Only a Paper Moon

 

Since leaving Myrtle Beach, Patches' favorite time for a walk is any time after dark.  Last night I stepped outside with her sans camera and so missed the opportunity to get a picture of the biggest, yellowest moon I have seen in months.  Low on the horizon, barely above the mountain tops, this glorious, glowing orb gleamed so distinctly in the clean, desert air that it appeared to be painted on the sky.  So the picture of the moon remains in my memory instead of on this web page and what you see above is from our moonlit stroll of two nights ago.

Since I wasn't concentrating on trying to snap the perfect picture of the moon I was more aware of our surroundings.  At first I only heard the crunch of my feet on the crushed rock that covers most of the ground here at the campground, but gradually my ears opened to other sounds.  Next I noticed the sound of chirping tree frogs and barking dogs, then the crickets and finally the slap of a fish jumping out of the water of the small fishing pond on the grounds.  Beside the motor noise of the random car going in and out of the campground there was no human noise; everyone else was encapsulated in their tin cans on wheels while Patches and I shared the evening with the night creatures.  While Patches sniffed ground and bushes with head held low, I turned my face upwards and gazed at the stars, lucky enough to see a satellite arcing across the sky while searching for Orion, the only constellation I can recognize beyond the Big and Small Dippers.

It has become my favorite time too.

Sunset on the Superstitions

As I was fixing dinner last night I glanced out our back window and saw the sunlight on the Superstition Mountains behind us.  Over a period of nine minutes I took these photographs which admittedly are of poor quality, my excuse being if I took them outside from ground level I would have been 3 feet lower and therefore most of the shots would have been blocked by the chain link fence and the house across the street.  So the images are marred by the interior lights reflecting on the windows, but I wanted to show the wonderful play of light on the mountains along with the beautiful clouds.  Pretend you don’t see the manufactured home, the power lines and the flashbacks, okay? ‘kthx.

Rock and Roll

We had a bit of rain over the past two days; as always in this area roads had to be closed due to flooding.  There are very few areas in this part of the world that have storm sewers so during downpours there is no place for the rain water to go once it hits the hard packed desert sand and gravel.  Wind gusts of up to 60 mph blew down shallow-rooted palo verde trees and snapped our neighbor's flag pole.  And the winds caused the Superstition Mountains to disappear from view when we looked out our rear window as shown in the above pictures.

All of which meant it was a good time to shop for wood for shelving and for metal shelving units to create more space in our bins and cupboards.  A couple of cupboards inside the fifth wheel were rearranged to better accommodate our "stuff" and we picked up some brochures on pull-out shelving as an idea for future creativity on Denny's part.  We also picked up a new water filtration system that we'll be trying in an effort to have some consistency to the taste of our drinking water/ice cubes in our travels.  If it works as advertised, then we'll put the name on our fulltiming website for others to try.  Denny will probably install it when we hit Yuma next week.  First he has to figure out how he's going to tap into the refrigerator water lines since we'll do that rather than drill through the Corian countertop by the kitchen sink.  The refrigerator in our new rig has an water dispenser in the door, so Denny plans on just connecting the water filtration system to that.  All of which means there may be some curse words flying around in the Yuma area sometime next week.  Fair warning.

Not in the Mood

The notice came up this week for the renewal of my website; the poor thing has been sadly neglected the past two years while Denny and I sat in one place working at our parents' homes. It's hard to keep up a travel website and blog when you are not traveling. I also just haven't been in the mood; a lingering bit of depression/grief? Who knows? But I haven't had much to say.

Yesterday was a sociable day for Denny and I; we went with a group of folks to see Avatar at the Imax, although poor Denny sat with his eyes closed through most of it. He gets nauseous on amusement park rides and the movie is one, big, long ride. Afterwards friends Barb and Rene hosted a chili dinner followed by an evening of Mexican Train (big with RVers). Much tippling and laughter ensued.

Today we'll work on finishing the new shelving that Denny built. I have to take some of the weight out of the cupboard on one of the slideouts as it's throwing off the alignment of the slideout. Since I need to coat the shelves with polyurethane I have to do it today; the dreaded thunderstorms/major flooding/impending doom are coming tomorrow.

