Beachfront Property and the Price is Right!

As I’ve mentioned before we use several aps/websites to help us choose our campsites. We read a review of Rutherford Beach on Campendium and decided to check it out. Just outside of Creole, LA you can park your RV right on the beach and stay for FREE! Yes, it sounds too good to be true, but it’s public land managed by the Dept. of Fish & Wildlife and it is awesome!

I am always a little nervous when we take the short bus off road, so when we arrived on Tuesday afternoon (1/17) we unhooked the CRV and drove down the beach. There was a hard-packed sand “road” that was smoother than many a highway we’ve traveled and a broad area of pretty firm sand to park on just above the high tide line. The beach is easily a mile long with plenty of spots to pull off and it was nearly deserted!  We picked our spot and got settled in. We had a lovely sunset and were set to enjoy several days of beachfront living! Whoohoo.

Our beachfront property (at least for a few days). Lol.

Lovely colors at dusk.

Beautiful sunset our first day on the beach.

And that was the last decent weather we would see. Lol. Leave it to Mother Nature to throw us a curveball. We knew there was some rain forecast, but we got that along with days of dense fog, lightning and thunder, and wind. We had lots of time to read and relax. Rog and I would time our walkies around the rain. It was still a lot of fun. We would beachcomb for hours and I have two bags of shells to show for our efforts. Some days we were completely alone and on others there would be maybe one other RV or a few locals fishing. The cows in the nearby field were our closest neighbors. With the fog, we literally couldn’t see anybody else, so it felt like we had the place totally to ourselves.

Good day to stay inside and read!

Sunbreak - quick time to walk!

Our nosy neighbors. Lol. 

Enjoying the foggy solitude.

Beachcombing - who needs sunshine?! 

We found this cache left by another camper.
Apparently we're not the only ones who love a treasure hunt. Lol.

 We got lots of reading done too.

Nature's compensation for the damp weather - beautiful!

We noticed on Wednesday that our chassis batteries weren’t holding a charge like they should. The RV has two battery banks, the “house” batteries run the lights and 12v appliances in the coach and the “chassis” batteries start the diesel engine. We weren’t too worried, we ran the generator a couple times to charge both sets of batteries and just monitored the situation. By Friday, the chassis batteries were losing their charge overnight with no load. We made plans to stay a week at our next stop and get them replaced. In the meantime, we figured we could just use the battery booster which shunts power from the house batteries to the chassis if we needed to. 

Rog kept a sharp eye on the weather reports and the National Weather Service alerts. There was a big storm due in early Sunday with winds gusting close to 60mph. I’ll pass on that, thank you kindly. Our plan was to leave early Saturday morning and beat feet for Texas, getting west of the stormfront.

Apparently Mother Nature missed the memo and decided to get things started early. While we were watching a movie (making good use of the time the generator was running to charge the batteries, Lol), a tornado watch was posted for our area. There were hours of lightning, thunder and howling winds. The worst of the storm and the tornado alert ended around 2am and you can bet we didn’t get much sleep before then. Lol. Since this was just a warm up for the action on Sunday, I was really glad we weren’t hanging around.

Sunday morning we finished our preparations to leave, but when Rog went to start the coach… nothing. “Well, try the booster”, I said. “That was with the booster”, he said. Uh-oh. We started the generator, hooked up the trickle charger, did everything we could think of, but not a click. We left the generator run for an hour and the chassis battery amps were actually going down instead of up. Arrrrrrgh!

We decided to try to use the CRV to jump start it in conjunction with the booster. The first try got a tiny cough, but wasn’t enough to get the big diesel engine going. We left the CRV running and hooked up to chassis batteries for awhile and tried again. Sweet success!  There was no way we were staying on the beach another night, our next plan of action would have been to call for roadside (beachside??) assistance, but luckily that wasn’t necessary.

Even with the late start, we made it to the campground in Texas by 4pm. We are safely tucked in under the oaks and will be getting a new set of chassis batteries you can be sure.  :)