RV Adventures

Surgery is complete.  The Blue Flame now has Lithium Ion Batteries.  We went from this…

Two compartments, inverter on the left, 2 good batteries and 4 burst batteries on the right.

To this…

One compartment, inverter mounted to ceiling, batteries behind all the wiring.

Nifty, eh?  Our new “pure sine wave” inverter (converts 12 Volt battery power to 110 Volt household power)  means I won’t have to run the generator or be on campground electric to get clean power to run my sewing machine, the bed heating pad, or a whole host of other electronics.  That’s HUGE!  All the electronics hated the modified sine wave inverter we did have, it’s going on e-Bay.

We also got this nifty little control panel to manage it all.  I’m making the comprehension of it all Jim’s responsibility.

Control panels for the inverter and batteries.

The people at Starlight Solar, the company that did the work, are super.  We “camped” next to their building for 2 nights while the work was being done.  One of the owners is a quilter…so we did a “show and share” of our projects this morning.  Heck, they gave us a free breakfast at this cute local diner.

Penny’s Diner

Now that the battery issue is worked out, we are truly dry camping in the desert for the first time.  We drove a whopping 15 miles north of Yuma and are at Mittry Lake.  It’s BLM (Bureau of Land Management) property.  That means we can stay here for free.

Dry camping at last! Just us and….no one!

This is the view from our window.  You can see the lake and the surrounding mountains.

Mittry Lake as seen from our RV window.

This is my first opportunity to try out my new cell phone booster.  The 4G signal is marginal out here in the boonies, a booster takes care of that.  Jim put the antenna up on the roof of the RV for me.  The antenna wire hooks into the booster/cradle, the phone goes in the cradle, and basically my phone now has an external antenna.  It’s really increased the signal strength and is allowing me to write this blog.

Wilson Sleek 4G Cell Phone Booster

We have a wind storm kicking up a lot of dust, so we are taking it easy for this evening.  Tomorrow we’ll probably do some more 4-wheeling.  On Monday we’ll go back to Starlight if needed for any tweaks.  Then it’s time to head home.  The temperature next week is heading up into the upper 90’s down here.  Now that IS too warm.