Apr 11th - Sightseeing Day

We took off today and went sightseeing. We went over to Bodega Bay, up the coast to Jenner and back home through Guerneville, Rio Nido & Forestville.

While out on the “ocean overlook” at Bodega Bay we spotted two whales “blowing” but didn’t actually see the whales. There was a guy out there with his thermos full of coffee, a lawn chair, and very warmly dressed. He had a button on his hat that said “Whale Watcher.” We talked to him some and he said he had seen a pair of whales blow about 30 minutes before we saw ours. The ones we saw were maybe a mile north of where he saw them and he was pretty sure that they were the same ones.

The photo below is looking north along the California coast, while on the ocean outlook.

The next three photos are looking back at Bodega Bay. There is a channel between the buoys that show in the center and bottom photos. The rest of the area is tidal flats. When we went out to the outlook there were LOTS of people out searching for crabs.

There is a campground out on the peninsula in the above photo. I thought it might be cool to move the RV down there for a couple of days. We won't do it because when we leave here we will head north for at least 250 miles and find a place to spend a few days before heading on up to the Portland, Oregon area and the next camp where we will volunteer.
Below is a photo of some of the shoreline at Goat Rock Beach. There were supposed to be sea lions there but we didn’t see any. There was lots of nice sandy beach and we did talk a walk on the beach. I can’t imagine how this P&H crane got there.

From Goat Rock Beach we drove over to Armstrong Woods Redwood Grove. It is the only place in Sonoma county that has old growth redwoods and that is open to the public. (In California the counties are LARGE. There are only 58 counties in the entire state. Sonoma county is almost 1,800 sq miles.) We took a nice hike on the trails to see a couple of the more famous trees. Walking though the timber there is like walking through a fairy land. Below is a photo of me in front of the Parson Jones tree. It is the tallest tree in the Armstrong Woods. It is 310' tall, 13.8 feet in diameter and approximately 1300 years old.

Below is a photo of Kathy in front of the Colonel Armstrong tree. It is 308' tall, 14.6 feet in diameter and approximately 1,400 years old.

The trees are actually larger than they look. We were both over 10 feet in front of the trees for the photos. You are not supposed walk off the pathways so we couldn't actually go back and stand next to the trees.

Below is the route of our day trip. We travelled about 70 miles. We left around 9:30 and got back to the RV around 4:30. The weather was beautiful.

April 9th - An AWESOME Day

It was beautiful here today. The high was a sunny 72 degrees. Tonights low is supposed to be 46. The forecast had said that rail was possible today, glad it was wrong. Rain is in the forecast for the rest of the week.

I found a highly recommended place to take our RV furnace and have it cleaned. The place is in Santa Rosa, maybe 15 miles from us. We will drop it off Wednesday before we spend the day sight seeing. At least that is the plan.

Kathy did some light cleaning today and went in to Sebastopol to buy groceries. She made me the Salsa that I love. I will be chowing down on it for an after supper snack. We are at the Dining Hall now, on the Net, and waiting for the campers to get through the food line. We are supposed to be having pizza tonight.

I cut the flooring (3/8" plywood) pieces and fit them for the bathroom floor. The big piece is glued and nailed down but I ran out of glue and didn't get the two small pieces fastened down. The people at the camp have some special paint they want to use to paint the plywood. For now that will be the finish floor.

Good evening to all. May God bless you and yours.

Apr 8th - HE IS RISEN

We left home about 8:15 AM Saturday and headed towards Drew’s in Oakland. We stopped at the Walmart in Rhonert Park to pick up Kathy’s prescriptions, which delayed us maybe 15 minutes. We arrived at Drew’s about 10 AM.

He gets more “moved in” each time we visit. The bookshelves are now well loaded.

Outside things are blooming. His plum trees has small plumbs on it. Right now they are about the size of big olives. The rose “bush” that climbs trees has lots of roses on it.

It had some when we were there but nothing like now.

We think we made good progress on his “chicken coop”. We got it to the point where he needs to do a little more planning on how he wants to arrange the nesting and roosting areas. The nesting area will be on the “shelf” that we were using as a bench. I think he plans to put a feeder and waterer under the shelf. I think the plan is to have 3 chickens.

