[ We'll update this post throughout the weekend of the game. ]
Hello fellow RV’ers. Sheri and I took Puma down to College Station Texas for the 2010 Big 12 regular season game between the Nebraska Cornhuskers and Texas A&M.
This is the first time we’ve taken Puma off of ‘life support’. We don’t have a generator so we’re going to try to do it all on the battery.
Getting to College Station Friday night with the RV :
From Austin, we took 620 North, then Toll 45 to Toll 130, then Texas 79 to Milano, 36 south, 21 north, 47 south right into College Station.
Keep in mind we did this at quittin’ time Friday. There was NO traffic to speak. It was an easy trip. When we got to College Station, we stopped at a convenience store and filled our fresh water tank. No we didn’t disinfect, which you should, but we’re not going to drink the water from the tank. We brought fresh drinking water separately. When we go back on city water, we’ll flush the lines. Feel free to post comments on that concept.
We’re setup @ Lot 50 and we’re about 500 yards from the stadium. It is a good walk, but not too bad. We get to park in 4 parking spaces. It was a trick getting Puma in. Definitely travel trailers are the hardest rigs to get parked. She isn’t perfectly level, but not too bad.
First Night :
Bought a 6 pack of beer, shared 4 of them with friends (guess I’m not a hard core partier like some of the tailgaters).
Had two friends stop by. Then while I was outside a RED suburban pulled up with a travel trailer. It was an old Nebraska friend that I worked with in Austin. Jim and I talked and had some scotch until 12:45 AM. Boy was I tired.
One downside to tailgating : At 4:30AM in the morning some IMBECILES starting playing that moronic game where you throw a beanbag into a board with a hole in it. They were acting like it was the Olympics. Not to mention they were loud and obnoxious. [ Please Lord do not let them be Huskers. ]
Update – They were Aggies [ hee hee ].
Game Day :
Roamed around and met other tailgaters.
Food and drinks were the watchword for the day!
One thing we did notice : The Honda generator stands out in the tailgating crowd. It is amazingly quiet. I also noticed that the Yamaha generator was quiet. Rumor has it that the LP gas generators run you out of LP really quickly and are less convenient to get fuel easily. One more generator note – several people had two Honda 2000′s instead of one 4000 which I think is a cost thing.
Having your ‘bed’ with you (the RV) is really cool. We took a Saturday nap! We’re a few hours from game time so things are really starting up! One other thing – we don’t even have to worry about bed bugs!
As the day progressed, we got a little tired so we went back to Puma and took a nap. How cool was that.
We headed for the game later that day and enjoyed a wonderful football game. Would have loved to see the beloved Cornhuskers win, but that was not in the cards.
Heading Home on Sunday : Since we had a travel trailer, there was NO WAY (in my opinion) to get our of our parking spot without other folks moving first. We just didn’t have enough turning radius.
The good thing is that even though pull out deadline was 2pm, most people were out by 10am. We pulled our fresh water drain so we could be lighter. I don’t think we used more than about 15-20 gallons which are now in the gray/black tanks. We elected to drive home with the 20 gallon load (about 160 extra pounds).
We were worried about battery capacity, but we got the slide in just fine and found we had only took the battery down about a 1/3 (third). Not sure how accurate the gauges are, but I do think we had plenty of battery.
All in all a great first trip for dry camping. So, even if you don’t have a generator, don’t be afraid to go camping on your battery. You can do lots – you just can’t have air/heat or TV. But those are survivable. Happy tailgating!
