White Meat & Scramble

SNOWBIRDS: THE OTHER WHITE MEAT!
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That statement was on a sticker on the back window of a PT Cruiser in the parking lot at the grocery store. Don’t ask me what message the sticker is supposed to convey: I have no idea. I like it, though, made me laugh out loud. I’m extremely dubious about the quality of said meat, suspect it’s dry, tough and stringy, doubt that I’ll try it.
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SCRAMBLE
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One of the LHC golf courses has a Sunday AM scramble for couples during the winter months and we participate when we’re in town. For you non-golfers, a scramble involves 2-4 players (4 most often) with each player taking his/her next stroke from the same location - the ‘best ball’ location of the prior shot. Does the way I explained that make sense? If not, ask any golfer for clarification, google it, whatever. Oh yeah, one other thing: there’s a rule that a foursome must use a minimum of 2 drives per player, regardless of how great or how lousy those drives may be. That rule helps level the playing field considerably.
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The Sunday scramble group has a Christmas day tradition: The Fruitcake Scramble. We’re signed up for it. The morning will be spent playing 9 holes of golf, followed by a gift swap-lunch at a local restaurant. They no longer exchange fruitcakes but they actually did back in the day. I’ll not miss the fruitcake, already have all the patio paver bricks I need. As you may have guessed, these scramblers are retired folks and mostly the other white meat - from all over the northern US and Canada. I don’t know if the lunch is a buffet or we order off the menu; in either case, white meat will probably be a popular option - bunch of doggone cannibals!
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Merry Christmas y’all!

Rain in the desert.

It's supposed to rain 1/2" during the day today, another 1/2" tonight and possibly another inch tomorrow.  If that forecast is accurate, historical record averages for Dec/Jan (0.59" and 1.05" respectively) will be inundated.  That means we'll have sunny weather from day after tomorrow through Jan 31st, right?  Works for me. 

This is only our second real rainfall since returning to LHC in late September.  Rain doesn't soak in or puddle much here.  Mostly, it runs down the washes and the streets and ultimately, into the lake.  The residential area of LHC is akin to one side of a football stadium, sloping down to the lake and causing the rain runoff to move along right smartly

The runoff picks up tons of sand, gravel and rocks from the washes and deposits them on the streets - job security for the city road crews who spend the next several days scraping and sweeping the deposits back into the washes.  A good rain is also a overtime windfall for city police cuz they need to be out and about, monitoring and shutting down as needed, those streets that are crossed by major washes.  There are numerous wash-crossed streets and the flows on some are several feet deep and quite swift; drive into one of those and your trip to Walmart turns into a ride to the lake, baby!  You won't actually get to the lake either, will get hung up at some culvert or whatever - but you'll have one hell of a ride while it lasts.

Jan is our wettest month historically, Feb & Mar are next, respectively at 0.9" and 0.86"; August comes in at number 4, with 0.67".  I'd guess that there are about 6 heavy, shut-down-the-streets type rainfalls per year.   Our elderly neighbor ladies are joining us for dinner tonight so we can all watch the deluge together.

Quail

Quail are the most abundant bird species in these parts. They’re all over the place and you hear their chirps all day every day, a very pleasant form of background music. Come sundown they all fly up into the trees to roost, safe from marauding coyotes.

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Trish read up on quail, learned that they post a sentry on a high point like a fence or rock to sound an alarm if there’s danger to the covey as they forage for seeds on the ground. This raises all sorts of questions in my ever-curious mind:

1. Who appoints the sentry?

2. Is there a covey committee or birdie board that decides whose turn it is to pull duty, how long the shifts last and so on? If so, are the committee/board members elected? How often are elections held, who is eligible to vote, are there term limits?

3. Could be that birds have benevolent dictatorships rather than democracies; in what manner then is the head bird determined?

4. Maybe it’s a just a volunteer position and after a few hours the on-duty bird cheeps the message, “Hey, I’m starving here! It’s time for a new sentry. Dan, get your fat ass over here!”

