We also did a quick stop at Petsmart to pick up some things that they had given us coupons for when we adopted Benji a few weeks ago. We got a bag of dry food, six cans of squishy food, two bags of treats, and a new collar, all for two dollars thanks to the various free coupons. Yea! After our shopping trip we went back to the coach and relaxed the rest of the evening.
Tuesday, December 11th, we awoke to a very nice day with temperatures about ten degrees warmer than they were up at Silent Valley. Of course, that is the difference between 3,500 feet elevation and the couple hundred feet that DHS sets at. I spent an hour or so in the morning getting some outside Christmas lights and decorations put up. After lunch we drove into Rancho Mirage for some appointments at our dermatologist. I was just going in for a routine annual skin check and to have a large mole removed. Since I had the melanoma removed back in 2009 I have been very diligent in getting checked by a dermatologist at least once a year. He checked me over and didn’t find anything bad, but he was concerned about a pink spot on my arm that I know I have had at least four or five years, maybe longer. He said it looked like a basil carcinoma, the least serious type of skin cancer, so he scraped the top of it off and burned it with his little arc welder tool. Looks pretty ugly, but it didn’t hurt. He said this is the most common type of skin cancer and rarely aggressive or dangerous unless ignored and allowed to grow for many years. He said his cauterization would take care of that particular lesion for good.
Jackie had gone in to have a couple of skin tags removed, and she ended up having a mole burned off the back of her hand too. This was a big spot that she has also had for a long time. She even had a biopsy done on it about six years ago that came out negative. Nonetheless, the doctor was concerned about how it looked, so he removed it.
After our doctor work we drove over to the nearby Costco for some shopping. We needed to do a Costco run since the last one was over a month ago. After Costco we headed back to the RV park, unloaded the groceries and got everything put away. We had an early dinner and then went down to the clubhouse at the RV park at 6:30 for some Texas Hold’em. I lost my $5 and Jackie lost about a buck, but we still had fun. We met several now people, including some other geocachers that we hadn’t met before. After poker we went back to the coach and watched TV for the rest of the night.
Wednesday, December 12th - 12/12/12. There was a lot of buzz about the date, since this type of repeating date will not be around for another 100 years. The geocaching community likes these kind of kitschy commemorations, so there were 12-12-12 events scheduled all over the world. We had signed up to attend one in nearby Palm Desert, which was advertised to start at 12:12 p.m. and last for 12 minutes. We left the RV park in time to arrive a little early, stopping along the way for a couple of geocache finds. When we got to the event we found that there were about 20 different caching teams or individuals there, some of whom we had met before, many of whom we had not. It is always fun to meet other cachers, especially when you can say, “we have seen your name in caches we have found.” It is fun to put a face with a caching handle.
We spent about an hour at the caching event before leaving and going to a late lunch at the Cactus Jacks restaurant in Palm Desert. Back when we owned our house in Indio we used to hang out a lot a Cactus Jacks in Indio. A couple of years ago George, the owner, opened a second restaurant here in Palm Desert. Unfortunately, our friend who bartends for Jacks was not working, but we still had a great lunch. We spent the rest of the afternoon shopping at different places in Palm Desert. We didn’t want to drive all the way back to DHS because we were also going to another caching event at 6:30, a pizza party in Palm Desert.
We arrived at the Pizza Hut and met up with a lot of the same cachers that we had met at the park earlier in the day. We had some pizza and chatted with folks for about 90 minutes or so before heading back to DHS and the RV park for the rest of the night. Among the other cachers at the events we attended today was the couple that we met at poker last night. They hadn’t known about the events until we mentioned them last night, but they came to both. Very nice people and we hope to stay in touch with them through caching.
Thursday, December 13th, we woke up to a very cold, rainy day. A winter storm has rolled into Southern California and it looks like it’s going to rain all day. We did go out briefly after lunch, during a lull in the rain, to pick up one geocache. We needed to have a cache on this date for our days of the year challenge. Other than that we just stayed in the coach and relaxed for the entire day. Friday the rain had cleared up, but now the wind behind the winter storm had come up, so it was very windy and cold all day long. We decided we really didn’t need to go out for anything, so we spent the whole day in again.