That's the agenda for now.

Weather Alert

My weather icon on the computer is yellow this morning for a weather alert. Since the radar on the screen shows nothing, I open the alert to find....it's going to RAIN! Monday, Tuesday and MAYBE WEDNESDAY! OMG!

Okay, seriously though, when it rains in the desert it's like six inches of snow on the roadways in the Midwest; people forget how to drive. Admittedly, the rain mixing with the oil and dirt on the roadways here makes the pavement slippery, but the big danger is the flooding on the roads and in the washes that cut across the secondary roads. When it rains in the desert, it often rains hard and quick so that the soil/sand does not have time to absorb the rain and thus flooding quickly ensues. And people try to drive through the water, not understanding how quickly it flows through the washes and how deep it quickly becomes and so they become stories on the six o'clock news either as a rescue victim or as a drowning victim.

And thus, a weather alert because it's going to RAIN!

Ruffled Her Feathers

I was concerned late this morning, when I scrambled up the small hill of dirt and gravel behind our rig to walk Patches and spied a female roadrunner. Not that seeing a roadrunner is a problem, but this one appeared to have been roughed up or caught by a predator. I had my camera with me and zoomed in on her, thinking to look for injuries. All I could think of was that a bunch of her feathers had been pulled out and that she was hurt because she didn't move upon seeing Patches with me. But silly me, the roadrunner was only doing what I was doing; enjoying the warmth of the sun. By spreading her wings out and down and ruffling up her body feathers she was able to soak up a few rays and feel the heat of the sun on her skin. Once I stepped a little closer she settled her feathers and took off at a roadrunner-like pace, disappearing into the scrub bushes. And once again, I was able to see a little bit more of nature because of the slow pace of walking a cat.


Speaking of potential injuries, the desert is filled with trees and bushes that cover themselves in thorns to protect their leaves, seeds and berries. This little beauty is nothing BUT thorns and is the main reason I walk with a flashlight at night--those thorns are like needles.

Who Needs PS?

One of the things I love above Arizona is the sunsets. Out here, you don't need PhotoSh*p to intensify the color of the sky because Mother Nature does that all on her own. These shots were taken on the hillside that we're backed up against, so you see the tops of RVs at the bottom of the shots. Denny had just taken some luscious pork chops off the grill, so I rushed the shots a bit, but the colors speak for themselves. The fourth picture is actually the sunrise behind The Beast this morning, taken from inside the trailer since I don't wander out in my robe when it's 30 degrees outside; I'm weird like that.

Another Time(Zone)

It's 4:30AM Mountain Time and I'm up because my body says it's 5:30AM Central Time. Heck, it REALLY thinks it's 6:30AM Eastern Time because I haven't yet moved out of THAT mode. The real reason I'm up is because I heard Patches scratching at the carpet, which means that she once again peed just outside her litter box.

We've thrown a lot at her the last month; new trailer and being moved back and forth daily between the old trailer and the new one while work was being done inside the new one. Then I accidentally crushed her litter box with the bedroom slideout when I forgot to move the box to a larger open area. And when looking for a new box (none of which was as large as what she is used to) I found a new set of cat dishes and bought them. Dumb, dumb, dumb. She is a creature of habit and boy did I throw new stuff at her; now the carpet is paying the price.

December was a month of travails rather than travels for all of us. I'm hoping that once we settle into a routine of moving weekly/bi-weekly rather than daily the three of us will relax more and that the kitty "accidents" will stop before the new carpet is totally ruined.

So, how has YOUR morning gone?

A Sign of the Times

This sign pretty much sums up Van Horn, Texas; broken, faded, nondescript. There is history to the town; founded when the railway came through in 1881, used as a base because of the natural wells in the area, popular as a movie set for Western films. The town is not close to anything of great scenic or historic importance, has no famous landmarks, no shopping other than a small market and a Dollar General, is home to two restaurants, one of which may not be open at any given time due to the lack of suitable employees, and hosts block after block of abandoned motels/motor courts straight out of the 1940s. It's a sad little town that turns magical at night under a huge sky filled with stars since there are very few businesses to light up the evening sky. And for that reason alone, I'm enjoying this brief stay.

