Winter Ends, Spring has Sprung!

Oh, hi there. Contrary to what you may have thought, we did not drive off the end of the earth. I have just been a little slow in updating our little chat. Sorry :-(

I believe our previous episode left us relaxing at the Desert Pools RV park in Desert Hot Springs, California. We had intended this two week stay to be relatively quiet, and for the most part, it was. We did some caching on Friday the 13th of March (can’t scare us!) and found seven. This also happened to be my son, Roy Jr.’s birthday. My youngest turned 35 - yikes! On Saturday Barry and Colleen came over for an early St. Patrick’s Day celebration. We had a very nice corned beef and cabbage dinner, Barry and I did some karaoke while the girls played cards. Had a very nice afternoon and evening. On Monday we went back out caching in the Desert Hot Springs area and found 12 more caches. When we talk about caching with folks who are not familiar, one of the things we mention is that it tends to take us to places we wouldn’t have gone had it not been for the search. On Monday we found an historical park in Desert Hot Springs with a 50 foot tall wooden Indian statue. We also ended up on top of hill on the North end of town with a killer view. The hill has been subdivided into house lots and the one on top of the hill is listed for $1.9 million. And this is with no paved road or utilities.

On Tuesday, the 17th we went out and found another 12 caches then went to the Desert Hot Springs Elks Lodge for a couple drinks and to meet up with our friends Jack and Gail Little. They live in DHS and belong to the RV group at the Elks Lodge. We have been camping with them on numerous occasions and really enjoy their company. The next few days were pretty quiet and we stayed around the coach. On Friday, the 20th of March, we drove down to Indio for a party at the Cohen’s. It was Barry’s birthday on Friday, and their anniversary a couple of days later. Both of Barry and Colleen’s daughters were in town along with their significant others and the Cohen’s granddaughter, Zoe. She is now 4 and this was the first time we had met Zoe in person. A very cute, very bright kid. Jackie had a lot of fun interacting with her. We had a great time at the party.

Saturday evening we went back to the DHS Elks Lodge for dinner with Gail and Jack, as well as several other members of the RV group. We also met with Tom Warren, the past president of Elks International, the FMCA Chapter for Elks. Tom and his wife Dorothy have a place in DHS, just down the street from the Western Horizon’s park we stay in. We were to meet both Tom and Dorothy for dinner, but Dorothy had to work late and couldn’t make it. We had a very nice dinner and visit with old friends.

Sunday morning, March 22nd, was our day to move from DHS up to Silent Valley, our ownership park in the mountains above Banning, California. We woke up to very dark, threatening skies and pretty high winds. We only had about 35 miles to drive, but were still a little anxious about the weather. Once I got on the freeway headed West, the wind, although strong, was blowing straight at us so it wasn’t making it too difficult to keep the coach straight. Once we reached the head of the Banning pass near Cabazon the rain started. At one point it was raining so hard you could barely see the road - thank goodness everyone on the freeway used some common sense and all traffic slowed to about 30 miles per hour or so until the rain let up. Fortunately, the weather let up for the last nine miles of the trip, which is the two-lane winding uphill run out of Banning to Silent Valley. Once we got to Silent Valley we found a nice campsite close to the village center and got set up. No rain, although it was windy and very cold. We actually thought we might wake up Monday morning to some snow, but that didn’t come to pass. The next few days we pretty much stayed in the coach because it was cold and windy in Silent Valley.

Finally, on Wednesday, the 25th the weather cleared up some and we were able to go out. We drove to Cathedral City to pick up our mail from Barry’s shop. We have it forwarded there when we are in Silent Valley because the park will not accept mail or packages. We also stopped at the property management company where Jackie used to work. We had a nice visit with Carol, her old boss. When we got back to the Banning area we did some caching and found 14. On Friday we went back down the hill for some more caching and found another 16 caches in the Beaumont area. That evening we went to the restaurant at Silent Valley for dinner and then to the bar for drinks and karaoke. Had a great dinner and a lot of fun in the bar. That is one of the nice things about Silent Valley, they have a good restaurant, nice bar and a little store. No need to leave the park.

On Saturday morning Jackie woke up with the beginnings of a cold, so we stayed in for a couple days. It was really too cold to do much outside anyway. I don’t think the temperature ever got above 60 for our whole stay. Last year at this time is was a little warmer and more enjoyable up there. On Monday, the 30th, Jackie was feeling a little better so we set off down the hill for some caching and found 20! This is our highest single day total ever! Yea! On Wednesday we went to Beaumont and met Marianne Conner for lunch. You may recall that her husband, our good friend David Conner, died late last year. Marianne is very upbeat and doing well - she has even learned to drive their big 40 foot coach and plans some trips this summer. After lunch we did some caching, finding 10 more. Sunday we drove down to San Diego to spend some time with Jackie’s mom. We took her to lunch and then some shopping at the mall. She is in good spirits and we had an enjoyable visit.

We spent the next few days taking care of chores, laundry and shopping, getting ready to leave Silent Valley. We were originally planning on spending 30 days in Silent Valley. However, we learned that our Indio Elks RV club was going to Borrego Springs for a three day outing and then the Palm Springs/DHS Elks RV club was going to Chula Vista, near San Diego, just a few days later on an outing. We decided that we wanted to go on these outings rather than just sit another two weeks in the cold in Silent Valley. So, on Sunday, the 5th of April, we headed down out of Silent Valley and drove to Borrego Springs, a nice little town in the Eastern foothills of the inland range. Although the town is in San Diego County, it is really a lot closer to the Salton Sea and Coachella Valley than it is to San Diego. The outing was at a very nice new resort in Borrego. We got to the park early in the afternoon and relaxed the rest of the day. There were 15 rigs on the outing so we got to spend time with a lot of our old friends from the Indio Elks Lodge. After a nice pot luck we spent several hours sitting on the patio around our portable campfire chatting with friends.

The next day, Monday, we had a “free” day (the golfers were out on the course at the resort) so we did some caching. We found 9 caches and also found a whole series of life-size metal sculptures of prehistoric animals that Ricardo Breceda, an artist from Perris, California, has placed in the desert area around Borrego Springs. There are several dozen scattered around in life-like tableaus. The animals include mammoths, saber tooth cats, and early horses and camels. If you are in the Borrego Springs area you need to go find them. More information on the art can be found at www.galletameadows.com. Monday night we had a steak BBQ with all the fixen’s at the resort. Our wagon masters, Bill and Lynette, bought huge T-bones for the group as well as some of the biggest baking potatoes I have ever seen! After dinner I set up the karaoke and we had a couple hours of great fun. A lot of the group got up to sing and everyone seemed to really enjoy the evening.

