Camping coffee crisis!

It was our first time out in a new camper trailer, a Forest River Rockwood Roo hybrid. We didn’t go far, just about a half day’s drive to Red Top Mountain State Park in Georgia. It was late October, a little early for peak color, a little late for the best apple picking, but still a pretty time of the year in northern Georgia.

The weather was a bit warmer than we expected, but enjoyable until Thursday night. That’s when the remnants of a hurricane that had come up through the Gulf of Mexico blew through the northern parts of Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia. The wind and rain really picked up over night, and somewhere around two or three in the morning, the power went out. Lots of mall pine boughs and cones hit the camper, but nothing big.

As the dawn approached, we got word about the big stuff that had fallen. When the storm blew through, the hosts who were camped about half a mile away heard some big trees cracking and took refuge in the shower house. A few forty foot maples fell and took out some of the power lines that ran through the campground. No one was hurt and no campers were damaged, but there were lots of close calls!

We weren’t too worried. We had water to drink and propane to keep the refrigerator cold. What’s a little power outage?

Until I went to make coffee. We had was a Keurig and pods. It must have tried to draw too much current because I couldn’t get it to work with either the camper battery or the truck’s inverter. As you might have guessed, we were not happy campers.

I really impressed my wife when I declared, “I know what to do.” I put a saucepan of water on the stove while I opened up five or six coffee pods and threw them into the water. When my brew reached a rolling boil, I let it simmer a bit, threw in a cup of cold water to take the grounds to the bottom and filled our first cups of the morning through a paper towel filter. I think some call it “cowboy coffee.” It tasted great! I was proud and basked in my wife’s praises for my ingenuity. I even brewed another batch later on and the next day before we broke camp.

For the future we’ve got a pour-over coffee maker we’ll stow in our camper, just in case.