We hit our breaking point
After leaving the Grand Tetons, we had plans to travel across the state of Wyoming. We were well equipped with everything we needed for a summer of boondocking. We had our solar setup, new toilet, and with the exception of a few minor issues, everything in the RV was working properly. We knew that Wyoming would be a departure from many of the places we had traveled thus far, and we expected to spend our days in rural areas, enjoying lakes and farmland, and slowing down to a relaxed pace.
Initially, we thought we might just wing it and book places to stay as we traveled along. The biggest problem with that, though, was that the further east you go, the less Wyoming has. We didn't want to end up in the middle of nowhere with few options, but we did want to end up in the middle of nowhere with some options. So, for the first time since we began traveling full-time, I sat down and planned a more detailed itinerary.
This would be our longest stint boondocking, which meant we would need to prepare, buy the necessary provisions, and plan our travel days around doing the necessary chores: Dumping, laundry, grocery shopping, etc. I spent a lot of time looking at the towns we'd pass through on each travel day, noting where we could do all these things. Because we'd be towing, we couldn't just pull off and park anywhere. We'd need parking lots large enough to accommodate us, within walking distance to groceries, a laundromat, and anything else we needed.
Things were going well, and once everything was planned, I was actually pretty excited. This was the very reason we got solar, so that we could boondock for extended periods of time and really embrace the off-grid lifestyle. We had our final few days of full hookups at Longhorn Ranch in Dubois, WY, where we made sure to fully stock our kitchen, get our remaining projects done, and take our long showers before jumping into major water conservation. Our first stop would be Boysen State Park, a campground/beach/marina on the Boysen Reservoir and Wind River. It's also the largest state park in Wyoming. I found us a lakefront site at the very end of the park's Tamarask Campground, and I had one thing and one thing only on my mind...
I welcomed the idea of going nowhere and having days of just relaxing on the lake, getting work done, and having room to breathe. We had been moving very fast up until that point, with too many major adventures to even count. Sometimes it's nice to not have bucket list items that we're rushing to check off.
We arrived to an almost-empty campground loop, with only one neighbor tent camping in the site next to us. We immediately noticed that we'd not just be lakefront. Any further, and Buggy would be going for a swim! Still a little traumatized from our flood experience, we had some mental obstacles to overcome being so close to a body of water, but we knew the reservoir water levels were controlled and there was no rain in the forecast for several days. Plus, who can deny the awesomeness of getting to camp with this view?!
We literally had water on three sides, and we'd get to do work while looking out the window to this:
But still, even after we settled into our spot, we continued to feel unsettled. It didn't help that we were already worrying about the water, and then when we tried to level the trailer, our levelers kept sinking. We remedied it by putting wood planks under the levelers, but we weren't sure if we were risking our trailer sinking into the ground if we stayed for several days. After we unhitched, we kept checking our LevelMate to make sure we weren't slowly sinking.
We had recently left a dispersed camping spot early because of the willy nilly nature of our neighbors, and we got the feeling that this place might be culturally similar. Our neighbor was very nice and had the cutest dogs that kept coming over to visit us, but he had told us that he was passing by and saw how empty it was, and so he decided to grab his tent and camp out for a couple nights. Totally not a problem typically, but when we arrived to the park, we noticed that it was not being manned at the entrance gate or anywhere else for that matter. Many of the campground reviews stated the same thing. No camphosts, no rangers, no workers. We had an inkling that locals might use this place to come and "camp," aka party, and we didn't want any part of that. We wanted a quiet time to regroup after our busy Yellowstone and Teton adventures. We didn't want to have to deal with more moochers coming in and out, not paying for sites, and potentially even invading our space.
We decided to sit with our feelings for a little while and see how things played out, only they got worse. It was the middle of the week, so we didn't yet know if our gut instinct was correct about the party vibe, but we had entered into a massive heatwave, the one that most people in the US were experiencing - only we were in a desert in Wyoming with no tall trees and a sun shining so hot that we might as well be directly on it.
Temps were getting well into the 90s most days, with some days inching up to 100. Because we had no electricity, we were running off limited air conditioning. Our solar setup is hefty enough for us to run one AC off our batteries, but it depletes them pretty fast. We found ourselves running our generator every day just to keep up, which used a lot of fuel. We also kept getting alarms that our batteries, and even our inverter once, were overheating. We had similar issues in Vegas Bay, another place where we felt like we were living on the sun. While some of our Vegas Bay issues were our own, some are simply because there isn't good enough airflow in our storage bay, which houses our batteries and inverter. Anthony would open the doors and even stick a fan inside the bay, but that only does so much. Plus, we started questioning that solution one day when I came across this guy:
Did you know that rattlesnakes are really good climbers, and they can even swim? Trying to get it to not deter me from going in the lake, I did tell Anthony that perhaps keeping the bay doors open wasn't wise. Little snakey might enjoy the hot, dark area. So we ended up trying to just leave the doors open a crack, but no matter what we did, we still had occasional overheating messages.
