It Finally Is Here

 

Adventure Location: Decatur, Al

Adventure Date: 01-20-2023

It has finally arrived. The get ready to roll again evening was a long time coming this visit. Arriving on July 7 and not leaving until January 21 is a long time to the teams members. But it is here now. YAHOOOOOO.

We did a good bit of running around town today saying goodbye to several folks. But later in the evening we got busy starting the breakdown of the camp.

Here we are dissembling the utilities for travel. We like to get everything we can done the evening before travel to make the morning easier. Mostly we break down the sewer hose and supports and store it all. The sewer hose goes into the rear bumper.

Then we top off the potable water tank and wipe the hose off. Then coil it as well as we can and screw the ends together. Then into an outside access bin it goes. This hose is very stiff as if we need to consider getting a newer hose that has less hours in the sunlight.

And somewhere along the way the folding ladder gets strapped on the Castle's roof access ladder.

Check out the roof and you can see two of the three solar panels we use most of the time. We put the first two on in January 2006. The third one came about four years later. We have 350 watts of panels and two AGM 100 AH Deep Cycle batteries. Yes they do save us enough money to notice when in “plus electric” campgrounds. The AC and microwave in our rig have to have shore power to run because we chose not to add enough more solar to run them.

In the morning the Castle and Sierra are coupled, then the chocks between the tires are removed. Then the stab jacks are raised and the door mat placed inside the Castle. Now the critical last walk around where everything is looked at. The main trouble at this point is we have to proper way of checking the brake lights. However we do put on the emergency flashers to guarantee the bulbs are OK but that does not check the brake light switch for functioning.

For our normal situation the morning finish up takes about thirty minutes when not hurrying. Then we are ready to roll from the site.

Give a couple of practices without several months since the last time and from wake up in the morning we normally get rolling within about 50 minutes. Add a dump stop to that if we need one. The Castle usually makes about 14 days between dumps with just the OFM aboard.

The rig averages about 10 mpg towing. We try to refill the gas tank every 200 miles or so. We feel that the rig can comfortably make about 250 miles on a full tank of gas but we do not push it at all.

We hope the OFM can remember how to tow now after so long of a time. He is getting pretty old and senile you know. However he can be pretty good at trying to have tooooo much fun.