Saturday, March 26, 2011

Monday, March 21, through Wednesday, April 6, 2011: In Palm Springs:
We left for the 70-mile trip to the Palm Springs Thousand Trails preserve before 7:00am Monday, to try to get there early enough to get a pull-through space in that very crowded park. We succeeded. Late in the morning, Becky asked me to join her at the local dealer's RV display at the park. It turned out that she had fallen in love with a new 5th wheel there. I had known that she was not thrilled with the external appearance of our rig after 8 years (it is looking a bit tired), but I did not know she was in a mood to get a new one right away. Wrong.

On Tuesday, I saw a dermatologist, Wendy Roberts, MD, about a growth on my left ear that Bob Newhouse had noticed and strongly recommended I take care of. She sliced it off, put a band-aid on the wound, and wished me well. Not counting the blood I splattered during the procedure, it was quite a non-event. I like that in doctor visits.

Surprise!!! We bought the new trailer on Wednesday, arranging to take delivery the middle of next week.




The dealer is taking our current trailer in trade, as is. So, it seems that replacing the entire rig was easier than replacing the destroyed lounge chairs. We celebrated the deal with the Wheelers at the nearby Don Diego restaurant, where I enjoyed one of their "medium" margaritas and some excellent enchiladas.


It will take some effort to get used to a new rig, especially personalizing it and adjusting to the placement of all our stuff. But it will be fun. Otherwise, we played pickle ball and walked the dogs, and on Thursday, we had lunch at the lovely Indio (second) home of Carlos and Denise Solis. Their next-door neighbors, Roy and Edna, joined the group. Fun.

On Friday, Daisy discovered a forgotten package of doggie treats while she was killing time alone in our truck. Somehow, it had gotten lodged between the right-rear seat and the adjacent door. To get to it, she had to tear apart a portion of the seat cushion. I guess she had seen the fun Ramsey had with our lounge chairs, and decided to join in. I have arranged with a local auto upholstery shop (Caruso's) to replace the seat cushion next Thursday. Ah, the joys of pet ownership.

Saturday morning, Ramsey chewed his way through the covering on his soft crate while we were away, and escaped into the rig. Becky repaied the damage (to the crate; there was no damage to the rig) while I went to PetSmart and bought an indestructible crate. Ramsey's adventure happened while we were on an excursion to two sort-of-local attractions: Salvation Mountain and Slab City. The most appropriate description: Bizarre.

According to Wikipedia,

"Slab City is a camp in southeastern California, used by recreational vehicle owners and squatters from across North America. It takes its name from the concrete slabs and pylons that remain from the abandoned World War II Marine barracks Camp Dunlap there. A group of servicemen remained after the base closed, and the place has been inhabited ever since, although the number of residents has declined since the mid 1980s. Several thousand campers, many of them retired, use the site during the winter months. These 'snowbirds' stay only for the winter, before migrating north in the spring to cooler climates. The temperatures during the summer are unforgiving; nonetheless, there is a group of around 150 permanent residents who live there all year round. Most of these 'Slabbers' derive their living by way of government checks (SSI and Social Security) and have been driven to the Slabs through poverty. The site is uncontrolled, and there is no charge for parking. The camp has no electricity, no running water or other services. Many campers use generators or solar panels to generate electricity. Supplies can be purchased in nearby Niland, California, located about three miles (5 km) to the southwest of Slab City.


Located just east of State Route 111, the entrance to Slab City is easily recognized by the colorful Salvation Mountain, a small hill approximately three stories high which is entirely covered in acrylic paint, concrete and adobe and festooned with Bible verses.


It is an ongoing project of over two decades by permanent resident Leonard Knight."


The description appears to be accurate, and the place is worth visiting, if only to remind yourself that there are some very eccentric people in this world.

The early part of the week was spent preparing for the closing of the deal on the new rig and getting ready for the massive job of transferring all our stuff. The storage area on the new rig looked huge until we started moving things over. On Tuesday, we closed the first part of the deal (i.e., we gave them the money and signed a thousand pages of documents) and on Wednesday, we continued the transfer process, leading up to the final closing ceremony in a Flying J truck stop 50 feet inside Arizona (to avoid exhorbitant California sale taxes) where we signed more papers and actually picked up the new trailer. We then drove it 106 miles back to the same site in the Palm Springs RV park, arriving in the dark for the first time in years. It's no fun setting up in the dark.

