Yesterday morning Daryl and Judy Patterson stopped over to say hello and goodbye as we were getting ready to leave Elkhart Campground.  We only had a minute to chat before they left so we could get everything unhooked and ready to take off.

Experienced RVers like Daryl and Judy know that if you get preoccupied while doing the hooking up or unhooking chores, mistakes can easily happen. We’ve all had it happen at one time or another… somebody comes by and you get to talking, and the next thing you know, you’re pulling away from the RV site and forgot to unplug your electric power cord, or to put your tow vehicle’s transmission in neutral. Mistakes like that can be not only embarrassing, but expensive too!

After saying goodbye to Bob and Gita Patel, Jim and Chris Guld from Geeks on Tour, Greg and Jan White, and everybody else in sight, we pulled out of the campground a couple of minutes after 10 a.m. and headed east on Interstate 80.

Across northern Indiana, Interstates 80 and 90 run together as the Indiana Toll Road, and it’s a route we’ve been over many, many times. A little over an hour later we crossed into Ohio, after paying our $11.10 toll to the good people of Indiana, or at least to the private company that leases the toll road from the good people of Indiana.

We got onto the Ohio Turnpike, and stopped at the Fallen Timbers Service Plaza near Swanton for fuel. The price of diesel was three cents a gallon more than at the trucks stops off the turnpike, but it was easy access to the fuel pump, and I didn’t have to wait for anybody ahead of me. Since I only needed 75 gallons or so, it wasn’t worth the hassle of paying a toll, getting off, fueling up, getting a new toll ticket, and getting back on the turnpike. I like saving a buck or two just as much as the next guy, but there’s something to be said for convenience too.

We made good time crossing Ohio, with a gentle tail wind helping. My Silverleaf VMSpc engine monitor said we got 8.4 miles per gallon between Elkhart and the service plaza where we stopped for lunch, about 30 miles west of Cleveland. That was running at 64 miles per hour with the cruise control on. 63 to 65 seems to be the sweet spot for our Winnebago, where we get the best combination of fuel economy and power.

I like the service plazas on the Ohio Turnpike. They are clean, have lots of room to park a big rig, good restaurants, and some even have back-in RV sites with electric for a few bucks a night!

I wish I could say I liked the turnpike too. Most of it was actually pretty good, but west of Cleveland we ran into a long stretch of very rough road, and I sure appreciated the Koni shocks that Redlands Truck and RV installed on our motorhome last year! The toll all the way across Ohio on Interstate 80 for our two axle motorhome and van was $31.75. Ouch!

We crossed into Pennsylvania, and immediately the road got better, and the terrain more hilly. Pennsylvania is one of my favorite states, in terms of beauty. The interstate in western Pennsylvania is a good road, and trees crowd right down to the edge of the highway, with occasional breaks to see the pretty countryside.

We passed lots of pretty farmland as we drove east.

Before long we were in what folks back east call mountains, though my friends in Arizona might not agree. But the hills did take their toll on our mileage. We dropped down to 6.9 MPG.

Here is a nice shot of the Allegheny River that Miss Terry took as we passed over it. I didn’t even snivel about the bridge because the scenery was so pretty!

We had planned on about a 300 mile day, but that put us right at the state line, and it was still early, so we kept driving. We decided to spend the night at the Flying J in Brookville, and by the time we got there, I was getting tired. But they only have four designated RV parking sites, one of which is marked handicapped. There were big RVs in two of the other sites, with the one between them empty. But the way they were parked, it would have been a very tight squeeze to get in between them, if we could have made it at all. We checked out the truck parking area, which was about half full, but we really don’t like to use them if we can avoid it. They tend to be pretty noisy, and we don’t want to take a space that a trucker might need.

So we decided to push on another 42 miles to the WalMart SuperCenter at Clearfield, where we arrived just as the sun was starting to set. Miss Terry had called ahead to make sure RV parking was permitted, and the nice lady she talked to said no problem, just park on the outer perimeter of the parking lot.

Here is an example of what not to do when you boondock at a commercial parking lot. He had both of his slides out, his TV antenna up, and notice the leveling jacks down! 

This fifth wheel was just as bad – jacks down, slides, out TV antenna up. They look like they’re camping! In both cases, their slide rooms are extended right into the roadway where cars are passing close by.

When we are parked like we are here, with our bedroom slide facing the outer perimeter, I’ll run the slide out at bedtime to make it easier to get in and out of bed. But we wait until bedtime, and we never extend our living room slide or jacks. That’s just poor manners.