5. What if Dan responds with, “Pluck you, Quentin. I just found a really good mess of seeds, my favorites, gonna snarf ‘em up.” Who does Quentin complain to? Is there a grievance committee? A union?

6. Is this a males-only position or do females pull guard duty also?

7. May gay birds be guards if they don’t ask and don’t tell?

8. If the sentry falls asleep and a cat nails one of the grazing birds, is the guilty birdie punished? In what manner?

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Does anyone out there speak Quail?

Mecca Campground in the Salton Sea Recreation Area, CA

Ever heard of Salton Sea? I hadn’t until a couple years back when I was poring over a CA map and stumbled upon it; I wondered why it was called a sea and if it was a sea how could it be in the middle of the desert and from whence cometh the name Salton. Turns out, it’s called a sea because the water is very salty. The name Salton still throws me, thought at first it was named after a person, the famous fur trapper/guide Ralph Salton perhaps. But no such person ever existed. Salton isn’t a word. Why not Salty or just plain Salt - or Saline or Briny? Nobody seems to know where Salton came from.
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In 1905 a dike that was part of the Imperial Valley irrigation project was breached and for several months, the Colorado River poured through the breach, into what was then called the Salton Sink. The resultant ‘sea’ is 10 miles wide and 35 miles long, the largest lake in CA. It’s a bird watcher’s paradise (and thanks to Sonny Bono, a refuge) with over 400 species hanging out at various times during the year. At the moment, gulls, plovers and pelicans are the most numerous species.
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Eons ago, the Gulf of California extended to this area. More recently, some 2000 years ago, it was a huge fresh water lake with 10000 Native Americans living on its shores. The lake dried up and stayed that way for hundreds of years, finally refilled as mentioned above. Salton Sea is 30% saltier than the ocean and becoming more so because there’s no fresh water circulating through it; many species of fish are threatened by the increasing salinity. When the fish go, the birds that feed on them will go away also.
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To the east are the Chocolate Mountains and the Chocolate Mt Gunnery Range; one wonders what kind of guns they fire there - M&M cannons, chocolate kiss rifles? That taj mahal tent set up was next door to us, belongs to a family group that spends several days at the campground every Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving & Dirt. Santee, CA

About 2 years ago, my son Tod and his wife, Char, bought a fixer upper house in Santee and spent the next four months renovating it. They, along with my other son Adam, stripped it down to the studs and did it right: new wiring, plumbing, wallboard, the whole 9 yards. And they did the finish work right too, textured walls and ceilings, attractive moldings and a great selection of warm colors on the walls. Nice!
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The house is on a cul de sac in a quiet residential area and has a fantastic view of the city and surrounding mountains from the rear of the house, see pix. It’s oriented such that the back patio is sunny most of the day and that felt really good because a cold snap came through while we were there, frost on the cars both nights.  That green stuff in front of the house is low maintenance grass - astroturf or whatever they call it these days.
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There were about a dozen of us there for the holiday, the aforesaid plus other members of Char’s family. Fantastic food! We watched some of the parade, some football, topped it off with the annual Punkin Chunkin competition. I really enjoy the creativity, goofiness and just plain fun-loving folks involved in that event. You gotta be a little crazy to spend $50-100K and hundreds of hours building a machine that’s used for 10 minutes one day a year, and no payback except bragging rights. It’s a good kind of crazy though, helps offset all the sick and violent craziness that’s a staple of the nightly news. Good on ‘em, say I.
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En route to (and from) Santee, we drove through desert recreation areas populated with thousands of boondocking RVers with their off-road toys: dune buggies, dirt bikes, Jeeps, ATVs of all kinds. Off-roading is very popular in the SW but holds no attraction for me. Every summer of my teenage years was spent off-roading, pulling all kinds of machinery behind tractors, getting fried by the sun, ending the day totally filthy - eyes, ears, nose and mouth full of grit - and clothing that stood up all by itself. Oh yeah, those were the days!

