All by ourselves.....

6:09 am - Thursday - October 24th - WW - 44° F, humidity 38%, wind 3 mph out of the south by southeast......there will be crystal clear, blue, sunny skies today with a forecast high of 80° F.  On this date in 2020 TLE and I were enjoying another Oregon coastal sunset at Seal Rock, OR.....

As you know, whenever we change our view, and arrive at our winter destination it takes us a few days to pull all of our stuff out, and set up our site, and this time is no exception.  TLE and I spent the better part of the day emptying a lot of our stuff out of the trailer, and moving it to the two car garage, where a lot of it will remain until we return next winter from LPG&RVR. We've been carrying around a lot of stuff we don't use on a regular basis, but we are too cheap to get a storage unit....lol.  Now we have a place to store some of that stuff, and lighten the trailer load.  That process took most of the day.  Fortunately, we have the use of a couple of 'wagons' to move stuff from the trailer to the garage, which are separated by a 150', or more......

.....TLE pruned some of the juniper trees in the front yard, and we will continue to do that on Thursday.  That was pretty much the extent of what we did Wednesday.  By 4:30 pm we were on the house deck having cocktails....

.....our first night by ourselves in the middle of nowhere.  It is SO quiet here at night!

Charles and Phyllis left around 1 pm to head back to Phoenix for a few days before returning this Saturday.  We're hoping to get more done in the next few days before they return.

Thanks for stopping by!

So much to do.....

7:54 am - Wednesday - October 23rd - WW -  49° F, humidity 54%, wind 4 mph out of the northeast.....crystal clear, blue, sunny skies today with a forecast high of 81° F.  On this date in 2020 TLE and I were in Bandon, OR visiting some of our old haunts from our Cape Blanco Lighthouse days back in 2014 and 2015.....

Bandon Coffee Cafe

Fish tacos at Tony's Crab Shack.....best ever!

When we arrived at The Wilson Wilderness (TWW from this point on) Monday we quickly parked in what we knew would not be our permanent site, but we were tired, and I didn't want to drop the trailer so I could position the Newell in a better orientation.  When we are boondocking, and relying upon our solar panels to provide our electricity, we like to have the Newell face due west so our 4 roof mounted solar panels will get sun all day long.  We awoke to temps in the high 40's and ran our gas furnaces for about 45 minutes before the sun began to hit the Newell.

Once we had some coffee in our systems we began to get organized.  I first backed the Newell and trailer up about 100' so I could drop the trailer, then move the Newell to a better position.....

....which put us in front of the house.  This will not be our permanent position, but will serve us well for the next few weeks.  I'll need to use the Ford loader to better level the site where the Newell will be parked until next April, and there are a few other things that needed to be done.  While I was maneuvering the Newell Charles used his pickup to position the trailer next to the site where the Newell will eventually reside......

....the Newell will eventually be backed into the area to the left of the trailer facing due west.

Next it was time to tilt the solar panels, which took about 20 minutes, then we began to assemble our Bluetti power station on the driver's side of the coach......

.....our plan is to continuously power the Newell with these three batteries which total over 6,200 watts of power.  It will be like we are plugged into an electrical pedestal.  To the Bluetti system we have attached three 100 watt solar panels to charge them up each day.  As I write we got through the night with the coach totally powered all night long, and still had 41% left in the battery bank....perfect!!!  The next experiment will be to use our electric heaters Thursday morning to heat the coach.  Frankly, the Bluetti system is working better than I expected, and now that $4,000+ I spent seems to be well worth the expense.

TLE and I spent part of the day unpacking the trailer, so it can be used as my shop once again, and we've still got a ways to go on that, but we're getting there.  Later in the day I installed some indoor/outdoor carpet on the deck of the house, and a runner down the stairs....that turned out pretty nicely. Additionally I put up our two market umbrellas to provide shade on the deck in the afternoon. Eventually a patio cover will be added, and the deck extended, but for now it is much more welcoming.....

....around 11:30 am we drove over to a local resort about 8 miles away to help Charles and Phyllis take on 1800 gallons of water ($9 for 1800 gallons!), so we could learn the process and do it ourselves when we need more water, and they are not here...

.....it takes about 3 minutes to fill each tank.  It is a 25 minute drive each way, most of which is on the Primitive Road.  Once we hit pavement it is just another mile to the water station.  We were home by 1pm and doing more work.  By the time 5 pm came around TLE and I were beat.  I took a shower, and then we headed into the house for dinner with Charles and Phyllis.

There is so much to do here, and all we can do is focus on one thing at a time, and keep moving forward.  This is exactly the kind of project I love, and I know this winter will be amazing! 

By the way, my sister-in-law took a video of us entering the property on Monday.....

....TLE also took some pictures of us crossing a cattleguard....

Thanks for stopping by!

The Wilson Wilderness.......

1:06 pm - Tuesday - October 22nd - Wilson Wilderness, AZ - 75° F, humidity 17%, wind 4 mph out of the south....crystal clear, blue, sunny skies today with a forecast high of 77° F.  On this date in 2017 TLE and I were hiking the Fairyland Trail in Bryce Canyon NP.....

