Sunday, October 23rd - We leave Rachel & Nicks.

Eli with a messy face

Grammy & Grampa with Sawyer

Grammy, Sawyer, Rachel & Nick

We had planned to leave 2 weeks after Sawyer was born, which would have been Saturday, but the trailer was in the shop for 2 weeks and we didn’t get it back until Friday. The black tank had sprung a leak and it was stinking something aweful! The RV shop kept trying to patch the leak, but then found more leaks. Gross! I had also wanted to add a larger battery bank and a 2000 watt inverter before we left, so that took another 2 days. The inverter would enable us to have 110 volt AC house power without an external electrical hookup so we could “boondock” i.e. camp in places with no hookups. The advantages of boondocking are not to have to pay the usual $30-$40 per night fee and not being crammed into little spaces with the next RV only a few feet away. There is also the possibility of having fantastic views. The weather was very warm that last week in Colorado Springs as they were having a “heat wave”, so working on the trailer was pleasant. It would only be a week later that Rachel & Nick would get snow.
We set out for The Great Sand Dunes National Monument, which was a 3 ½ hour drive. We had to go through 1 mountain pass, but it was not too difficult as the mighty diesel pulled the trailer up the hill. The access road to the monument was 16 miles long. About 3 miles down the road, we noticed a dirt road and a sign that read “Public Land”. There was a trailer parked in a large dirt area there and a pickup next to it with its hood up. We took a mental note of this just in case it didn't work out at the camping ground. As it turned out, it didn't. We were headed to the camp ground in the park where I had previously read that there were some spaces that could handle big rigs. Well, they were wrong! As we drove around the loop, we noticed a lot of tent campers and small trailers and short little camp sites. There was one class A big rig on the loop that had gotten stuck on a rock trying to negotiate one of the sharp corners. We had to wait while he figured out a way to get himself free. He then backed into what looked like a slightly longer site than the rest. There were 2 more campgrounds, so we drove further up the road to try those. As we approached, we saw that both gates to these campgrounds were closed and we found ourselves in a dead end, the very place you don’t want to end up if you are pulling a long trailer! I tried to maneuver back & forth to try to get the trailer turned around, but we were too big! I finally said to Jan that we would have to back the trailer back down the road until we could back into the first campground road. She got out & guided me down the road and we got going in the opposite direction again.
Now it was getting late and we did not have a place to park, so we were feeling a little discouraged, maybe even a little panicked. We had noticed a general store & campground right outside the park, so we drove back to there and asked the guy inside about the camping facilities: full hookups $30. We said no thanks and decided to head back to where the sign had said “Public Lands”. The trailer & truck we saw there before were still there, but nobody was around. We parked about 50 feet away and got ready for the night. It was getting cold and we turned on the furnace to get warm. At first, we got heat, but when the furnace turned on a little later, the fan was only blowing cold air! In desperation, I started the generator and plugged in the electric space heater, but then the generator started to fail! I switched to the other propane tank, and the generator ran O.K. again, but then after about 10 minutes, started to fail again, so I had to shut it off. I couldn’t figure out what was happening because the gas top stove worked fine. It was a cold night for us as the temperature in the trailer dropped into the 40s.

Boondocking in the desert