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.

One of the things we really liked about the floor plan is that the driver and passenger seats pivot so that they can be used for seating in the “lounge” area of the camper.  The Navion IQ doesn’t have a slide, but the seats rotating really opens up the space making up for the additional space created by a slide.

There are plenty of cabinets in our IQ floor plan.  The manufacturer touts the curved design as European in style.  I guess I don’t really know what that means, but I like it.  The galley sink and cooktop both have hinged glass covers over them that increase the available counter space when they’re not in use.  The galley faucet is hinged and is raised for use when the sink cover is open.

The dinette at the back of the coach folds down into a what seems to be a fairly comfortable bed, though we have yet to try it for a night of camping.  The dinette table slides to either side and is lifted out of the way and stored under neath when the dinnette is made up for a bed.

There is a nice entertainment system.  The TV can be oriented to face to the rear or to the front.

More images of the inside can be seen in in my Navion IQ set on Flickr.

I’m sure that we will be using this RV a lot more than our old one.

Buffalo National River, Arkansas

Composite of images taken on November 7, 2005, with a Kodak DX4530 Zoom

I’m finally back to work developing content for Haw Creek. The current page I’m working on is one on the Buffalo National River. It’s part of the National Park System and a really, really neat place, and — I regret to say — we’ve only went there once intentionally, though we’ve crossed the Buffalo on various bridges many times over the last 28 years. If you’re interested in hiking, camping, white water canoing or rafting, kayaking, wildlife viewing, or just in learning about other places, check the page out. While I’m still adding material to it, there is plenty there all ready — it doesn’t have an “under construction” feel about it at all. I plan to have the page complete by June 1st and will be moving on to the next page after that — sooner if this page is done ahead of schedule!

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 content. A lot of the content will be available in other places on the web, but, generally, not all on one site. My intent is to provide useful and interesting material as well as valuable links that should be viable for a reasonable period of time.

The format for the places and images pages will be very similar to the rest of the site. I’ve learned that it is difficult to keep up with different design templates, especially when the material isn’t worked on very often. For the time being, on Haw Creek I will just be using one design template. I may change it up a little bit on occasion, but, by using just one design template, I can apply the changes across all of the pages of the site at the same time.

Devils Den State Park, Arkansas

Focal Length: 300 mm
Exposure: 0.002 sec (1/500)
March 1, 2008 at 12.49pm CST
Aperture: f/6.7
Camera: Pentax K10D
ISO Speed: 100

Delicate Arch is one of the popular destinations in Arches National Park. We had seen it on our one previous visit to the park in the early 90s, but it was on a relatively short and moderately strenuous trail to the rim of a steep canyon across from Delicate Arch, so we weren’t able to get very close.

On September 24th, 2007, we took the longer trail that goes right up to the arch. The trail is slightly over 3 miles round trip and the arch is out of view for almost the entire length of the trail. Starting from the parking area of Wolfe Ranch, the first half mile is easy and well defined. After that, however, the trail goes out over open slickrock, but is relatively easy to follow as its path is marked with rock cairns.

The easy part of the trail is readily seen in the picture below. The slickrock part of the trail goes across the image from about 1/3 down on the left side of the picture diagonally across towards the upper right side. Hikers going across the slickrock can be seen in the picture on the right above, which was cropped from the original of the photograph below.

It was a good hike and the day was cool. Even though it was cool, one bottle of water each was NOT enough. The National Park Service recommends at least one quart (litre) of water per person. In the heat of the summer, it would be prudent to carry more.

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.

The morning started out very cloudy with a forecast of 60% chance of rain. We had been planning on taking a 2.8 mile loop trail, but decided to wait awhile to see what the weather held for us. When the clouds lowered and it started misting, we decided to go for a drive back to Spearfish in South Dakota, do some shopping and see some different country on our way back.

On the way back it was still raining intermittently.

In one section of Wyoming 24, the fill dirt under the road had settled a lot earlier this summer. Until just the last couple of days the road had been closed as a result.

We had gone over that section of road the day before and had been wondering whether the workers would be out in this kind of weather. Having lived in this kind of country before, we were not terribly surprised to see them out in the misty fog. There is not a lot of time left before the weather could get inclement to the point that the job will have to be shutdown until late spring.

While the road is open now, there is only one lane open — and it is nasty muddy. It was a bit windy and cold and the flaggers were all bundled up. In just a short section of road, the truck got dirty enough that we need to take it to a car wash so that we won’t have to be careful of leaning or rubbing up against it.

On the way back from Spearfish the conditions must have been just right to entice deer to come out in the open. We counted 95 deer — almost all of them white-tails — between Belle Fourch, South Dakota, and Devil’s Tower, Wyoming, and I’m sure that there were many more that we didn’t see.

Three of them were pretty close to the road and I got some close ups of one of them. I was very pleased with her doe eyes, but when I saw the second picture, I was surprised that it looked like she was sticking her tongue out. She’s really in the middle of eating, but it is one of the oddest pictures of a deer that I’ve seen.

By the time that we got back to the campground it had cleared up considerably. Deciding to take a walk while it was clear, we first went over to the front of the KOA store. At the entrance to this campground, there are 2 artistically painted large boots. The first boot has the KOA logo on it and it is also painted on all sides.

