~Wednesday, April 27, 2022~
Day 682 (Travel Day)
Not easy leaving a campsite you fought so hard for. It’s like giving away a little treasure. As expected, we were approached by Kathy, another full-timer, who had her eye on Goose Island Campground for the past few days. We couldn’t have asked for a nicer person to take over our gem. She kept apologizing for being a little aggressive, where we replied with, “No worries, you gotta play the game”. What’s interesting though, is the longer we’ve stayed here, the more we’ve realized that our original struggles of getting into this campground were not by the popularity of the campground alone, but our bad timing of arriving on Jeep Jamboree/Easter weekend. Things have certainly calmed down. It’s not quite the feeding frenzy it was when we first arrived.
Initially, the truck was not happy with the 7-day “load” it was carrying, so off to our familiar $5 dump station we went. Interestingly enough, you meet the nicest people at dump stations since there’s a lot of wait time. Today, we met a guy from Ontario and another guy from Raleigh, NC (a full-timer). I didn’t have the guts to tell him we were thinking of moving to his former state. But you know what…..people are moving everywhere, so maybe it really doesn’t matter that I’m ultra concerned about being just another Californian setting roots in a different state.
Today we’re on a 2-hour drive heading for Rabbit Valley, Colorado for a few days of boondocking. We stayed at the same location back in October of 2020, and man does it look different. You can tell the rains have been kind to the area with all of the wispy green pasture all around. Last time we had only sand. But I do remember the winds here. Enough wind already! Don’t you just find wind completely exhausting? Our old site was already occupied, which is just as well, since it wasn’t the easiest to access.
But we managed to find a perfect site, much easier to maneuver and only a few hundred yards down the road. There weren't a whole lot of options left, so we got lucky that we arrived early enough in the day. But we had some hesitation about claiming our territory because we couldn’t clearly read the worn tag on the post. It looked like it read 28 as a departure date. Or could it be 23? An 8 and a 3 can look very similar, right? To be sure, we got out the handy magnifying glass which solidified our plan. It was a 3 after all. We’re in! Makes sense why there was a neatly piled stack of wood for the next customer in line (us) and nothing else to mark the site.
Jeff went into town to Fruita to get water, gas for the generator and a few groceries while Sadie and I stayed back so I could finish setting up. While we were unloading, Jeff realized that the back window of the shell was not closing or opening properly. What he discovered was where the piston from the back window meets the shell, the fiberglass was cracked and crumbling. So now we can’t leave the door propped open on its own (a real pain), and we have to be very delicate when closing it. Jeff has worked with fiberglass before in his past line of work, and thinks that the layer of fiberglass they put over the joint has failed due to air pockets. I guess to strengthen fiberglass, they build it in layers for strength but in doing so, have to be sure it’s also void of air pockets. The air pockets cause failure. In order to have it fixed we would have to A) bring it to the manufacturing plant hundreds of miles away or B) have guru Jeff try to fix it himself. So frustrating for something that is only 2 years old. So stay tuned on that one.