Debbie and I have wanted to visit Death Valley National Park in California and know that winter is the best time to do so. We began making plans back around Thanksgiving 2019 to take our new 2020 Grand Design Solitude S-Class 2930RL-R fifth wheel and heading out west. Over the next few weeks, I hope to post about our month long experience getting there and back.
Planning To Dry Camp.
We had made a couple of minor changes to our new trailer to make it possible to make stops along the way, without having hookups. Since the new trailer had a residential refrigerator, which would be running on an inverter, we knew the two standard, lead-acid batteries wouldn’t get the job done. So, we replaced those with a couple of lithium-ion batteries and a new lithium-compatible battery charger. The new batteries effectively raised our capacity by 2-1/2 times.
Uh-Oh, We Have a Problem.
As we were getting close to time for this trip to begin, it turned into “the trip that almost wasn’t”. Just about three weeks before our scheduled departure, we were involved in an accident with our new 2019 F-350 dually. We were helping out some friends by carrying some of their stuff from Gordon to their new home near Fredericksburg, TX. While driving into Goldthwaite, TX, a woman in a Lexus managed to “not see” our huge crew cab dually truck and ran through a yield sign. We bumped sides like they do in NASCAR before both heading off the side of the road. The damage to our truck would have been minimal, but we decided to run over a road sign in the process of going off-road. The sign crashed into our windshield, shattering it completely, showering us both with glass. Fortunately, nobody was hurt. Even though the whole experience was very unnerving, we did manage to get our truck back just a couple of days before our scheduled time to leave on this trip.
February 25; The Trip Begins, Plans Change, El Paso.
Debbie and I had planned to make our first stop somewhere between our home and a Harvest Host location in Deming, NM that had come highly recommended by one of our neighbors. We set out with the plan to stop at a roadside rest area just east of Van Horn, TX. We arrived there only to find that it wasn’t quite as open as it had appeared on Google maps. Since it was still a couple of hours before dark, I checked in with the Harvest Host app and located a dairy farm just east of El Paso. We gave them a call and received permission to stay the night. We arrived just as it was getting dark and found four other Harvest Host guests also camping there. There was plenty of room for us to park without being on top of each other, so we set up for the night at our first ever Harvest Host location. The dairy, which was also a cheese factory, had already closed for the evening, but they did have a little restaurant on the premises. We walked over and each had a ribeye steak before returning to the trailer and getting to bed for the night. It turned out to be a pretty cold night with the temperature dropping down to 27 degrees. Even with our heater running, which is a huge battery draw, the two lithium batteries lasted the night. That investment we had made in lithium-ion batteries proved to work out just as planned. After waking up, we ran the generator for a couple of hours to charge the batteries back up to make sure that we had enough power to make it to our next destination.
February 26; Deming, NM
Since we had driven an extra 100 or so miles the first day, our second day turned out to be a short travel day of just over 100 miles. Our destination was another Harvest Host location (woohoo, free camping). We arrived at the D.H. Lescombes Winery just after noon and had our pick of spots to park our trailer. They have a huge open area that can accommodate many rigs. After firing up the generator to fully recharge our batteries for the night, Debbie and I went into their tasting room and had lunch and a wine tasting. We discovered that Debbie’s wine preference was for those that were ultra sweet. My preference was for those that weren’t sweet at all. We watched as other RV’ers came in while we spent the afternoon chatting with the workers. By the end of the afternoon, there were five or six RVs staying the night. One couple had actually been at the same dairy the night before. The night was again pretty cold, even colder than the night before. Although we had planned on it being fairly cool while on this trip, we really hadn’t planned for waking up to a 21 degree morning. Once again, we ran the generator for a bit while we fixed breakfast, showered, and packed up the trailer. Since we are heading to a state park with hookups for the next few days, we didn’t really need to get the batteries fully charged this time. So, Arizona, here we come. And we’ll have some more scenic pictures once we get there.
LyndDebTravel 