This is the other side of it.

The other boot is also painted on all sides. The back of the boot has an image of Teddy Roosevelt and the front has an image of Sitting Bull. The side that is in this image is interesting in that it depict Devil’s Tower and above and behind it is the real Devil’s Tower.

When we got to the overflow camping area on our walk , I changed lenses on the camera replacing the telephoto zoom with the closeup zoom so that I could get more area into the shot. However, just after I did, we spooked two deer and they took off running for the national monument. I didn’t have time to switch back to the telephoto zoom, so the images of one of the deer as she ran and then jumped the fence are not as clear and crisp as I would like.

The area at the rear of the campground is by far the prettiest. It is wide open with a lot of tall cottonwood trees. One side borders the national monument and on another the campground property ends at the Belle Fourche River, with a red rock cliff on the opposite side of the river. There are a lot of photo opportunities in that part of the campground.

This photo is a twisted dead tree with the Belle Fourche (pronounced foosh) River, part of the cliff and other land in the background. The buildings in the picture are KOA Kamping Kabins.

This is a similar image, except I’ve focused in on the grasses along the river, with the background intentionally blurred.

The monument boundary fence ends right at the river and then picks up again at the top of the red rock cliff, as shown in this picture:

Every month during the summer and when weather permits, a nighttime walk is conducted on the night when the moon is full. In the morning the weather looked like it would likely cause the walk to be canceled. However, after we got back to the campground from our drive earlier in the day, the sky just got more and more clear. By the time we headed up to the trail head where we would be hiking from, the sky was almost perfectly clear. This photo was taken with my camera held in my hand, no tripod. The night by that time was too dark for any other photos without using the flash. I didn’t want to use the flash because it would momentarily impair the night vision of the other hikers.

We enjoyed the walk, though when we stopped for the park volunteer to talk, the breaks lasted too long. The temperature has dropped into the low 50’s and there was a slight wind blowing. Even though everyone had bought flashlights, the moon light was bright enough in the open areas away from the trees that you didn’t really need them. We started out on the trail at 9 P.M. and got back to the truck at 10:30 P.M.

If you’re looking for tips, hints, and ideas about anything to do with recreational vehicles, this blog and website is not the best place for it. While you’ll find some valuable information here, when I’m looking for RV related information, one of my first stops, and often my only stop, is the RV Forum at rvforum.net. As well, I often spend time at RV Forum reading the newest in discussions that interest me and posting when I have something to contribute.

RV Forum is also a community. While there is always a lot of new folks who come and go, the RV Forum claims to be the oldest online RV community and “the friendliest place on the web for anyone with an RV or an interest in RVing.” While there is an occasional misunderstanding that requires clearing up, there seems to be a complete absence of flaming that I’ve seen on other forums. In fact, recently, I made a serious comment about something I had not realized had been said in jest. After a little clarification, the topic’s discussion continued.

The forum was originally formed on Compuserve and many of the paticipants of today have been on the forum since the Compuserve days. Some in the forum refer to themselves as framily - a made-up word derrived from friends and family.

After more than 10 years at the old location, in January 2005, attendees at a rally at Quartzsite, Arizona, voted to move to a new location because for many it was no longer usable at Compuserve, and there were excessive commercial ads, and far too frequent login difficulties. The forum “opened the doors” in its new location in March 2005. Since then, membership and participation has continued to climb. At the end of February, 2006, there was over 3500 members and there are 10, 362 members today, an increase of 2 just since I started writing this review.

The forum hosts, unpaid volunteers all, do what it takes to keep the forum operating smoothly and contribute significantly to the discussions. When new members first post on the forum, within a few hours there is generally a welcome from one or more of the staff. When I joined on February 7, 2006, there was a welcoming post from both Jim Dick and Ron Ruward within hours, and Carl Lundquist had some great advice for me that basically told me that our truck wasn’t big enough to tow what we wanted in a camper.

As a result of that and my further research, a great deal of it garnered from RV Forum, we traded in our Chevy Avalanche for a heavier duty vehicle that would tow a trailer that fit what we really wanted. We returned from our first relatively long trip just a few weeks ago and for the most part it was relatively trouble free, thanks in part to things I learned from reading articles from the forum’s library and disscussions on many of the boards.

And one of the best things about the forum - it’s free! You don’t have to pay anything if you don’t want to. The cost of the forum is largely supported by the Forum Administrator, Tom Jones. Tom is the person I was referring to having said something in jest that I responded to thinking it was serious - it had something to do with GPS and AdSense. Those who spend much time on the forum appreciate Tom and all that he does, especially now that he has the search feature figured out. Tom gives a lot of credit to others, “The staff here…, truly deserve the praise. Their tireless efforts, along with the wonderful members we have here, are what keeps us going.”

There is a feature that allows folks to help the forum out by contributing, but it’s not touted by the forum staff. I encourage anyone who is a member to fork over a few dollars. I contributed a little bit last year. I suppose it’s about time to do it again.

If you’re looking for information on RVs and the RV way of life, check out the RV Forum.