and sewer connections. The only downfall at all is that it is a bit out of the way, about 25 miles South of Bend and seven miles North of the little town of La Pine. It is also six miles off of the highway, although it is a nice road going back to it. Our site is right next to the camp host’s site, near the entrance to the camping loop. Although we are in a wooded area, we have a fairly open site and were able to even get our satellite TV with the dome on the roof. After we got settled into our site we did a little cleaning inside and then relaxed the rest of the day and evening. One nice thing about this stay, at night, once all the campers have gone to bed, it is VERY quiet and peaceful. No generator noises, no street lights shining in the windows. A real departure from the last couple of weeks. It also cools off very nicely at night, from the high 80's during the day to the 40's at night. It all makes for very restful nights.Wednesday, August 18th we drove up into Bend for the day. Our first stop was lunch at the Black Bear Diner. On our various tours through the Northwest over the last few years we have seen a number of these restaurants. They are a chain with stores in Northern California, Oregon and Washington. This was the first time we decided to try one and we found it very good. The restaurant is very nice inside, the staff was friendly and the menu large. The food was very good with large portions at prices comparable to other chain diners. I had the Big Bear burger which was nearly too big for me to finish. (“Nearly” being the operative word) I did end up leaving a few of the large portion of fries. We would definitely eat at one of these again and I can recommend it to anyone looking for a good meal, breakfast, lunch or dinner.
After lunch we did some caching in the Bend area, interspersed with some shopping. Altogether we ended up with only five finds, but that was mostly because we spent an hour or so walking around downtown, looking in shops and the local farmer’s market. We also spent an hour or so at The Mill, an upscale shopping area South of the downtown area. All in all we had a very pleasant and relaxing day. After the hectic pace of the rallies, it was nice. By late afternoon we were ready to head back to the coach for the evening. I did discover another downside of our camping location - mosquitoes! I wanted to sit outside around sundown and enjoy the cooling evening and found I was being attacked by mosquitoes. Haven’t really seen any of those since Alaska last year. They don’t seem to be around during the day, but come out in strength in the evening hours. We are only a couple hundred yards from the Deschutes River, so that is probably the reason.
Thursday, August 19th was a chores day. During the FMCA rally I purchased several items which needed to be installed, and I had some minor repairs that had to be made to the coach. Jackie did some cabinet cleaning and rearranging. I installed new covers on our outside steps and put in new LED bulbs in place of the halogen bulbs in our reading lights. The halogen bulbs were very hot when in use. The LED bulbs are much cooler and use far less 12 volt power as well. I feel so Green! Another of my chores was replacing the connectors on our 120 volt shore power system. Over the last five years the connectors have gotten a little loose. This causes heat buildup from resistance and tends to deteriorate the connectors. Eventually they fail completely, and can even catch fire if left to deteriorate too badly. The male connection went fairly quickly, but when I went to replace the female connection on my surge protector I found that the cord was too short to use the connector I had bought in Redmond at the rally. I had to make a run into La Pine to the hardware store to get another type of connector. Fix it jobs are no different for a motor home than they are for a sticks and bricks house - they always require at least one run to the store.
I also installed an automatic fire extinguishing system in the outside compartment of the refrigerator. The gas leak that we had last Fall in Casa Grande scared me enough to decide to get the Halon extinguisher at the Redmond rally. It was a real easy install and gives me a little peace of mind. Although the gas absorption type refrigerators used in most RVs work well, there is a significant fire danger if and when they do fail. There have been a lot of stories recently about RVs being burned to the frame because of refrigerator fires. The extinguisher I installed has a head just like a sprinkler in a building. If a fire starts in the outside compartment, which is where all the equipment is, the heat melts the element and the extinguisher goes off. We had a very productive day and got a lot of things done that have been put off while we were on the rally tour.
Friday, August 20th we decided to go out after lunch and do some caching in the area around where we are camping. In a couple of hours we managed to add ten finds to our list. This whole area is forest and we had a good time exploring. We also spent a little bit of time in the town of La Pine, which is only about 4,500 population. When we came through here four years ago we ate at a small mom and pop Thai restaurant and we spent some time looking for it. Although there was an internet listing for it still, we were unable to find it where we remembered it, or at the listed address. It must have gone out of business. Too bad, the food was pretty good. After caching we headed back to the coach for the rest of the night. We used the BBQ for the first time in a while and cooked up a nice big tri tip roast we had found at one of the local markets in La Pine.
