Pancho and Grunt. LHC

Pancho and Grunt were delighted to see us return home, although they pretended to be totally indifferent. One might call them stoics. They are quite reserved, displaying little emotion regardless of the occasion. No doubt they were sick of being cooped up in the hot dark garage for 4 months; like Trish and I, they’re outdoors types at heart. For those who have yet to meet P&G, I’ve included pix (Grunt is the short one) – and some of the LHC house/yard also.

.
Trish has spent many hours swamping out the EDGE interior since our return. Four months of occupancy plus 500 miles of gravel road equals one filthy RV. We’ll wait for the weather to cool a bit before cleaning and waxing the exterior, tightening screws and nuts, lubing springs and jacks, etc.

.
Speaking of weather, it’s been a least a week since I last whined about it, maybe 2 weeks. Too long entirely. It feels great to be back in the dry heat, but it would be even greater if heat levels were normal. Late September highs are running 10-15 degrees above normal which means daily highs of around 105. We’ve had the A/C on most of the time since our return home and the 10-day forecast indicates it will stay on awhile. The A/C was only on for 3 days in the Jan-May, 2010 period however. It's quite comfortable without A/C with temps up to 90.

.
Having recently enjoyed several days of OR liquid sunshine, I’m reminded of an old stale joke – one that is actually better spoken than written but what the hell, you’ll figure it out. In recent years, OR has earned quite a reputation for producing excellent wines, in addition to its rep for long, rainy winters. OR natives, when asked, “What’s your favorite OR wine?” consistently respond with, “I wish it would stop raining!”

.
I ordered a couple of portable misting towers to use during hot spells. Misting is a very effective cooling method, should allow us to be comfortable outside on the terrace even with 100+ temps. Will let you know how well they work.

Lake Havasu City, AZ

Home again, home again. We hit LHC at 4 PM on 9-23, found house and yard to be in fine shape despite our 4 month absence. We switched the breakers on, turned on the water, plugged in the fridge, and slept in our spacious, comfortable bed. Woo-hoo!

.
Trip summary:
1. Days/miles: 116/14189
2. Gas cost: $3998
3. Cheapest gas: $2.45; Gallup, NM
4. Highest gas: $8.36; Toad Lake, BC on The Alaska Highway
5. Camping fees: $2624 (about 15 nights were freebies, parked in people’s yards or driveways)
6. Number of states/provinces visited: 12/4
7. Number of times we set up camp: 58
8. No flat tires, no mechanical breakdowns, no empty gas tank, no traffic tickets, no hits, no runs, no errors, nobody left on base
.
What would we do different if we did it all over again? Not much. Let's see ........okay, I’d leave my long johns at home. We hit some cruddy weather but there was only that one night in Leadville, CO when it got down to 32 degrees. Our pre-trip planning was thorough and we had the right travel references, The Milepost and The Traveler’s Guide to Alaskan Camping. Four months turned out to be a little long, will shorten that up a month or so next summer.
.
If you’ve an interest in seeing AK and haven't done the Inside Passage cruise, I suggest you cruise to Homer or Skagway from Vancouver, BC, rent a vehicle and drive back. We might have done that ourselves but I’d already taken the IP cruise.
.
For those hundreds of avid readers who are flat out devastated and depressed at the thought of these posts coming to an abrupt end cuz the trip is over, take heart. The blog posts will continue, filled with harrowing tales of life in a harsh, barren desert teeming with venomous snakes, biting spiders, voracious buzzards and hordes of marauding Q-tips. “What are Q-tips?” you ask: people with white hair and white tennis shoes. AZ is heavily infested with ‘em, especially in winter.
.

Pix: Mt Shasta, Carina (niece) and I psyching ourselves up for pickleball, wind farm near Tehachapi, CA.

