Here and There

Picket Post Falls

“About time to update the blog. When we left it we were over near Superior at Picket Post mountain enjoying that beautiful spot while Brenda was undergoing her Scrambler Therapy treatments in Gold Canyon. They reduce her nerve pain, although they do nothing to deal with the muscle or deeper bone pain. Better than nothing I know. 

We enjoyed our time chilling in the desert there and other than trips to town for those appointments we just hung out. I have never, nor am I going to start to spend a lot of time in my blog, telling you about my morning coffee, I don’t drink it anyway, or the regular things that happen every single day. I like to stick with those things that are of interest to our friends and readers and to tell the truth we are not doing a whole lot of them. I like to throw a few photos that I deem worthy of sharing in here and I apologize if you are a follower of mine on Facebook, they are probably repeats. I find my own journal to satisfy all my cravings to ramble on about my daily mumblings.

Once we pulled out of Picket Post we headed over towards Thunderbird Farms to visit our friends the McMeekins, Trish and Lorrie, and empty out their entry of all our Amazon packages. We also managed to eat a little Mexican at Plaza Bonita as well as a couple of home cooked meals at the McMeekin Hacienda. Thanks for your hospitality Trish and Lorrie, it was great visiting with you and telling a few stories, all the gospel truth I might add. 

After leaving our old haunts we headed for Gila Bend and Holt’s Shell to fuel up, dump our tanks, fill with fresh water and propane before heading over to Quartzsite for the Grand Design Owners Rally in the desert south of town. This was our second appearance at this event, I always find the talks from Grand Design, suppliers and equipment manufacturers to be very informative.

Along the way we had bit the bullet and made the decision to upgrade our battery bank from 4-6V Lead Acid batteries to 4-12V Lithium batteries from Battle Born. They had them shipped to Quartzsite for us to pick up on the 13th. That started a major re-powering program led with the batteries and a new Victron Solar controller MPPT 150/60 and a battery monitor also from Victron, a BMV-712 with a temperature sensor added in. Along the way I upgraded a couple of cables from smaller wires to 2/0 cabling and moving wires to make sure the shunt actually was able to log accurate information. Learned a lot along the way, and got a lot of help from Jim Hinkle, a fellow Grand Design owner, Battle Born Batteries, and the manufacturer of our inverter/charger Go Power. They all had good tips and as of this writing we are on the verge of saying we have a working system. Update: two days of testing with or without the generator all seems to be working as advertised now.

Once we got done with the re-powering and the rally we moved on to our old favourite spot near Bouse with a stop at Satellite Advantage in Quartzsite where we had an upgrade installed in our Winegard dish that enables us to automatically locate the Shaw satellites. They had made some changes over the summer that made older dishes like ours unable to do that. 20 minutes of work, and a pocket full of money and it is all good. Along with that change Shaw was moving channels around amongst their three satellites, one of which has no coverage down here in the sunbelt, and it appears that one of my favourites has been shuffled out of range. Oh well.

Once we got settled in here we headed into Parker to get caught up with our laundry and restock the larder.”

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