Settled in Milton Freewater, Oregon

Posted on June 26, 2026 by Jim@HiTek

May 31st, 2026 – Moved my RV from the nearby Raspberry Loop RV park to my daughters house!

I have parked the RV in the side yard and began to slowly move my stuff from the RV into the house. My daughters SO Scott wasn’t much on staying persistent with home repairs and improvements so there are a lot of nagging issues that invigorate my ‘fix-it’ nature. But first, before those stories, a few pictures of my new digs…

Parked the RV in the side yard, already have had 2 quotes on installing an RV pad…$8900 & $12,500. I’m not sure I want to put in something permanent like that though.

Home was built in 1962 and it’s in fairly good condition but as usual there has been deferred maintenance I’ll need to catch up on. But it’s June now so plenty of time before winter to work on things.

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Adventures in being there…

Posted on May 21, 2026 by Jim@HiTek

Last post, I went from Tucson to Quartzsite to Preferred RV in Pahrump. 

Arrived in Quartzsite March 15th. Had my usual Silly Al’s pizza. Couldn’t find any way to pay for the night at the RV park so that was free. Random guy said the RV park doesn’t care so next morning headed north to Pahrump. I’ve stayed there occasionally over the years as it’s so close to Silly Al’s.

I stayed at Preferred RV Resort from 16th of March until the 4th of May. Didn’t take a single photo as I’ve posted 10’s of photos of the resort and Pahrump in the past. Really didn’t do much but stay home, watch TV and monitor the weather up north along my intended route to Milton-Freewater.

Eventually the weather warmed up enough that it was looking good along the entire route with just one overnight spot showing near freezing overnight. I have tried traveling this route with two nights layover but I am not in a hurry so these days I make it a 3 night trip. I’ve got my favorite places to stay and I’m a member of Preferred RV Resort in Pahrump so my expenses are low. As a member for instance, I pay $350/yr for the privilege of a guaranteed RV parking spot and then it’s $4/night for 35 nights followed by $17/nite thereafter. If I count the yearly fee into the first 35 nights, it comes out to $14/night. Pretty cool savings as from then on for the rest of the year it’s only $17/nite for members. I’ve been a member for 10 years I think? Stop there 2X per year for a month or two. They have all sorts of amenities like a swimming pool. And they have a carpenter shop available.

Stayed in Pahrump waiting for the weather to clear up on the northbound route to Milton-Freewater. My big concern was snow on the roadways and there were two big storms up that way dumping some snow along my route. I stayed in Pahrump until May 4th. I didn’t do much as the weather wasn’t always agreeable.

Anyway, after staying there for a month, the weather finally warmed up enough for me to continue north and I took some photos because, well, I just love these huge valleys. I did stop in Beatty at the candy and nut place and got $50 of sugar free candy. Sorry about the bugs on the windshield but I got them off in Battle Mountain.

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And on into Spring…

Posted on April 22, 2026 by Jim@HiTek

Last time, we visited the AF aircraft boneyard in Tucson, then I showed some pics of John’s cactus blooming. It wasn’t long after that that I decided to head north. The inducement to head north was because I’ve been monitoring the homes for sale up around my stomping grounds in Oregon and there were 2-3 homes I wanted to visit during the poor weather conditions up there, before the prices rise. So on the 15th of March, started my trip heading northerly.

This year, instead of taking the all freeway over to Quartzsite route, I wanted to take the back road to Ajo first, then up to Gila Bend. So headed west on AZ86 direct to the town of Ajo where the highway turns north. And here’s what it looks like on the highway just a few miles west of John’s place on Ajo Way. Lots of open land, some of it BLM land with a small community development occasionally along the way. Small cluster of buildings usually surrounding a fuel station and cafe and then a smattering of homes nearby in the desert. Passed through Why and it’s interesting in the number of large industrial buildings along the highway. Didn’t seen any corporate signs indicating what types of businesses though but there were lots of large machines with wheels.

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Visit to the aircraft boneyard…

Posted on April 11, 2026 by Jim@HiTek

As mentioned previously, there is another aircraft display in Tucson…the Airplane Graveyard.

This has morphed over the years into a restricted military base where they scavenge parts from older aircraft retired from military service to use on still active aircraft. Up until a couple years ago, this site allow public tours in buses around the site. They stopped doing that as it’s now full on military so I couldn’t get any pictures from inside the fence, only from the roadways outside of the site. I’d hoped there’d be a road on a hill overlooking the site but no such luck.

Anyway, here’s some not so good shots from the ring roads. First a few shots of leaving John’s place and some shots of the drive through Tucsons. The outskirts mostly.

