Tuesday, May 24th we went down the hill and back to Redlands for some more geocaching. This time we worked the area of town North of I-10. We found a dozen caches in about three hours or so and saw some very nice areas of the city of Redlands. We were looking for one cache in one
of the city parks and we were having trouble finding it. We noticed that there was a park employee walking across the park towards us and we thought, “oh - oh, busted” because we were wandering around through the shrubbery. When he finally got close he said, “it used to be over there.” We talked some more and he told us that he had talked to other cachers and knew that there was a cache here at one time, but he didn’t think it was still there. There was supposed to be a big brass plaque with some historical information on the city and the area, but a few months ago someone cut the bolts and stole the plaque. While he was still standing there I took one more look inside one of the large pipes that had served as a post for the plaque and Bingo - found the cache hanging inside by a wire. The park worker seemed almost as excited as we did. His closing was, “now I know where it is, I can help other people having problems.” Nice guy.We also found a couple caches along an old railroad route that had been turned into a hiking trail. The tracks and ties were gone, but the cinder railbed was still in place. One of the caches was near an old railroad bridge that was half gone. We also had a cache that was a bird
in a nest, up in a tree. Had to use a pole to get the bird down. We found that the city of Redlands has some very nice neighborhoods with some really nice homes. After caching we drove into Beaumont to the Elks Lodge for dinner with our friend Marianne. Tonight they had tri-tip and it was very good. We had a nice conversation with Marianne. This will probably be the last time we see her on this trip as we leave the area in about a week. After dinner we went back up the hill to the coach for the night.Wednesday, May 25th we took off about noon and drove to Menifee, California, which was about 45 miles Southwest of Silent Valley. Menifee is a former farm town that is growing into a fairly large bedroom community. It is on the I-215, probably twenty-five miles South of Riverside and 70 miles or so North of metro San Diego. We were going there to visit our good friends Ray and Suzie Babcock who have moved into a house there. Ray and Suzie have been full-timers for about five years and we have traveled with them, and been with them at various places all over the country over that time. We first met them at a Monaco event because they have a Monaco Diplomat, a coach model similar to ours. Ray is a retired firefighter and they have always owned and rented out several houses. The last year or so Suzie had decided that she wanted to have a house as a permanent “base” again, so they have moved back into one of their rental homes.
We arrived after about an hours drive and found a very nice home in a small development about a half mile off the freeway. It is a large, single story four bedroom home with a nice patio and pool area and a huge family room and kitchen area. We spent about four hours sitting and talking with them, catching up on what each of us has been doing. We last saw them in March when we were in the Yuma, Arizona area. About 5:30 we went out for dinner at a great local Mexican restaurant that the Babcocks had discovered. When we pulled into the parking lot we were surprised to see Bill and Karen Swart just getting out of their car to go into another restaurant in the complex. We just had lunch with Bill and Karen a couple weeks ago in Banning after not having seen them for over a year. Ray and Suzie also know Bill and Karen so we spent a few minutes saying hi again. We then went into the restaurant, which is called Carnitas Express. Their card says they have three locations, this one in Menifee, one in Murrieta and one in Brea. The food was very reasonablely priced and very, very good. Jackie had fajitas and I had a red chili burro that had to weigh two pounds. I am a red chili fanatic and this was a very nice red chili with huge chunks of beef. I would highly recommend it to anyone who likes Mexican food and is in the area. It is on Newport Road, just South of I-215 in Menifee. After dinner we dropped Ray and Suzie back off at their house and we headed home. This was the first time we have been out after dark in several weeks. We got home about 8:30 and settled in for the night to watch the finals of American Idol. Yea for Scotty! He was the one I was rooting for, but Lauren was very good too. Both of them are just teenagers, but they have great careers in their future.
Friday, May 27th we went down the hill for a last day of caching before we leave Southern California for the summer. We were able to find eleven caches in a couple of hours, with no new DNFs. In fact, we finally found one cache that we had looked for on two different occasions. We love fixing DNFs! After caching we did some quick last minute shopping at Walmart. No Walmarts for the next few days, so we needed to get a couple of things. After that we headed back up the hill and spent the rest of the evening at the coach.