On Thursday, we set out in earnest to complete the transfer of stuff to the new rig, and failed miserably. We have things parked temporarily all over our site and no place to put them in the rig. It's not as "storage friendly" as our old trailer, notwithstanding that it is larger, and we have not been very efficient in placement, so we have more work to do, a lot of stuff to donate to charity, and some stuff to transport (perhaps) to our storage facility in Las Vegas.

We also had scheduled DirecTV to set up our service in the three TV sets in the new trailer on Thursday. The guys arrived on time. So did the blistering weather. The temperature soared to 103 degrees, and after six or seven power failures in the RV park, the DirecTV guys said rhey could do no more work without electricity, and said they would return Friday morning to complete the job. It was over 100 degrees again on Friday, but the DirecTV people were able to complete the installation, anyway. Good job, guys. One small glitch: Because of the screwy way the rig was wired, the third TV set, the one in the "basement," could not be made independent of the one in the living room. That is, the same show had to be played on both sets. That was
OK with me because I didn't expect to watch the basement TV except for special events, such as the Super Bowl, in which case I'd have it showing on all three sets, anyway.

Because of the power failures, of course, the air conditioning in our trailer was not working well and the place became an oven, so Becky and the dogs hung out outside in whatever shade they could find---and, happily, survived. That night, they all went to bed early due to the exhausting day all had spent.

We had the work done to repair the truck upholstery on Thursday. It turned out OK. Two things didn't turn out so well. First, one of the changes to the new rig we had negotiated was replacing the king-size bed with an RV queen-size bed. (They are 5 inches shorter than regular queens.) The change allows for more room in the bedroom. The dealer took its time locating the appropriate bed and ended up ordering it online, with a five-day delivery time. That meant we couldn't leave the area when we had planned, so we extended our stay and spent the extra time continuing the transfer of our stuff. It was quite a project, but we avoided having to drop off anything in Las Vegas---primarily by donating a lot of stuff to a local charity (Angel View).

The Wheelers were scheduled to leave Monday morning---for points east. We probably won't see them again until September, so we said goodbye Sunday night with a wonderful Chinese dinner at the Emperor Buffet in Indian Wells.

The second thing that didn't work out so well had to do with the magic self-leveling system the new rig had as a major selling point. In short, it didn't work. After several attempts by the dealer to diagnose the problem, it was determined that the computer "brain" needed to be replaced. After some haggling, the dealer agreed to borrow the brain from another new rig. In the process of installing it, the tech realized that the problem was not with the brain but with the fact that two connecting wires had been reversed. Voila! No problem (or so he said). When I still couldn't get it to work, the tech insisted that I was misreading the instructions.

The new bed issue turned out to be a bigger problem than initially thought. The dealer informed me Wednesday morning that the five-day delivery time did not start until the bed was finished (it was a special order due to its being an RV size) and the bed was at least a week away from being finished. That was not acceptable, of course, and, after some heated words, the dealer agreed to deliver the bed to us---wherever we were when it arrived at the dealer---at no charge. In the meantime, we "borrowed" the one from our old rig---simply to be trashed when the new one arrived.

We had predictions of very windy weather the next day, when we were scheduled to leave, so we decided on short notice to head out for Soledad Canyon Wednesday afternoon without further interaction regarding the leveling system. We arrived at the Soledad Canyon Thousand Trails preserve without incident, and settled in to relax for a change.

It was an altogether exciting and fruitful (and expensive) stay in the Palm Springs area.

Thursday, March 10, 2011

Tuesday, March 8, through Sunday, March 20, 2011: In Menifee:
We made the 130-mile trip to the Wilderness Lakes preserve in fine fashion, notwithstanding some hefty wind. We found a site not far from the one we had earlier---near the entrance. The Wheelers are here, about 1/4 mile away in a distant site. It's good to see them again.

For quite some time, the gizmo that raises and lowers the legs of our trailer (allowing us to connect to, and disconnect from, our truck, and to level the trailer) has been subtly telling me that it was going to fail at some inconvenient time. Tuesday, it failed---just after I disconnected from the truck. As luck would have it, there was a mobile repairman visiting another hapless RVer. He wasn't able to get to us until Wednesday afternoon, whereupon he diagnosed the problem and, after determining that the necessary parts were available locally, announced that he could fix it forthwith. I gave him a check to cover the parts, and haven't seen him since (but it's now only Monday morning). I hope to hear from him soon.

