Friday October 11th 2019

It was a little above forty degrees inside the RV this morning. Once the sun started to hit the side of the RV it began to warm up quickly inside.

I took my time getting ready to depart this morning. I only had about eighty miles to travel and I was waiting for the fifth wheel trailer in front of my RV home to pack and leave. The way the campground is laid out, I would have had to back out of my site if the rig in front didn’t leave. Backing up without disconnecting the towed car is not possible, so I was content to wait for the clear space in front. The fifth wheel finally departed at 10:45 and I followed a couple of minutes later. It turned out they had the same destination I had. They were checking in when I arrived.

Since I had another bunch of desert to cross today, I topped off the gas tank in the town of Beatty before I got into travel mode. It was another day of heavy traffic on a two lane road at sixty to seventy miles an hour. There was more wind today than yesterday. Detecting wind in these desert areas is hard. The brush along the side of the road isn’t big enough to provide a good indicator of wind direction or strength. It’s easy to get surprised by gusts or find the transmission is downshifting on level ground to compensate for a head wind.

I arrived at the Lakeside Casino and RV Park in Pahrump NV about 12:30. Pahrump is about sixty miles north and a little west of Las Vegas. It’s in a wide valley on the other side of a high ridge from the Las Vegas valley. I’ve been to Pahrump on day trips while staying in Las Vegas several times. The community is a little more developed and built up than I remember. With a population over 36,000 it is bigger than I remember.

This campground is built around a small lake behind a Casino. There are about 150 nice sites with cement pads and full hookups. The campground has a good compliment of winter residents and the lake has a good variety of wildlife to provide stable neighbors for the campers. I’ll be here for two weeks before moving on to Las Vegas for the winter.