Does honesty always pay or is it painting me inside the lines?

We did a final check of our fridge just moments before handing it over to Camping World, and wouldn't you know it ... it worked! So we saved our cash, and headed on down the road, hoping it continues to work. We figured it must have been Harold cleaning up the connections and then a lot of twists and turns that got things working the way they're supposed to again. That's our non-techie, layperson's explanation. It works and that's all we care about.

Since we'd driven further the day before to get to Camping World, we were now too close to our next stop, the Walmart in Willows, CA so we changed plans and went to Cache Creek Casino in Brooks, CA.  We were amused when we saw we were now in Yolo county, and expected to see all sorts of yahoos pulling crazy stunts. That, or a bunch of hipsters working at the art of ironic. We saw neither.

The casino is out of the way, about 20 miles off the highway so we expected it to be a hokey locals place but we were pleasantly surprised when we saw it appear in front of us. We pulled up in the parking lot behind another RV and spent the afternoon working in the sunshine, looking out over grassy meadows and vineyards, backed by the mountains in the Northern Coast Ranges.

When night fell, we went inside to find a big, fancy casino with 6-7 restaurants, a spa, hotel, and a large casino. Signing up for a player's card got us $25 each that we could use for anything on the property except gambling or alcohol. We chose to use half of it in the buffet for dinner and use the rest for breakfast the next morning.

I typically choose to stay away from buffets, but we figured it was the best choice for vegetarian fare. It was a good decision as I managed to eat very well and wasn't at all tempted by the meat selections.

After losing $15 between us on Video Poker, we left the casino. On our way out we noticed signs saying RV's weren't allowed in this lot and we saw security stopped close by where we were parked.

In hind sight, we probably should have just ignored them and waited until they came and told us to move. Unfortunately, I have a problem with breaking rules and didn't want to take the chance they'd come banging on our door at 4am. I went up and asked them if we could stay there or if we needed to move. The guy was very friendly but told me we needed to move to the lot on the other side of the casino. As we were leaving, I noticed that the other RV was still there, and wondered if security would just leave them alone.

On the other side, it wasn't nearly as nice. The view was the backside of the parking garage and the lot was hillier. We were also further from the casino. There was a shuttle that came around often but the day I use a shuttle for a short walk like that is well ... a long, long way off.

Breakfast the next morning was great. I was going to have the steel cut oatmeal, but that was too cheap. We had $30 to spend. So I had a wonderful vegetable omelette and Harold had one of the three Filipino breakfasts offered, small, squat, sweet sausages, eggs, and garlic rice. The hotel caters to Filipinos and there were very many there gambling, in both the regular areas and the high limit areas.

After breakfast we closed the trailer up. It was time to get on the road to the next stop. As we drove by the nice, big front lot, I willed myself not to look to see if the other RV was still there, and I was successful. But now I'm kicking myself for it. I want to know if security let them stay. The county is Yolo, it's rules are made to be broken! Would it have paid to have broken the rules? Yolo Tracey, YOLO! We'll just never know.

Is your fridge running?

"I wonder if the fridge is running? Maybe we need to go catch it too." Had I seriously just uttered those exact words in jest? Famous last words that came back to bite us less than 24 hours later.

Ask me again, that silly old kid's joke: "Is your fridge running?" and I'll answer you with a big resounding "No!" No it isn't running so there's no need to catch it. We're short on ice for my Mango-ritas, and we're having to eat up all our Trader Joe's frozen food quicker than we'd planned.  Oh the horror! It's almost like the Universe is conspiring to lead us down a trail of unfunny jokes with messed up punchlines.

Tuesday night we slept in the parking lot of the Salem, OR, Walmart. It's a few minutes off the I-5 but in an interesting location across from a small airport and lake.

Our new dog Teddy is having some issues getting used to living in the trailer. He barks at everything that moves close to us, and answers every howl and bark he hears from the surrounding area. The geese really got to him in Salem with all their honking. Then there was the old lab left alone in the car for over an hour that did nothing but howl, non-stop. I expect my Mother would say that dog and those geese were thumbing their noses at poor Teddy.

