Walt's Corner

A very cool part of swapping my truck out for Rio Grande the day or two prior to camping is that it becomes my vehicle! Meaning, I have to drive it to work. Unless I use my motorcycle, which ain’t happening during all this rainy weather. No sir.

Which also means I got a little house to retreat to during lunch. To eat. To write. To plan this weekend’s activities. How cool is that?

Couple of little mods you can see in this picture. For starters, the Howard Miller wall clock. What RV doesn’t come with a clock? I guess one could argue that everyone has a watch or a phone that tells them the time, but I appreciate time pieces. So yeah. I mounted a standard RV wall clock.

Next up is the Thermometer. We’ve always had a weather station mounted with outside sensors in our RVs. This one will be no exception. Top left, attached to the wooden cabinet.

Directly underneath the wall clock is a magnetic ring. Rio Grande came with mounting and hookup options for a TV, but no TV. The mount for it is in the sleeping area. I don’t want a TV in my sleeping area. If we want to watch a movie or something the iPad will snap into place on the wall, and our captain chairs both face it when turned inward. Perfect! iPad will play the sound over the included JBL Flip6 Bluetooth speaker. And man does that speaker sound good!

To the right above the table window, attached under the cabinet is the paper towel holder.

Finally, in this shot, is a small sponge holder above the sink mounted to the wall.

Slowly but surely we are making this bitch ours! Next up – custom curtains!

My Dad and I, and to some extent, my mother, always had a dark sense of humor. Mine probably dives a bit deeper than theirs, or at least more than they let on.

Parents tend to shield their kids from what society deems inappropriate. The line drawn between what is and is not acceptable moves between generations. My father would say that each passing generation’s behavior gets progressively worse. He would undoubtedly point to the amount of skin shown as an example. How much skin one allows to be viewed by the public today is much more tolerant than it was, say, 80 years ago.

Back to humor, sometimes my parents’ guard would be down and they noticed me noticing. Which brings me to today’s episode. A memory. A memory of when technically, I had surpassed that threshold of parent/child relationship to parent/adult-child relationship.

I was still in my teens. I had flown the nest and joined the Army at this point, but was back home visiting. We decided to hit up a local mall. Remember those? In particular, a store called Spencers. Full of wonderful, humorous gag-gifts.

There was this particular item for sale that resembled a small baseball bat that had been labeled a Bed-Snake Beater. The picture on the packaging had some cartoonish characters with the female walloping a guy’s groin that was covered by the blankets with this Bed-Snake Beater. Mom giggled. I snorted. Then she realized I had caught her giggling and we shared that awkward moment of both of us coming to the realization that I wasn’t a kid anymore, and this shit was pretty funny. Then we both looked at my (younger) sister to see if she noticed. I don’t think she did.

Dog Canyon Campground. The name itself instills a false sense of dread within me due to its similar name to a trail located at Oliver Lee Memorial State Park that winds up the mountains and takes you nearly up to Sunspot. A trail that took me a few times to make it up to the top – Dog Canyon Trail.

But no. This is not that Dog Canyon. This is a remote campground nestled within the north side of Guadalupe Mountains National Park (GMNP). There are two ways to get there. From a trail system beginning at the Pine Springs Campground, located just off Highway 62/80 on your way to Carlsbad Caverns from El Paso, TX. This would be a grueling ~15-mile hike utilizing the Tejas Trail.

The other way to get there is also the only way to get there in a vehicle. While physically 12 miles from the Pine Springs Visitor center, one must drive 102 miles from Pine Springs Visitor Center to reach Dog Canyon Campground, incurring an additional 2 hours of travel time.

Once there, however, you’re greeted by amazing views and weather unlike whatever area you left. Trash receptacles and water are available but no hookups of any kind. 9 tent sites and 4 RV sites. Fresh water is available at a couple locations from a spigot. Gray water can be dumped into a large wash-basin sink located next to the tent campground if you can carry it in a bucket. We reserved site RV A.

When we cleared out the Lance, it was as if we were moving out of a house. So much stuff! There was no way it was going to transfer over to the Airstream. We knew this going in. We also kept a list of things we needed along the way that we didn’t pack. We are now working off that list to make sure we have everything needed for a next trip.

No charcoal burning is allowed at any campground in the GMNP so a containerized propane grill was brought along and did the trick. Hot dogs twice and hamburgers once. Along with some potato salad I made a couple days prior to the trip.