Saturday was a shopping and laundry day and we headed back up to Bend after lunch. After some searching we managed to find a Laundromat and got our clothes washed. It had been nearly two weeks, so we had quite a batch. After laundry we went to the outlet mall for a while, and then hit the local Fred Meyer store for groceries and other stuff. No super Walmarts in Bend - Fred has the place tied up I guess. After our shopping we spent the rest of the evening relaxing in the coach. Sunday we just stayed around the coach and relaxed.
Monday, August 23rd we went out after lunch for some final caching in the La Pine area. We actually spent most of our time in a very nice residential area called Sunriver just North of the State Park. There is a big golf resort there and just this past week they played one of the PGA Senior Tour events there. It is a very large development pretty much “in the woods”. The area looked like it might have been logged back in the 40's or 50's and the new trees were just reaching maturity. There are some very nice, large homes, some condo complexes, and shopping areas. Looks like a very nice place to live. We had a good afternoon of caching and managed to find fourteen caches with no DNF’s. A couple of times we thought we might DNF, but we persevered and found the cache. After caching we headed home for dinner and relaxed the rest of the night.
Tuesday, August 24th was a travel day. We got an early start packing up and then headed out about 9:30 a.m. After a quick fuel stop in La Pine we drove back North to Bend and then headed East on State Highway 20 towards the town of Burns, Oregon, about 140 miles East. The ride was pleasant with a lot of rolling hills and few steep grades. It was all two lane road, but there wasn’t too much traffic. After we left bend there was not much of anything for the next 100 miles. The terrain was typical high desert, lots of scrub pines and sage brush. Most all of Oregon East of the Cascades is desert type terrain. We arrived in Burns about 2:00 p.m. and got settled into the Burns RV park for a couple of days. After four hours of driving and the work of taking down and setting back up, we were tired and just stayed in for the rest of the day.
Wednesday, August 25th was our only day to explore and experience Burns. We started by going downtown and having lunch at one of the local cafes. We ate at the Elkhorn Café and I had a very simple grilled cheese and a bowl of chili (one of my favorite meals) and Jackie had Thai food. Yes, they had a Thai menu and a buffet that seemed to be very popular with the townsfolk. A number of people came in while we were eating and the owner of the café seemed to know all of them. After lunch we spent an hour or so walking around downtown and exploring the various shops. After our tour of downtown we started doing some geocaching. When I ran the list for local geocaches I ended up with a total of twelve caches within 15 miles of Burns. We managed to find ten of them in a few hours and decided that ten was a good number. We found ten with no DNF’s, although a couple of them had us stumped for a while before we found them. One interesting thing was we were looking for a cache in a National Forest campground North of town and there were thousands of small white butterflies all over the place. We were amazed at the number of them flying around. Once we started back down the hill and out of the big trees we stopped seeing them. They only seemed to be in the forested area. After our caching and exploring we headed back to the coach for the rest of the night.
