01-26-2016 Little Glitches and A Scary Moment

Current Location: Ogilby Road Boondock Area Winterhaven California

Writing requires thought, concentration, getting into the past rather than the present moment.  I love writing, for me it is therapeutic, creative, fun.  Except when I am trying to write and lots of other stuff is going on.  Might be the reason the best writing shows up when I can’t sleep, and the posts are finally finished at 3AM.

I don’t have that luxury this morning.  We are boondocking in the well recommended Ogilby Road area, with a wonderful campsite review by Nina that helped us to find our way after yesterday’s mixup.  But then, I have yet to write about yesterday’s mixup.  More about that later.

For now, though, without the luxury of an expensive solar setup, I can only use the computers when the generator is running. Our laptops don’t have a very good battery life, so they need to be plugged in for any kind of extensive time online.  Nina was right, though, our Verizon MiFi has five full bars here. I am trying to write while Mo is cooking breakfast for us, Daughter Melody is messaging me about some plumbing issues at the apartments, we are trying to track down the last person who worked on them, and figure out how to handle it all.  Doesn’t make for good writing time.

Mo is also trying to get the TV to work again.  Every time we turn the satellite off, (when we turn off the generator) and then back on, we have to find the satellites again, and Direct TV seems to think it has to download the “guide” again, and even though the satellites are connected, the receiver can’t seem to “acquire”  Crap!  so much for a touch of news with breakfast during our morning one hour of generator time. 

This is why this post is all about “stuff”.  I have to get the stuff out of the way before I get to the good parts.  We had amazing days with our Tucson friends, lots to write about there!  We enjoyed a fabulous hike once again when those same friends joined us at Catalina State Park for a day. I can’t concentrate on writing about all the lovely times and great things we did when dealing with distractions!

I am the one who does most of the detailed planning for our trips.  I use the same tools we all use, Streets and Trips, Google Maps, blog recommendations, Google Calendar.  The Calendar is my lifeline, and I also have a hard copy printed out with all our plans on it.  Which is why I can’t for the life of me figure out how I thought four days at Catalina State Park would start on Sunday night and end on Friday morning.  Ha!

Mo and I were feeling a bit stiff from our killer hike with Wes and Gayle on Wednesday, thinking how great it would be to have a lovely down day, doing nothing but some nice low key walks with the dog, maybe enjoy another great shower in the biggest shower stall we have ever seen, read in our chairs in the sun, maybe write a little and process photos from the previous two days.  Perfect plan.

Our tanks were a bit full, since I had been entertaining guests, I used a bit more gray water than normal and we decided to go dump the tanks a day before our Friday departure.  Around noon we unhooked the MoHo and drove the short distance around the loop to the dump.  Love that dump, it has a perfect angle and we get really good dumps here.  Keep that in mind if you come to this park, the main dump near the entrance doesn’t have nearly the great angle.

While we were finishing, a young woman came by asking when we planned to get out of our spot. “Tomorrow morning” I replied.  “We have a full four days reserved and paid for”.  She was sweet, and said oh I am sorry, they must have made a mistake.  We laughed until a few minutes later the ranger came up and asked us again about our reservation.  UnOh.  I said, we have four days, and he said yeah…four days ends today at noon.  Geez.  I still don’t know how I managed to screw that one up!

Mo and I were both incredibly embarrassed, and finished our dump in record time, went back to the camp and loaded up.  We both have certain tasks that we do, nothing set in stone, but it just works out that way.  Mo unhooks the satellite, I am the one to turn on the key and raise the jacks after the slide is in.  We were working quickly.  I turned on the ignition key, hit the store button for the jacks and suddenly heard a whomp and a yell.

I had no clue, and opened the door saying, “You OK?”.  No, Mo was NOT OK, she was in a heap on the ground where she had landed.  Thankfully she didn’t break anything, and today only has a few bruises.  She was standing on the step unhooking the cable when I turned on the key, and that automatically retracts the outside step.  Mo said that she was frantically trying to get off the step and that having it suddenly disappear was a very weird feeling. Needless to say, she wasn’t that happy with me at the moment.  Too many glitches!

The ranger was incredibly nice to us, considering our screwup, and explained that he was so sorry, but there were no other sites available, as I said before this is a popular park and reserved far in advance.  He did have a one night no hookup site for us, but we thanked him and said never mind, we wanted to go to Yuma anyway.

Mo remembered to fill our fresh water tank, our holding tanks were empty, but in the rush, I forgot to add the gallon of water and black tank chemical to the toilet.  Our total time to shut down and pack up the rig, and get out of our site was 17 minutes. 

We hooked up the Tracker and followed the same route out of town that we took into town.  With just half a tank of gas however, I needed to find some of that really cheap gas in Tucson.  Bypassing the major part of town, however, also bypassed the really cheap stations.  We were happy to find fuel for $1.53 (with our RV Pilot/Flying J card 3 cent discout) at the Pilot on I-10 just before our exit to the 8 toward Yuma.

It was late enough in the day that I was concerned that it might be dark when we reached Olgiby Road, so didn’t stop to refuel as we approached Yuma, didn’t think we had time.  However, with only half a tank of gas, that gave us only a quarter tank for whatever generator use we might need in the desert.  Plus, I had completely forgotten that we would be in California with gasoline a lot higher price than back in Arizona.

So.  We are here.  We have plenty of fuel for running the generator, since it takes way less than a gallon an hour and we have at least ten gallons available. We never got our great showers yesterday, and my hair looks like some birds could be nesting there. Hopefully I have finished raving about all the glitches and when I start up the generator next time I can write a nice newsy post full of pretty photos and good stories about our wonderful friends and the great time we had in Tucson this week.