I’ve heard for years how beautiful Eleven Mile State Park is and it did not disappoint. There is not much nearby, so not much cell service either, which we weren’t quite prepared for. The next lesson we learned was to make sure we have all campsite info downloaded/offline. Without cell service, my phone would not show the reservation details in the confirmation email. I had the loop and site # in the trip planner app on my phone, but when we got there, none of the loop’s site numbers matched our reservation. We were confused until I got my computer out of the RV and figured out our reservation was for the Rocky Ridge campground across the street (not the North Shore one we had be driving around in — I made these reservations about 6 months ago, so I didn’t remember the details.). Making extra turns pulling our long trailer isn’t ideal, but thankfully campgrounds have lots of loops!
It’s funny how relative things can be. We would not normally think a 45 minute one-way trip to see a National Monument would be worth it, but given that it’s the closest thing to do around the state park, we decided to make the drive to visit the Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument. It had a nice visitor center and hike with cool petrified tree stumps. While we were there, we visited the nearby Hornbek Homestead. It’s fascinating to see the old buildings, especially when they are original, and imagine how people lived back then.
The next day, we decided to see how far we could climb up a large rock hill that was near our campsite. We got further than I thought we would and were rewarded with a nice view AND cell service! 🙂 We later learned we could just hike a little higher from our site without climbing the rocks to get service, so we took advantage of that a few times. (People probably thought we were weird for hanging out next to the lockers for tenters to keep food from bears, but no one said anything to us.)
It wasn’t actually as easy as I imagined it would be to slow down at a remote location. We struggled a bit to figure out how to spend our time without internet, but we managed — we took naps, played a game, read paperback books, rode our Lectric bikes, and finally got to try out our new Solo Stove since the fire ban was lifted the day we arrived. It was pretty easy to start the fire in the stove, even in the windy conditions. Unfortunately, the length of the our chopped wood was a little too long to fit all the way down in it. Once the wood burned down, though, the stove was less smokey than normal campfires as they claim, which was nice. Beside enjoying its non-smokey warmth, we cooked a couple of meals on it and roasted marshmallows. So, while the Solo Stove gets a good rating from us, it remains to be seen whether its benefits will outweigh the extra weight and space it takes in our storage compartment.
Since this campground did not have water hookups, we practiced conserving our fresh water tank’s water while washing dishes and taking showers. I think we did pretty good, with using less than about 15 gallons in 5 days. (Randy took one of his showers at the campground facility and we refilled our drinking water jug at their potable water spigot, but still.) We learned how our RV’s water system can pump water from an external container into the fresh water tank, so that’s reassuring. If we ever run out of water while boondocking, we won’t have to move the RV to refill it — we can just bring water to it. We also unplugged from the electrical outlet most of the time to make sure our solar setup would function well enough for us when boondocking. So far so good! I think we’re ready to go off-grid!!
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