Lessons learned while RV Boondocking in Colorado | Full Time RV Living

Do you hate Colorado? I don't hate Colorado. I just like Utah a little bit more. Maybe Colorado doesn't like me. I love Colorado. This is an ongoing joke in our household lately because of how much I loved Utah. We spent about a month there boondocking and I felt it had everything that we could have needed. It had free RV dumps, awesome national parks, great weather, abundant free camping, and real life dinosaur tracks. Come on! I also loved Utah. I loved it a lot. I was really excited to get out of Arizona. I was in Arizona much longer than I wanted to be, so Arizona was great for both of us. But I was really, really excited to get to Colorado. I love Colorado and when I think about it, I think about the mountains and the creeks and I just love it. I love when you drive in. We immediately got some green vegetation and a change of landscape. Yeah, it is pretty. It is so pretty and we've had a lot of good trips to Colorado in the past, so you know, I have good memories there. And I was stoked, but somebody wasn't equally as stoked. No, our first two nights in Colorado, our free spots turned out to be a fail and we ended up spending two nights at two different Walmarts. The worst. So this video picks back up on our first night where we did find a great boondocking spot outside of Salida and we got a little visitor that night. And before we get into this episode, we just wanted to give a big thanks to everybody that is following along our journey. Thank you to our current subscribers and our continuing subscribers. Yeah, thank you so much. It's been fun for us to travel along and to have you with us along the way. Well, we are sitting at a welcome center right outside of Salida, Colorado, and we've just been spending the past couple hours doing a little bit of cleaning and we're both a little wigged out. And we had one hell of a night last night. And won't you tell us a little bit about what happened, Chris? Well, it was about 2 a.m., 2.30, and we started to hear some noises. And at first I thought it was the eggs rattling in the fridge because that happens a lot, you know, when you're like groggy and sleeping. And then all of a sudden Aaron sits up and he's just sitting in bed. And then we start whispering like, what is that? And then Aaron's like, I think it's a mouse. So we were in bed listening to this mouse and then we finally determined there is a mouse in the house. Yeah, we actually saw the mouse multiple times. We're now roommating with a mouse for the past night. Yeah, so we made it a year and a half without having a mouse in our RV. It's super common for RVers to get mice in. And I guess it was a rite of passage. I don't know. But we woke up and we were trying to hunt this mouse for three hours. So we didn't get very good sleep last night. We were unsuccessful catching it. We did see it. We know it's in here. He didn't get into any of our food or anything. So, but we're still feeling pretty cringy. So we came here, did a like a deep clean. We came into town actually to get some traps so that we can remove him today, hopefully before he does any damage and get him out of here. So now we're on like high alert and I guess going to be more careful about how we store food and, you know, got to sanitize everything. And it felt good to get a good clean and it was long overdue. So, yeah, I popped the hood this morning and I just wanted to take a peek in there because since we were in, I think Arizona and into Utah, we started seeing a lot of boondockers with their hoods open. And at first we didn't know exactly what that was. And then I read that people do that to let the heat out so that rodents and things like that don't try to... So they're not attracted to you in the first place. Get into that engine compartment. And there's little tiny mouse paw prints in the dust in our engine compartment. So you can see where he struggled to climb and was roaming around in there and somehow he found a way through a vent or a hole or something inside the engine compartment. And he came right in. So this is pretty alarming. I mean, we just got to this BLM land... Yesterday. Yeah, right outside of Salida. We were just there... Our first night. Late in the afternoon. So we're going to get him tonight. This is going to be our mission now tonight. And the good news is our van is small. We were just talking about how much different it would be if we were in a big, giant class A bus. Like, oh, there's so many places that they can go. Yeah, it's good and it's bad. So it's good because we can hear him. We can hear him. Right away we know, boom, there it is. It's bad because it feels like he's six inches from your head. It's just after six o'clock. It's starting to get dark. That means it's time for us to set up our traps. Are you ready? Ready. First, I'll show you guys that hole back there. We think that's kind of how he's getting in through the engine compartment and up kind of through the flooring. And then that also connects to this side in there. You can kind of see the cracks back in the corner there and that gets him into the walls. So we think he's inside the kitchen cabinet area. And this morning we didn't really have any food eaten, right? I mean, he chewed on one of our little bags there a little bit. He got to a little bit of our trash. And that was it. Yep. And I think that's because he just got in at like two o'clock and he wasn't hungry yet. He was tired. He was looking for a place to sleep. Yeah. So we have two different kinds of traps we're going to use. These are called Tomcats. We've had these before at our house and it's pretty much just a plastic trap where you put peanut butter we're going to use. Your bait. Organic peanut butter, nothing but the best for him. And this other style puts the peanut butter up top. So we're going to see which one is more effective, but we're going to put one each underneath the chairs. And then I think we'll put the other two up on the front mat. Maybe one under the bed. I don't know, but we are going to be ready for this guy tonight. We have a motion sensor camera also that we kind of use as a security camera. So I'm thinking about setting this up tonight. Last night was