Here we are, on the road: We’re in Palm Desert

January 12, 2013 Lorraine’s report

Hello again, this time from 1000 trails, Palm Springs. We are here, having left my daughter and granddaughter in Sunnyvale, CA. We spent the Christmas holidays with them. What a joy to see an 8 year old celebrate the Christmas holidays!!! Thanks again, Susy, we loved being there.

Well if you recall, we had to be with Susy longer than we had planned because the freezer on our 15 month old fridge broke, and it took them 3 weeks to get the warranty worked out. The repairman came on Tuesday. We waited all day. Chuck called the place, around 3pm, and they said he would come later. We finally heard from the repairman about 6:00 pm, when he called and said he would show up 20 minutes later. He worked on the refrigerator until about 10:15 that evening, a very long day. We had invited Susy and Kaitlyn to go to eat, but ended up ordering pizza. But, at least the freezer is working again.

So then my computer was broken, a couple of months out of warranty, and the Geek Squad were forever getting a test on it to see what was wrong with it. It came from Best Buy, so we took it to the Geek Squad, but after Mark worked on it. Thanks, Mark. It was what he thought it was, a bad hard drive. But, the guy at BB took forever to diagnosis it; we decided that once again I needed a new computer. We opened up the new computer a short time before we heard what was wrong, the guys at Fry's would charge a 15 percent charge IF I open it and returned it, unused. We found a new computer at Fry's. a whole lot cheaper than trying to fix my old one.

And my whip lash. One of my friends, Judy J in WA, (I went to school with her, she graduated with me, and we are getting to know each other again) wrote and told me about Arnica Montana. It took a bit to find it, but we found it. This tiny, tiny pill-I take 5, 3 times a day, and use the gel that is for bruises and such, has worked well for me. Just taking the medicine, over the counter by the way, has worked wonders. The fist day after I took it felt like I might actually survive the pain. Thank, Judy, I appreciate the heads up!!!

Being back in Palm Springs found Chuck and I enjoying the drier weather. It is cool, down to the upper 30's at night, but in the upper 60's to 70's during the day, absolutely wonderful for this time of the year.

We are looking forward to seeing friends in Quartzsite this next week. And from there, who knows. Until next time....Hugs to all...

Lorraine

1/12/14 Chuck’s report

Yea, we are back on the road again, back here in 1000 Trails Palm Springs enjoying the great weather. Even though we really like being near Susy and Katie, we know they want to get their lives back to normal and not feel the need to spend so much of their time with us. But when I last asked Katie when we should return, she said Feb. 1 and to stay until her birthday in April, ha. But I did tell her we would be there for her birthday.

Last Sunday we went over to Susy’s place and watched the San Francisco/Green Bay game. I guess I was rooting for Green Bay as I hope Seattle doesn’t have to play San Francisco one more time this season, they are too closely matched. But San Francisco ended up winning, Lorraine was rooting for them so she was happy with the outcome, me, not so much. Lorraine and Susy put together a good pork roast dinner for us for after the game, at least everyone enjoyed that.

While we were watching the game, Mark completed the set-up on Lorraine’s new computer. Her old one was at Busy Buy since Friday and they were supposed to have set it up to run a diagnosis and let us know what repairs were needed. When Lorraine and Susy went by on Saturday, they told them the diagnosis wasn’t complete yet but they would call when it was done. I called them Sunday morning and the tech checked and reported that no one had started the diagnosis yet but he would get it going and call when it was done later that afternoon. So we decided to set up the one we had bought at Frys in case the repairs were too expensive. Mark loaded up an older version of Windows so it needed to run overnight to add all the updates, no problem, we left it there until he finished.

Morning morning we headed over to Best Buy and picked up Lorraine’s old computer, it can still be used but the hard drive has some bad sectors and they said it probably will just get worse. I may look into replacing the hard drive but will worry about that at a later date. Lorraine ran a couple of loads of laundry too, wanted to get caught up before we hit the road.

Later we headed over to Susy’s place and watched the college football championship game between Florida State and Auburn. I think there were 4 lead changes in the final two minutes with Florida State coming up the winner in that one. Mark fixed up taco makings for dinner for everyone and explained about the changes/updates he had made to Lorraine's computer for her. Thanks for fixing that for us, it’s a bit over my pay grade.

I have been in correspondence with our insurance company about repairing our car after the accident. They have a different way of doing things in California than I’m used to dealing with. They sent an app to Lorraine’s phone and had us enter some information, take some pictures and send it to them. They would then look things over and make an estimate for repairs. I’m used to going to three repair shops for estimates and sending that to the insurance company. So this time I did both, sent the info and pictures to them and went to a local repair shop for their estimate. Of course, the shop was higher and now I’m working with the insurance company to revise their estimate but so far no luck.

I went to the repair place on Tuesday morning and was on the phone for a bit in the afternoon. Later we went by and picked up Katie from school, their Christmas vacation is over. Then we sort of hung around waiting for the fridge repair guy to show up. They told me he would show up between 1:00 and 5:00 but I wanted to be ready in case he came by early. I called at 3:00 to check on his schedule and was told he was going to be late, maybe as late at 5:30. I said that was fine by us, we wanted it fixed so we could get on the road. He called about 6 and said he would be there in 20 minutes or so and I told him to come on in. I figured he would find an excuse to look at it and say he needed to come back the next day.

