Today, we ride! Finally! Pull the bikes out – it’s been a while! The Bear’s front wheel needs air, but we’re not surprised … it’s been a while! Get everything aired up, and head out! Down the dirt road a bit, to the bathrooms, then hang a left to get into the trail … “Bill … BILL!!!”. Damn. Now what? Her front tire is low. “I thought you aired it up?”. Back to the truck. Air it up, and it’s leaking … maybe it needs more Stan’s. Let all the air out, pop the bead, pour in some Stan’s, air it back up. Spin it to spread the Stan’s … and it starts coming out between the rim and the spoke nipples. Great. Rim tape is bad, and we don’t have any. Just lovely. Well, I did get to ride about a quarter of a mile.

In to town to get some other stuff taken care of, and then come back to get ready to move tomorrow. It has GOT to get better.

Ok, promised a shot of my battery switch when I got done:

You can just barely see it poking up top of the right battery. What a crappy photo! Too bright to see what I was doing. I’ll do another later.

More finishing up today. Started on the batteries yesterday, here’s a shot of that:

Junk in the way on that shot, I’ll get another taken tomorrow after it’s all dressed right. Where that 2×2 is in front, there is a switch so I can switch to battery 1, battery 2, both batteries, or turn them both off. So, when I’m plugged in, either to the truck or 110VAC, I can have them both charge at the same time, then I can easily switch to whichever I want to use when I don’t have external power, and easily switch batteries when one is depleted. Cool!

The other project was the solar panels. Did a quick-and-dirty just to try it out, and here’s what that looks like:

I just placed it like that, and it was pushing 5.5 Amps. Turns out that was optimum! Tried all kinds of other angles, and they all produced less, from a little less to a lot. And don’t let ANYTHING shade ANY part of it, or it all goes away! I didn’t know that! I mean, cover up 5% of that panel, and you go from 5.5 Amps to about 0.38. YES, the difference really is that dramatic. They’ll have to be placed a bit high, so fences, grass, or other low things don’t cast a shadow on them. Of course, this is only one of the panels. The other one is waiting for the mounting to be done. Pictures when I have it figured out. But at least now I know that on a sunny day, I can get 11.0 Amps out of my two panels. That will EASILY charge what I lose overnight. Normally I use about 2 Amps, so that’s 48 Amp-Hours over a full 24 hour day. I can recoup that in under 5 hours of full sun! Just over 4, actually! Means we can stay out longer without hookups. National Forest, here we come! We should be able to do a week, easy, without breaking out the generators. Looking forward to it!

Ok, pretty dry today – except at our site! The truck sinks into the mud about an inch at our site, so even though the roads are pretty much dry, I’m not sure I could pull out of our site! I’d hate to tear it up anyway, so it’s good we’re staying until Sunday.

It’s morning, and we’re planning the next week or so, which means we had to drive up to the Visitor Center to get phone and/or WiFi. This really sucks! Down where we’re camped, there is NOTHING. Well, beautiful views right out the front door, but can’t really get anything done electronically speaking. Later today, I’ll hook up the solar panels, and we’ll see how that works. I’m so excited!

Rain. Started yesterday. Rained ALL NIGHT. We were supposed to leave tomorrow, but that’s not going to happen. Why not? Can’t. No, really, literally CANNOT leave. Roads are dirt, and now they’re wet. They are just as steep as they were when they were dry, but now they’re slick. Even the bare truck slips and slides up and down the hills, so there’s no way I’m pulling my trailer into a ditch, thank-you-very-much. So we leave Sunday, IF it dries out by then. Ugh. Well, the rain is supposed to stop later today.

In the mean time, I’m playing with solar. Ordered a couple of solar panels from Amazon, to charge up the batteries on the trailer. BatterIES because we got a second one yesterday, so we can swap out and charge one offline while we run on the other. BUT, with the solar panels (two so far), we should generate enough to keep the batteries charged pretty long term. Got excess capacity so we charge what we discharge at night. I’ll post pictures as it goes.

Well, another rainy, cold day. So, today we instead went to Laramie, a little closer than Cheyenne, but the other direction. Not nearly as big a town, but kinda cool in its own way. Went to “The Pedal House”, local bike shop, got a map of the Happy Jack and Vedauwoo trails. Hopefully we can ride them tomorrow, or SOMETHING, because it’s not happening today.

So, early afternoon, here’s the temp:

Chilly! And on the ground? Hail! Left over from this morning:

Unbelievable! So then we headed for a bar (of course!) to sample the local brew. Went to Altitude, which reminded me of the bar by the same name in Salida, CO, except these folks have a much better brew, a Stout. Here’s the place:

And here’s a sign on the mirror at the bar itself:

Yes, The Bear felt right at home!

As far as our mission out here, though, today was a total bust. I did buy a small 9-watt solar panel to play with, I’m trying to get some ideas to work on on  small scale, so I can then transfer them to the big panel that should be here tomorrow. Fun stuff, but I’d rather be riding.

Well, today was going to be a ride day, but with funky weather, somehow riding a lightning rod does not seem a good idea, so no riding today. Cool looking clouds, though!

Also at the trailer:

We went into Cheyenne, got some stuff done. Ordered a solar panel, we’ll see how that goes. It just makes a lot more sense than powering up the generators every couple of days, especially since one or two panels should recharge what we use at night. We don’t use much. Couple of amps all the time, this one panel should give me maybe 6 amps, so if it can do that for eight hours a day, it’s basically a wash. We shall see.

Interesting day today – looks like it’s gonna rain, and it’s started to a couple of times, so we just went trail hunting today. Maybe we’ll ride later.

On the way back through the park, we saw a fox! Which brings to mind:

What does the fox say? He said “I’m outta here!”

Ok, back at our site, we see the next door neighbor is leaving … and he has a PRIMO site! We gotta move! The nice thing about this place is that the non-reservation sites are not assigned, so if you see a better one, you can just move in! Here’s the new one:

Not much different? Well … except for the view:

We had only trees to look at before, now we have lake! I like it!

Tomorrow, we ride! Unless it rains, of course – hoping for dry.

Wooo! Big day today. Drove almost 400 miles! Went back to RCMP, though this time with a full fuel tank! Last year we made it through on fumes – NOT a good experience. This time, we took our time and saw pretty much everything we wanted to see. We did the short (!) trip, Fort Collins to RCMP, over the top to the other side, and back. Beautiful! Here are a couple of panos:

While on the far side, we needed lunch, so looked for a place. Not easy to do, but eventually ran across a Chinese place, the Pearl Dragon:

Good food! In Granby, CO. Yeah, we’d never heard of that town either! Then it was back across. Hmmm. Dark clouds in the sky, very ominous, soon, rain … then hail! Quite a lot of hail. Small, but plentiful. Here’s what it looked like:

See the pile under the wiper? Couldn’t see very far, either, sometimes. And lightning. Glad to get out of there!

On the way back, I did see something that falls into the “WTF?” category. I don’t make this stuff up, I just post it:

Yeah, I’m baffled too.

I did also take a bunch of photos with two of my cameras (instead of the phone), but they’ll have to wait. When I post them on this day, I’ll let y’all know on that day’s post to come back here.