Day 34 - Back To Cave Creek

It was a fairly early start leaving the Dreamcatcher RV Park. We stopped at the local Pepper's supermarket to do a little provisioning. Although they had a tortilla factory in the back of the store, we passed on fresh hot tortillas and bought veggies, fruit, deli meats and milk. We are just being hopeful that we can keep the refrigerator cool.

It is not functioning well on propane, but seems to cool adequately on AC or DC. The temperature was back in the 30°s when we left the park. It is as if the propane is not burning hot enough. Either the pressure is low or the burner is faulty, but there isn't much I can do on the road.

As backup, we also stopped at the local Walmart for boxed milk. They had none at Pepper's. Milk seems to be the first thing to spoil when the refrigerator warms up.

It was back on to I-10 for the drive to Arizona. We were on our way to Portal, AZ and the Cave Creek area of Coranado National Forest in the Chiricahua Mountains. It was an uneventful drive and we crossed into Arizona (and another time zone) just before we reached Portal.

Arizona is a bit unusual in that it stays on Mountain Standard Time year-around. This meant we gained another hour. Let's say that it seemed like noontime when we arrived since we were still running on Central Daylight Time (Big Bend Time). So we set up camp in the Sunny Flat Campground, had lunch and collapsed. While we did do a short walk around the campground and on the road, we basically lazed away the afternoon.

It is very sunny and clear here and one of the surprising good effects of all that sun was that we found out the solar panels put out enough power in full sun to leave the refrigerator on DC without running down the batteries. DC usage in an absorption refrigerator is about 175 watts, since it is just a resistance heating element. We added 250 watts of solar panels to Speedy and it meant that we were able to us DC until about 4pm...dinner time.

After dinner it was time to do a little owling. Well.. it wasn't quite after dinner. Our clocks were still wrong and we ended up having dinner at 4pm...sunset was at about 7pm.

As the sun set, we walked over to tha campground entrance road to get our life bird of the day, the Elf Owl. One has a nest hole in a Sycamore right next to the road. We, most of the other campers and a group of college students on a field trip watched the hole until the owl appeared—then quickly flew away.

We flew back to the van and called it a night. A hike tomorrow.