Problems while Boondocking In Wyoming | Full Time RV Living

So that's where our rug and campsite just was where a big bunch of cows just decided to roll right on through and leave us a little present on the way out. Their poop isn't firm. It's juicy green oozy poop that just squirts out as they walk. So it's everywhere. And then the cows, they're like all around us right now. They came in like two days ago and it was kind of cool. Like 50 cows just come into your campsite and they started eating the grass, but cows do. They're literally like a half a foot from the van surrounding all sides of the van. Yeah. And so they come in and they eat and they eat and they eat and then they take a little nap. And then they nap. And then they poop. That's all they do. Oh, there's one pooping right there. That's disgusting. That is gross. So then your campsite kind of starts to smell like a farm. The flies, I think, come in and swarm around it because of that. And that kind of ruined the water a little bit too because they hang out down by the water. They go bathe in the water. We were going to go swimming until we saw what the cows do in the water. And we're like, okay, we're not going to go swimming anymore. Yeah. Imagine 50 cows rolling up on your beach and then just making it a mess and hanging out in the water and stuff like that. So, but anyways, this is a sweet spot. I mean, you got to check it out. If you're near Wyoming, it's a cool, it's a cool, cool spot. People stayed like one night. We were here for six. And it was magical for us because we haven't seen any sort of a body of water since Los Angeles. Which was probably in November. So like seven months. So when we rolled up and we saw this bright blue, beautiful body of water, that closed the deal for us. And it was worth it for that. It was a nice change of scenery. But now I'm getting very irritated. I'm starting to get really irritable because it's hot and humid. Flies are coming out. There's cow poop everywhere. And we had that incident with the battery yesterday. So we have a lot of things going on. It's time to go. Usually things start to mount up and then it's like, okay, it's time to go. Plus we are about out of fresh water. How do you like driving through Wyoming compared to Utah or Colorado? And I just realized like how it's all the same. It's not changing. Where's the mountains? Yeah, it's just a lot of land. The trees. It's just a lot of farmland. Heading up Wyoming's welcome center. And we've actually hit a few welcome centers the past couple of states. And they're like free RV dumps, free water. Super cool. And you can't pass up. We did just dump like two days but since we're traveling, so we're using our bathroom a lot, we might as well do a quick dump and then maybe a little top off on water. It just makes sense. Otherwise it's like we spend all the time settling, getting into a new boondocking spot. And then if we don't come in with fresh tanks, then we're only going to last like two, three days. And there's some BLM, I think about a half hour or so from here. So it shouldn't be too bad to find a spot. Good. It's a little baby fox. We last saw our fox when we were at the Tetons. That was so cool. He's a cute little guy. He just started prancing. Yeah, I hope it does too because it is pretty nice, peaceful. It's pretty. That's the reservoir. What is a reservoir? It's just a body of water that's like man-made. It's so blue out here. Yeah. Public access area. Let's make some friends that have a boat. Yeah, it looks like boating and fishing is allowed. Beautiful. Well, we're heading back out. Mission failure. And it was pretty busy here. There was not really anywhere to really park. This is why you give yourself plenty of time to find a spot. Yeah, it would have been pretty cool You can camp anywhere from the road to the reservoir, but it's just there's only maybe a dozen spots and they were all pretty full. So it seems like this is a pretty well-known local place. It's really beautiful. We ran into one local. He was kind of stuck in the road, but he was agitated because of how busy it is for a Thursday. So apparently this is busier than usual. So on to another spot to see what we can find. Well, this is our second shot at a second reservoir in Wyoming. There's a lot of cows on this one. He's looking at you funny, Chris. Well, he's been driving through his bathroom area. That's a crazy amount of cows right here. Yeah. Tucked in better this way. Yeah, she's trying to give those guys a little bit of privacy up there. This feels level. Check our system. Yeah, so we're kind of having some tough time here finding a good spot. It's beautiful, like the lakes right outside, but it's just so packed right now. It feels like Memorial Day weekend, doesn't it? It really does. I don't know what's going on right now. Kids coming in here. A little kid? They're telling us not to park here. Why? I don't know, Oh, you guys do? Okay. Sounds good. I thought they were kind of close. So apparently we're a little too close to the rig next to us, and I think they just pulled up and they have a couple more people coming in. We got the boot. They were really, really nice about it, weren't they? Yeah. Excellent people skills. Do you want to turn right here? Maybe. Yeah. Because this is the next option, right? Yeah, I think they connect a little bit too. Yeah, they seem to link together. Some of them do. This looks kind of steep going down here. Well, let's see what it looks like. Oh yeah. That's no good there for us. We're having