Chaos Leaves Town

I’ve added some pictures that were taken at Lone Pine and I didn’t get uploaded last time…enjoy!

These neat boulders were rounded by glaciers and then plopped into an upright position…

Dan takes a rest…

It was getting dusky but Mt. Whitney there in the background came out pretty nice…Dan has backpacked up to the top.

—Vegas Trip During Xmas

After Dan & I returned from Seattle, we left the next day (last Wednesday) for Las Vegas. I don’t gamble much but this trip Dan was able to get me into craps for a while…I was up $125 and he was up a couple hundred before we left to go to another casino…where we proceeded to loose all of our winnings plus. I lost $100 and that was enough. Next day I just watched the football games on the big screens while Dan lost another couple hundred. If any of you are going to be in Vegas soon remember where they got the money to build the casinos.

Since there doesn’t seem to be anyway to eliminate the Spam from the comments on this site I’ve turned them off. There isn’t any easy way to delete them all at once either…I have more then 30 pages now and I had to go to each page and delete the spam instead of a ‘Comments’ page that would allow simply deleting of all or some of the comments all at once. If you want to comment please use GoblinBox Rants. Thanks!

I’ve attached some pics of our trip. They are kinda fuzzy and it’s the same kind of camera as mine only it has 3.1MP and mine has 4.0MP…

OK, here are some more pics from our trip north. The rocky place is outside of Lone Pine, CA. You may remember it as being the place where literally 100’s of movies have been made. It took me this long to get the pics up because our Uncle Lew passed away and Dan and I drove to Seattle to attend the funeral. We left here (Rosamond, CA) Friday around 9am and arrived at Paul’s house Sat. morning. On the way, we learned that Maria in Walla Walla, a family friend of 30 years, had passed away from brain cancer. I’m truly going to miss her and our visits together. I was lucky enough to have been able to give her a couple trips around the countryside in my RV.

Saturday evening in Seattle, we went to one of Paul’s friend?s houses and Dan and Paul played several hours of poker with friends. Both of them lost money…Dan around $100 and Paul lost $60 in gift money (new father gifts). Sunday we just lounged around or went shopping so Dan could buy some presents. Later we had a great time trying to find studs in the wall so we could put the dartboard up in Paul’s daylight basement game room. In my spare time, I got Paul’s home network up and running on wireless equipment.

Monday we went to the funeral and listened to Lew’s kids and friends describe his life. We all admired and loved Lew…

Tuesday morning we left for CA and arrived here at 2am Wed. morning. Don’t want to travel in Dan’s car again…way too uncomfortable, the seats are too stiff, the heater is skit so, the wipers clatter, the steering is way too tight, it’s too noisy, etc. I’ll try to stick to travel in my RV in the future.

Now that we’re back here in CA, we’ll be heading off for Las Vegas tomorrow for a few days with Dan’s roommate so they can gamble. I’m not much of a gambler myself, I mostly just dabble, so I’ll be wandering around the town most of the time.

Bye!

There’s my RV off in the distance…

This is a shot of my brother Dan walking off into the distance trying to find another place on the map. We didn’t. The map shows where various movies were filmed.

Thanks to Mush for helping me get these pictures up on the blog site!!

Northwest corner of the lake.

Notice the big black mound in the middle? That was underwater before LA started stealing the H2O. It was a cinder cone from 12million years ago. Notice the snow in the foreground. But it was a comfortable 64F or so.

Swinging the camera to the southeast.

Even farther around to the southeast…

These are spring created spires in the southeast area of the lake that were formed underwater by chemical reaction of the spring water with the highly basic water in the lake…table salt and baking soda. They will be back underwater in a few years as the lake fills. We only saw one working spring in the area though.

About a week and 2 days ago, I left Gresham, Oregon for points south. I got to the Flying J gas station around 10am and tried to fill up my propane tanks for the fifth time at that station. That day they decided that they couldn’t possibly fill my tanks because there is too much rust on them. W-t-f? They had done it 5 times before! Idiots.

Anyway, since the tanks were 3/4 full anyway, I got my diesel tank topped off and headed down the road. Got to Ashland (yes, where they have the world famous Shakespearean festival every year) around 7:30. There was a downpour going on and I found a waterlogged RV park just off the freeway. Turned out to be filled with hippies and the like. Since one of them had decided to park in front of the space I had rented for the night, it took almost a half hour to be parked right (with help from staff). All night rain came down in sheets pounding on the roof and woke me up at least 4 times.

Next morning I took a walk around the place and found that they also had an organic veggie garden goin’ on. There is also a natural hot spring that feeds their large pool (smells of sulfur) and many damaged ‘improvements’ that were in various stages of completion. Turned out that last year they had a flood that put all their work under several feet of water. Kind of put a halt to improvements for a while. Speaking of water, when I checked in, the counter guy didn’t mention that the water provided at the faucets wasn’t drinkable. Sure glad that the babe helping me park the rig mentioned it. I was going to fill my drinking water tank.

On my way out of Ashland, I went to the nearest gas station and was able to fill my propane tanks without a word about the rust…and it cost me $17 more then if the asshole had done it in Gresham. Butt head.

Headed on down the road (I-5) for another 12 hours until I reached Mohave and my brother’s house in Rosamond. Naturally, he has a house on a steep hill so I’m not able to keep the RV here, I have to park it about a block and a half away on a flat stretch of road. The refer stops working if you put the RV on an angle of 12 or more degrees.

Dan took Friday off and we goofed around for the day doing some yard work he needed done. Then on Saturday we took off in the RV for points north on the 395 hiway. Up into the Sierra Nevada mountains. The road goes past a ghost town (closed for the season) that would have been fun to visit, maybe next year. Further up the road we stopped at Fossil Falls, an ancient river falls, empty now, that must have been pretty cool after the last ice age. It was too dark to take pictures.

Around 8ish we started looking for RV parks and came to one that had an empty space but the office was closed and there were no ‘late arrival’ instructions or means to leave money. Also no ‘assistant manager’ that we could find and the empty space we found needed a fuse from the manager to get any electricity. So, off down the road again. Around 9, we found a RV park that seemed open, had an empty office but did have a map showing where we could park. We bashed through a snow pile, parked, hooked up to electricity, and watched the Zulu movie until bedtime. The space had electric but no water or functioning cable. The place look deserted…none of the trailers around us were occupied. Next morning, found that the public toilets were closed for the season, the office was still empty, and the late arrival payment mailbox had no envelopes. So I dropped a buck in the box and hit the road. Hey, I didn’t get water, cable, sewer or use of the toilet facilities so I figured all it was worth was a buck.

Dan’s lived in this area for years and hikes all the time for fun. Here’s one of the spots he had me stop at as we toured around the Mojave basin.

Next day we went south and headed back to Rosamond.