We ordered supper from a local carry out. Kathy and I had different types of cheesesteak sandwiches. Drew ordered fish, enough so that we shared them. Enough french fries came with the fish to feed 6 people. We also had two different types of chicken wings. My cheesesteak sandwich was very good, as was the fish and the fries. Kathy & Drew said the wings were also good.

We arrived back home just after 9 PM and got to bed around 11:30.

We got up this morning at 4 AM. I had ham & eggs for breakfast and left at 4:40 to walk down to the sunrise service parking area, I needed to be there by 5 AM. The first car rolled in at 5:10 AM. By 6:15 there were several hundred cars parked in the grass lot. At 6:10 it was still dark enough that I could still quite easily see at least one star. Most of the cars/trucks were loaded with people. I was told that in the past most people walked the road/trail “up the mountain”. There were 3 four wheel drive crew cab trucks and a four wheel drive SUV ferrying people up the mountain. They filled up the backs of the pickups, as well as the cabs. I think more people rode than walked. Kathy was a trooper, she walked up. I caught a ride up in the next to last truck that went up. I had not been up before and was glad I didn’t walk up. One of the guys had told me that it was a 15 minute walk. Kathy & I walked down and I bet it took us at least 20 minutes to walk down. The road/trail is so steep that when coming down you are constantly concerned about stepping on several loose stones and having your feet go out from under you. These photos don’t come close to giving you an idea how steep it is. I took them from the same location. One is looking up the road and the other looking down.

Kathy was sure it was below freezing while we were “up on the mountain.” I don’t think it was that cold, but it was cold. It was 36 when I left the RV to walk down to the parking area. Weatherbug says that the overnight low was 34.

The sunrise service was good. We could look down and see the lights of Santa Rosa, about 15 miles from here. We got to watch the sun come up, over the mountains to the east, during the service. The view was beautiful.

Over 300 people came to the Dining Hall for the free breakfast. They served scrambled eggs, smoked sausage, french toast, biscuits, sausage gravy, cinnamon rolls, cookies, cereal and drinks.

We got back to the RV around 8:30. When we stepped in we commented on how warm it felt. It was 58 degrees inside.

Kathy is napping and I might do the same before heading off to the Dining Hall to post this. Chris Bebe, one of the local volunteers, invited us to their home for Easter dinner but we are going to stay home and “veg”.

I ended up taking a nap also. After my nap I took the furnace out of the motorhome. It needs cleaned, especially the combustion chamber. (The furnace is the size of an old desktop computer) You have to completely dismantle it to clean the combustion chamber. I didn't want to get into that so tomorrow I will call a couple of RV places to see about taking it to one of them to have them clean it and bench test it. You can't even see the burner viewing window when it is in the RV.

Yesteday, while at Drew's, I started sending out "feelers" to camps in Oregon. We think it will be time to move north in another couple of weeks. I already have a camp in central Washington that wants us to come volunteer but want to find at least another camp somewhere between here and there.

Happy Easter to all! The Lord has risen, for all of us who are willing to accept His free gift. May God bless you and yours.

April 6th - Scrapped Frost This Morniing

I had to scrape the frost off the windshield this morning. It was 34 degrees out when I got up (and 54 inside). It was also cool Wednesday night, 36 degrees. Some day it will warm up out here in sunny California and we will head further north.

Yesterday was kind of a non-day, I guess it was a rest day. Kathy had felt poorly on Wednesday. Whatever she had she either passed it along to me or it just took me a day longer to get the same thing. It was nothing serious just felt run down and a little nauseous at times. I did feel good enough yesterday evening to go back to the Garden Grill in Guerneville. We both had half pound hamburgers this time. I had regular fries and Kathy had the Parmesan-garlic fries (she shared). The hamburgers were good. When the waitress brought them to our table the juice was still running out of the hamburgers and onto the plates. You definitely needed a napkin or two handy while eating one of them.

