Welcome back to our story. Our last episode concluded on Friday, October 26th with our arrival at the Wine Ridge RV Resort in Pahrump, Nevada. Since Pahrump is our official “home of record” we consider our arrival here as marking the end of our summer travels for 2012. This resort used to be called Charleston Peak and it was one of our Western Horizons membership parks. We have come here for at least two weeks each fall since 2007 when we made our relocation from California. Last year the park went into foreclosure, and this year it was purchased by the same company that bought two other Western Horizons parks, the one in Indio, California and the one in Casa Grande, Arizona. Fortunately, at least for the present, the owner is offering great discount rates to WHR members at all three parks.Saturday, October 27th, we left the coach after lunch to do some caching. Since we spend at least two weeks a year here, we have done a lot of caching in the area. Fortunately, there are a number of active cachers in the area who are busy hiding new caches through the year. Even though we have found a lot of the caches in the area, there are well over a hundred newer caches we haven’t located yet. We actually have three caches in Pahrump that are our hides. The first thing we did was check on the two that are placed close to the RV park. We wanted to make sure the containers were still in good condition and that the logs didn’t need to be replaced. We found both to be in good shape and ready for another year of cachers.
After we checked on our two caches we went out and found ten new caches in the area. After caching for a while we stopped at the Pahrump Nugget casino and spent an hour or so gaming on the nickel machines. I actually played the entire hour or so on $5, although I eventually lost it. Jackie lost about $20. Still a lot of fun for not much money. After the casino visit we went back to the coach for the rest of the night.
Sunday, October 28th, we woke to the promise of another great day. Although the newscasts are full of dire predictions for the “Monster Storm” about to hit the East Coast, our weather is perfect. Temperatures in the mid-70's, no wind and no clouds. We had to find at least one cache today for our days of the year challenge, so after lunch we went out to do some more caching. Like yesterday, we were able to get ten new finds in about two hours. During our caching we met one of the local cachers that had put out dozens of new caches over the last year. We had a nice chat with her. It’s always nice to meet other cachers. After our caching we went to Walmart for a shopping trip and then back to the coach for the rest of the night.
Monday, October 29th, I spent some time in the morning working on odds and ends around the coach. We are putting together a bunch of new travel bugs to place into caches, so I worked on those for a while. I also have a few minor repairs to do on the coach. After lunch we drove down to the Nye County administrative center and took part in early voting for the general election. There was no wait, they had about nine voting booths set up, and both Jackie and I got our votes cast in less than ten minutes.
After voting I walked over to the Sheriff’s Office, located in the same building, and picked up the papers I needed to renew my concealed weapons permit. As a retired law enforcement officer I am eligible for a Federal permit which essentially exempts me from any state law which prohibits carrying a concealed weapon. I rarely actually carry a weapon, but I like to have the option, plus it makes it much less stressful to have weapons inside the motor home when we are in gun “unfriendly” places like some of the states in the Northeast. We made a quick trip to the drug store so Jackie could get a birthday card for her friend Kathy Yarbrough’s granddaughter, and then the UPS store to mail the card and pick up our mail. After all our stops we went back to the coach and I went back to my chores around the house.
We had an early dinner and at 6:00 we went down to the clubhouse for Texas Hold’em poker. This park was the first place the Jackie and I played the game, back in 2007 the first time we were here. Unfortunately, because the remodeling construction at the park has over half the sites closed, there are not as many people here as would be in a normal October. We only had four people show up for cards, but we played anyway and had a good time. We played for two hours with a $5 buy in and I lost $2 while Jackie won $4.50. After cards we went back and watched TV for the rest of the evening.
