An Inauspicious Start

    In my haste to clear out of the Hitching Post Motel, attend a funeral mass in the Willow Glen area of San Jose, pick up my camper from the RV Service Center of Santa Cruz, get some things out of the storage lockers, load items from the motel stored in our former garage, and buy some groceries, I manged to miss one key item.
....
    Once I arrived at the large spread of a ham [not as in poor actor but rather as in radio amateur] near Castroville, I stored most of the things which had been in shopping bags in the many drawers of the camper.
    After trying the AM/FM radio/CD player which the previous owner had installed along with some of the lights and the toilet, I began to fix dinner. But, alas, I did not have my my former BP [backpack lunch food bag] -- which contained 2 sets of utensils, 2 can-openers, and excellent corkscrew, and a veggie brush.
    In rummaging through the 2 storage boxes I found a table knife and a butcher knife. I was able to whack off several pieces of the sourdough bread I bought at Save-Mart with the butcher knife and spread peanut butter on them. Then I repeated the process and used jam as the spread. (I prefer bread that is a couple of days old, especially if I have a bread knife.)
    Manage to spear 2 bread & butter pickles with the butcher knife and then cautiously nibble them off of the point of the big blade. [For some reason I think of early trappers sitting around a campfire on which they just cooked a buffalo, antelope, or deer using their Bowie knives to cut of hunks of meat and popping those morsels in their mouths without cutting their lips.]
    Ate some Reser's Potato Salad with the table knife, sliced up an apple with the large knife, and cut off half of the apple-bread the new owner of our former home had baked and given me earlier in the day. (It was almost as good as her pumpkin cheesecake!)
....
    Just after I finished eating the one light over the kitchen sink and sideboard seemed a bit dim; just then an alarm went off. Shut off the radio and and started using a portable battery-powered light.
    I did get out my Walkman clone to listen to in case I didn't feel sleepy, climbed up onto the mattress in the cab-over and gradually worked my way into my down sleeping bag. It started to rain a bit more heavily just as I was doing that.
    I was so tired I skipped both listening to the radio and setting the alarm clock. Even though the low-battery alarm was beeping loudly roughly every 30 seconds I slept for 2.5 hours before I had use the self-contained [within the camper] plumbing.
    When I got back in bed I was able to block out the beeping with my right ear in a pillow and my left ear covered with a watch cap inside of my sleeping back. For the first time in many weeks I was able to go back to sleep. (In motels I rarely could go back to sleep even if I had only had 2.5 hours sleep.)
....
    In the morning when the ham came outside, we isolated the sound to the power panel; when I had turned the light and radio off, I wasn't sure where the beep was coming from: the smoke detector, carbon monoxide detector, or power panel.
    We discussed how long a charge should last while I tried unsuccessfully to get the mute switch to shut off the beeping. [Good thing I'm not parking next to a cemetery, for it's almost loud enough to....]
    The ham, whose name is Jim and who collects anything operating with vacuum tubes, brought out an extension cord from his shop, providing what RVers call "shore power."
    Will likely use it tonight before the beeping begins. (The 2 batteries, the one in the truck and another in the camper should have been charged while I drove back to Santa Cruz to fetch my blue nylon-net BP lunch bag and get a hooded sweatshirt and long-johns out of storage.)
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    The lessons in the above are that if you skip making a shake-down trip as virtually everyone recommends and choose the "sink or swim" approach, be prepared to get wet. Secondly, if you have a Load List, use it -- even if you think you put everything in a stack in the middle of the garage floor. [I know from 53 years of backpacking that not using a Load List can lead to an uncomfortable weekend trip; and not having such things as a hand-warmer or a couple of ponchos for a long trip might be fatal -- especially if you have poor circulation as I do.]