{"id":167943,"date":"2025-04-22T05:57:36","date_gmt":"2025-04-22T11:57:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=167943"},"modified":"2025-04-22T09:27:11","modified_gmt":"2025-04-22T15:27:11","slug":"shakedown-cruise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2025\/04\/22\/shakedown-cruise\/","title":{"rendered":"Shakedown Cruise"},"content":{"rendered":"

It went better than I thought it might, despite some unfortunate circumstances.<\/p>\n

It’s my longstanding practice to take a new camping trailer (or an old one after major repairs or modifications) on a shakedown cruise. Typically, it’s a short overnight trip to a nearby camping spot just to run all the RV systems through their paces in a real-world situation to make sure everything works as it should. Since I prefer backcountry camping, these shakedown cruises are just about the only times I ever stay in a campground. Boondocking in remote areas is my very strong preference,<\/p>\n

I know from experience that discovering a major malfunction, or sometimes even a minor one, in a remote area hundreds of miles from home can be a disaster. Long-time readers may remember my report on the shakedown cruise of my last new trailer<\/a><\/span>.<\/span> On that trip the furnace didn’t function properly, so at night the inside temps of my trailer got down to the low 30’s F.<\/p>\n

Don’t want something like that to happen on a long trip when I’m far from home.<\/p>\n

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My shakedown cruises have always been to Antelope Island, so that’s where I spent Easter Sunday night in my new trailer in Bridger Bay Campground. It was a stormy night with howling winds and rain and both days the biting gnats were out in full force. Those little bastards are a pain in the ass, and almost everywhere else.<\/p>\n

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This photo was taken from Ladyfinger Point, roughly 3\/4 of a mile away from my tiny trailer, the one closest to the lower-left bottom (nearest to the pile of white boulders).<\/p>\n

If you look carefully, you’ll see a shoreline shelf of old Lake Bonneville near the top of the frame, which suggests to me that this photo could use a small amount of counterclockwise rotation to make it perfectly level. Some of the trailers look a little “tippy” too.<\/p>\n

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Sunday night’s sunset from my campsite. Those clouds to the west were precursors of the incoming storm.<\/p>\n

Despite the storm and those miserable gnats, I succeeded with the primary purpose of the trip. I put my trailer through its paces and only discovered one potentially problematic malfunction – a quirky kitchen stove that sometimes wouldn’t stay lit. I’ll check it out more thoroughly now that I’ve got it home. Everything else worked as it should.<\/p>\n

And compared to my previous longer, heavier and wider trailer, my new little trailer gets major bonus points for gas mileage while I’m pulling it. That will save me some significant cash on longer trips to places like Montana’s Centennial Valley. Pulling my old trailer, those trips used to cost me over $500 just for gas for a 4-5 day long stay in the Centennial Valley. Now it should be much cheaper.<\/p>\n

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Bird photography was secondary on this shakedown cruise, but I did manage to spend some time looking for birds. This photo of a Loggerhead Shrike would be one of my favorite flight shots of the species, if<\/span> I only had a catch light in the bird’s eye.<\/p>\n

But I don’t, so it isn’t.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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PS – I fully intended to post to Feathered Photography from the island early yesterday morning using my laptop and a hotspot, so I left the campground in the dark (where there isn’t a reliable cell signal) and drove to the marina where the signal’s much better. <\/em><\/p>\n

But several things conspired against me. My laptop is new so it has a new version of Photoshop on it, which for some reason isn’t giving me the option of saving images as regular jpegs. WordPress doesn’t like that. And it didn’t help that I left one of the two card readers I needed at home. Live and learn.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It went better than I thought it might, despite some unfortunate circumstances. (4 photos)<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":167959,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[334,406],"tags":[31,7792,457,7793,7791],"class_list":["post-167943","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-northern-shrikes","tag-antelope-island-2","tag-antelope-island-sunset","tag-bridger-bay-campground","tag-loggerhead-shrike-in-flight","tag-shakedown-cruise-for-2024-geo-pro-g15-fbs-camping-trailer"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/geo-pro-at-campsite-2-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-HGL","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167943","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=167943"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167943\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":167997,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167943\/revisions\/167997"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/167959"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=167943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=167943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=167943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}