Unlike the previous 6 days we've been on the road, we were up before 6:30 am Monday morning.  Monday would be our last day of travel before reaching our winter destination....The Wilson Wilderness in Northern Arizona.  Yup, the cat is out of the bag now.  You won't find The Wilson Wilderness on any map, but it exists....7 miles from pavement, and 32 miles from the nearest town, which is not a very big town.  Anyway, I get slightly ahead of myself.

We were in the process of organizing the coach for travel when I heard a knock at our door....hmmm....who could that be at 6:40 am in the morning?  I opened door to a very familiar face, but I could not immediately put a name to her.  She said, "you probably don't remember me, but my name is Sandy....".  I immediately knew who she was, Sandy Dittus, with whom we worked with at Tahoe Valley Campground from the summer of 2014 to the summer of 2017.....

.....it has been 7 years since we last saw Sandy.  She lives in Henderson, NV, just a few miles from the Walmart.  We've been friends on Facebook for years now, and she saw my post about overnighting at the Walmart near the In 'N Out Burger, and took a chance that we were still there, and drove over at 6:30 am in the morning to see if she could catch us before we left, and she did!  We invited her into the coach, and talked until after 7:30 am.  What an amazing, serendipitous occasion.

We did some morning shopping at the Walmart, and after putting our purchases away were rolling our wheels ever southward by 9 am.  We would be meeting up with our friends about 8 miles from their property at 2 pm, and they would lead us into their property.  We had around 156 miles to drive Monday, and that should take us around 3-4 hours, so we wanted to give ourselves plenty of time to make a couple of stops, one to refuel the Newell, and still get there on time.

As you will remember, the previous two days were amazing driving days, but Murphy's Law dictates that there will always be a bad day, and Monday was a bad day.  Bad in the sense that the road conditions on US-93 were some of the worst we have traversed in recent memory.  When the road is rough, it makes 156 miles feel like 300.  Nevertheless, we continued our journey.  Around 11:30 am we stopped at a Travel Center of American truck stop to take on fuel.  The posted price was $3.56/gallon, but with our TDS discount card we paid just $3.03/gallon.....we took on 115+ gallons, and saved $48!  We got an amazing 7.5 miles/gallon on our last tank of diesel, which is around 1 mpg better than our usual 6.5 mpg!

The pump price, but we paid just $361.94

.....from the TCA station it was just 96 more miles to our destination meet up place.  The road continued to deteriorate mile after mile.  At least we reached the Interstate, which was even worse, if that is possible, than US-93.  Finally, we exited the Interstation for a secondary road with just 50 miles to go.  We arrived at our meetup place around 1:30 pm, and saw that our friends had just arrived....perfect timing.  From there it was another 30 minutes of driving on a 'Primitive Road' to our destination for the next 6 months.

By the time we had parked in what will be a temporary location, and set up camp it was getting close to 4:30 pm, so we headed into the house for an early dinner, wine, and conversation.  Eventually the sun began to set, and we got our first amazing sunset here.....

Thanks for stopping by!

Hang on and steer.....

7:07 am - Monday - October 21st - Henderson, NV - 57° F, humidity 39%, wind 2 mph out of the west.....mostly sunny today with a forecast high of 83° F.  On this date in 2017 TLE and I were attending the wedding of our youngest, Tim, to Laila in Riverside, CA at the Mission Inn.....

.....seems like yesterday!

We had a 200 mile drive planned for Sunday, but we were in no hurry to be on the road.  We had our eyes set on leaving around 10 am, and what do you know?  As we drove through Goldfield I looked at the clock and saw it was 10:02 am....perfect!

After a brief climb out of the city we began a 196 mile descent from over 6,000' elevation to just under 2,000' elevation in Henderson, NV.  The first 90 miles was either flat, or a slight decline, so we were at zero throttle for a lot of the time, just coasting along on a cushion of air.  The driving does not get much better than Sunday.....

......sometimes we could see where we would be in 30 minutes the view was so big, and so long.  The Newell performed flawlessly, and all I had to do was hang onto the steering wheel and enjoy the view.  We made one stop at a truck stop in Amargosa Valley to add air to the trailer tires, and were back on our way in about 20 minutes.  

As we neared Las Vegas the traffic, of course, increased exponentially, and US-95 went from 1 lane to 5 lanes in just a few miles.  We arrived at our destination, a Walmart Supercenter, around 2:15 pm.  The Walmart is behind us, and there is an In 'N Out Burger in front of us.....

...we walked over to COSTCO to do some shopping, and while we were there we each had one of their $1.50 ballpark hotdogs with a drink before walking back to the coach.....

....I watched part of the NLCS (National League Championship Series) game 6 between my L.A. Dodgers and the New York Mets in which the Dodgers were victorious.....10-5.  The Dodgers will be playing the New York Yankees in the World Series beginning Friday.....nice......they last won the World Series in 2020.....

.....it took a while to get used that background sound of a busy city, but we slept well, and in a couple of hours we'll be heading to our winter destination....stay tuned!

Thanks for stopping by!