Tuesday our wagon masters had a Mexican potluck brunch which was wonderful. Jackie and I are not morning people, but this was scheduled for 10:00 which was perfect for us. We had a great meal and visited for a while. In the afternoon we went out and did some more local caching, finding another 8 in the area. That night the wagon masters had a hot dog and fixen’s dinner and a number of us sat around our little portable fire pit for a couple hours, drinking, talking and telling jokes. Wednesday morning we packed up and headed back up to Indio. We didn’t want to go all the way up to Silent Valley for just six days, so we went to our membership park in Indio, Indian Waters. We had a nice spot there and relaxed the rest of the day. On Thursday we did some caching in the Indio area and found 6.

Friday Jackie went to the doctor for some tests. In the late afternoon we headed over to the Aqua Caliente Casino in Rancho Mirage because we had tickets for the Chelsea Handler show. Chelsea is a comedian who has her own talk show on the cable network, “E” which we watch almost every night. The show was in the brand new show room at the casino which is a fabulous venue, especially compared to what they have at the two Indio casinos. We gambled for a little while (only lost about $60 between us) and then had a real nice dinner at one of the casino restaurants. The show was wonderful, and a bit raunchy, but we expected that having been exposed to here TV show, which has a lot of “bleeps” even for a cable show. We really enjoyed the evening.

On Saturday, the 11th of April, we met Tom and Lynn Gilliam for lunch. Lynn was the General Manager and my boss when I was the Association Manager at the Desert Princess Country Club. I worked for her for almost seven years. She is now the General Manager for the new Sun City Shadow Hills development in Indio. Tom has had some major health problems recently, including a spontaneous subdural hematoma which could have killed him had the doctors not diagnosed it properly. He didn’t hit his head or anything, he just had a blood vessel burst in his skull. That was a couple months ago and he is doing pretty well now. He seemed to be in good spirits, although he has not been able to return to work yet. After lunch we did some shopping for our trip to Chula Vista with the Palm Springs Elks RV group next week.

Sunday, the 12th, was Easter and we went to our old church, the Pathfinder Church of the Risen Christ. Father Ned and Rev. Kathy are long time friends and we used to be really involved with the church and their retreats when we lived and worked in Indio. I used to do all the music and sound for the retreats and Jackie was also a member of the team. Most of the people at the Easter service were new to us, but it was nice to see Ned and Kathy again. After the service we went over to the Motorcoach Country Club where Barry and Colleen Cohen live to spend the afternoon with them. This will probably be the last time we see them before we leave for our summer travels. We stopped in at the Country Club’s restaurant to see Shane Ryan, Jackie’s Godson and his family. Vicki, Shane’s mom, is the food and beverage manager at the Club and she had the family up there for Easter brunch. We got to see Shane’s mom Vicki, his dad Gary, his uncle, Larry and his grandmother, Nancy. After we visited with them for a bit, we headed over to Barry and Colleen’s for some fun. Jackie brought over some lamb chops for she and Colleen - Barry and I don’t care for lamb. We had a couple drinks and a nice boat ride on the private lake. It was a great afternoon. The girls had their lamb and Barry and I had some pasta with some of Barry’s great sauce. It was a very nice way to spend Easter.

Tuesday morning, the 14th, we packed up the coach and headed to San Diego for the outing with the Palm Springs/Desert Hot Springs Elks RV group. We arrived in the early afternoon at the Chula Vista Elks Lodge, which has a 27 space RV park in their parking lot. They have full hookup sites, including sewer and cable at each site. There are 10 rigs at this outing. Tuesday afternoon we had a nice happy hour and met a lot of newer members of the group we had not known before. They are a very friendly group and we had a nice time chatting. We had dinner in the Chula Vista lodge. It was “taco night” but the food was much more than just the crunchy hamburger tacos you get at most lodges. They had about four choices of filling along with rice and beans and it tasted great. The next day, Wednesday, we took Jackie’s mom out to lunch, then some shopping and finally to her hair and nails appointment. Normally, we don’t get to spend that much time with her because we usually visit when we are staying up in the Coachella Valley. That means we have to leave San Diego by mid afternoon to miss the rush hour traffic. This time we are staying only about six miles away so it was easy to take our time. She seemed to enjoy the visit. Wednesday evening we had a wonderful pot luck dinner with the group in the RV park. We played a couple of games after dinner and visited. This is a great group to be around. Today (April 15th) is also the day we designated as our cat Smokey’s birthday. We got him in May of 2000 and figured he was about five weeks old, so we decided that April 15th was an easy date to remember (tax day) and was probably pretty close to his real birthday. He is nine today, which is 52 in human years according to a web site we checked. Happy Birthday Smokey and welcome to middle age! Jackie said he looked depressed today, I’m not so sure.

Thursday morning we went out and did some caching in the Chula Vista area. We only got eight, but one of them was our 600th cache! Considering we have only been doing this about a year, we are doing pretty good. Tonight we have dinner at the Galley Restaurant, over at the Chula Vista Marina. We used to go to the RV park with both the Palm Springs and the Indio Elks Rv clubs. The Galley has great food and we are looking forward to dinner.

Well gang, that catches us up to the minute. We are here in Chula Vista until Sunday the 19th when we start our journey North! Our winter is almost over and our grand summer adventure to Canada and Alaska starts in just a few days. I will try to be a little more timely with my updates to our little news blog as we travel North. Until the next time, have a happy life and remember that life’s a journey, not a destination, so enjoy the trip!

