Boyd Lake Getaway

A weekend at Boyd Lake State Park just outside Loveland — Cottonwood Shores Campground, right on the water and barely sixteen miles from the house. It’s our favorite season-opener for one reason: it’s a shakedown run. Something always works its way loose over the winter, and we’d much rather find it sixteen miles from home than six hundred.

This year, it was the hot water.

We pulled in, got leveled and set up, and went to fire the water heater for the evening — nothing. No hot water.

A little backstory: last year this same heater got replaced after a winterizing job went sideways. The mobile tech who did it didn’t think the water heater counted as part of the system, so it never got properly drained — and it didn’t survive the winter. He’s long gone; the new heater is his legacy. The catch is that whoever installed the replacement wired it with an inline fuse tucked away somewhere I couldn’t reach. Out of sight, out of mind — until it finally let go.

So the next morning I popped the exterior access door and had a look. The heater itself was perfectly healthy — the whole problem was that buried fuse. So I did what the install should have done in the first place: cut it out and ran a clean rewire with a brand-new inline fuse holder, this time mounted somewhere I can actually get a hand on it.

Strip, crimp, heat-shrink. About ten minutes of honest work to undo a shortcut someone else took. Flipped it back on and we had hot showers before dinner.

That’s the whole point of a first-trip shakedown: the win isn’t that nothing breaks — it’s that you catch it close to home and the rig comes back better than it left. Everything else checked out clean, and Boyd Lake did its part too: quiet water, a good sunset, and the kind of evening that makes you forget you spent the morning elbow-deep in the heater bay.

Have you camped at Boyd Lake? Drop a comment below — we’d love to hear your tips.