RV Travels: Weekly Wanderings #11 – Bryce Canyon
Every week seems to be a little different, which keeps things interesting. We've had some stress this week. Snow for four days straight temps below freezing.
We dealt with freezing temps before in New Mexico. At night we'd fill our water tanks, disconnect our hose from the park's water source and roll up our hose until the following morning when it warmed up enough to reconnect to the park's water.
Some posts on this site contain affiliate links, meaning if you book or buy something through one of these links, I may earn a small commission (at no extra cost to you!). Opinions are always my own and I’ll never promote something I don’t use or believe in. Also as an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
We did that here but then our own pipes froze! We'd been running the heat full time as the temps have been in the 30-40's so interior pipes were fine, it was the pipes in the wet bay that froze Wednesday morning, so no water was getting through.
So we did what people normally do these days, we Googled what the hell to do! Hairdryers and space heaters. My hairdryer is ancient and about to die so we drove 45 minutes to the closest hardware store and bought a space heater. Within 30 minutes that did the trick and we had water again!
We also hit our 50 Amp limit. If you will recall from last week, we moved from our original spot which was 30 amp because we were having too many problems. Well with running all 3 heaters, the floor heater, three computers etc., when I decided to vacuum while Mr. Misadventures was defrosting the pipes, I blew a fuse! Ahhh, RV life!
Despite the multiple days of snow, it melted each day by noon and it didn't prevent us from exploring the greater Bryce Canyon area. The hubby went back to the park every morning to do sunrise photos from various points. After three mornings I cried uncle and stayed home to work.
I will say I haven't brushed my hair in a week! I take a shower at night before we unhook the water and when I get up in the morning I put a ski cap on because it's cold! Life is super low maintenance right now!
Bryce is beautiful and we did some nice hikes. We drove the scenic Highway 12 byway and we also visited the Grand Staircase Escalante area, a favorite of ours from our 2012 Southwest road trip.
The area is massive and the color range of the rocks is incredible. From purple, picks and red to deep orange.
We stopped at a slot canyon along the Burr Trail in the Grand Escalante National Park. Mr. Misadventures was majorly bummed as this was on his Jeep 4×4 bucket list, a very technical 75-mile dirt road through the canyon. But it's paved now! Yay for everyone else who gets to see these gorgeous orange walls, sad face for all the off-road enthusiasts!
We did eventually hit a dirt road when we hit the Capitol Reef boundary but as we are spending the next week in that park we turned around. There will be posts on all our Bryce Canyon adventures coming soon.
RV misadventures this week:
> Freezing pipes in the wetbay, we had to buy a space heater to defrost them.
> Blew the 50 amp fuse, easily fixed.
Current location:
In route today, moving to Wonderland RV Park in Torrey Utah, near Capitol Reef National Park.
That’s it for this week! Happy escaping!
What have you been up to?
Nice rides 🙂 Driving in the snow must have been fun. Glad it cleared by noon every day so you can explore the area. Did you hit up Arches National Park as well?
@Hung, we just arrived in Capitol Reef where we will stay for 10 days, then we are headed to Moab where we will visit both Canyonlands and Arches.
I used to love visiting my great aunt and uncle in Manitou Springs, Colorado. You could see Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs from their deck, and we’d take trips down to explore and climb around the red rocks. We visited again a few years ago, and I was so bummed to see it was all paved! I was happy for the disabled who would never have gotten to see it up close otherwise, but still bummed that we no longer had the place mostly to ourselves. People tend to be more destructive when they travel in packs. :/
You do have to be careful of freezing pipes. We used to have a trailer which we would over-winter and frozen pipes was one of the things that we had to check regularly. We took all the precautions similar to your night time routine of disconnecting from the water supply, but we still had a worry that water was in the pipes and would do some damage that would be hard to reach. It never actually happened fortunately. Good use of a space heater if it does though.
Nice adventure you got there i hope i can also do that kind of trips coz my body is weak in cold and i need a good portable space heater.