Go East, Old Man!

Spring Robin in Elk Horn

Our home has been rolling down the road toward Maine. After leaving Lincoln, NE, we headed north to Pender, NE, to the Blue Ox factory where we had our tow bar, the part that connects our car to our motor home, checked and repaired. It was still in pretty good shape after 5 years of traveling.

We developed a problem with our slide awning, designed to cover the main slide to keep it clean. It failed to unroll when the slide extended, requiring a ladder and some muscle to open it and extend it before the slide went out. The awning is made by Carefree, and a call to one vendor in Lincoln resulted in a report of "No we don't want to deal with Carefree". Camping World in Council Bluffs said they might be able to fix it, so we went there after Pender. But Camping World really didn't want to help either, saying that they might replace it, but it would likely take a couple weeks. We decided that getting it fixed in Maine would be our best course of action.

Danish Windmill in Elk Horn

From Council Bluffs, we roamed along I80 to Elk Horn, IA, listed as an "overnight stop" on one of our RV lists. We found a wonderful Danish Windmill and Danish Immigrant Museum there, and a tiny campground which offered us electric. In the morning, we toured the sights, anso found a nice quilting store on Main Street.

We could have made one more stop on our way to Rochester, but made the trip in one day. We arrived at the Silver Lake Campground around 5:30 PM, got ourselves parked and set up, and began contacting our friends there. We had planned most of our appointments for the following week, so we called Mayo and asked that they reschedule. We managed to moev up everything, including our dentist appointments.

I made plans with Curt Kraft to play golf on the next day. Now that Curt is retired, that was no problem for him. It was the first of 6 golf outings in 1-1/2 weeks, interrupted only by Clinic visits and weather one day. That was a load of fun.

The time in Rochester was wrapped up by a get together with my former work mates at Jon Camp's new house in Stewartville. It was good to see everybody and chat for a while. I showed a boatload of pictures and ate altogether too much. Thanks, Jon.

Immigrant Museum in Elk Horn

On Saturday, May 1, we moved the house to Lake City, MN. They were having their annual 100 mile garage sale along the Mississippi River, and we toured a few garages. We bought little... a few hostas to plant in our yet to be built Maine landscaping. Saturday night, we had dinner with John and Deb Wilkinson at the relaxing river condo. Good food and good company. We'll see them again in late summer when they come to Maine.

Sunday began our trek east. We stopped at a Flying J in Beloit, IL for an overnight. We ate at a greasy spoon in a truck stop, and the next day, I developed serious diarrhea and a low fever. We kept moving though, and arrived later in the day at the Elkhart Red Cross, our home chapter for our volunteer activities. We got our paperwork up to date, and they found a couple tasks for us to do while we were there. We also did some shopping at the RV places. I managed to find a pair of awning arms which may effect a repair for the awning.

I was thoroughly embarrassed that night when I set off the alarm in the Red Cross building. I had unlocked a door while going back and forth to repair an Ez Up shelter for them, looking up info on the Ez Up web pages. At 9:30 PM I realized that I had not re-locked the door, and apparently nobody from the Chapter had caught that fact. So I opened it and locked it, setting off the alarm. I went back into the motor home and said to Consuelo, "the cops will be here soon." And they were. I reported my actions, he said fine, then somebody from the Red Cross came out and turned off the alarm. Embarrassing, but had to be done. Turns out that the Exec Director was the one that was supposed to check the locks, so she was embarrassed, too.

On leaving Elkhart, our main slide failed to retract. After trying several things, I relented and gained access to the manual gear to roll the slide in. Fortunately, a little elbow grease was enough to get the slide moving up a ramp it needs to climb, after wich it retraced the rest of the way on its own. One more thing to fix in Maine.

We stopped for overnights in Hubbard, Ohio and near Scranton, PA, before finally arriving at Croton Point Park in Croton, NY.

Cruising through January

Consuelo's Gourd Project

January has been a busy month for us in Yuma. Our friends from Pincher Creek Canada arrived, and that alone added to our calendar, including occasional bike rides, some golf, dinners out with a movie (It's Complicated), happy hours, progressive dinners, Mary's good cookin', and various projects.

The friends are Ken and Mary Clinton and Art and Sharon Bonertz. Sharon and Mary are sisters. We've also gotten to know some other Pincher Cretians who are staying here, Leslie and Gerry Musa, and met folks from all over.

