Thursday morning, and nothing but sunshine in the forecast, I started the generator for a couple of hours to help get our batteries to 100%, and by noon the solar controllers had switched to float mode…batteries officially fully charged. Now I was able to recalibrate the battery monitor with the inverter, so now we again have an accurate source for the battery bank condition. Our objective is to get to a stage that the solar harvest will replenish our daily power usage.

There was another group of the rally people that headed out today, we are down to about a dozen coaches, our new friends Ronda and Pat are heading out in the morning, they are off to Tucson to visit with family, before heading back to Wyoming to their sticks and bricks. They have a 1998 Beaver Patriot as well, it was a new to them in the fall so we were able to help answer some questions about the coach, I think we all learnt some new things about our coaches. It sounds like we will be trying to make it back to this rally again next year, we have enjoyed this area, we are far enough from the highway that we get no road noise, and most of the group seem to be respectful of the generator noise, and even when the generators are running, they are quite quiet by design.

Tomorrow we will head to the LTVA to look for a spot for the next fourteen days, the crowds are about at there highest the last two weeks of January, so hopefully there will be some spots at La Possa West so that we can walk to the rock show, and the tented city that pops up every January in Quartzsite and we know how much Miss Laurie likes rocks…just saying. We may end up at La Possa South as it is a lot larger and more inviting for large coaches and it’s only a mile from the big tent and parking will be easier next week.

It’s early Wednesday morning, this is the only time I can get connected, again that is why the blogs are not being posted daily, by eight or nine getting any cellular is hit and miss. This morning it is 43 or 6 degrees at 5:30 a little brisk, but the forecast is for sunny but only low sixties at best today. We have not been running the heat as with the front windows missing it just seems useless. We should be getting our new glass installed this morning, and it will be nice to get the front of the coach reassembled. Right now the curtain is half removed, our sun shades are removed, and laying on the floor or the dash. I’m going to take the rest of the curtain down this morning and lube the mechanical slides to make it work a little smoother.

Because we had the battery switch fail, so all power was cut from the coach all our instrumentation has lost its accuracy and is out of sink with the batteries, so today I’m going to have to get the battery bank back to fully charged, but with the generator and some solar we should be able to back to our base line and reset all the calibration. You don’t realize how much you depend on the information these monitors give us until you are not getting it accurately.

Well it’s now about lunch time and the fellows are here reinstalling our windows…and I mean as I look through the new glass I really wonder why I put up with the old windows as long as I did. The sight lines and clarity are outstanding, this was not an inexpensive project but it has been of great value, the company that does this work also does the regular fogged windows as well and we could have saved a couple of hundred dollars by just having the top half defogged but because it is in the line of sight from the drivers seat, we felt it would be money well spent.

After lunch we ventured off to Blyth CA to do some grocery shopping, it had been a while and we needed quite a few items, not the kind of items that are readily available in Quartzsite. Blyth is only about 15 miles (20 kilometres) west just over the state line, we needed fuel so I thought we would get some fuel at the Pilot fuel station in Arizona at the state line, but all the fuel stations at the line were out of fuel, you see the price of fuel is the best part of a dollar a gallon cheaper that in California, yes California prices are very similar to the fuel cost back in Ontario, so a lot of people drive to Arizona for the savings so all the stations at the first two exits were sold out. Luckily we had enough fuel to get back to Quartzsite where fuel is still fifty cents higher that in Yuma or Parker, ah the power of supply and demand combined with location.

We really didn’t accomplish a lot today, other than admiring our new windows and getting groceries, but that’s what is so nice about our down time, just not having to do anything other than sitting and reading or just absorbing some much needed vitamin “D”.