A little belated Christmas

We had a fun afternoon opening presents with our kids and granddaughters via Google Hangout. We had to find a date when everyone was home and not working and the girls were not involved in an activity. It was fun watching them.

Reading the book "How Do You Hug a Porcupine?"

A new movie 

 The coding robots Dash and Dot 

Trying to control a flying unicorn

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Maps are working

The Maps tab now has our 2014 and 2013 maps, and we'll finish up 2015 and get that on there.  Click on the Maps tab above to see them, and (hopefully) if you click on one of the dots on the map it will open up to provide the information of where we were. 

Merry Christmas!!

We wish everyone 

a Merry Christmas 

from the California desert

Curt & Sheila

Catalina Spa and RV Resort, Desert Hot Springs, CA

For those of you who like swimming pools and spas, I would assume you would enjoy the Desert Hot Springs/Palm Beach area of California. There are a lot of spa/hot springs resorts here. Catalina Spa and RV Resort is a Passport America participating resort, so that’s why we picked it. Resorts are not cheap here. It’s a very popular 55+ winter area. We had been boondocking for a while and I wanted to catch up with laundry, baking, mail, etc.

Catalina Spa’s sign advertises 285 sites, the Passport America site shows 482 sites. I believe this was a member-only park at one time, thus the remaining 285 are being rented. The Passport America rate is $22.50, full hookups. The park didn't seem like it was that large, but then it was probably only about half full too. They have two clubhouses and two pools. Most of the activities are at the upper clubhouse area. According to their calendar, they do have activities daily for the people staying there. I had called ahead of time to see if they had room, and when we got there we were able to pick a site we wanted and then went back to the office to pay. There’s varying lengths and levelness of sites.



We stayed two days longer than planned, due to our mail not arriving in time (sent priority mail general delivery to the post office) and Curt ended up having to see a dentist and getting a wisdom tooth pulled. Such is life on the road.

For more pictures, including some of the papers from the park,  please click here.

Blog post testing

I’ve been using Windows Live Writer for a while now to write my blog, and then publish to Blogger where it comes up in blogspot.com. December 11th it stopped. There is now Open Live Writer, a free source version, and there’s been issues with that as well. They are based more for windows 10, and I’m still on windows 8.1. So we’ll have to see how this goes.

This post is mostly my testing the new version out and seeing how it works. Some people were having issues posting pictures, some publishing, etc. 

Lots of wind generators in the Desert Hot Springs, CA area.

An article about the wind generators is here.

  

So far, so good.

BLM North of Joshua Tree CA boondocking

We found the boondocking area north of Joshua Tree through freecampsites.net. The GPS coordinates showed a house when we looked it up, so we had to search around to find the area. Looking on Google Earth we were able to see campers in a couple of areas in the desert, so we got new GPS coords.

We have 4G 2 bar Verizon and get about 20 TV channels, although most of them are not in English. We're thinking they're Chinese or Japanese.  We're about 10 miles from the nearest Walmart and Home Depot (which we've been to already) in Yucca Valley.  The nearest post office is in Joshua Tree.

Some nights we've had about 25 vehicles in the area, well spread out. That's been over the weekends. During the week it's down to about seven of us. Weekends its busy with dirt bikes, dune buggies, remote airplanes, target shooting, etc.

 We've had some beautiful days with highs of 70s, but this coming week there's a storm front coming in with lows in the 30s. So I'm thinking we'll be heading to a campground; we'll need to dump and get water, wash clothes, etc.  This week we had a couple of days of wind; one really windy like we had in Death Valley. So the solar panels were put back down and the slides were put in again. I think we're lucky where we were parked though, as it looked worse closer to the hills.














We're south of the National Training Center in Fort Irwin. So occasionally we have helicopters flying over us, and we hear occasional "rumbling" noises.











And, of course, there's always beautiful sunrises and sunsets in the desert, though I can't say I'm ever awake for the sunrise! Curt, on the other hand, always is.

I usually use Windows Live Writer to write my blog before I publish it to Blogger, but for some reason I can't use it this week. So in case some of the pictures aren't lining up like they're suppose to, that why.

You should be able to click on all of the above pictures to enlarge them. For more pictures of our time here, please click here.

BLM Silurian Dry Lake Bed Dispersed Camping

We found Silurian Dry Lake Bed from freecampsites.net. It’s a BLM dispersed camping area. Some areas are soft, you have to be careful where you drive just as in any desert area.  There’s a large area for parking. One night there was three of us in the area, other nights just two of us. We had good Verizon cell service. No TV.


We went geocaching one afternoon. (Curt must have been bored, he suggested it.) There is a 50-State Star series a couple of miles from where we are parked, so we took the jeep as close as we could to one of the caches off a sandy road. We found all 50 in the series, what was left of some of them, plus two more. This is what it looks like mapped on the geocaching website.   Curt’s tracker showed 6.79 miles, my GPS showed 7.10. All I know is that my hips really hurt by the time we got back. I thought the desert was fairly level, but once we got past the first point of the star, we couldn’t see the jeep until we got back around to the top again.

On our way to this camping spot, we passed Dumont Dunes. This is a BLM OHV (off-highway vehicle) recreation area. There is a long dirt road to the area and we could see that there were a lot of campers there.  There is another area just off the highway, the Dumont Little Dunes, which we did pull in to see if there is a charge. There is a charge, but I think it’s only for the off-highway vehicles, not for camping according to the website I looked up today.
   

For more pictures of our travel, please click here.

BLM “The Pads” Dispersed Camping outside of Death Valley National Park

We found “The Pads” on freecampsites.net. The area used to be a trailer park for miners who worked at the Billy mine near Death Valley, according to a geocache there. There’s concrete pads that you can park on or on gravel. The only downfall is no cell service. It’s approximately 17 miles from the Furnace Creek area off highway 190. There were two RVs there when we  got there. By night we had another RV and a car. The next night there were seven of us, including a van, pickup and car. (The people in the car set up a tent.) When we got up in the morning it was 32 degrees - brrrrrr. It’s amazing how much traffic was on the road Thanksgiving evening.



For more pictures, please click here