Saturday, December 15th, it was still cool, but at least the sun is out and the wind has gone for the time being. We decided to take a drive into Palm Desert to the College of the Desert (COD) street fair. COD is a large, two year community college and was, for many years, the only college in the Coachella Valley. Now a couple of the State Universities have branches in the Desert. For decades there has been a street fair set up every weekend, Saturday and Sunday, in the parking lot of the school. There are several hundred vendors, many of whom have been there for as long as the fair has been going on. We always try to get to the street fair at least once or twice while we are in the Desert.
We left the coach about 11:00 and drove to Palm Desert for the fair. Being just a week before Christmas, the place was even busier than normal. We finally got a parking place and walked into the vendor area. We only did a couple aisles before we decided to go to the food court for lunch. After lunch we spent a couple of hours walking up and down the rows, checking out the merchandise. We didn’t buy much, a Christmas garden flag, some asparagus from the farmer’s market, and a few other little items. The street fair closes at 2:00 and we finished up our tour just as everything was closing up for the day.
After we got back in the car we decided to spend a little time looking for a couple of geocaches. We looked for four different caches, finding two and not finding two. Two new finds, two new DNFs. Not a good ratio, but it was still fun. After our somewhat frustrating caching we drove back to the coach for the rest of the night. We BBQed some steaks, had the fresh asparagus and enjoyed the evening.
Sunday, December 16th, our sister-in-law Susan’s birthday. Happy Birthday Susan! She and my brother Ken live in Goodyear, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix. We decided to go out on this partly cloudy and cool day to do some geocaching in the Desert Hot Springs area. We first tried our hand at a new off-shoot of geocaching, a game called Munzee. Like geocaching, it is a scavenger hunt type game where players hide game pieces and other players try to find them. Unlike geocaching, there is no container involved in the game. A Munzee is a sticker with a square QR type bar code printed on it. The person hiding, or “deploying” as it is known in this game, a Munzee simply picks a spot and sticks the Munzee on the surface. The actual barcode is less than an inch square, so they are not very visible.
Much like geocaching, the Munzee is published on the Munzee.com website with a description and GPS coordinates. With a Munzee application on your smartphone or tablet you can pull up a map, or a list, of nearby Munzees and then go out and search for them. Once you find them there is a scan application within the Munzee software on the phone that scans the Munzee and then sends the information to the website where it is logged that you found that Munzee. One advantage over geocaching, no manual logging required.
We found two Munzees, we got credit for one, but the other was on the back of a street sign and was so far up that I couldn’t get the phone into position to scan the barcode. Without the scan we did not get credit for finding the Munzee, even though I could see it. Right now I don’t see the hobby taking off like caching has. For one, they don’t provide the tools you need to download a group of Munzees from the website like you can for geocaches. You are relegated to just finding Munzees that show up on your phone if you happen to turn the application on. You then have to use the turn by turn navigation function of the phone to get to the place where the Munzee is deployed. The phone is the only GPS needed. Unlike geocaching, the Munzee is always in plain sight, not hidden, so there is no challenge to finding them. At this point, the hobby really doesn’t hold much interest for me.
After our foray into Munzees, we started doing some geocaching. In a couple of hours we were able to get eight new finds, with no new DNFs. We only got eight, because we have pretty much cached the area down to where only very new caches, or those out in the desert and hard to get to, are left. We did get a cache that was hidden alongside the road that winds up 1,000 feet to the top of Edom Hill, which is just north of I-10 between Desert Hot Springs and Cathedral City. Edom Hill is where most of the radio and television stations have situated their broadcast antennas, and there is a roughly paved access road that takes you up the side of the hill on a series of switchbacks. There was a great view of the central Coachella Valley from up near the top. After our caching we headed back to the RV park and spent the rest of the evening in the coach, relaxing and watching TV.Monday, December 17th, we left the coach after lunch and drove down to Palm Desert. We were headed for the movie theater to see Lincoln. We got into the area a little early, so we decided to do some nearby geocaches before going to the movie. We found a set of six caches that were set out along a sandy road through an undeveloped section of land not too far from the shopping center where the theater is located. The sand was real soft, but our four wheeler Jeep handled it OK. We managed to get all six caches within forty minutes or so. We then went to the movies.
