Leg 1: Thanksgiving & SW US Tour (Broomfield, CO to Superior, NE)
November 2023
Night 1: Before you set out on the road, especially in the winter months, you really should execute an RV checklist before you depart. It is easier to make sure your propane heater and Wi-Fi are working when it is parked in your driveway than it is to troubleshoot when there is a cold, steady rain at the RV campground. We thought we were prepared. We purchased tire chains for the RV, filled the propane tank, and packed everything we thought we’d need. What we didn’t do was make sure the propane heater (which we hadn’t used in about a year) was still actually working properly. There is nothing worse than an E 212 H error message on your Trumi control when the air temp is below 40F outside. After this discovery, the contingency plan was to buy a space heater and keep rolling while trying to find a place to service the propane-based heater along our route.
We stayed in my parent’s driveway the first night because we couldn’t make reservations online to stay at nearby Lovewell Reservoir State Park. We’d always been able to do this previously, but now it was “walk ups” only and no online reservations.
The rain began around midnight.
Night 2: We picked up a small space heater for the camper van and decided to stay at Lovewell SP on Night 2. In the past it was a great place for the first walk in the morning with the dog. The rain was continuing and the roads to the lake were muddy. Upon arrival at the lake, the offices were closed, and the “walk-up” reservation system was unintuitive and numerous suggestions were to download apps such as “Camp It KS” to make reservations. It that actually worked, we would have made reservations days or weeks ago. The other instructions were to go find a site that was unoccupied (one that doesn’t have a receipt attached or a “reserved” sign displayed) and then follow the instructions on the back of the placard at the site. That doesn’t work either when it’s Thanksgiving and the park staff hasn’t removed old receipts and “Reserved” signs since Labor Day. There were no placards with instructions and only a few sites actually had QR codes that weren’t so badly damaged that they were recognizable as QR codes. In theory, you could scan the QR codes, and it would link you to a website and you could then reserve the spot for which you just scanned the QR code. You need cell service or internet to do this. We had neither at a functional level. After a good hour of messing around and trying to figure this out I simply swiped my credit card at the self-pay station, which offered no instructions. It simply said, “scan card to get started.” A couple odd questions later the machine vomited out a receipt for one night. But I wanted 4 nights.
It was rainy and cold. The ground was muddy. The restrooms were a couple of hundred chilly yards away. We gutted out the night in relative warmth with our small space heater plugged in while we ran on shore power but decided in the morning that it would just be easier to stay at my parent’s house and use the generator for power. The restroom situation and the dog walking situation would be much easier and not $25/night.
Rain totals were between 1.5 – 2 inches for the storm locally. Once again, we brought the rains to Superior, Nebraska upon our arrival.
Side rant: Why take a process that works (online reservation system for a campground) and throw it in the trash? I hope they return to online reservations during peak season, but it still makes no sense to not do it during the offseason when you don’t staff the park office each day.
Night 3: It was 11:18 PM when we both heard the generator shut off and then the familiar beep in the RV that signals, you’re screwed and there is no power. I knew it was a short matter of time before it got much colder in the RV as the space heater was now dead and the mercury was beginning to plunge. What else could go wrong? Why did the generator stop?
The temps inside the RV were somewhere between bone-chilling and sub-tolerable for me. I was under 3 blankets, but the draft was persistent with the north wind winding up. Dawn came and revealed that we really didn’t know previously, but did now, how much gas to put in the generator. It drank nearly 4 gallons that morning and I was confident that the generator would no longer be an issue.
Night 4: It was pretty simple in hindsight. The generator was running, and the space heater was plugged in, heating the RV interior in my parent’s driveway. A phone was plugged in to charge and the whole system went down. Learn about amps. Really, just learn about them. We heard it again. The soul-crushing beep signaling power was lost and the heat was slowing seeping away. I was wondering how much we could get for the RV. It would be a nice windfall to sell it and bank the cash. Should we abort our journey and just go home with our tail between our legs?
I awoke crestfallen about the event of lost power again. I googled. I watched YouYube videos, and I read about resetting the battery by disconnecting the positive terminal. This all after running the engine, trying to charge it with the generator, hitting the inverter reset, trying to invert, trying to reset the GFI, tripping and resetting all the breakers, pulling, and replacing all the fuses.
I counseled with my father-in-law and decided that what I’d seen online by disconnecting the positive cable to reset the Lithium battery was the only real option. If we could not reset, I knew from experience completely depleting the battery and then charging it was also a reset option. I thought that heading into the maw of winter with a guess that maybe things would work themselves out was not smart. We needed heat and outlets to work, to charge computers, etc. I was able to unhook the positive cable and lo and behold, everything reset. Moral of the story: Amps matter. Make sure you don’t overload and don’t use frayed charging cables. Also, a space heater draws quite a few amps and your RV battery’s preferred method of power is being connected to shore power. Every other source is a distant second place to shore power.
Emboldened by my success resetting the battery, I decided to take a swing at the propane heater. I unscrewed the seat and lifted it off to expose the Trumi system. My goal was to find a small reset button, but I found a large one labeled “on” and “off”. It was set to “off”.
Moral of this story: Camping World or your service dealership may leave stones unturned, or switches turned off. Why would they service the propane system (which they did to install a propane tank sensor) and then bolt the seat back down without turning the thing back on?
Just like that I toggled from “off” to “on” and all our system were working, and problems solved. I also reset the satellite based WIFI today.
Night 5: It was a warm night in my parent’s driveway with the propane Trumi heat system running. The next morning, we enjoyed a walk on the country roads. Picture of Sanni below.
Night 6: We had Thanksgiving dinner and spent the night in my friend’s machine shop, which is a huge building that is climate controlled. We were watching the weather and guessing that we were going to have a challenging Saturday going from Dodge City to Amarillo, TX.