Day 116. Bakersfield, CA

“Oh Lord, stuck in Lodi again.” John Fogerty; Creedence Clearwater Revival
.
Headed south out of Sacramento on I-5, we heard a radio advisory to take a different route cuz an accident was blocking 3 lanes up ahead. We jigged left, over to hiway 99, spied a grocery store in Lodi, decided to stop and get a couple things - but had already passed the turnoff. I turned right 2 blocks past the store, into a residential area full of cul de sacs and no side street access back to the store. I did a huey and returned to the main drag, planning to hang a left. No way Jose, concrete divider, right turn only, the hell with it, there’s other stores.
.
You may notice a remarkable phenomenon in the day count in this post: the clock got turned back 4 days. I’ve been cavalier about the accuracy of the count but figured I should get it right for this, our last day on the road. So, I did a calendar check and discovered the discrepancy. Do I really care? Uh-uh. Am I going to go back and correct all the day counts in previous posts? What – you think I got nothing better to do? Get real.
.
Trish grew up in Sacramento, which she often calls Sacatomatoes. I didn’t understand this until yesterday. On southbound I-5, there are tomatoes on the right shoulder of the highway, mile after mile. No, they aren’t growing there. They’re ripe tomatoes that fell of the trucks hauling them to market. Or, maybe a couple harvest workers riding in the backs of two separate trucks had a running tomato fight, which is not as farfetched as you might think. I vividly remember a lengthy tomato fight with my brother Gerry one crisp autumn day back in MN. It was great fun – more so because the tomatoes were rotten, killed off by the first frost. There are darn few things in life more satisfying than nailing your big brother with a large rotten tomato. Yes!
.
Orange Grove RV Park is the scene of our last night’s campout. It’s a large campground with many amenities and hundreds of mature orange trees heavily laden with fruit. Several weeks out, the happy campers here will be gorging themselves on nice ripe oranges. See pix.

Day 119. Sacramento, CA

Doug, Trish’s brother, is a civil engineer, manages huge construction projects, and is a skilled builder. He built a snazzy gazebo in their back yard, complete with lights, fan, natural gas centerpiece and mister. Doug and Jan own a space at an upscale RV park near LHC and they’re building a casita there. They’ve spent most of their LHC time (the month of February) on that project the last couple years and will wrap it up this winter I think. The pix are of D&Js back yard; pretty neat, huh?
.
Doug took the day off yesterday, and played golf with Trish and me in the morning. He hadn’t played for about 5 years but enjoyed it, said he’d play with us in LHC this winter. D&J are great hosts, even going the extra mile (and the extra dollar) to buy my favorite single malt Scotch. Last night they served up a fantastic dinner of barbecued ribs; their 2 sons, Doug and Eric, joined us for the feast. Trish hooked up her PC to the big screen TV after dinner and presented her slide show of our trip.
.
A couple of posts back I mentioned injuring an arm muscle while playing pickleball. Two days ago I noticed an 8” bruised area on my inner forearm, similar to the look of a badly sprained ankle, purple and green and ugly. I really did a job on that sucker and it’s going to take awhile to heal. With the help of 2 Aleve, it didn’t bother me much when I played golf.
.
This AM we start the home stretch. We intended to drive through Yosemite NP and camp near Mono Lake, CA tonight. However, the shortest and quickest route to LHC from here is down I-5, or alternatively, down 99. We hate driving CA freeways: beat-up roads, lots of traffic and a posted maximum speed of 55 for all towing rigs – what’s to like? But this time we’re going to bite the bullet, eliminate one day’s travel and beeline it for home. We’ve been on the road long enough.

Day 118. Trip miles: 13513. Sacramento, CA

Our last night in OR was spent near Ashland, OR at Emigrant Lake Recreation Area, a spacious county facility with good campground and day use areas on a manmade lake/reservoir used for irrigation. The lake’s water level is now at its annual low point, some 60’ below the average high water level in late winter. Some floats and buoys are high and dry and look silly sitting on the ground 400’ from the water. The paved boat ramp has been extended to the water’s edge, appears long enough to land small aircraft. The pix were taken at Emigrant Lake.
.
Trish’s new kayak rides in style inside the RV cuz we don’t have a roof rack on the pickup - not a major problem, since the kayak is only 9.5’ long and very light weight. We move it outside upon arrival at the campground. It’s presence in the RV ‘hallway’ hampers bathroom and refrigerator access but we can live with that for the few remaining travel days.
.
Trish and Ranger stepped aboard the new yacht for the first time yesterday – on dry land cuz schlepping it to the lake was not a viable option. We’ll have to get a bottle of champagne for the actual launching and christening although breaking the bottle on the prow is ill advised – not to mention a waste of perfectly good, albeit cheap, bubbly. We’ll just wave the cork over the prow; it’s the thought that counts.

