Magnus in New Mexico, Day 4

Bye to Davis Mountains!

Thu 21 Mar

We left for El Paso at 10:35 and arrived at about 2:00.  Great time!  Until you take into account that we gained an hour at the timezone change in far west Texas. So the Google map time of 3:25  took us 4:25. Yeah, really.

But part of the problem was that I hadn't realized I wouldn't be able to pick up a navigation signal once we were on the road. Yes, I know we had no signal at the campsite, but since our phones connected to WiFi through the Starlink, we hadn't really been hampered by the lack of AT&T phone signal. Except in calling my brother, which should have clued me into the potential issue with navigation.

Anyway, I didn't think to check the route while we had the Starlink hooked up, so I ended up choosing the Google map route that went directly over and through the Davis Mountains.  It was the fastest one--for cars!  But for the Motorhome, a better route would have taken us south and then west toward Marfa.

We ended up at the El Paso RV Park by Road Host, a great big gravel parking lot in the desert. Sites were large--for an RV park--and nicely spaced. Although it was a pleasant 78-degree temperature in late March, in summer it would be miserably hot and there was no shade at all, except over the bench at the dog park.  Which was very large and lovely.  After smelling all the dog markings', Molly got a good run around and ball chase.

Since the RV park was right beside a Camping World and I had a $20 coupon for them, Ed and I walked over to do some browsing in the store. We ended up spending $100 so we could use the $20 off coupon. Make sense, right?

Not so silly as it sounds, though. The items were both things we were going to buy soon anyway, and Camping World's prices were comparable to Amazon's.

The power went out in the evening and stayed off until 330 am. Next morning, our neighbor said it was a planned outage due to the road construction on I-10 and the power was out all over the area, even the stoplights.

The funny thing was, we didn't notice it until I tried to turn on the bedroom fan at bedtime. Most of the appliances went on working with the house batteries, and since the temperature was cool enough outside that the air conditioner wasn't running, we sat in blissful silence watching Netflix on the TV.  The bedroom fan is part of the air conditioning unit, so that finally clued us in.

To keep from accidentally running the house batteries totally down during the night, Ed turned on the feature that will start the generator automatically if the battery charge gets below 25% or so. But it never came on, so now we know we can go at least 5 hours and maybe 6 on batteries alone. Good to know.