Gravitational pull.....

Today at 3pm we slipped the gravitational pull of our Ontario home and "rocketed" 13 miles east at 60mph to Rancho Jurupa Regional Park.......free at last, thank God, free at last.........we are now fulltimers! This Newell is our home.....what a marvelous feeling!

We are still awaiting our start date as camp hosts, so we are staying here thru Thursday on our Passport America discount, and then heading up to Ventura to sit on the beach staring at the Pacific Ocean for 4 days, and then back here on Monday. I'm hoping by then we will have our start date. So we are in a wonderful park with 50amp service and full hookups for $17.50 per day....1/2 price Monday thru Thursday. If you don't belong to Passport America seriously think about joining. We'll save enough money this week to pay our annual membership fee. It is a great deal and pays for itself quickly.

Good News!

We have gotten the go ahead to do our "Live Scan", which is essentially finger printing, and background check from Riverside County. Once that is complete, and we are found to be free of felonies we will receive our start date for being camp hosts at Rancho Jurupa Regional Park. Our anticipated start date is 2/1/2011, but we will update that shortly.

We are, NEEDLESS TO SAY, very excited about this timely development!

Thanks for reading......

Update....

Received a call from Ranger Dana at Rancho Jurupa Regional Park last Friday. We had submitted an application a few weeks ago to become camp hosts at the park starting in February, when we move into our Newell fulltime. We were invited for an interview on Monday, January 10th.

When we arrived for our 8:30am appointment Ranger Dana walked us over to the new cabins for a tour. On our last trip there we had spent a few minutes looking through the windows of the new cabins and were impressed with the amenities. We are tentatively going to be responsible for the 6 cabins recently added to the park, helping people check in and out, being sure the units are left in good condition, and cleaned. We are awaiting approval, and the completion of our back ground check.

Essentially, in exchange for the use of a site (including utilities, and rent) we will each donate 10 hours per week. We are very excited about this development as it will further reduce our overhead, and allow us to remain in one place for the next 8 months until retirement! We should get final confirmation within the next 2 weeks!

Thanks for reading!

Spontaneity......

One of the things I love about owning a motorcoach is the increased spontaneity in our lives. We had planned, as has been our custom for the past decade, to be at home on New Year's Eve. On Wednesday, December 29th, I got a call from a long time friend, Claude, who lives in a retirement community (Sun City) in Indio, CA with his wife Lindy. They have a small two bedroom home there, but the second room is used for his wife's therapeutic massage business. He invited us down for New Year's Eve, and suggested we bring our coach so we could spend the night. It took me about 5 seconds to say "YES!". We're always looking for an excuse to head some where in our coach.

So, Friday morning around 9am I went over to the storage lot to pick up the coach. When I arrived the outside temp was around 40 degrees, and had been in the low 30's most of the night, so I knew I would have to run the block heater for a little while to turn over the Detroit Diesel. As always, the genset started right up, so I switched on the block heater and began readying the coach for departure. Since I had about 40 minutes before I knew it would be warm enough to start I decided to clean the windshield inside and out, as well as the mirrors. I always feel kind of rushed at home when we're trying to hit the road, so this opportunity gave me time to do a thorough job. By the time that task was done and I had removed the tire covers, raised all the blinds, the engine was ready to be turned over and it roared to life immediately!

I got back home around 11am, and while Elaine was finishing up some work on her computer I decided to clean the aluminum wheels and clean a little of the road grime off our trip down to San Juan Capistrano a couple of weeks previous in the rain.

Claude and Lindy's home in Indio, CA

We finally were able to hit the road around 1:30pm for our 90 minute drive down to Indio, arriving at our destination around 3pm. At the security gate we were promptly checked in and given a two night pass to park in front of Claude's home. I don't think the temperature the entire day got above 49 degrees!

Claude ran a power cord out from his garage so we could gobble up 15 amps of power for our coach. I knew the temps would get into the low 30's again that night, and was grateful for the 15 amps. We could at least run our bedroom electric heater, which is much quieter than the gas furnaces. Those electric heaters each use about 11-12 amps, so there is no way to use two of them at the same time. Both mornings I got up before Elaine and turned on all 3 gas furnaces to take the chill off the interior while the coffee was making (I had to turn off the electric heater to run the coffee maker as the two draw about 16 amps). Wow was it cold inside for a few minutes!

Courtesy Parked!

