Our new digs and aarhhg, electronics!

Our exile from the North Rim first landed us in a nearby campground about 45 miles away in Jacob Lake.  It was a nice, privately owned campground in the Kaibab National Forest but a little on the pricey side to stay very long as well as freezing, way below freezing.  We were there just long enough to wait for our UPS packages to arrive and then we jetted out of there to lower costs and higher temperatures.

I have a cousin in Las Vegas we wanted to see and we had planned since the beginning of summer to exit the North Rim via Las Vegas no matter what our destination was.  But let me tell you, a campground that fits our preferences in and around a city like Las Vegas is a rare thing.  However, we lucked out and found something that looked interesting in the suburb of North Las Vegas.  It is a county park but it is not just your average park with a golf course, duck pond, grass and picnic tables.  It has none of those, no grass whatsoever, no jogging trails, no trees.  Instead it has golf carts that don't carry golf clubs, graveled terraces up the foot of the mountain, a couple miles of arrow-straight sidewalks, clay pigeon throwers and a pro-shop that rents shotguns and not golf clubs.  The whole place is one, giant shooting complex!  They have trap, skeet, rifle, pistol and archery ranges spread out all over a couple hundred acres of the foot of Sheep Mountain.

The RV park consists of a long, single row of 80 RV pads.  There is a wide asphalt road running the length of both the front and rear of the sites, which are pea gravel on hard pack.  Each pad is a good 80 feet long and every pad has 50 amp electricity, 90 psi water pressure (thank goodness I have a pressure regulator), and sewer. 

The RV park is no picture post card itself but the surrounding mountains are pretty nice.
This shot was taken standing about a third of the way down, looking west.

 

Turning around and looking east from the picture above this one.  That is our rig sitting there all by itself.

 

 

Looking north, towards the shotgun range and Sheep Mountain.

On our arrival there were only a couple of shooters.  This guy was at a skeet station.

RV sites with shotgun range in background.

 The experience of being in our RV and hearing nearly continuous gunfire for hours at a time is a totally new thing for us.  But all goes quite just about sundown.  They are going to have a large tournament this coming weekend.  I expect that they will turn on the large and numerous lights and continue shooting into the evening for that event.

Something else that is pretty nice is the view.  We are oriented such that our rear picture window looks south to Las Vegas.  The daytime view is pretty good with the city back-dropped by high desert mountains.

When the sun starts to set the view gets really interesting.  Since there is virtually no vegetation on the mountains, the jagged edges of these young mountains cast sharp shadows and the view changes every few minutes.

Once the sun drops all the way behind Mt. Charleston, attention turns from the surrounding mountains to the city.

Although nature still had some wow of its own to show off.

We have been at this campground for a few days now.  The first couple of days the weather has been glorious but today a front moved in and it got about 20 degrees colder, seriously windy and storm that has been hanging over Mt. Charleston all day.

The news this evening reported that the ski area of this mountain got about 5 inches of snow today.

Despite having been here several days, we have not really gotten around to exploring our surroundings.  I have been spending an inordinate amount of time emailing, on-line chatting and phone calling technical services for my satellite dish, DirecTV and my wireless router radio.

I won't go into the gory details but after months of thinking that my lack of a good signal from the satellites was due to obstructions, it was probably a faulty piece of equipment from the antenna factory all along.  After finally finding some RV installation specialists today and paying them $150/hr to come out and use diagnostic equipment to track down exactly what the problem is, they found it and reported it to the antenna manufacturer, Winegard, who immediately put practically a whole new antenna and all the electronics to operate it, on a truck to me.  Scheduled to arrive next week.  And all in full warranty, they are even going to pick up the tab for the diagnostic work.  For this to be a happy ending I just need the next fix to work.  I'll hold off on pulling the champagne cork until I see it work the way it is supposed to.

My other time-sink has been the WiFi Ranger (WFR).  In simple terms this is a wireless router, but it is really much more.  It has an external antenna mounted on the mast of my aerial TV antenna and it can seek out and latch onto wifi signals about a quarter mile away with a clear line of sight.  As long as I have a password I can join a network.  This comes in pretty handy when a campground has an office-only wifi.  Most times I can get on right from my rig and not have to schlep my gear down to the office to do email and blogging.  But recently the WFR seems to have forgotten how to establish a connection with certain kinds of signals.  I have been working with the mfr. since about mid-Sept but it has gotten really intense since getting somewhere that I have a good cell phone signal.  I have not seen light at the end of the tunnel with this one like I think I have with the satellite dish.  I have a(another) phone call scheduled with technical services tomorrow afternoon.  Being on the phone and having 4G available for my jetpack, they should be able to remote in and take control of my machine and see what needs to be done.

In-between the above I have been trying to get all our devices updated after having been isolated for about three months.  The iPad had about 16 apps that needed updating, along with its OS.  Both iPhones had apps to be updated and their OS's.  By the way, I am not sure iOS7 is a good thing.  But anyway, both the laptops are way behind on updates from Microsoft, as well as virus definitions.  I still have a ways to go before they are all caught up.  With the WFR not working it is taking forever because I have to take each device over to the clubhouse and sit there and wait for it to do its thing.  I suppose I could hook up through my jetpack but my data plan is only 5GB.  The updates I am dong, and with so many devices, I would blow through that in no time and start getting charged astronomical prices for every bit of data above my plan limit.

But at least everything is moving in the right direction.  I am thinking that we will be far enough along that we have made a date with another couple to go exploring Mt. Charleston and Old Town Vegas.  It was pure dumb luck that we happened to pick the exact same campground that this couple we worked with on the North Rim are volunteering here at the shooting complex for the winter.  They worked this park last year and know their way around so they graciously volunteered to be our tour guides.