Tuesday, October 30th, we left the coach just before noon and went to the local Chinese buffet, China Wok. We met our friends Ken and Bonnie Woepke there for lunch. We have known Bonnie and Ken, who are also full time RVers, for many years, having met them on the road at a FMCA Full Timers Chapter rally back in 2008. We cross paths with them from time to time since they also spend most of the winter in the Southwest and travel the same “circuit” of membership parks that we do. Last year they leased a spot at the Escapee’s Co-op park in Casa Grande, so now they spend nearly the entire winter there, but they still travel the circuit a bit. They were already here in Pahrump when we arrived on Friday, but this was the first time we were really able to spend time with them.
We had a really nice lunch and caught up with what we have been doing since the last time we saw them in Casa Grande back in March of this year. They are leaving here this coming Friday to go to the big Encampment in Death Valley. The Encampment is kind of like a big rally of folks who like to get together and boondock in the desert for a long weekend. It is an annual event and we know several people who go there often. We have talked about doing it sometime, but have yet to put it on our schedule.
After lunch we went out to do a couple of caches since we needed to have at least one for day for our days of the year challenge. We found five new caches in about an hour and then decided to visit the animal shelter to see what they had in the way of cats. We have been talking off and on about getting a new kitty. Smokey is doing fine, but he is 12 years old and we know that sooner or later he is going to kitty heaven. He is also not the most affectionate of cats and Jackie wants a cuddle kitty, something Smokey is definitely not. When we first went on the road in 2005 we had Smokey and Fuzzy with us. Fuzzy was a cat that had belonged to my mother, but when my dad died in 2002 my mom went in a home and we took Fuzzy into our house. He was a real cuddle cat, never saw a lap he didn’t want to sit in. Unfortunately, he was already 16 years old when we went on the road and he died less than a year after we started RVing. We have just had Smokey since then.
The shelter had a lot of very small kittens, and several older, adult cats. Kittens are a crap shoot because you never know what their personality will be when they grow up. All the older cats they had were males, and two older males, even if they are fixed, generally will not get along because they both wants to be the alpha male. They did have one very nice cream colored male Siamese mix that was eight weeks or so old and very mellow. He was old enough to show what his personality would be, but still young enough to not be a threat to Smokey. Unfortunately, the shelter will not neuter him until he is three months old, and we are not going to be around Pahrump that long. To bad, he was the best candidate we have seen to date for the new kitty position. After the shelter we headed home and hung around the coach the rest of the day and evening.
Wednesday, October 31st, Happy Halloween. After lunch we loaded up all the dirty laundry and headed into town to the laundromat. We washed the clothes, the bed sheets, and our rugs, and got most of a game of Skipbo in while we were waiting. After getting the laundry done we went back to the coach for a little rest. Later in the evening we went down to the clubhouse for another round of Texas Hold’em. This time we had a decent size table, with eight players. Just like Monday, I lost a little, a dollar and a half, and Jackie won big, finishing about seven dollars ahead. We had a good time and were home not too long after eight, where we watched TV and relaxed the rest of the evening.
Thursday, November 1st, another great morning in Pahrump. Although it was a little breezier today than it has been, the temperatures are still supposed to be in the mid-70's, a perfect day for some geocaching. We left the coach after lunch and started on a series of caches that was located only a couple of miles from the RV park. A series is a group of caches, usually with similar names, that are put out by a single cache team at pretty much the same time. Normally they are close, or reasonably close, to each other. The minimum distance required between caches by Geocaching.com is a tenth of a mile, or 528 feet. In the case of the series we hit today, the majority of the 21 caches were just over a tenth of a mile apart. They were very clever hides and each required a walk of about 100 feet or so into the desert from the roadway. This was good as it provided a little variety and a little challenge for the finds. Some series’ are hidden right on the side of the road where you just jump out of the car, grab and sign the cache, and move on to the next. Those are good for the numbers, but get boring after a while.