A Time of Sadness

We are now back in the California desert in beautiful Desert Hot Springs, North of Palm Springs. At the end of our last chapter we were in Salome, Arizona, halfway through our two week stay there. On Saturday, the 21st of February we went to the chili cook-off and celebration in Salome. They held it at one of the two airparks in town. Both of these airparks have large home sites located adjacent to a runway suitable for most small private aircraft. Most of the houses have hangers as well as garages so the folks can taxi from their driveway to the runway and take off. Pretty cool setup if you can afford the hobby of flying or have a serious business need to fly around in a small plane. The celebration had contests for both chili and salsa. We didn’t sign up for the tasting because it has been my experience that most of these contests have the contestants working to make the product as hot ast they can. While I like spicy foods, super hot chili’s and salsa’s I don’t need. One of the food booths did have some locals cooking up beef chili verde with beans and rice. Both Jackie and I had that for lunch and it was great. They had a few art vendors and a real nice car show considering we were 150 miles from any major town. There were probably three dozen cars including some very nice street rods. They also had some local bands playing and a motorcycle drill team. All and all not a bad festival for a small desert town. We had a good time. Couldn't resist taking the picture shown here. This propane business was just down the road from our RV park. The Passmore Gas Company! Too Funny!

Other than doing some more caching and playing poker one more time, we didn’t do too much more while at Salome. We were originally scheduled to leave Salome on Tuesday and go directly to Yucaipa, California, about 50 miles West of Indio. However, we found out that a friend of ours, Lynette Bollier was doing a Cajun party at the Indio Elks Lodge on Tuesday night, which also happens to be Fat Tuesday, the start of Mardi Gras. In addition, our Elks RV club, the Indio Desert Drifters, were holding their monthly meeting right after the party. Since we had decided that we wanted to go with the Drifters on their April outing to Borrego Springs, we thought we needed to attend the meeting to be sure we got signed up for the outing. With all these considerations, we decided to leave Salome one day early, on Monday, and delay our arrival in Yucaipa until Wednesday, and stay two nights at the Indio Elks Lodge’s RV park. So that’s what we did - we left Salome on Monday, the 23rd and drove the 150 miles to Indio and settled into the park early in the afternoon. That gave us time to do some shopping at Costco and Wally World since we had been out in the boonies away from large stores for the last two weeks. We also got to visit with our friends Barry and Colleen that evening. The next night we went to the party and had some great gumbo, met all our old Elks RV friends and had a great time.

That Tuesday night we went to bed knowing that we had to get up the next morning for the long 50 mile drive from Indio to Yucaipa. At one in the morning my phone rang and it was my brother Dennis letting me know that my mother had just passed away back in Phoenix. He told me that he had been with her at the end and that she went quietly and peacefully. While sad, I knew in my heart that she was now in a better place having seen how she had to spend the last six years wasting away. Alzheimer’s is a horrible disease that robs you of your loved ones while still leaving the shell. I certainly hope that they find a cure for it soon. My mother came from a family of 12, of which eight were girls. To the best of my knowledge, all of the girls in the family who lived past 60 developed Alzheimer’s. My mother was the youngest of the family, so my memories of my older aunts is fuzzy, but I do remember as a very small child hearing talk about my older aunts being talked about as "senile" or even crazy. I remember very clearly my aunt Betty and aunt Bernice going into homes and suffering just as my mother did later. None of the men in the family seemed to develop the condition, so I am not as frightened of what may come in my later years as I know my mother was. I know she knew what was coming and had to be scared, but she never let it show. She just drifted into it, slowing losing everything that was mom, leaving us many years before she actually died. Rest in peace Mom, we love you.

The next morning, Wednesday, we sadly packed up and headed to Yucaipa Regional Park. We have stayed here and written about this facility before. It is a very nice San Bernardino County park with full 50 amp hookups. The sites are widely spaced and there is a lot of green. Our reservation at the park was for 12 days, although we had already given up one day by coming in a day late. Since we had no clear idea as to when my mother’s funeral in Phoenix would be, we checked in and paid for the entire reservation. The next day, Thursday we did some chores and laundry and just hung around the coach. On Friday we spent several hours caching in the area and ended up doing about 15 caches, one of our more productive days. We also got a call from Dennis that the viewing for my mother would be on Tuesday, March 3rd in the evening and the memorial service would be the next morning. With that information we made reservations at an RV park in Goodyear, Arizona, very close to where my brother Ken lives. We decided to drive over to Phoenix on Monday and leave on Friday. Fortunately, Jackie contacted the County Park Headquarters and explained our situation and they gave us a credit for the six days we weren’t going to use at Yucaipa. While not a refund, it is good for a future stay and we will probably come back here for at least a week in the Fall after our trip north. Kudos to the San Bernardino County Park folks for being understanding and reasonable.

On Saturday morning, the 28th, we headed out early for San Diego to spend some time with Jackie’s mom. We got there in time to take her out to lunch and then some shopping at the local mall in National City, South of San Diego. We took her back to her group home and chatted for a while before heading back up to Yucaipa. Beverly just turned 90 and is doing pretty well. She has a little trouble walking and uses a walker, but she still wants to get up and out from time to time. While she has some memory issues, they are typical age losses and nothing even close to Alzheimer’s or dementia. The next day we stayed around the coach getting ready for heading to Phoenix on Monday morning. We normally don’t drive over 200 miles with the coach in one day, but we knew that we needed to do the nearly 300 miles to Phoenix in one hop, so we planned to leave about 9 in the morning, which is VERY early for us! Not only was it a six hour drive, but we lost an hour going from Pacific time to Mountain time. The drive went well and we checked into the RV park, Cotton Lane RV Resort, in Goodyear about 4:30 local time. We didn’t visit with any family because we found out after we got there that all of my brothers and their kids and grandkids had driven up to Cottonwood, North of Phoenix about a 100 miles, to spend the day with my brother Dennis who lives there. My brother David and his family, who live in Virginia Beach, Virginia, had driven in for the funeral and were staying with Dennis. Russ, my brother in Vegas had driven down with his daughter and had been staying with Ken in Goodyear, but they had all driven up to Cottonwood that morning. It was far too late for us to drive up there, so we missed the early family reunion.

