I started working on the shower modification today and took pictures of what it looked like before I started, for post modification comparison. The original shower “door” was actually a fancy rollup, very heavy duty plastic sheet. It operated like old-fashioned rollup window shades except it was mounted vertically. That is entirely removed with only a couple of scratches. It was mounted using induxtrial strength double sticky back tape or something very like it. I still have a bit of the residue to get cleaned off. I will be installing a Recreational Vehicle Offset Shower Rod which was delivered on Saturday in the mail. I’ll have to do some fabricating to make it fit, but it will give me an additional 12 inches — plus we’ll be using a shower current that is a lot more flexible than the original heavy duty plastic rollup screen that, with the top and bottom tracks, was pretty rigid when in place. The bathroom is inside the door on the left of the picture shown here.

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.”

A motorhome traveling west on the interstate near Badlands National Park in South Dakota

August 19, 2007 at 10.34am CMT
Camera: Pentax K10D
Exposure: 0.004 sec (1/250)
Aperture: f/6.7
Focal Length: 70 mm
ISO Speed: 100

If you’re not sure that you’re the RVing type, renting a recreational vehicle can be a good way to find out. Our first RV experience was with a rented small tow behind trailer. We later bought a used, near identical model.

On our trips in 2007, we saw a lot of class C RV rentals. This CruiseAmerica rental was at an interstate highway overlook near Badlands National Park. The driver and passengers were tourists from Eroupe — possibly Germany.

August 19, 2007 at 10.34am CMT
Camera: Pentax K10D
Exposure: 0.004 sec (1/250)
Aperture: f/8v Focal Length: 70 mm
ISO Speed: 100

PhotoHunt: Heavy

We saw these two heavy-duty offroad recreational vehicles in September 2007 at Arches National Park, near Moab, Utah.

Check out our RV pages at Haw Creek.

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.

Today we drove from near West Yellowstone, Montana, down to a campground just south of Jackson, Wyoming. The shortest route would have been through Yellowstone National Park, but that probably would have taken the longest because of the speed limits in the park and the amount of traffic even this late in the season.

There were two other routes that we considered. One was down to Idaho Falls, Idaho, and then across into Wyoming, roughly following the course of the Snake River. The other was up over Teton Pass between Victor, Idaho, and Jackson. We had been up over the pass a number of times in years past and I knew that it would be a test for the truck and camper if we took it.

Boy, was it ever a test!

The maximum grade on the road is 10% and I think most of that was down hill for us going into Jackson. The truck and fifth wheel seemed to be handling it fine, but I was reluctant to drop down from second into first gear.

I should have!

At one point, I pulled over to let a small car go by and really had to press on the brakes to slow to a stop. The brakes were smokin’! Literally.

The rest of the way down, I dropped the transmission into 1st gear and used the brakes sparingly so that they could cool down. When we got to a stop light a few miles further on, the rig stopped just fine with no squealing or fading of the brakes.

Lesson learned!

I’ll use the lowest gear necessary to keep from overheating the brakes — even it means slowing others down. People don’t need to go fast on that kind of road anyhow.

Better yet, we’ll take the longer route — if feasible.

We’ve visited Yellowstone National Park quite a few times over the years. Normally, after Labor Day the crowds are no longer there except at the most popular spots like Old Faithful. Usually, even there, the crowds are not as large.

In 2007, it’s different. The crowd to watch Old Faithful was huge and it was difficult to find a place to park in the huge old Faithful parking lots. A steady stream of vehicles flows on the park roads.  Most of the time, except when there’s a “critter” sighting, it’s not bumper to bumper, but there always seems to be a car or two in sight ahead of you and another one or two behind you on these winding mountain roads.

The lady at the our campground’s check-in desk told me that one of the hotels in town had called to see if they had any cabins available, because the hotel was full. She said that this was the first time it had happened this year.

A man and his daughter in one of the cabins told me a similar story. Having been to Yellowstone before in September, they didn’t expect to need reservations. Not a single room was available in West Yellowstone. They managed to get a cabin here, several miles from town.

My guess is that some folks, many of them retirees like us, postponed their trip because of the extreme heat at the beginning of summer and the wild fires of July and August in the western states — much as we did. As well, more people know how great Yellowstone is in September — so more people come. There was also a lot of foreign tourists, as well.

Never-the-less, we are enjoying our visit to Yellowstone. I’ve disconnected the water hose to the camper because it is supposed to freeze tonight, but tomorrow is supposed to be a cool, but sunny, day.