Saturday, April 13, 2024:
Spending the 2nd night at: Pines Trails Campground in Robber’s Cave State Park near Wilburton Oklahoma
Weather- clear & sunny. Hi 80, low 58, Humidity Hi 68%, low 29% A warm beautiful day!!
Around noon, before it got too hot, we took Kawi for a spin. But first, we changed out the windshield to the short one so we could get some air-flow. The full glass windshield is nice when the weather is cooler or if there’s some rain in the forecast, but we knew today would be too toasty for that. We set out to see what the trails were like, thinking we wouldn’t be gone long. This made me laugh… At he beginning of the rocky trail, there was the “Tent Camping” sign. Apparently you have to trek all of your stuff in by foot to tent camp here!!
The topography was very rocky. There are these random big boulders all over the place in the forest here. There is not much underbrush, so I wonder if that is normal for this time of year, or if the park rangers keep it trimmed down. It’s nice to be able to look through the forest, but we did not see any critters…. not even Earl the squirrel.
Alrighty then! This was looking like we were going to have much more challenging riding than I anticipated…. not just a ‘walk in the park’ kind of day!
Sheesh! Boulders and big rocks everywhere!
There were trails that went all over the place, and we didn’t have a map, so we’d just pick a direction and go. The only thing we had was our gps in the GAIA app, which we like to use when we’re in National Forests. It did show some tracks from previous riders so we had a few ideas of where we could go. But man! Some of these trails were gnarly!! And steep! I had to stop using my camera on this one, and held on for dear life as we climbed up the side of the mountain.
I really held on! I held on so tight that I ended up with tiny waffles in my hands from holding onto the “oh $h!t” bar!! That has never happened before.
Later I looked closer at the map and realized that we were climbing nearly 300’ in elevation each time we went from south to north. The light blue lines are our tracks. The Oh $h!t hill is under the 0 of 800. We went along the top near the ‘1000’ to the right, and thought we’d take the perimeter road back down…thinking it would be less gnarly, right?
Uh – maybe not. We didn’t look at the elevations on the map, but looking at it now, obviously farther to the right was steeper terrain since the elevations waves were much tighter together. It was a really pretty view at the top, but didn’t look like a great way down. This hill would be better as a climb up, but not a fall down. So we saw a trail that went off to our right, and we went that way.
And even then, there was some really steep downies to do. I got out to look, and decided to stay out while Kenny and Kawi negotiated with the hill.
Wow! It was a much more interesting ride today than we expected. We were only out for an hour and went a total of 4.6 miles…. at an average speed of 3.5 mph. THAT tells you what kind of riding it was. Slow and rocky! There were only a few mud puddles so Kawi didn’t get too dirty.
Kenny gave him a bath when we got back, and we took a break in the air conditioning for awhile. It was a beautiful sunny day, and got up to about 80 degrees, not humid.
We were having weird issues with the power in Nitro. It was the weirdest thing. We were plugged in to 50 amp power. But somehow, one half of the circuit was flipping over to the battery in the trailer. Huh? Ya, it was weird. We have a little light indicator that says where power is coming from: Blue says power is AC coming in from the shore plug in. Green says power is DC coming from the batteries. The air conditioning will not run off the batteries, yet it continued to run when the green light would come on. But the fridge was definitely sucking battery. Kenny has an app on his phone that monitors the batteries and solar system. They were draining power. I don’t understand electricity at ALL, but it sounded like the system was completely confused. :/. We somehow did not have a multi-meter with us anywhere, which is weird. We always have one around for checking power stuff. So Kenny took a trip into Wilburton which was only about four miles away. They had a Tractor Supply, an O-Reilly Auto Parts, a grocery store, and a PIZZA HUT! He brought back a multi-meter and pizza! Yum! He checked all the power stuff and still couldn’t figure out how it was running on half on shore power and half on battery at the same time, other than it appeared that the amount of some kind of power element that we were getting from the shore plug-in was too much, so maybe that was causing an issue. He texted with our son-in-law Cam, the electrical genius of the family, and they knocked around ideas. I guess we’ll see how Nitro behaves the next time we’re plugged in, and that will help identify if it’s an internal Nitro problem or a shore power supply problem at this particular power pedestal.
Tomorrow, we’re off to Texas to have some cousin time with my dad’s sister’s oldest son Steve and his wife Carol.