Junipers Reservoir RV Resort
We arrived here at Junipers on the 30th April, ready to take up duties as camp host. With just a day of briefing, we took over on Tuesday, 2nd May! To be fair, our mentors Glenn and Caite stuck around pretty much the whole week to dig us out of several holes we created for ourselves.
Here are some photos of the place, mostly sans RV’s (early in the season). Freaking gorgeous.
Glenn & Caite’s Truck Camper is on the right. Our little trailer is in the middle.
View to the East, and the Junipers Reservoir itself
Evening view of the empty campground
View from our trailer
Journey, continued
We have no pictures of the rest of the journey to Lakeview, OR, but a few comments about it may be amusing:
We woke up to a furious dust storm in Death Valley, so we headed out as soon as we could. West, up the hill to Beatty, NV, a long climb with strong winds from the North, but at least we got out of the dust.
From Beatty, we headed North on Highway 95. into the nightmare headwinds from hell. Fueling in Tonopah, we calculated that our fuel usage had dropped to 6.5 mpg!! This stretch was not particularly uphill, but it felt like a 10% grade all the way due to the winds. For reference, our mpg almost never drops below 12.
Things (relatively) calmed leaving Tonopah, and we got to our overnight destination in Hawthorne, NV – Whiskey Flats RV park – which was pretty good for an overnight stop.
Next day, the winds had died and we had an easy time, north to Fernley, NV via Alt 95, and then back onto Hwy 395 in Reno – what the heck is this – Big City! The last overnight stop was at the Days End RV park in Standish, CA, which was actually very good indeed.
Next day, Sunday, 30th April, we got back in the saddle one last time and headed North again. The landscape became more and more pastoral, leaving the desert behind.
Heading North Again
The plan is to make our way to Junipers Reservoir RV Resort and start work-camping on May 1st.
So, this is day 1. First thing we cancelled our internet connection with Spectrum, as we’ll be away 4 months. Not unexpectedly this caused all email that used their servers to fail, which isn’t much as we’ve both long ago moved to gmail addresses.
We got to the trailer storage later and hit the road around 11:30 am. We had previously decided to make today a short run, so we just headed up I-15 to San Bernardino County’s Glen Helen Regional Park as the base of Cajon pass, about 110 miles.
On the way here, a jerk cut us off so closely, we had to brake really hard to avoid the vehicle. The 18 wheeler semi truck in the next lane in front of us must have seen the idiot’s behavior, and as the offending car, ‘undertaking’ the semi, got about halfway alongside, and the semi just pulled into jerk’s lane, forcing him onto the shoulder. Yay, vindication!
It’s a good park for an overnight stop.
But it’s awfully close to both I-15 and the railroad.
Borrego Springs Superbloom
Actually, it’s been superbloom all over San Diego, and still is. Welcome rainfall over the last weeks has wakened up all of the wild flowers.
But in the desert, when most of the time nothing has much of a chance to grow, it’s astonishing that all of these flowers poke their heads up out of the sand.
Enjoy.
Just a little note
Just in case it isn’t clear – you gotta do it now.
There was an absolutely super guy, let’s call him Bill, principal person at our trailer storage place. He was so friendly, helpful, personable, ready to chew the cud, ready to lend out a tool, run a water hose or an electrical cable, or even ignore someone (us?) running water into storm drains after washing the trailer.
He adopted his daughter’s daughter when his daughter ran into drug problems. He continued to love his wife after her extravagance lost him his home in WA. He came down to San Diego, and worked for minimum wage at two jobs, just to keep things going.
Between them, his family had arranged a move to Palm Desert, and it went well. His adopted daughter (grand-daughter) previously home-schooled because of some vicious racism hereabouts, was beginning to do well there. He planned to retire there in a year.
His wife suffers from cancer, and is/was undergoing treatment.
And then he effing died, in his sleep, of a heart attack, on February 20th. Age 65.
And everything has come crashing down. His wife has had to miss treatments, and hasn’t enough cash to pay the mortuary. His buddy, a police sergeant, bought his his elderly F150 truck and newish motorcycle at premium prices to help out a bit.