Road Warriers

Yesterday Denny and I were settled fairly early into our campsite in the middle of Nowhere, Texas as I had the short drive of 170 miles of all highway driving. By late afternoon new fulltimers (on the road for 2 months) had pulled up near us, bustling about sweeping up all around the exterior entrance side of their rig. We thought that they were being anal about their parking area; it turns out when they stepped outside to register at the office for their campsite, their Plexiglas screen door exploded sending plastic shards all over. Never heard of that happening!

Denny and I were sharing a dessert of tiramisu (we highly recommend the tiramisu and bread pudding at the Pizza Shack in Willis, TX) when other folks started arriving-- at 8 o'clock at night! Understand that these folks pulling up aren't young, working couples; no, these are retired folks who should theoretically be relaxed and enjoying life and instead are apparently driving 12 and 13 hours a day. Why do I figure that? Because these same folks who arrived at 7:30 and 8:00PM last night were leaving at 6:30 and 7:00AM this morning! That's insane. Granted, Texas is a BIG state. It's almost 1,000 miles across Interstate 10 from border to border (we'll have put on 1,200 miles by the time we reach St. David, Arizona from Willis, TX). But to try to do it in one or two days? Crazy. Plus, it's never fun to try to navigate a strange campground in the dark--there's too many things you can't see, like overhanging limbs or stray decorative boulders that jump in your way.

I like our way much better.

Old Dogs

Our plans to head west today were canceled by predictions of gloom and doom, better known as rain/sleet/ice/snow. Up to 4 inches of snow were predicted in the area we were supposed to travel through today, and having lived through the great ice skating adventure of 2007 we decided to stay put in our current campground for another day. Temperatures tomorrow are supposed to zoom up to 57 degrees, so that should give any accumulations on the roads a chance to melt. So you CAN teach old dogs new tricks.

Denny and I are still acclimating ourselves to the new trailer. Most of the changes are good, but one caused us a great deal of frustration yesterday. Our new rig has hydraulic front leveling jacks as opposed to the electric jacks on our previous two trailers. I'm used to having about two feet of jack extension to work with in raising our trailer up high enough to hitch up to Black Beauty, so yesterday when I raised the jacks and they stopped about 3 inches short of being high enough to slide the truck into position I freaked. The jacks would go down, but stopped after extending about 14 inches. Not good. I immediately put in a call to the RV dealer service department, speaking to the manager who did some trouble shooting with fuses until we got it through his head that the jacks would go down and then back up, but only to a certain point. That's when he explained that we only had about 14 inches of extension available on the hydraulic part of the jacks. Crap! Do we haul out the hydraulic jack we use to change tires, meaning we'd also have to unload the air compressor to make it work? Denny decided to try to back the truck up and see if the angle of the downhill slope would allow the hitch to slide up the receiver and lock in. As he backed up I could see the receiver turning so far downward that I was sure the whole thing would jackknife and bind up so that we'd never get either hitched or unhitched, but thanks to the new Trailair hitch and some guardian angels, the receiver angled back up and the kingpin settled into place and we were hitched up. Lesson learned; no steeply sloped campsites for us, since the jacks don't extend anywhere near as far as what we're used to. It seems as though we are doomed to be stressed out for the month of December so I'm really looking forward to January and a new year.

Thus today we are snug in our new home while it sleets outside. Patches is curled up in the recliner, smart enough to know that today isn't a good day for walks. I've managed to make a few campground reservations today for the coming weeks and now it's time to go through a couple of cupboards in an effort to clear the clutter and arrange things in a more logical manner. Or maybe I'll just make a couple of mugs of hot chocolate for Denny and I and then sit and read a book. That would work too.

Our Christmas Present to Ourselves

This is the interior of The Beast. It's wet, cold and muddy outside so pictures of the exterior will have to wait.

