Month: October 2022

Kevin’s updates on the new RZR plus our first trip with it

As of last Friday, Kevin had installed a rear view mirror, side mirrors, turn signals and running lights, and a front windshield. He has a rear windshield, lower and upper doors , and a new roof on order. They arrive sometime this week. He also bought a Fire tablet to run the off-road mapping software on, a case for it, and is figuring out the best place to mount it. He’s been busy!

We did go on our first big ride on Saturday. It was a charity ride for some local volunteer organizations in Northeast Iowa, and we started at the Volga River campground in the town of Volga, Iowa. The ride was restricted to 200 rigs, and it closed early last week, amazing to me. The event was advertised on Facebook through some UTV groups, and there were still people who wanted to get in. I have never even heard of something like this, and it was an experience. Cost was $50/rig.

We loaded the rig up with everything we needed on Friday, and we headed to Volga by 8:30 in the morning. We got parked and unloaded the RZR, then headed to the checkin, arriving there about 10:15. We had reserved a sack lunch from a local church (“free-will offering”, and not much!). Next time we will definitely bring our own. Lots of good organization. The parking area was huge and easily handled the crowds of mostly pickups with trailers.

A tiny fraction of the parking

The check in was orderly too, and we were given a numbered tag and got in rows.

Rows and rows of UTVs

We knew we were going to be the little guy, but some of these rigs are as big as cars! Four and six seaters were common, some with full fiberglass doors and roofs with roll down windows. Then there were the true utility rigs that doubled around the farm, a few mud racers, lots of donut maker/racers, and a few like us. I was rather astonished to see people drinking beer and hard liquor at 10:00 am on a Saturday before they were going to drive, but it seemed very acceptable to the crowd. Lots of vaping and cigarettes too. It had been so long since I had seen groups of people smoking that it took me aback.

We got started a few minutes after 11:00, and we had so much fun! It was 30-40 miles with a wide assortment of terrain. A little bit of road (the local fire department and police blocked traffic for us), some cornfields, lots of fallow pastureland with rolling hills, some heavy forest, and a number of stream crossings.

A little bit of roads
Some cornfields (hey, it is Iowa)
And forested hills just past peak color

There were three stops along the way. Lots more drinking. Portable toilets were on a trailer that two trucks pulled to each stop. As we went through some farm fields, we actually had the farmers there to open gates and keep their cattle away. It was definitely a community endeavor. That makes sense since the proceeds were going to the local volunteer EMS folks! Each place we stopped for a break had plenty of room for people to spread out.

A view from our second rest stop

The ride finished at our starting spot about 4:30. We both had big grins on our faces. The ride had been bumpy and rough, but we weren’t all beat up like we would have been in the Jeep. The soft balloon tires and suspension of the RZR were much gentler on our bodies, though we were feeling a bit worse for wear this morning! It wasn’t anything some Tylenol wouldn’t solve though. I am really very happy with the entire purchase, and I am looking forward to using it a lot this winter in Arizona.

What’s going on at home after the trip

I am finally getting caught up. The first week we were home (mid September), I just collapsed. I was still sick from the sinus cold from hell, and it kept me exhausted. It took 5 days before we got the motorhome half-way cleaned up and winterized. While I napped and relaxed at home, Kevin went through every bay and cleaned and sorted them. Lots and lots of stuff came home. Some ended up on the garage shelves and some just ended up in the trash. I bet we are hundreds of pounds lighter! That is good because he is now packing up our “normal” stuff we didn’t take with us this summer like the 3D printer and the telescope.

Some things are great being back. For example, I am back in church choir! it is so lovely to sing with others again. It had been almost 3 years since we left for Arizona in January 2020. Choir stopped during the pandemic, and it just started again in September. We no longer sing every week since we only have one service split between praise band music and traditional choir music, but it is better than nothing. A lot of the regulars at church haven’t been coming. Some are still worshipping online, and sadly a number of the older folks died. That included people in the choir too. I have hopes a few more will start showing up for choir, but it is easy to lose habits when they are paused for 2 years.

We have finally bought a UTV, a skinny 50” wide 2020 Polaris RZR Trail model. Love it! It will fit in the back of a pickup eventually, but we bought a trailer for it now. Of course it needs all kinds of fun and practical stuff that Kevin is buying including a new roof/door combination, full front windshield, rear view and side mirrors, and turn signals. We intend on using it a lot in Arizona this winter, and they allow UTVs to drive on the street if equipped properly. It will be a pain getting it there this year because we have to tow the UTV and trailer with the MH while Kevin drives the Jeep, but then we will leave it in AZ until some time in June when we will pick it up and spend time in Utah.

