Miss Travelaire Gets New Energy!

Our bad weather is past, and we're back to sunny skies, but still pretty cool. It went down to just above freezing, 33 F last night. But, of course, parked with electricity, water, and sewer, we were quite snug and warm. Miss Travelaire looks her best in this picture after her bath yesterday, and parked under our tree, the only real tree in the RV park.

 

The mountains to the northeast of here have a dusting of snow from the precipitation of the last couple of days. Doreen and I saw this scene as we walked over to a shopping mall this morning that is close the RV park. There was a Target Store there, with very few people in it.

 

We got away from the RV resort at about 11 AM, and drove about 7 miles up to a Costco Store. Miss Travelaire hasn't been keeping up in the energy department the last while. Her house batteries are over 10 years old, and we run them down really fast if we use the furnace for warmth. So, I figured we might as well just bite the bullet and buy new ones before we get into colder temperatures on the way north. One can lay out big bucks for the top of the line batteries, but Costco here sells Interstate batteries, and they are significantly cheaper than you can get batteries anywhere else. I figured I'd just go with Costco's deep cycle batteries, as our battery usage is very minimal. There is a recycle fee of $15 that you get back when you return the old batteries. So instead of installing the batteries at a later time and having to find another Costco store to return the old batteries, I decided to just install them in the Costco parking lot. I'm disapointed that I didn't remember to get pictures of this, but you can imaging it, I'm sure. To keep battery acid off my good cloths, I dressed up in my coveralls that have the name tag "Trevor" on them (I wonder why?), and I had tools and batteries spread out all over the parking lot. But everything went really smoothly. It appears that I got the multitude of wires all hooked up correctly, and Miss Travelaire is supplying us with lots of volts and amps tonight.

 

After Miss Travelaire's operation, we set off north to Red Rock Canyon State Park. We stayed at this park last year on March 7th. It is one of the cheaper California State Parks, but of course you get nothing but a place to park. There is no water (the one water tap in the park is shut down because of drought, they say), the dump station is only open on Sundays from 2 to 4 pm, and of course, there is no electricity. But the place is quite scenic.

 

And something I didn't remember from last year is that the park is full of Joshua trees (fairly small as Joshua trees go), and here is Miss Travelaire framed by a clump of these small trees. A disadvantage of the layout of this campground is that all the sites are up against a cliff that causes the sun to set about 4 PM, and once the sun goes down the day goes from pleasantly warm to cold within a few minutes

 

And some more typical Joshua Trees silhouetted in the setting sun.