Thursday 8-28-25 Overcast Day, Walking & Camping

 

Camping at Matchless

 

Today was the beginning of our second week of our fall trip. 

The day was overcast but we still got some solar. Larry setup the solar panels and they were out all day. When the sun was shining the panels were pulling 11 amps. The batteries were fully charged before I played my games. By the end of playing my games I had used 5% of the battery. 

I woke up at 7:15 and made pancakes for breakfast. After breakfast we got ready to go on a hike. We were going to hike the trails but the weather forecast said we may get rain between 9:00 and 10:00. The clouds were pretty dark. We decided to walk the roads. We walked to the dam. Once at the dam we walked over it. The lake was gorgeous and very flat. The mountain range around us was beautiful. We saw farmland, buildings and homes. There was a group of five people skipping stones on the lake. We also saw a gentleman put in his stand up paddle board. If he had done it at the boat ramp it would have cost him $11.00 for the day.

 

Farmland

  

Turquoise Lake

 

 

Paddle boarding down the lake 

 

From where we were it looked like they were trying to teach a kid how to skip stones. I can still remember when Larry tried to teach me. It's been years and I don't know if I can still do it. 

After resting we turned around and went back to Matchless Campground. We didn't stop at the campground we continued going up to Sliver Dollar Campground (next one up the road). As we were walking past a little meadow Larry saw a critter, that looked like red-tail fox but it was too small. Then we thought maybe it was a weasel except it was reddish color. It had caught chipmunk for breakfast. The site calls them a ground squirrel. In the same meadow we saw the four deer (two does and two fawns) we saw the other night. One of the fawns was laying down. When we got to Silver Dollar we walked around both loops. Then we went back to the Minnie. By the time we got back we had walked a couple of hours. My band said we went 3.75 miles and Larry's watch said 4.5 miles. It was a great walk.

A doe and a fawn laying down

 

A fawn and doe

 

Larry had setup the solar panels before our walk. When we got back he moved them around. Every few hours he would move them to face the sun. He is reading another book. 

 

 

Relaxing with a book

 

Before lunch I went and paid for another two nights. Larry made lunch because I was busy talking to another camper on the way home from paying. When I got back to the Minnie lunch was ready. Thank you honey. 

After lunch I played my Daily Challenges of Solitaire and Mahjong. The event was Event: Hard Road Mini of 5 games. It took me 54 minutes and 9 seconds, which put me in 23rd place in my group. Then I continued reading My Name Is Yip.

After dinner we went on our night walk to Silver Dollar Campground. Larry had done research on why my band was not calculating distance correctly. Based on what he found he made an adjustment to the GPS settings. So we did an experiment, we started my band and a GPS application on my phone and his watch to see how close they were to each other. We walked around for 50 minutes. We looked at the three trackers and found my band, the GPS tracker on my phone and Larry's watch were almost exactly the same. Thank, you again honey for fixing this.

By the end of the day I had done 18,000 steps, which was 7.1 miles. I'm a happy camper.