Thursday, August 26th was a travel day. We originally planned to drive from Burns to a little town called McDermitt on the Oregon/Nevada border. A little research showed McDermitt to not really have any RV facilities, so we decided to suck it up and go the entire 220 miles from Burns straight to Winnemucca, Nevada. We got out of the Burns RV park pretty early, about 9:15, but the drive was still tough. The wind was blowing, most of the way directly to the front of the coach, and it was
hot, very close to 100 degrees. I had to constantly watch the temp gauges on the coach to make sure we didn’t over heat. The wind was blowing us around and it was a long, tiring drive. We finally made it to Winnemucca, Nevada about 2:30 p.m. and got settled in. Not the nicest RV park we have ever been to, but adequate with 50 amp and full hookups. It is a Passport America park so we get two of our three days here at half price. The total cost for three days of camping here was only a couple of dollars more than what we paid for two nights in Burns. We have never been to this part of Nevada, so we are looking forward to exploring. After getting settled in we just chilled and tried to stay cool. The temperature peaked at 99 degrees before starting to drop.Friday the weather promised to be a little bit cooler, so after lunch we went out to do some caching in Winnemucca. Although only about 7,700 in population, there were a lot of caches around town. One of the caches was virtual at a small Veteran’s
Memorial park on Highway 95 just North of town. We had seen the park the day before as we arrived. There were various pieces of military equipment on display, a WW I artillery piece, a couple of WW II tanks, a Korean era fighter jet and a Vietnam era Huey helicopter. On the helicopter was written “Welcome Home”, the traditional greeting for Vietnam vets. Welcome Home was also the name of the cache. In the cache description the person who placed the cache also suggested a tour up the side of nearby Winnemucca Mountain for those who had never been to Winnemucca before. We went ahead and took the drive which was six and a half miles of switchbacks up to the top of the mountain which overlooks Winnemucca. The road was paved, although in rough shape, but no too steep, so the drive was easy. We went from 4,300 feet at the intersection with Hwy 95 to 6,680 near the summit. The actual summit was closed because there were a
bunch of radio and telephone antennas and microwave towers up there, but we were close and had great views of Winnemucca and the surrounding desert. We also learned from the cache description that this was an old Air Force station, probably a radar surveillance station back in the pre satellite days. This was a good example of the kind of things we would never find except for caching. To get to the road to the top of the mountain you had to take the road to the county dump and then just keep driving. There were no signs except for the dump and a gun range, so without the cache info we would have never known this road went to the top of the mountain.Altogether we found ten caches in a couple of hours just in the North central part of town. After reaching ten we quit and went to the local Walmart for some shopping. We also made a stop at a liquor store to get some more Absolute. We wanted to wait to get out of Oregon before buying more liquor because it is pretty expensive up there. We had stocked up before leaving California in June, so we didn’t have to buy any while we were there. After shopping we headed back to the coach and relaxed the rest of the day and evening. The temps were still in the nineties, but now in the low nineties.
Saturday, August 28th we woke up to cloudy, threatening skies, cool temperatures and a brisk, cold wind. The weather report said possible showers but it looked like it would storm any minute. We decided to just stay in for the day and do chores, play games and just relax. As it turned out, it never did rain, but it was pretty cold and windy so we were glad we didn’t go out to cache.
Sunday, August 29th was another travel day. We left Winnemucca about 9:30 a.m. and started Southwest towards our next destination, Fallon, Nevada. The trip was about 130 miles, most of which was on freeway, Interstate 80. After a quick fuel stop we headed out and arrived in Fallon about 1:00 p.m. We have been through Fallon several times on previous trips, but we have never stopped here. We are looking forward to seeing the town and the surrounding desert and doing some caching. Fallon is about the same size as Winnemucca, about 7,500 population, but there is a large Naval Air Station here. NAS Fallon is the home of the Top Gun squadron, famous from the Tom Cruise movie. Top Gun used to be at NAS Mirimar near San Diego until 1999 when it was transferred to the Marine Corps and renamed Marine Corp Air Station Mirimar.
We found a spot in the RV park at the Bonanza Casino, right on the main street of town. It is really just a parking lot with utilities, but it is only $15 a night, which is a bargain for full hookups. After getting set up we headed out for a late lunch/early dinner. The AAA book had recommended a Mexican restaurant in town called La Fiesta, so we went there. It is a fairly small, very nice place with good service. They had a big menu and the food was outstanding. I know that a lot of our friends who read this blog travel and may find themselves in Fallon, Nevada one day, so I would highly recommend La Fiesta, on Center Street just off Maine. We were going to visit the casino after getting back to the coach, but we got lazy and just stayed in the rest of the day and evening.
Monday, August 30th we left the coach after lunch for some adventures in the Northern Nevada desert. A few days prior to our arrival at Fallon I was doing some research on the town on the Internet and I came across some references to a place called “Project Shoal” which was about 30 miles Southeast of the town. It seems that on October 26, 1963 government conducted an underground test of a 12 Kiloton nuclear device at this place. This test was one of just a handful of domestic nuclear tests that were conducted off of the primary test sites in New Mexico and Southern Nevada. The Project Shoal test was supposed to help scientists become more adept at telling the difference between an underground nuclear explosion and a natural earthquake. One has to remember that this was in the heart of the Cold War and detecting nuclear testing by other countries was a primary concern. They chose the site near Fallon for its deep granite geographical characteristics.