Consuelo, Sharon and Mary participated in a gourd decorating project. Consuelo's is shown above. It came out pretty nice, I think.

The bicycle rack that Art built in Canada for Consuelo's bike developed a list, and Art wanted to correct it. We pulled the trailer hitch off the motorhome, got some heavier bolts and reattached it. It's now straight. That took most of a day.

Art Bonertz strumming

Music has been touched as a topic. Art Bonertz brought his guitar along, and Ken Clinton is practicing steadily on his new electric guitar. I got my old buzzing ukulele out and rediscovered a few standard chords, but my memory is a sieve with regard to song lyrics. None of us has felt comfortable enough to get together and play at the same time, so maybe we'll skate by some bad music. Consuelo was encourage to enter the Karaoke Contest (with a $1000 prize to the winner) but the contest ends long after we depart Yuma, so that was sufficient for her to say no.

Classy slippers

Besides, Consuelo has been busy enough with other projects. She generated a slipper knitting class with 9 students, and they all made their way through to the felting process. Some students only managed to get one slipper made, and they are now out searching for Cinderella, or hopping around on cold mornings.

Speaking of cold mornings, the weather has been pretty good here. We did have a couple days of rain and hefty winds, highly unusual for this area. Record rainfalls were recorded, close to 2 inches on one day, which is 1/2 of Yuma's average annual amount. Many folks reported minor leaks, including us, and a slide awning or two was damaged, and some lighter than air plastic lawn chairs departed for places unknown. We're now waiting to see if the desert blossoms, as often occurs after a rain.

Tissues and Bananas Still Life

Meanwhile, I've been pursuing my photographic hobby. I acquired a new strobe flash for my camera, and have been experimenting (or, studying) its use and operation. Various objects have found themselves exposed on our tabletop, then subjected to bright lights. Some of the pictures, like the red gourd, look pretty nice. Bananas and a tissue box weren't so pleasing, but they were well lit. I'll be moving into portrait work next.

Flashy golf tees

I've also been leading two meetings a week for other campers in the park. One is a computer group, where we mostly help newbies learn how to use email and web browsers. The second is a photo discussion group, which led to a request for a presentation from a neighboring RV park. I expect this can develop into a photo seminar for amateurs in the future.

Does a Ford moo?

Ken Clinton's truck got horny one morning, as Art decorated his hood with some real Texas flair. Ken declined to take up the spurs, though, and de-horned the big hauler.

On to February!

Central Washington State

We've been parked in Quincy, Washington for a few days. We're at Crescent Bar Resort, a big sandbar in the Columbia River, on a lake formed by a power dam. This place must really rock in the summer, but now we're the only campers, paying winter rates. We've got electric and water service, so we're happy.

Bluffs along the Columbia River

Besides the campground on the Bar, there's a Thousand Trails RV ownership park, several condo developments, and a huge trailer/RV park. There's a 9 hole golf course, and a 9 ho;e executive course. Docks and hundreds of mooring buoys attest to the summer boating scene. Two public beaches provide swimming and sunning. Swimsuit and quick food shops fill out the venue. All of this closed for the season, except that the golf course has an honor box on the first tee and several golfers were out enjoying the sun on Saturday.

Blue Heron

We stopped out here to visit Wayne and Mary Jo Lohrman, RV friends we've bumped into several times around the US. We both saw some of Canada this summer, so we compared notes on that. We also showed them our scenes of Alaska, since they're headed up that way next year. Wayne has been picking apples here, just about done with that.

The Columbia ha carved a fairly deep canyon through this part of the country, which leaves a fairly high bluff alongside the Bar. Across the river the land tapers down to the water. The land above is high desert, full of scrub and devoid of trees. The exception is the orchards, vineyards and farms that irrigate with river water. Quincy has several large fruit shippers, along with beans and grapes.

Foliage behind Crescent Bar

About 35 miles north of us are the burgs of Wenatchee and East Wenatchee, straddling the river. Consuelo visited a knitting supplier in East Wenatchee to check supplies and get ideas.

Twenty miles east of the Wenatchees on the edge of the Cascade Mountains is the faux German Alpine village of Leavenworth. We took a ride up there with the Lohrmans to shop the town and have some lunch.