T-Bird Travel

Like a zillion other Americans, we’ll be traveling at Thanksgiving, taking the EDGE to places unseen via roads untraveled. Santee, CA, near San Diego, is where my two sons, Tod and Adam, live and we’ll be joining them for the feast. We’ll drive over the day before, spend a couple nights in Santee then another 2-3 at a campground either on the Salton Sea or the Colorado River.
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This will be our first EDGE trip since returning from our 4-month summer odyssey in late September. We’ve done a few modifications to the trailer since returning, including the replacement of the noisy but wimpy el cheapo bathroom ceiling fan with a large, quiet and reversible Fantastic Fan/Vent. It has 3 speeds, it blows, it sucks, it’s freakin fantastic!
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And, we removed the bathroom door and replaced it with a curtain. The door opened inward, taking up most of the small bathroom floor area and banging into the sink and blocking access to the closet that contains most of our clothing. It was a pain in the butt in more ways than one. True, a curtain doesn’t allow for much privacy but in reality neither did the door; it had 1’ gaps at top and bottom.
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A person who is hugely embarrassed by the sounds of normal body functions shouldn’t buy a travel trailer – or else be prepared to sing/whistle/stomp their feet to cover the noise. Hey, at my age just being able to produce said sounds is a major accomplishment - even, one might say - wait for it …… a truly moving experience. It’s something to celebrate rather than denigrate. Holler woo-hoo and break out the champagne!

MAYAN RUINS FOUND IN LAKE HAVASU CITY!!!

Local resident discovers ruins while doing yard work.

Expansive excavations and digs anticipated in near future! Archeologists from all over the world are expected to start pouring into the area in the next few days.

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Okay, enough hype and BS. A few posts back I commented on the terraces in front of the house. The middle terrace was a blank canvas until a few days ago when I decided to put some of the leftover paving materials there, and to try to make something attractive with them. Attractive or not, here’s the end result. Eat your heart out. We’re looking for an appropriate piece of metal sculpture for the middle terrace, a stallion maybe?
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We recorded the Country Music Awards on the DVR so we could watch them at our leisure, sans commercials. Trish is an avid country fan and I enjoy it also although classic rock is still my favorite. One thing about the CMAs disturbs me greatly: the attire. Looking out at the audience you see many bright splashes of color in a sea of black – black as in formalwear, bright color splashes as in $10000 gowns. What happened to denim and boots and leather vests and those silly-ass western cut shirts with pearly snaps? Granted, several of the male performers wore hats and boots with their designer suits but others were bare headed and a few were even wearing knit watch caps. Good grief, knit watch caps! It would have made Gene Autry puke.
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And the women: I want ‘em in skin tight jeans and western shirts with the top 5 buttons undone. Instead they’re bundled up in these stupid gowns that contain a couple hundred yards of cloth and have a 8’-12’ diameter. Is there a woman in there somewhere? It’s just not right.
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Another thing: what makes a song or group ‘country’? Mostly there’s little doubt cuz the lyrics refer to trucks, tractors, hay, barns, floozies and two-timers, and the voices have that classic, often mournful, southern drawl/western twang. Some of the CMA nominees had none of that and I’m wondering, who defined this as country anyway – and what were they smoking at the time? The sound is soft rock and the lyrics contain no reference to pickups whatsoever. Which one of you faithful readers can shed light on this mystery?

