We took our new camper out for its first camping trip over the weekend. Overall it was quite a success.

We had reservations for the campground at  Petit Jean State Park, Arkansas. (see my Petit Jean State Park and Petit Jean Mountain page.)  We have camped there several times in the past.  It is a good place for setting up and checking everything out.  There is also a decent climb with curves on the way up from the west, which allowed us to see how it handled climbing as well as a curving descent on the east for checking out how it handles going down hill.

The western approach to Petit Jean was via Dardanelle and Arkansas Highways 155 and 154. This goes through flat bottom lands from the west until just before you get to the mountain. We were at the visitors center by a little after 7 PM on Friday evening and set up on our campsite by 7:30.

We knew that the weekend was going to be very hot and that most of the time we would either be sitting inside our little motorhome in the air conditioning or sitting outside sweltering. We did take several walks, but it was before air temperatures rose into the high 90s or after they had started dropping for the evening.

Our intention was to do this weekend without an additional vehicle. For most trips, we plan to tow a small car. If we were traveling day to day and stopping in a new place almost every day, we might be willing to do without the small car. However, our style of RVing is to travel to some point and then park the camper for several days while we do things in that area. With a small car, we can leave the camper at the campground while we explore.

One of the tasks to be accomplished this week or next is to get the car set up so that we can tow it. Unfortunately, it looks like that will be a bit more expensive than I thought it would be.

One thing that I did get done while we were there was to re-read a book that I thought I had left unread last summer. It had been long enough, though, since I read it, that it was still a good read. We also managed to watch two movies that we had taken along. We don’t watch television very much.

I don’t know what the outside temperature got up to on Saturday, but it got up to the high 80s in the front of the camper before I figured out that I could improve the airflow at the front by shutting off some of the airflow at the back. In our last RV, the registers at the end of the ducting couldn’t be closed to allow that, but they can be closed in this one.

Other than a speaker wire, we didn’t find any real problems with the camper, which is actually pretty unusual. Even though this is much smaller than our fifth wheel, we are finding that there are many RV features that we like better in this camper than the equivalent in the old one.

One thing that isn’t better than the old camper is shower space. I’m a big guy and the shower space as it stands now is inadequate, but I have a modification in the works that should alleviate that problem.

Yesterday, we picked up our new Navion IQ.

The IQ is a class C motorhome, built by Itasca, a division of Winnebago.  It’s built on a Dodge Sprinter chassis and has a Mercedes-Benz diesel engine.

This is quite a a change from our previous camper.  We traded in a 31′6″ high profile fifth wheel.  We had found that the fifth wheel was just not suited for the kind of camping that we are interested in and that it would not fit in many of the campgrounds we would like to go to.

It will certainly require some adjustments. We carried a lot of stuff in the fifth wheel that we really didn’t need because we had the room and we had adequate margin to our weight limit.  In our new camper, we’ve got a lot of margin to the weight limits, too, but there is a lot less room for storing things.  There will be much more of a focus in only taking the things along that we really will be using or that we need,

Our first shake-down trip will likely be this next weekend.  We’re going to go for a night or two at a nearby state park.  We’d like to go for longer, but my schedule doesn’t allow it for the next few weeks.  However, the contract job I am working on will be over in about 6 weeks and then I’ll be back to the retired life again.

Our first relatively long distance trip will be to Wisconsin, where our youngest daughter and her family lives.  We’ll probably take a few days to get there, stay a week or so, and then take a few tays to meander back home.

We still have a few things to get in order before we take off on that trip.  We need to get our CRV set up for towing.  I’m going to have to come up with some sort of modified shower curtain so I’ll be able to use the shower — I’m a big guy and the shower is not quite big enough with the installed “door.”

Now there are two.

The second page I’ve completed since getting back to work developing content for Haw Creek is the page for Woolly Hollow State Park.

