Winter Adventures

The last post had us attending the Family Motor Coach Association’s Western Area Rally at the fairgrounds in Indio, CA. We had parked on the grounds on Sunday and the last post reported our activities, including my surgery, through Thursday. On Friday we went through the vendor booths at the rally, attended one seminar on driving to Alaska (just to get some possible pointers for our summer trip) and just hung out. Barry and Colleen came over after work and went through the vendor area with us. We skipped the evening entertainment, which was a clarinetist and a singer, both from the 50's. Instead we went over to Cactus Jack’s Bar and Grill, our old hang-out just down the street, for dinner with Barry and Colleen. Saturday morning Barry and Colleen picked us up so we could go to the Palm Springs Elks Lodge for a memorial service for our friend Jim Hanson. It was a very nice service, although quite sad. We did see a lot of friends and acquaintances at the service that we hadn’t seen in quite a while. After we got back to the rally we went around the grounds and visited with a couple of different acquaintances we have made over the last few years in our travels. We also went through the vendor area one last time to make sure we didn’t miss anything we could spend our money on. The entertainment Saturday night was The Platters, or at least one “Platter” and a couple of new guys. The one “original” was a guy who had joined the group in the early 70's as the lead singer (the third in the group’s history). Since he had been a member of the original group he had the legal right to use the name. They also had a woman, who had a great voice. They didn’t only sing Platter’s songs, they did a lot of stuff from the 50's and 60's and let each of the four singers do a couple of numbers as lead. The woman and the bass guy were great. When they did the Platter’s tunes the original guy sang lead and I didn’t care for him. I didn’t think he really sounded like the original group. Jackie thought they were pretty good.

On Sunday morning Barry came over to help us move the coach from the fairgrounds down to the Elk’s Lodge (about 3 miles) where we were going to be staying for the next 10 days. We got out of the fairgrounds easily because they opened a gate right near where we were parked so we didn’t have to drive all the way through the grounds and all the coaches parked all over the place. However, when we arrived at the Elks, the place was in chaos. A lot of people leaving the rally who were Elks were looking for a place to stay, or a place to dump, or both. The motorhome traffic was backed up out to the street. We were supposed to relieve Tom and Joan as park hosts, however, because they were so busy they had not been able to move their coach out of the host’s spot. It was two hours before Tom was able to move his coach and Barry was able to back our’s into the spot. It was a real hassle also because the host’s spot is pretty tight and we ended up having to park the coach at an angle to keep it from sticking too far out into the driveway. The part of the park where the host spot is really isn’t made for large coaches, but we got it in. It was crazy busy the rest of the day and most of the next day, however, after Monday it settled down into a pretty easy routine that, had it not been for the fact that we had to be out of the coach for work by 8:00 a.m. would have been completely enjoyable. One nice thing, the camp hosts get free lunch and dinner every day as well as free camping while they are hosting, so the week cost us nothing.

On Tuesday afternoon, Jan 13th, we went to doctor to get the stitches taken out of my surgery area. However, the doctor wanted to wait another week or so to let the wounds heal and dry out some more. He told us to stop putting any ointment on the site and just let it dry. We made an appointment to come back the following Monday so the nurse could remove the stitches. He did tell me that the pathology from the tissue removed in the second surgery came back completely negative for suspicious cells, so the cancer had not spread beyond the original mole. Good news.

The rest of the week as hosts went kind of slow because we really couldn’t go anywhere. On Sunday we moved our coach to another spot to open up the host spot for Paul and Barbara Mueller, our replacements. They had been on a camp out with the Desert Drifters and were coming back on Sunday afternoon. Finally, on Monday morning, we were relieved as camp hosts and could sleep in for the first time in a week. YEA! That afternoon we went back to the doctor and the nurse took out my stitches. She really had to work and pick at the wounds because several of the stitches had actually healed over and she had to remove the scabs and skin to get at them. Although the incisions are healed well, she made me a little sore with the picking. This also meant that I could now take a real full shower for the first time in two weeks. I have been taking sponge baths from the waist up - it was nice to be able to just stand under the water again.