We found all 21 of the series in about two hours, and we also found one other cache that happened to be right in the proximity of the series. This gave us 22 new finds for the afternoon with no DNFs. We were also able to exchange four travel bugs, which was good because we just created 16 new travel bugs for ourselves and we wanted to get some of them out on the road. Two of them are little Hot Wheels NASCAR race models which we put out on the same day with the intent for them to see which can get the most miles in the first year. Both are old, 1960 vintage race cars, but they have different paint and numbers, so the race is on. After our caching we went to pick up our mail at the UPS store and then went to Walmart for a few things we needed. After that we headed back to the coach and relaxed the rest of the night.
Saturday, November 3rd, woke up with a touch of the cocktail flu from last night. After a couple cups of coffee I went down to the clubhouse and packed up all the karaoke stuff and brought it back to the coach. We had left everything there when we were finished last night because it was late and dark, and the clubhouse is secured so the stuff was safe.
After I got everything put back away in the various hidey-holes in the coach I spent the rest of the day working on bills and caching stuff. At about 4:30 we left and went to the Pahrump Nugget, one of the larger casinos here in town. We are meeting Phyllis and Don, the Manager of the park and her husband, here for dinner at 6:00 and we wanted to come a little early for some gaming. Neither of us had much luck, losing about $20 each in the course of 90 minutes. Around 6:00 Don and Phyllis came in and we went into the café for dinner. They have pretty good food at very reasonable prices, it was a nice dinner. Although we have been acquainted with Don and Phyllis for a couple years now, this was the first time we really had time to have a nice chat and get to know them. We had a great dinner and nice conversation. After dinner we gamed for another half hour or so before heading back to the coach for the rest of the night.
Jackie and I both actually had breakfasts, as the restaurant had an excellent breakfast menu and they serve it all day. They had a chili and cheese omelet, which I love but which are hard to find. This is a fairly new chain, Russ said this store only opened a few months ago, but hey have a good menu. They serve a lot of food, I had trouble finishing all of my breakfast, and the price is pretty reasonable. They could pay a little more attention to cleanliness, it was a little dusty and icky around the edges of the table, but all in all it was a pretty decent place to eat.
We had a great lunch and caught up on what has been going on with everyone. After lunch we got into our car and did a few geocaches. We had to get at least one cache today for our days of the year challenge. Russ is one of our proteges. We had gotten Russ and Zen interested in caching shortly after we started doing it. They really took to and already have over 2,000 finds. They don’t get to do it as often as we do because Russ still works, but they do like to cache. We got about four caches before we took Russ back to the restaurant so he could pick up his Jeep. We then a few more caches on the way back to their apartment. We ended up with seven new finds altogether, including three that had one or two DNFs posted prior to our looking for them. A few of them Russ and Zen had already found, but one was a cache they had been looking for months without luck. We finally found it, so we all got a new find. We got back to Russ and Zen’s apartment and talked for a while more before we finally left about 4:30. Daylight savings time ended today, so it is getting dark early and we wanted to get started for home before it got too dark. We were back home before 6:00 and we stayed in and relaxed the rest of the night.
Monday, November 5th, we left the coach about 12:30 and went out to a local Mexican restaurant for lunch. We had never been to this place, called El Jefe, but it had high ratings on the internet. The food was good, but not outstanding. Most of it was pretty bland and needed salsa and hot sauce to spice it up. It was also served without any garnish or effort at presentation. I would probably eat there again, but only after I try some of the other Mexican places in Pahrump.
After lunch we set out to do some geocaching. We had to get a cache today for our days of the year challenge and we ended up finding five in a little over an hour. It took so long because we have pretty found most of the caches right in Pahrump. We are now having to go out into the desert, on the desert trails, to find caches. That always takes longer because they are further apart, miles instead of blocks, and we have to go slow on the rocky trails.
After our five finds we decided that was enough for the day and we went out to do some errands. We made a stop at Home Depot to see if we could find some interesting cache containers. We want to put out several more of our own caches here in Pahrump before we leave at the end of the week. We have several ready to go, but they are more traditional containers and we were looking for something unique. We then stopped to pick up mail and then made a quick stop at Walmart before heading back to the coach.