Woolly Hollow is a nice little state park in Faulkner County north of Conway and near Greenbriar. The centerpiece of the park is a 40 acre reservoir, Lake Bennett, constructed in the early 30s by the Work Projects Administration (WPA) and the Civilian Conservation Corp (CCC) as a watershed project built for scientific studies of the effect of run-off, silt and erosion control in a specific watershed. See my Woolly Hollow State Park web page for more information.

Administrivia details:

I’ve had the page on Haw Creek for quite some time in a different location. However, I’m moving all of my places and images pages and changing their format. I’ve decided to concentrate on optimizing the pages for search engines as well as adding new, accurate content. A lot of the content will be available in other places on the web, but, generally, not all on one site and, in many instances, the information is sketchy and often inaccurate. My intent is to provide useful and interesting material as well as valuable links that should be viable for a reasonable period of time.

Campground at Lake Ogallala

Nebraska State Park System

August 17, 2007 at 8.18am MDT; Pentax K10D; Exposure: 0.017 sec (1/60); Aperture: f/4.5; Focal Length: 45 mm; ISO Speed: 100

 Woolley Hollow State Park — Located in the rolling hills just to the south of the Ozarks and 50 miles north of Little Rock, the 370 acre Wooly Hollow area was established as a state park in 1973. (read more)

Devil’s Walking Stick

We spent Saturday morning of our late autumn camping trip just lazing around the camper. Having spent somewhere around 90 nights in various campgrounds around the country in the last year, sometimes it’s nice to just have a lazy morning.

After lunch we decided to try a trail that we hadn’t hiked since the late 80s or early 90s. Seven Hollows Trail is 4 1/2 miles long loop trail that is rated moderate to hard. Despite its name, it actually only goes through 4 of the 7 hollows.

At this time of year, streams along the trail and in the hollows are normally either dry or just a small trickle. In the spring, though, water flows through at a pretty good rate at times. If it is raining, some parts of the trail could be a bit treacherous.

One of the things we both were looking for — though neither of us realized the other was looking for it — was a plant called the devil’s walking stick. It’s a woody plant that grows very straight — straight enough to make a good walking stick — and has very devilishly sharp thorns on it. We found quite a few. There are more images in the flikr set gallery for this trip.

A sign at the beginning of the trail warns not to take the trail during periods of high wind due to the potential of falling trees — dead trees killed years ago in a forest fire that burned through the Seven Hollows.

The summer of 2000 was hot with minimal rainfall. Just before Labor Day, a trash fire on private land outside the park got out of control and spread up the south side of Petit Jean Mountain towards Seven Hollows. As it burned in the hollows area, it primarily burned downed leaves and undergrowth. Along the ridges, though, strong winds pushed the fire along into a crown fire — where the fire moves at the top of the trees from crown to crown — a rarity in Arkansas fires. Trees along the ridges were decimated, while trees in the hollows for the most part survived.

On the trail, we saw several instances of trees having fallen across the trail. Several times we had to go over trees and in other instances, we had to go under — a couple of times we actually had to crawl under the dead trunks. The worst area was a place where the trail goes through a notch in the rocks about ten feet deep and several feet wide for a couple of hundred feet. Several trees had toppled across and into the crevice. To get past them we had to climb over and under the fallen timber. (See image below)

We were worn out by the end of the trail and, even though it was a cool day, probably should have taken more water with us. We had originally not planned to do the whole trail, so, though we were tired, it was a good feeling to have completed the whole thing.

All of the photos from this trip to Petit Jean are posted in my Petit Jean 2007 flikr set for those who may want to view them.

November 16, 2007 - Petit Jean State Park

We are on our final camping trip of the year — just a short one over the weekend. The weather will be changing on Monday and we need to get the camper home and winterized before the temperatures drop below freezing.

We got here in the middle of the afternoon and hadn’t thought to make a reservation in advance. We wanted a spot with full hookups and didn’t really think it would be a problem, even though it’s a weekend, as late in the year as it is. However, when we got here we found out that there were only 3 or 4 of the full hookup sites available. I guess we lucked out.