Saturday we hiked the Tejas Trail up to where it falls below Lost Peak, about 3 miles. Once directly under the peak we left the trail and headed up (about another .2 miles), eventually finding the geological survey marker and very large cairn. From the trailhead to the peak was just over 1550 feet of elevation according to my AllTrails app. This was quite satisfying as we had not hiked that high in a couple years. Maybe more.

Sunday was another hike. This time along the Bush Mountain Trail. This one was only about 5 miles out and back and around 800 feet of elevation.

Monday was our travel day taking us back home. Leaving the site consisted of simply latching the drawers, putting chairs/table inside the van, and securing the gas cans to the cargo rack on the hitch of the van. Was pretty sweet not having to hook up a trailer anymore.

Eagerly awaiting our next adventure. Hopefully one where charcoal is allowed so I can bring the little green egg along.

Our first real camping trip in Rio Grande was at Guadalupe Mountains National Park: Dog Canyon Campground. Over the long Labor Day weekend.

No hookups. Generator hours from 8AM-8PM. A prime place to attempt boondocking for the first time where we aren’t too far away from home – just in case some things didn’t work out.

My main concerns transitioning from the our Lance to the Airstream were the tanks, solar, and battery.

Tanks
Lance had 45-gallon tanks for all three – fresh, gray and black. Airstream has 28, 19, 12, respectively. Initial edge to the Lance. Real world practice tells a different story. In all our 3-4 day camping trips, which are the majority of our trips, I never filled our fresh water tank with more than 25 gallons and I still emptied some when we were done. 28 gallons will be sufficient for most of our adventures. Black and gray tanks should never be more than your freshwater capacity anyways. When hitting multiple sites, there is always a place to dump and refill water if necessary.

The one trip a year where that might suffer will be our annual Big Bend Ranch State Park trip. Years ago we would spend 10 days in that park without needing to hook up and drive to dump/refill. We haven’t spent that many days out there for the last 4 years. We’ll manage.

Solar
Lance has 400 watts of solar while Airstream has 200 watts. Edge to the Lance. This will have to be increased. 200 watts on the Lance was sufficient when the fridge, furnace and hot water tanks used propane. 200 watts of solar was enough to charge our battery back up to 100% by the new day’s end.

The Airstream uses no propane. The fridge is a 12-volt compressor which draws 3-8 amp hours depending on how hard the compressor is running any given moment. Propane fridges barely uses .5-1.5 amp hours depending on whether it is actively burning propane for the absorption. The Airstream’s furnace and water heater is a single Timberline 2.0 hydronic unit that heats up a glycol which then transfers the heat to your water for instant-on hot water or runs the glycol through a radiator with fans for your furnace.

While the hydronic heating system uses no propane, it does use gasoline from the Airstream’s gas tank at a rate of about .18 gallons per hour when run on high. So maybe 2 gallons consumed overnight max. And from the battery, about 5 amps per hour on average. I expect to lose 40 amps hours overnight from the battery.

I will be looking into seeing how to get an additional 200 watts of solar on the roof. I know the controller can handle it.

Battery
Lance has a 200ah lithium. Airstream has a 270ah lithium. Airstream is the clear winner here in specs, but is necessary considering the draw from the battery will be considerably more than what we are accustomed to.

Summary
Even though the solar isn’t enough to charge the battery during the day, it does manage to keep the battery loss to a minimum of 5-6% loss throughout the day as it keeps the fridge and exhaust fan running.

What makes up for this is the included Onan generator. We kept some interior lights on during the evening hours. Fan on medium-high all night with the windows open. Fridge running. Fired up the Timberline briefly for some hot water. When we woke up the next morning we turned on the 3000 watt inverter to power up the Keurig coffee brewer 3 times. All this brought the battery level down to 61%, or 164 amp hours. After running the generator for about an hour, the battery was back up to 100%. That was super-impressive to me.

Next post – will be about the camping/hiking part of this weekend.

With Airstream, one can officially name their RV and have an aluminum medallion engraved with that registered name. Ours has been named Rio Grande. Fitting for our area where the Rio Grande runs through our beautiful city of El Paso, TX.

But primarily, I named it after the small shuttlecraft called a runabout from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Deep Space Nine’s first runabout was called Rio Grande. Named in honor of Gene Roddenberry who was from El Paso. This Airstream reminds of a small shuttlecraft so it only seems fitting.

On our first real camping trip in this new RV we attached the name plate. I love the reflection of the Guadalupe Mountains in our back window of this photo. More on that trip to follow in the next couple of days. Stay tuned!