The next day was very difficult. We went to the funeral home for the viewing at about 3:00 pm. The viewing was scheduled to last until 8:00. Mom looked at peace for the first time in many years, but it was still very emotional and difficult to say goodbye. Over the course of the next couple hours almost all of the immediate family came for the viewing. Mom had five sons, twelve grandchildren, thirteen great grandchildren, and two great great grandchildren. Of these 32 immediate descendants, only two of the grandchildren and one of the great great grandkids were not at the viewing. In addition, there were the various spouses and significant others of the family. Since mom had been pretty much isolated by her condition since my dad died in 2002, we didn’t expect too many others besides family. The man who ran the hospice in which she spent her last five years and took care of her, did come to the viewing and brought his entire family to the memorial. While these viewings are very difficult emotionally, it was also a time for reunion for our family because we are very widespread and don’t get together very often. In fact, the last time all five sons and their families were together was in November of 2002 when my dad died. One very nice touch that made the viewing easier was a video slide show Dennis had put together from mom’s old photo albums. He had over 200 pictures from 1920's, when mom was born, all the way up to 2002 when dad died. Having this program run gave everyone a natural outlet for conversation and reminiscing about the happy times. I am very grateful to Dennis for all the work he did in putting this nice presentation together. It allowed people to focus on the good times rather than the immediate loss. Among the pictures were the portrait of mom from the mid-1950's above and the picture of mom and me from 1954 shown here. Thank you Dennis, for this and everything else you have done the last seven years for mom and the family.

The next morning, 10:00 a.m. was the memorial service. The entire family, as well as a number of other friends and acquaintances, gathered to say goodbye to LaVerne Disch, matriarch of the Holt/Disch clan. The pastor of the Lutheran Church in Phoenix they used to attend officiated at the memorial. Although he never met my mom, he did a great job on the memorial. Dennis and Ken picked out some good music and it was a very moving service. Mom will be cremated and ashes buried at sea in the same area as dad was seven years ago. After the memorial everyone gathered the flowers and headed to Goodyear and Ken’s house for the wake.

Ken and his wife, Susan, did a great job with the wake. Like most wakes, this one became a celebration of mom’s life and a grand reunion of the family. Hundreds of pictures were taken of the various permutations that come with four generations gathering together. Although Ken and Susan don’t have any kids of their own, they went out and got some stuff to keep the little ones busy and also put on some great food and drink. At one point we all (adults anyway) had a final toast to mom to help her on her way to heaven. Finally, around dark, the family and friends who had gathered started to disburse. We went back to our coach to relax after two very difficult days.

The next day, Thursday, we invited Ken, David and Russ and their families to come over to our coach for snacks and drinks. Dennis had gone back up to Cottonwood, but the rest of us spent another several enjoyable hours talking about our childhoods, mom, families and all the stuff that brothers and their families discuss. Finally it was time to say goodbye for now. David and his family started the long drive back to Virginia on Friday, we headed back to California Friday morning, and Russ and his daughter went back to Las Vegas on Saturday. We all vowed to try to get together more often and no only when someone dies. I hope that it works out and we can stay in closer touch with each other. We have a great family and need to celebrate that as often as we can.

Our drive back to Indio was uneventful and, since we had given up our spot in Yucaipa and received a credit, we went back to the Indio Elks Lodge for another couple of nights. Friday night we met with Bill and Lynette for drinks and dinner at Cactus Jacks. Saturday afternoon we went over to Barry and Colleen’s place. The gals played cards, Barry and Roy talked and drank, and we went for a nice boat ride on their little private lake. A very pleasant evening after a tough week.

Sunday morning we headed for Desert Hot Springs and Western Horizon’s Desert Pools RV Resort. It was a long 25 mile trip, but we made it! We got settled into a nice spot right near the clubhouse. We will be here for two weeks before heading up to Silent Valley, our park in the mountains above Banning. Things have been pretty quiet for us here for the first part of our stay. The first four days we only left to run a few errands, do laundry and some shopping at Costco and Wally World. (We ran out of Absolute and THAT absolutely cannot be allowed!!) Thursday I took the car down into Cathedral City to Barry’s shop to have the front wheel bearings replaced. They have been making a terrible racket and I wanted to get them fixed before the big summer trip. After I got back we went out and did some local geocaching. We found 11 caches all within a few miles of the park. Had to do some desert driving, but we have started to enjoy that.

Well that brings us up to date gang. I will probably post again in a few weeks while we are up in Silent Valley. Until then - happy life!

Arizona Travels

Greetings friends from beautiful Salome, Arizona. In our last episode we had just arrived in Casa Grande, Arizona for a two-week stay at Western Horizon’s resort. Casa Grande is located near the junction of Interstate’s 8 and 10 and is half way between Phoenix, 50 miles to the North and Tucson 50 miles to the South. Although we stayed at this particular resort for a couple of days back in 2005, this would be our first extended stay here. It is a quite large resort with nice facilities. Paved roads, 50 amp full hookup gravel sites and concrete patios at all sites. Not many trees, but then it is in the middle of the Sonoran Desert. The clubhouse facilities are very nice. Our first few days there were pretty routine, taking care of some chores (like laundry which we hadn’t done in about two weeks) and doing some local urban geocaching. All tolled, we did about 30 caches or so in the Casa Grande area during the two-week period.

On Saturday, the 31st of January, we drove up to Phoenix (actually Glendale, a Western suburb) to visit my daughter, Tye and her family. We got there in time for lunch and had a nice visit with Tye and her three daughters, as well as three of my granddaughters from my other daughter, Tracie. I also got to see, for the first time, Tyrell, my first great-grandson. Tyrell is the son of my granddaughter Crystal, Tye’s first child. Crystal and her husband, also named Tyrell but with a different middle name, have another child, a girl named Cristin. Unfortunately, they were living in Texas at the time they had her and were having problems, so Tyrell’s parents took custody of her. They have not relinquished custody back to the kids yet, although Tye seems to think they are working on it. I have not yet seen my great-granddaughter, who is four, except in pictures, but hope to soon. At least Crystal and Tyrell are living in Arizona now. We also got to visit briefly with my son, Roy Jr. after he got off of work. Because of our traveling lifestyle we only get to visit the family about once a year, but it was good seeing most of the kids again. The middle daughter, Tracie, is living back in Illinois.

Of course, on Sunday, the First of February, we watched the Super Bowl! Since I grew up in Arizona, and we were IN Arizona, we were rooting for the Cardinals. We watched the game with several dozen other residents in the park’s recreation room. They had a nice big screen TV and snacks. It sure was a good, exciting game. We actually thought the Cards were going to pull it off - but, alas, it was not to be. Maybe next year.