Bugs, Balls & Lard

Thar’s Bugs in Them Thar Hills….but you have to dig for them. One of the many things we like about AZ is the dearth of flying insects. The Midwest, where I grew up, has beaucoup mosquitoes and flies. The Pacific NW doesn’t have many flying pests but they have an abundance of carpenter ants. What we do have here in AZ is subterranean termites; neighbor lady says there’re only two situations when it comes to these critters: you either have ‘em or you’re going to have ‘em. And, she’s right: we have ‘em.
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STs are small, can become unwanted houseguests via cracks as small as 1/32” – the little shits. To keep them out you need to treat the perimeter of the house with bug juice, saturating the soil to a minimum depth of 6”. Step one is breaking up and removing the crust of stucco residue from when the house was built – tedious but not difficult. Step two is removing the pavers and bricks and all the other stuff that’s in the way. Step three is forming a trench along the edge of the house foundation, a place for the juice to sit a spell before it seeps into the soil. Step four is pouring the juice into the trench. Step five is replacing the soil you removed from trench – quickly – and mixing it in with the bug juice before it seeps away. And there you have it folks, my latest hobby: termite trenching.
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We’re back to playing golf regularly.  Most area courses were closed in October for reseeding.  That was a surprise to us but okay cuz we had a lot of house and RV projects to get done.  I joined a men’s league for the first time; they play on our favorite little ‘executive’ course, a par 30. Most of the guys are older than me I think. Could be they’re not older but just look that way from traveling lots of rough roads and visiting too many all-you-can-eat buffets.
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The high obesity factor in seniors is alarming. And, it’s not just seniors. Lardy, lardy, lardy! A multi-billion dollar industry is the losing weight business, millions of people in denial, looking for magical cures to being overweight. Here’s the cure, it’s not magic and it’s free: eat less, burn more.  Duh.

A/V Evolution

Every few years you have to update your home entertainment equipment. No, that’s not exactly right. You don’t have to. Really, you don’t. But you do, don’t you? Because you’re vigorously urged by a zillion ads to get the latest gizmos, can’t live without ‘em, not cool like your buds who have all the latest crap. And so it goes, buying one thing after another, all of which are technically obsolete long before they actually wear out. First it was LP records – the content of which was often loaded onto reel to reel tapes. I used to configure these long-playing (up to 5 hours) tapes for given occasions: there was one for parties, one for background dinner music, and of course the ever-popular hand-picked never-fail seduction tape ending with Ravel’s Bolero. No, I don’t recall the level of efficacy of the seduction tape.
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From LPs, we went to cassette tapes: new inventory and new equipment required. Next came CDs, another new inventory, more new equipment. Now, CDs are virtually obsolete, replaced by mp3 and ipod and online personalized music from sources like Pandora. And that’s only the audio portion.
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It’s the same thing with videos, movies and TV. Remember VCRs? They’re dead, Jim (Bones, Star Trek; he must have said it a hundred times). It went from VCR to DVD some time back, and then on to DVD Blu-Ray which is nearly obsolete also cuz now there’s online download streaming.
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I have to admit I’m a sucker for new A/V technology. Some of it anyway; just upgraded to a Blu-Ray player with built-in wifi for streaming movies and other stuff - slicker than snot on a doorknob. Never went for the Ipod/mp3 stuff, tunes not being all that important to me anymore. Trish has an Ipod and uses it a lot, tunes in music, tunes out the world – and me, might as well talk to a chair.
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Pix are of last night's sunset.  Not bad, eh?

Of Bears and Heroes

Two notable events were reported in the local newspaper recently, the first of which was a black bear in the state park fronting Lake Havasu a couple miles north of London Bridge. This is a first: no other bears have ever been seen near LHC. It doesn’t seem like bear-friendly habitat to me at all; I’m thinking that it must have come over from the California side.
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The flora and fauna are virtually identical on both sides of the river but everybody knows that Californians are a little different. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against people (or bears) from CA. To the contrary, I’m extremely fond of several - despite their numerous bizarre ideas and quirks (people, that is; don’t know any bears well enough to comment on their quirkiness). Besides, I think it’s involuntary, something in the water perhaps, not their fault at all. Many have achieved near-normalcy after living in other states for several years and are to be congratulated on that significant accomplishment.
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Back to the bear (got carried away back there, sorry). Here’s a link to the story:  http://www.havasunews.com/articles/2010/10/04/news/doc4ca964a28b655067215330.txt
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The other event, involving local heroes, is a little closer to home. In fact, the heroes are in our home at this very moment: they live here. Trish and Ranger made the front page of the local paper on Tuesday. While kayaking south of town, they found and rescued a dog that had gone missing from a boat a week earlier. The dog, Chipper, is a Shih Tzu – hardly big enough for a good snack for your average coyote, and it’s amazing the coyotes didn’t get him. Chipper’s owners were ecstatic, had about given up hope; they wanted to put the event in the paper – a good-news story to offset the bleak news of recent times.

