Hello from Howard, CO
Wednesday evening– June 8, 2022 (First post of this travelogue)
This is our third trip out in our new trailer. We are camped at the Pleasant Valley RV Park (Google Map).
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We left home on Friday (6/3) and drove to Pat’s brother’s house near Guffey, CO. Jeff and Julie are great hosts and they have 60 acres of beautiful land. We went into the town of Guffey two nights for great dinners at what they call “The Bakery”. One night was pizza and the second night was with some of their friends (Zach and Jen) where we had a great three course meal with the main course being a special beef plate.
Besides wanting to spend some time with the Spring’s, we wanted to try dry camping with our new trailer. That turned out to be a bit frustrating.
We had three problems testing our dry camping capabilities. First of all, the afternoons were very cloudy so we did not get a lot of solar. Secondly, we gave up on pure dry camping and plugged into the Spring’s 120V outlet. After an hour or two the GFI outlet (not the breaker) would trip. This often happens with campers equipped with inverters – somehow the inverter makes the circuit look like the system is going to ground. Lastly, we tried our 2000W Honda generator and it went bonkers after a few minutes, acting like it was overloaded. I did not have the proper test equipment, but the inverter data panel would suggest it was not overloaded. I had tried the Honda with an 1800W resistance heater at home and it did fine. I will have to troubleshoot it at home where I have the proper testing equipment. We finally ended up using the Spring’s Generator (Firman 3000 watt (link)). This handled the charging load just fine. However, we ran two CAPs and one concentrator (plus some small loads) off the batteries during the night and that let us know that we need to add battery capacity.
We left the Spring’s on Monday and came to this campground. It is a very beautiful campground. We paid extra for a river front site and it was well worth it (see photos). For reference, we are in site 8 but sites 8-10 would work well for us in the future.
We had thought about going into Salida for a day, but it is so relaxing here that we just stayed in the campground. We tried to see if they would let us stay in the site for another couple of days, but they are booked up.
View from our Patio
View across the Arkansas River (our campsite is in the middle of the photo)
That is all for this post.