Life on the road

Wednesday October 3 2018

We started exercising again yesterday at Planet Fitness. It’s a very nice clean facility and it has not been crowded at all in the morning. This is in contrast to our home gym in Myrtle Beach where mornings are the very busy. Surprisingly I pretty much picked up where I left off before we left. Millie is also going at the same pace as she did at home. I thought we would have softened some with the time off. PS: The gym is still; painful and not very much fun at all. Even though I try to exercise regularly, I have not become a gym rat. I only go because I have too.

Yesterday afternoon I repaired our hot water heater. It is powered by propane or electricity and the control board for the propane operation had failed. I ordered the part and had it sent ahead to Palm Springs. Instead of sending it to the campground, I used the new Amazon option of sending it to a secure locker. After your item is placed in the locker they send you a code number to retrieve it. I will use this again when traveling; it eliminates all the worry about lost shipments. Another nice feature is, if for some reason you cannot retrieve your package, after three days it is returned and you are refunded.

My next repair is to our onboard generator. We have dash air conditioning we use when driving down the road, but switch over to the generator whenever we stop along the way, Wal-Mart, lunch, etc. Most of the time it is very dependable, but every so often it will not start. It acts like it is not getting fuel; we’ll see what we can find out today.

Palm Springs aerial Tram

Tomorrow the last of the clouds from tropical storm Rosa will have passed and we plan on taking the Palm Springs aerial Tram car from the Valley Station (2643 feet) to San Jacinto Peak (8516 feet).

I almost forgot this story. Yesterday after we left the gym, Millie asked me if I saw the man collapse in the gym.

Me: No, I hadn’t seen that.

She said they called 911; paramedics came, worked on him, and hauled him away to the hospital.

Me: No I didn’t see any of that.

Millie further said, he was the man that was wearing gym shorts like yours with the green stripe, but he had on a yellow shirt and his shoes were……and his hair was…….

Me: No I didn’t see him.

Millie, he was the man that was cleaning out his car when we walked across the parking lot.

Me: No I didn’t see that either.

There are two possible explanations for this disparity. One of us is far more observant than the other or when we walked across the parking one of us entered some kind of time-space warp and we were not in the same gym at the same time. I’m going with the second choice!

Palm Springs

Monday October 1 2018

Today was a driving around and getting the lay of the land day. There are about 6 to 8 towns that run together and collectively make up the greater Palm Springs area. 

Coachella Valley

It’s an interesting place; there are large tracks of semi arid desert mingled in with the commercial or residential sections. Residential areas seem to be divided between manufactured home communities and high end golf course enclaves.

All new communities are walled and gated.

 All of the high end golf course communities are walled and gated. The walled communities are immaculately landscaped with lush tropical trees, shrubbery and green grass. 

Typical manufactured home in greater Palm Springs

In stark contrast, the manufactured home communities have crushed stone yards with bare concrete driveways. Landscaping is native plants that don’t need a lot of water. Every so often we’d see a homeowner who had a small patch of grass but we never saw a complete yard in grass.

Downtown Palm Springs

The downtown business district is busy; the only empty businesses we saw were ones being demo’ed to make way for redevelopment. One project is a live/work town center that is renewing an entire city block. BTW, this whole valley is low rise, I don’t think we saw a building over 3-4 stories. Downtown Palm Springs is decidedly 50’ish, lots of Art Deco architecture, many cocktail lounges. It’s easy to imagine the movie icons of that era hanging out in these places.

Would we want to revisit the Coachella valley, No. Would we recommend it to y’all, not unless you can afford to play on the golf courses.

Sedona to Palm Springs

Cottonwood Arizona to Palm Desert California (350+/-)

Sunday September 30 2018

Out neighbors in the campground, obviously new to camping, started their vehicle up at 4:30 am and let it run as they noisily prepared to leave. They departed at 5:30 and by then we were wide awake so we decided to leave too.

Coming home from Prescott yesterday we came down a miles long steep decline. Knowing we would be going up that mountain this morning we decided to give the motorhome a break. Millie drove the truck and I the motorhome, we stopped at the first rest stop we came too beyond the mountain, hooked up the truck to be towed and ate breakfast. 

Millie at the rest stop on I-17

I decided to follow Amy the GPS this morning. She took us past the first loop around Phoenix, then past the second loop and continued straight down into town until we intersected I-10. It is Sunday, traffic is light, I didn’t make a fuss about it, but I’m watching her!

It was an easy run west on I-10, There were some mountains, most of them off in the distance. Most of the drive was in a desert. As we were leaving the Phoenix area there were signs along the road advertising tracks of land for sale, the surrounding desert looked about as dry and useless as could be. It reminded me of the  land salesmen in the old movie, GlennGary GlennRoss. For a hundred miles or more we saw nothing but desert. As we neared Palm Springs we descended into a valley and saw civilization for the first time since leaving Phoenix.

Arizona desert.

Our campground for the week is another Thousand Trails facility. This one was a disappointment; it could be a very nice place if they fixed up the sites. The worst thing is the sand spurs, they are everywhere. It is impossible to walk a dog here.