Summer Wanderings

After leaving the Rosses house we moved into the Famcamp at Buckley AFB. Thank goodness we still have our AF IDs. It was a great spot to settle for a bit. RVing takes a learning curve and the Famcamp was a perfect place to do this. Not to mention the fact that the boys loved having access to the BX and its food court :). Shopping for military paraphernalia, knives and lunch became a favorite past time since they could ride their bikes by themselves the mile and a half to the BX. 

We pulled into our RV site at 2pm on a Saturday and finally had it all hooked up and mostly level by about 7pm. Thankfully, several helpful folks came over - think "RV" the movie. It was rather comedic as we look back on it, but not so at the time.

First, we pulled in, unhooked, leveled and then found that our sewage hose wasn't long enough. We re-hooked to the truck, moved, unhooked from the truck, and leveled again. As Andy was hooking up the sewage hose it broke. Off we went to the RV store to purchase a new hose. Upon return we resumed the hooking up process. After staring at the water hookup situation for some time and then consulting the user's guide, not knowing where to put the hose, we found another "Big Sky" in the camp ground and went to visit the owner to see if he could shed some light on the situation. While the three of us were staring at it all another RV owner walked up (with his beer of course) to see if he could be of help. Thankfully, he was a wealth of knowledge. Around 6:30 I finally left the men to finish hooking it all up and went to pick up the boys, who had been at a friend's house all day. 

We began to settle into RV life. We brought our bikes out of storage, so we could ride on base. I learned how to grill on charcoal and bake in the little gas oven. We loved watching the fighter jets (mostly F-16s) flying right next to us. 

Our new home 

Cookies from our oven (they were made in a muffin tin since that was the only pan I had that would fit)

Finishing up our charcoal with some s'mores

After a month on base we decided to park at a church for a few days while we had a practicum going on. This was convenient, but things started going downhill with the trailer at this point. We had already had a few issues - we blew the converter our first night in it (a several hundred dollar mistake), the broken sewage house, etc. Onc we lived in the parking lot we were dry camping. We had filled our water tanks and showered quickly and we lived off the charged batteries. Quickly, we found that none of our outlets worked when we weren't plugged in. Not a big deal, but we wouldn't have A/C either, so thankfully it wasn't too hot. We went to the store to stock up and returned to find that our fridge wasn't working. We hauled everything into the church fridge for the night and decided we needed to defrost our fridge. By the next evening it was working and we moved our food back out there. At the end of the three days, after helping to clean the church we went back to our RV to hook it to the truck and move to a friend's. At this time we found our battery completely drained and the fridge beeping (not working). We couldn't lower the trailer onto the truck without any power and we had no idea how long it would take to charge. We sat in the parking lot long after all were gone and waited and waited for the batteries to recharge. Eventually they charged enough for us to use the jacks, so we got it on the truck. Before we could park at our friend's we had to go empty the tanks, which took some time, but we were starting to get that down.

Once at our friend's we hauled all our refrigerated items into their fridge and went to bed. The next day I contacted a repairman and he thought he knew what was wrong, but couldn't get there for a week. Then Tegan's, Riley's and my allergies kicked in horribly. After five days we couldn't take it any more and moved back to base (all our food in a cooler). Our allergies were better out there since it was mostly surrounded by concrete as the Famcamp is right next to the flight line. Eventually the fridge guy came with our recalled part and fixed the fridge. Thankfully, that was a free fix.

Andy and I took off for a long weekend to do a few 1-day practicums in Grand Junction and Salt Lake City. When we returned on a Sunday night we found our fridge completely out and our food spoiled. I was able to salvage a few condiments, but that was it. I called the fridge guy again and after running me through a few tests on the phone he determined that it was shot and we would need a whole new cooling unit. Not exactly what we wanted to hear. We packed what we could salvage in a cooler and lived out of that for the next week, until we left for Michigan. The morning we left for Michigan we hauled the trailer to the fridge guy's lot and dropped it off for the time we would be gone and then took all our condiments in the cooler with us on our road trip.

Hiking with friends