Kevin worked really hard to get the garage ready for 3 vehicles again, but there is now room for the Jeep, the RAV4, and the RZR on its trailer. We hope to go for our first real ride in it on Saturday when there is a charity group ride in NE Iowa. We are hoping for decent weather and beautiful fall colors.

Coming back in the fall is always a busy time for us because we schedule all our yearly doctor visits now. Kevin has a big one – his knee replacement is scheduled for 9 November. Since I am a poll worker on 8 November until late, we will have a long day. The plan is to be healthy enough to head to Arizona soon after Christmas. Of course there will be a number of appointments for imaging and checkups in addition, but we will manage those. I finally got the colonoscopy I tried to have in April of 2020 (yeah, we know what happened then!) then in April this year (cancelled because I came down with COVID). Still have to schedule a mammogram, but my routine physical is scheduled for December.

Hopefully the next post will be full of lovely foliage pictures from the UTV ride.

My totally personal view of RV caravans

I wanted to summarize my personal thoughts on RV caravans. Let me emphasize that again – my personal views. These comments are based on the one and only caravan I have ever been on, the 63 day trip to western Canada and Alaska. So take it for what it is worth, perhaps very little!

We signed up for this caravan after our planned trips (sans caravan) in 2020 and 2021 were cancelled due to COVID. We were really worried that with three years of demand we wouldn’t be able to find places to stay or get into attractions we were interested in. It turns out the increase in diesel prices kept a lot of people closer to home this year. Few campgrounds were completely full, and there were nearby options for the ones who were. Oh well, live and learn.

Good things:

Everything is set up for you, and you need to plan very little. This is particularly good if you are new at RVing or new at long trips. I would say well over half of the folks were in the “newer” category, though some had been full-timing for years. We had travel booklets with routes identified in detail.

Lots and lots of full hookup campsites and even more electric/water sites. We have never in our life stayed at so many serviced campsites in the period!

Lots of built in social activities if you choose to participate. Things like drinks around the fire or dinner at a local restaurant.

A good wagon master is well organized, keeps people informed, provides alternatives if an activity isn’t appropriate for an individual. We had travel briefings every 2-3 days to discuss the details of the next few days travel and planned activities. The wagon master also confirmed our campgrounds and directed us to our sites when we arrived. Our wagon master was amazingly organized. He was retired military man, and it showed.

The tail gunner can be extremely helpful if you have trouble on the road. Every morning he went by all the rigs thumping tires to give a brief check. At the start of the trip, he crawled under everyone’s rigs checking out undercarriages, springs, shackles, etc. We had a few people come down with serious rig issues on the road, and the tail gunner stayed with them until they got to the campsite or had service arranged.

The activities that a group can get are more varied than an individual can get. For example, we had guides when individuals did not, for example on an old riverboat. We were allowed into special areas that weren’t open to the public, like a puffin exhibit at an aquarium. We got a special viewing of sled dogs and a presentation that others did not, and there were other things. The bus trips were nice since we got an entire bus to ourselves and the trips were customized to our group.

Now for the not so good things.

With all that planning there were times I really wanted to stay longer or stay less long at certain places. There is significant rigidity in the schedule. And I found the schedule,rushed. I would have taken at least half again as long for the trip, maybe twice as long. It was more of a sample rather than in-depth, even at 63 days.

Some of the activities were of zero value to us. For example, we spent lots of time at coastal towns where the main activity was fishing. The thing is, we aren’t anglers! These are very small places that can be well explored in a day or two, but we stayed longer.

While the social butterflies were extremely happy, I found all the emphasis on group socialization a bit uncomfortable. We are more introverted, and we are used to solitary camping in a wide variety of places. There were a few days where I just hid in the camper because I was overwhelmed and “peopled” out!

I got tired of the complaints people had about the campsites. We were in fairly remote areas much of the time, and campground amenities weren’t 4* except in a very few places. If we had electrical service, it was almost always 30 amp. They didn’t tell us this when we signed up, but they did tell us in the preparatory emails we got a month or so ahead of time. Those with full electric rigs that need 50 amp struggled some, and a few of them (ok, one in particular) whined on a regular basis. I think this fits in with the item above – no control over who we were around.

Summary: We won’t do a caravan again. I am just too solitary a creature to enjoy the forced company of others quite so much. I will happily trade the special group activities for the flexibility of staying as long as we want where we want. While I recognize the value a caravan trip might have for many, it just wasn’t our cup of tea. Oh, and I don’t think Adventure Caravans, the company we went through, is significantly different than Fantasy. It wasn’t Adventure Caravan’s fault that we just aren’t caravan people. They did exactly what they said they were going to do, so I won’t fault them.

