The Traveling Dragonfly

2009-12-14T10:52:00.000-08:00

One of the things we miss from Reno, is our friend, Omar. This Blue Jay became almost like a pet. He would come and sit on the back of a chair next to the door and actully ask us to give him some peanuts. He was so fun to watch and we miss him. There are not too many critters around our place. Although Sonya does manage to get some bread out to the birds on a regular basis.

The Park we live in is mostly what they call park models. Sort of like small mobile homes, but without an axle or wheels. Most of them have what is called an Arizona room. We have been in a couple of them and they are quite nice. The park has about 700 spaces, and most of them are park models. There is probably space for about 100 RV's. There are three of us on the street where we are, and room for 4 more. It is very nice. It is a gated community and the people are wonderful.
This is the pool area, in the background is a huge ballroom. There are many things going on every day of the week. They have their own post office, craft room, pool room, lapidary and silversmithing room, a library, a small theater, and also a party room. Many activities from card games, to dances. They even have a computer club.
Throughout the park are many wonderful cacti plants of every size and shape. Some of them are so perfect that you really have to go up and inspect them to see if they are real or not. Now that Christmas is coming some of these wonderful plants have been covered with lights and even a Santa hat on some of them.
There are also a lot of palm trees. The people who have park models are responsible for their own landscaping. There is no lawn anywhere in the park except around the clubhouse.

Don't these two plants look phony. they are so perfect. Notice the gravel around the plants that is what is in all of the spaces.
Here is our patio area. One of the reasons we chose this park is that there were two full driveways for each site. The RV sits on the gravel nect to the cement. and there is one whole area for a patio and still another area for the car.

We went to Thanksgiving dinner at the Hermosa Inn. This is a picture of the outside. It is an old ranch of a cowboy artist.

This is the outdoor seeting at the Hermosa Inn, we sat inside because the wind was blowing. It was a great place, and the food was delicious. I am sure we will be going back again.

This is what the parking lot looks like for church. Most people have golf carts and many ride bikes in the park. People do have cars but for the most part when they travel around the park they use these small means of transportation.

Living in an RV is very challenging. You have to remember to put things away, then you have to remember where you put them. There is a place that we call the basement, but you have to go after things in the daylight, and it takes moving many things to find what you are after. So inside the RV you find lots of places to put things so they are out of the way, but yet accessible. Do you see the bottles of water, stored on the top of a shelf, before they go into the refrigerator. We have a refrigerator, but space is at a premium, so some things just have to wait their turn.

You know that computers and printers are a must, but where to put them when you aren't using them. Luckily we both have lap tops and they fit nicely in a cupboard under the kitchen table. But, where do you put a printer. Look closely and here it us under the passenger seat.

Decorating for the holidays presents another problem. Since we both love Christmas we had to have some holiday decorations. We put two little rosemary trees outside, (oops, forgot to get a picture of them). Then we put this small basket decoration on the dashboard. We can close the front curtains around it so it shows outside. The other problem we have is that of electricity. We have 50 amps of power. So we got battery operated light for this basket, but the batteries die after just a couple of hours, so the basket is not being lit now.

2009-12-14T10:40:00.000-08:00

2009-11-02T10:34:00.000-08:00

So, we are getting ready for this very long trip and instead of packing and getting ready to go, we decide to do a craft fair at a local high school. It was a lot of work, but a lot of fun. We made a little money for our trip. The hardest part was setting up and taking down the booth.

We were hoping that the craft fair would be Christmas oriented, and instead it was a "Harvest Festival" so we didn't do as well as we could, but it was good experience.

Then we had the RV delivered to our door. We are terribly spoiled, the people who store him are wonderful and they brought him up to our cul de sac. (We always warn the neighbors before we bring the big guy up!!!!
Here is Wesley sitting in front of our house. He is so big that we had to park Aaron in the neighbors driveway, good thing they are never home.
Here you can really see how big it is, and how the compartments slide out to make more room inside.