Patches waiting to be taken out for a walk. The mirrored doors hide the controls for the lights and slides as well as a couple of coat hooks.
The dining/living room area.

Our TV watching spot.

A too dark photo of the desk area. I still have to work at connecting AV cables for the TV satellite sound and hook up the Wii.

The kitchen with the appliance garage/cabinet that went through five different proposed configurations before I finally caved in and met the manufacturer half way. But still not happy.

Water in the door refrigerator--if they could have made it with an ice dispenser Denny and I would have been in seventh heaven as we're ice water fiends.

The hallway houses a huge closet/cupboard area. I'm getting my exercise going up and down the steps to get food items for meal preparations.

The bathroom, obviously.

The hoity-toity glass vanity bowl.

The fixtures in the shower match the sink; brushed nickle, very modern.

Yep, it's a bedroom. I've already removed the original stiff-as-cardboard and poorly fitted bedspread and bought a new comforter. More warmth, more eye appeal. This is another area I fought over; our decor package is called Indigo. Do you see any Indigo in this room? Yeah, me either. Seems the manufacturer now makes every bedroom chocolate no matter what color package of the four offered that you choose. WTF?

Behind the louvered doors is hidden the stacking washer and dryer.

Glass paneled door to the hallway. The other door leads into the bathroom.

Darb's Christmas Present to Us

Ups and Downs

Denny and I arrived in Elkhart, Indiana on Tuesday to look over our new fifth wheel. I'll just say that when I walked around inside it after arriving Tuesday afternoon I cried. Unfortunately, they weren't happy tears. There had been many unannounced changes made between the 2010 model Denny and I looked at and the 2011 model that we ordered sight unseen. And they weren't changes for the better. It's a long and ugly story and I'm not up to telling it right now. I was so upset that I didn't even get pictures of what was wrong with the trailer to show you, all I'll have eventually is the rig finished more the way I wanted it. But right now, we're in transit to Texas and what with all the fixes the service techs had to do Denny and I were still transferring our stuff out of the old trailer and putting it in the new one at 11 o'clock at night on Friday night so we could get out of Elkhart early Saturday morning. That meant that we just piled and crammed stuff in any cabinet and nook and cranny we could find and I'll have to rearrange once we settle in Texas for a few days. So no pictures while this place looks like a hurricane just hit it.

There was an inch of snow on the ground and more coming when we pulled out of the service building Saturday morning and the truck slipped and slid pulling out onto the street. Fortunately all the main roads were just wet and none of the bridges were icy so we made it to Terre Haute for the first night where we hooked up to the campground's wi-fi to make contact with the world for the first time in 4 days. We had been so busy dealing with service guys, our RV dealer, insurance people, bank people, et al that for once we didn't miss not having access to TV or wi-fi (we were parked inside the RV dealer's service building while the guys took care of all the changes that I insisted upon) The service techs had to finish getting the rig ready for us (prepped) since the trailer had come off the assembly line two days later than planned and we almost beat the trailer to the RV dealer. We were all working on top of each other as the workers fixed and installed things while Denny and I were trying to carry our belongings in, so the guys never even had the opportunity to clean up the rig as is standard procedure; that's something I'll be doing once we're settled for a couple of days. I didn't ask them to finish their prep work because that would have meant hanging around in the cold and snow for three more days and we just weren't prepared to do that and us making the service techs make the unexpected changes threw off their scheduled work on other people's RVs. Everyone involved was pretty short-tempered at any given time over the four days we were there.

Emotionally, it's not been a good week. I have had to tell Denny (and myself) to take a deep breath several times to keep from blowing. In the season of brotherly love, I've wanted to tear the heads off several people and smile as I'm doing it. But tonight I'm sitting here with a cup of hot tea while the tiny table top Christmas tree twinkles merrily beside me and I'm finally beginning to relax and appreciate the features of the new trailer. I know it will be a while before the trailer becomes "ours" as Denny and I have several small modifications and additions to make/install to make the rig more livable and user friendly. It's what we've done with the four other RVs we've owned and so we'll do it with this, our final RV. In a few days, I'll post pictures, starting with one of Black Beauty and the Beast.