Mist and plant. LHC, AZ

The portable misting tower is effective, creates a comfortable mini-atmosphere in a small area like a patio table. Problem is, the water here is full of lime and/or calcium, maybe other stuff, too, and it clogs up the misting nozzles after a while. The vendor recommends using an inline sediment filter to alleviate this kind of problem: I do, it doesn’t. I tried hooking up the garden hose to soft water and that seems to work better. Another challenge is keeping the mist headed in the right direction despite frequent breezes wafting it hither and yon. The expression ‘it’s like herding cats’ has been popular in recent years but I think I’ve one-upped the users of that phrase. Ever tried herding mist?
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There are 2 stepped terraces fronting the LHC house, plus the upper terrace/patio at house floor level, so we'll call it 3 in total. The lowest terrace has 3 irrigation bubblers so it’s a good place for plantings. The middle terrace was originally planned to be part of a pool system, a spa/hot tub I think. The uppermost terrace/patio was designed for a pool; wiring and plumbing are roughed in for both spa and pool – but it ain’t gonna happen on my watch.  Pools are a pain in the ass, wouldn’t take one if you gave it to me. There was to be a waterfall or water feature or some darn thing flowing from the house-level pool to the spa on the next terrace down. Neat concept, I admit.
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One of my house do-list items since day one was to remove 2 butt ugly, rabbit-bitten plants on the lower terrace. I have no idea what kind of plants they were or why anyone would want them – other than the rabbits, that is. One of the plants died of natural causes this summer. Well, actually it died of thirst cuz someone who shall remain nameless shut down the irrigation to the lower terrace. We’re talking plant-slaughter here, plain and simple. This week the remaining plant joined it’s sibling in plant paradise, in this case, murder one.  And, you know what? I have no remorse whatsoever. Cold blooded bugger, aren’t I?
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Pix are of misting tower and lower terrace before the demise – “from the womb untimely ripped” – of butt ugly plant number 2. In the next post I’ll include pictures and descriptions of the new plantings, hope you can stand the suspense.

MKM LHC, AZ

In the early 80s I took an assignment in Egypt for 2 ½ years. My employer, CH2M Hill, was the lead firm in a 4-firm consortium on a USAID project there, expanding and upgrading the wastewater treatment system for the city of Alexandria. My job was to manage the financial, administrative and logistical aspects of the project, in short, everything except the design function. My entire staff of about 100 people was Egyptian, and nearly all of them were Muslim. Muslims have 2 long holiday periods each year: Ramadan and Hajj. The project offices closed during those periods, and most of us Americans went to Europe.

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On one of my Europe trips, my niece, Mary Kay Magistad, and I, arranged to meet in Copenhagen and go on from there to tour Sweden together. MKM was taking a break before pursuing an MA Rotary Fellowship at the University of Sussex in England. This was the first of many shared adventures and visits back and forth. I visited her in Boston and Beijing; she visited me in several OR locations, and now here in LHC. Last summer she joined Trish and me on our North Shore Drive (Lake Superior) excursion. She also climbed Mt Whitney with me – as did her brother Steve and my brother Pat - some 20 years ago.
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If her name sounds familiar, it’s because she’s a radio journalist and a regular on the BBC/PRI program, The World. The program airs each week day on most public radio stations. MKM has lived in Beijing for many years, in Bangkok before that. She’s currently in the States to receive an award (not her first) for a 5-part series “Created in China”. The award presentation will be in Las Vegas – which happens to be the closest major airport to LHC. It’s great to see her again, and to indulge in our sporadic conversations about investments, travel, religion, politics, philosophy, and so on. I can’t think of any social or world problem we’ve not addressed and talked into total and abject submission.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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!”

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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!

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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.

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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.

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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).