Saturday was a “get ready to travel day” with me cleaning up all the outside stuff and getting it put away and Jackie doing some inside preparations. We hoped to have a nice warm final day, but it was cool and breezy again, so we didn’t get to sit outside in the sun like we wanted.
Sunday, May 29th we woke up to a foggy, wet and cold morning. It had drizzled on and off all night and the wind was blowing pretty hard. I was a bit worried about our trip today as I don’t really like going down the hill with the coach when the road is wet and it is foggy. However, by the time we left about 10:30 the fog had lifted and the roads had dried. It was still windy, but with the speeds I get in the coach going down the hill, no more than about 30 mph, the wind is really not a factor. There was no fog and no wet road. At the bottom of the hill we hooked the Jeep up to the back of the coach, for the first time in nearly three months, and started East on I-10. This is the official start of our summer 2011 travels. Yea! On this day we are headed for Ehrenberg, Arizona, just across the Colorado River from Blythe, California. We will be staying there at the Colorado River Oasis, one of our Western Horizon parks, for two days. We really didn’t have to leave Silent Valley until Monday when our 30 days was up, but I didn’t want to be on the road on Monday, which is Memorial Day and a major road travel holiday. So we left a day early and will “lay up” over Monday and stay off the roads.
We arrived at Ehrenberg right around 2:30 p.m. or so and got checked in and found our spot. The park is pretty empty, but it is the Arizona desert in summer. It looked like most of the people were at the pool or
on the river. We could hear the boats running up and down the river. The park backs right up to the river, as you may recall from our episode when we were here in February. We didn’t go anywhere after we got set up. The temperatures were in the low 80's so we just enjoyed the warm breezes.Monday, May 30th, Happy Memorial Day! Woke up to a pretty nice day, little breeze and temperatures in the low 90's. We decided that we needed to do our laundry, so after lunch we packed everything in the car and headed back into California to the laundromat in Blythe. After finishing our laundry we did a little bit of geocaching. There were a couple of new caches in the Blythe area that had been put out since our last visit there in February, so we went out and got them. Two new finds for the record. We then went back to the coach and chilled for the rest of the day.
Tuesday, May 31st we left Ehrenberg, Arizona about 10:00 a.m. and continued East on I-10 to Tonopah, Arizona. Tonopah is a little farming community about 40 miles West of Phoenix. It is very close to the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station. There is a very nice RV park there that we like to overnight at so that we can head into the metro Phoenix area early in the day. Since it was only about 95 miles from Ehrenberg we got in early, before noon. So, after getting settled in and getting some lunch we went out to do some caching in the area. There were not a lot of caches around this remote area, but we managed to get three in a little over ninety minutes. The really neat thing is one of them was an FTF, which means “first to find.” The cache had been placed and published back on the 13th of the month, but no one had gone out to find it yet. FTFs are kind of a neat thing because each cache can only have one. We have over 2,500 finds, but only about a half dozen FTFs. We are usually too late. After caching we went back to the coach for the rest of the evening. It was warm, about 95, but not too uncomfortable.