The heat brings problems that aren't just equipment-related. We found ourselves in a routine where we constantly had to keep turning the AC on and off, turning the generator on and off, reminding ourselves whether or not the generator was on when we cooked, and figuring out how to actually sleep when it's past generator hours, we have no solar energy, and it's still in the 80s outside. Then, we had the bugs. The flies were loving some good, hot sunshine...well, either that or they too hated it, which is why they were so adamant about coming inside. And forget us actually going outside. Our only respite was going in the lake, but after a couple days, we got sick and tired of tracking in so much sand. It was far too hot to walk, especially being that the only place to walk was on the paved road, and the sun beat down on that road like crazy. I attempted to float, with my sun hat and parasol shielding me from sizzling like a fajita, but it was not the relaxing experience I had come to love on my floaty. I ended up just going in the water instead.
The weekend came and, as expected, it brought in the locals. Thankfully, besides some loud talking and music, things didn't get too rowdy. At least not from our viewpoint. But that Sunday morning, we witnessed some drama.
One of our neighbors needed to be picked up by med-flight and be flown to a hospital in Casper. We don't know exactly what happened, but our new neighbors the next site over told us that it seemed like heavy drinking was involved. The night before, our neighbors were sitting out by their firepit and these people invited them to go have drinks, which they declined, saying that drinks wasn't just going to be a few beers. So who knows what actually happened, but if that guy drank what we heard was at least an entire bottle of vodka, and then he went into the heat hungover, that's a recipe for some dangerous repercussions.
In talking with our neighbors, they mentioned that they were going to stay longer but decided to leave because the heat was too much and their generator was on the fritz. We all agreed that in this heat, we all just need to be okay with everyone running their generators during quiet hours. Clearly, it was a matter of safety.
Our window to leave would have been that day as well. We could bounce on out of there before the work week started. But in checking the forecast, we saw a light at the end of the very hot tunnel. Wednesday would usher in some storms, and the temperature was supposed to drop significantly. We just needed to hold out through Monday and Tuesday, so we committed to staying. Don't get me wrong, we definitely researched full hookup RV parks. I even found myself up at 2AM again looking for places to escape to, just as I had done during our dispersed camping debacle. But unlike the dispersed camping spot, we had already paid to be at Boysen. And also, were we really going to be the people that leave this site a week early?!
Sometimes the worst part of making a decision is the actual process of deciding, and once the decision is made, the brain can relax. We had a little bit of that reaction, and once we committed, we figured it was time to boost our spirits. We tried to relax and enjoy our evening. We played some games, one of which proved just how stir-crazy we had become. (This is the extended version of the video I posted on Instagram).
Then, when the sun set and the air finally cooled off, we took a late-night float in the moonlight.
The psychology of slowing down is interesting. After struggling our way through the week, we realized that we weren't actually having that difficult a time, circumstantially. After all, we weren't evacuating floods or getting struck by lightning. We were in a beautiful campsite, met some nice people, and most days had the campground loop to ourselves, which was so wonderfully quiet. We hadn't sunk in the sand and the lake's water levels hadn't come anywhere near our rig. Most of our problems stemmed from our minds. We had been running around like crazy since Montana, and this was our first time in weeks that our brains could actually think about something other than travel adventures and RV projects. So they started exacerbating the little issues we were having, making them seem much larger than they were. I even found myself getting homesick for the first time all year, thinking about how this time last year, we were far east enough that we detoured over to New England for a little while. This year, we're out on our own. Granted, the heat was actually really uncomfortable, but in another headspace, we probably wouldn't have thought about fleeing our site as much. Our brains simply recalled the last time we fled, and they perceived this situation as a similar threat. Once we decided to stay our second week, we could focus on calming our minds and making sure they weren't perceiving threats that weren't actually there. One way we did this was by planning a purposeful excursion. We decided to take a trip into Thermopolis, a small Wyoming town known for its hydrothermal features, making its state park look almost like a mini-Yellowstone. We needed to go super early in the morning, because even then the temps were in the 80s, hotter in the sun. But we desperately needed to do some exploring. That was clearly what our brains needed to ensure that we weren't sitting ducks, bobbing in the middle of a danger zone. We took a very sunny, hot hike up T Hill, which thankfully was an easy hike because any worse and I probably would have passed out. No matter how much water I drank, I still had bouts of dizziness. We got to see a pair of pronghorns closer than we ever had up to that point, and boy are they beautiful up close! Then we went over to the hydrothermal terraces. Heat aside, our little morning adventure was a huge morale boost.
After that, the storms came in, and our highs up near 100 disappeared. Even though we still couldn't go outside much due to the on-and-off thunderstorms, we finally could open our windows and shades (which we had been keeping shut to block the heat from the sun), and soak in the outstanding view. From Sunday to Friday, we were totally neighborless except for two RVs that came in just for a quick overnight. It was so peaceful being cozy inside on the rainy days, with no one else in our line of sight. That's exactly the kind of leisurely summer vibes we wanted for our summer in Wyoming. Those of us in the RV world call these periods of struggle "dips." They're bound to happen when living this unconventional life, but they're almost always temporary. We're glad we stayed at Boysen long enough to make it out of our dip, so we could see the good that awaited us on the other side.