Wednesday, March 27, 2013

On the road

27 March 2013

We di it! We actually left home and are on our trip.

We had to stop by Camping world in San Bernardino to pick up an extra oven rack I had ordered but that was on the way.

There is a wildlife preserve on the Whitewater River which is not surprisingly named "The Whitewater Nature Preserve".  I hoped we could spend the night there. We called along the way to see if we could camp there. The ranger said that we should come in before 5 PM they had sites available. When I mentioned the 30 foot trailer however he added that it was tent camping only and very limited parking so they don't let RV's in.  Darn - it looked like a good place to visit.

What to do? Well we found the "Shady Hills RV Park" here in dear old Indio and are now settled in. And it only cost us $60 for the night!!

Here is us in our little (latterly) space.

Brenda bought (actually I bought at Brenda's request) an i-pad.  I think we got this in February. After arriving here last night she tried to set up her email account. This was UNSUCCESSFUL even after many tries. Not too surprising that we couldn't figure it out given we don't know the passwords for her email accounts. This morning I contacted Verizon (our provider) to change her email password. After only one hour on the phone the very patient Verizon technician had her account up and running on her i-pad. Next we will tackle setting it up with a data plan.

We traveld 192 miles yesterday. I hope we don't travel very many miles more than that on any day of our trip.


Monday, March 25, 2013

Update


This is going to probably be sort of a boring blog. It is just an update before we actually take off.

Last month I started this blog in anticipation of our trip cross-country. Here it is March 25, 2013, and it really does look like this trip is going to go.

Man, have we been busy.

Last month we did campouts with our good sam club. We did petroglyph tours. We did Jr. Audubon Clubs. We did Doctor appointments. We did car registrations. We did Maturango Museum things. We did field trips. We did board meetings.

Man have we been busy.

During the Pixley campout to Colonel Allensworth State Historic park we installed a Tailgater satellite antenna we will be taking so we can watch TV in anywhere to go. This system works with Dish TV and allows us a month to month fee with no contract. So, for a mere $489, we can enjoy HD TV and get the latest breaking news. It took four of us three hours and several phone calls to various tech reps to set this "simple to operate" system up.  (Remember when camping was in a tent and entertainment was oh so primitive?)


 During the tailgater installation exercise I put the broadcast antenna up. You can see by the picture below that as we left the park I left the antenna up.  The camp host caught up with us before we were on the highway.



We had a second good sam campout this time in Jawbone Canyon.  This is an Off Highway Vehicle open area that has been pretty much trashed by the motorcycles and dune buggies. Otherwise it is a pretty place close to where Lee Sutton and I did raptor surveys last year. We decided to host a campout there when there were likely to be few OHVrs. It was a nice campout.




Interspersed with these campouts Brenda and I led tours to the petroglyphs on the China Lake naval base. For you who have not seen these ancient rock art drawings you must put this on your bucket list. They are fantastic and mysterious. The drive to them, 36 miles across restricted testing areas, is scenic.  Maybe we can do a special tour for all our friends some day.  Here are some photos of the recent tours.



The one with all the kids in red in green is a tour of Boy Scouts, 40 of them, that I helped lead. These 14 through 16 year olds were just great. They were preparing for the national jamboree in Washington, D. C. (I think). Very good young people.

Well then we were also getting ready for our trip. Unfortunately Tom and Dianne Rindt won't be going with us and I think Hop and Deb Porter aren't either. So it will be the Grossmans and the Burnetts. I think we leave tomorrow after Junior Audubon clubs meet at Faller and Inyokern.

Jeff Grossman decided to prepare by having two surgeries. He now sports two artificial toe joints, new lenses in his eyes, and a new knee. He looks different without glasses and clicks a little when he walks but, hey, same old (and you know I do mean by OLD) Jeff. Linda is way behind on remodeling.

Wow - tomorrow we actually leave!!!!