How dry I am.....

We had an ever so small window of time Wednesday to take a hike down to the 'dry' lake bed about 2 miles to the north of our position.....five of our group set out for the 4+ mile round trip hike about 0900 in slightly cool and blustery conditions, but by the time we completed our roundtrip we were all shedding clothing and wishing we had worn less.....sometimes it is just hard to gauge the right amount of clothing......

.....nevertheless we set out for our daily adventure and were not disappointed with the company, the conversation or the views.....

 (photo courtesy of Steven Dempsey)

.....we observed snow on the local mountains for the first time as the cloud cover began to lift....

.....at last we came to the 'dry' lake bed, which was not so dry for the time being......a result of the copious amounts of rain which have fallen on our locale in the past few days....

.....we returned to our encampment in slightly less than two hours having agreed to head into town around noon time for lunch at Los Jilbertos Tacos.....Yelp gives them 4 stars on 51 reviews, and all 6 of us would have to agree wholeheartedly.  I had the 2 taco combination plate, and TLE had two enchiladas a la carte.  In addition their salsas were magnificent.....the only drawback was no brews.....just soft drinks and water.  

After lunch we drove a quick block over to the local super market which is in a shopping center that also includes a very cool thrift shop called The Frugal Coyote Thrift Shop.....I just went along for the ride, but did I ever find a treasure!  Size 10 Keen hiking sandals for $5.83 (including senior discount).  They fit perfectly and are hardly worn......normally these Keens go for close to $120......SCORE!

  

Michael and Liz rode into town with us while Linda and Steven took their car....we all have 4 seater cars, so if we go anywhere together we must take two cars....Mike and Liz's car was in town having a flat tire repaired, so on our way back out of town we dropped them at Jake's Tire & Auto to pick up their car.....as TLE and I pulled back out on to S-22 the rain began to fall.....

Precursor to the forecast storm (photo courtesy of Steven Dempsey)

And here comes the rain courtesy of TLE's timely photography

......we all retired to our individual homes for the evening listening to the wind and rain on an off throughout the night.  

Some might think it was a mistake for us to come to Borrego to boondock with several days of rain in the forecast, and El Nino type storms hovering over our heads, but we all agree we have loved having weather, and the challenges of keeping our batteries charged up with little to no sun these past few days.  Even though we only had sun for a few hours Wednesday we managed to get our batteries back to 100% before we returned from our hike.  I will grant you that we ran our 7.5 kw generator for about 90 minutes first thing as we knew we had rain coming once again, and then let the sun take over.  We have learned that the best time to use fossil fuels to generate power is when your batteries are at their lowest.....you get the most bang for the buck then.....when you try to charge your batteries using your generator when they are over 91% you might run your generator for 3 hours and gain 1, or 2 %.  In just 90 minutes our batteries went from 83% to 91%!  We find that letting the solar charge controller take over at 91% is much more efficient, and we almost always get to 100% within just a few hours.  Naturally, our preference is not to use our generator, but we are continuing to learn more and more about our solar system on this trip, and how to utilize all our resources in less than ideal circumstances to keep our battery bank charged.

Thanks for stopping by!