I’ve been fighting with Express Scripts over getting prescriptions refilled, AGAIN. I ordered the refills on March 24th and they still aren’t here. Our insurer pretty much forces us to use Express Scripts, and Express Scripts knows that we are captive customers. The concept of customer service is totally foreign to them. Yesterday afternoon I finally thought that I had them straightened out and then, after crawling into bed, I had the horrible thought that I had only told them to use Mt Gilead for my temporary address until the 7th. Based on ESI’s past performance (if we can screw it up we will) I was afraid that they would send the refills to Crossville, TN, our permanent mailing address. Since cell phones don’t work well here I crawled out of bed, got dressed, drove down to the Dining Hall so that I could get a WiFi connection and sent them an email telling them to make sure to send the refills here. I just checking, online, and it appears that the refills have actually been sent to Mt Gilead. Thank you Jesus!

This morning I had breakfast at home, no campers on site so no meals at the Dining Hall, and then went to the Dining Hall to get on the Internet again. Tate & Lyle had sent me an email saying that I needed to take an online class on data security. Since they pay me to do them I went to the Dining Hall logged on and did the class. To go through the class, take the easy test and read the 12 pages of accompanying documentation took me an hour.

I then went up to Haven, the single wide house trailer where I’ve been working on the bathroom floor, to get to work. I set up saw horses, pulled out the 3/8” plywood that I am to use for a “finish floor”, to get it ready to cut. First I did a little more trimming at the hole for the sewer pipe and then got the pieces of plumbing cut to fit to connect the new toilet flange to the sewer. I took one of the pieces of pipe down to the shop to so that I could get a good square cut on both ends. There isn’t much space to make joints in the piping so things have to be close fit. On my way back Frank flagged me down to see if I wanted to work on the new stop sign today. I said sure, it was a nice day.

Frank had the tools so I got them from him. He also had the location marked on the asphalt. I did a partial depth saw cut in the asphalt and then jack hammered out the asphalt, with an electric jack hammer. (It really wasn’t a jack hammer, just a really big hammer drill) Rocks and roots made digging the hole something of a challenge but Frank only wanted it to be 20” deep so that made it a little easier. I got the redwood 4x4 set and Frank held it plumb while I filled in the hole and compacted the dirt. We found some old asphalt cold patch, broke it up (which wasn’t easy) and did the best we could putting an inch or so of asphalt at the top, to match the surrounding pavement. We don’t have the new stop sign yet so we drug over the old one, and set it back up for now.

By the time I got the post set and cleaned up our mess it was nearly 4 PM. I went back to Haven put things away, loaded my tools in the CRV and came home and took a shower. I will sleep good tonight. We old guys get tired out easily, at least this old guy does.

Tomorrow we are supposed to leave here around 8 AM, drive to Rhonert Park to pick up some prescription refills at Walmart for Kathy, that has also been a fiasco, and then go on down to Drew’s to work on his chicken coop.

I’m a volunteer traffic director for Easter sunrise service so I’m supposed to be down at the parking area (at Mt Gilead) no later than 5 AM Sunday morning. After the sunrise service the camp serves breakfast. They typically have around 400 people for breakfast.

Good night to all and may God bless you and yours.

Apr 4th AM - Still Here

Pretty much same old same old going on here. The past two days have been mostly sunny but today looks like it is going to drizzle rain at least part of the day. It had not started when I walked down to the dining hall 90 minutes ago but things are now wet outside.

Just got my plate full of pancakes and sausage for breakfast. Yesterdays menu was scrambled eggs and potato cubes for breakfast, hamburgers for lunch and pizza for supper.

Kathy is still cleaning and doing laundry. Washing sheets is a never ending job here.

I spent two hours splitting wood Monday afternoon. You have to have a "safety person", and since Kathy was to busy to watch yesterday, I didn't split any more. I enjoy it, if I only have to do it for a couple of hours a day. The stuff I'm splitting splits well. The only small problem is that the sections are HEAVY. After lifting the first four of them up and splitting them I set the splitter upright and quartered the big pieces. After that it was much easier to handle the smaller sections. I much prefer running the splitter in the horizontal position so, after breaking the large pieces up, I returned it to the horizontal position to finish splitting them to size.

