01/01/2016 - Apocalypse Now?

You know how for the first month of a new year you keep writing the year as 2015?  I do the same thing, so this year I'm going to type it and write it often in the next few days so when I write my first check of the year to our dentist down in Los Algondones I won't spoil the check with the wrong date like I do every single year......I've typed it once in the title.......today is January 1, 2016.....now that's twice.....lol!

Needless to say there were a few people amongst us who were a little the worse or wear Friday morning, which was also the first 5th Saturday of 2016 (3 times now).  We were both up by 0700 and ready to enjoy the first day of 2016 (4 times now!).  I spent time making our little campsite ours by putting up the sunscreen, and bringing out a few tables and chairs.  Since we are facing east we get a lot of sun on the passenger side of the coach now......our now preferred position when boondocking is facing east.....why?   We get the morning sun through the front windshield and passenger windows first thing and it warms up the salon faster meaning I don't have to run the heater as much, thereby saving valuable electrons for later in the day.

When we got up the battery monitor said we were at 89%....not too bad.  We were back to 100% by noon time, and I didn't even worry about it until TLE asked later in the day....that's a first for me, but this is precisely why we added two more solar panels.....I don't want to have to worry about it.  Just park facing east, tilt the panels and then forget about it.....say that twice with a New Jersey accent!  So far in three days we have not had to use our generator to do one second of charging while most of our neighbors are running their generators a lot......with the lone exception of Steven and Linda who have 8.....count them....8 solar panels providing just over 800 watts of charging power.  They don't even tilt theirs and get charged back very quickly.

Around mid morning Michael and I decided to go for a hike up the small hills across S-22.  I'm not sure how far we hiked, but we were able to get up quite high.

The summit of this small mesa was our goal

The dust from thousands of ATV's is becoming visible

 Interesting rock formations

Almost at the top

The view looking back at our encampment from the top

The Salton Sea

 I built a 'small' rock cairn to commemorate our successful summit

In all I think we were gone about 90 minutes.....as we began our descent you could already begin to see a cloud of dust developing from all of post New Years Eve revelers.....it only became worse as the day wore on, and eventually we headed inside to escape the dust and noise.....oh well, it will begin to go away Saturday.  Prior to heading inside we sat outside with Mike and Liz for a couple of hours talking and relaxing.  Liz brought out some hamburger patties and we bbq'd them on my Sea-B-Que.

We officially abandoned the outdoors around 1430 as the Rose Bowl game was heading into the 2nd quarter.  Most of the 'bowl games' this year have been disappointing one sided affairs, and the Rose Bowl was no exception.  Stanford won 45-16 over Iowa State.  For the first time in years I turned off the game well before the end.

Around 1640 I headed outside to snap the the following two pictures......it reminded me of a post apocalyptic scene from a Max Max movie......

The apocalypse?

....even though we were chased inside by the dust and noise.....the first day of 2016 was a day well lived......Saturday the vacuum will turn on and folks will begin to head for their workaday lives once again, and order will be restored......:-)

Thanks for stopping by!