My Trails

So far so good. Just a short drive from Mesa, AZ, near the scenic Salt River, is a recreation area where several retired people park their RVs and soak up the winter sunshine. It is close enough to town that supplies and parts are a quick motorcycle ride away, and most importantly, it is the place where expert RV mechanic and technician, Richard Lafferty is parked.

I left Donna’s home mid morning, stopped at Walmart to stock my fridge with groceries, filled the Minnie with gas before it went up again, and arrived at Phon D Sutton just before noon. It is different driving this motorhome. I have to plan ahead in parking areas and watch for low hanging tree branches. It is kind of fun to drive, though.

Soon after I parked and set up camp, Richard started wiring my batteries and solar charging system. I had purchased two switches that would let us configure several scenarios for charging and using different batteries. I wanted to add my agm batteries to the batteries already in the coach but mixing different batteries can be tricky. Richard had drawn a schematic detailing the wiring and proceeded with the install.

Just thinking about the complexity of the project gave me a brain cramp so I’m sure glad he was there to make it happen.

I now have a charging system that allows me to charge either set of batteries or both, and switches to use different combinations of my batteries.

Last night was my first night sleeping in the Minnie. The bed was comfortable and I kept warm. This morning I tried out the stove by making a ham and egg omelet. Yum! Tonight I am going to try the shower. How exciting!

This is my new home. It is a 2002 Minnie Winnebago. Compared to my van it is a mansion. I now have the ability to sleep in a full size bed, take hot showers, bake a batch of cookies, and best of all, stand up inside and walk around. It has a generator to power an air conditioner and microwave, and a nifty little hot water tank for all those cleaning chores.

I learned to be quite comfortable while living in my van and It served me well as I traveled around the country. For a single person in constant motion, exploring and living for adventure, finding new places every day, It probably is one of the best modes of travel. With good gas mileage and the ability to reach back country places in forests and hidden roads, you can’t beat a van. But it was time to move to a bigger home.

While the ability to live the vagabond life is still important to me, I realize that a lot of my time will be spent parked in one place. A van dweller usually lives outside more than inside and this system works great as long as the weather is nice. The problem lies in the fact that there are places around this country where it may rain for several days in a row. That is when the interior of a van can get a little confining.

I hope to tell more of my new lifestyle in short and fascinating posts here. The travel will be slow and the traveler’s mind has always been a little slow, but I want to chronicle even the silly and ordinary so I will never forget.

Sometimes when I’m in my camper I wonder how the outside is doing. When I’m outside I sometimes wonder how my camper’s inside is doing. Often when I wake in the morning I wonder how cold it got in the night. Now, a lot of that mystery is taken care of with my new little weather station. I was going to call it a thermometer but that seems too simple for all the tasks it performs.

I’m heading back to Mesa today for some overdue family time. I also need to do a few minor repairs on my adventure vehicle. This trip has been a test of my new solar system and continuing boondocking skills. Everything is working great but I still have an idea in the back of my head that I should look for a new adventure vehicle. Maybe I will get to check out a couple bigger RVs when I get to the city.

Wow! What a difference a day makes. Yesterday it was almost 90 degrees. All I felt like doing was sitting in the shade, sipping on a grape drink, wishing for a little breeze to come through. In the night the wind picked up until I was forced from my bed to roll up the awning before it flew away. Today has been windy and chilly, a good day to stay inside and read. I stayed in my pajamas until 11 am.

Last night a BLM ranger stopped by to tell me they were enforcing the 14 day stay limit and I had better not be here when she came back in two weeks. I agree that you need some rules out here to keep homesteading folks under control. I asked her why I see some people camped out here for most of the winter? She said it is because they don’t have enough Rangers to enforce the law. I’m heading back to Mesa tomorrow.

I was thinking today that I have become like the ancient cliff dwellers of the west who disappeared without a trace hundreds of years ago. They knew how to write in a fashion. We have found many pictographs of symbols and art they left on rocks and caves, but nothing that really tell us why they just picked up and left. If someone stumbles on my blog in the future, they may think I left, too.

Home

Today I bought a new thermometer. It is one of the fancy kind that has a wireless sensor you hang outside and get a digital readout on a little monitor inside. I could have just hung a basic thermometer outside the window, but where’s the fun in that? The thermometer tells me what I knew all along – it is hot here in the desert near Yuma, AZ. Tomorrow should be cooler but windy.