 3, different places to boondock IN Florida IN the winter that were available!

New Orleans and Mardi Gras

A while ago I posted a blog about listening to that inner voice, you know the one that is telling you when something isn’t right. Sometimes that inner voice just isn’t doing its job. Maybe it is and I just wasn’t hearing it. It was a long driving day, and one of the 2 GPSes we used was giving us the wrong directions to the state park we were heading to. So I stopped on the side of the road twice to check the directions on the map. The first time, we ended up at the back entrance to the park, which we obviously couldn’t get in. The second time, I finally figured out where we needed to be. There was a street that went straight to the road we needed to be on. So great, I’ll scoot down there. Just as I’m making the turn, I see the No Trucks sign, as does Trish. Being from Toronto, where a No Truck sign usually means they don’t want commercial trucks going through residential streets and not that commercial sized vehicles don’t fit, I figured this was the same.

From San Diego to New Orleans

After our boondocking adventures in Quartzsite, we had to decide, do we start heading back east right away or go south to visit Yuma first. Our ultimate goal is to make it back to Florida for our wedding with a stop in New Orleans for Mardi Gras, so we didn’t have a lot of time left for extra trips.

Our RV’s Quartzsite Boondocking Adventures

Since the last post was mostly about what we did while we were boondocking, this will be about how the RV handled boondocking. We started off our time in Quartzsite in an RV park. This gave us a chance to visit friends in the park and start our 5 days of boondocking with a full fresh water tank, 50 gallons, and empty black and grey tanks. On our camper, we have 3 waste tanks. The black tank for the toilet. A grey for the galley and a separate grey for the bathroom shower and sink. All totalled we have about 120 or so gallons of waste water capacity, so that wasn’t the limiting factor. The fresh water was the limit in my books.

Quartzsite, AZ – The Boondocking Mecca

While we were getting healthy enough to travel again, we were trying to figure out where to go next. The original plan was to go to the SKP park in Yuma, KOFA Ko-op Retreat, then on to Quartzsite. We knew we needed to get to Quartzsite to join the Escapees Happy Hour and XScapers Convergence and to visit with some friends from home, but we also wanted to visit Yuma. To add to the dilemma, we needed to be back in Gold Canyon, AZ for a meeting of RV Inspectors. That left us with only a week to see Yuma and Quartzsite.

The Continental Divide

The next leg of our trip took us west of the Continental Divide and we didn’t even realize it until we crossed the divide! We were on our way from Deming, NM to Casa Grande, AZ across I-10 and all of a sudden there was a sign, Continental Divide Elev. 4585 ft. We missed it and the photo op. 😦 Oh well, life happens I guess.

Always Listen to Your Inner Voice

Have you ever had that little voice in your head that is telling you something, but you aren’t quite sure what it is? Well, on our trip from Pecos, TX to Deming, New Mexico that little voice was there just nagging at the edges of my brain for the last half of the trip. I had no idea what it was telling me until about a mile from the exit for the Escapees Dream Catcher RV Park. That’s when the voice became crystal clear, “You should have gotten gas at the last gas station!”