Lincoln was a great film, as most Steven Spielberg films are. Daniel Day-Lewis was magnificent as Lincoln, and the rest of the cast was very good also. I am not enough of a student of the era to comment on the accuracy of the history set out in the film, but fact or fiction, it was extraordinarily interesting and riveting. I do know that the basic differences shown between those who wanted to abolish slavery and those who didn’t are accurate, but I don’t know about the specific individuals portrayed. It will be interesting to see how many Oscars this film will garner. In my estimation it is worthy of several. Excellent film, even for folks like me who usually like their movies a little lighter and/or faster moving. After the movie we went back to the coach and relaxed with the TV the rest of the night.
Tuesday, December 18th was a rainy day in DHS, so we decided to just stay around the coach all day. So that’s what we did, just stayed in and did little things all day. Wednesday morning we woke to exactly the opposite sky. Tuesday you couldn’t see any blue, this morning there isn’t a cloud to be seen. It is still pretty cool, mid-40's, but at least there is no rain. We were both dressed and out of the house by 8:30, believe it or not! We have routine doctor visits scheduled a couple days after Christmas, so we needed to have blood tests taken for our prescription renewals. We drove into Palm Springs to the lab for a 9:00 appointment. Jackie had called our doctor’s office on Monday and requested the lab test orders. Our doctor uses LabCorp, which has electronic submission. As soon as the office enters the order, it is available at any LabCorp in the country. Very convenient. Unfortunately, the clerk at LabCorp said she couldn’t find any orders, for either of us. Jackie got on the phone and called the office and it turns out that our doctor’s assistant, the one she talked to on Monday, hadn’t submitted the order on Monday and had not been in the office since. Jackie was able to convince one of the other doctor’s assistants to submit the orders, so we got our blood tests, but it was a pain in the butt. Not real good customer service, but most doctor’s offices I have dealt with don’t really care.
There is a tendency among doctors to begin to believe that patients exist so that they can practice their hard earned skills and we need to be grateful that the doctor would take the time and effort to treat us. In most practices I think the patient is looked on as a necessary inconvenience. After our lab tests we went back to the coach for our delayed morning coffee. One must fast before a blood test, that means no morning coffee.
After lunch I went out to do what should be a routine chore, I needed to empty the black tank on the coach. A little background for our non-RV owner readers. Most people should be aware that RV’s don’t have flush toilets. There are some newer models that look and sound like they are flushing, but they are still just dumping the contents into a big tank, kind of like a traveling septic tank. Most modern RVs have two, one black for the toilet alone, and one called the grey tank, for sinks and the shower. When you are in an RV park with a sewer hookup, you can leave the valve for the grey tank open if you want. Sink and shower water will go into the tank and right out the bottom through the valve, through your sewer hose, and into the park’s sewer. Not a lot of solids in grey water, other than a few food particles and some grease, so it works OK. Not so much for the black tank, as you might guess. You need to let the black tank get pretty full, so that when you dump it, all the solids get flushed out the bottom with the water flow. There is nothing else besides gravity to get the stuff out of the tank. Our black tank is forty gallons, and it usually takes about eight or nine days to get full enough to have to dump the tank. That was my mission today.
I went out, pulled the dump valve open, and waited for the rush of water and other stuff. Nothing. No rush, no water, no stuff. Now a plugged toilet in a house is bad and messy, but it nothing like a plugged tank in an RV. A plunger or snake into the toilet will usually clear the clog and then everything goes right down the sewer like it should. In an RV you don’t have access from the top, even through the toilet the drain hole in the bottom of the tank is not accessible from above. You can only clear it by coming up from the bottom. But, if you take the sewer hose off of the valve, poke around with your snake you can clear the clog. Unfortunately, once you do so, everything starts pouring out and you don’t have a hose connected to take it to the sewer. VERY messy and VERY icky. I finally worked out a partial solution whereby I cut a small hole in the plastic sewer hose, inserted my snake and worked the clog loose. I still had some yucky water come out of the hole in the hose, but the majority of it went down the hose and into the sewer. I only had a few ounces on the ground rather than gallons, so clean up was easy, but it was still an awful job.
One of the best cinematic presentations of the issues surrounding RV holding tanks is in the movie RV, with Robin Williams. It is about six years old, and can be found on the bargain racks at Walmart. If you have never seen the film, get it and pay special attention to the first time Williams hooks up the sewer hose to the rented RV. One of the most hilarious scenes in movies.
Anyway, what should have been a five minute job turned into an hour long one, but I finally got it finished. I then had to make another repair, the metal scissors arm on the top of the door to the coach came loose and I had to rivet it back into place. I didn’t have big enough rivets to get the job done right, so I had to run into town to buy supplies. I finally got that job done and then just settled in and relaxed the rest of the day.