But when he showed up, he was ready and willing to work on it until it was done. He figured it would be about three hours and with my “help” he was done a little after 10. He had to recover the Freon, flush the system to get all the oil out of the coils, refill the system with Freon and solder the holes he had made in the tubes where he hooked up some temporary fitting for recovering/refilling the system. He actually was able to do the repairs from the access door behind the fridge, said it was nice that he didn’t have to work on his knees as was usual when the work was done in a house. He had some specialized tools, gauges and tanks so this type repair isn’t something just anyone could accomplish.

By the time he was finished, the freezer was starting to cool off but more importantly, the coils that were not getting cold before were now cold. By the time he was finished with the paperwork, the temperature had already dropped about 25 degrees and he was confident it would work just fine. And he was correct, during the night, I heard the ice maker dump and refill with water at least twice, proving the temperature was cold enough for that, yea.

We had to say bye to Susy, Katie and Mark that evening as we planned on leaving on Wednesday morning, if the freezer in fact was cold enough. When I got up, I put a thermometer in the freezer and it was reading 0F, much better than the 25F it had been showing before the repairs.

So Wednesday morning we got ready for travel, pulled over to the dump station to empty our gray and black tanks and headed out. There hadn’t been any rain the whole time were had been there, about three weeks, but sure enough, it was raining when we got up. But by the time we were on the road, the sun was out and everything had dried out so we had a good travel day.

Once again we stopped overnight at the Bakersfield Orange Grove RV park. Compared to the last time we were there, three weeks ago, the trees had been picked over a lot. The park was offering the use of a picker on a pole if we wanted to pick a bag full. I did walk over to the tangerine grove to see if there happened to be any of them left on the trees. I managed to get a bag full of them too, Lorraine really likes these. While we were there, I transferred the stuff from the basement freezer to the fridge/freezer inside the coach and unplugged the basement one. We didn’t use it since we had the residential type fridge installed but it did come in handy when we had problems. We have had it for sale but may just keep it, we haven’t decided yet.

Thursday morning we got on the road and headed on to here. It was another good travel day, sunny and warm and we took a route to keep us out of San Bernardino and the traffic around that area. We got here just a bit after 2, found a good site and got set up. Later we went over to see some friends of ours, Mike and Linda who are in charge of the group we stay with at Quartzsite. They will be leaving Quartzsite a bit earlier this year than normal, Linda wants to go to her latest grand daughter’s first birthday but they will be a Q as usual up until then.

Friday morning we drove over to Indio to attend the FMCA rally, at least for one day as a walk-in vs camping there with our coach. We walked through the vendor area but didn’t find too much we had to have. I did get some quotes on changing out the shocks on the coach but will do that at a later date. Lorraine did find a couple of shirts and had an applique put on them. We made a quick run to Wal-Mart to drop off her prescriptions then returned to our place for a dinner of left overs.

Saturday morning we returned to Wal-Mart to pick up her prescriptions and few other items. I wanted to be sure we were back in time to watch the Seahawk/Saint game, it started at 1:30 so that was no problem. And the Seahawks won, even though their offensive team didn’t play that well but the defense was sure good, especially in the first half. We also watched part of the AFC playoff game between New England and Indianapolis but didn’t care as much about the outcome of that game.

We have been spending some time working on our travel/hotel/car rental plans for our trip to Alaska in July for Lorraine’s high school reunion. We are planning on flying to Ketchikan for awhile then fly on up to Anchorage where our son will pick us up and we will stay at his place for two weeks. He needs to find out about his work schedule while we are there so the dates we’ve chosen may have to be modified/changed but at least we have something to start with.

While we are here, Lorraine is trying to stock up on our needs for when we leave here and go to Quartzsite. There will be hundreds of thousands of people in and around the area so the two small grocery stores as well as every other place will be packed and pretty well picked over.

Like I said, the weather has been really nice this past week. We really feel for those who were caught in the extreme cold in the rest of the country. It was even freezing in the middle of Florida, they sure aren’t used to that. Sure glad we have wheels under our home.

We will be traveling on to Quartzsite, leaving here on Thursday. We plan on meeting up with a group of Tiffin motorhome owners, we’ve been with them a couple of year previous and had a good time. Then we’ll move over and join the group we met the first time we stayed at Quartzsite, the RV America group. We’ve stayed with this group every year we’ve been down here and by now are considered “old timer”, ha. We have fun with both groups, like to go to all the vendors and displays but usually only hang around for a week as it’s dry camping, i.e., no electric, water or sewer hookups. It’s not that bad as we head in with full fresh water tank, empty holding tanks and use our generator as needed to keep our batteries charged and run any electrical items we need.

So with that, I’ll add a few pictures and get this posted.

A quart freezer bag with the oil that was flushed out of our freezer coils. It’s hard to tell but there’s a bit over a tablespoon full.