Friday - Our Un-Rally ends

<<< Whoops! I just realized (on Sunday morning) that I never actually published this on Saturday morning -- sorry! There may be two posts on Sunday as a result!

Friday was the official end to our Un-Rally. We had originally planned to move to park with the Newmar Owner's Group on Friday (their rally began on Wednesday) but we decided that we'd rather stay with the folks who are staying at the Christian Fellowship encampment, at least for a few more days.

Carl had a couple of things he wanted to do on the solar panels - he did some re-wiring so the 4 panels would operate in parallel (2 panels in parallel with 2 panels) while I put some loom on the wires that are more exposed to sun and weather.

His goals were to alleviate the impact of a shaded panel and to reduce the voltage coming down. We had been having difficulty with our solar controller, and he was trying to see if reducing the voltage coming down would help. Our controller continued having problems (continually rebooting) so we tried one of our friends' old controllers to see if it worked better. It is only a 30A controller, so we had to take two panels out of the system (disconnected them) and the other two in parallel, and it seemed to work fine, though only minor help in providing energy to try to keep up with the loads within the rig pulling power out of the batteries.

We decided to head out to visit a couple of other groups that we might move to (Newmar, Ham Radio, and Blue Birds), and to check out prices on solar controllers at the two solar shops in town, as well as to get water and sausage at a store in town that Carl knew had good Italian sausage.

As we drove past the big tent area (which would open on Saturday morning), it appeared that the tent was a lot smaller than previous years.

We were glad that we got to see where the Newmar and Ham Radio folks were parked, and we got to visit with some of the Blue Bird folks. We decided that we are not going to bother with moving to the Newmar group as the majority of their scheduled activities ended on Friday. We are contemplating whether to move to the Ham Radio or the Blue Bird group, right now, leaning toward going to the Ham Radio group, but we'll decide on Sunday when we move!

When we got back to the rig, our perspective coming in made it look like Gracie's back tires had sunk into the desert!

But, there is a mound beside her that made the optical illusion.

The ground here is "odd" -- it is *very* hard packed and mostly flat, almost like an asphalt parking lot, with lots of rocks. Someone said to me one time that they thought that this was previously a shopping center and the asphalt is left behind (uh, no...) -- but I can see why they might think that. But... there are odd rises at various places, like pitchers mounds. The mounds are just as hard as the flat parts, though most of them have holes in them that I guess are burrows of some kind. Then there are washes -- where the plants grow -- you can see the plants just beyond Gracie. That's where the water flows when it rains, and where you *don't* want to park! We drive across one wash to get to where the Christian Fellowship group parks, and we walk across a couple more when we take our walks further down the road. We usually turn around at a deep narrow wash that we call "the rift valley" -- which I think would be impassible for any large rig. If I remember (and if we walk that way again), I'll take some pictures of the washes that we pass on our walks and also of "the rift valley".