The day after the backpack, we decided to go into town.  Because we had left a light on in the RV from Friday to Saturday night, the RV battery was completely dead, so to take a shower or read at night, I had to use jumper cables to hook our truck’s battery to the RV electrical system.  A fellow staying next to us told us about getting a solid state isolator, and how this might solve our problem.  So, we decided to go to the town of Mammoth to see if someone could install such a device in our truck.

With Trish and I in the truck and my parents in their Toyota, we headed east out of Tuolumne.  After about 30 minutes, we had crossed Tioga pass and headed down into the town of Lee Vining.  Since the town was too small to have anyone who could install the isolator, we headed South another 30 minutes or so to the town of Mammoth.

While Trish and my parents did laundry at the laundromat, I headed to the pay phone.  Unfortunately, I was not able to find anyone in town who knew what an isolator was, much less how to install one.

After the laundry was done, Trish and I spent quite a bit of time at the visitor center in Mammoth, watching the Belding Ground Squirrels, and playing with the huge Ponderosa Pine cones.  Eventually, we got back in the truck and headed back to Tuolumne.

After a couple weeks of playing with the battery after we got home, I determined that there was something very wrong with that particular battery – I couldn’t get it to hold more than about a 20% charge, and the battery would boil over when I tried to charge it, since it could never get up the voltage that the charger considers “full”.

Anyway, that’s how the day went.  You win some, you lose some, I guess.