Tuesday morning I took the coach down to the tire store in Thousand Palms to have the tires rotated. The two front tires were showing some bad wear on the outside edges and one appeared to be out of balance type wear. I had them remove the two front tires and put them on the right rear and had the two right rear tires put up front and balanced. Hopefully that will help the tires last at least through our Alaska trip this summer. We also had the coach washed - someone at the Elks had given us a certificate for a free wash at the truck wash which was right next door to the tire shop.

On Wednesday morning we packed up to leave the Elks and head East to Quartzsite, Arizona for a five day stay during the big RV show. As I was checking the tire pressures before leaving the Elks I found that one of the rear tires that had been changed from the front the day before was down to 38 pounds from 110 yesterday. That means a leak. Duh! I filled the tire back to 110 pounds and we made a brief detour to the tire store again. Turns out the braided extension for the tire was leaking. They took that off of the tire stem and no more leak. Now I have to find a new extension because they sure make it easier to check the pressure and fill the dual tires on the back axle.

We hit the freeway from Thousand Palms finally headed to Quartzsite and I drove the coach up the Chiriaco grade East out of Indio, then pulled into the rest stop at the top of the hill. At that point I turned the helm over to Jackie for her first taste of actually driving the coach. She was VERY nervous at the beginning and I told her to just relax, set the cruise for 55 and get the feel of the coach. For the first 15 minutes she had a death grip on the wheel which caused her to weave in the lane a little as she over corrected - however, after the first 15 minutes she started to relax, got the feel for the center of the lane and did very well. She said she was still nervous, a quote was “the bottom of my feet are sweating”, but she did good. She has only driven the coach very short distances in an RV park in the past and we decided that she needed to at least learn enough to be able to handle the coach in a situation where I can’t drive. My surgery brought that to mind because we weren’t sure at first how long I wouldn’t be able to drive. Anyway, she drove for a little over an hour, a total of 63 miles on the freeway, then pulled into the rest area just West of Blythe to turn the helm back over to me. Hooray for Jackie!

We pulled into Quartzsite and our RV park late in the afternoon, so we didn’t do anything on Wednesday. Although thousands of Rvers travel to Quartzsite and boondock in the desert, we had decided we wanted hookups on this trip so we had reservations at the RV park in town. Good thing we made our reservations early (back in July) because several of our friends tried to find a place to stay at a park in town a couple weeks before the show and there were no vacancies anywhere in town. On Thursday we headed over to what is called the “big tent” which is where all the RV oriented vendors set up during the RV show. We walked around the tent for a couple hours, bought a few odds and ends and met some friends. We had lunch with Ray and Suzie Babcock, the new VP of the 100%ers and our other friends, Gary and Ramona Wilson, who were camping with them out in the Desert. Later that night we met up with the four of them again at Silly Al’s Pizza for dinner.

On Friday we headed out to the Tyson Wells shopping area which is basically a huge swap meet type area. Took us most of the afternoon to do that area. Friday night we went to a restaurant called the Grubstake North of town on Highway 95. On Fridays they do an all you can eat fish fry. I have never seen a plate of fish and chips as big as what they give you there. Although it is all you can eat, the first plate was truly all I could eat. We met some new friends there, some folks we met at the Elks Lodge the week before with whom we had some mutual friends. We had a very enjoyable evening, including some karaoke after dinner. Saturday we did some more shopping and also did a couple of geocaches in the area late in the afternoon. On Sunday we did some serious geocaching finding a total of 15 caches. One of the caches was the tomb of Hi Jolly, a 19th century camel herder who worked for the US Calvalry. In the 1800's the Army tried using camels for transportation in the desert. That night we had some Mexican food in town and went back to prepare to leave for Casa Grande on Monday.