I finally totally finished the trim around the Education building door. The camp has a "Carpet Pool" game, the table is similar in size to a bar shuffleboard table. The table is carpeted, mostly to keep down the noise. Kids roll pool balls up and down the the table. I don't know how they score the game. The carpet is shot and I've torn about half of it off. It was glued and stapled. I spent hours yesterday pulling the 1.25" staples out of the half where I have the carpet removed. At this point people can look it over and decide what they want to use to replace the carpet and I have time before I need to get the other half off.

They got plywood for me yesterday so today I'm going to piece back in the 5/8" plywood subfloor I removed from the bathroom and then "finish" the floor with 3/8" plywood over the entire floor.

Time to get to work. Have a great day and may God bless you and yours.

Apr 1 - Guereneville

We met Drew for lunch at the Garden Grill outside of Guereneville. It was about a 20 minute drive for us and a 90 minute motorcycle ride for him. I think he was a little chilled by the time he arrived.

The food was good. Kathy had eggs benedict, Drew had a caesar salad with chicken and I had the fish and fries. We also ordered a side of their garlic parmesan fries. Drew has been there before and claimed that they were worth the motorcyle ride. They were good.

After lunch we went back to town, the restaurant was a mile or so out of town, and walked up and down the main street. It was a very enjoyable morning. The sun was out and it had warmed up into the high 50's. You can see photos of downtown at
http://www.guerneville-online.com/photogallery/mainstreet.htm

After our walk we stopped for dessert at an ice cream place. They spoon out hard ice cream into this screw type machine, add whatever you want (fruit, candy, etc), and when the screw extrudes it from the machine it is completely mixed and almost like soft serve.

I bought both a San Francisco and a local Sunday paper. Once Kathy and I got back home we set out in the sun and ready the papers. She took a walk after that but I just vegged.

Thank you Lord for a very enjoyable day.

Good night to all and may God bless you and yours.

PS. I am actually able to use my phone as a WiFi hotspot, at the RV, today. The connection is slooooooow, but at least I have a connection.

April 1st - April Fools Day

I wonder if we are the fools this day, or at least if I am. It was 39 outside when I got up this morning. It was 58 inside the RV, great for sleeping but a little chilly for a morning shower. Over the past couple of weeks you folks back in the midwest have been experiencing far warmer temperatures than we have. Next winter I plan on staying in Texas/Arizona until at least mid-March, before even seriously thinking about moving north. The forecast for the next week in Tucson is highs in mid 70's and lows in mid 40's, with lots of sunshine. Almost perfect weather.

It rained, off and on, again yesterday. March 2012 will end up being one of the top 10 wettest March's on record in Sonoma county. March rainfall in Santa Rosa was 7.51", the average March rainfall is 4.53". This is good for residents because February was one of the driest. After what is being called the "March miracle", water supplies will be reclassified as normal today, before they were classified as critical. Average high/low temps here this time of year are supposed to be 69/44. We have only been slightly below the average lows but we aren't even close to 69 for an average high. The highs have been in the low 60's, at best. Today's forecast is partly cloudy with a high of 62 and a low tonight of 39.

We went to the Walmart in Rohnert Park, about a 45 minute drive, yesterday so that Kathy could refill a couple of prescriptions. That turned out to be a joke. After two stops at Walmart, an hour apart, she is going to have to drive back tomorrow to pick up the prescriptions. Even at that they could not refill one because is was some kind of "controlled substance" and was written by an out-of-state Doctor. Don't you just love all the damned government intrusion that we have to live with, and that continually gets worse. She probably could have bought the "controlled substance" from Drew's neighbors, and not even needed a prescription.

Between the trips to Walmart we went to a small oriental restaurant for lunch. It was one of the better meals that we have had in CA, and reasonably priced. We were going to go to Costco, which is within a mile or so from Walmart, but the crowds were so bad that we just came home. There wasn't anything we needed from Costco, Kathy just wanted to go. She can go when she goes back tomorrow.

I am down at the dining hall this morning, to post this and to have breakfast. This morning was pancakes and sausage links. As always there was fruit, cereal and oatmeal.

Today we are meeting Drew in Guereneville, about a 20 minute drive for us and maybe a 90 minute motorcycle ride for him, for lunch.

Good day to all and may God bless you and yours.