First Camping for 2025

Martha and I left the overcrowded cesspool that is the Metro Denver area on Sunday of this week.  We were racing to catch a narrow weather window before snow threatened to close down our route through New Mexico.

We left these conditions, not too bad really but cold:

We got our wish, dry roads all the way into New Mexico.  We ran out of daylight though and had to find our way to our chosen county park campground in the dark!  

It would have to wait till sunrise on Monday for me to see what the campground looked like:

Monday was spent driving through New Mexico and into Arizona using the I-10 Super Slab.

Hot Well Dunes was pretty much empty in terms of campers.  We got a nice site for Uma:

We checked out the hot tubs, no one around!

The weather would be overcast/cloudy and colder than normal.  Tuesday was spent on repair chores such as fixing the ground points for the front rack lights, broken fender mounts on the trailer.

Of course, it was time for a mishap.  Our second visit to the hot tubs Tuesday afternoon resulted in me carelessly getting my Pixel 4a phone wet!  Dammit.

The marketing specs say the phone is IP68 water resistant.  Supposedly you can put it into at 3ft of water for 30 minutes with no issues.  My pixel 4a didn't survive 5 seconds of foot deep water.  

A bit of a bummer ending for Tuesday but it finally got me off the fence about getting an upgrade.

Wednesday, Jan 8 

Rode in some bone chilling temperatures to the village of Thatcher, located west of Safford, AZ.  There was a Verizon store there and I'd placed an online order for a replacement phone:  A Samsung Galaxy S24+.

The phone was ready for pickup by the time I motored up, less than an hour later I was all set up and driving back to camp.  Some really strong wind gusts added to the fun as I drove Scarlett.  I think I would have rather spent the morning relaxing warm in the VRRV instead but one must pay the price for careless stupidity eh?

Here's the first pics taken with the S24+:

The above are in the default .jpg format, I've seen switched the camera setting to shoot in RAW as well.

Spent the rest of the day configuring the new phone, getting data from the old phone when it would cooperate with me.  The old phone sometimes displays correctly, but you have to use an external keyboard (courtesy of Martha) to navigate around.  I might send the pixel in for repairs, not sure.  Right now, it won't recognize the SIM card so no phone functions, the display only works half the time and its recognition of finger input is crap.

Hopefully it won't be as windy tomorrow and things are supposed to get a bit warmer starting Thursday.  Sunny conditions should help a lot.