Wednesday, June 1st, Happy “official” summer! We were up and out early again, around 9:30, headed East towards Surprise, Arizona. It was only about a 55 mile trip, so we knew we would be off the road before it got too hot. We stopped for fuel and still arrived at the Sunflower RV Resort in Surprise
before noon. We actually had to wait about a half hour because the person in our designated spot had not left yet. We finally got settled in and set up and decided to just stay in for the rest of the day. We will be here in Surprise for a week, hopefully seeing family and doing some sightseeing in my old home town.Thursday we woke up to a bright, sunny Arizona day and decided to do some geocaching. Since the temperatures were predicted to be in the high 90's by the middle of the afternoon, we decided to go out before lunch to get a bit of an early start. We headed out about 10:30 and started caching in Sun City West, which is a large retirement community that is pretty much across the street from where we are staying. For those that don’t know my history, I was a Sheriff’s Deputy here in Phoenix for 28 years, from 1970 to 1998. I worked on and off in the Northwest Phoenix area and Sun City for much of my career. I was a patrol officer here in the early 70's, a detective here in the early 80's and the Commander of the Patrol District that includes Sun City in the mid-80's. The “original” Arizona Sun City was built from the mid-60's through the mid-70's. Sun City West, where we did our caching today, was built from the mid-70's through the mid-80's. Both of these communities, which total probably 25,000 people, are in the unincorporated area of Maricopa County, which means the Sheriff’s Office provides law enforcement protection. Two new communities have been built, Sun City Grand and Sun City Festival have also been built in the area, but both are within the City of Surprise. I have been told that the total Sun City population in the Northwest part of the County is over 40,000.
We cached for a while, stopped for lunch and then picked up again. We were able to log a dozen finds before we decided it was too hot. We also had two DNFs. After caching we went back to the coach and cooled off for the rest of the day, although it only got up to 97 today.
Friday, June 3rd, we went out for lunch in Surprise to meet my daughter Tye, her husband Frank, and their kids, Jordan and Courtney. Jordan, my youngest grandchild, is eleven and Courtney is 22. We met them for lunch
at a Golden Corral buffet and had a great lunch. We ended up spending a couple hours there just catching up and visiting. It was very nice seeing them again. We normally only see the kids once a year when we come through the Phoenix area. After lunch we did some shopping and then went back to the coach for a little while.About 4:00 p.m. we left and went to the Glendale Moose Lodge for our first Moose lodge visitation! As I discussed in an earlier episode, I was approached by a guy we met in Silent Valley to join the Moose. I did and when we got our mail here in Surprise on Wednesday my new Moose membership card was in it. I am now a Moose as well as an Elk. They are very similar organizations, started about the same time in the late 1800's. The Glendale Moose (actually in Peoria, but whose checking) was a very nice lodge that looked very similar to any Elks lodge, or regular bar for that matter. The people there were very friendly and we talked to several people learning a little bit more about the Order. Unlike the Elks, where you have to go through an indoctrination and initiation, where you learn some things, my joining the Moose was just a paper thing. We had a couple of drinks and then left. Unfortunately, it does not appear that the Moose lodges have lodge pins as the Elks do, so we won’t be able to collect mementos of our visits.
Saturday, June 4th, didn’t start out too well. I was having my morning coffee, watching Fox News and checking email when Jackie’s new computer just crashed. The screen went black and windows would no longer start. The computer is only six weeks old, which really ticks you off. I did everything I could think of to get it going, and finally called Costco concierge service. We bought the computer through Costco and they provide a tech help line. I spent an hour on line with a tech and we tried a couple of restore and recovery methods to no avail, windows would not load. Even the restore disks I made when we got the computer wouldn’t fix it. He finally decided that the hard drive must have gone bad so he transferred me to Dell service so that they could confirm the problem and get it taken care of.
I knew I was in trouble when the Dell guy said his name was Raja. I could barely understand him because his Indian accent was very strong. In ended up being on the phone with Raja for about an hour. He was very technically adept, but it was a struggle to figure out what he was saying. The end result was that Raja finally agreed that the hard drive had crunched, so he got our address and said we could send the computer back for repairs, or he could send us a new hard drive. I told him I was pretty good with computers and had changed laptop drives before, just send me a new drive. He said it would go out within a couple of days. With that we put the nice new computer aside and dug out the old Acer, which was still working fairly well. We just have to wait for the new drive now.
We finally left the coach after lunch and headed for the local mall to go to the movies. I needed a little escapism after struggling with the computer for three hours. We went to see “The Hangover II” because we had enjoyed the first one so much. The second was pretty much the same characters and plot line, just set in Bangkok, Thailand instead of Las Vegas. It was nearly as funny as the first and had a lot of REALLY funny moments. The plot was just a little more obscure, but it was still a good movie if you just want some escapist comedy for an afternoon. After the movie we stopped at the Sun City Elks Lodge for a drink before going home. In the past we have been in the Sun City area in the spring before the snowbirds leave and the heat comes. The Sun City lodge was always busy. Today there were four or five people in the place and the bartender was downright surly. We had one drink and left and no one spoke to us except the bartender, and that was just to ask what we wanted. We went back to the coach and hung out there the rest of the day.
