Tex Trek '23 Starts March 20

San Antonio or bust!

Sunday, March 19

Hi Oliver’s Travels Fans!

Tomorrow morning, Frieda, Maddie, Skipper and I depart Harriman, Tennessee for San Antonio, Texas where we will meet up with dear friends from our time with USS Independence (CV 62) in Yokosuka, Japan. It’s been nearly 30 years since we served together on that great ship and we look forward to sharing memories of that time back in the mid-1990s.

This past week we added a wonderful new accessory to our toolkit: a Honda EU3200i inverter generator.

Longtime dedicated readers may recall that on the morning of Day 10 of our Summer ‘22 Cross Country, we were awakened about 4 am to a completely dead (electrically) Ollie. When all the normal noises, such as the air conditioning, all of a sudden stop and it’s library-quiet, you know something is wrong. With all the power out for miles around, extremely high humidity, dangerous temperature warnings, and no power at all to even raise the jacks on our trailer, we found ourselves in a rather uncomfortable position.

Later in the year, on Day 69 of West Quest Part Deux, we discovered what it’s like to lose electricity when it’s in the ‘20s outside and ‘40s inside the trailer. Short answer: miserable (and did I say cold?).

We have the solar and lithium battery package in our 2022 Oliver Legacy Elite II and it’s wonderful. For short stops at rest areas to eat lunch in air conditioned comfort, make a quick pot of coffee, or just wanting the convenience of using 110 VAC power in the trailer, the lithium batteries and 3,000 watt inverter are great. But push things too hard and you could wind up like we did above. Furthermore, we already were well-aware that the only way we could comfortably camp without electrical hookups would be when it was not expected to be excessively hot and humid. This meant passing up on a lot of Harvest Host opportunities we might otherwise enjoy.

After a lot of research and agonizing over the expensive decision, we settled on the Honda EU3200i. This post is not intended to be a review (I’ll do one of those later), so suffice to say, we look forward to being able to enjoy plenty of electric power anywhere we go now with the exception of places where generators might be prohibited.

As for Tex Trek ‘23, the route has changed a bit from my last post. Here’s the current route which we will do counter-clockwise:

That’s it for now. Look for a Day 1 post on Tuesday morning.