The device was placed about 1,200 feet down in a sealed shaft and detonated. According to the literature, there was no ground breach and no release of radiation. Because the site was not on an established government reservation, and there was radiation danger, the site was reopened for public access in the 1970's. The only restriction is that digging at the site is prohibited. They also drilled a few test wells in the area surrounding the site to monitor any transient radiation in ground water. According to one of the stories I read, echo testing of the site has shown that the blast created a 170 foot glass “bubble” under the ground.
Several of the articles I read provided the GPS coordinates for the site and one contained very detailed directions to the site. It also said that the final five miles were on good gravel road, so there was easy access to the site. Having grown up during the Cold War and remembering all the fears of the “atomic bomb”, I thought it would be way cool to visit this site. The weather was great, the temperatures were to be only in the 70's - a perfect day for desert exploring. We set out from Fallon and headed East on U.S. 50, called the “loneliest highway” because when you leave Fallon and head East it is over 100 miles before the next town. We drove 28 miles East on Highway 50 and then about 5 miles South on State Route 31. As we were driving South on Highway 31 we could see a large amount of military equipment, old tanks and trucks, airplane carcasses, and other hardware, stored in the desert on the East side of the highway. My research had told me that this was one of the bombing ranges for NAS Fallon. The equipment is used for targets out on the range.
After about five miles we came upon a good gravel road, just as promised, which headed straight West up into the hills. The road wove up through a narrow canyon, known as Ground Zero Canyon, and into a shallow valley at the top of a range of mountains. We ended up driving about eight miles West before coming upon the Project Shoal site. There were actually two sites because the bomb was placed by
digging a vertical shaft down about 1,200 feet and then a horizontal shaft was dug West about another 2,000 feet. The bomb was placed at the end of the horizontal shaft which was then sealed. This was how they kept the bomb from rupturing the surface through the vertical shaft. Our first visit was at the site of the vertical shaft. To someone who just happened upon the site, without the benefit of knowing what it was ahead of time, it would look like an old mine site. There were two concrete pads, one which was right over the top of the vertical shaft and one that served as a foundation for a test equipment shack. There were also a couple of steel structures in the ground around the shaft site which appeared to have been parts of the original derrick that was over the vertical shaft and used for drilling th hole and lowing the bomb. We spent a few minutes looking around and taking some pictures, including the two of us standing on the slab which sealed the vertical shaft. We also found the geocache that was hidden at this site, our first for the Fallon area.We then went over to the site of the actual explosion. The only reason you can find this site at all is that there is a marble monument placed describing Project Shoal. The monument appears brand new and you can see the remains of an old
concrete monument lying nearby. The articles I read talked about the “rubble of a monument” but didn’t mention the new one, so it must be very recent. It was here that we were actually standing only a little over a thousand feet from where a nuclear bomb was detonated. Pretty awesome! Of course, I was a junior in high school when it happened, but it is still a part of my history.After our visit to the site we started to drive back out the canyon road and we heard jet planes and bomb blasts in the distance. We also saw a couple of military helicopters flying around the area. When we came out of the canyon we could see the bombing range and saw that there was bombing practice going on. We watched the
planes and helicopters for a while, although they were a little too far off to see real well or get pictures. We then geocached our way back to Fallon, finding a total of ten caches. Several of the caches were in the area of giant dry lake bed from which salt is now mined. We also found the remains of an old brothel that had burned down. You could see the remains of three double wide trailers, the standard housing for most Nevada brothels, and the remains of many, many box springs.When we got back to Fallon we stopped at the Fallon Elks Lodge for a visit. This is our first time at this lodge. It is a fairly large old stone building right in the middle of downtown. The lodge is small, only about 226 members. There weren’t too many people in the bar, but the bartender was very friendly and we had a nice chat. It turns out that he retired and moved to Fallon only about five years ago from Lodi, California. On a lark we ask him if he knew our friends, Andy and Fern Leonardini who live there, and he did! What a small world. We first met Andy and Fern in Palm Desert, California where they have a winter house, but we have visited them in Lodi as well. What a small world! We had a couple of drinks and got our lodge pin before heading back to the coach. When we got back to the coach we decided to go into the casino for a little while. We didn’t win anything, but had some fun. We then went to the casino coffee shop for dinner. After dinner we went back to the coach and relaxed after our exciting day in the desert.