Once he is loaded, then we turn him around in the cul de sac, and attach the car to him. It is always a good idea to make sure the parking brake is off before you tow the car. OOPS, just half way down the block before we discovered we did not release the brake. The problem of the day!
A nice drive down 395, ran into some rain and even a little bit of snow. The colors on some of the mountain was spectacular. Very hard to get a picture when you are driving a 52' rig, and even no place to stop for pictures.
Into Lone Pine, California. A park where we have parked before. All gravel, but it has pull throughs. Which is a blessing, because as usual, the car is dead. (We are going to have to solve that problem.) Got ready to leave the next morning, went out to unhook the utilities. We are both outside, the door to the RV closes, and I guess you figured it out, all the keys are inside and the door locks. Now Lone Pine is not the most metropolitan city in the US. So we call Good Sam, our RV Emergency club. "What? You want our member number, OOPS, it is locked in the RV." Good Sam finds an RV guy, very nice fellow named John, who comes to help us. Well, he tried to find the local locksmith, but he couldn't. So he attempts to get the driver side window open, yea, success. And the good Lord was with us, the keys were in the ignition, and he had a long rod and reached in and grabbed them. We talk to him about the weather, (since the wind was blowing so hard) his suggestion was to stay put for another day, then drive further south. We agree and stay an extra day. Nice when you don't have to be a certain place at a certain time.

So off we go toward Arizona, our next destination is Needles, California, for a one night stay. As we are driving we hear this loud noise. The next time Sonya heads for the bathroom, (that is one of the nice options of having an RV), she sees a can of Dinty Moore Beef Stew outside the bathroom door. She looks back and sees what we use as a pantry, wide open with the contents taking a nice tumble out onto the floor. There is nothing that can be done until we stop for the night. The bedroom slide out blocks us from getting to the pantry until we put it out. OOPS, the problem for that day.

The only casuality of the pantry calamity was a package of spaghetti, which spewed forth all over the bedroom. Over one week later we still find small pieces of it on the floor.
So we arrive in Arizona, and head down Interstate 10, going over what seems like a million miles of Phoenix to get to Apache Junction. The freeways in Arizona are very well marked. We are able to get off to Interstate 60 and head right for our park where we have a reservation. So we pull in, it is about 4:30. The office closes at 3:00. We take a look around. What no pull throughs. OOPS!!! Now you remember that we have a dead car, so we can't take it off to back Wesley into a space. We walk around the park and find that the space the fellow wants us to go into has an empty space on the street behind it. Well, this could be very interesting. Sonya is able to put that big rig right where it needed to go, except if we move it forward 2 feet we will smash the sewer hookup. We get the RV in, get it hooked to the water and power. Then call AAA to come and get the car started. Once they do that we have to drive it around a while to charge the battery. Once that is done, we get something to eat and get ready for bed.

It is then we discover we don't have any water. OOPS!

The next morning we try to figure out the water problem. I look at the water pipe, take of the filter and pressure valve, check the water flow and then I happen to look under the RV. Hmmmmmmm why is the jack sitting on the water hose? Perhaps that is the problem. So I have Sonya start up the RV (motor must be running to put up the jacks), so up go the jacks, and down comes the tire onto the water hose, I was laughing so hard I could hardly tell Sonya what the problem was. So jacks up again, water hose out, jacks down. Yea, problem solved

The park is not exactly where we would like to stay for months, so we start looking for other parks. Find a wonderful place and decide to move there. Took some special effort to get the RV out of its place, but we got it done. Drove it to our new park and had one of the fellows there back it in. We are now settled at The Resort, 1101 S Ellsworth Road, Mesa, AZ 85208 and will be here for a while. We will keep you posted.

2009-09-28T15:07:00.000-07:00

The time is fast approaching when Wesley, (that's him above) will be taking us to Arizona for the winter months. We plan on leaving Reno about the 19th of October. It will take us about 3 days to get to Mesa Arizona. Wesley doesn't seem to go as fast as the other traffic on the road.
We plan on staying one night in Lone Pine California, then on to Needles California for another night. Into Mesa on the 3rd Day.
When Wesley and Aaron (the car) are hooked together they are 52 feet long. They make it very interesting to try to maneuver in small places. The most looked for words in the RV park directory is "PULL THROUGH"
The car is very happy to travel behind the RV. We are hoping that this time we have solved the problem of the battery being dead, and I do mean dead when ever we get anywhere. I am sure AAA will be happy that they don't have to come and charge it every time we stop someplace.

We will keep you posted on our journey.