a rough day today. Yeah, we've been driving for eight hours. I mean, we visited the park, Rocky Mountain National Park this morning, so that kind of adds on a lot of driving, but yeah. Eight hours, 15 minutes on the clock, and no wind in sight. Yeah. Well, we'll keep trying. Victory! We found one. Barely. This is the last gate. Gate two, after this, well, there's gate one. We could have tried two, but that looked pretty busy, and it kind of looks like this is a freshly newer spot, and the bugs look bad, and we're in the weeds, but we'll take it. At least to sleep tonight, right? Yeah. Yeah, at least so we got something. Am I tucked in? Should we just stay here for the night and we can figure out what the hell we're going to do later? Yeah. Okay, sounds good. We'll take it. Yeah, long day. Yeah, nine hours of driving. Nine hours of driving. That's a lot. I guess on the good news, our batteries charged up to 100%. Yeah, that happened a while ago though. Home sweet home. Two days of driving. You know, some days are, some places are really easy to get spots, and some days are really hard. Some days are difficult. Yeah, I would say this is the most difficult we've ever had. Usually it's maybe an extra half hour or 45 minutes of looking. This was like an extra couple hours, just because the places were an hour apart, and getting around that first lake took 30 minutes, and then I think we've been here for like 40 minutes. I think longer than that. Yeah, so we're going to settle in, have some dinner, relax, and crash. Yeah, catch up on some z's. It is pretty out there. Gonna get to listen to the frogs tonight. I don't know how much we're going to show of us driving around trying to find a spot tonight, so that's why I just wanted to talk about this for a minute, because that was pretty frustrating. That was, what time did we leave Colorado? We left the visitor center. Like one? One or two. I think it was like 1 30, and it's now almost seven. Sorry. 7 0 5. It's now after seven, so. It was a long day. Yeah, and we had to drive a couple hours to get here, but it can be amazingly frustrating trying to find boondocking spots, and we're in a little van that's pretty easily, you know, able to get to a lot of spots, so if you're in a big trailer or big motorhome and you're not used to it, it's going to be frustrating at first. And that's why to go of what I was saying earlier, the big rigs sit for the full extent of the full two weeks that they're allowed. Yeah. Because it can be a pain, and it can be exhausting. But there's probably 30 or 40 fifth wheels out here. I mean, that's a lot. That's how busy it is right now. So you plan ahead, go on a... Thursday is a really bad day, we think. We're finding that Thursday afternoon. Thursday is a new Friday. It is. People start coming Thursday, Friday, Saturday is busy. If you go on those three days. If we would have gotten in this morning, it would have been a different story probably. Oh yeah. But as soon as that noon time comes where people can take a half day, then you're going into the three and a half day weekend. Yeah. But once you get to a spot and you have your own little private beach and lake access, and there is nobody that's within a couple hundred feet of us. It's really, really beautiful here. Like on its own, this location is a jackpot. Somehow we just turned down the right road and found a little pull off spot that's perfect. Hey, some good news. I think I got the coffee out of my sweatshirt. Oh good. Looks clean. Feels like a week ago that you washed that in Colorado Rocky Mountain National Park. It's still wet with Rocky Mountain water. Nice. So I just wanted to talk about that for a second because it can be frustrating. It's not all beautiful, lovely places. I mean, it is once you get there, but it takes a little bit of planning and a little bit of time to get there. And you usually have to, you have to stay patient with the situation and with each other and just remember how lucky you are to be in this situation. Yeah. You know, it's like you can't get frustrated and complain because you're driving around looking for a spot to sleep. Well, how cool is it to be driving around looking for a spot to sleep? So you got to keep your mindset straight. Yep. And the more you do it, the better you get at it. So this, these reservoirs were new to us. This is very recreational here. There's a lot of boaters. There's a lot of people that are out for the weekend or for a long four day weekend. So we're used to going out into the middle of a national forest. And so we're comfortable with that. So this is a little bit different of a, of a BLM for us, but really it's the same. But these trailers, I don't know if you can see that coming on the road, like every couple of minutes, another, another rig is coming down the road. Yeah. The vehicle are rolling in and out and about. I don't know if they're coming in or coming out, but it's, it's busy. Yeah. It's June 11th or whatever the date is. It's not like it's anything crazy, but it feels, it feels like it's, it's a holiday out here. It does feel like 4th of July. Yeah. Which is right around the corner. Finding the perfect boondocking dispersed free camping site has been a little tough for us. We've found some numerous places that are very, very, very close to perfect. This one is not perfect. It's got a, it's got a couple dings against it, doesn't it? Yeah. We had attack of the killer moths last night. We had like, it's like a horror movie. I swear there was like 20 moths in