Mr. Jello had other ideas......

6:24 am - Tuesday - February 4th - Riverside, CA - 44° F, 16% humidity, wind 11 mph out of the north by northeast......clear, cool today with a forecast high of 56° F.

Our intent was to roll our wheels Monday morning and head for Borrego Springs, as I have mentioned a few times before.  I was awakened around 4:30 am Monday morning to the sound of wind buffeting the Newell, and whistling through the window awnings.  We traditionally avoid driving when there is a crosswind, or when it is raining, so I hoped the wind I heard was just temporary, not a day, or two wind event, and went back to sleep.

I got up sometime after 7 am and retrieved my phone to check the local weather and saw that the current wind speed was 23-25 mph directly out of the north, and was forecast to increase into the 30's later in the morning, topping out at 35 mph around 3 pm.  A wind out of the north means a crosswind if you are traveling east, or west......Borrego Springs is directly to the east of us.  When I saw the forecast it was easy to let Mr. Jello take the lead, and we decided to stay put for Monday, and try to haul anchor Tuesday morning.

This change in plans had some benefits for me.  First I was planning on organizing the trailer first thing Monday morning before inserting the car.  It takes about an hour to do so as long as we have not deployed to much of our 'stuff', which we had not, nevertheless, I was not looking forward to doing it in the morning.  Secondly, we still had TLE's Cannondale F600 bicycle, which I had planned to just take with us, but that meant I would have to find space to stow TLE's new eBike, which in turn meant I would probably have to move the firewood into the back of the Beetle......again, not looking forward to that.  Since we had one more day in town we decided to take TLE's Cannondale to my son's office warehouse, along with a few other things I had identified as not being needed when we begin our trip to Alaska in mid April.  Finally, we wanted to fill the rest of our purified water containers for our planned month long boondocking foray in the desert.

A little explanation on the water containers.  As you know, we have a 160 gallon fresh water tank which we utilize when we are boondocking, or dry camping as we have been the past 10 days.  When we boondock, or dry camp we do not use our R/O (Revers Osmosis) water purification system as it generates a lot of waster which fills our gray tank, and depletes our fresh water supply more quickly than we like.  We have three 5 gallon water containers, plus five 1 gallon water bottles.  When filled that gives us 20 gallons of drinking water for making coffee, drinking, cooking, etc.  The water in the fresh water tank is strictly used to flush the toilet, take showers, and wash dishes.  This lasts us about 10-14 days...sometimes longer.  We fill the water containers utilizing these purified water dispensing stations located in front of most supermarkets (which I believe have the brand name 'Glacier Water' on them) and/or liquor stores in California.  Locally there are two of these stations two blocks from where we are staying.  Five gallons costs $1.75.

Around 11:30 we drove into Rancho Cucamonga to drop off the additional stuff I mentioned above at my son's office warehouse, then headed home where we picked up the rest of our water containers and then were off to the Ralph's Supermarket two blocks away to get the water, and a few final items from the store for our pantry.  From there we headed directly across the street to the local Goodwill to see if they had anything interesting without which we could not live. This is one of our favorite Goodwill stores, and we find something almost every time we visit.  I recently recycled a bunch of t-shirts, so I need to resupply, and was lucky to find 3 interesting t-shirts to buy.  

We arrived back at the Newell around 2:30 pm at which time I began to organize the trailer for our departure Tuesday morning.  By 4:30 pm I had everything stowed away, and I was done for the day.  Once that firewood is removed from the trailer at our campsite Tuesday we will have more room in the trailer than we have had in a very long time.  The wind was still howling when I closed the door behind me, which only served to validate our decision to stay in Riverside another day.

We watched a few more  episodes of 'Outlander' (I think we're on episode 13 of season 2 right now)......this series becomes more intriguing the deeper we get into it.

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