One of the ponds at Cherry Hill Park, the closest RV park to Washington, DC.
We got away from Knoxville in the middle of the afternoon on Thursday. While progress was made on the installation of an inverter on Tuesday, work on the motorhome on Wednesday was pre-empted by someone picking up a new coach and needing the work of an electrical technician. All that remained to be completed was done on Thursday morning. It included wiring the control panel of the automatic generator start option to the PowerTech generator. Since some of you may wonder what this is all about, please read on for a little more information.
Generally speaking, the lighting in a motorhome is based on 12-volt DC current, the same as can be put out by batteries like you'd put in a car or a golf cart. There is circuitry that handles the two air conditioners, convection microwave, receptacles, and water heater that are 110-volt AC. That's where the generator comes in. It can create up to 8,000 watts of 110-volt, enough to power a hair dryer, television, coffee maker, and air conditioners (of course). Most often during the summer we travel with the generator running to power one or both of the roof-mounted air conditioning units. However, there are times that running a generator isn't advisable, such as when it's cooler than the typical summer day or when "dry camping" at a large, motorhome rally where "shore power" isn't available (shore power is the term used when an RVer plugs the power cord into a power pedestal at a campground). It is at those times when a generator isn't warranted that the inverter is put into action.
The inverter draws power from a bank of four 12-volt DC batteries and converts it to 110-volt AC for use throughout the motorhome. Of course, since the inverter is drawing energy from batteries, the batteries will need recharging after a period of time. That is done by either plugging into shore power or by running the generator.
When we stay in at a large rally of motorhome owners or, as we did last night, stay in the RV parking of a Flying J truck stop, we don't have access to shore power and rely on the inverter or the generator to provide the needed power. As implied above, the inverter will only function for a certain amount of time. The auto generator start option on an inverter will sense when the voltage has dropped to a certain level and automatically start the generator so it can recharge the batteries. While it isn’t essential to have such, it is very handy because it means the humans don't have to be monitoring the situation so closely.
Now, on with the rest of the travelogue --
While in Georgia we attended the wedding of a nephew stayin at Mistletoe State Park which is near Augusta. It is situated beside a large lake. The campground, like a lot of campgrounds in state and national parks, has water and electric but no sewer hookups per site. However, the sites were spacious with an abundant amount of trees for shade. At this particular park, cellular coverage from AT&T was sparse while coverage from Verizon was excellent. Since we primarily rely on AT&T we took a vacation from our iPhones, iPads, and Mac computers.
The weather cooperated for the outdoor wedding. It did rain on Saturday but the rain came through about three hours before the evening event and the cloud cover kept things from getting steamy.
On Sunday morning we headed for Jacksonville, NC to visit with one of Martha's uncles, wife, children, and grandchildren. Along the way we listened to a Bible teacher on a religious station. It was a call-in program. We were both impressed with how calmly he handled some questions. That, in addition to some music played via iTunes, was our church experience for the morning -- the Church of the Open Road.
We arrived in Jacksonville and had a nice visit. We also had a great supper the family had put together.
Fuel consumption from Louisville to Georgia averaged about 8.3 mpg -- we were hoping for better. It did get better when checked on the next day when we achieved 8.7. The difference was mainly attributed to driving three miles per hour slower.
On Monday, after a night at Kenly, NC, we arrived in the Washington, DC area about 3 pm. We were staying at the campground nearest the DC area. The name is Cherry Hill Park. It is located in College Park.
Our location at the 400-site Cherry Hill Park, closest RV campground
to the Washington, DC area. Partial shade for every site.
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