Day 76, 77,78,79, 80, 81: Shut down time for the Rig

Monday
We have spent the last six days cleaning and cleaning the truck and trailer, inside and out, so that we can put it into storage and hopefully return in march to a clean and ready to go rig.
Everything has more or less gone smoothly, our daily pattern was breakfast, clean for a couple of hours, go out for a coffee or shopping then rest or visit the pool in the afternoon. The only exception Being Thursday, as that was Bingo Night at Royal Palms, so we made plans to visit it with them, and they remembered us from last year!
Sunday we wen to the First Christian Church on 7th Ave, which we had visited last year at Easter, we received just as warm a welcome and enjoyed the service, which was looking forward to Thanksgiving.
In the afternoon Sally and I went for a steak at the Texas Roadhouse, which we also enjoyed very much, Sally even got up and did a little bit of Line Dancing with the serving staff!!!!!!!!!

Our Flight to Oakland

Monday we carefully put the rig into storage in Royal Palms and were taken to the airport by one of the dear residents of the community, who is also willing to pick us up on our return in march, so at least that is organised.
With very little hassle we boarded our plane and flew west to Oakland Ca, arriving safely at our dear friends Debra and Rich, who have kindly allowed us to visit with them for our last week and Thanksgiving.

Day 74: McLintock and Stillman Railroad Museum

Monday.
Weather was again beautiful on Monday, so after allowing Sandy to do some washing we packed our lunch and drove off to the McLintock and Stillman Railroad Museum in Scottsdale, East Phoenix.
We had visited there Easter 2013, but were happy to return as we had enjoyed it so much. Sandy was ecstatic. We investigated the Forty and Eight Merci Train Boxcar, we rode on the small train round the park, we visited the railway museum and stood in the Presidential Pullman railcar (one of only six ever made).
We then spent some time looking at the three enormous model railroad layouts on display. Sandy rushing from one scene to another oohing! and aahing! like a little kid (which I suppose we all did), marvelling at all the little model cars, trains, houses and scenery that were on show.
All too soon it was time to go home, so we drove with the drive time traffic, stopping at Denny's on Camelback for dinner. We had all had a lovely day, which we hoped was especially good for Sandy.

 
Tuesday
Today we had to take Sandy to the airport and bid farewell, though none of us were prepared to say it was for the last time as we are sure that we will meet up again some time in the future, somewhere.
Thanks for a great, but short, week with us, which we will treasure for a long time.

Day 71: Wickenburg Bluegrass Festival

Wickenburg is a small town that lies to the North West of Phoenix, also just East of Quartzite, it doesn't appear to have any natural attractions, but it fights hard to get people  to come to the town. This weekend it has its 35th annual bluegrass festival. It is housed on the rodeo ground, which has a lot of sand. We are placed just outside the main arena, which is where performances take place. The festival is a combination of professional acts and competition for instruments and singers. Top of the list this year is the Dry Branch Fire Squad, sort of hokey band from Kentucky, interesting lead vocalist/mandolin player who has lots of homespun humour and stories.
We have spent sometime playing music with our friend Sandy, who is staying with us, but not felt like joining in jams on the campground - maybe tonight.

Day 70: The Girl with the Lemon Lift

Thursday
Today we moved on to Wickenburg from our very pleasant stay at Lake Pleasant. Our friend Sandy joined us on Tuesday and on Wednesday we relaxed. We went back out on to the marina on the lake, to Dillon's, for our mid morning (12.00) drink. Sandy had tea, I had coffee and Sally would have had earl Gray tea, but they had none. The only thing the very pretty waitress had was a Lemon Lift, which I thought was quite impressive. In the afternoon we sat in the shade of our trailer and played some music, which was a lot of fun, though we are all very rusty.
As we are packing up today I noticed the arrival of a couple of single engine planes, they look like second world war Mustangs (P81's?), they converged in the air space over our campground and proceeded to chase each other in what looked like a mock dog fight. After a while it was obvious that there were more than two, in fact four of them were chasing around the skies. I thought it was quite impressive and managed to get a couple of photos.