On Monday, the second, we headed up to the Phoenix area again, this time to Goodyear, located on the far West edge of the Valley. We were up here to visit with my youngest brother, Ken, and his wife Susan. Ken works for the City of Avondale and Susan works for Southwest Airlines. Ken is 20 years younger than I am. In fact, he is only about six months older than Tye, my oldest. We spent a very nice afternoon visiting with Ken and Susan and went out to an early dinner with them before heading back to Casa Grande. The 5th of February was my 62nd birthday! Yippee! Lest you believe me crazy for such celebration of 62, it means that I can now start drawing my Social Security checks. An increase in our annual income of about 25 percent!! I applied several months ago, have already been approved and my first check arrives in the bank the second week in April. HOORAY! Jackie and I went out the Olive Garden for dinner to celebrate.

The next Saturday, the 7th, we headed up to Sun City, Northwest of Phoenix, to visit with my brother Dennis and to see my mom. Mom, who has late stage Alzheimer’s, had some recent health issues and had been hospitalized in Boswell Hospital, up in Sun City. We first met Dennis for Lunch in Sun City, near the hospital to visit. Dennis is the next youngest after me - he is eight years younger than I. We had a good visit during lunch and caught up a little. After lunch we all went to the hospital to visit mom. She is much the same as she was the last time we saw her, about nine months ago. She is nearly totally nonresponsive and contracted into a fetal position. We didn’t stay too long since she can’t really respond and it is very difficult to see her that way. One tries to remember the good times, and seeing her in this condition is very sad. After our visit with Dennis and mom, we headed back to Casa Grande to celebrate our wedding anniversary which is the 7th of February. This was our fifth wedding anniversary! Five wonderful years. After we got back to Casa Grande we went to a local Mexican restaurant for a great dinner to celebrate.

On Monday, the 9th, we left Casa Grande and started toward our next stop, Salome, Arizona. Salome is located in Western Arizona, on Highway 60, about 35 miles from Quartzsite. We have never been to this resort, Desert Vistas, which is one of our Resorts of Distinction affiliated parks. Since our reservation at Desert Vistas didn’t start until Tuesday, we stopped for the night in Tonopah, Arizona. Tonopah, about 50 miles West of Phoenix on I-10, isn’t so much a town as a wide spot with a couple gas stations. However, it is "famous" as the closest community to the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station. Palo Verde is the largest nuclear power plant in North America. It has three nuclear reactors and produces a total of 1.25 Gigawatts of power when all three plants are fully operational. They were building the plant during the last 10 years that I was with the Sheriff’s Office in Phoenix, so I was able to visit the plant several times during construction, even going into the containment buildings, prior to the introduction of nuclear material of course! We (the Sheriff’s Office) also had to participate in annual emergency drills required by the Federal Government. We would practice isolating and evacuating the area in case of an emergency. The last couple of years I was with the Office I served as an evaluator for the exercise.

The next morning we finished the trip to Salome and checked into the Desert Vistas RV Resort. For those with a map, we are 35 miles Northeast of Quartzsite and 45 miles Southwest of Wickenburg on Highway 60. It is quite literally out in the middle of nowhere and very pretty. We are surrounded by the Sonoran Desert and several mountain ranges. The weather since we got here on the 10th has been spotty, pretty cool with some rain and windy days, but the weatherman says it should get better. We haven’t done too much since we have been here except cache and be lazy around the house. We did play Texas Hold’em on Friday night. Saturday they had a little Valentine’s dinner party. Some of the residents and employees put on a really funny skit. It was a very nice, sociable get together. On Sunday, the 15th of February we drove up to Wickenburg for the day. Wickenburg is a very western type town 50 miles Northwest of Phoenix. When I was a kid Wickenburg was a very small town known mainly as the dude ranch capital of the west. Now it has grown into a small city, but it still has a distinctly western atmosphere. We discovered after our arrival that we were there during Rodeo Week, so we spent several hours visiting the arts and crafts fair set up downtown. We also did some local caching prior to heading back to Salome.

On Wednesday, the 18th, we drove to Quartzsite, just to have something to do. It is amazing the difference between now and three weeks ago when the RV show was in town. We went to the area where all the vendors set up and found only about 10 percent were still there. Everyone else had packed up and left town. After a nice lunch, some shopping and a couple of caches, we headed back to Salome. One of the caches we did was really cute. It was a large plastic dinosaur hidden in a tree.

We will be here in Salome until next Tuesday, the 24th, when we will head back into California. We will be going to the Yucaipa Regional Park again, located about 50 miles West of Indio on Interstate 10. We will be there for 12 days and then up to Desert Hot Springs, North of Palm Springs, for two weeks.

I will probably update our little chat site sometime after we get to Desert Hot Springs. Until then, stay safe, enjoy life and keep happy thoughts!!

Winter Adventures

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Desert Holidays

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cruising Paradise

Our last episode had us arriving at the RV park in San Diego getting ready to leave on our 15 day cruise to Hawaii. We had booked this cruise almost a year ago and had given the information to one of Jackie’s long-time friends, Helen Reilly. Helen, who now lives in Western Massachusetts, lived in Southern California for many years and she and Jackie were very close. Helen lost her husband Joe in the summer of 2006 while we were visiting back there. Helen decided to book a cabin on the cruise as well and brought a friend, Joan, along. Joan works for Helen at her bar and grill back in Massachusetts. Helen and Joan had flown into San Diego several days prior to our arrival there and were up in Torrance, near Los Angeles, visiting some of Helen’s relatives. On Thursday they drove back down to San Diego to get ready to go on the cruise. We picked them up and went out to dinner on the waterfront in downtown San Diego. It was nice to see Helen for the first time since 2006.

Friday morning at 10:30 the shuttle came by the RV park and picked us up for the trip down to the cruise terminal. We only had about seven bags packed for the trip. Some of the bags had been packed for a couple of weeks. We weren’t too excited! We arrived at the cruise terminal and found that they still hadn’t opened up the entry area for arrivals since they were still clearing the previous passengers off the ship. The shuttle driver said that he would have to drop us off down the street and we would have to get our bags (all seven) to the terminal on our own. We asked him to go around the block one time and he agreed. When he came back around they had opened the lot for embarking passengers so we got dropped right in front of the entry to the ship. Yea!