We covered 420 miles yesterday, which was quite a bit more than we had originally planned, but the good news is that today we only have about 150 miles to go to get to the Thousand Trails preserve in Hershey, thanks to a a different route that the man on duty at the Pennsylvania Welcome Center recommended. So we should arrive and be settled in fairly early in the day.

Thought For The Day – Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.

I always enjoy talking to new RVers or wannabes about the fulltime lifestyle, and hopefully, I can help them avoid some of the mistakes we made as greenhorns by sharing our experiences with them. But sometimes I feel like I’m talking to a brick wall, and I want to ask them “Do you want me to tell you what I know, or do you want me to tell you what you want to hear?”

A couple of weeks ago, at a fuel island, I had a conversation with the fellow next to us, who was driving a fancy new diesel pusher. He told me that he and his wife have been fulltiming for several months now, and that they are about to throw in the towel because it’s just too expensive. “How can anybody afford to pay $1,000 to $1,500 a month on campgrounds and still put fuel in the tank?” he asked me.

I told him that I don’t know anybody who spends even half that much on campgrounds, and he asked me how we do it. I told him about all of the ways we save money on camping fees, from free campgrounds, to discount programs like Passport America, camping at Elks and Moose lodges, fairgrounds camping, and boondocking.

“My wife would never do any of that,” he said. “We joined Passport America, but we pulled into one campground and she said “No way” and we drove right back out. We have never boondocked, she wouldn’t stand for it. We only stay at four star rated RV parks, because she doesn’t like the looks of the people at other places. It’s costing us a fortune, but what else can we do?”

I felt like telling him that his wife needed a lesson in reality, but I knew it wouldn’t matter. It was obvious that she wanted nothing to do with the RV lifestyle, and that she fully intended to have a miserable time of it until she finally made him miserable enough to give in and go do whatever she wanted to do instead.

This can be a very affordable lifestyle, if one takes the time to learn about the many ways you can keep camping costs low. But, one has to be willing to settle for less than upscale RV “resorts” (and there are a lot of excellent campgrounds that don’t get a four star rating), and flexibility is also a major asset to have. But some people, like this lady, just will not be happy living the gypsy lifestyle, and that’s fine too. It leaves more opportunities for the rest of us.

I also had an interesting conversation with a couple while I was doing some genealogy research at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City a while back, but I really had to bite my tongue to keep from bursting their bubble. They noticed my Gypsy Journal t-shirt, struck up a conversation, and told me they had just purchased a new diesel pusher, and would be taking delivery in three days.

I congratulated them, and the husband told me that they looked at a lot of RVs, both new and used, and decided to go with a new motorhome because, while they don’t plan to become fulltime RVers, they will be traveling six to eight months a year. “We just don’t want to mess with repairs and stuff,” he told me. “With a new motorhome, all we’ll have to do is turn the key and go the day we pick it up, and not have to worry about anything being broken.”

I told him that he might want to be prepared to spend some time going back to the dealer once they take delivery, because every new RV that hits the street seems to need a certain amount of time to get the bugs worked out of it. I told him that many experienced RVers seem to feel that once you buy a new rig, it takes at least six months just to get all of the stuff fixed that should have been handled before it left the factory.

“No way,” he told me, “That’s why we bought a new diesel pusher. With the money we’re spending, I guarantee you that it will be ready to roll the day we take delivery.”

What could I do, except nod, wish them well, and also secretly wish I that could be a fly on the wall of that new motorhome about a month or two down the road, to see how their thinking would have changed.

Thought For The Day – A father is a guy who has snapshots in his wallet where his money used to be.

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After saying our goodbyes to Dennis and Irma, the managers at Crossroads RV Park in Wells, Nevada, we left yesterday morning at 10 a.m. and drove east on Interstate 80. We only had 180 miles to go, so it was an easy day on the road.

Terry loves taking pictures as we travel, and she’s gotten really good at it. When we’re doing 60 miles per hour, it takes some practice to get a nicely framed, cleanly focused picture. Especially with a pocket digital camera. The great thing about digital cameras is that you can shoot all you want and it doesn’t cost anything. That’s one of the first things I learned about taking newspaper pictures – shoot a lot of film and your chances of getting something worth using are greatly increased.

Here is a dramatic rock formation Terry spotted on the other side of the highway. She found a bug-free spot on the windshield to shoot through and framed it just right.