Dunno if wife and daughter have enough income to pay the mortgage in Palm Desert. I’d guess not.
And think about the daughter, she’s about 16 and delightful. It looks like she’s about to be ‘abandoned’ by her second family, if her adoptive mother doesn’t survive without treatment.
Bill, at least, apparently had his affairs in order.
I cry. I grieve.
I’m not asking for donations.
Just
Do it now.
That’s all I’ve got.
That was weird
Having worked for the requisite period (30 years) in the UK, I (Simon) have paid enough money into the UK state pension system to have earned a full pension (which is not very much, by the way). Because I started taking this pension 2 years after I was entitled to it, I was offered an increase in the stipend or a lump sum.I chose the lump sum.
Cutting a long story short, these pension payments arrive at the Bank of America and get transferred to the San Diego County Credit Union (because SDCCU somehow can’t receive payments from overseas). This is fine, usually, as I can use the SDCCU online tools to transfer the money when it arrives, but today, the lump sum arrived and was too much in value for the online tools to work.
So, I sez to B ‘let’s just go to BofA, have them cut us a check (cheque) and drive over to SDCCU and deposit it.’
You would have thought it was just that easy, but no!
BofA wanted to charge us $10 for the check! You read that right, they wanted to charge us for accessing our own money. The teller sez, ‘you can always just have cash’. ‘OK’ sez I. So they counted out all these $100 bills using the fancy machine, and then B and I counted them by hand and put them in a couple of now fat envelopes. So then I thought ‘this is so bizarre’. In a connected world, we should just be able to click a thingy on a web site and transfer the money, but now here we are, like some old time western outlaws, counting money and driving across town with it.
Even more bizarre was arriving at SDCCU, they double-teamed when they manually counted the cash twice. It just felt like a scene from a very bad movie.
Otay Mountain
So John emails us all, Howie, Bruce, Victor, Charlie and I to propose a group offroad motorcycle ride up Otay Mountain in South County. John says it’s an easy ride, and offers to lend his Yamaha TW200 to me and his Yamaha XT-250 to Charlie, as neither of us has a dual-sport capable bike. John and Howie have Kawasaki KLR650’s and Victor has a stable full of bikes, but it turns out that his Suzuki DR650 wouldn’t start so he brought the Suzuki 650 VStrom with road tires. Bruce brought his Suzuki DR400. Howie couldn’t make it.
Long story short. Loaded the KLR 650 and the XT250 on a rack on the back of John’s Jeep Liberty (boy, was it overloaded!), and the TW200 and DR400 in Bruce’s Tacoma. Victor just rode there as he lives around the corner.
John handed me the TW200, which I had ridden before, but that was a long time ago, and without any practice time, set off up this dirt road up the mountain. Triggering my ‘heights’ phobia. And some uncertainty as to where important things like the brake levers and gear change controls were.
Despite me being ‘slowpoke’ all the way up the mountain, the views were spectacular, even though it was cloudy:
Otay Lake
And up even higher at near the summit, a view to the East
So, then we headed down towards the East. By this time, I was feeling more confident, and not so much of a drag on proceedings.
We took a right turn at a T, and later found ourselves at a gated stop. Turning around, we headed back towards the T, knowing that direction led to Hwy 94 a little east of Dulzura.
But, disaster loomed. On the way, John hit an edge and his front wheel went out from underneath him and he went over the bars to the ground, hurting his wrist, big time.
I and Charlie happened to be first to the scene, and we helped John get the bike upright, and tried to get him to chill out for a while. But no, he had to get back on the bike, which he did, and so, off we went. Lunch at Rubio’s in Rancho San Diego and then back to John’s, unloading all the bikes, trying to make sure that John’s wrist wasn’t stressed.
It turns out that X-rays showed the injury to be a bruise, and that’s a huge relief.
What a great day 🙂
A Computery Reflection
We just got a couple of new smart phones. They’re Nexus 5X’s, for what it’s worth, which isn’t very much.
But, were it not for the rest of our infrastructure, the experience would have been very different.