We spent the early evening on their patio in front of their roaring gas fire ring all bundled up. Eventually Claude fired up his Weber BBQ and cooked some great "baseball" sirloins for dinner. We sat around after dinner until almost midnight talking and laughing, which pretty much sums up the rest of the weekend, other than we watched the entire Rose Parade New Year's morning, which I haven't done in years, in High Definition, and then watched a "few" college bowl games the rest of the day. Of course, I managed to take a few cat naps, and snacked way tooooo much.

Around 10am on Sunday we bid our farewells to our gracious hosts and headed home. As we pulled on to our home street in Ontario we commented to each other that in just a few weeks we would no longer be going home after a trip, but now fulltiming in our beloved Newell home!!!

A Happy New Year to all of our readers! Thank you for reading!

Sooner than we thought.....

You just never know when things are going to go in a different direction! I've been writing for some time now that our target date for beginning our fulltime life was the fall of 2011.....not that far away....for Elaine retirement happens in September of 2011, and October for me....yes I did marry an older woman...haha!

For the past few months I have been examining our budget and how to pay down our remaining short term debt. It became obvious to me a few months ago that with the number of months left until we hit the road, our current income level (which for me has declined due to the economy since 2008) that we would have to eliminate a big chunk of our monthly overhead to get those debts zeroed out by October. One of our children has agreed to rent our home beginning February 1st, so that means we will move into the Newell permanently February 1st. Elaine and I will continue our respective jobs as planned until the fall, but eliminating the mortgage payment, and household utilities will free up a significant amount of money monthly so that we can finish paying off those nagging balances.

Wow, the future is NOW! We've got less than 6 weeks to clear our home out, and reorganize our STUFF that currently fills around 2,000 square feet, to fit in less than three hundred square feet. Fortunately we started the process last January when we cleaned out the garage attic, and storage areas, so I feel a lot better about the prospects of finishing in the next few weeks.

There are a lot of emotions coming at me like waves on the ocean. I thought I was past this part, but apparently the idea of moving out was still far enough away in my mind that I hadn't focused on the reality of actually moving out of our home of 26 years........for good. I have processed this intellectually, but it is obvious that the emotional part is yet to be processed.

Nevertheless, Elaine and I are both very excited about the change coming sooner than later, and spent a couple of hours this morning talking about what needs to be done. She is a great organizer, and seems to have all the steps laid out in her mind, so I will just line up, receive my daily instructions, and proceed with style.

Stay tuned for more frequent updates now that our move in date has accelerated!

Thanks for reading....

Other adventures....

Del Mar, CA.....across PCH from Del Mar Racetrack

Like many of you who follow our blog, our identity is not defined soley by our love of RVing. We have other interests that add to our identity. One of our numerous interests is bicycling, and to further that descriptive, multi-day self guided bicycle touring. We have been planning for a number of months to do a two day tour with a college days friend starting at the AMTRAK station near Angel Stadium in Anaheim, CA (yes, near Disneyland, also) and finishing at the AMTRAK station in downtown San Diego.

Terri, our good friend from our college days, was scheduled to arrive at our home in Ontario, CA November 11th, and she did. She lives in Northern Nevada, so it was about a 9 hour drive for her.

Our plan was to drive down to the AMTRAK station located in the parking lot across from Angel Stadium (baseball Angels) in Anaheim. We left home around 8am, and arrived in Anaheim around 8:45am, starting our ride around 9:45am. As always there were a few mechanical issues with the bikes that had to be resolved....one was a flat tire on Elaine's bike....inexplicable since the tires and tubes were brand new....oh well, so much for plans to depart the train station at 9am.

We proceeded over to the Santa Ana River Trail that runs parallel to the Santa Ana River all the way to Newport Beach, CA about 14 miles south. The bike path is completely separate from local roads, and highways. We hit PCH (Pacific Coast Highway) around 11am, and proceeded south through Newport Beach, Corona Del Mar, Laguna Beach, Dana Point, San Clemente, Camp Pendleton (Marine base), and Oceanside to our destination for the evening, Carlsbad, CA. The distance for that first day was 68 miles, and we made it just before sundown at 4:40pm!

Dana Point Warf, Dana Point, CA

We ate lunch in Dana Point at Proud Mary's located in the Dana Point Warf area where we joined some friends who have cycled with us in the past, Ted and Eileen.

Ted and Eileen (below) to my "right", Terri to my "left"

In front of Beach Terrace Inn, Carlsbad, CA

View from our balcony....

We had a nice evening in Carlsbad, CA staying overnight at the Best Western Beach Terrace Inn, and dinning out at a local Italian Eatery (Fresco's) located on Carlsbad Village Drive just below Carlsbad Road.