Just before 6:00 we walked down to the clubhouse for Texas Hold’em. Last Monday we only had four players, but we ended up with eight tonight, which makes for a better game. Unfortunately, both Jackie and I lost tonight. I lost half my $5 stake, and would have lost it all except that I won the last hand which had a big pot. Jackie lost about $8, which is most of what she won in the two games last week. Not huge money, but you still like to win. After poker we went home and watched the last night of endless political ads.
Tuesday, November 6th, Election Day in the United States. Since Jackie and I had already participated in early voting last week, we were able to avoid the polling places today. Instead, we left the coach about 1:00 and set out to do some geocaching, but today we are not finding caches, we are hiding caches. That’s one of the things about geocaching that makes it neat, it is driven by cachers. Although geocaching.com and the mother organization, Groundspeak, Inc., make the rules and maintain the website, all caches are hidden by other cachers, usually cachers who live in the general area where they set out their hides.
Last year we hid three caches here in Pahrump. Although we are only here a couple of weeks a year, it is still our “home of record” so Groundspeak considers us to be from Pahrump and let us hide caches in the area. We know that if one of our caches ever needs maintenance between our annual visits, my brother Russ, who is also a geocacher, lives in Vegas only an hour away. We could disable the cache, which is noted on the website, until he could get up here to fix it or let us know it was gone. Since the three caches we already had out did so well this past year, we decided to put out a few more. I had seven containers ready for hiding, mostly fixed up with cammo tape and already stocked with logs.
So, off we went driving around Pahrump, looking for likely hiding spots for caches. The rules will not allow a cache to be placed within a tenth of a mile, 528 feet, of any other cache. With both Jackie’s phone and our tablet computer we can pull up maps that show the nearest caches to any location we pick. That way we can be sure we are far enough away from any other cache. Our first stop was the Pahrump Elks Lodge. We had already checked and knew that the closest cache to the Lodge was over a half mile. We hid a bison tube, which is a small aluminum tube, a little smaller than a lipstick tube, in a hole which we found had been drilled into an old telephone pole that was being used as a parking bumper in the Lodge’s parking lot. We decided to call this one “Elk Crossing.”
We then drove all the way to the far northwest edge of the valley where there is a big “Welcome to Pahrump” sign. Welcome signs for cities and towns are popular spots for hiding geocaches, but no one had put one out here yet. I noticed that under the sign the town had put a thick layer of granite gravel, and then put a couple of large, flat pieces of sandstone on top, all just to decorate the area under the sign. I dug down into the gravel enough to put a coffee can in so the top was level with the top of the gravel. I then moved one of the flat pieces of sandstone and laid it on top of the mostly buried can. Bingo, a well concealed, but easy to get to geocache. This one was big enough to put a few trinkets and some travel bugs in, so we did that. We intended to create this cache as a Travel Bug Hotel. If you put that in the name of the cache it lets other cachers know that it is a good place to go to get and drop off travel bugs. We called this one “Welcome to the Pahrump TB Hotel.”
We also hid one, a small Altoids tin, in the framework of a large, roadside sign advertising a nearby RV resort called Nevada Treasure. Of course, the name of this cache is “Nevada Treasure.” We placed one in a concealed nook under a large, outdoor propane tank behind an abandoned and closed mini-market. This was a pill bottle with cammo tape and it’s called “Life’s a Gas.” We found a paved road called Baccarat Circle that wound around what I guess was to be a development of some kind, but there was never any construction other than building the nice paved road. We hid a film canister under some rocks just off the road. We called this one “Casino Royale”, because in a number of the James Bond spy movies and books Bond is portrayed as being a real fan of the card game Baccarat.
