Catching Up

It’s been a week since I posted here. Yes, we are fine. I’ve just been too busy reading and doing other things to write. I have lots of new websites and blogs I am following and they take more time than I had anticipated. Plus, we are now in La Posa LTVA near Quartzsite, Arizona, where the Escapee Class of ’08 will have our graduation gathering so we keep having visitors. It’s fun meeting other class members. But, yesterday I didn’t finish my “morning” computer stuff until 5:20 p.m. Part of that is we don’t have the high speed connection we got used to having so every download takes longer.

Here’s some of what we’ve been doing for the last week.

We finally made a departure checklist and started using it. It helps. We don’t always do everything in the order listed but at least we get everything done. I print them from my computer. The first day we make a check mark by items as we complete them. The next day we turn that check into an X. The third time we use them we circle the X. The fourth time we cross the item off. Then I print new ones and we start again. I need to print some today.

WalMart has their online prescription refills system relating to my prescriptions as messed up as I had feared and we were not able to get the pharmacist to straighten it out. We couldn’t make her understand that what we see on our computer is not what she sees on hers. She insisted they are all there on hers so I should be able to see them all on mine. Maybe next time I’ll bring my computer into the store to show them what I see.

In places, I-8 runs so close to the border with Mexico we could see the fence. It’s pretty ugly.

There’s a rest area in the Imperial Dunes Recreation Area.  Here’s the dunes and some dune buggy riders.  The border fence is just on the other side of those dunes.

Nearby is the BLM LTVA field office with lots of people boondocking near it. That would be a safe place in spite of being this close to the border because it is so well patrolled.

Going up S24 toward the Imperial Dam LTVA area we passed lots of farm fields. If I tell you the products without adding proper punctuation we get, “Lettuce date lemons.”

Imperial Dam is one of those places where you can met friendly people. One guy told us there would be a parade of decorated vehicles about 6:15 and another told us there would be Christmas Carol singing at 6:30. We didn’t realize this place in California is on Arizona time so we nearly missed the parade and did miss the caroling because we were eating supper then. The parade went by too quickly to get decent photos but here’s the best one we got.

And here’s what camping at the North Mesa area of the Imperial Dam LTVA looks like in December.

Lots of elbow room but lousy Internet. We checked out the Coyote Ridge area but it was much the same. So when we went into town to buy groceries, I talked Dave into going north on Hwy 95 to La Posa LTVA instead of S24 back to Imperial Dam LTVA. S24 is lousy driving; we actually saw them plowing the mud off that road. And La Posa is closer to a town so the odds of getting good Internet reception are better there.

We went through our first Boarder Patrol road block check. The guy looked in our window, asked if we were both U.S. citizens, and waved us on. It wasn’t nearly as interesting as I thought it might be.

We are now at the class graduation site, protecting it from non-class members until someone else from the class comes to relieve us. That’s probably going to happen Sunday. Our whole class writes our plans in chalk so we can erase them easily. Apparently, we’re all commitment phobic. I think it’s mostly that there so much new stuff for us that we don’t yet know how to plan where we’ll be when. We make lots of plans, we just don’t follow them very well.

We had Christmas dinner here, just the two of us. We had turkey, potatoes & gravy, and cranberry sauce. The pumpkin pie was not edible. We need to learn how to use our convection oven.

Other than the pie, life is good.

TTYL,

Linda