Thursday January 14th already!

Another busy week of not doing much.  We are still at Holiday Palms RV Park in Quartzsite, Arizona.  I really like this area, at least at this time of year.  It is a little cooler here than in Phoenix, but still highs about 70 everyday, but is does get into the 40s, or even the 30s at night sometimes.  However the last two nights the lows have only been in the low 50s.  This town is not all that big most of the year, but during January there are a couple of shows that attract a lot of people.  One is huge gem show, and then there is the RV show.  I have heard that as many as a million people pass through here during January.  There is also a huge flea market going on here most of the winter I guess, and if it is made somewhere in the world, you can probably buy it here.

Since we have been in Arizona we have been busy spending money on adding things to our RV that make it more livable, especially when we go "boondocking" in the desert on Saturday for a few days.  The first thing we did was replace our two Interstate 12 volt coach batteries with four Sam's Club 6 volt golf cart batteries.

  This will double the amount of amps we have available when we dont have the generator running, or are not hooked to shore power.  In order to make room for the four 6 volts, I had to move the chassis battery to another compartment.  A pretty easy job, and I was able to use the same cables.

Another purchase we made was a new Black and Decker fully automatic battery charger.  This will do double duty as a regular batter charger, and will also be used to charge our coach batteries until we replace the current   Paralax 7455 on board charger/converter, as the on board charger/converter is not designed to rapidly charge batteries, but is designed to be used when you spend most of your time hooked up to shore power. 

We have also purchased a Kozy World 10,000 BTU propane heater that is made for indoor use, with proper ventilation, of course.

Yet another purchase was 4 walkie-talkie radios.  Our Winnebago came with these radios, and a built in charger, but the radios were missing when we got the motorhome.  As a result of spending many hours on the internet reading about RVs and RVing, I read on an RV forum that a place here in Quartzsite sells new charger units with radios for less than the price of replacement radios alone, so we just had to get it.  Here is a pic of the built in charger in the motorhome.  It is just to the left at floor level when you come in the door.

Here is a pic of the new charger and radios.

Well, that is about it for now.  Ann has been very busy with her work the last few days, and spent most the day yesterday on conference calls on some huge project that they are trying to wrap up.

I will post more later, and hopefully get some more pics up of our travels to California.

Paul