After we got everything all set up, we took a short walk along the shore of Lake Bailey over to the picknic area and then back to the campground along the road. The temperatures were just about right for camping, hovering in the upper fifties, though the sun was getting low in the sky. When we got back to the camper, I walked over to the shore of the lake, thinking I might get a few more photos and was treated to the sight of a small airplane doing aerial acrobatics. There were about a half a dozen small planes on the end of the runway of Petit Jean State Park Airport, which is situated just across Lake Bailey from the campground. Perhaps tomorrow we’ll be treated to some more fancy flying.

One of the things I wanted to do on this trip was try to publish material, including photos each day. All of the photos have been reviewed and the better ones have been cropped, edited and posted to flikr –It’s time for bed.

I started working today on updating the RV manufacturer pages on Haw Creek Outdoors and on the first site — Airstream — noticed a very big change.

The only motorized Airstream in the 2008 lineup is the Interstate — what Airstream calls a touring coach.

There’s no SkyDeck motorhome on the site. Not only that, there’s no large motor home of any kind.

AutoWeek called the SkyDeck “a frat house on wheels.” It’s only 10 inches taller than a standard coach, but, with its roof top deck, in good weather it has essentially twice the usable”floor” space. There’s room on the top for as many as 15 people, including amenities such as wet bar, barbecue, and entertainment center.

While the SkyDeck was included in the 2007 lineup, along with a couple of other motor coaches, it looks like Airsteam has returned to what they do best, for the most part, with several models of quality trailers and the Interstate touring coach.

In your RV, when running water to adjust for temperature for a bath, save the otherwise wasted water in a container for use later. The experienced camper always takes a “navy bath,” which means to turn on the shower to get wet, turn it off to soap yourself down, then turn it back on to rinse off.(”RV Independence,” Trailer Life, July 1996 )

This is a good tip when one is dry camping where there is no water or sewer connections. However, if he’s in a commercial campground — or even one of the better public campgrounds — connected to the hookups, the experienced camper takes advantage of the luxuries. After all, he’s paying for them.

For most locations, the busiest season corresponds with schools’ summer break. Off-season visitors find there are fewer people, the traffic is lighter and camping locations are easier to obtain. In addition, some sites are at their peak of beauty during the spring and fall.
“One of the best times to visit Muir Woods is during the fall,” says Joyce Snodgrass, an intern at Muir Woods National Monument in California. “During fall, the crowds are much smaller and visibility is much better than during the summer months.”(”Crowd Free Camping,” Trailer Life, March 1997)

On the trip we just finished, we found that visiting in September — the anticipated off-season –was more crowded than we expected it to be.

We visited Yellowstone, Grand Teton, Canyonlands, and Arches National Parks. The traffic was quite heavy, very similar to what we had experienced in other years during the summer.

It’s a good thing that we had made sure that we had reservations at the campgrounds in the towns where we stayed because they were packed by the end of almost every day, though by last part of the month, in Utah, we were seeing a few empty spots in the campground each night.

One of the owners of the Snake River KOA south of Jackson, Wyoming, said that this was the first time they had ever been this busy in September. We had heard other locals express similar comments in both the Yellowstone area and the Jackson Hole/Teton area.

So why is this year different?

My guess is that it is a mixture of reasons that has resulted in a very busy “off-season.”

For us. the prolonged drought, the heat earlier in the year, and the wildfires in Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming are partially why we were there later in the season than we might have been otherwise. I suspect the same is true for a lot of the people who were there.

I believe another reason for the increase in visitors is, at least in part, the depressed value of the dollar against foreign currencies. Wherever we went in the national parks, there were a large number of foreigners, mostly from Europe, but also other regions. One man, from England, alluded as much when he admired my camera. He told me if he got one like it, he’d have to buy it before going back home, because it would be much more expensive in Great Britain.

I seriously hope that this year is an aberration, and not the new norm, or, even worse, a harbinger of things to come.

We plan to do more visiting of interesting places during the off-season — and hope that there will still be an off-season.