Tuesday, August 31st we left the coach after lunch to do some local urban caching. We found that there were a lot of caches right in Fallon and we had our best single day total of finds ever - twenty one finds with no DNF’s!! Yea us! Most of the caches were fairly typical, small container and not too difficult, although there were a couple that had us stumped for a few minutes. One of the reasons we like urban caching, besides not having to walk across the desert for a half mile for a find, is that the caches tend to be very close together, usually a few tenths of a mile. You don’t have to use a lot of time going from cache to cache. Among the finds were two virtual caches (no physical container) which are worthy of mention. One was located just behind the Fallon City Hall. Shortly after 9/11/2001 some of the City leaders contacted New York City and made arrangements to obtain a small piece of steel from the World Trade Center to use in a memorial. They now have that piece of twisted I-beam as part of a 9-11 memorial. It was one of the most touching memorials we have seen, even though it is very simple. The I-Beam is incased in a
pile of burned bricks depicting the fallen towers. Brought tears to both our eyes. The second great virtual in town was located near the Churchill County Museum in Fallon. The building was an old Safeway store and is huge. The museum board has done a magnificent job of gathering artifacts and creating displays that show the history of Churchill County from the Native Americans all the way to the current. We spent over an hour in the museum looking at all the displays and tableaus. We both agreed that it was the best local history museum we have ever been to, and it is free to get in. They do ask for a two dollar per person donation, but it is not mandatory. We paid it and it was well worth the price. If you are ever in Fallon, you need to see these two sites. We also made a stop at a local pawn shop in downtown Fallon. I went in there originally to see if they had a camera tripod. I want to have a tripod for taking night shots at the Albuquerque Balloon Fest in October and really didn’t want to pay full price for something I won’t use much. They didn’t have a tripod, but we did look around and found a couple of other things. They had an eight inch LCD picture frame, which normally sells for about $60 at Walmart, for $14. It didn’t have a power cable, so I asked them if they would take $10 and they did. Jackie has also been wanting a small digital camera to carry in her purse and they had several. We settled on a 10 megapixel GE pocket camera with all the bells and whistles that they had marked for $69. I offered $50 and they took it also. This camera sells for over $120 in the stores. The camera works great and I was able to download the owner’s manual from the Internet after we got back to the coach. The power supply from our old, much smaller digital frame fit the new one perfectly and IT works well also. Our old frame had started to fail and had a white line running though the screen. We found some really good bargains! Still need a tripod though. After our caching and errands we finally headed back to the coach and chilled the rest of the evening.
