As darkness descends on the Chihuahuan desert at our 4500-foot elevation, it can get pretty cold here on a winter night in central New Mexico…especially if the winds are blowing.
Sunny mornings are now starting to show the evidence—frost on my skylight!
Even though I’ve experienced a couple cold nights while traveling (rapidly) from Chicago to warmer destinations in previous years, I’ve never spent an entire winter season in a location that gets below freezing nearly every night. So, I’ve recently had a lot to learn about making my RV comfortable for winter living. Fortunately, fellow volunteers here at the Refuge have provided some excellent tips!
If you might be RVing in some cold and remote places this winter, here are 5 ways to keep your RV home comfy and cozy:
After a week of full-hookup, high-speed WiFi luxury at AquaMarina RV Park in La Paz, I wanted to try out the free boondocking beach 15 miles north of La Paz, Playa Tecolote. While perhaps slightly less scenic than the Best Boondocking Beach in Baja (Playa Santispac on the Bahía de Concepción), Tecolote was free and even offered quite a rarity for beach boondocking in Baja-- a decent Telcel signal for internet surfing!
Whenever I thought about spending my winter days lazily boondocking on a beach in Baja, this was always the scene I always imagined—RV’s (not too many, not too few) parked around an emerald bay with views of islands in the distance.
When we first drove down Baja Highway 1 and crested the hills south of Mulegé to see this stunning picture postcard in real-life for the first time, I knew I wanted to come back ASAP to camp at Playa Santispac along the Bahía de Concepción. So after a few days together in Loreto, when Hans and Ursula continued south to La Paz to visit their old sailing buddies, Millie and I backtracked 70 miles north to find a bit of paradise on the beach!
(Welcome to Baja!)
After such a glorious introductory trip to Mexico last winter (see my blog posts from Dec 2013 thru Mar 2014 visiting the mainland’s west coast and central colonial cities), I wanted to check out the Baja peninsula this winter to see how it compares.
As luck would have it, my View friends from Denver (Hans and Ursula), were planning their first RV trip to Baja, and thus the idea of a “mini Skinny Winnie caravan” was hatched! We would leave the U.S. in mid-December to hopefully get a jump-start on the post-holiday snowbirds.
Our rendezvous location was up in the very chilly hills about 40 miles east of San Diego, at Potrero County Park. Less that 10 miles from the Tecate border crossing, it’s a popular meet-up spot for RVs headed to Baja.
There’s not a whole lot of things to go buy yourself for Christmas here in Baja, so I decided to buy my Christmas toys a few weeks early while I was still in the U.S. After my extended boondocking experience in Nevada, I wanted to shore up a few deficiencies and make the Winnie an even better boondocking-mobile for hitting the beaches of Baja this winter.
The weakest link in my Winnie systems seemed to be my 3-year-old Sams Club Duracell AGM batteries. I had really expected these to hold up longer than they did, but as this was now my second set of low-cost batteries to die an early death, I finally had to admit “you get what you paid for” and pony up to make a proper battery investment. Just like all the cheap Windows laptops I once had to buy and toss before finally investing big bucks on my Macbook Pro laptop (which is now 3+ years old and still looks and runs like new!).
So my new battery decision was now a no-brainer to buy the “Apple” of the battery world – a pair of Lifeline 6-volt GPL-4CT AGM batteries.
After two weeks at a National Park campground (with electric hookups no less!), I was yearning to do some boondocking again and Millie was more than ready to find some wide open space where she could run around leash-free (the National Parks may be beautiful, but by their mandate, they cannot be as pet-friendly as other public lands).
So, with a family Thanksgiving on the horizon in Los Angeles, I decided to spend the 10 days before then at a spot headed towards that general direction-- exploring the area around Valley of Fire State Park at the north end of Lake Mead (about an hour northeast of Las Vegas).
Jim & Gayle were headed to that area a couple days ahead of me and had just the perfect boondocking spot to recommend just down the dirt lane from their site a few miles south of Overton, NV. Oh, yes! This site will do quite nicely!
This time of year, it is usually still pitch black in the morning when Millie wakes me up for her nature’s call. We stumble out of the rig into the expansive desert that is our boondock spot just outside of Canyonlands Needles District.
The sky is no longer awash with a carpet of stars, but rather, almost completely covered by clouds—all except the fringes along the horizon. Could we be in for a fabulous sunrise today? I head back to the RV for my camera and tripod and then set up to await the big show.
What a show it is (and a great way to start the day)!
On our second morning camped on the Edge of the Abyss at Goosenecks State Park, Millie starts getting a bit more curious to snoop over the edge…
After spending a week in Moab, by Saturday, I had learned one important rule—get out of town on the weekends in the peak Spring and Fall tourist seasons! The town had seemed to triple in size virtually overnight! Rather than fight the crowds at the national parks nearby, I pulled up stakes and headed out for a 4-day road-trip to explore the areas along Hwy 191 south of Moab (down to Southeast Utah).
No plan other than that. No campground reservations for a Saturday night, just trusting that my Allstays Camp & RV app and my Escapees Days End Directory would lead me to some great available campsites!
We meandered our way down Hwy 191 checking out a few camps along the way, but Goldilocks was not finding the “it” campsite just yet. But as we reached Goosenecks State Park as the sun was setting, “it” had most certainly been found!