And we'll be fine.

We're Off

Today we start our trek to Indiana to pick up the new fifth wheel. It will take us four days of driving to get there and we're hoping for dry weather with temperatures above freezing while we're en route. I have little hope of decent temperatures in Elkhart; it's just too far north for that.

Poor Patches will hate all of this; being tossed into the truck daily for the long drives and then once we arrive we'll be set up inside the RV dealer's service building where she won't be able to wander around. It will take us a couple-three days to haul our belongings from one trailer to the other and then we'll once again be on the road for four days returning to Willis to title and register the new trailer. Everything will be a mess until Denny can get some shelves built and installed in the cabinets and closets and we get everything put away to our liking. There will be frustration, because for weeks we'll not be able to find anything--we've been through this three times already so we know. It doesn't make for the best of holiday seasons and I've been struggling to find my "ho,ho,ho" this year.

I'll try to remember to take pictures of the new trailer before we toss all of our "stuff" in and maybe a few pictures of the mess in the process of being stored away. This is what it looked like when we moved from our 38 foot motorhome to our 36 foot fifth wheel.We ended up hauling a convertible full of stuff to my mom's house to be sold in a garage sale, plus donated bags of unneeded items that had been sitting unused in the cupboards. This time around I've been sorting through cupboards over the past couple of weeks and dropping things of at local charities before we make the switch. It took me a while, but I do learn!

Check back in a week to find if I still have any hair or if I've pulled it all out.

The Cutest Video Ever

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Lord love a duck! That's an ugly one, isn't it? It's a Muscovy duck at a campground in Louisiana. In case you wanted to know.

Yesterday Denny and I officially became Texans. Well, not really, because we have yet to own cowboy boots and hats. That will come I suppose, since the new fifth wheel will have a larger closet. We celebrated at a small restaurant in Coldspring, TX; a tiny town with a huge courthouse. It was the kind of place where the locals got their own table settings and autographed pictures of George *. Bush lined the walls.

Gremlins are still affecting our lives; yesterday we stopped at the post office to pick up our mail and when we returned to the truck it wouldn't turn over--it acted totally dead. I'm searching through the owner's manual trying to look up a symbol that appeared on the electronic instrument panel while Denny sat there cussing (always helpful). Eventually the truck started and we had no further problems for the remainder of our day. I've become a little frustrated with the weirdness, though.

One thing that did go well was the upgrading of Denny's new laptop to Windows 7. When we purchased the computer it came with a coupon for a free upgrade so when the DVD arrived yesterday I girded my loins and installed it. Perhaps it's because we haven't put a lot of our own programs in the laptop yet, but the installation went flawlessly and all the programs still work. Big sigh of relief!

Since the weather forecast is for more rain, I'll get back to rooting through drawers and cupboards to see what else we're hauling around that we don't really use. Now if I could just get Denny to go through his stuff....

The Rain Isn't Helping

Nice sunset, huh? Haven't seen one of those for a couple of days. It's been raining like crazy here in Louisiana and we've been experiencing a lot of frustration with our trailer gremlins.