Monday morning we headed to Casa Grande, Arizona and one of our Western Horizon’s parks for a two week stay. My original plan was to let Jackie drive again for a little while, but the wind was blowing pretty strong and I didn’t want to put too much on her plate too early. We are now settled into the Casa Grande park and ready to enjoy a two week stay. At this point we plan to go up to Phoenix a couple times because we need to visit my mom and two brothers who live up there. Ken lives in Goodyear and Dennis lives in Cottonwood, up north, but he comes down to Phoenix frequently to visit my mom who has Alzheimer’s and is confined to bed in a home out in Surprise, Arizona, a Northwestern suburb of Phoenix. We will also arrange to visit my daughter, Tye, and son, Roy, who live in Glendale, along with several of my grandkids and great grandkids. We will report on all those visits in our next blog episode.

Until the next time, enjoy life - it’s a journey, not a destination.

Desert Holidays

Our last installment had us at the Western Horizon’s Resort in Ramona, California a week after our Hawaiian cruise. We were in Ramona primarily to wind down after the cruise but on the 4th we drove back down to San Diego to see Jackie’s mom and brother. On the 5th we drove the 100 miles to Palm Desert so I could get the stitches taken out of my back from the mole removal. While that little excision was healing well, the pathology report on the mole showed that it was a malignant melanoma and that I would require further treatment. Fortunately, the pathology showed it to be a very thin melanoma, about a ½ millimeter in depth. I did a little research on the internet with the information from the pathology report and learned that melanomas less than 1 mm in thickness are about 96 percent curable with nothing more than some additional cutting around the site to ensure a clear “margin” of at least 2 cm. I did make an appointment with a surgeon oncologist in Palm Springs for the 23rd of December to go over any additional surgery or treatments I might need.

On Sunday, the 7th of December we left Ramona and headed across the desert to the Pilot Knob RV Resort in Winterhaven, California. Winterhaven doesn’t amount to much, but the park is actually about 9 miles West of the Arizona border and Yuma, Arizona. We have stayed at Pilot Knob several times before and find that we really enjoy the Yuma area. The Yuma Elks Lodge is a great lodge with meals and activities nearly every night. The first couple days at Pilot Knob we did some local geocaching and visited the Elks Lodge to get a schedule for the two weeks we were going to be in town. On Thursday, the 11th, we went down into Algodones, Mexico to get our teeth cleaned. We have written about Algodones before, primarily a town dedicated to snow birds consisting mostly of dentists, eye doctors, pharmacies and liquor stores. Neither of us needed new glasses this year so our visit was pretty much just getting our teeth cleaned, having lunch and coming back home. We did manage to find two geocaches within the town, so we now have our first two Mexican caches. One of the Mexican caches was also the number 300 find for us.

Unfortunately, on December 17th we learned that our good friend Jim Hanson had passed away after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. We knew Jimmie as a fellow Elk and avid Rv’er. We had been at a number of Elks RV outings and rallies with Jim and his wife Lynn. We also knew him from his days as a bartender at Cactus Jack’s in Indio where he worked for 20 years. Like Roy, Jim was also a former Marine. The next day we learned that another great friend, David Connor, had also died on the 17th. David had been fighting kidney failure for a number of years. We first met David and Marianne while we still lived in Indio when they joined the Indio Elks Lodge RV group. They were both very good friends of ours and we enjoyed their company often. David and Marianne sold their home in Bermuda Dunes and bought a motorhome similar to ours about the same time we did in 2005. Like us, their intentions were to travel full time. We spent a lot of time traveling with them off and on over the next year and a half, meeting up with them in the summer of 05 in the Dakotas and spending two weeks in Yellowstone Park and Idaho. In the summer of 06 we met them in Branson, Missouri for a rally and later spent over a month traveling across Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York with them. Unfortunately, David’s health did not allow them to continue the full-time life style, so they bought a new house in Cherry Valley, near Beaumont and settled down to part time Rving again. Our hearts and prayers go out to Marianne, Lynn and the families and friends of both these fine men. They will be missed.