pretty rough. I woke up, I was on edge last night, even before I heard the mouse. And I think it's probably because I was lightly sleeping and heard it. Oh, come on. I swear I was up since like one and I didn't know, you know, I was just, well, yeah, that was our first night here too. So I get a little, um, unnerved on our first night too. Just new territory, new place, new area, you know, not comfortable with the surroundings. Okay. Let's load these bad boys up. They love the smell of peanut butter, but who doesn't? We were saying, we think that mice like high fat foods because they like peanut butter. They're notorious for liking cheese, which I don't know if that's actually true or not. And last night they went after Aaron's pancake plate that had chocolate residue on it. Can you see that in there? I put it way in the back. Oh. Not where it told me to. We'll see what happens. Hold it still. I should have thought of this earlier. We now have all four traps on the motion camera. And as soon as that little mouse peeks his head out, it'll capture it, send an alert to my phone and it will record it. I'm, I am interested to see what it will actually look like in the recording. The quality. It's not super high quality, but yeah, it'll be evidence. Yeah. And at least we'll hopefully be able to see which area the activity takes place in. Yes, this should be very, very interesting to be continued. 30 minutes into it being dark and the little snap went off. We got one. Yeah, that was quick. Hopefully there only is one. These traps work so well. Poor little guy. No, these traps do pretty good. Well, Colorado has been interesting to say the least so far. I'm glad we took care of that mouse situation, but we, we thought we might have another little problem. Yeah. So once you get a critter friend, you get kind of paranoid. And yesterday, last night, Erin and I both caught whiff of like a foul smell. And if you've ever had like a mouse in your house, in the walls, like when you first like learn about getting rid of them and you might like put out the poison or something like that. And then they go back in your walls and they, they die. Yes. And they have a very distinct smell. It's rancid. It's disgusting. So anyway, we caught whiff of that smell and we're like, God, is that a dead mouse somewhere? Do we have another one? But we're, we're concluding that it's some garbage that we have. So in here, I have some trays that like ground turkey and chicken came on, which I always preach about getting the stinky smell out of your RV before you boondock. Well, here we are. Gosh. So this morning I double bagged this to try to block the smell, but it is this bag. I can smell it right now. This bag, it's not airtight. So the smell is coming through. And so I'm just going to like go back in here, take this trash apart, find those pieces that are causing the smell and put them into this dirty used ziplock. Hopefully still airtight ziplock. Yeah. One thing we still need to figure out is the, uh, the trash situation. Oh, it leaks in here. We need like, we, we have a way to compact them like the bowls and the plates. We separate them. We got one bag for recycling, but we need to get like a container to like, you know, be able to hang off the back of a ladder. Like what Cast has. Gross. And it's going to get really hot today. How hot did you say? 88. Which in here it's going to be like 98. So we're going to get rid of this. Try to get it into here. I don't know. Cause we're not going into dump and full for another two, three days. Yeah. We just wanted to share this, uh, as we ran across it. And that's kind of one of the problems with the van. At least it's not a mouse in the wall. Yeah. Cause at least this, we know what it is. We'll deal with it for a couple of days. It's so weird. It came the night after. The mouse. That we killed the mouse. Which by the way, we've, we've maintained the four traps on upfront just to make sure no more come in and we haven't gotten any more. So yeah, the area, the area we're in is it's definitely filled with mice. We had some, uh, friends that are just right down the road that had two mice that they caught and we see a bunch of vehicles around here that have their hoods up. And obviously they're trying to avoid the mice coming in. Yeah. So easy. We'll survive moving, moving on and learning. Yeah. But beautiful spot here. We're at like 9,000 feet elevation. We're right next to a big 14 or that we walked two miles to that. We're still a few miles away from and just a great little area. There's only one word I can think of to describe the weather at 9,000 feet elevation. Diverse. We went from sunny skies, enjoying our morning workouts to afternoon winds and approaching storms. Then rain and even hail. Utah never hailed on us. After a week at the Shavano wildlife management area, we decided to head out. A quick stop to visit the quaint little town of Salida and we were on our way to visit friends in Colorado Springs. Good morning. It's about 12. Good afternoon. We just, we just checked into an RV park, which we weren't planning on doing, but we are visiting some dear friends for one night. We're staying. We just came from Salida. We were at 9,000 square feet. Rough. We were at 9,000 elevation, roughly, and we just left, slept at, slept somewhere else on the way last night. And it turns out there was snow where we were in Salida. So we just beat a snowstorm. Where we were, there were some crazy winds and rain. Pueblo. We were in Pueblo and that kept me up all night. So I'm kind of like wired on coffee and lack of sleep and I'm really excited to see our friends and we're going to do a grill out. So we just got in, we just parked and we're going to stay stubborn and we're not going to plug in any electricity while we're, while we're here. We are going to dump and fill our water as needed, but we pulled in, we're not hooking up at all and we're just going to get straight to it. I got lots of food. We've got to get our grill out stuff ready and we're really excited to see our friends. So one night in and out, no plug in because we want to maintain our no plug in streak and just keep pushing it because we're like, we're going to be at a month and a half here before we know it