On The Move

June 20-22, 2012

Wednesday-

We got packed up and ready to move out from our campsite by 10:30.   We had received a call that the tire would be in by 11 am, so we wanted to get parked and disconnected at the RV park in time.    It was a short drive to the Red Mt. Campground – about 10 minutes.    We got checked in and disconnected, and then sat around waiting.   We utilized the hot showers and did some laundry.   Finally at around 5 we got a call that the tire was in.   Since it was closing time at the repair shop, we made arrangements to bring the truck in first thing Thursday morning.

Thursday –

Got the truck in by 8:45 and the new tire was done by 9:15.    I asked for advice on tire inflation and got the 3^rd set of different advice from professionals.   Sigh.  But, since this guy regularly services pickups and knows about pulling RVs, we’ll follow his advice.   We’ve probably been keeping the inflation too high.   We dumped our tanks and got hitched again.   Pulled out at around 10.  We’d decided to just head for the Taylor River area and try to find a spot at one of the many pay forest service campgrounds on 742.    We’d called and found out that there was water at Lakeview, so Missy said we should start there.   Even if we couldn’t find a spot there, at least we could fill the tanks.    By waiting to fill with water, we saved ourselves having to travel the mountain passes with that extra billion pounds of weight.

I was nervous about driving the rig through the mountains, but it went fine.  I utilized engine braking as much as possible to save the new brakes and rotors.  It went pretty smoothly.   We stopped at the grocery store in Montrose and then continued on towards Alton.   When we turned onto the forest road to head to the campground, we encountered the road construction.    We had read about the construction, but didn’t realize the extent of the delays.   There was a 6 mile stretch of work being done, and the workers were scattered on the WHOLE 6 miles.   They had the one lane at a time deal going on…but instead of only for a short .5-1 mile section, it was for the WHOLE 6 miles.  We actually waited for 15 minutes for our way’s turn to go.   They had a pilot car to follow, and he made us stop 4-5 times along the way for 2-5 minutes at a time waiting for loaders to get out of the way, or for dump trucks to load up, or other random stuff.   It was not pleasant.    Missy started to get frustrated and lament our choice, but I just reminded her that we had the time to spare.  :-)

We had some issues with Karen and Jane not knowing where we were or where the campground was.   But we finally saw the sign for Lakeview at around 4:30.    We drove around and chose a spot.  There were some nice electric sites with views of the “lake”  (reservoir).   However, with sunny skies and temps into the 80s, we needed to find a shady spot.   So we have a non-electric site with a nice shady yard.   We unhitched and tried to level the rig.  Oops.   Couldn’t get low enough.   So we had dinner and then went about re-hitching and backing up about 10 feet.    Bingo.    We sat in our loungers for the rest of the evening enjoying the warm breeze and the absolute silence of the forest.

Friday-

Today was a lazy day.   We relaxed in our loungers and read most of the day.   Missy harangued Josh into finishing a Scrabble game that I’d abandoned.    It was kind of amusing.   She would text Josh his tiles and a picture of the board for each of his turns.   Pretty impressive that he could play without an actual rack to move tiles about on.    We didn’t get to ride bikes because there are no trails at this campground.   And the campground loops themselves are very steep and curvy.  It’s interesting how much we’ve enjoyed riding bikes and how now we’ll have to evaluate new campgrounds for riding options.