Trailer Life
22 September 2016, Yellowstone National Park.
It has been raining since yesterday night. I could hear the rain falling on our travel trailer all through the night. It has continued raining for most of today except in the afternoon when we went on a ranger led walk around the grand canyon of the Yellowstone. Dinner was prepared fairly quickly in a tight kitchenette where Deepa and I can barely manage to stand side by side. Sautéed asparagus and mushrooms, followed by vegetable pasta soup. Thankfully, kids made no fuss over dinner today. A game of cards after dinner is our new routine. All of these happened with two LED headlamps. You see, we have to preserve our trailer’s 12V battery for the six days that we will be at the Madison Campground inside the Yellowstone National Park. We are without any hookups here. And for some reason, our Suburban SUV isn’t able to charge the trailer batteries even if we hitch the trailer and let the SUV run. The only way to charge these is with shore power at a full hookup site. So it means that to preserve battery, we shouldn’t turn on the lights, or use the toilet, or wash the dishes in the trailer. The last two use water pump, and that runs on battery. We will have to do all these at the common toilets and at the dishwashing area about 50 meters from our campsite. Not a big deal. It’s just a little inconvenient though while it is raining and we have to put on ours and kids’ rain jackets and boots to go to the toilet one last time before going to bed. Oh and it’s cold out here, somewhere around 35 F.
So what do we need to preserve the battery for? We need it to run the heater in the night. While the furnace runs on propane, we need the battery to periodically ignite the furnace and to run the blowers. We already have had to sleep one night without heat when it was 25 F at the no-hookup Timber Creek Campground in the Rocky Mountains National Park. That was because of a faulty battery, for which we spent the rest of next day installing new batteries and refilling propane. An interesting experience. By the way, unknown to the heat problem I had spent that night in a broken tent, and even though I was layered up I woke up cold well before dawn only to find Deepa in the trailer wide awake and cold too.
That morning it felt like I had tricked Deepa and the kids to spend 45 days on the trailer in the cold fall days. In a way that’s true. I had got introduced to hiking and camping while in school when we used to go on two-week trips to the Himalayas during the summer breaks. The first time I had come back cribbing, the second time was fun and by the third time I had fallen in love with the mountains. I kept on it when I was living for a few years in Massachusetts. I did several weekend backpacking trips to New Hampshire in summer, fall and early winter. It was wonderful. So when we were planning the US leg of our one year adventure, I was keen on getting the kids to the mountains, to the national parks, and introducing them to hiking and camping. Deepa was just as excited for it, though I guess she was partly tricked into doing this. But regardless, we together decided that we will do a 45 days trip on a motorhome starting from Denver and ending in San Francisco traveling through the various national parks.
Leaving aside that night, I think it has played out great so far. It has been a little over a week now, and us and kids have adapted to the trailer life fairly well. They aren’t complaining of the super tight sleeping space. And they aren’t complaining of the cold. They get layered up and are out and about. It took a couple of days though to get acclimatised to the high altitude where it is so common to get headaches because of thin air. They are having fun playing ball, collecting pine cones and rocks, and watching chipmunks run around. Right now the main excitement for them is around the junior ranger program. Each national park has this program, wherein a kid does few fun and interesting activities around the park and upon completion gets sworn in as a junior ranger and receives a badge. Thing 1 and Thing 2 are both majorly motivated to earn their badges, and this makes it a lot more easier to take them to places, to make them sit through a ranger talk, and to complete a hike.
We will see how it goes in the days to come, but right now we are enjoying our trailer life.