here. Yeah. They hit out during the day. And then at night, once you turn the lights off and then turned them back on, we opened a cabinet and like three or four popped out. Then we opened another cabinet and more popped out and other little bugs. Lots of bugs here. Yeah. It's very, you can kind of see we're right next to the water. It's a little swampy, but it's really nice. There's a little beach down there and we've been here for two days now and it, it's really nice spot, but the internet, we got two bars of Verizon here. So the reason we're heading out right now is because there is no upload speed here. There's a few bars download and we were able to stream and, and work and wifi call. Okay. But the upload speed is absolutely horrendous here. And I tried for the past day to upload a video and it's just not working. So we're going to head to town. For tomorrow's video. Yeah. Yeah. Actually for tomorrow's video. Um, that's, it's kind of tough about traveling, driving, hunting, finding. It's really hard to get your little routine down and get going, but we are going to leave our rug and chairs again. And hopefully everybody, no, no, no, no, no. At this time we're getting more totally unnecessary. You can see those moths hopping around. Yeah. And we're getting a little more comfortable with, uh, leaving our stuff. We left them back in Moab and, but it's really, really busy here. You can see a string of fifth wheels there. There's probably, Oh man, I don't know, 50 to a hundred campers at this place. It's I'd say a hundred easily. Yeah. Because down at the very end there was like 50 down there. Yeah. That was insane. It is just, it's a beautiful spot. It's really nice. If, if we had this growing up next to where we lived, a free, uh, camping for seven days in a reservoir, I mean, you'd have family reunions out here celebrating birthdays. It's what a cool spot, but I haven't done a video on that's our little Mimo Wi-Fi, uh, or our Mimo, uh, cell booster for our Verizon hotspot. And we have a, we boost, uh, like the four drive four GX or whatever it's called. Uh, we bought that right away before we even got our van because all of my research said, you got to have a four G drive X. We boost, you know, that's what everybody said was the best. And so far it hasn't been that handy, I guess the last 18 months. And we just bought that little, um, Mimo booster maybe, I don't know, six months ago. Did we get that? Yeah. It's been a little while. Yeah. And that was after seeing a video from the mobile internet resource center from Chris and Cherie, um, doing one on that little booster. So that thing's like 20 bucks. The, we boost is $500 and we found ours at a really good deal. I think we paid like 350, but I want to do a little comparison video because I think if you have the capability of using that little, Oh, that little, uh, booster it's way better. So that will be coming up in the future. So we woke up this morning and our solar wasn't charging at all. It went right to float mode. So I open it up back here and you can see how fried the power wire is, uh, the positive to the battery. Um, the fuse isn't blown. That's a 20 amp fuse. So it's weird that it would just melt like that. I don't know if that charge controller just malfunctioned. Um, very unusual. Yeah. The charge controller is definitely fried. So I'm not sure if it was something I did or if it's something, uh, defective with the controller itself. We've had this since December of 2018. So a year and a half now over a year and a half. Um, and we haven't had any issues with it at all. Um, but I think like a month ago I did smell some burning and I thought it was my laptop cause it was kind of working on high and the fan was ripping and I think it was this. So now our generator's on the fritz and now our controller is on the fritz. So we don't have any way to charge our batteries except for driving or plugging in, but we haven't plugged in for almost totally forgot about that option. We haven't plugged in for seven weeks now, uh, but we're two weeks away from getting back home. About two weeks. We'll be, we'll be driveway surfing on the second. So yeah, two weeks. Okay. Yeah. Well, this is part of RV life and part of having, um, an electrical system like this. So I'm going to look into contacting Victron. I don't know if it's covered under warranty or if it's, like I said, something I did, but, uh, either way we were looking at possibly upgrading that to the 130, um, because we wanted to maybe put some more solar on the roof. I got some guys helping me out here. They're not doing a very good job though. I'm a better helper than they are. Yeah, you are Chris. They just kind of look at me funny and chomp their hay. So while we're leaving this spot tomorrow, this is Wyoming. Beautiful gray rocks reservoir. It's awesome. It's been an interesting little spot here with the cows and moths. We get attacked by moths, flies. The water's awesome. It was a good change up. We're happy we came. We're hitting some speed bumps here. We got to get the solar figured back out. We might have to, we might have to plug in somewhere and charge back up because driving just does not charge up quick enough. It will, it'll charge maybe 50 percent in like four or five hours of driving. It would take us a full day of driving. To charge all the way back up, yeah. Yeah, which we don't plan on doing. Yeah, it's, it only charges about 35 amps an hour. 35 to 40. So at a 400 amp battery bank, if we were empty, that would take 10 hours of driving. But I