Wednesday, September 1st is an anniversary day for us. This was the 12th Anniversary of our being together. September 1, 1998 was the day I moved from Arizona to Indio, California and started my life with Jackie. We had originally planned to leave Fallon today and drive South to Hawthorne, Nevada, our next stop on our way to Pahrump. However, after waking up and thinking about it I decided that there was no pressing need to leave today, it would only mean cutting our stay in Hawthorne from three days to two. Since Hawthorne is a much smaller town, we wouldn’t be missing much. I went over to the casino and extended our stay one night and we spent most of the day just relaxing around the house. Around 5:00 p.m. we
went out to one of the other casinos in town, The Stockman Casino, to do a little light gambling and have a nice anniversary dinner. The AAA book had said that the steakhouse in the Stockman Casino was very good. We didn’t do much good at gaming, but did go into the steakhouse for dinner. I had a very nice Porterhouse and Jackie had lamb, which she loves. Because we had mentioned our anniversary when we went into the restaurant, they also bought us each dessert with dinner. We were having a great dinner when all of a sudden Jackie showed me one of her front teeth had broken. Eight or ten years ago she had veneers put on her front teeth and one of them cracked and came off, leaving her with quite a gap in her front teeth. Needless to say, she was very upset, especially since we were going to Las Vegas in a few days to meet a woman that she hadn’t seen since her high school days. I told her that we would work something out and take care of things. We asked the waiter if he knew of any dentists in town but he lived about 30 miles outside of town. However, the hostess, Cathy, was born and raised in Fallon and gave us two recommendations. We headed home for the rest of the night with Jackie still very upset and worried.Thursday, September 2nd Jackie called the first dentist on the list at 8:00 a.m. and was told that they just couldn’t get her in. When she asked the girl about any other dentists in town she gave her the same name as Cathy’s second recommendation, a Doctor Ferguson. Jackie called his office and they told her to come in at 9:30 a.m. and they would try to take care of her. We took quick showers and headed over to the dentist’s office, which was only a few blocks down the street. Jackie filled out the papers and went in. About two hours later she came out with a very nice temporary cap on the tooth that looks as good as the original. You can’t tell anything had happened. They stressed that it was only a temporary fix, she would have to get a permanent crown at some point, but Jackie was very happy to have her smile back. And the total cost was only $180, which I thought was quite reasonable. If anyone should find themselves in need of emergency dentistry in Fallon, Nevada, we can highly recommend Dr. Jason Ferguson! Since it was almost afternoon, we decided to just stay in Fallon for one more night, do our laundry, and then get ready to do a two day run to Las Vegas.
Friday morning we got up and started packing the coach up for travel early. We were out of the parking lot by 8:45 a.m. and headed South on U.S. 95 towards the town of Mina. We are going a little over one hundred miles and want to be off the road early because it is going to be hot today in the desert, close to 100 degrees. I don’t like running across the desert in the high heat, you have to watch the engine temps too closely. We arrived in Mina (Population 261) just before 11:00 a.m. and checked into the Sunrise Valley RV Park. This is the only park in town, in fact, the only park between Hawthorne to the North and Tonopah to the South. We were only going to be here for one night, so we set up but didn’t put out any of the knick knacks in the coach. We want to be up and out early again tomorrow to avoid the heat. We didn’t even unhook the car, so we just stayed in for the rest of the day.
Saturday, September 4th was another early travel day. We planned on going about 160 miles from Mina, Nevada, South to Beatty, Nevada. Again, the weather forecast is calling for temperatures in the low 100's in the Nevada desert, so we want to be in Beatty before afternoon. We got out of Mina about 8:45 a.m. and were in Beatty at exactly noon. We checked into the Beatty RV park, which fortunately has 50 amp electric so we can run our air conditioners, and got settled in for the day. We didn’t unhook the car since we didn’t plan on any sightseeing. We are leaving early in the morning for Las Vegas.
Sunday we were up early yet again and on the road to Las Vegas by 8:30. The weather said temperatures in the 100's again, so we wanted to be in and set up before it got too hot. We had 125 miles to drive and figured about two and a half hours. We arrived at Arizona Charlie’s Casino and RV Park on Boulder Highway about 11:00 a.m. This is the first time we have stayed at this park. It is fairly new, quite large, and nice. Full hookups for $28 a night. We got parked and set up and then took our showers and got cleaned up. We had delayed our normal morning preparations so we could get on the road earlier. After getting cleaned up and having some lunch we headed out for a quick Costco run. Finally, low prices for liquor again. Yea! We loaded up on supplies and went back to the coach and unloaded. I took the car down for a badly needed wash and then we waited for my brother Russ and his wife Zen to come over. Regular readers will remember that Russ lives in Vegas and works at the Golden Nugget, downtown, as a craps pit boss.