and we're just going to keep going. We're bringing dinner over to our friend's house. So I just did this spread, really easy of some baguette with peppers and sausage and some spread and doing corn on the cob in my thermal cooker. So, you know, I'm having fun with this thermal cooker, just like seeing what I can do with it. So trying to make this as easy as possible. So just going to boil up some corn and carry it over and it's just going to be like ready to eat. We're going to grill burgers and I have Caesar salad. So since we've checked in here, I dyed my hair, which is great. I was having a lot of gray hairs popping up over the past few COVID months. So this was my first time I've had access to a restroom that I can shower in. Like in here, I would ruin our shower curtain with dye. So that's my limitation. So I did my hair. I feel like I'm in a spa. I did laundry and we're cooking up a good barbecue spread. So Aaron and I are going to take this over. We're going to have a good night. One night goes quick. We're still not plugged in. We still haven't hooked up water. We just rolled in, parked it. The laundry room is literally like a 20 second walk. So it's just super convenient. We get to see our friends and it's a perfect little getaway from the boondocking we've been doing. And then bright and early tomorrow morning, we're going to get up and get back on the road. So we're going to enjoy a good dinner. See you tomorrow. Well, that was quite a different experience for us coming to an RV park, visiting friends for the night and not plugging in at all. It's liberating, isn't it? It is weird. And actually, we haven't been in an RV park for almost six weeks now and it feels weird. It just feels different. We got so used to boondocking that now it feels a little, you know, I don't know, a little claustrophobic. It feels congested. There's just a lot of people right next to you. And I guess that's probably the biggest complaints that people have about RV parks is just the space, the privacy. Um, I don't know, you know, it's, uh, all I can say is it's, it's great to spend the night and, you know, maybe if we were actually spending a week and, you know, we could hook up and, and relax a little bit or catch up on work or whatever we need to do. But, um, it's nice to, to hit the road. So where are we going? Garden of the Gods Park, which is 2.9 miles from here by road. I think actually distance, it's like one mile from here. So it's super close. We're going to just check it out, see what we can find. And then we're going to continue north through Denver. I think we're just going to pass through Denver to get closer to the Rocky Mountain National Park. And then we'll most likely, because we're visiting the park tomorrow morning, so we want to be close so we can get in for our reserved time, which is 8 a.m. And then after that, we'll probably go back to Denver to explore Denver. Right? I don't know. We don't know. We really don't know. We don't know. So we got to get a, we got to get a boondocking spot, uh, right outside the park. Hopefully that's going to be easy or, you know, within 20, 30 minutes of the park. Um, I'd like to sit and stay for a week and, you know, catch up. When you travel and, um, you know, start sightseeing, it's really hard to do any type of work, you know? It is, yeah. So we've lost a couple of days traveling and then, uh, spending some time with some friends here in the park. Socializing. Um, but yeah, I think it's going to be fun. It'll be a quick drive through Garden of the Gods. It'll be a quick drive through Denver. We're going to maybe see how Denver's holding up. We've heard they've had some riots and, um, kind of see what that looks like as we drive through and, uh, Rocky Mountain National Park's about three and a half hours from here. So we're at 53% on the Battle Born batteries. And I think we might be, by the end of today, we might be at like 80, 90%. Yeah. It's going to be great. So five plus weeks without being plugged in. Yes. It's a beautiful day. Yeah. Having some good weather. Life is good. Let's go. check and see what it's like. We haven't been to a big city for a long time, I guess. And, um, I know there was riots here maybe a week ago or like four or five days ago, but I think things have settled down here a little bit. But I know Chris, you're excited to be in a big city. I am. Yeah. I love cities. I like cities so much more than the boonies. So yeah, I'm excited to go through. I would love to see some peaceful protests here. Um, but we might be after that. Yeah. Well, I don't know. We'll see. We're, um, just under a mile from the state capitol. So we'll see what it looks like when we get up here. So pretty quiet down here at the capitol. A few people, but not too many. You can see a little bit of like spray paint. Oh, that's really bad actually for the state capitol. Oh, that sucks. These buildings are really, really old and just to see them get trashed like that. Sad. So with having to have the reservation system for Rocky Mountain National Park tomorrow, we've got to be there at 8am. So we decided not to do the BLM land tonight. We'll go there tomorrow after the park. But tonight we'll just hit up a Cracker Barrel either here in Denver or there's one just a little bit north of here also. And that way it'll be a little bit easier and we'll just wake up at normal time and hit the road and get there early. Yeah, it's a little bit easier to control the timing that way when you're in and out of a like a consistent place such as Cracker Barrel. Yeah, well sometimes the BLM spot takes a half hour just to get down a two mile rocky road. So yeah, but that'll give us what time is it now? It's only noon so we'll be able to hang out in Denver a little bit. We're going to go to Union Station and check that out. We've been there once before. So nice little day in Denver and we'll get out walk around a little bit. Find somewhere nice to hang out and then we'll hit up Rocky Mountain National Park tomorrow. Sound good? There it is. Union Station. I love it here. I just love it. Parallel parking in downtown Denver. Not funny? That's funny. Parallel parking a 23-foot sprinter van at Central Park in New York City. Good idea or bad idea? We're getting close.