Pete here: Its just before sunrise on the outskirts of Roswell, New Mexico and the weather is calm, clear, and cool. I like to wake up early when everything is still and quiet to have some time to myself to reflect on our journey and focus on the day’s tasks. Today is moving day and we’re about to make the turn north towards the Rocky Mountains and higher elevations!
Quick truck update: The issue was a bad high pressure fuel regulator and everything is rock solid since replacing it. Also, after about two hours of wrestling, I freed the spare tire using a stripped bolt extractor and some cooking spray to get my arm deep enough. The keyed lock has been removed and I successfully stole my own spare tire without the key.
As Kristen posted, we spent 4 nights outside San Antonio, Texas. It was a really great stay and we continued to learn a lot about America, our RV, and ourselves. It was our first time hooked up to 30 amp power, instead of 50. For those who might not know, 30A is a single 30A 120V input on a three prong connector (3600 Watts), 50A is actually two 50A 120v inputs on a 4 prong connector (12,000 Watts), so its about 30% of the power! Since the highs have been in the mid 90s here, we picked a shady spot and our single 13,500 BTU air conditioner uses about half of our power when running, and spikes to about 2/3 when kicking on.
We knew that we’d have to be aware of our power usage, but we had no experience with this and we were excited to experience it. I turned all the circuit breakers off when we hooked up, and first turned the air conditioner on without problems. Once it was running, I set the refrigerator to AC power as well (it can also run off our propane system). A few fans and charging outlets later and everything was running just fine. Later that night we tripped the 30A breaker twice, but learned what combinations of devices exceed our available power. The microwave and electric hot water heater are obviously heavy consumers, and when combined with the air conditioner, refrigerator, and other small outlets are over the budget! After learning this, we used the propane hot water heater when the air conditioner was on, and microwaved our food between air conditioner cycles. Air conditioner, refrigerator, and TV all work together so we really only needed to pay attention to the microwave and electric hot water timing, EASY!
The next morning, we headed into San Antonio to see the sights. I was excited to show Evelyn the Alamo and curious to see what questions she would ask. She’s very inquisitive and wants to understand everything. Who was here? What were they doing? Why did they fight? The Alamo is a very powerful story and as we watched the short film in one of the side rooms, I was reminded once again how indebted we are as Americans to those who have sacrificed so much for our freedom. Evelyn asked many questions and I did my best to explain that only 200 brave men chose to stay and try to defend this very place against an army of nearly 6,000 men. Its sadly too easy to picture these 200 patriots as some Spartan warriors, a row of linked shields all the same, where fighting is their duty and their obsession. We read the letters these men wrote in the days leading up to the battle and realized that these were regular ordinary people just like us with families, friends, plans and goals for their lives and risked all of that for a greater cause. The human connection is why I love visiting historic sights, and why I especially love experiencing them with my family.
After the Alamo, we walked around the river walk for a while. The river walk is a waterway below street level and goes around downtown San Antonio. The walk is mostly shaded and the running water keeps the area much cooler. There are numerous restaurants and shops along the river, and we found a nice Tex-Mex restaurant with river side patio seating to relax and recharge.
Back at the campground, we spent the next two days swimming in the pool, taking walks, grilling lots of meals (cheeseburgers, corn on the cob, hot dogs, bacon/eggs, pancakes), and watching and naming the deer/turkeys/rabbits. Evelyn befriended a baby fawn “Speckles” who ran right beside me and explored under our RV steps. It was so small and quick I thought it was a cat at first, haha.
We played putt-putt at the campground course, which was shady but we had to tip toe, and putt putt around deer droppings. On the last hole, I reached in the cup to get my ball and saw movement by my hand. I initially thought it was a brown lizard a second look revealed a Texas scorpion! Startled that I had almost touched it, I reminded myself that I need to be more cautious in new environments.
There are so many deer here. While it was cool to see deer up close, I didn’t really enjoy seeing them like this. I have so much respect for these animals and their elusiveness as a hunter, it saddened me to see their wild instincts traded for hand out food. They were so domesticated that they got to be a bit of a nuisance after a while. They would obnoxiously swarm me begging for food every time we came outside, since the campground sells bags of feed corn for campers. I’m certainly not an expert on this, but the high population of deer in this limited campground has forced them to rely on campers to feed them, and without any predators their population has exceeded the natural resources of this habitat. The deer were a lot thinner than any I’ve seen in the wild, and a few were sickly.
I used our 4 day stay to order some things from Amazon prime, so that was a new experience trying to arrange shipping to ensure it reaches me, but I was able to get most of the parts I needed to continue some of my RV projects. I’ll make a later post just on the projects, since I imagine it won’t appeal to everyone.
We got an early start on Sunday morning since we had a 9 hour drive to our next location: Roswell, New Mexico! The packing, hitching, and drive all went smoothly. The drive through west Texas went by faster than expected. The drive was very hilly at first just to the west and then went flat. There isn’t much out there except for huge farms and oil derricks, but the drive was off the interstate and there wasn’t much traffic at all. It was awesome crossing the border into New Mexico and we were greeted almost instantly by a tumbleweed crossing the highway in front of us, how stereotypical! We also entered Mountain time zone, another exciting milestone.
We arrived at our campground just east of Roswell, Bottomless Lake State Park. The weather is hot and dry, with a constant breeze blowing. It feels almost like living under a bathroom hand dryer. The campground is on the side of a bluish-green lake that is apparently almost 100 feet deep. Kristen, Evelyn, and I took some pool noodles and made the half mile round trip swim to the other side and back, whew!
For our day in Roswell, we found a local diner (Big D’s Downtown Dive) in town for lunch. I had a Big Kahuna burger (Teriyaki glazed grilled pineapple, spam, cilantro, cheese, and spicy jalapeno sauce) and it was amazing! Kristen got the gyro and it smelled great, I snatched a tomato that fell out but that’s as close as I got to it. We next went to the Roswell UFO museum and research center to judge for ourselves what had happened here. It was a fun little museum and Evelyn seemed to enjoy it.
We’re about to pack up now, next stop is just north of Albuquerque at a KOA for two nights and then into southern Colorado at a campground above 9,000 feet elevation!!!
If you’re curious out our fifth wheel layout, here’s a 7 minute clip from someone doing a walk through on the same model as ours:
Thanks for reading! Until next time!
Mountains to Climb 
Dat beard 😍😍😍
LikeLike