Toonie, the Chihuahua is all old school, "Tedster, man, chill out!.You think this is bad? You should have been there when we hit Tonopah, NV!" 

The RVers in the Salem Walmart were driving older rigs, there were people with signs asking for money at all the exits, and both the computer and cosmetics sections were walled off, requiring that you pay before being allowed back into the main area of the store. I'm never sure whether to give money to people or not. Maybe it's better to err on the side of compassion?

Wednesday night we were at the Seven Feather's Casino in Canyonville, OR. The free RV lot was absolutely full of Canadian Snowbirds on their way home. How can you tell who is going which direction? It's all in the skin colour. Me, in my shorts with my lily white legs compared to the dark brown leather of everyone else around us. Like we heard back in October when we were headed home against the tide of traffic going south, we've already had a couple people remark "You're going the wrong way!" That's us, rule breakers.

Tonight we're in the parking lot of the Camping World in Anderson, CA, just south of Redding. We have an appointment at 8am to have them look at our fridge. We're pretty sure we know what's wrong with it and if we were at home, we'd fix it ourselves ... well, okay, Harold would fix it himself ... but we'd just like to get it done and taken care of, so we don't have to waste any more time on it.

The final irony of the day is after driving from BC, through Washington and Oregon, and having nothing but sunshine, as soon as we hit California, we hit torrents of rain and a sky full of angry, black storm clouds. They need it a lot more than we do back home, so I expect it's very welcome.

I'd make a wisecrack about the weather, but then I'd probably bring on an earthquake ...

The best jokes

The best jokes are those whose punch lines come from a completely unexpected direction, or aren't even jokes. Google's best April Fools joke was back in 2004 when they released Gmail on April Fools day. Nobody believed it. It had to be a joke. No way would any company give away email accounts with 1,000 Mb of storage. But the joke was, of course, there was no joke. It was absolutely true.

Imagine the poor sucker who has a real emergency on April Fool's Day and can't get anyone to pay serious attention. Or the person who finds out they are pregnant or someone who wins a lottery or anyone who has anything great they'd like to share. Nobody at all is going to believe it.

So when I saw the message from my daughter that she'd sent at 1:30am, I discounted it as a bad attempt at humour. We'd just left home. She couldn't possibly have had such a serious problem in the first hour we'd been gone! Not on April Fool's day.

"ANSWER YOUR PHONE! The dryer is on fire!" it read.

Oh come on, I wasn't born yesterday. I chuckled and told Harold about it.

"Just got my first joke of the day. It looks like our dryer is on fire." He laughed in response, and I almost didn't call her back. "I wonder if the fridge is running? Maybe we need to go catch it too." By this time it was after 2:30am and she was probably asleep. But I changed my mind suddenly. Didn't she deserve to have it backfire on her? What if I called her and woke her up and told her I'd called 911 and we'd turned around and were almost home?

I called, prepared to pull off my joke reversal, but forgot all about it as soon as she answered, upset and worried because against the odds, the story was, surprisingly, true. Okay, so the dryer wasn't actually on fire. That's just the flair for exaggeration she inherited from her father. But it had been smoking until she removed a portion of the mountain of clothes she'd tried to stuff in there. I guess the weight of all those clothes had caused the dryer to stop revolving and the friction caused the smoke. Scary, but probably something she can handle herself.

The April Fool's joke, like the Google joke, is that there is no joke. I suppose, the joke could also be the metaphorical umbilical cord leading back home. The one I can't quite manage to sever completely. But there's no punchline here.

Did you turn off the oven?

“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.” - Jack Kerouac

When you're on vacation, you usually only have a few weeks, so you rush out, spend a ton of hours driving somewhere, see some sights, then get back on the road to the next place. It can be a tiring whirlwind but it's the only way you can cover a lot of ground in a limited time.

We've been learning that we enjoy more when we slow down. If we spend a little less time driving, and a little more time in each area, we enjoy ourselves more. We don't see quite as many places, but what we do so, we see well.

