We woke early at the Lakefront RV Park to take showers in Khan. Despite the fact that they advertised bathrooms and showers, and had bathrooms and showers, they were padlocked. After showering and breakfast, we tried the “hard reset” on Polo to see if that would revive the dashboard display. This involved disconnecting the battery for 8 hours (we had disconnected it the night before.) No luck – it will have to be taken to a Jeep dealership somewhere in Canada or, failing that, Hermantown MN.
There was no activity that we could find to entice us to stay in Lake Moses, so we started the trip to our next campsite in Sandpoint Idaho. Scott – never one to suffer internet outages quietly even for a few minutes while we crossed cellular dead zones, looked into rooftop mounts for Khan on Amazon, but there were all magnetic. He recalled that Marcus Kolb, who had borrowed the Starlink Mini on his New Zealand trip, said that he kept the dish in the front overhang on the camper he rented there. Would that work for Khan?
Seemed unlikely since Starlink is very susceptible to obstructions, but a quick google search for “does Starlink work through fiberglass” indicated that several internet posters had indicated that yes, indeed, this could work. We decided to check this out when we stopped for lunch on I90 near Spokane.
As we crossed Washington the scenery started becoming more mountainous. We stopped to park at Pape Equipment in 4 Lakes, Washington, found a cigarette lighter outlet in Tom’s bunk, fired up Starlink, and it worked right away – and well! We now never need to be out of touch in Khan, and we now have a much easier way to deploy Starlink than going outside the camper and putting it on the ground or on top of Khan or Polo.
We arrived at our next home for two nights – Bonner County Fairgrounds Campground – around 3PM. Similar to Heyburn Riverside from our last trip – see post – this one is run by the local government and is very nice and very uncrowded. The Restroom seems to have nice showers and toilets – and you can hear BNSF trains going by – not close enough to disturb sleep, though. While the weather was almost warm when we got here, it is getting chilly and starting to rain a bit. After BBQ chicken dinner we’re going to sleep soon.
