Tuesday - May 3, 2022 - WE ARE FINALLY ON THE WAY TO ALASKA!! We left Beale Air Force Base at 7:15 am on the first leg of our trip through Canada to Alaska. We drove to Reno, Nevada where we made a stop at DragonflyEnergy. This company manufactures and sells Battle Born Lithium Ion batteries and they sell Victron components needed to keep the batteries fully charged. We bought a Victron 3000 Watt Inverter/Charger that we will have installed in our RV at a later date. The people at DragonflyEnergy are wonderful when it comes to helping us and making recommendations on what to install.

After we left DragonflyEnergy, we drove to see J.K. Pauley who owns a shop that installs batteries and inverters. They, unfortunately, do not install in large vehicles like ours since they do not have the room to park the RVs inside their building. They did take the time to explain to us what we needed to do with our systems to get our batteries charged and continue on our way up to Alaska. They were super-nice and the took all the time we needed to answer our questions.

At 3:00pm, we arrived at New Frontier RV Park, in Winnemucca, Nevada. It is an excellent park with easy access and 100 foot long, paved, level slots. There is plenty of room between RVs and all of the services work great. The cost is $48 per night and we are staying for two nights so that we can see what there is to see in the Winnemucca area. It is nice to actually be on "shore power" and to have water/sewer service. We have been boondocking for over a month and a half at Beale where we have no base services. We have to go dump our tanks and fill up with fresh water about every ten days. We even take showers at the base gymnasium to save water in our RV tanks. I also hooked up our new lithium ion battery charger to our batteries and can take two days to continuously charge the batteries up to their full capacity and voltage. We are excited about this.

Wednesday, May 4, 2022 - We went to breakfast at a small diner called "The Griddle." They had great food and they even sell individual cinnamon rolls (we bough one for the road). After breakfast, we went to Napa Auto Parts to get a new carrier bearing for the truck in case the one we have fails. We then returned to the RV to get our hiking gear and headed out to a canyon east of Winnemucca called Water Canyon. This is a nice canyon with a small creek flowing through it. There are places for small campers and tents, 4X4 trails, and hiking trails. We decided to hike up to the top of the mountain; a hike of about two miles each way. The hike up was continuously steep with gradients in the area of 15 degrees. It was a lot of work and when we arrived near the top of the hill, we were forced to turn around due to the trail being covered with snow. It usually does not open until early June. We hiked back down the hill and it was much easier than going up. We decided to go to Dairy Queen to treat ourselves to a frosty.

On our way to breakfast, we decided to purchase diesel for the truck. Yesterday evening the cost at Maverick was $5.19. Over night the prices had been increased to $5.25. We decided to wait until after hike to fill up the truck. During our hike the prices rose again to $5.30. We decided to buy fuel right then in case it went up in price again. The truck was about 30% full of fuel and the cost to fill it was still over $425.

We returned to the RV to relax and have dinner. The next morning, we left at 7:30 am for Caldwell, Idaho near Boise.