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Wrap up of the Pima Air Museum…

Posted on March 26, 2026 by Jim@HiTek

This is the wrap up of our tour of the museum. It’s such an interesting way to spend the day. 

There are hundreds of airplanes to gaze at, bringing back memories of the toys you had as a kid and the planes you rode in your youth. So, here we go with another batch of pics. And we’re back inside another large building. There are 5 of these buildings scattered around the grounds. Inside there are the occasional docents that can give you a run down of some individual aircraft which is interesting.

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More from the air museum…

Posted on March 19, 2026 by Jim@HiTek

Continuing from last post, returning to our visit to the Pima Air & Space Museum.

Here’s a few older sea planes.

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Air Space Museum….

Posted on March 12, 2026 by Jim@HiTek

A bit late with this post, but as promised last time, this will be mainly about our visit to the Pima Air & Space Museum. The place is so big with thousands of interesting exhibits and air craft that I’ll probably break the posts into three parts.

With that said, first a link to their website; Pima Air & Space Museum 

After you’ve perused that, we’ll start with our own visit…

Several odd looking aircraft on display, along with engines showing the various methods they used back in the day with air cooled radial engines.

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Wayback Machine…

Posted on February 13, 2026 by Jim@HiTek

Back in late Aug. 2025, went to the Milton Freewater Street Fair.

I forgot my camera so I used my new-to-me Motorola phone with it’s 3 lenses and fancy-schmancy photo taking setup and settings. Well, when I got home, I couldn’t figure out how to get the pics transferred to my PC so I can post them on my blog. Tried to get them downloaded several times after that over the months but I gave up and also over the months have taken many additional shots with my phone and finally, just the last couple days worked hard to figure out how to get them downloaded to the PC like a normal human/machine.

First problem is with the phone’s magical type of formatting. Turns out that a user MUST use a special cable, USB – USBc standard connectors but somehow the cable is special. Of course I hadn’t read about that when I first got the phone but when I did a google search about it, finally discovered that little quirk IN FEBRUARY 2026! Rooted around in my cables until I found the cable that came with the phone. It worked! So, finally solved that issue.

Second problem was the formatting was changed several times when I was messing with the phone’s settings on-the-fly and wouldn’t download the pic if it had a certain format…the bytes would be zero when others would be over 1 M bytes. Since my PC had problems with many of the pics and wouldn’t download I had to ‘Share’ each problematic pic to my email address and save them that way. Over 30 photos, one at a time. Grrr. That was a few days ago, and yesterday, suddenly it worked to download all 125 photos from my phone to the PC. And I didn’t change anything.

Well, anyway, it ended up since all those problems that only yesterday I finally figured out how to download all the pics, edit them (reduce them to 800X600), and in the downloads I found this set from back in late August and I’ll be posting them today.

We go back to Aug. ’25 and the Milton Freewater Street Fair that they hold every year. I just wandered around the streets like a bozo and took a bunch of random shots while playing with the phone’s camera features.

Fire engine water carrier on display and since it was hot, they’d set up a misting system for everyone.

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January ’26

Posted on January 31, 2026 by Jim@HiTek

John and I enjoy going out to local bars that have food to sample what’s offered.

And we do that once, twice a week. We have our favorites from years past and tend to visit them instead of seeking out new adventures. I posted pics of them before so didn’t take any new ones this trip. I still want to visit the Nike missile museum but haven’t made it yet. Soon I think.

And of course it was time to make a Tamale Pie. I can get 4 meals out of this.

Good for a quick meal when there’s a game on. Just pop a section into the MW and 5 minutes later, dinner.

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Dec-Jan’26

Posted on January 5, 2026 by Jim@HiTek

Didn’t spend much time in Quartzsite…just one night. That did give me time to get a pizza at Silly Al’s though. Had pizza for dinner and then cut the giant pie into 3 & 1/2 more meals to freeze. It’s a freakin’ delicious pizza. Fresh, spicy meats, crunchy peppers and onions, tasty olives. Yum.

And then it was time to head to Tucson. I have stayed at my friend’s place there as a paying guest at one of the two built RV spots just down the hill from his home. But this year I was going with a purpose, and that was to help him improve the electrical in his garage. He knew I’d done some electrical contracting like 25 years ago and wanted my help with his setup.

It only takes 3.5 hours to get there so it was a lazy driving day. Left the RV park at 11 and just enjoyed the scenery…such as it was. But then, off in the distance, around 45 miles from Phoenix, found this wreck…

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