RV Trip Day 1 and 2 _ departure and Leadville

Jeff's mom and dad left monday morning and we dropped Lauren off at daycare and started to load the RV. We expected it would take about an hour to pack- HA HA!! This RV had much less storage than our last rental and the bins down below were tiny and didn't fit our crates. We finally headed out of town around 3pm (we were hoping for 11am).  Our plan was to camp at Turquoise lake near Leadville. It is beautiful there, so we used the GPS to maneuver to a campground. BUST- all of the campgrounds near turquoise lake are closed for the season- it is 10,000 ft altitude and I guess that is too cold for most. OK, so we head to Twin Lakes ares ~ it is lovely there, one of our favorite places to camp. There are no plug-ins for the RV but we dont care- the last time we rented we only plugged in a couple times. We ran the generator before bed to charge up the battery and warm the camper for Lauren.
Snafu #2: The carbon monoxide monitor starts to blare at 930 pm. Lauren was in bed, and I now have to lug her outside in the freezing cold, pitch black night. She is crying " mommy I scared..." Poor baby.  Well, Jeff calls the RV guys and gets it worked out. We get the munchkin to sleep, and then wake up to this.

OK, not too bad of a view. It was freezing cold, so Jeff tries to fire up the generator to get the heat rolling. Enter Snafu #3, A.K.A. The Big One. The battery (to the RV, not the driving part) is dead. The generator is needed to charge the battery, but the battery is needed to start the generator. Who designed this?? Now, you might be thinking, drive down the road to find electricity! HAHA! The *best* part is that we have both of the slide-outs open in the RV and you cannot drive with them open but you need the battery to close them. I reiterate "who designed this?".
So, Jeff spends about an hour running the engine and talking to the RV guys (who are apologetic for giving us an RV with a dead battery and telling us it was full~ we got some major $$ off at the end). We decide to take a nature hike:


I sometimes forget how much I LOVE this part of the state!




I DO IT gets to walk Casey.




Pinecone (pronounced piecone!)

 In the end we had to drive with the slide-outs open to get to electricity. I was late in the day whe nwe got going and we were a bit frustrated, so we decided to just get going over to montrose/ Ouray area and set up camp where we knew there were outlets. This meant a long day of travel ....... the pinecones needed googly eyes!