Our cruise was on the MS Zaandam, a Holland America Line ship. This ship is what they call a medium size, not one of the mega-ships. The Zaandam carries a little over 1,400 passengers, compared to the 2,500 or so of the really big cruise ships. Also docked at the terminal was a Celebrity Line ship, the Mercury. The Mercury was supposed to have been in port on Thursday, but about a day out of Hawaii on the way back they had a medical emergency on the ship which required them to turn around and go back. This meant that the passengers on the ship got an extra day, but the passengers loading up on Friday would lose a day of their cruise. Bummer. We were able to get a porter to grab our bags and we zipped through the entry process and were on the ship before noon. We weren’t scheduled to leave until 5:00, but once you’re on the ship you are “cruising” even if you are tied to the dock! We met up with Helen and Joan, got some lunch, and hit the bars!

The timing for our departure was great, we left at 5:00, just as the sun was going down so we sailed out of San Diego harbor right at dusk, very pretty. Of course, there was a little “sail-away” party going on the fantail of the ship. About 30 minutes after clearing Point Loma we lost sight of the California coast and we didn’t see anything but water until Wednesday morning. We had a very nice cabin, an outside with a window, but no patio. We were on deck one. Helen and Joan had a veranda cabin up on deck seven. Not too much bigger than ours, but it was nice to have the veranda. The next four days were spent doing what people do on cruises. We ate, drank, gambled, shopped, went swimming, lazed around the deck, ate some more, drank some more, gambled some more, etc., etc. The food on this cruise was excellent and we had the open dining option which meant we didn’t have to show up at exactly 5:30 or 8:00 to eat. We usually went to the dining room around 7:15 for dinner and found that to work out very well. Jackie didn’t go swimming except for one foray into the hot tub. I was in the pool and hot tub for a little while just about every day. We also made good friends with the bar staff in the Ocean Bar, the central bar on the ship. We spent most of our drinking time either there or in the Crows Nest, which was on the top deck and had a great view. By the second day the staff in both these bars knew us by name and drink. Go figure! It didn’t hurt that one of the waiters that worked the pool area during the day, Ian, also worked in the Ocean Bar at night.

One thing that became apparent was the fact that Holland America had a lot fewer activities going on around the ship than we found on other lines like Royal Caribbean or Carnival. Holland America seems to have a much older clientele (we sometimes felt like we were among the younger folks on the cruise) so they didn’t have a lot of stuff going on. We didn’t really miss it last year when we were on the seven day Alaska cruise because we only had a couple of “at sea” days. With four straight days at sea we found it to be a little too quiet. The casino was typical for a ship, mostly slot machines, a couple of blackjack tables, 3-card, Carribean Stud, and roulette. They also had one Texas Hold’em table with two sessions each day and the table was always full. It was a fairly low stakes 3/6 game so they didn’t have any problem getting players. Like most casinos, we lost more than we won overall, but both Jackie and I did have a couple of $200 plus wins which helped keep the gaming going for the whole cruise.

Finally on Wednesday morning, after four days of nothing but water, we found ourselves cruising into Hilo, Hawaii, for our first port call. The four of us had decided that we weren’t going to take any of the canned “shore excursions” offered by the ship. They were mostly overpriced bus trips and we figured we could have more fun on our own. We got off the ship about 11:00 and took the free shuttle to Hilo Hattie’s, one of the best known Hawaiian tourist shops. Hilo Hattie has stores, usually more than one, on every one of the islands. After looking around for a little while we found some free-lance “tour” guides in the parking lot. We managed to hire a car and driver for the four of us for about $40 apiece, far less than the ship’s tours cost. Our driver was a local who grew up on the big island and took us on a nice tour of the area around Hilo. We went to a couple of beach areas, although we weren’t swimming they were still pretty to see. He also took us to the Macadamia Nut Candy Factory. I think the factory gives “incentives” to all of the guides, amateur or not, to bring them to the factory. We got back to the ship by late afternoon and sailed out of Hilo at sunset.

When the ship left Hilo harbor the Captain sailed Southwest along the shore to the area where the Kiluea volcano is dumping hot lava into the sea. This volcano has been active for about 15 years now and is adding a couple acres a year to the size of the island. It was pitch black when we arrived in the area, however, because we a couple miles off shore we really didn’t see too much except for a very distinct red glow on the shore. It would probably be pretty impressive in a small boat up close, but with a large ship we couldn’t get close enough for it to look like much more than a big bonfire on the beach. After a few minutes looking at the volcano, we turned and headed North along the chain of islands headed for Honolulu.

Thursday morning, the 13th of November, I woke up about 6:30 a.m. and when I glanced out the window I noticed that we were about five miles off of Oahu, headed into Honolulu harbor. I threw on some clothes, grabbed the camera and headed up on deck to get some great sunrise photos of our arrival into Honolulu. Even though it was about seven in the morning when we approached the Aloha Tower at the harbor in downtown Honolulu, they had brought out the Hawaiian band and hula dancers to welcome us in. I guess this is a tradition that goes back a sixty years that every passenger ship is greeted with hula dancers. Unfortunately, we learned later that the other tradition of providing lei’s to everyone as they get off the ship is no more. If you want to get lei’d in Hawaii now, you have to do it on your own. The four of us got off the ship about 10:00 or so and spent the next hour trying to locate a rental car. Again, we had decided against any of the organized tours and chose to rent a car and drive around ourselves. Since I had lived on Oahu for two years in the late sixties, and been back several times since then, I was comfortable playing tour guide for all the obvious stuff. We finally got a hold of an Enterprise agency and after going to two different downtown offices found ourselves in a big chevy minivan. It was nice because it was comfortable with plenty of room for the four of us. We were going to be in Honolulu overnight, until 9:00 p.m. on Friday, so we rented the car for a full 24 hours so we would have it the next day also.