We also hid a simple one in the parking lot of the Desert View Hospital. This cache is of a type well known to geocachers, and is called an LPC, for Light Post Cache, or a Skirt Lifter, because the cache is hidden under the metal or plastic skirt that is around the pole on most parking lot lights. If you are not a geocacher, the next time you go into a parking lot, check out the lights. Most of the time you see a round, concrete base, about two or three feet high, with the metal light pole coming out the top. On top of the concrete, around the base of the pole is a skirt. The vast majority of those can be lifted up and a small pill bottle or other container put under it. This is a very popular type of cache and I would venture a guess that at least 90 percent of Walmarts in this country have at least one LPC cache in the parking lot. This cache we called “I’m Sick of These” because a lot of cachers claim to not like LPCs because they are too easy and don’t present a challenge. Of course the word sick always works because of the location of the cache, near a hospital. Coming up with names for caches is a big part of the fun of putting them out.
The last cache was the most special of the seven we put out today. On Sunday, when we went over to Las Vegas to spend some time with my brother, Russ, we had done a few geocaches with him and his wife. One of the caches was hidden in a small, neighborhood park and on the little playground area near the cache I found a plastic toy on the ground. It could have been a dog squeaky toy, but it’s squeaker didn’t work anymore. It was about three inches around a two inches think and looked like a round, ice cream sandwich. On one side was a silly looking face. I picked it up and took it home, hoping to maybe find a way to make it a cache container.
Ultimately, I cut a small hole in the side where the squeak hole was, removed the broken squeaky and put in a film canister. This turned the plastic toy into a cache container. Here in Pahrump there is an ice cream store on one of the main roads, that is a small square building with a huge ice cream cone on the roof. We found that there were no other caches within a half mile of the place, so we put a wire on the toy and hung it in a Mesquite bush in the parking lot behind the ice cream store. Of course, you can guess this one is “Silly Ice Cream Sandwich.”
Once we had all the caches hidden we went back to the coach and I went to work creating the cache web pages for each of the seven new caches. In order for a cache to be published on geocaching.com, which is the only way for other cachers to learn about it, you have to submit a potential cache to the website. They then send it to volunteer reviewers that they have all over the world for review and possible publication. Basically the reviewers check the coordinates to ensure it meets the separation rules, reads the narrative and other verbiage submitted to ensure it is not offensive or confusing, and checks to see that all of the proper information has been included.
I spent an hour or so writing up the descriptions for each of the caches, which not only describes the cache physically, but also can include other information pertinent to the cache. In the case of Elk Crossing I wrote a brief history of the Order of Elks. For Casino Royale I wrote a brief narrative about the game of Baccarat and it’s prominence in James Bond stories. I did this for each of the seven caches. Once I had all this information and Jackie had proofread and agreed with the names and stories, I began to fill out the submission forms. Geocaching.com has an online form that you fill out with the name of the cache, the coordinates of the hide, which we took with two separate devices to ensure we got reasonably close coordinates, the description of the cache and other information.
Once you get all the information filled in you submit it to geocaching.com, which then creates the standard cache page with the information provided. They send it to a reviewer, and if the reviewer approves it the website publishes it for all cachers to see online. It took most of the day, but we got all seven caches prepared, hidden and submitted for approval. Yea! Not sure how long it will take for the reviewer to get them published. I am hoping to see them published before the end of the week when we have to leave.
With all that work out of the way Jackie and I settled down for a night of watching the election returns. This blog is supposed to just be a chronicle of our travels and our life and I don’t want to get it political. I have my opinions, just like everyone has, but this is not, in my mind, the forum for those discussions. Suffice to say things didn’t go the way I would have hoped, but that is the process in this country. After everything was wrapped up conveniently timed for our normal bedtime, we went off to sleep.