Forgotten end to the Canada Alaska caravan trip

I guess I was sicker than I remembered at the end of the trip, because I forgot to post! I was getting together to put a new one up, and I realized I never finished the trip posts. Oops! Here you go, weeks late. And the photo quality isn’t very good. My camera finally gave up completely, so they are all from my iPhone. The zoomed in quality is particularly bad!

We left Prince George after breakfast on Tuesday, 7 September. We decided we wanted to head home the fastest way possible, so we took the TransCanada Highway to just north of Jasper. We had intended on staying at the Icefields, but with the fires we decided on the Hinton KOA instead, the same place we stayed on the outgoing trip. The campground sites are lovely, but make sure you drive very, very slowly coming in. The campground roads are awful! Huge potholes are too numerous to dodge, so just go slowly. We had some caravan friends staying at the same place, and we all sat around our propane fire pit and relaxed after the rigors of the trip.

The next day we drove down through Jasper and Banff National Parks. The town of Jasper was closed completely as were all the campgrounds, and it was obvious why. Here are a bunch of pictures of the fire and it’s residual smoke.

When we got to Banff we saw mountain goats at the same place we saw them on the outgoing trip. There actually are 5 in this picture, but the baby is tough to spot.

Banff is just outside Calgary, so the road quickly becomes a major one, but the smoke still lingered.

Being a populous area with lots of wildlife, we saw a number of these wildlife crossings.

Animal crossing were frequent.

We spent Kevin’s birthday at Cranbrook KOA. Nice enough place. Not a great place for a 70th birthday though! We were both feeling pretty miserable, so we just had eggs and bacon, using them up before the border. No nice dinner for his birthday!

On 9 September we crossed the border with hardly any wait. Quite different when it is a weekday morning than the middle of a Saturday! We spent the night at one of the prettiest campgrounds we have ever been in – Jim and Mary’s RV Park outside Missoula, MT. The place is a gardener’s paradise with flowers everywhere. We always try to stay here when we are in the area. Since we were both feeling so blah, we would have like to stay 2 nights, but they didn’t have any availability, so we headed to Big Timber KOA west of Bozeman, MT. Nice enough place, but I don’t remember any details. Remember I noted the fuzzy head?

On 10 September we came to the Buffalo, WY KOA, and we finally got to rest a bit. We reserved a fancy patio site next to the river in their newer area. We stayed two nights. Much of the time I just relaxed on the patio, soaking up the sun and mild temps. We both needed a rest. After two nights, we were beginning to feel human again! It helps that the Buffalo and Sheridan areas of the Bighorns are some of our favorite places, though we usually stay up in the mountains or at the lake between the two towns. We wanted relaxing pampering though, so we chose the KOA. I don’t usually spring for patio sites, but this one was well worth it for recharging.

Feeling almost human, we continued east to Belevedere, SD KOA, west of the Badlands. We would normally have spent a couple of days boondocking in the Badlands area or at the park campground, but we were on a mission to get home! And yes, you are seeing a theme of KOAs. We find them standardized enough and close to the highway that we particularly like them on traveling days. After Belevedere, we spent the last night on the road at the Sioux Falls, SD KOA.

We are now almost home, and we booked it out of there on Thursday, 15 September. However a minor disaster struck not far out of Sioux Falls. We used the Blue Beacon Truck Wash there, and discovered the rock guard at the back of the MH had come unattached and we were leaking fluid of some type. We called our local shop in Decorah, IA and they said bring it in though it would get looked at for a few days. I drove the MH there while Kevin drove behind in the Jeep making sure nothing disastrous happened. He did enough debug to discover it was a small oil leak from near the oil filter. We just stopped at every rest area and checked the oil on the way. It was a slow way to travel! When we got to Decorah, we unloaded only the bare necessities (cats, meds, night clothes) and headed home. The cats were thrilled to have all the space, and they spent a lot of times doing zoomies and looking out the windows. The next day we drove back to Decorah and picked up clothes and a few more necessities. The forecast was for sunny weather, so we just left the refrigerator running knowing the batteries and solar would keep it happy. It took a week to get the diagnosis and a part (oil filter loose and a turbo hose leaking, so needed a new one of those), but we finally got the rig to Cedar Falls a week later on Thursday, 23 September.

We parked the rig at a nice local campground, Big Woods County Park. It is only 7 miles from the house and has roomy FHU sites. It makes a handy place to stash the rig while we unpacked and clean up. I admit we weren’t very quick at the cleaning business. We got the important things like like haircuts, grocery runs, and laundry though. We finally got the MH winterized. Kevin also emptied out every storage bay and repacked! I bet we are hundreds of pounds lighter LOL! It is amazing how unneeded junk hides in the back of the bays.

I will summarize our views of caravans in general and the specifics of this caravan in the next post. This one is long enough!