Leavenworth has sculpted itself in alpine motif, picked Bavarian designs and names, and filled its shops with Deutchland-like wares. You can buy steins, liederhosen, and european crystal. The food features wursts, German style potato salad, and lots of beer. We enjoyed a good lunch, then visited the stores.

Winter comes here, and it's coming soon. We're out of here later today.

It's Raining... what a surprise!

We've been parked in Hoquiem, WA for 3 nights. It's on the southwest corner of the Olympic Peninsula. I surmise that wood products and/or paper are the major industries here. Hoquiem and her larger sister Aberdeen sit at the inland end of Gray's Harbor, one of the few bumps in the Pacific coastline providing safe shelter for boats. So there's a fishing fleet here, too.

We've been parked in Hoquiem RV Park, a nice campground with good amenities and friendly staff. They have a very good wifi, as campground wifi's go, and I've downloaded some Windows upgrades and checked out some video tutorials on the Adobe site.

Ocean City Beach

It's been raining since before we arrived. Such is the reputation of the Northwest Coast in the US. Right now, the weather forecast has no sun in it for the foreseeable future. The sun came out for a few minutes Wednesday night, so I took off to Ocean City beach, about 20 miles NW of where we're parked. By the time I arrived, the overcast had arrived again. I walked out onto the beach, which I shared with one lonely seagull. IF it had been summer, and IF the sun had been out and IF I got there at noon then it would have been a really great day at a beautiful beach. Only IF.

Consuelo has been busy knitting slippers, preparing to sell a few pair at a flea market in Yuma when we get there. She's had a little trouble with yarn deliveries, as we've been on the move since we left Chimacum. It turned out that the last box she expected arrived the day we left Chimacum, and was returned to the vendor.

I've been busy working on 2010 photo calendars, also to sell in Yuma and online. I've started a web site here for them. I expect to add 3 or 4 more before I finish. I've ordered a new printer from Office Depot to print them, but Office Depot has thoroughly screwed up my order, and may cause me delays before I can deliver. We'll see. I've asked them to refund my money, but I expect a gnat has a better chance of devouring an elephant.

I've also been working on my commercial photo website. Photoshelter offered up a 30 day trial of their custom websites, which I've had up for a couple weeks now. It's a lot nicer than the regular site, but until I sell some photos, I can't really justify the extra cost for style points.

April

Naples Wedding

It's April, and we've left Jekyll Island. The first thing we needed to do was go to a wedding in Naples, FL. Consuelo's nephew Gabe was getting married. Consuelo made origami boxes as favors, and little hand fans with the program info on them. That was a very smart thing to do, since it was an outdoor wedding in 85 degree heat.

My job was to take pictures for a digital guest book. I set up in front of a hedge at one side of the pavilion, and captured folks before they sat down. At least, that was the plan. Because of the heat, everybody stayed indoors until the time for the wedding, so I missed a few in the rush. But it turned out pretty well.

Sand Hill Crane

To avoid the cost of driving the RV to Naples, I parked it at the Escapees park in Bushnell, FL, about 40 miles south of Ocala. The park has a pair of sand hill cranes that wander around looking for food. They are beautiful creatures.

After the wedding, we returned to Bushnell and stayed for a few days since our friends the Lohrmanns were staying there. Otherwise, this park is pretty deserted at this time of year. Most of the winter guests have moved north already.

I managed to get our Internet satellite up and running, though it took me a while. I'm so out of practice after 5 static months in Maine, and never setting it up on Jekyll.

And I finally got our solar panels mounted on the roof, with Wayne Lohrmann's help. I have yet to find the wire that Alfa supposedly ran to connect them into the system, but they're out of the storage compartment, anyway.

We also filed our taxes while we were here.

Florida Butterfly

For diversion, we went to a wildlife area about 10 miles from the campground to hike and for Consuelo and Mary Jo to pick up long leaf pine needles to make baskets from. I expected to see some wildlife, but the small lake in the middle of the park was virtually dry, even though we had received an inch of rain a couple days before. The Southeast remains very dry, at least south of Georgia.

Today we pack up and begin our long journey toward Alaska. It's going to take a while.

Busy, New and old Friends, Summer?

Turtle in the sun

The last month has been a busy one for both of us. Good busy, not bad busy. We've been happily doing things that we enjoy, finding friendship, and enjoying the turn toward warmth we've seen in the past few days.