.

It occurs to me that Trish has yet to come up with a name, will have to work on that. Lollipop? QE3? Jalapeno? Bambi? I kinda like QE3, short and unpretentious like the craft itself.
.

Crossing into CA one must stop for a fruit check. That statement opens the door for any number of snide remarks but, being the sensitive, totally PC guy that I am, I will of course refrain. The checkpoint is a wise and necessary precaution, protecting all manner of native fruits and nuts from assorted nasty infectious alien vermin and fungi. At the checkpoint I confessed to the dastardly deed of having in our possesssion 2 tomatoes. Apparently, tomatoes aren't on the no-fly list: they weren't confiscated.

Day 116. McMinnville, OR

This is the home of Evergreen Aviation and their pilots are highly skilled at landing on short runways. Witness the 747 that landed on top of that building in the pix above.
.
Evergreen built an air museum near the airport here; it has Howard Hughes’ Spruce Goose, a Blackbird spy plane, several fighters and so on. By coincidence, there’s an older fighter plane parked outside the museum, and it has the names of the pilot and copilot written on the cockpit. The pilot’s name is Major Tony McPeak. Tony was a Blue Angels pilot who later became a 4-star general and air force chief of staff. It so happens he was a neighbor of mine when I lived in Lake Oswego, OR in the 90s.
.
We spent a pleasant 2 hours listening to Brian and Carina yesterday, doing a pro bono gig at a local music store. They have an appealing sound, nice blend of voices. Brian has several original songs and some of them are very good. See pix. After the performance, we all went out for dinner at the Golden Valley Brew Pub, good brews and chow.

.
About 8:30 this AM we’ll hit the road, destination somewhere in the stretch between Ashland, OR and Weed, CA. En route we’ll stop at Dick’s Sporting Goods in Salem to pick up Trish’s new kayak – her third toy acquisition on this trip (the others were a folding bicycle and a set of golf clubs).

Day 114. McMinnville, OR

Pix taken in McMinnville.

.

“Growing old is not for sissies.”
.
Several days back I turned 66. Anymore, that’s not considered as ancient as it once was - ‘60 is the new 40’ and all that crap. Generally speaking, I don’t feel old but there are times when I’m rudely reminded of my senior status, and those times are becoming more frequent.
.
I’ve played pickleball 3 times in the last 6 days and each time I’ve strained or pulled a muscle or 2: my right forearm doing overhead slams, a groin muscle when I rush to the no-volley line after returning a serve. My style of play has always been aggressive but maybe I have to tone it down now. More stretching and warm up exercises will help, no doubt; we’ll see how it goes.
.
Pickleball came into existence in 1965 in western WA. I discovered the sport a few years later, while living in Seattle, and shortly thereafter put away my tennis racket in favor of the new game. It takes a fair amount of time and effort to become decent at tennis but not so pickleball: you can pick up a paddle for the first time and be enjoying the game within minutes. Now it’s becoming quite popular with seniors, especially in retirement havens like Phoenix and Tucson. To my knowledge, it hasn’t hit Lake Havasu City yet – but it soon will: yours truly is taking on that mission.
.
Trish will be spending time with her daughter today, tomorrow we’ll sit in on a musical performance provided by Carina and her guy, Brian, and Sunday we hit the trail back to AZ. We’ll spend 4 days on the road plus a one day break in Sacramento to visit Trish’s brother Doug and his wife Jan. Doug and Jan are the culprits we hold responsible for our move to LHC; they’ve been going there for years, typically spending the month of February in their 5th wheel RV. Truth be told, they were quite surprised that we decided to move there after only 2 weeks of exposure. Have to confess, I’ve never been one to dawdle when it’s decision time.
.
Life’s short. Do it. Now.