We started the tour by heading to the windward side of the island across the Pali. The Pali is the mountain range (or ridge) that goes down the center of the island. There are only two roads that go up and over the Pali and one that goes around the Southeastern shore. Those are the only three ways to get to the other side of the island. We made a stop at the Pali lookout which is at the top of the ridge and looks out over the windward side towards Kaneohe and Kialua, the two big towns on that side. You can also see the peninsula on which Kaneohe Marine Corps Base is located. This is where I was stationed back in the late sixties. It was a major Marine Corps Air Station at that time, now there are only a couple of helicopter squadrons on the air side. The ground combat units still use it as the primary Pacific Marine Corps operating base. We then drove down and through Kialua, checked out where the apartments where I used to live only to find that they had been recently torn down. Ah, progress. We checked out a couple of the local beaches and then headed around the coast line for the scenic route back to the Honolulu side of the island. After a lunch stop we drove through Waikiki and located the Honolulu Elks Lodge. What a place! It is located right on the water on the Diamond Head end of Waikiki Beach. The front and sides of the bar are open to the beach and when you sit on the patio you can see all of Waikiki Beach just down the sand. This property has got to be worth millions. One of the members there told us that they lease a small piece of land they own adjacent to the lodge to a hotel for $70,000 per month! Even with all that, their dues are still close to $300 a year, but what a place to go have dinner and a cocktail. The four of us had a drink, enjoyed the lodge and chatted with one of the members who was originally from Southern California. We also got our first Hawaii Elks Lodge pin.

After visiting the Lodge we decided that we needed to drop the car off for the day. We had found that overnight parking near the ship dock was $50 a night, which was more than we were paying for the car for 24 hours. The Enterprise folks said if we got back to the office before they closed at 6:00, we could park it in their garage and they would give us a ride back to the ship. Then in the morning they would come pick us up and we could take the car out again. So we dropped the car off late Thursday afternoon and went back to the ship. We did do a little shopping in the shopping center right near the dock before we reboarded. The next morning we headed out about 9:00, picked up the car and then headed back over to the Southwestern shore for some more sightseeing. We went to blowhole, a pretty standard tourist attraction where waves go into an cave under the rocks then water blows straight up through a hole in the top of the rocks. After that we stopped at Haunama Bay, one of the prime snorkeling spots on the island. We didn’t go down to the beach, but got some great pictures of the bay from up on the bluff that overlooks it. When I lived in Hawaii in the sixties we used to go to Haunama bay a couple times a month for the snorkeling. Great place and very pretty. After that we headed to the other side of Honolulu to Pearl Harbor to visit the Arizona Memorial. We went into the visitors center and spent about an hour there, but we didn’t wait in line to actually go over to the memorial. You could see everything pretty well from the visitors center. We then headed over towards Waikiki Beach, but the afternoon traffic was so bad we decided to just take the car back and go back to the ship. At about 9:00 our ship pulled out of Honolulu just as the moon was rising over the Pali. We had a great view of the lights of Honolulu and Waikiki off the back of the ship as we pulled away, headed towards Maui.

The next morning, about 8:00, we found ourselves anchored off the coast of Lahaina, Maui. We were only going to be in Lahaina until about 5:00, so we decided that it would be our beach day. We took the tender into Lahaina, then took a cab to the Whalers Point area where all the big resort hotels were. We rented a couple of beach umbrellas and chairs and all four of us went swimming. The girls had a little trouble staying on their feet with the waves and such, so Jackie only went in once. I spent a couple hours in the water and got pretty red, but not too badly burned. It went away in a couple of days. After a couple hours on the beach we changed and went to lunch at a Bubba Gump’s restaurant on the waterfront, then walked old town Lahaina and did some shopping. I got a couple of shirts and Jackie got a muu muu. Then we went back to the tender pier and took the tender back to the ship. We pulled up anchor at about five and south back towards the Big Island and the town of Kona.

Again about 8:00 we anchored off the coast of Kona, Hawaii. After breakfast we took the tender into the port. Kona was very small and there was limited shopping, but we hit a couple of shops. We had a nice lunch in a café overlooking the water, then Jackie and I headed up to the Kona Elks Lodge which I had called and found to be open. Helen and Joan stayed in town and said they would meet us back at the ship. The Lodge was only a short walk up the hill from the tender pier and we found a kind of decrepit building but with a very “beach hut” feel to it. There were a couple of members there, including a woman who was a PER, who were very friendly. We had drink, chatted for a while and got our second Hawaiian Lodge pin. After visiting the lodge we went back down on the waterfront and looked for a geocache that we knew was hidden in Kona. We had downloaded a couple of caches for each of our port stops, but this was the only time we actually went out and looked for it. We thought we were going to have a DNF (did not find) until I spotted something up in the fork of a tree. I had to stand on the beach wall to get it, but we had our first and only Hawaiian geocache! After finding our cache we did a little shopping then headed back to the ship. At about 7:30 we finally pulled anchor and left Kona. We were supposed to have left at 5:00, but several things went wrong. First, the Captain came on the intercom and said that although all the passengers were back, they had to keep one tender in the water to off-load a medical evacuation. We never did find out any details, but apparently one of the passengers became ill enough to have to be removed along with their traveling companion. Then, as they were loading the last tender (which are actually some of the ship’s lifeboats, back up onto the side of the ship, one of the crew members was hit by a piece of equipment and fell into the water. Again, the Captain came on and said our departure would be delayed while they took the crewman ashore for treatment and evaluation. Finally, about 7:30 or so we felt the ship moving and the Captain announced that the crew member was doing OK and we were headed back towards Ensenada, Mexico, our final port call five days down the road.

The next five days at sea were pretty much the same as the four sea days coming over - eat, drink, gamble, swim, then more of the same. One activity that I did participate in was the Karaoke stuff. About every three or four days they would have a Karaoke session at night up in the Crows Nest bar. It was generally the same eight or ten people singing and we got to know each other pretty well. On Thursday afternoon, two days before we arrived back on the mainland, they had a contest where all the singers that wanted to participate got to go up on the main showroom stage and sing in front of a live audience. Since we were at sea and there wasn’t much to do, the showroom was pretty full. There were eleven of us in this “semifinal” round and they selected five of us for the finals, to be held the next afternoon, on Friday. I was fortunate enough to be one of the five finalists. On Friday I got all dressed up in my suit and went up on stage and sang “My Way” and a got a real nice round of applause from the audience. I didn’t win, but I had a good time and all the rest of the afternoon and evening I was stopped by other passengers and told that I had done a nice job. Made me feel pretty good.

Friday night we were supposed to go into Ensenada, Mexico for a couple of hours. Cruise ships that are not registered in the United States are not allowed to start and finish a voyage between American ports, so we had to make a “foreign” stop before we went back to San Diego. We were supposed to go into Ensenada about 8:00 at night, leave at midnight, and then dock in San Diego the next morning at 7:00. However, about 6:00 we noticed that we were going into a pretty heavy coastal fog and by 8:00 it was a thick as pea soup. You couldn’t see the back of the ship from the front decks. We were pretty much sitting still in the water for a while, then the Captain came on the intercom and said that the fog was too thick to safely enter Ensenada’s harbor, so we were cancelling the port call. I assume that since we were in Mexican national waters at that time that this satisfied the technical requirement to be in another country prior to going back to San Diego.