If we were retired, and had all our days to ourselves, I bet the perfect way to do this thing, would be to get up early, drive a few hours, setup by noon, spend a few days or weeks or months, then move on. Of course we have to work, so the schedule is blocked up with work hours during the day. We can start early and be done in the early afternoon, then travel, if it's a travel day, or go explore if it's not.

That's why we planned to leave Monday afternoon. That gave us the weekend to get ready and caught up, get my daughter sorted out, and get on the road while it was still daylight. We could have been in Tulalip by dinner time, with even some extra time to go to Walmart if we wanted. It would have been great if things had worked out that way, but well, they didn't.

Scheduling was a big part of the problem, and hours in the day was another part of that. We just had too much left to do on our last day and not enough time to do it all in. There was the doctor and the gym, and Costco, and the vet, and taxes to finish, and email to answer and a trailer to be packed. Even without problems, I knew we were fooling ourselves that we'd get out of the house by 3pm.

Right around the time we'd planned to leave, we realized the air conditioning in the truck wasn't working. The very same air conditioning that had caused us a problem on our last trip in October, the same air conditioning we'd just paid $1100 to have fixed last month. We called the place that had done it and they got us in right away, and surprisingly got it fixed again by 5. While we were aggravated it hadn't all been fixed properly the first time, we were definitely mollified by them getting us in and out so quick. Impressed by their management, not by their mechanic, I guess.

Re-figuring times, I guessed we'd maybe leave by 9pm, but that was about the time I finished filing our taxes. So then I thought 10, but that was the time I finished loading my clothes into the trailer. 11 maybe? That sounded like maybe it was bordering on too late to even go today, right? But rather than have this all play out again tomorrow, we left, nice and early, at 12:30am in the morning on April Fool's Day. Sounds appropriate.

At 2:05am we were across the border headed down the highway to warmer climes. All the stress was gone, and though tired, we were happy to be on our way. I checked my messages to see a missed one from my daughter. My first thought was "Already?" The message read "ANSWER YOUR PHONE! The dryer is on fire!"

Cycling the Pacific Coast

As reported by Bikeportland.org there are fix it stations, bike racks, covered shelters, and food storage now going into the hiker/biker sites in Oregon State Parks. Reading this article brought back so many wonderful memories of when we cycled down the west coast.

One of the best things about cycling the coast is meeting up with all the other cyclists at the hiker/biker sites each evening. While it's almost impossible to get a drive-up camp site in the state parks for everyone else from Spring to Fall, they never turn anyone away who comes in on foot or bike. Often we had access to the best sites along a lake or the ocean, and all they charge is $5 per night. The west coast is very cyclist friendly, particularly Oregon. We loved the communal atmosphere where everyone would sit around the fire each night, in the hiker-biker sites, discussing where they'd been and what their next plans were.

We met a German guy who had gone out of his way to get up the Dempster Highway so he could start his trip from the most northern point. He planned to cycle all the way to the most southern point of South America. He didn't have any idea how long it would take him. He had all the time in the world.

A young kid we met, from Montreal, had made his away across Canada, before heading down the coast. Quite happy to get off his bike and hitch a ride with people he met at gas stations along the way, to him it was about the experience, not the means of getting there. He told us the campground we met him at was the first place he'd actually paid to stay. The $5 per night that was a deal to us was a decadence to him. He'd spent it because it had been a while since he'd really been able to talk to anyone and he was getting lonely. His camping setup was our first introduction to a camp hammock tent. It was easy to setup, comfy, and waterproof and worked especially well for camping in areas where he wasn't supposed to be.

We met college students on their summer break, and retirees on their life break, a newlywed couple on a unique honeymoon, and an environmentalist moving to a communal organic farm. There was this homeless man who had recently been kicked off a friend's couch, given $20 and a girl's bike with no gears. Cycling past him, as he pushed the little bike up the hills, he'd then go flying past us on the down hills. Turns out, it wasn't just gears he was missing, but brakes. For someone with limited cash, he sure made bad choices. At the grocery store where we met up with him again, he spent over $5 on a ready made sandwich, when he could have bought bread, meat, and cheese that would have lasted him much longer. Then he tore out all the vegetables in it and threw them away. He told me he was planning to spend the rest of his cash to try and get on a bus to California. He knew he didn't have enough money to get there, but he was hoping they wouldn't kick him off.

