I spent a week in Oasis, Thanksgiving week, as I prefer to not travel during holiday weeks. It’s such a hassle with the traffic and the last minute RVers who suddenly decide to invade a RV park leaving no spots available for us full timers. I learned this was a problem in the first two years I was traveling. You need to plan in advance of a holiday and get your ass parked before the crowds flock to the parks. Now, depending on how popular the area I’m staying at is for particular holidays, I’ll get to where I want to be a week or two in advance. Sometimes a month in advance. This gives me squatters rights at a RV park and also time to scout the area for other RV parks that might have better accommodations, or are closer to services and stores. And I especially look for parks that are closer to sports pubs. So I can watch my favorite teams on a big screen, or with other fans.
Although there are online resources like rating systems for RV parks, they never tell you everything you’d like know and there’s no substitute for actually parking there for a few days. If it’s not a holiday week, usually I’ll pay for 1-3 days, depending on what my research has shown about the park and area. If it turns out good, I’ll roll that over to a week stay. Some parks will not allow that, so I don’t get the weekly discount that I would have if I’d just initially sprung for the weekly rate, but staying at a bad park is much worse then paying more than you’d like for those days.
Make no mistake…many parks flat out lie about their features. Both online, and over the phone. Even attempting to baffle you with bullshit when you call them on their inaccuracies. This is the main reason I so seldom call for reservations. I’m not going to fork over money to someone for what may turn out to be wholly inadequate accommodations. Luckily, many parks allow you to reserve a spot without taking your CC info though. Others have really strict rules about it and sometimes suggest on their web sites that they require reservations. BS usually. I just show up. I think I’ve been turned away 3-4 times in 12 years.
So, you’re protecting yourself when you only pay for 1-3 nights to begin with then roll over to the weekly after deciding it’s an OK park. I’ve read so many hilarious accounts of people who failed to check out a place, paying for a week or month to save money, only to discover the park did not meet their expectations, then ranted and raved about the park refusing to give refunds. I try to avoid that unpleasantness. It does cost a bit more over the long run but not enough to be a concern. My spreadsheet shows I’ve been averaging $332/month over the last 12 years for RV parking spaces. I’ve spent the majority of my time in what would be called 2nd tier RV parks which tend to be less expensive, but doing so has given me the funds to occasionally splurge on fancy, expensive parks. One problem with expensive parks that annoys me to no end is that they often can afford to pay some outside company to completely control their WiFi system. And generally, it doesn’t work worth a damn. And complaining to staff brings up the oft repeated, “We don’t handle the WiFi here so we can’t do anything”, or my favorite dodge, “It’s slow when too many people are all online at the same time”, and you’re in a nearly empty park. Gah!
So here are two examples within two weeks. I called the Oasis RV park before leaving Rosamond and found that they ‘knew’ they had a very good WiFi signal. So when I arrived at the park, the guy was kind enough to rung Speedtest.net on his office computer and show me the results. As a result, I spent a week with them over T-Day holiday. Turned out they handled their own WiFi and it was blazing fast. Like cable fast. I really enjoyed the video streaming I was able to do, but the park was soooo far from anything. So I moved on, headed south to El Centro.
First though, on my travel day, Dec. 1st, I thought I’d try to visit the Salton Sea. But I’d checked the air pressure in all my tires that morning and there was one that was 40 PSI low. See the tire story here: Tire Low Dec. 2015.
Crap. It’s the inner dually on the driver’s side. My destination of El Centro is only 1 & 1/2 hours away so I took my time on the road since you can limp along with one of the dual tires a little low. Gotta be careful and keep your speed down though. Meanwhile, I wanted a few pics of the Salton Sea so tried to drive over there just across the freeway from the RV park. Turns out the road is private and this is as close as I could get.
Here’s a look at how dry and desert like it is here in this below sea level valley.
There are farms here though. I did not discover how they water these trees. I think there are fresh water wells all over the place. The Salton Sea itself is filled with salts. The RV park where I stayed had well water with excess arsenic and fluoride in it. Not sure if it would harm trees or not over the long term.
Grapes! Wine maker here in the desert. BTW, this is the Imperial Valley. You’ve probably heard of it.
This is about as close to the Salton Sea I could get, anywhere along the route. There were a couple small towns that I could have visited that would have gotten me closer but I still had the tire issue to take care of.
