February 10, 2008

 

Sunday, February 10, 2008 3:30:36 AM

My mind has been racing I hoped that writing a little might calm it down. I may not have as much to worry about regarding my sleep as I had been. Waking up this morning really scared me because after all the trip has started. But really the fact I woke up isn’t at all surprising. I am nervous about our first on the road church trip and I didn’t get my run. Another point to consider is that even though I was able to sleep until 5AM last night it really wasn’t any different in that I didn’t get to bed until 11PM. So going to bed at 9PM and waking up at 3AM is really the same duration. It is just a lot less convenient for interfacing everyone else.

I wanted to write a little more about dinner with the in laws. I just ran out of time at the Fort Cove stop. Maybe my writing is working I am feeling sleepy, I am going to try to sleep again.

Well it didn’t quite work but it was nice and relaxing for a while. I thought of a couple of other reasons that I might be having trouble sleeping. I took an Excedrin migrane yesterday at Fort Cove. It seems that an effect caffeine has on me is that in addition to staying awake on it I wake early the next day. Another thing that is going on is my shoulder pain.

We are in the Sand Hollow State Park campground. It is very nice here. They have full RV hook ups. There is even a wifi hot-spot but the signal is too weak to get it. I think state parks are going to be a staple of our travel strategy. We got here just as dark was setting in so it was hard to see much but what I did see was beautiful. Two things that were almost overwhelming were the weather which was warm enough it was possible although a little uncomfortable to be out in a T-shirt and the clear, clear sky full of stars. The stars are something that helped me fall in love with the travel trailer. It seems like I see a lot more stars when we are out in the trailer.

We had chili dogs for dinner last night. I used the new grill to cook the hot dogs. I had a little trouble lighting the thing but using a lighter instead of its build in igniter worked. The chili dogs were great, I had two. I was probably full at one but they really were amazing chili dogs. Which brings me to another point… I am getting very concerned about my weight. Not so concerned of course that I didn’t eat the second chili dog last night but just concerned enough that I’ll stay up at night and write about it. I have gained about 10 pounds over the last two months and I am sure it is because I have been eating like a garbage disposal. I am really hoping some good rest and some good exercise will get my body regulated again to where I don’t eat that way. I also think that just getting immersed into life on the road will reduce my stress level quite a bit. We had some trouble finding a place to camp last night. I was thinking that since St. George was a sun bird community it would be very simple to find a place to park an RV. Apparently St. George is a Condo community. When we got into St. George the recreation information office was closed. The office was quite large, incidentally it is almost always a good sign for an area when they have an office that large dedicated to recreation information. From the parking lot I looked up RV parks in St. George. There were two, one was $40 a night the other was $30 a night. I of course called the $30 a night place. The guy on the phone didn’t seem very keen on having us there or not having us there. He was very clear that it was mostly snow birds there which made me self conscious about having children who were not doing a very good job staying quite. Not seeing good choices we decided to head over anyway. The man at the desk surprised me quite a bit in that he showed me a travel brochure and then helped me find a couple of places that I would have a lot more fun at. I thought it was quite an honest thing to do. I think he may have been trying to keep kids out of the park but I got the feeling he was genuinely concerned in just helping a lost person find a better accommodation. He said feel free to stay here a night or two if you want to find your bearing but you will have a lot more fun where you can have a campfire instead of being by a freeway. I was amazed to see a shut down RV park on the way to his park. I asked him about it saying how surprised I was it was shut down because it seemed like a place that would do really well as a park. He laughed and said yeah it sold for 3 and a half million the day it listed. He then gave me a history of the RV park business in the area. Apparently there used to be a lot of RV parks in town but as commercial property got more and more valuable they were replaced. Even the RV park he has full of permanent residents is being shut down soon to be replaced as commercial property.

We decided to leave straight for the state park instead of stay at the RV park in town. At the time I thought it was a mistake because it put us past our dinner time and Natalyn fell asleep on the way out. The directions to the park also didn’t seem very accurate. The directions said 4 miles east and 2 miles south. The trip odometer made it look more like 3 miles east and 4 or 5 miles south. A couple of extra miles can seem like a long way tired and hungry in the dark. In the end of course things worked out find. Natalyn even stayed asleep for the night. I really do want to get into a routine where we do not move camp on a Sunday.

I am having a hard time deciding what I want to do about Monday and Tuesday. Our checkout time isn’t until 2PM so we can stay quite a while. The issues are that we could move to a “primitive” campsite and save $15 a night foregoing hookups. For the most part that wouldn’t be a problem because there is a public RV dump and I think they even have potable water there. The problem comes in that I feel extremely self conscious about running the generator in such a quite place. However with out the generator it is hard to do very much in the way of work. I wonder if it wouldn’t be a good thing to get a very small generator. A small one may not cost very much and could be a lot quieter. I would imagine that 90% of the time when we need electricity we are going to need it for just the laptops. Another idea is that if we could get some super hefty batteries that could charge quickly and support two laptops all day then we could get away with only running the generator long enough to charge them. However I think a quick charge for a battery is on the order of hours. Getting a solar panel would be nice but they are awfully expensive. I saw a place out of Cedar city that sold units for $1000 which they claimed to be full cabin systems. They looked interesting but weren’t designed for going on an RV. On the same note even if I could get a good solar panel solution for $1000 it still is $1000. $1000 dollars will pay for a lot of $15 dollar a night differences 66.666666 to be exact. That actually isn’t as many as I was thinking it was. I may take a closer look to see how far $1000 solar dollars will take me. If I could get a quite solution that would be enough to run the laptops that could be a very good thing. With that said I would be interested in seeing how quite a small generator could be. The thing that is nice about solar power of course is that after we pay for it once we don’t pay for it on an on going basis. Well sort of, I imagine battery replacement rivals fuel costs. Something that is more difficult to handle is the climate control issue. In order to have good climate control we are going to need a full sized generator. In weather like we are having now that isn’t as much of an issue but in hot weather or very cold weather it wouldn’t be practical to try and have a productive day of work without climate control. The answer may be to just wait and travel a bit more to get a better idea of what our needs are and the answer may be that as we are learning our needs outfit to meet them. I don’t know if the $15/night difference is typical. In Yellowstone the difference is $17 a night. Other places I saw are only $8 dollars or so a night. There is also of course the consideration that there will be sometimes that full hook ups are simply not an option like Betatikin ruins. Another option would be to replace the generator we have with super quite full sized model but I don’t think any full sized model is super quiet. Everyone raved about how quiet the model we have is relative to its price and how it met state park requirements however the thing is still like running a lawn mower. Who wants to listen to a lawn mower at a state park. Maybe I need to just get over it as a necessary evil. Then again there are times when parks don’t even let you run generators like in the City of Rocks when they are in fire season. It seems like it would be extremely rude to have full hookups available and then go over to the tent section and blare a generator in their ear. I think the practical options are to realize that we will need more plugged in nights than we were originally planning, look for a robust solar solution or get much better at finding extremely remote places. I guess that solves my Tuesday question. I think that if we are going to stay here we stay here with hookups. The last trip budget I did had us at $25 a night anyway. Of course it has us $15K in the hole at the end of the year but details … I think the $25 dollar a night figure may be a good one to hold. Things may be backward of what I was thinking. I was thinking we would be hooked up for weekends and primitive for the week however we may do just the opposite and go primitive for the weekends and full hookup through the week. Well we kind of need a place we can drop the trailer to go to church. My guess is that as we get to more populated areas they won’t have as much parking in church parking lots. Even Chubbuck wouldn’t have enough parking to support our trailer.