Route 66 Golden Shores and Bullhead City

Feb 7 - Feb 12, 2017

Obligatory cool Post Office pic complete with a Pat finger

After leaving Lake Havasu City, we decided to stay at a Passport America RV park at 50% off for a couple of nights so we could dump our tanks and garbage, and do laundry.  After boondocking at beautiful open BLM areas, it was hard to be side by side in an RV park again.  But our neighbors were really friendly as usual and that always helps!

I think this was near the museum!

We spent a wonderful day driving up through Oatman and up to Kingman then across to Bullhead City to check out places to camp next.  We found our next spot dry camping (no hookups)  right on the river for $17 a night.  It was nice to be able to scout it out ahead of time before movnig!

The drive to Oatman and on to Kingman was beautiful (and we did see two donkey butts) but we didn't stop in town.  We took a picture of the Route 66 signs and stopped to see the Route 66 museum in Kingman which was cool.    Oh and we had breakfast at Cracker Barrel there which felt like"home" even though we don' have them in Washington state (at least where we've been!).

Proof we saw donkey(butts)

After leaving the RV "park", we pulled into our perfect spot at Davis campground with a gorgeous view out our large front windows.  While there, we rode our bikes along the river path, had campfires, read books, roasted hot dogs on the campfire, had happy hour dinner at a casino (with a boat ride to get across the river) and took a few drives around the area. And of course more errands (barber, shoe shopping (not successfully) pedicure while waiting for the movie to start since we didn't know Nevada is one hour behind Arizona!).

Next door to us at Davis Campground we met another couple from Washington and discovered so many things in common around places we'd been in Washington, books and movies etc.  This is always one of our favorite parts  - meeting folks and sharing information and a bonus to connect with folks from "home"!

Loved this spot right on the river.
Waiting for Pat to arrive in the Motorhome.

Bike ride along the river to the dam.

While we were here,  we discovered another important clue to the battery puzzle! We were monitoring how the batteries were doing with a few cloudy days and noted we were about 35 amp hours down close to the end of the day.  Not so good but we'd just run the generator later that evening.  When we went to log our "end of daylight" readings, it said we were 100% full!!  No way we made up 35 amp hours with practically no sun.  SO that is not good because it throws into question all the monitoring we've done to date.  If we're gone all day and come home and see we're 100% but we're not really, it would explain why the battery monitor thinks we're not very far down but the battery continues to go downhill.   This is a really good (and bad) thing to learn.  Our work-around:  we turned off the Tri-metic auto reset feature (since we don't know why it jumped to 100%) and when we're plugged in at Las Vegas, we will wait to reset it to 100% until after it gains the 35 amps AND after we validate our batteries are fully charged with the hydrometer (hopefully).  Basically after that, we don't plan on resetting the state of charge so we'll always know how many amps down (or up) from our new starting point.

We wondered if we should wait to leave to Las Vegas since winds were predicted at around 30 mph (with gusts higher).  Motorhomes do not travel well in wind (stressful at a minimum!). But we decided to go for it since most of the drive would be a headwind.  It turned out fine and not as bad as some of the drive cross country when we picked up the motorhome in Michigan last August.  Not sure if additional weight (being fully loaded and with solar panels) helped with that or what!

Highlights:  Camping right on the river at Davis camp with morning and evening campfires.  Weather was perfect until the day we left.  Possibly learning why the Trimetric said we'd only used 20% when the battery volts indicated we used more than 50%.

Lowlights:  still not really into the casino scene.  Too smoky, expensive (where we went).

Things we learned: Trimetric resets to 100% charged when it's not!