Thursday, December 20th, we left the coach about noon and drove into Indio for lunch at Cactus Jacks. Last week we met a couple, Bob and Diana Knight, while playing Texas Hold’em at Desert Pools. At the end of the game Jackie mentioned something related to geocaching and Diana spoke up and asked, “are you guys geocachers?” We started talking and learned that they were also cachers, for about the same length of time as us, and we chatted for a while. They left the RV park a couple of days later, moving on to the Thousand Trails RV park, which is in Palm Desert, closer to Indio. We saw them a couple of days later at the caching events we attended in Palm Desert on 12/12/12. They hadn’t known about the events until our conversation at the Park, but were happy to learn of them and be able to attend. At that event we made plans to meet for lunch today at Cactus Jacks.
Regular readers will know that Cactus Jacks was our regular hangout place back when we still had the house in Indio. We sometimes ate there three or four times a week and were there most Friday nights. They have great food and drinks and generally friendly people. We got there a little early, but Bob and Diana came in just minutes later and we had lunch and conversation. We learned a lot more about their story and travels. Like us, they are full time RVers and don’t have a house anywhere. We talked a lot about caching and traded stories about caches, including some very interesting ones that both of us had located at one time or another. We had a great time talking about one particularly frustrating cache in Casa Grande that we had both finally located, both of us with a little help from a third party. It was a great lunch, Jackie had lamb and I had beef ribs, both CJ specialties. We had a good time learning about our new friends, whom I am sure we will stay in touch with and cross paths with in the future.
After lunch we did a little shopping and then we drove back up to Desert Hot Springs. We relaxed for a while before going down to the clubhouse for one more round of Texas Hold’em. Unlike our last two games here in DHS, tonight I had great cards and ended up the big winner. I cashed out almost ten bucks ahead instead of losing most of my five dollar stake. Jackie was still down about three dollars. After cards we went back to the coach and relaxed the rest of the night.
Friday, December 21st, Apocalypse Day, the end of the world, according to the Mayan Calendar. Unfortunately, the Mayan’s weren’t courteous enough to give any details. No time, no method, just the end of the calendar. NASA sees no meteors rushing to collide with earth and initiate the beginning of the end. No apparent international conflicts sufficiently on the edge to precipitate a nuclear exchange and the beginning of nuclear winter. Oh well, just participate in the day and hope the best.
We left the coach after lunch to do some geocaching. End of the world or not, we needed to cache today to fill in the date for our days of the year challenge. We cached in the Desert Hot Springs area, actually only a few miles east of the RV park. We captured about four caches and then found ourselves on a sandy desert road driving through a very interesting canyons area that we didn’t even know was in the area. The road would not be suitable for your dad’s Buick, but the Jeep was doing OK. We wound our way south down a long wash and eventually into a fairly large stream bed before we got to the cache we were looking for. We found a spot which has been heavily used as a gun range, lots of casings laying around, but there was no one in the area today. We did find the cache, even after I slipped and fell climbing up to get it. No damage to me, but I did tweak the outside screen on my phone. Not working so good anymore, although the phone itself works fine. Don’t really need the small outside screen anyway, just flip it open to the regular big screen.
On the way out we discovered four other caches along the way thanks to Jackie’s phone. We hadn’t had them on our list because the terrain rating was higher than we normally go after. We cached for about three and a half hours and ended up with 14 new finds, including find number 4,600 for us. Because most of the finds were out in the desert, on some pretty rugged roads, it took us a while to get from cache to cache. Still had a great day of caching, and discovered an interesting area we were not aware of previously.After our caching we drove over to the Desert Hot Springs Elks Lodge for a cocktail. We hoped to run into some acquaintances we have that are members of the lodge. We are members of the RV club from this lodge, which also includes members from the Palm Springs Elks, but we haven’t been on a trip with them in several years. We had a couple of drinks and talked to a couple of people that we knew slightly, but none of our camping friends came in. The Lodge was having dinner tonight, but it was all fried stuff we didn’t want, so we left there and went to a local Mexican restaurant down the street. The bartender at the lodge said the food was good, and Yelp gave it a good rating, so we decided to try it. Since it is a heavily Hispanic area, there are a lot of Mexican restaurants in DHS, but we haven’t found a really good one yet.