I’ll try to lay it out:
For the longest time, we’ve been RoadRunner cable internet customers at 15 mbps down and 1 mbps up. A few months ago, we got upgraded to 50 mbps down and 5 mbps up (for no increase in price). Then, just last week, and I don’t want to go into the details, we became Spectrum (nee RoadRunner) customers, and for the same $40 a month, we got 100 mbps (actually 120) down and 10 mbps (actually 12 mbps) up.
Aside: so we’re nearly up to the connection speeds enjoyed in South Korea.
This change alone has transformed the little business that I do. It involves uploading huge (by my standards) 10 to 20 Gigabyte files to a server located 20 miles or so from here. At 1 mbps upload speed, it’s not a viable option, and I have to drive those miles with a thumb drive and have the techs do their stuff, and drive home. At 5 or 12 mbps it’s easily doable on line. I miss the social aspects of that, but it certainly saves huge bunches of time (and therefore costs).
Around the turn of the year, we got both a Microsoft Surface Pro 4 and, as a result of the fact that the Surface Pro 4 does wireless ac, a new Asus router that supports wireless ac. Nearly Gigabit network speeds for that Surface, woohoo! (Except that I bought a Surface dock, and it’s currently connected via wires…)
Our current phones were Motorola Moto E 2nd gen. Locked into Android L(ollipop) and no (despite promises) prospect of upgrade, it was getting tiresome, icky and slow to have to deal with the 2.4 G wireless N connections and general slowness of communication. We live in a condominium, an everybody here has a 2.4 Gig wireless router. There are literally dozens of them, according to wifi survey. So that band is choppy and unreliable.
So, bring on the new phones, with 5GHz ac connections. Holy cow! The phones were delivered with Android M(arshmallow), and within seconds of connecting to the network were downloading Android N(ougat). An hour later, we were done, including installing new apps. This was Gigabytes of new stuff.
What’s the point of this message? That you need the rest of the stuff to make your phone experience sweet and fast. A good and fast connection to the internet and a router that does dual band wireless 5GHz ac makes a huge difference.
Trip Wrap-up
Saturday (yesterday), we headed out on 395 South towards home.
It wasn’t that we were homesick, not at all, but we’d run out of viable options from where we were.
It was no fun driving south, hefty side winds from the west meant 100% driver concentration.
Adelanto was, as usual horrible for congestion, but at least no worse than we’ve experienced.
We stopped for a packed lunch and fuel fill up halfway down the Cajon pass and set out on the last 130 miles or so to home.
I-15 was its customary snarl-up through Corona (we’ve tried I-215 many times, and it’s always worse than I-15).
The rest of the way was unremarkable, except that the water heater door became detached, and we’ll probably have to buy a new one, as it is rather bent!
When we got to our trailer storage, the lovely lady who fills in for the main guy said she’d been following along on this blog. That’s kind of nice. 🙂
Stats:
Tow vehicle did 4,543 miles at an average 14.9 mpg.
Trailer did 3090 miles.
It looks like both tow vehicle and trailer are in line for major service, including fixing leaks.
Oregon is freaking beautiful. California remains dramatic.
Where next? Probably south of the border into Mexico.
Edit: Thursday 13th & Friday 14th October
About 5 am, I heard what sounded like strong wind, and thought ‘Oh, no, here we go’, thinking that the storm had arrived ahead of time. So I says to B. ‘should we get up and get out here?’. She says, sleepily, ‘No’.
But we weren’t going to go back to sleep, so we got up, and cleared out of there before dawn, on what turned out to be an utterly windless day!
Between Reno and Carson City the sun came up:
And so, on down Owens Valley, we passed lots of fall color scenes like this one:
<Edit>:
Long drive up and over the top to Bridgeport and then through Lee Vining and past Mammoth, then off the hill and down.
We stopped in Brown’s RV Park in Bishop for one night. Unremarkable, except that a brand new Lance 1685 was parked alongside. Lovely people, Jeff & Karen.
The following day, </Edit>
It was only a short trip to Lone Pine, and Boulder Creek RV Park, where they put us in the ‘overflow’ lot, rather than the main campground, which made a rather long walk to the facilities.
After a lazy lunch in town, we did little but relax. B. took pictures of the clouds:
Which later became riotous:
And then the sun set – this picture is completely untouched. Wow:
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