Here’s a pretty good view.
Finally, I found a working air station along the way and pumped the tire back up. I knew that putting 90 PSI probably wouldn’t be good for the tire so I just planned on limping to El Centro with 60 PSI. Didn’t have much traffic to worry about here in the desert south so I’d just drive at 25-45 MPH. Still had plenty of time too.
I had called what seemed from the online descriptions to be a fairly nice park in El Centro a couple days ago, and they too told me their WiFi was very good. The Country Life RV Park. Four miles from downtown. And just 9 miles from the Mexico border. They had one thing going for it other then the Wifi, they were the least expensive RV park in town. All the other parks were almost double the daily and weekly rates. But those other parks were all closer to town too. I opted to save money.
Turned out this park was kind of lackluster. It’s actually a very large ‘trailer’ park with hundreds of spaces. Most of them filled with trailers and the rest with semi-permanent RVs. They told me right off the water wasn’t good, so I’d be staying in another park where I just used my onboard tank water. No problem. I asked and received permission to hook up and test the WiFi before I paid. I would stay at least 3 days, but probably a week if the WiFi was OK. At first blush, it was fast, so I paid for a week. Did not realize it was throttled, and the staff certainly wasn’t going to volunteer that info before I paid.
Looking north, back the way I’d come limping in today.
Now looking South. On the right the temporary RV spaces where I’m parked. On the left the more permanent.
Like I said, they’d told me on the phone the WiFi was great. WiFi Sucked. It’s handled by an outside company and it’s throttled as though this were the 1990’s when bandwidth was arbitrarily limited as ISPs upscaled and tried to monetize every megabyte. I contacted the outside company about the horrible speeds and throttling after I’d unwittingly watched 30 minutes of a NFL game and used up my bandwidth for the day, and they tell me the RV park has known for years they could pay for a faster ISP’s bandwidth but just won’t. When I pointed this out at the office, there was some sudden hemming and hawing by the manager as it seemed she knew she couldn’t explain that away. But, I was here for the week, and knew I couldn’t get a refund.
Next day I got the leaking tire fixed so I was ready to find a sports bar to watch the Seahawks the next Sunday. Weather was great. Rode my bike all over the park during my non busy times, even rode a couple miles toward town.
Worked out a way (disconnecting my WiFi antenna and swapping it with my spare WiFi dongle) to get the WiFi back up to a reasonable speed and did my Mexico trip planning. Found that San Felipe looked like fun so made up my mind to head there. It was funny how quickly I got to the first WiFi throttling threshold. It’s got some funky algorithm that suppose to reset your usage somehow but I could never figure out what it was keying on. So I’d swap back and forth between my two WiFi antennas to try to keep it going at a halfway reasonable speed. Such a sucky system. I did accomplish something with speaking to the WiFi people. Got them to look at their software and the last two days I was there, the quick jumps I’d seen from Tier I (2 Mbps) to Tier II (0.5 Mbps) seemed to slack off even though I hadn’t changed my conservative surfing methods from before. Tier II was really painful. Like modem speeds. Never got to Tier III (0.2 Mbps) thank goodness.
I’d arrived on a Tuesday and surfing the web showed a pretty nice Sports Bar in town. Checked with several cab companies and turned out that being 3 miles outside of El Centro meant a $24 one way taxi ride. Yikes. No, thanks, I’ll drive now that my air leak was fixed.
So I plugged the address into my tablet mapping app and thought nothing else of it. Sunday morning arrives and I head off to downtown. And the mapping program takes me to an empty field. I’m on the right street, Imperial. Huh. There ain’t no sports bar here. And there aren’t any bars even close. So I wander around a bit until I notice the numbers on some of the buildings. Whoa. I’m way off. I’m looking for 260 something and here I’m in the 3300 somethings. Backtracked and arrived just 10 minutes before the 10 AM game. WTH, Skobbler Mapping, what’s up with that?
Got all parked at Burgers & Beer, went in and was pleasantly surprised that this is a true sports bar! TVs everywhere! Open early! Settled in, got them to set up the giant TV right in front of me to the right game and ordered breakfast. Cool. And the Seahawks win! Yea! Seahawks 38, Vikings 7. Can’t complain about that.
And the next Tuesday, I head off to Mexico! See you next time…