The Sandcastle

This is making the rounds of the blogging world. You are invited to participate.

TTYL,

Linda

A Bloggers Centerline Day, or ABCD, will take place on Sunday 1st May 2011.

The plan is to inspire as many bloggers as possible to go outside and take a photograph of themselves on this day, wherever they are in the world. The photo can be creative, arty, contain more than one person, be in any type of location and can contain anything else you like. It must however contain the centerline of a road and at least part of you, the blogger.

There are 5 rules….

Rule 1 – the picture must be taken on 1st May 2011.

Rule 2 – the picture must be of yourself, and you must be a person that publishes a blog. You can include whatever else you like in the picture, including other people if you wish.

Rule 3 – the picture must include the centerline of a road.

Rule 4 – you should publish the picture on your blog on 1st May 2011, along with a few words about the picture and why you chose that location or pose.

Rule 5 – when you have posted the picture on your own blog, put a comment onhttp://garysusatour.blogspot.com/2011/04/abcd-will-you-take-part.html and include in that comment the address of your own blog post containing your own picture.

Gary France will then pick his favourite photos and publish these as being the winners. There will be a prize of $100 awarded to the overall single winner, as chosen by Gary.

In order to get this event known as widely as possible, please copy and paste this posting onto your own blog, including the title. Please do that today!

As a reminder to yourself to take the photo and post it, put an entry into your diary for 1st May 2011.

Let’s see if we can get as any people to join in as possible.

I’ve been working on my California Public Park Camping listing. It has nearly 550 campgrounds now. Since this is the time of year many people plan to travel that huge state I decided to upload what I have even though the spreadsheet is not nearly complete.

If you are reading this posting through a reader you will not see the public parking page. You must go to the full page to see the listings at the bottom of the right hand column.

I hope this helps at least some of you plan your travels this Spring and Summer.

TTYL,

Linda

We arrived at this RV park last Sunday afternoon to be greeted by these signs:

So Dave walked over to the red box…

…where he found what looked to me like a CB radio handheld microphone.

The guy on duty soon showed up and checked us in.

Here we are looking down the road in front of our “campsite” as Dave unhitches the car so we can back into our site.

And here’s our site and our view after parking of our neighbor across the street:

Ah, yes. All the comforts of home.

Hey, we have water, electricity, and sewer with some shade thrown in for a bonus and our air card works just fine. We even have atmosphere–look closely under our neighbor’s awning and you can see the Colorado river flowing by. What else could you want?

TTYL,

Linda

We’ve spent most of the winter in Arizona but it’s now getting hot here so it is time to move on. (OK, technically we’ve been in California a whole bunch of the winter including these last three weeks but everyone thinks of this park as being in Parker, Arizona, to the point that it’s even on Arizona time.)

Today we will move to Needles, California, where there is another park belonging to our membership camping system for us to check out. We can stay there for up to two weeks for free but how long we will actually stay depends on several things. The first, for us, is how strong an internet signal we get; must have our daily connection, you know. The second is what the weather does there; we’ll move on if it gets too hot. The third is scheduling of future stops. This is prime snowbird migration time so we may actually have to make reservations for campgrounds we hope to visit.

From Needles, we’ll move west. We want to spend some time at the joint Southern Pacific/Santa Fe Railroad’s Tehachapi Loop. We saw it when the driver was taking us to Nevada to deliver this motorhome but there was no way to convince him to stop so we want to go back and really see it this time. And we may drive over to Caliente to see what’s there now. The La Mesa Model Railroad Club, http://www.lamesaclub.com/, is modeling that entire stretch of railroad and when we were at the club many years ago I played the part of the Caliente Operator at an operating session. It might be nice to see the place where I spent a day. 🙂

From there we hope to go visit the Escapees’s Park of the Sierras co-op RV park. We’ve heard rave reviews of it from friends. And we have a discount coupon allowing us to stay there for a week for $48! That’s quite a bargain.

Our next proposed event is at a Segway dealer in Oakland, California, where we hope to either repair or sell my Segway. I did get right back on it after my fall but I never regained my confidence in it so I seldom ride it now. A friend (Hi, Bruce.) sent me a link to a folding travel scooter  I may buy to replace the Segway if I can sell the Segway for enough to justify the exchange. You can check it out at http://www.travelscoot.com if you are interested.

Then we’ll get on US Highway 101 and head north. Right on out of California again.

Of course, all of this is written in chalk to make it easy to change but that’s the plan. For now.

TTYL,

Linda

We’ve been having trouble staying under our 5 gig a month limit on our data downloads through our Verizon air card. Millenicom offers 20 gig a month for less money and uses primarily Verizon’s towers to do it. So, Dave decided we should change.

We now have another new air card. This is the third one in three years. Sort of like our motorhomes. 🙂

So now that we have such a big limit, Dave asked if we should try streaming video. Our Netflix account lets us do that at no extra charge.

We started tonight by watching two episodes of a ten episode TV series. We connected Dave’s computer to the big screen TV for the video output. It sort of worked.

It was like watching You Tube on a big screen. The player was faster than the download so it kept stalling. I think next time, unless we are somewhere with a much faster connection, we’ll download the whole thing first then watch it. We didn’t even have any commercials to watch while waiting for the program to resume. 🙂

We don’t know yet how much of our 20 Gig we used watching the two episodes. Depending on how much it used, it may take us awhile to see all of the program.

Is this better than waiting for our next movies to arrive in the mail? The jury is still out on that question.

TTYL,

Linda