Wednesday, November 7th, I got up and dressed and was out of house by 9:30, taking the car to the local Jeep dealer for an oil change. The last time we had a problem with the A/C, back in Indiana in the summer, I had made a complaint to Jeep corporate about the number of times we had failures with the A/C condenser on this car. As a result, Jeep issued us a free two year service contract, good for four oil change services. They have to be done at a Jeep dealer, but I always take the car to a dealer anyway because the diesel engine makes it a little different than what the local Jiffy-Lube is used to servicing. I was surprised that the service only took a couple of hours and I was back home by 11:30. I was also surprised to see that all seven of our new caches had already been published and by the time I got home from the dealership they had all been found, by the same local cacher.
We hung around the coach the rest of the day, doing a few chores and playing on the computers. At about 5:30 we walked down to the clubhouse for our last night of Texas Hold’em here in Pahrump. We had eight players, which was good, and this time I finally had a good night, finishing about three dollars ahead, just about what Jackie lost, so as a family we came out even. After cards we went back to the coach for the rest of the evening.
Thursday, November 8th, we pulled off one of our occasional miracles by both of us being up, dressed and out of the coach by 9:15. This was a day we needed to log at least one geocache find for our days of the year challenge, and we decided to go out and tackle another local power trail. Our first stop was Denny’s, where we had a nice breakfast, which alleviated the need to pack a picnic lunch, since we knew we were going out into the desert to cache. The power trail was located on a good gravel road about ten miles west of town and the caches were located about every six hundred feet or so. They were all a few yards off the road, so we also got some exercise. Other than the wind blowing pretty hard, it was a good caching day with cool temperatures, but not cold.
In addition to the caches hidden along the good gravel road, the same cacher also had a bunch of hides on some rougher side roads and trails that we also went out and got. The end result was that by 2:30 in the afternoon we had 55 new finds, a new record day for us. Our previous record was 47 a couple years ago when we cached with the Bullocks in the Yuma area. We also, with one of the caches for the afternoon, went past the 4,500 finds milestone. All in all a very good caching day for us.
After caching we stopped by the Pahrump Elks Lodge for a cocktail and a visit. Although this is our home lodge now, we haven’t made it there since we got into town. We had a couple of drinks and played the slot machines in the bar for a while, without much luck I might add. After the Elks we went back to the coach and relaxed the rest of the evening. While we were sitting at the bar another member walked in with a big bag and asked if anyone was interested in some left over lunch meat and sandwich rolls. She had been to a party and they had some stuff left over. We said sure and took it home. That’s what we had for dinner. Free food is always good.
We spent most of the day around the coach. I went down to the clubhouse in the morning and packed up the karaoke stuff. I spent an hour or so in the afternoon putting everything away outside in preparation for our departure tomorrow. About 5:00 we drove into town, back to the El Jefe Mexican restaurant, and met Don and Phyllis for dinner again. We had a great dinner and some nice conversation before saying our goodbyes. Since we are leaving on Sunday, their day off, we won’t likely see them again before we leave in the morning. After dinner we went back to the coach and relaxed the rest of the night.
We did find one geocache that was in the parking lot of the Elks Lodge and we got a lodge pin from the Hesperia Elks for our banner. We have stopped here for overnights in the past, but never got a pin for some reason.
Monday, November 12th, yet another holiday, at least officially. Although Veteran’s Day is always on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, this year that date was a Sunday, and the government and banks didn’t want to miss out on a holiday. So, today is also a Federal holiday with no mail, no banks, and a lot of government workers off for the day.
We left Hesperia just before 10:00, made a quick stop to top off with fuel, and then started down the Cajon Pass into the Los Angeles basin. Our destination today is Silent Valley, our time share (sort of) RV resort in the mountains south of Banning, California. Today’s trip is only about 75 miles, so we pulled into Silent Valley just before noon. We got settled into a nice spot and got everything set up for a month long stay, our longest stay in any one place since Spring of this year.
This will also be an excellent place to close out this chapter of our story and get it published. As I said, we will be here a month, so I will probably put something out in a couple weeks. Until the next time, be healthy, happy and safe and don’t be afraid to live life with a smile. Later, Ya’ll.