Russ and Zen made it over about 3:00 and we had a great time catching up. We had not seen each other for almost a year. We looked at old pictures and talked about family and friends. Russ’s daughter Raquel graduated high school this past spring and she was on a trip back East, so we didn’t get to see her. Russ’s son, Russ the
Third, was in training with the Army as a combat medic. For the first time in many years Russ had no kids around the house. After talking for a long while we walked over to the casino for dinner. We ate in the coffee shop and the food was pretty good. They had a nice menu and good portions. After dinner we went back to the coach and visited some more until they left about 10:00 p.m. We will be going up to Pahrump, about 60 miles West of Vegas in a couple days and will be there for three weeks, so I hope that Russ and Zen come up to see us again while we are in the area. We got them interested in geocaching last year when we were here and they have gone crazy for it. They are up over 900 caches now! Another of our geocaching success stories. Monday, September 6th, Labor Day! Around 11:00 a.m. our expected visitors arrived at the coach. Today was the day that Jackie would reunite with an old high school friend and was the reason that we modified our plans with this stop in Las Vegas. To fill in the story, about two years ago Jackie was contacted by someone from the 1959 graduating class of Dorsey High School in Los Angeles regarding an upcoming 50 year reunion. This was Jackie’s school and her graduation year. The reunion would be in the summer of 2009, which was when we were going to be in Alaska, so we knew we wouldn’t be able to attend the event. However, Jackie did respond to the reunion committee with basic information, including her email address.
She didn’t hear too much more about the reunion until about six months ago when she got an email from a woman named Jeanne Foote, who’s maiden name was Harris. She had attended the reunion and saw Jackie’s name and email in the reunion book. It turns out that they were good friends during Jackie’s senior year at Dorsey. She and Jeanne had a running correspondence through emails until just about a month ago when they discovered that we would both be in the Las Vegas area at the same time. Jeanne and her husband Le Roy were going to be in Las Vegas over Labor Day weekend for a wedding and we were just arriving for our stay in Pahrump. We revised our traveling plans slightly to include a two night stay in Vegas so Jackie and Jeanne could finally get together.
Jeanne and Le Roy were very nice people and she and Jackie had a great time talking for hours about old times, old friends and acquaintances, and Jeanne’s experience at the reunion. It turns out that Le Roy and I have some commonalities too. He graduated from West High School in Phoenix, Arizona. West was one of the Phoenix Union High School District school’s, as was Maryvale, the school I graduated from. He graduated several years before I did and left Phoenix to go in the Army after graduation. He never went back to Phoenix and actually lived there a few years before my parents moved there from Wisconsin. He was an employee of the U.S. Geodesic Survey administration, the folks who monitor earthquakes among other things. His specialty was seismographs. He and Jeanne lived in Las Vegas for a while during the 60's nuclear testing activities and he took care of the seismographs at the test range. I told him about our recent visit to Project Sloan up near Fallon, but he was not involved in that test, even though it was intended to mimic an earthquake.
After several hours of visiting we decided we were hungry so we all walked over to the casino for a late lunch/early dinner. We had a good lunch and more conversation before returning to the coach to talk some more. About 4:30 the Foote’s left because they had some family members they had to meet for dinner. Jackie was very happy with the visit and was glad to be able to catch up with her old friend. Unfortunately, we got wrapped up in the visit and completely forgot to take any pictures! We spent the rest of the evening relaxing in the coach.
Tuesday, September 7th we left Arizona Charlies RV park about 9:30 and started the 60 mile drive to Pahrump, our “home” of record. The first 20 miles were through the middle of town and, as expected, the traffic on the freeways was terrible. In
addition, it was raining, more of a drizzle really, but still wet and nasty. The good thing is that it wasn’t hot, so we didn’t have to worry too much about overheating on the long grade out of Las Vegas towards Pahrump. To get to Pahrump you have to go up over a 5,000 foot plus pass in the foothills of Mt. Charleston. We finally arrived in Pahrump just before noon and got checked in and settled. We are going to be here for three weeks - the longest we have lighted in one place for a long time, since Silent Valley in March. It took a while to get settled because I put a lot more stuff out
for a long stay, but we did get settled in time to go down to the UPS store to get our mail in person. Machelle, one of the managers, was very happy to see us and we had a nice visit with her. The girls at the store are very helpful to us over the course of the year as we get our mail forwarded to us. We then headed home to relax for the rest of the day.With our arrival “home” I will close this episode of our travel story. We look forward to our stay here and will publish all those details at the end of our stay. Until the next time, stay safe, be happy, and enjoy everything life has to offer. We do!
