OK, temps down to around 20, and a very light dusting of snow. Laugh if you will, but dang, it was cold.
My XYL and I decided to spend the weekend camping at Chattahoochee Bend State Park southwest of Atlanta on the Chattahoochee River. The park is a short drive for us, and has become our go-to park if we're just looking for a quick get-away.
I had even arranged a gathering of local hams at the park for an informal Winter Field Day event. A few hardy souls like us decided to camp, others just showed up for the day. Overall we had a good time, but for my wife and I it became a steady stream of forced and unforced errors:
- A power outage at the park that left us without reliable heating in our camper, forcing a one-night evacuation back home just to keep from freezing
- Realizing, at 0100 in the morning, that my lone antenna setup was mounted on my truck and the truck couldn't be moved without an emergency teardown, meaning we had to evacuate in the XYL's SUV
- Camp stove problems - my venerable Coleman 425 started acting up and by the end of the weekend refused to work
- Inadvertently leaving one of the under-camper storage doors open - the door that just happened to be right next to the water pump and fresh water storage tank. Yup - frozen water pipes
- Plugging in a combined 20 amp load into a 15 amp circuit results in... no power (again)
- Frozen black and gray water tank valves, meaning only a partial flushing of both tanks
I was so consumed with dealing with the various issues that I didn't get much operating done. Perhaps worse, I didn't get any good pictures of my campground or antenna setup.
So here's the one picture of me operating Winter Field Day, taking refuge from the cold inside my camper:
But hey, there's always Winter Field Day 2023!
W8BYH out
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