We arrived at Casa Blanca and found a very nicely decorated, and clean, restaurant with quite a Friday night crowd. I had the red chili burrito and a taco, which were excellent. The red chili was some of the best I have had. The taco was OK, and the waitress mixed up the order, giving me the chicken and Jackie the beef. Jackie said the beef taco was tasty but tough. The rest of her plate, the chili reallno and the enchilada were average according to her. I though the service was very good, even with the little mixup. Interestingly, if you did a review on the internet while you were there, and showed it to the waitress, you got a 5% discount on your meal. We did it and saved almost two bucks. Interesting concept. I would go back to Casa Blanca and can recommend it to anyone who should find themselves in Desert Hot Springs with a hankering for Mexican. It is on Pearson, just west of Palm Drive. After dinner we headed back to the coach and relaxed the rest of the night. Hopefully, the Mayans will be wrong and we will wake up tomorrow to the same old world.
Saturday, December 22nd, The Day That Was Not Supposed To Be! We awoke, not just to sunshine, but to, well, being awake. The Mayans were wrong, YEA! With a new lease on life, we set out after lunch to do some more geocaching in the Desert Hot Springs area. This was another must cache day for our days of the year challenge, the last for December. We spent about three hours caching and ended up with a dozen new finds and two new DNFs. One of the DNFs, I am convinced, is actually missing. The other I think we missed, but it is by a cacher that can be pretty devious in his hides. Maybe next time. After our caching we went back to the coach and relaxed the rest of the day and evening.
Sunday, December 23rd, dawned a cool and windy morning. I spent a couple of hours in the morning taking down all the Christmas decorations and other outside stuff, getting ready for our departure from DHS tomorrow. After lunch we packed up our dirty laundry and went into town to wash it. After our chores we went back to the coach and relaxed the rest of the evening.
Monday, December 24th, Christmas Eve. Wanting to Santa Claus on his toes, we are leaving Desert Hot Springs this morning and driving to the Indian Waters RV park in Indio, only 27 miles away. As with the last trip, the distance was too short to bother with hooking up the car, so Jackie just drove and followed me down to Indio. We left DHS a little after 11:00 and were settled into the Indian Waters RV Resort, with all the Christmas decorations put back up, by about 1:00.
Indian Waters, up until a couple of years ago, was one of our Western Horizons membership parks. When the park was sold and became a public RV park, the new owner made a policy of continuing to honor WHR members by offering deep discount rates. We can stay here for $12 a night, which is only a few dollars more than what we used to pay in “amenities fees” when it was WHR. The normal rate is in the $50's, so our rate is quite attractive.
After we got set up we relaxed for a while, and then at 4:00 we went over to the clubhouse for Christmas dinner. The park bought the main course, ham, turkey, stuffing and potatoes, and then it was a pot luck for everything else. We brought some cakes for dessert. Other than that, there was no charge for the dinner. Our friends Jay and Donna Blumenthal were hosting the event for the park and Jay was playing Christmas music on his portable keyboard when we got to the dinner. Jay and Donna used to be movers and shakers with FMCA, Jay was a regional VP when we first met them. Now they spend their entire winter at Indian Waters. They go back to their native New York in the summer.
We sat at a table with the current FMCA International Area VP, Al Vormittag and his wife Bobbie. We also know Al and Bobbie from all the rallies we have gone to over the years. After an hour of Christmas carols we had dinner, which was excellent. One of the features of the dinner was that Jay and Donna had found a local family that needed assistance, and had taken donations of gifts and money for the family. Apparently they had lost their house and all their belongings this year in a fire. They had a bunch of kids, I think six, from six to 18 years, and all of them got presents. All the smaller kids got new bikes, it was quite heartwarming to watch. We also won part of the fifty-fifty drawing, netting $20, which was less than what we paid for the cakes. So we had a great time, a good meal, made some new friends, and caught up with some old friends, all essentially for free. A very nice Christmas Eve.After dinner we went back to the coach and relaxed for the rest of the night, waiting for Santa to come visit. We will be here in Indian Waters for two weeks, after which we will move a couple of blocks to the west to the FMCA Western Area Rally. Since it has been two weeks since our last post, this marks a great time to get this episode published. Until the next time we talk, we wish everyone a great Holiday season and a safe and happy 2013. See ya soon.
