Raven’s RV
The ongoing education and adventures of two rank newbie RVers

Oct 24, 2007

Camp Flying J, Lodi

So, we had some fun with our electrical system today, but we’ll get to that in a short while. ;)

Don hadn’t known about Flying J’s friendliness towards RVs, but it was pretty obvious once we pulled in and saw the sign pointing to a parking area for cars/RVs. We signed up for a $5/night wireless service and a quick search revealed that it was the same basic common sense policy as Wal-Mart: buy something from the provider of free overnights. They even provided a nice pull-through space for us. Easy parking–woot!

We had an interesting night playing with our electrical system. We ran out of water, and our house battery went flat. It’s not a good battery, and it obviously hadn’t been thoroughly tested before we bought the RV. Don did something magical involving physics lessons I’d never had so that my laptop with its own dying battery could run off the house power; however, since the house battery’s demise resulted in piercing shrieks from an alarm system we had to periodically also run the generator. This is considered kind of rude, but I also had a lot of writing to catch up on, and our neighbors were doing it too. Right next to the freeway, it’s unlikely that anyone would be that bothered in any case. ;)

When you turn off the generator, there is a disconcerting dim in the lighting before the battery kicks in, sort of like in horror movies when the lights flicker…and go out. We were fortunate. We avoided their going out.

Don played Grateful Dead on the CD player. The music is piped backwards and is decent quality. Funny to hear Truckin’ while we were staying still, though. ;)