When we arrived here our landing jacks wouldn't lower, which meant the batteries weren't working on their own. Trying to replace special batteries in a small town isn't easy but I found a business that said they had what we needed. And here's where the fun began. The owner of the business and Denny didn't hit it off for some reason; they were like two junkyard dogs confronting each other. Then the man tells us that his credit card machine isn't working and so we have to pay in cash. Great. These are expensive batteries and there's a limit to our ATM withdrawals to prevent fraud. We manage to come up with enough cash to pay for the batteries, go back and pick them up (now the guy is trying to be nice to us) and we get theme home. The rain is pouring down the entire time as we're going in and out, mind you. Denny gets the batteries in, I make lunch but notice the refrigerator light is glaring bright, as are the overhead fluorescent fixtures. All of a sudden one fixture goes out. Okay, the bulbs went bad. Then the other light fixture goes out. Uh-oh, this isn't good. Denny goes outside to look at the batteries, I call the store where we bought them to confirm he sold us 6 volt batteries. Nope, he sold us 12 volt batteries, so instead of 12 volts going through the system we have 24 volts going through. So we zapped the light fixtures. Okay, re-cabled to hook up only one battery, the owner is special ordering two 6 volt batteries and now I have to find new light fixtures, otherwise it's going to be pretty darn dark in here at night. Call the Camping World that's 35 miles away, ask if they have the lights in stock. No, not the same model number but some that would work. And so we drive over there (still pouring rain) only to find that no, these will not work AT ALL! Drive all the way back home and call the manufacturer. There are two distributors; one in Indiana and one in California. Of course. I call the one in Indiana and reached a very nice man and we did some reminiscing about a local celebrity that had the last name of Braun. The man did have our lights and will be shipping them to Texas for us. It will just be a bit dark in here for a while, we can swap out the fixture in the bedroom for one of the living room fixtures so it won't be quite as dark as it is now.

Therefore, the lesson is; don't make assumptions that store owners know what they are doing. Check and double-check. And ask if they can take credit cards. *sigh*

And please let this be the end of the weirdness going on now that we've found a buyer for the trailer??!!!

Men Are From Mars

I should have gotten a picture; we had a repairman out fixing a broken spring latch in our awning. It's a repair you don't want to do on your own due to the danger of the tightly wound spring, plus there are no RV parts places nearby. So the gentleman who works out of our campground got the part for us and stopped by with it today to install it and before long there was a crowd of men in front of our trailer. Just supervising, of course. Bored, curious, just wanting to help or wanting free advice from the repairman while he was "in the area" as it were, there were five or six guys there at any given time for the duration of the repair.

This gathering of men is a routine phenomenon in campgrounds; raise the hood of your truck and two or three guys will wander over, one of them offering a bigger, more powerful version of whatever tool or device you have in your hand. Climb a ladder and wax your rig and there's a discussion of oxidation removers, the best wax/polish or dry-washing system or chamois versus microfiber as polishing cloths. It's as if men need an excuse to congregate and chat, whereas women will just stop and be neighborly because you step outside for a moment. It tickles me every time I see it happen.

It takes so little to entertain me.

Not There

I see y'all were checking in yesterday; still looking for the Lazy Sunday posts? Yeah, that ain't happening. This year I took relatively few pictures since we really haven't traveled; we were in one place in Ohio for eight months dealing with my mother and afterwards her estate and that didn't make for shots of scenic vistas, believe me.

Lately we've been preoccupied with the old and the new trailers. En route to our current campground we had a tire blow on the interstate (fortunately we both heard the "pop" and stopped quickly before the tire self-destructed) and the gremlins have set in now that we have found a buyer for the old trailer. You know, little things have started to go wrong that we'll now have to fix before turning the trailer over to the new owner. Seven years of constant usage and thousands of miles of road travel will do that; things are bound to jiggle their way loose.

Therefore we're going to be busy ordering a new tire, fixing the glitches, finding campgrounds in Illinois and Indiana and Arkansas that will be open mid-winter for our trip up and back to Indiana (campgrounds close due to the fact that their water lines freeze up if not properly buried, insulated or drained) and digging through cupboards, closets and drawers seeing what we can get rid of before we have to transfer items out of one trailer and into another. Because carrying boxes and drawers full of "stuff" down three steps from one rig and up three steps to another for hours gets very wearing. This will be the fourth time we've switched belongings from one RV to another and it ain't fun. You think you lead a simple life with very few belongings other than the necessities, but it's pretty amazing how many necessities there are. Each transfer has taken us two days just to move everything from one rig to the next and that's just hauling the stuff out and in. That doesn't include having to put it all away in a new place, and then moving a lot of it again later because you rushed it to get out of the dealer's lot and back on the road and wherever you put it at the time is really not convenient or logical. Yeah, been there, done that.

All of which should explain the lack of scenic photographs and lyrical posts about the beauty of the area. At least for now.