While we were in Pilot Knob we spent quite a bit of our time meeting up with friends we had made in the RV community over the last couple of years. Among them were John and Rita Ham whom we knew primarily from their participation in several of the FMCA chapters which we belong to, including Monaco International, Elks International and MIME. We learned that John and Rita actually had a permanent RV pad in the Foothills area East of Yuma. They invited us over for lunch one afternoon and we were impressed with the development in which they lived. They have their RV parked on a nice pad and they built a large casita with a big living room, kitchen, bath and huge enclosed patio. The Casita has no bedroom so they sleep in the coach, but that also means the casita is not officially a “house” so it is taxed by the county as a storage shed. It was a very impressive setup and the entire development around them consists of similar large RV lots. We were impressed with the concept and might consider a similar setup if we ever get tired of being on the road all the time. We also learned that the Ham’s were avid geocachers and four-wheelers. Since Yuma sits in the middle of the desert, the four-wheeling possibilities are endless. John invited us to go on a four-wheeling geocaching trip down to the Marine Corps bombing range which borders the area where their house is. We learned that the bombing range is several hundred square miles with much of it open to the public with a permit from the Marine Corps base in Yuma. It seems that only a few parts of the range are actually in use for bombing practice and are off limits. A search of the geocache web site showed dozens of caches hidden within the confines of the range.

We went to the base and got our free range access permits the next day. Basically, you sign a paper that says you give up your right to complain if you get blown up or lasered, and that if you get lost, break down or die in the desert, you understand you are on your own. Other than that, have fun. We were originally going to go out with the group on Wednesday, the 17th but a really bad storm blew through the area and we rescheduled for Friday the 19th. We headed into the range with four other geocachers in two other Jeeps about nine in the morning. We had a great time, actually did some four-wheeling with our Jeep for the first time, and traveled across some pretty rugged desert. We visited an old mine from the early 1900's and also found 13 caches. We left the range about 4 that afternoon after having a great time. The next day we went back to the Ham’s home for a Christmas party. All of their four-wheeling and Rving friends from the area were there and we had a great potluck dinner and gift exchange that was a lot of fun. We met some very nice people and are considering joining the four-wheeler chapter of FMCA.

On the 21st we left Pilot Knob and headed up to Indio to the Indian Waters RV park. This is another of our membership parks located right in downtown Indio near all our old haunts. It is actually only about a mile from the country club where our old house is located. On the 23rd I went to see the oncologist and the information he gave me was pretty much the same as what I had learned through my internet research. My melanoma was very small, caught early and in the category of extremely curable. He indicated, as I expected, that I needed to have additional surgery to excise a larger area around the site of the melanoma. He was not sure at the time whether or not they would have to explore any nearby lymph nodes because he wanted to examine the original mole himself to determine the thickness. If it actually was a thin as the original pathology indicated, he would not need to do any lymph node removal, only the additional excision around the original site. I was scheduled for surgery on Monday, the 5th of January. While the doctor never specifically notified me, I did learn a few days after my first visit, when I went in for my preoperative tests, that the only surgery scheduled was the excision, so he must have verified that it was a very thin melanoma. Yea! Although I was not really looking forward to the surgery, at least it is the minimum amount of treatment and I will not require any type of chemo or other cancer treatments for this particular problem.

