Blogapalooza

As the old timers say, it’s been a month of Sundays since my last post. So, to make up for this blogging drought, I’m going to post a number of updates over the next several days.

Here goes . . .

HAVASU BALLOON FESTiVAL & FAIR (January 10, 11, 12, & 13th)

I’ll just say it . . . I was too lazy to get up in the morning in order to take pictures of the balloons lifting off, but, bless her, Jan got up and took these photos . . .

 

 

 

RANDOM SHOTS

We’re Staying!

 

Up until about a week ago, we were dead set on eventually selling our Arizona park model and then buying a “real” house, probably back in Wisconsin where both Jan and I spent most of our life

Well . . .

About a week ago when Jan talked with our financial planner about our plans, he said “Why would you want to move back to Wisconsin?”

Good question. Really good question.

While it might seem like we changed our minds rather quickly, I believe we’ve been thinking about permanently staying in Arizona for a long time. We love the SouthWest. With our RV, we’re close to a number of absolutely superb places . . . the desert, Grand Canyon, Sedona, full hookup AZ state parks, Zion and Bryce, Coachella (check out Blackpink), CA Sierras, . . . . Also, we’re “hooked” into the community now, especially Jan. (I have to schedule using our Jeep because she’s so busy.) Our doctors are here. And, of course, those scarlet sunsets . . .

Finally, Flirt loves it here. She goes on long walks, swims in Lake Havasu, plays with neighbor dogs, watches EVERYTHING from our porch (especially that white cat).

To cement our decision to stay, we’re in the process of adding a room to our park model. It will serve as a guest bedroom and Jan’s artsy fartsy room. This will increase our park model square footage to around 530 square feet. That’s living!

Anyway, I’m motivated as hell now, so it only took two days to finish the Demolition Phase of the room addition . . .

 

We’ll keep you posted on our progress . . .

Booking Banff

Several years ago when I was working in Green Bay, WI, I came across the picture above. It was taken by a RVer camping at Banff National Park in Alberta, Canada.

It was love at first site. Jan and I both wanted to camp Banff.

Last Wednesday (January 9th) I was able to book a 10-night stay this July in Banff’s Tunnel Mountain Trailer Court campground . . . 7 of those 10 nights are in a prime (“the prime” to me) campsite.

Here’s how I did it . . .

PRE-BOOKING RESEARCH

First, besides Banff National Park there are a number of campgrounds in the Banff area (see RV Park Reviews). However, I’ll only talk about the Banff National Park campgrounds.

By the way, if you’re not a planner, then this post isn’t for you. Though we pretty much do not plan each and every campground stop, we do plan extended stays and highly desirable campgrounds. Banff is the latter.

Where is Banff?

Depending on which route you take, Banff is about 600 to 750 miles from Seattle. The town of Banff (4500′ elevation) has a population of about 8,000.

The three Banff National Park Tunnel Mountain campgrounds (Village I, Village II, and Trailer Court) are located just a few miles outside of Banff itself.

Since the Trailer Court campground provides full hookups (water, 30A electric, and sewer), it’s the best for our needs.

While we can go about 4 days without a sewer connection to our motorhome, we really can’t go more than a day without an electric hookup. When we used to camp in Wisconsin state parks, we typically had just an electric and maybe a water hookup. But if we stayed longer than about 4 days at one of those non-sewer sites, we would have to make a trip to the park’s dump station to empty our waste tanks. This has become a PITA as we have aged, so we’re always looking for full hookup sites.

CAMPGROUND RESEARCH

For long-term stays like Banff, I typically research the campground where we plan to stay and also the best campground sites.

Since we had already determined that Trailer Court was the best campground because it had full hookups, the next step was to determine the best sites — for us.

Keep in mind that our campsite criteria may not be yours. For example, we prefer not to camp in the woods. We did that for almost a decade in Wisconsin campgrounds. We now prefer the clear sky campgrounds so prevalent in the SouthWest where we’ve lived for several years.

Non-tree campgrounds usually allow us to receive DISH satellite television and HughesNET Gen 5 satellite Internet service. We schlepp around during the day taking in the scenery where we’ve camped, but at night we like our TV and our Internet.

However, any type of satellite service looked to be problematic in Banff. This is tree country, so I needed to check camp sites that may have clear views of the sky . . . in particular the southern sky because that’s where the DISH and HughesNET satellites are located.

STEP 1 – WHERE EXACTLY IS EACH CAMPSITE?