We departed the next morning around 8am heading south on PCH to our final destination for the day, San Diego....40 miles away. The day was spectacular.....sunny, cool, and no clouds. We passed through Leucadia, Del Mar, Solana Beach, La Jolla, and finally arrived at the downtown San Diego AMTRAK station around 2pm. Before arriving at the station we stopped at an In-N-Out burger place in Northern San Diego for lunch! Our return ride would be on the Surfrider and it was scheduled for departure at 3pm. We chose the Surfrider as they have bicycle racks on each car that can handle up to 3 bikes....exactly the number we had! Their cars look a lot like the Metrolink commuter trains. There was a delay of about 45 minutes as the train arrived late from Los Angeles. We arrived just after sundown in Anaheim.

In line at the San Diego AMTRAK station

Our 3 bikes at San Diego AMTRAK station

Home for now.....

Our trip home was pretty uneventful, and, as usual, a little bittersweet. Each time we leave on one of our Newell adventures we jokingly say as the trip nears it's end...."why not just keep going for a year?"....of course reality hits, and responsibilities we must maintain for another 11 months, or so, intrude, and we head home. The day when we leave home for good and begin our endless summer is less than 11 months away for Elaine now.

After loading the T-Bird, securing the bicycles, and putting away the few things we had put out while in Santa Fe I turned the key around 9:30am to fire up the big Detroit, and, while it turned over strong, would not fire. It got very cold last night...probably into the high 30's, and I should have turned on the block warmer when I got up. So, I turned it on now. Took about 40 minutes for it to get warm enough, and it then fired right up. We finally left Santa Fe Skies around 10:20am on October 15th, pointing the Newell south on I-25. The weather was cool, and clear, just as it had been for previous 6 days. Our tentative goal for the day was Holbrook, AZ. We had driven by Holbrook many times over the years, but never even got off the freeway.

As we neared Albuquerque the signs for I-40 westbound began to appear. We transitioned smoothly from I-25 to I-40 and then began a 60 mile climb to 7,300' elevation, before descending back down to Gallup, NM. We stopped to top off our fuel just over the Arizona line at an Indian owned truck stop called Speedy's that seems to have the best diesel price between Albuquerque, NM and Kingman, AZ....we paid $2.91 (cash price) on our way east, and $2.94 on our way west. From there it was a quick 72 miles to Holbrook. We arrived in Holbrook around 3:30pm, parking in a local supermarket parking lot for about 30 minutes while we decided whether to push on to Flagstaff, or call it a day......"call it a day" won out, and we quickly checked into the OK RV Park located about 2 blocks behind the supermarket. This is another nice overnight park...good strong WiFi, level pull through pads, which were about 100' long....more than enough for our 60' length! The staff was courteous, fast, and efficient.

We had one filet mignon left so I pulled out the BBQ (Sea-B-Que, a marine grade BBQ made by Dickinson Marine.....http://www.dickinsonmarine.com/bbq.html) and cooked it to a beautiful medium rare condition.....combined with a nice salad, and some Pinot Noir.....mmmmm!

Our goal for Saturday was Kingman, AZ, only 238 miles west of us. Our "plan" was to get there late afternoon, and park either at the local Walmart, or Cracker Barrel until about 3am, and then push home to Ontario in the cool of the early morning. We arrived in Kingman around 3pm, and found an empty parking lot a block away from the Walmart in a Medical Plaza, which was not open on Saturday. Much more privacy than Walmart, or Cracker Barrel. Shortly after leveling, setting up the Satellite to watch a few college football games, it began to rain with lightning and thunder for about 2 hours. I'm glad we were stationary for that display! I took an hour nap, finished reading a book, while glancing up once and a while to see some of the game. Around 7pm I suggested to Elaine that I was wide awake, so why not press on now for home, and stop when I got tired. She agreed, and we broke camp. We basically descended on I-40 all the way to the Colorado River where we began a long, long, long climb that seemed to go on for an hour. Finally, around 10pm, as we approached the Kelbaker Road exit (one of the gateways to the Mojave National Preserve), I decided I was tired, and needed a nap, so we pulled off, crossed Kelbaker to the on-ramp, and parked on the shoulder of the onramp. I laid down for what I thought was a 30 minute nap, waking up over 3 hours later at 1:15am. As we merged back on to I-40 I realized our adventure would be over in around 3 hours....we arrived home to Applewood Drive around 4:20pm, parked, and hit the sack.

What an amazing 9 days! Looking forward to retirement, and being on the road for a couple of years. We never get tired of living in our Newell. It is so comfortable, and easy to live in!

Thanks for reading....tune in again for our next adventure over Thanksgiving. Don't know where we are going, but go we will!