We were up early this morning, wanting to get a good start. Forry had hooked up the toad last night and we had taken out all of the garbage and put everything away etc. We had spent an extra day at Old Orchard, getting some laundry done and making a trip into Home Depot at Chico. We needed to get a few things before we were ready to boondock (camp with no hook-ups for water or electricity or sewer) on BLM (Bureau of Land Management, i.e. public land) land at Quartzite.
We got four big packs of firewood and a bucket. The firewood is on the "bring sheet" for the Alpine Coach Association Rally that we are planning to attend from January 14-19th. The firewood is for evening campfires and the bucket is to catch shower water (the water that runs too cold to step into at first) that can then be used to flush the toilet. (All in the name of conserving water!) We've been to seminars at Life on Wheels conferences on boon-docking, but this will be the first time we've tried it for more than overnight. The other instruction is to come with your water tank FULL and both your gray and black water tanks EMPTY.
As we were unhooking the electricity and water this morning, I noticed that our neighbor -- who had been up and going even earlier than we had -- did not look very happy. He had the hood up on his toad (towed car) with a battery charger on with power from his coach. When I asked him what was wrong, he said he had left the key on in his car the night before and had run the car battery down and now his charger had been on for a half hour and didn't seem to be working. I called Forry over to check and sure enough there was NO spark at the battery terminals. So Forry went to get ours while the fellow kept protesting that he didn't want to delay us. After he hooked up our charger up, Forry remembered that his new compressor had a battery booster on it that could be used to start the car. But by the time he got it out, there was enough juice from the battery charger to start the car. The fellow was going to leave it run for a couple of hours in neutral while he was going down the road. It was a Honda and he said he had run it before while he was towing it without any problem...
So, it was ten AM before we got going. It gets dark by 4:30 and we didn't want to be looking for a campsite at night. About 4 PM we cut over to Hwy 99 from I5 at Los Banos to a little RV park called The Viking at Kingsburg. (There is not much of anything in the way of towns and/or RV parks on I5 once you leave Stockton) It is very different from any other place we have stayed. I had called earlier this afternoon and the lady they told me they didn't take reservations, but had "lots" of pull-through spaces left. We followed another rig (who turned out to be from Everett also heading for Quartzite) in. She went into the office and quickly came out and met me before I got there. If you are an overnighter, you are not supposed to go to the office, but are to pull into any vacant spot -- there were only two left -- then fill out an envelope from a box on a post, put your money or a check (no credit cards) in it and put it into a slot in the post. No human interaction at all!
This isn't a very attractive place and there are no amenities at all, so we'll just spend the night and head out again tomorrow. We'll check out a few places closer to Quartzite and stay there until the ACA Rally starts next Wednesday.
No comments:
Post a Comment