don't know. Rough morning. Rough morning. Cows are hanging out underneath the tree, taking a little afternoon siesta. And you can see how dangerous this is with the wire melting. I mean, that's very dangerous. That's how fires start. And it'll be interesting to see what is the cause of that. But no matter how new or how old your RV is, you're always working on something. And that's kind of the tough part about RVing, especially if you're out boondocking. You're kind of out in the middle of nowhere. And if you break down, then it's, it can be a problem. Well, we're having a rougher day than the cows are today. Well, it is time to say goodbye to Gray Rocks Reservoir. We spent six days here and we kind of have mixed signals about it right now. It started off really positive. It's so beautiful. It's on this nice, large reservoir that's manmade. There's tons of people fishing. And over the weekend, it was really hot and there was boaters and jet skis and tubers. And, and it was great until we noticed on, was it the first night? No, it was the second night after being here for a full day, we got attacked by moths inside the van. I mean, there was like 50 of them in here. Yeah, the first night was really, really bad. And then each night after that, there was about five or six or seven moths. Every single night at nine o'clock, they like came up through the walls and they just started walking on the windows and... Well, and then you'd, you'd wake up, you'd, you'd get rid of a couple, you'd go back to bed and then you close your eyes and then you hear that. So then it's like, oh, it's like... It's very, I don't know. It's, it's the middle of June. So it's kind of like summer starting. The bugs are coming out. It's right by the water. So obviously there's gonna be a lot more bugs. But I kind of put bugs in like three categories. One is no bugs. That's the best category. Two are bugs that annoy you. And that's like what we have here, flies and moths and there's just a lot of like little things that are swarming around and... I think that the bugs that are here are going into category three. Category three are the ones that bite. These are starting to bite me. And sting. I know, but I'm... I got like 19 bug bites this morning cutting your hair. I'm talking like mosquitoes and or like things that really like, like the really big biting flies. I know they just started this morning, but we didn't have any flies the rest of the time. I'm putting this at a 2.5. Yeah. For you, definitely. You're always a notch above because they like to... They like me. They really do. Yeah. The woes are starting to hit us a little bit. So the batteries are great. Nothing wrong with batteries. They're actually keeping us alive. Yeah. I misspoke there. Our Battleborns are working awesome and that's a good thing, but we have no way to charge them when we're sitting. So our generators on the Fritz, we've really never used our generator that much. So we're hoping to, when we get back towards Minneapolis to have a friend, help us kind of tune it up a little bit and get it working. Cause the thing only has like 20 hours on it. But with our solar on the Fritz, that's what happened. This is our Victron charge controller and it fried on the positive side. So it was actually quite dangerous. That could have started a fire. You know, so on the good side, nothing came out of it harmful, but we do need to get that replaced, which we're in the process of actually talking with some of the guys at Battleborn this afternoon when we get some cell signal to kind of troubleshoot it a little bit. Yeah. They were super responsive to help us. And then, which is another thing, we don't have good cell service here. And that was one more thing that's mounting on the aggravation list. That's why this site was kind of like, it's bordered between like awesome and not so awesome just because of like those things. So her calls went great on Sunday. We called actually a few days before that. I had 20 calls on Sunday. I went through 20 of them without any issues. And then for some reason, Monday morning we woke up and we were just like dead signal. And I'm like, I don't know how we got so lucky. Yeah. The service was worse, but, uh, this is a very popular spot for the locals during the weekend. There was probably a hundred rigs here when we first got in. So we got really lucky to find a private spot here. Um, so I like it. It's peaceful. It's just, um, you know, a few, few negative things about it, but anyways, we are ready to move on where we got to get the solar thing figured out because they'll, the batteries will charge when we drive, but only 15 minutes on and 20 minutes off. So basically, you know, twice an hour or every 35 minutes it starts a charge cycle after that. Um, and that charges like 35 to 40 amps an hour. So to charge our whole battery bank up, it would take 10 hours of driving and we're probably at, you know, 25 or 30 percent. We're probably going to drive like four hours today. Yeah. We're just going to head towards a rapid city, South Dakota, which is where we want to spend the last two weeks of our stint before we start heading back to Wisconsin and Minneapolis. Time's flying. Yeah, absolutely. So I think that's it. We're going to get moving and we'll check back in when we get to our next spot, which we actually don't know where that is. Um, but we got a few spots picked out. See, they're going to be in Nebraska or South Dakota. Yeah. There's a few good spots that, uh, we'll get figured out. See ya. Let's go.