Surprisingly, for two people who pride themselves on being introverted, we found the best parts of this mode of travel was how it meshed all the hours alone with just our own thoughts and meeting all sorts of new people along the way. It became quite normal to have other cyclists pull up alongside us at some point in the day and travel with us for a while, striking up conversations as we all moved along. Our size and ease of mobility meant it was so easy to stop along the way, to chat to people, to head into a fair, even to take part in a church fish fry. If we'd been in a vehicle, we'd have missed all this.

The biggest downside to cycling the coastal road is having to share the road with impatient drivers, especially the logging trucks and huge RVs. There isn't always a lot of room on the side of the road and it can be terrifying to look back over your shoulder and see a huge monster bearing down on you. It definitely gives us an appreciation for all the cyclists we travel past in our RV.

There's a book that everyone cycling the west coast purchases. It's the bible of the west coast long distance cyclist, called Bicycling The Pacific Coast We found when we stayed at the campgrounds on the itinerary in the book we'd meet lots of people in the evenings, but when we went off course, we'd often have the sites all to ourselves.

RVillage.com - Great for RVers, tough on the OCD

I have a somewhat obsessive personality and I'm a life-long gamer who loves a challenge.

On the first day at RVillage.com, I noticed that I needed friends in order to see anything on the Home page, so I decided to start friending some people. At first I was taking my time, reading profiles, and then adding people, but soon my obsessive compunction kicked in and I had to speed things up. Like a game, I saw a challenge and set out to conquer and complete it.

At that point, there were only a little over 100 people listed, so it wasn't an insurmountable task, but by the time I got to the end of the list, it had already grown dramatically in size. There was a voice in my head telling me to keep going, to friend those other people too, but I resisted, and quite maturely told that voice, it could wait for the next day. I mean, how many more was the site going to get in a day? 100 more? I just proved I could handle that, right?

I spent some time joining, reading, and posting to new groups and their accompanying forums. I found myself in the bloggers group, where I posted a link to my blog and started adding everybody else's blogs to my Feedly list. That day, there wasn't much to respond to yet so I posted a few messages myself and then moved onto the next group that caught my eye. At first, I was being selective, seeking out the groups that most appealed to me, but once again, my need to do it all clicked in, and I found myself subscribing to everything that held even the least bit of appeal for me. Eventually though, I had to leave and make myself go do some work.

The next few days were super busy work days and I couldn't spend much time on the site. I noticed though that I was getting responses to the forums emailed to me. That made it so handy to collect all the links to everybody's blogs, and then that took on a life of it's own. I felt this nagging in the back of my head telling me I'd never keep up with reading all these blogs, but there was this other voice telling me if I didn't get them all, I'd probably miss out on the best ones.

The next visit I had some time to look around, there were already like a thousand or something people on the site and I felt a big wave of oh-no-this-just-got-waaaaaaay-tougher! I mean, even if I could find the time to friend so many people, there'd be no way to keep up with all the comments, and blogs and forum posts, right?

So now, a couple of weeks later, it's up to 3,678 people, and you know, I just have to come to the realization that I probably won't win this one. I haven't been able to push myself to go on a mad adding push again. There's just been no time. I have a ton of work to do, and we're leaving town in the RV in a couple of days.

I tell myself: Tracey, pace yourself, post some messages, friend people you enjoy talking to in the forums, give up the game. Some games need to be lost, some quests need to change, you can't always do it all. I'm probably not going to get to know every single person on this site, or read every RV blog and forum post. Just like I have to realize I'm probably not going to see every single town, city and attraction in the world. But damn it, I like to try. It might just be a little slower than I first thought.

Oh btw, you should really come and try the site out. And if you're already on there, send me a friend request, okay?

Where I've been ... so far

I still have a long way to go if I'm going to see it all!

Visited 22 Countries (9.77%)

Visited 34 States (68%)

Visited 7 Provinces (53.8%)

I'm not about to start counting the cities and towns!