Saturday morning we woke up docked at the San Diego cruise terminal where we started 15 days before. We got off the ship about 9:30, caught our shuttle back to the motorhome and were back home before lunch. Everything was OK with the coach, the cat obviously missed us because he has been much more affectionate since we got back than he ever was before. I guess being pretty much alone for two weeks makes you more appreciative of what you have. We didn’t see Helen and Joan after we went off the ship. They were going up to Temecula for a couple days before flying back to Massachusetts. On Sunday we packed up the motorhome and left San Diego for Ramona, about 60 miles to the Northeast. We are now there, at one of our Western Horizons membership parks. Barry and Colleen were going to come up on Wednesday and spend the Thanksgiving weekend with us, but just before we got off the ship Jackie came down with a bad cold. We called them on Tuesday and let them know that Jackie was still feeling poorly, so they cancelled the trip. That same Tuesday we drove up to Indio so I could go to the doctor and get a suspicious looking mole cut out of my back. Took about six or eight stitches, but it doesn’t really hurt much. Just a little pulling from the stitches because it is right in the top center of my back. Every time I move my arms forward the stitches pull a little. The stitches should be out and OK in a couple weeks.

It is now Monday, a little over a week since we got off the ship and yesterday was the first time Jackie felt well enough to go out and do some touring. Yesterday we spent the day up in Julian, which is only about 15 miles from where we are staying. Julian is a cute little mountain community with a lot of shops. We did some geocaching, getting eight and spent a couple hours walking around town shopping. We are going to be here in Ramona until next Sunday, the 7th of November, when we will go to Pilot Knob in Winterhaven, California - just across the border from Yuma, Arizona. We try to go there at least once each year so we can go down to Algodones, Mexico for our eye and dental exams and treatments. We have done this for three years running now and are pretty happy with the system.

So folks, that’s the tale of our cruise and safe return. I will post again after our time in Winterhaven and before the Holidays. Until then, have a happy life!

Halloween in the Hills

Don't pay the ransom, we've escaped! Yes, yes - I know its been a long while since an update. I will allocate the blame about 50 percent to being really busy and 50 percent to being really lazy. Last you heard, we had arrived at Silent Valley, above Banning, for a 30 day stay in the mountains. On Saturday, the 11th, our first full weekend in Silent Valley, Barry and Colleen came up to visit. Although they are members, they only came up for Saturday and Sunday, so they didn't bring their coach. There was a small car show being held at the park so we spent a little time walking around there. We had dinner at the restaurant, spent a little time in the bar, and then went back to the coach where the girls played cards and Barry and I sang Karaoke until we were hoarse. The dinner was great, they were having Oktoberfest and had a German grill going. Barry had the knockwurst and I had the German ribs with kraut - great food.

The next morning we got up early and headed down the hill for lunch and then off to Pomona for the annual RV show there. We only spent about three hours walking around looking at the new RV's, but we had a good time. We did note that most of the dealers and manufacturers were now featuring their Class C's and smaller gas Class A coaches. When we were here four years ago they were hawking the big diesel Class A's. Sign of the times, I guess. After the show Barry and Colleen headed home and we went back up the hill.

The next couple of weeks were pretty quiet and we generally stayed around the park, just enjoying the pleasant weather and the activities. We got involved with a group that played low stakes Texas Hold'em four days a week and had a really good time. Some days we lost our $20, other days one or the other of us would make $15 or $20. It was a very friendly, funny group and we really enjoyed it. We usually went down the hill to shop once or twice a week, one day we had to drive all the way to Palm Desert for some doctor's appointments, routine physicals for both of us. On the 23rd we drove down to San Diego to see Jackie's mom and brother.

On Friday, the 24th, we spent the day decorating the coach and site for Halloween. This is one of the biggest holidays for Silent Valley and the place is absolutely packed. Since Halloween falls on a Friday night, they are celebrating the weekend before because they always do the big trick or treat on a Saturday afternoon. We didn't put up a lot of stuff because we would have to find a place to store it afterwards. We had a few cheap decorations we picked up at the 99 cent store, including a whole bunch of phoney spider web. Some of the decorations in the park are huge, elaborate scenes, haunted houses, graveyards, and pirate dens. The park staff tells us that some people actually have storage units full of stuff they only use once a year at Silent Valley. In the afternoon we drove around the park taking movies and photos of the decorations.

On Saturday the celebration started. They had previously put up notices around the park that from 1:00 to 5:00 the entrance to the park would be closed and no one would be allowed to drive on the roads inside the park. Shortly after 1:00 the security guys were busy stopping traffic closing roads and it was easy to see why. Within a few minutes the streets were packed with people in costume walking around. Everyone from babies to old folks were dressed up and walking the streets. Since there are nearly 900 sites in the park, and we were full, there were literally thousands of people on the street. Most coaches had tables and chairs set up near the road with the candy and give-aways. We had bought eight big bags of candy and we were cleaned out within 40 minutes. After that we just walked around the park looking at the costumes and the fun. Halloween in Silent Valley truly is a "happening" as they used to say. Sunday was almost as entertaining because the bulk of the people that had been camping there left, starting about 8 a.m. and running all day. At one point people were lined up for half a mile leaving the park and the road up the hill from the park to the main road down to Banning was bumper to bumper. Looked like rush hour in LA. By Monday night the place looked deserted.

Tuesday we drove back down to Indio for a some more medical tests, blood work for me, mammogram for Jackie. On Saturday we drove down to Indio to spend the day with the Cohen's. We ended up spending the night and had a really good time. Finally, on Wednesday, the 5th of November we packed up and headed south to San Diego. We leave for our Hawaiian cruise on Friday, the 7th. We parked the coach at the Sante Fe RV park in Pacific Beach for the duration. Jackie's brother is going to come over to the coach periodically while we are gone to check on the cat. The next blog will be a recap of our cruise in about three weeks. We will be gone for 15 days on the cruise.

Until then, take care and Aloha!