We spent Christmas day with Jackie’s godson Shane Ryan and his family. Jackie has known Nancy, Shane’s grandmother since the 60's, and was present when Shane was born. It was a very nice family dinner with Shane, his mother Vicki, Nancy, Shane’s dad Gary, Vicki’s brother Larry and other friends of the family. Shane, who is 14, got a Wii system for Christmas and he and I spent a couple of hours playing various games. I was very impressed with the Wii - I think I will ask Santa for one next year!! The week between Christmas and New Year’s were spent primarily relaxing and doing some local geocaching in the Indio area. New Year’s Eve Barry and Colleen Cohen, who live in their motorhome at the Outdoor Resort Country Club about two miles down the street, moved their motorhome over to Indian Waters. You may recall that they visited us in Pahrump in September at the Western Horizons park there and ended up joining Western Horizons, which also includes Indian Waters among their resorts. By bringing their coach over to Indian Waters we were able to spend New Years Eve, and the following couple of days, with them, having a great grand party without having to worry about driving anywhere. We had a wonderful New Years Eve with the guys doing karaoke in the back and the girls playing cards. On New Years day the guys watched the football games and later we had a wonderful turkey dinner to celebrate the new year. It made for a great way to bring in the new year with friends.

On Sunday, the 4th, we left Indian Waters and drove 1.4 miles to the Indio Date Festival Fairgrounds for the Western Area FMCA motorhome rally. Although the rally doesn’t really start until Thursday, they allow early parking and we wanted to get in and settled before my surgery on Monday. As we were going in Jackie mentioned to one of the parking crew that I was having surgery on the next day and would it be possible to get parked in the handicap area where we had easier access to the rally activities. The parking crew indicated there was no problem so we ended up being parked right on the grounds near everything. We also have minimal electric service, enough to run our basic needs and keep the batteries charged without having to run the generator.

On Monday, the 5th I went over to the outpatient surgery center at Desert Regional Hospital for my surgery. They wanted me there at 11:00, but I ended up not going into the operating room until almost 1:30. The wait was the worst. Once I got into the OR they put me out and the next thing I knew it was 4:30 and they were waking me up in the recovery room. Jackie and Colleen, who had come along to keep Jackie company, took me home and let me complete my recovery in the coach. I was pretty groggy and out of it most of the night, but not in any real pain. The worst part of the process is that because they dig out a pretty good chunk of skin, they have to install a drain to pull the fluid out of the hole for a while. Since it is on my back it is not very convenient to clean. Jackie has proven to be quite the nurse and taking very good care of me. Fortunately, I have not needed to take any of the pain medication that they prescribed for me. The surgical site is very uncomfortable - it actually feels more like someone beat me with a stick rather than cut into me. The swelling and muscle soreness is the worst, but there is no real pain. A couple of days after the surgery we noticed that the amount of drainage from the surgery site had dropped way off, so we made an appointment to go into the doctor on Thursday to see if the drain could be removed early. On Wednesday night the sealed bandage sprung a leak and I woke up at three in the morning in a little pool of blood. Yucky. Jackie, who has no great love of the sight of blood did great, she patched the hole and cleaned up the mess. The next morning the doctor changed the old dressing and removed the drain. I got a first look at the wound - looks like a badly planned railroad route, but the bleeding has pretty much stopped and the dressing are now simple bandages that Jackie can handle changing. Without the drain I am MUCH more comfortable.

Thursday was also the first day of the actual rally activities, so we spent some time in the vendor exhibits and also watched the parade put on by various chapters of the Western Area of FMCA. The parade was an absolute hoot. The theme of the rally is Ancient Egypt and some of the float decorations and costumes were very inventive and entertaining. The evening entertainment was a country group called Legends of Country. They did a kind of musical country music history lesson with songs from the early country artists like Hank Williams, Marty Robbins and George Jones. It was a great show. We will be here at the rally until next Sunday, the 11th and then we are headed over to the Indio Elks Lodge for a week. We will be hosting the RV park which gives us a place to park for a week and gives me a chance to recover from the surgery. Barry is going to come over to the fairgrounds on Sunday and move the motorhome to the Elks Lodge for us. That way I don’t have to try to drive. With the surgery being right in the middle of my back, I am not supposed to do any driving or any other kind of upper body exertion for a while.

That ends this episode of Travels with Roy and Jackie. I will try to update again while we are in Casa Grande, Arizona later in January. Until then, happy travels and have a great life.