Day 68: Grrr! and Great

Tuesday
I guess you can't expect everything to always go exactly to plan, especially when you are living a sort of nomadic life and your environment is constantly changing as you move around. So I suppose we have become used to being fairly flexible, in fact I try to build flexibility into the decisions we make. Sometimes this drive Sally mad, as I say, "Well we could do this, or we could do this, or if we want we could do that", however sticking to a plan can be disastrous. So when changes to your bedrock activities happen it can throw you. Having said that the change that happened today was not dramatic, but very frustrating. Since we started travelling in 2007 I have tried to keep a blog going, and found that Google Maps has been the best way to show where we have been, or where we are. In 2011 Google, in it's wisdom introduced changes to the mapping programme, far from being an improvement it made showing a route, with a number of stops, quite difficult to do. It also limited the number of stops you could enter onto one map, unless you purchased the 'Pro' version, which considering my background philosophy towards the Internet and the fact that it didn't do what I wanted it to do in the first place, meant that there was no way that I would BUY into the mapping programme. Fortunately they left the old mapping system running, calling it the 'Classic Maps', so I was able to keep the maps going. UNTIL TODAY!!!! I went to modify the map for our current blog only to find that it had been changed to the now mapping system, and looked awful, and I couldn't edit it, and kept getting the message that the map was too big and I needed to switch (buy,at $5 per month) to 'Pro Maps'. Not only that but all the maps I had drawn over the years had all been switched to this new system. There was no explanation for this, it just happened. After a frustrating hour I tracked down that this was actually a change made by Google, not some error on my or their part. Well I just did not cope with this and found that I was repeating Sally's mantra of 'Why do they keep changing things, why can't they leave these things alone?'
So I am still continuing to discover that my views are not at all important to a business like Google, that having something work quite well (not perfectly) is not good enough, they have to be able to monetize it(as though they don't make enough money anyway).
So what have I learned from this, First I now need to find another mapping system that will do the job that I want done and secondly to reconfirm that while we have the illusion that we are in control of our lives (destiny) very small changes in the tide of world affairs can make that illusion painfully ephemeral and remove that control. In this case it was a small change in Google's business plan, but it could just as easily be change in policy for say American Visas, travel insurance (this will happen next year, when we hit 66 years old). A small fall, a drift across the white line on the road. All the time these things don't happen we are fine, but round every corner, at every turn is the potential that will change our lives completely and ultimately .............
So final thought on that is to give grateful thanks that we have remained in sufficient control of our lives to be able to do so much.
The GREAT part is that despite a small hitch with the planes our friend Sandy had arrived and we have collected her from the Sky Harbor airport in Phoenix and we have returned safely to the trailer, so we are looking forward to a great week together.

Day 66: Lake Pleasant

Sunday
We packed up from Krazy K and took a gentle ride (mostly downhill) to the outskirts of Phoenix, where we took a turn to the West on to R 74 to get to Lake Pleasant, a Maricopa County Regional Park, based round a reservoir in the middle of the desert.
At the junction of R74 and I17 we stopped to pick up  supplies and have a cuppa. we had the choice of Starbucks inside Albertsons, a nice posh coffee shop, or a donut place. Inexplicably drawn to the donut place we had a look in - it looked kind of basic, but on asking they did Earl Gray Tea, so in we went. So this donut place worked a bit like Subway - except with donuts. They cook your donut from scratch, while you wait, they add all the toppings and fillings you want, then you can eat it with your drink. Possibly the best donuts we have had since coming to America!!!!
A quick shop in Albertsons then off to our prebooked campsite, which we were relieved to find was big enough, not overlooked, had a shelter over the picnic bench and also had a view of the lake. Hope it will be a nice place to be for a few days.

Day 65: Montezuma's Castle

Saturday
We are staying at Krazy K RV park in Camp Verde, just off I17. It is one of the nicest RV parks we have stayed in. Plenty of space, nice grounds, laundry room (yes we have done laundry today). Yesterday we had a great day in Sedona, today is chillout day. SO having done the laundry we had a visit to Montezuam's Castle,  which is just about 3 miles up the road.
N.B. Montezuma's Castle has nothing to do with Montezuma -by  an Aztec Ruler in the 16th Century, who was defeated in battle by Hernan Cortes, a Spanish conquistador. This has given rise to the colloquial name for tourists to mexico who contract diarrhea - Montezuma's Revenge.
Montezuma's Castle is an Anasazi cliff dwelling built in around 1200 A.D. when this area was an important trade route crossroads. The buildings are similar to those found in a number of places round here, as well as the Mesa Verde cliff dwellings 250 miles to the North East. They indicate that the people who lived there were relatively advanced, but like Mesa Verde they had disappeared completly by around 1400 A.D.
We had a very pleasant time wandering round the area, talking to a few people, we found a guy called Harry, who was a whizz on the Indian flute. After talking for a while we found out that he lived in a trailer about 6 sites up from us at Krazy K!
After our visit to Montezuma's Castle we returned to Cliff Castle Casino as Saturday night is their $15, all you can eat, Prime Rib Night, where we had another excellent meal.