We're still on Jekyll Island for another 2-1/2 weeks. This is the longest we've stayed in one place since we began our life on the road, not counting stays at our own property. It seems like we've only been here a week or two.

Allen Newland out of the sand

Consuelo is winding down her slipper knitting classes. I've lost track of how many students she's had, but I'm guessing a dozen or more. When she realized how long it typically took the average knitter to complete a pair of slippers (three weeks), she realized she would have to stop accepting students long before we leave here, in order to finish everything. Some were disappointed, but that just points to the continuing interest people in our community have in trying new things to satisfy their creative needs. A few knitters could not get through one pair. Others have ordered yarn for four or five pairs.

One of the Jekyll water towers

My project of fixing the wifi in the campground has been completely successful. Initially, I worked with the IT specialist on the island to load-balance the Cisco router. Once he gained confidence in my ability to troubleshoot and program the system, he turned it over to me to proceed. The main problem was not with the router, but rather with the configuration on the wifi access points. I've received many compliments for getting this running. The system is now up against the limited bandwidth of the DSL lines, instead of folks being unable to connect at all. Everybody gets a little bandwidth now, enough for email and limited web browsing. Typically 30-40 people are connected at any given time.

Consuelo and Mary Jo

The campground has turned from a retirement community to a family campground. The weather warmed into the 80s this week, just in time for school vacations, and all the little camp spaces that were empty all winter are now full of van campers, tents, and little RVs. The average age of a bike rider has dropped by 30 years.

I got to know one little boy who was camped behind our RV with his dad. Adam is 6, the precocious kind of kid who wants everything to be the biggest, fastest, smartest in his life. The three of us walked around the campground looking at the RVs, he showed me his Pokemon cards, and one day I came home and found his feet sticking out under our doorway. He had crawled under our motorhome to pet Thumper. When he came out, he looked like he had eaten a box of chocolate ice cream, with all the dirt on his face.

Ron Anderson ready to tee off

Consuelo and I both have entries in the Jekyll Island Arts Festival. She entered slippers in the fiber arts competition, and I entered 3 of my photos. She also knitted a dozen pairs of slippers to sell in the arts store associated with the festival.

I also produced a 5 minute DVD on Jekyll Island Winter, which a number of people have paid me for. I'm also working on 2010 Jekyll Calendars which have been requested by other campers.

As we wind things down, Consuelo is now sewing a dress for Amelia's birthday next week. I'm playing more golf.

All this activity has spawned a whole new collection of friends and acquaintances from all over the US and Canada. Some we'll probably track down in our travels. Others we'll look forward to seeing again back here on Jekyll in a couple years.

Art and Sharon Bonertz

A plus for us, we've had some old friends here in the park with us for a month each. Wayne and Mary Jo Lohrmann were here in February, and Art and Sharon Bonertz from Alberta arrived March 1st. They make us laugh, a rare and welcome commodity in the current state of financial affairs. In fact, we nearly got thrown out of the campground for laughing a few years ago. We're not quite so silly this time, but then again, we're camped farther away from the campground host!

San Saba, Texas

San Saba County Courthouse


We stopped in this sleepy little town for a couple nights on our way east. San Saba declares itself to be the "Pecan Capitol of the World", and after driving through the countryside, I cannot argue that there are a lot of pecan trees here. The city (population about 5000) is the county seat of San Saba County, and the San Saba river traverses through. On the east side of town there's a golf course and a new RV park.


The water wheel in the park

We stayed in the older Mill Pond park near the center of town. Nice setting with a waterfall, water wheel, and a spring fed lake. The camping was cheap, $15 with full hookups including 50 amp electric.

Thumper had great fun chasing the ducks away from our motorhome, and got to rinse some of the west Texas dust out of her fur by swimming in the lake. We took showers to achieve the same result.

Sunset in San Saba

The weather was warm, and in our bug we toured some of the dirt farm roads north of town, through a little village called Pecan Grove. When we got back to town, we stopped and had praline pecans with a caramel pecan frappe at the Alamo Pecan store. We walked around town and through some of the mildly decaying neighborhoods near downtown, and we noticed that the luxury homes are outside of town.

Moving Days

New and old

We cleaned out the old motorhome; sorted, trashed, stacked, stuffed, stored. It took a full three days, and we still have to find places for many things. Many things that are in places, will need to be repacked in suitable containers once we figure out what those are. The space in the new house is about the same as the old one, but the shapes are different. We have much more storage up high, and not so much underneath.

