Old Man Winter

We had planned a guy's trip to Joshua Tree this weekend, but in the last five days we've received more rain than we did all of last year. The flooding knocked our power out for 22 hours, and Joshua Tree got snow last night. Since our trip was with several of Andy's buddies who have never camped before, we decided to postpone the trip for more favorable conditions. If the weather cooperates, we could head out for a hike on Sunday.

Here Comes the Rain

It looks like we're going to get our winter rains all in one week. There are major storms rolling into Southern California and the mountains could get as much as two feet of rainfall this week. Since it could be a while before we get out, Sherry and I decided to head up to Wrightwood for lunch.

We don't do too much camping in the Angeles National Forest. It isn't that we don't like the place, its just that there are only three campgrounds that take reservations, and the anxiety of wondering if you'll have a place to set up camp isn't our kind of fun. All three of the campgrounds with reservations are within a ten-minute drive of the town of Wrightwood.

Mountain Oak is the furthest from town, but they only take RVs up to 18' long -- La Rana is 23. Lake Campground is very intimate with only 8 campsites, but they too are limited to 18' campers.  Table Mountain can take up to 32 feet, and it is where we spent Memorial Day weekend in 2007. When we just had a trailer, our favorite sites were 85, 112, 113, 72, 73, 74, 75 and 76. Today we couldn't tell one site from the other because the entire campground was under a foot of unplowed snow.

Old Black Water

I've been wanting one of these black water flush kits for a while and I finally went over to Giant RV today and bought one. I'll be doing the installation like this video tomorrow.

The sales girl offered a really interesting suggestion for cleaning any really stubborn deposits in the tank. She said to put a few gallons of water in the tank, pour a big bag of ice cubes down the commode, and then drive around for awhile. The ice acts as an aggregate that knocks everything loose and once it melts is obviously no problem for the dump station.Very clever.

I also stumbled upon a really cool website, called CampsitePhotos.com. They have a searchable directory of campgrounds, with photos of every site in the place! If you sign up as a photographer, they'll even pay you to take photos of the campgrounds you go to.