Sunday, June 5th we awoke to what was predicted to be the hottest day since we arrived, about 106 or so by mid-afternoon.
About 10:30 my son Roy and middle daughter Tracie arrived at the coach for a visit. They brought along McKenzie Still, my newest (now five months old) great granddaughter. Although I have seen many pictures via email and Facebook, this is the first time that I have seen her in person. My granddaughter Ashley, McKenzie’s
mother, lives in Payson, about a hundred miles or so Northeast of Phoenix, but she had dropped McKenzie off with Tracie, who is Ashley’s mom. They were going to be taking her back to Payson today, but wanted to bring her over so I could see her. 
They stayed for a couple of hours and we had a nice time catching up. McKenzie is a very friendly, outgoing baby, so she took to Jackie and I pretty quickly. Tracie just recently moved back to Phoenix from Illinois, so I had not seen her in several years. Her boyfriend Jim was also along for the visit. After the kids left Jackie and I went out to grab some quick lunch and then drove down to the Arizona Cardinal’s new domed stadium in Glendale, a few miles South of us, for an indoor RV show. The stadium looks like a big flying saucer and is completely enclosed, although the center of roof is retractable for games when the weather is nice. Today they had the grass off the field and a whole bunch of RVs parked inside. We walked around for about 90 minutes looking at RVs in the air conditioned comfort of the stadium. After that we took a quick drive over to the other side of Glendale so I could look at the last house I lived in before I left Phoenix in 1998. The new owners have taken out all my desert landscaping, including two huge saguaro cacti that I had in the front yard. Too bad, but not my house any more. We made a stop at Best Buy to pick up a couple things and then headed back to the coach for the rest of the afternoon and evening. The temps did hit 107 on the car thermometer on the way home. Eek.
Monday, June 6th, we left the coach for lunch and met my brother Ken and his wife Susan for lunch at the local Olive Garden. Ken is my youngest brother, actually 20 years younger, and they live in Goodyear, a suburb of Phoenix. A couple years ago we introduced Ken and Susan to geocaching and they have become very active, actually working on catching up to us in number of finds. We had a very nice lunch and spent some time catching up. They just got back from a vacation trip to Wisconsin and they were telling us about some of their caching adventures back there.
After lunch we got in our car and went out to do some team geocaching in the Surprise area. We spent a couple hours out there and managed to garner a dozen finds, including one that had been a DNF for Ken and Susan in the past. Yea Us! We got our dozen and decided it was a little warm, so we all headed back to the coach for refreshments and more conversations. They stayed until about 6:00 before heading back to their house. We made plans for them to come up and see us in Camp Verde, our next stop, sometime during the two weeks we will be up there.
Wednesday, June 8th, my brother Dennis’s birthday. Happy Birthday Dennis. Dennis is the next oldest brother in the family, eight years younger than me. We packed up early and were out of the RV park by 9:00 a.m. headed North towards Camp Verde. The trip is only about 90 miles, but we wanted to get an early start because a big part of the trip is uphill and it is supposed to get hot today. We wanted to beat the heat. We got to the Western Horizons Camp Verde Resort right at 11:00,
got checked in and parked. We spent the next couple of hours getting set up. The new hard drive for Jackie’s computer was waiting for us when we got there. Yea! After getting the coach and site set up I installed the new hard drive and, yippee - Windows loaded! Now I just have to reinstall all our software. Another couple of hours of work.With our arrival here in Camp Verde I will close this chapter of the blog. We will be here for two weeks before moving on to new adventures. Until we meet again, remember that everything is okay in the end, if it's not ok, then it's not the end. See ya’ soon.