The last thing to come over from the old motorhome was our 18 year old cat Moonie. Consuelo tossed her in the kitchen sink and gave her a bath in the old home, then brought her over to snoop around in the new home. She's drying pretty quickly in the dry Arizona air.

The big slideout

We're enjoying discovering how to live in the expanded space, and how things work (or don't). Many years ago, we relaxed on a sofa together with Consuelo leaning on me as we watched TV. We can do that again. I can put my feet up on a coffee table and relax, exactly what I'm doing as I write this.

On Sunday, one of the dealer's people came out and drove our old coach away. There was a bit of sadness as we saw our faithful home disappear for the last time.

Monday was the final packing. I had a pile of things like hoses and pipes that needed bins that would fit in the one compartment designated for them, so I picked up a couple from Walmart. And I got the satellite receiver stuffed in the tight compartment up front and connected it to the external dish through the Alfa's built in wiring. The Kingdome still needs to be changed to Dish network, so we can't use it yet.

Max leaving us

The satellite dish is the overflow, and won't fit into storage. For the moment, we'll haul it in the back of our car. I'm hoping that there will be enough room for it below when we take the solar panels out and mount them on the roof.

Today, Tuesday, we will drive to the dealer to see if they'll fix a few nits, like missing catches on some of the drawers. Then we'll head to Apache Junction for most of March.

Little Dream, Big Reward

El Centro, CA, In The Rearview Mirror (by Consuelo)

A month, three days, twenty hours and twelve minutes… Rio Bend RV Resort, a nice stay by the golf course, surrounded by old and new friends.

Slippers drying for the craft fair

Early in our stay I checked out the planned activities looking for something crafty to do. I’ll take the watercolor class, I thought, so off I went the first Monday of our stay. $7 for all the mess I could make, what a deal. I brought to the class one of my now-famous knitted and felted slippers to ask the activities director how I should price them for the up coming craft fair. I’ve made over 30 pair but all have been gifts so far.

So, I whipped the slippers out before the class started and I was accosted by two enthusiastic Canadian women. They giggled as they tried them on and were curious how they were made. Felted? They had no clue what that meant but in the spirit of “we’ll try anything once”, they asked if I would teach them how to make them. They were sure there were a couple more women at their campground across the road that would be interested in learning as well. We made a date to meet at their place the following day.

Instructing the Canadians

At the meeting, four others joined our developing plan for a class. They, too, tried on the slipper I had brought and giggled with interest and curiosity. We chose a day, 10 days hence, to give time for large orders of yarn to be placed and delivered. I busied myself ordering yarn from a manufacturer I love and recommend for this project, we bought seconds which are low cost and flawed in small ways not impacting a felting project. Everyone was excited.

The class day came and we gathered at the home of one of the students… I made a feeble attempt to teach. These were all lively, fast thinking, smart women and I could barely get a word in edgewise!! Silly me, I had made IBM-ish charts to explain this and that to them but, no luck, they just wanted to get on with it and KNIT! And knit we did. There were “challenges” to techniques, some thinking they knew a better way… all that knitting had to be ripped and the teacher’s instructions were then, finally, heeded. Lots of laughs and a few struggles.

The class, pre-felting

When finished, these slippers are humongous. At least fifty percent bigger than the final product so… there were doubters that these large sloppy looking things would ever fit. A week later, having given everyone enough time to finish the pair, we gathered at the campground’s laundromat to felt them. Several hot washes did the trick and there were oos and aaahs of delight as the projects got smaller and smaller and finally measure the intended size. They were all going to show them off at the campfire that night. There were hugs and thank-yous and wishes for future projects. I was happy.

Finished products

Here is the part of the story I didn’t tell most of them: feeling qualified after thirty-plus pairs, I had been thinking of teaching this project. Had not yet figured out where and how, it was just an idea rattling in my head and then our paths crossed at the watercolor class and it all became clear. The moral of the story is a well-known one: dream your dreams and a way to attain them will show itself at the right time and place. In my fortunate case, it was also the right, fun, interesting people that just appeared out of nowhere to bring this little bit of fullfillment into my life. Now I think I’ll offer to teach at campground as we travel the counry and, come summer, maybe even in Maine.

PS I sold seven pair at $30 each at the carft fair. What a hoot.