Jan 13, 2023 Day 5 Carlsbad, NM

Happy Friday, the 13th! Overnight the temperatures dipped into the 20s and by morning, the hose connecting the park’s water to our camper had developed some ice. We were rather perturbed at ourselves for not thinking of bringing the hose in overnight to avoid this problem and potentially much worse problems if the water lines in the camper burst from freezing. Fortunately, after bringing the water hose in this morning, it soon thawed out and no other major problems occurred.

Yesterday, we had moved to site #8 from site #24. These moves were precipitated by others reserving these sites before we did. Looking on the bright side by moving 4 times in this campground, we are getting quite good at hitching up and unhitching, I think we got it under 10 minutes for each.

This is the 3rd or 4th campground where we had site #8 – maybe our lucky number if we go to Vegas?! Before moving to our next site, we decided to take the camper to the dump station located near the Visitors Center in the park. Some campgrounds have full hookups, which is electric, water, sewer and others have partial hookups, water and electric only, like here at Brantley Lake State Park. Our gray tank (washing dishes, face, brushing teeth etc) holds 30 gallons and the black tank (you guessed it, from the toilet) is 34 gallons. When using a dump station, Ron always dumps the black tank first, followed by the gray. Since they both go out of the same drain and the gray water helps clean out any residue from the black tank dump. Most dump stations will also have a water line available that we use to add water back into our black tank for one last swish and drain. That’s probably more information than you ever wanted to know about dump stations, but we wanted to share :)!

After work, we ran into town for laundry and groceries. We decided to fix frozen pizzas for supper, saving dishes, time etc. since we’ve been on the go and hungry when we got back. Unfortunately, I forgot the cardinal rule ‘Slow is Pro’ when preparing the pizzas. We had 2 pizzas, one gluten free and the other regular and I thought I’d speed up the process by baking both at the same time. To make a long story short, I had burnt GF pizza for supper. Lesson learned: Cook 1 pizza at a time or put Ron’s pizza on the bottom :)!