After hunkering down at the Island Acres Section of James M. Robb State Park for 3 nights, we finally had a break in the weather and headed home. We had stopped at the park for a night so make the final leg of trip home an easy day's driving. Then we looked at the weather forecast and paid for a couple more nights. Vail Pass was expecting both snow and gusty winds. Either one could be bad for driving a motorhome, but the two together could be a disaster. Finally, on Sunday the forecast still included snow, but not inches or gusts. At one point the rain started turning to snow, and there were a couple of gusts, but none of it was bad enough to need to pull over and wait out the weather.
We had a good trip. What started as a 2-5 day "shake down cruise" tuned into a 10-day mini-tour of southeast Colorado with a touch of Utah. You could call it a Snowmobiles and Red Rocks Tour (since the trip started with the quarterly meeting of the Colorado Snowmobile Association on behalf of our local club).
As a shake-down cruise it was a success. All the systems we used worked as expected. (We didn't need the air conditioning or generator, so those remain to be tested). We also learned how accurate the gas gauge calculator is. Our odometer/trip meter/miles-to-empty read-out told use we were down to 9 miles to empty as we approached our second gas stop of the trip. We'd underestimated the distance from the state park to the Costco in Eagle. There is a little bit of leeway built in apparently, since it "only" took 72.24 gallons for an 80-gallon gas tank. This was our biggest fill-up ever. It's really good to know that when it says we'll run out of gas in 9 miles we need to get to a gas station right away, but we can go a bit more than 9 miles. And that is a good thing to know if you miscalculate or if you find the gas station in the tiny town in the middle of nowhere can't accommodate our rig, or it's after 5 pm and all the gas stations are closed (been there before). Of course, it's better to not need that cushion in the first place.
One of the best things about this trip was being able to make and change plans as we went, and most especially, not having to be back at work on a particular day/date. We decided to stay another day at the first state park because a storm was coming in. We decided to stay 2 days in Monticello so we'd have a full day to go out to the Needles District of Canyonlands National Park, and we added 2 additional nights at Island Acres to wait out the snowy weather & road conditions over Vail Pass. What a freeing experience. I think we're going to like our retirement life!
I'm sorry there are few photos from this trip -- I was playing with a video camera we've had for years. I decided to take mostly video and put it together as a series of short video on YouTube (one per significant stop) and a full length video on a DVD of the trip as a whole. That will be a chance to really play with my video editing software. Then next riding season we can try to film/edit/post more videos for our snowmobile club's web site. I'll post links to the YouTube videos as I get them prepared and posted.
Now, we've got a little more than a week to prepare for our next trip.
No comments:
Post a Comment