02/24/2013, Sunday:  We woke up around 1:00 this morning with the wind howling outside. I don’t know if it’s noisier because of the slide at our head, but it was really loud. Curt went out to see if our lawn chairs and rug were still around. Luckily the wind was coming from the other direction and they were sitting up yet. He put them down and laid the rug around it. When we got up in the morning the wind was still blowing like crazy.  According to the news, we’re figuring it was 20 mph with gusts to 40. This last all day. We did put the driver side slides in ‘cause you could hear the canvas on top of the slides flapping. The whole house was  moving. This coach doesn’t have the jacks like the other one did, it levels with air. I’m surprised there wasn’t dust blowing though. This area has mostly rock.

Yesterday I got the scanner going again for pictures. I worked on that most of the afternoon and this afternoon again. It’s going to take some time for this. There’s so many duplicate pictures that I’m trying to weed out before scanning. Some of the pictures are still in packets with dates, so that’s good. But the other container I have is just loose pictures, so that’s not good. I haven’t decided yet how I’m going to do that one.

We’re north of Quartzsite, in the Plomosa BLM 14-day area. Our FoxFi and TV are working better than they were at the park. Very few people are here now.

Tomorrow we’re going to go to Parker, about 30 miles north of here, to do a Walmart and bank trip and some sightseeing. 

02/21/2013, Thursday:  Ahhh, the feeling of tax paperwork done and ready to go to the accountant…I like that. I’ve never enjoyed getting everything ready for taxes, but this year I must say it was much easier.  I scanned everything in, including the W2’s, etc and will be e-mailing it tomorrow in a zip file.

We’re at a resort (basically a campground in the desert) near Salome, AZ, Desert Vista RV Resort, about 35 miles northeast of Quartzite. It’s Passport America so it’s only $15.69 a night with full hookups. The power is good, but the wifi is Tengo internet service which you have to pay for. The park has a deal with Tengo for 1 hour a day free, which seems to work better than our FoxFi does for some reason. We have good cell service, but the internet, not so much. And we can’t get any TV channels either. It “depends on where you are in the park”. The park has about 100 sites, about 5 acres, but we’re in the wrong spot evidently. Most of the people of satellite, but there’s some with TV antennas up. They also have orange, grapefruit and lemon trees to pick from! I picked an orange yesterday that was overripe. The manager said that the fruit isn’t as good due to the frost, but some said the grapefruits were really sweet.

We decided to come to the campground to get our mail forwarded and catch up on laundry and do some baking. We got the W2s and 1099s, etc in the mail so that’s why I figured I may as well get the taxes out of the way.  It’s $1.25 to use the washer and the dryer each in the laundry here. I used their washer and dryer for some of the heavier things like towels and jeans and then used our washer/dryer for other things. It took me all day to wash and dry things. Yesterday I spent the day baking. This convection oven is different than the other one we had, but seemed to work okay. I did 3 batches of chocolate chips cookies, 1 loaf of banana bread and 2 loaves of bread machine bread. Lots of stuff in our freezer! Made chicken & rice in the oven and today meatballs and potatoes in the crockpot. I love electricity and water and sewer! We had grilled tilapia and catfish last week in the desert. Have to play around with the seasoning for those.

Our new home is feeling more like home, but still trying to find things we packed someplace or other. It uses diesel or electricity for everything except the burners on the stove, which are propane. Our old one had a fridge that we could change over from propane to electric, but this is a residential fridge which is electric. So our diesel consumption is going to be more when we have to run the generator (diesel) to regenerate batteries. Curt’s been working on something daily that needs fixing or cleaning, or just trying to use the TVs. We did manage to get the main TV working in the desert, got a couple of channels at least, but here we can’t get anything. It’s an old TV, so we’ll have to replace it eventually for more channels unless we get satellite.

2/09/13, Saturday:  What a wild month this has been so far. We started looking at motorhomes the end of January; there’s a lot of them in Quartzsite for about 5 months in the winter from the larger cities in Arizona, and also from other states. The RV tent show was the last 2 weeks of January so there were lots of people going through them, and lots of salespeople tracking you down. It was fun going through the different brands. One of the dealers had some nice looking units: Monaco, Country Coach, Prevost and Newell. (Prevost and Newell being 2 of the most expensive.) Curt was looking for certain things, engine size, etc. which none of the previous places had what he was really interested in (at our price range) and we were just looking, not really planning on trading yet. Well, we got caught. There was a 2005 Monaco Signature, 40 feet (same length as ours), had the specs he was interested in, has 3 slides, etc.  So we did some dealing; figured out it can’t hurt to see what ours is worth. We went back home and listed the pros and cons of trading; con, of course, is spending money. We talked ourselves in to it, talked ourselves out of it. Back and forth. We went back and looked at it again, found things that needed fixing, dealt again. It's been some sleepless nights. Needless to say, we have a new home (new to us).

It may be the same length, but we did lose some storage. I have less cupboard space and Curt has less room in the basement. We also used the space underneath both couches which we can’t do now, but we did squeeze some in under the bed. So we spent this last week cleaning house and deciding if we really needed everything we’ve got. The pictures got stuck back in the Jeep again; I have got to get them scanned in!  We’ve been learning an AquaHot system (electric heat), EatonVorad system (collision avoidance), trying to get TVs to work, wiring, batteries, solar, etc. We had to get 8 new house batteries and still has some issues with electrical. The schematics book is huge – about 18 x 11 x an inch or more thick.

Did we do the right thing? I hope so. We still have some issues that we have to get checked out when we get to Oregon (that’s where the dealer is from).  Hopefully all is well until then.