Also on Wednesday, I played pickleball for the first time since we were last here. I was a bit rusty, so I quit after three games. No use embarassing myself unnecessarily. Becky went to Claremont to have lunch with Michael Sessum, one of her former asssociates at both Union Bank and Sanwa Bank.

On Thursday, we went to Disneyland and California Adventure with Steven Vivell, Honoria's son, who is a "cast member" at the park.


Because he is a cast member (which, incidentally, they call all employees) we got in for free. That's worth $200 these days. Maybe that's at least in part why we we had such a terrific time. Actually, it was a lot of fun. We hadn't been there in at least ten years, and it was fun to visit old friends like the Matterhorn and Space Mountain,


as well as some of the new stuff at both parks. Thank you, Steven, for being such a great host.

The downside of the day was driving to and from the parks. We got stuck in both morning and afternoon rush hour traffic on some of southern California's most congested freeways. The combined 124 miles to and from Anaheim took more than four hours. Very frustrating. We comforted ourselves by having dinner at a sushi bar in Menifee. Yum!

Friday was Becky's day to make the long trek to visit her favorite chiropractor, Mark Adachi, in Glendale. He's a great guy and, as usual, pronounced her hale and hearty.


After her relaxing session with him, she then faced monumental traffic returning to Menifee, and was tense and exhausted by the time she arrived---thus largely defeating the purpose of the trip. Oh, well.

On Saturday, we ventured to Carslbad to visit Bill and Patty Fister. Bill's family lived two doors away from Becky during the many years she lived in San Marino. Bill had been unable to attend the 40th class reunion last year, so Becky took him pictures of the festivities. It's amazing to me how many of the folks they both remembered. I couldn't tell you the names of more than three or four of the people I went to high school with. We had never met Patty---they've been married only 20 years. Nice lady. They treated us to a very nice brunch at the Beach House restaurant in Cardiff-By-The-Sea.


On Sunday, we made the short trip to Temecula to have lunch with Roberta Ruddy and her husband, Steve Walde. Roberta and Becky worked together at Citigroup. They recently moved to the San Diego area from New York City where they had been based for many years. We had never met Steve. Nice guy. Tall.


We had a delightful lunch at the Thornton Winery, then decided to visit some others---to give Roberta and Steve a feel for the "scene" in Temecula, which they had not previously visited. The first winery we went to was Gershon Bachus, which we had enjoyed our last time in the Temecula wine country. We never got to another winery. At this winery, the owners (Christina and Kenny) and winemaker (Joe) chat with the guests.


It turned out that Roberta and Christina grew up in the same part of Long Island, and we spent the next two hours drinking their wine and, in general, partying with them. It was great fun.

The repairman showed up Wednesday evening, and soon realized he had mis-diagnosed the problem with our front legs. He went home to find out whether he could get the correct part locally, and promised to let me know that evening whether and when he would return. I heard the next morning that he would return on Friday. He showed up when he said he would, and fixed the legs. Of course, it cost more than we had thought, but it works!!! He also cleaned our sir conditioners (for the first time in years) and solved a problem we were having with one of our slideoouts. Thank you, George. Good job.

The rest of the week was a combination of pickle ball and shopping. After playing pickle ball on Wednesday, we returned to the rig to discover that Ramsey had torn apart one of our lounge chairs. There was stuffing all over the place. I immediately went into action calling upholstery shops, quickly determining that it would be a wholly uneconomic exercise to have the chairs recovered. (The chairs have to match, of course, so both would have to be done even though only one was damaged.) Becky the seamstress immediately went into action locating some compatible material at a local Joann fabric store, and, on Thursday, patched up the chair in a way that made the damage almost invisible. Good job, Becky.

On Sunday morning, the two of us were the only people to show up to play pickle ball, so we played singles---and did rather well, I thought. When we returned to our rig, though, we discovered that Ramsey had been at it again. This time he tore into both lounge chairs.


Becky quickly did an emergency fix, but it's clear the chairs cannot be saved and we will need to replace them.

Sunday night we had dinner with Dr. Bob and Beverly Newhouse. They had just returned from a trip. We enjoyed seeing them again. Monday, we will be off to Palm Springs for a couple of weeks.