While it’s vital to determine where to point in the sky for DISH TV and HughesNET satellites, it’s just as important to find the location of campground sites. This is necessary to see if there are any obstructions (trees, buildings, mountains, etc) for a clear line of sight.

There are PDF maps of all the campgrounds on the Banff National Park’s website like this one for Trailer Court which is not very precise:

 

However, I was able to “reverse engineer” the Trailer Court PDF to expose a more detailed map:

 

Finally, I now had a more detailed map of each campsite in Banff:

 

STEP 2 – WHAT DO PARK REVIEWERS SAY?

Before I book a campground site, I check RV Park Reviews.

Another good information source are the online RV forums like Escapees, IRV2, RV.net, and RV Forum.

In addition, RV blogger travel sites can be great sources. For example, RV Adventures created a Trailer Court YouTube video in which he visited many of the Trailer Court campsites. Invaluable!

STEP 3 – GOOGLE MAPPING

Once I determined where each campsite was located, the next step was to use Google Maps to investigate the “best” sites. Remember, “best” for us means a site without trees and a clear view of the southern sky.

Using the Google Maps Satellite, Map, and Street views, I investigated Banff’s Village II Campground:

 

 

 

After eliminating most of the tree’d campsites, I located several potential candidates in Trailer Court. The best sites with clear views of the southern skies seemed to be #141 and #143:

 

 

 

STEP 4 – WHERE ARE THE DISH AND HUGHESNET SATELLITES?

This step is easy. The Dish Pointer website gives you a host of information about satellites like the ones used by DISH and HughesNET.

Dish Pointer even shows you where to point your satellite dish from your current location:

As a side note, those of you with DISH know you can get the local TV stations wherever you’re camped. You just contact DISH, tell them where you are, and they’ll reset your DISH receiver to the TV stations near your campground.

However, this could be a problem in Canada. Using Satelliteguys The List, I checked if there were any US TV stations I might receive in Banff.

I think I might be able to receive the local TV stations from Spokane, WA:

 

Finally, I mapped the DISH TV and HughesNET satellite locations onto the Trailer Court map:

 

BOOKING THE SITE

After all my research, I tried reserving campsites in Banff a few months ago, but couldn’t because Banff 2019 reservations started on January 9th at 8 am MST.

As soon as I saw not only a date but a specific time, I though “Uh oh”. This reminded me of when I tried to book prime Wisconsin campsites on Reserve America 6 months in advance. As that 6-month day approached, you had to be on your computer, endlessing clicking the Reserve button until you either got the reservation or someone else did. Great fun.

Therefore, I expected that there would be tons of people trying to book Banff at 8 am on January 9th. And, indeed, there were.

Even though I did several test runs reserving my favorite site, at about 7:50 AM on that day, the Banff website slowed and then crashed.

Here’s the movie . . .

 

Regardless, I was finally able to book what-I-hope-will-be-a-great-site #141 for several days this summer.

Was all this trouble worth it?

Well, here’s what’s available in Trailer Court only 2 days later. I couldn’t find more than 2 consecutive days through September:

HughesNET Gen 5 – 2nd Evaluation

About 6 months ago I published my first evaluation of our HughesNET Gen 5 satellite Internet system. At that time I think I was a little disappointed with the results because I was expecting higher speeds.

While the average speed of over 20 Mbps was fast, especially for satellite Internet, I was led to believe that I would see of 40 to 60 Mbps.

However, I wasn’t really that disappointed as I found that 20 Mbps was pretty much the maximum download speed I could expect.

Nevertheless, I’ve decided to try to repeat these evaluations. So, over 4 days this December I conducted HughesNET Gen 5 speed test again, and here are the results . . .

 

According to the test results, I’ve lost ground . . . about 5 Mbps slower. My testing was comprehensive (see HughesNET Gen 5 Evaluation 2 Data).

I’ll retest after several months when we’re back on the road and see what happens then.

What We’ve Been Doing

It’s been over a month since we last blogged. Here’s some of the things we’ve been doing . . .

WATCHED TWO A10 WARTHOGS FLY OVER US

 

GOT FLIRT AND OLLIE TOGETHER AGAIN

 

INVESTIGATED A BEACHED PONTOON BOAT

 

BEGAN “WALKING THE ISLAND” ON A REGULAR BASIS

It’s about a 4-mile walk from our Crazy Horse park model and around the island walking/biking path:

 

The island is home to a World War Two landing field (“Site Six”). Parts of the two asphalt runways still remain (solid lines in photo above). The runway numbers — “20” and “23” — are still visible on Google.

 

From our island walks . . .

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And now this . . .