And here’s another one that she took out the side window as we passed.

It was 60 miles from Wells to the Utah state line, and as we topped the hill at Wendover, we were greeted by a breathtaking view of the famous Bonneville Salt Flats spread out before us. We thought that the salt flats we saw the day before in Nevada were impressive until we saw this huge expanse of white wasteland.

If my dashboard thermometer had not told me that the outside temperature was 93 degrees, I would have believed we were driving through a snow covered prairie somewhere in Kansas or Nebraska.

The salt flats stretched out for over forty miles, and it was monotonous after a while. This apparently is a problem for a lot of drivers, because we saw several signs warning drowsy drivers to pull over.

We actually found the drive a bit intimidating for some reason. It was a nice flat road, but the place just felt hostile. Very little lives here, just a few scrub bushes. We never saw a bird or any other critter for the entire 40 miles.

We also saw constant mirages that looked like water on the roadway ahead of us, but when we got there, the road was always dry. We’ve seen this phenomena many times in the past.

As we continued east, big cloud formations built up on the horizon, and we thought we were in for a real storm, but nothing happened.

Then we got our first view of the Great Salt Lake. This massive body of water is 75 miles long and 30 miles wide, with a surface area of 1,500 square miles. The water’s salinity is sometimes as much as 28%, which is three to five times more than sea water.

We stopped at the Flying J at Lake Point, just east of Salt Lake City, to top off our fuel tank, and guess what? Just like in Winnemucca the day before, the RV island was closed. But this time the truck islands were not too busy, so we pulled over there. We didn’t really need fuel, but I wanted to have a full tank when we leave Salt Lake City in a week, and the Flying J was handy.

Back on the highway, we connected with Interstate 215 and took it north a few miles to North Salt Lake City, where we pulled into Pony Express RV Resort. We couldn’t believe it, but there is another Flying J at the same exit!

Pony Express is a very nice, new RV resort, a bit more upscale than our usual haunts, but it is convenient for me to do my genealogical research. We have a nice concrete pull through 50 amp full hookup site, with a great view of the Wasatch Mountains.

By the time we were parked, had the jacks down and the slides out, and were all hooked up, we were famished. So we went to the Empire Chinese Gourmet buffet, a few miles north, and it was very nice. We have been wanting a good Chinese buffet for quite a while now, and this one was a winner.

Back at the motorhome, we were disappointed to discover that even though we have a full five bars of high speed EVDO service, internet access with our Verizon air card is terribly slow. I took the card out of the router and put it directly into my computer to update its settings and location, but that didn’t seem to do any good. When I first switched to an air card a couple of years ago, I was very pleased with the service, but over time it has gotten slower and slower. Especially in busy metropolitan areas. Our speed in tiny Wells, Nevada the day before, was twice as fast as we have here in Salt Lake City. Posting the blog may be a real challenge.

We have eight or ten different people who want to get together with us while we’re here, and we’ll try to hook up with as many as we can, but there just isn’t that much time, since I plan to spend several days at the Family History Center peering up my family tree, and Terry has a lot of preparations to finish before we leave for Colorado next week.

Bad Nick has been quiet lately, but he’s back with a new Bad Nick Blog post titled Do We Just Ignore Them? Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – It’s never too late to be who you might have been.

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I closed yesterday’s blog by telling you we had tire troubles. Here’s the story:

From the time we left Gilroy Tuesday morning, until the time we arrived at the the Emigrant Trail Museum in Truckee that afternoon, one of our inside dual tires had lost over 35 pounds of air. This is the same problem we have been having with the inside duals ever since Camping World installed them the end of February. Supposed they fixed it when we went back a few weeks ago, but evidently not.

At that time it was determined that the problem was the valve extensions, and it might still be. Especially since one look at the scratches and tool marks on it told us that the valve extension was not new, and was probably the one that gave us problems before.

Our motorhome has an onboard air compressor, and I have an air hose, but as it turns out, there is a problem in our auxiliary air system somewhere and we couldn’t get it to work. We found a gas station where we could fill the tire, and I left the valve extender and PressurePro sensor off, and checked the tire again before we set off yesterday and it was still holding pressure. So once we get into Salt Lake City, I’ll find a new extender to put on the tire.

Yesterday morning we left Boomtown Casino and followed Interstate 80 east across Nevada, Traffic was busy in Reno, but the rest of the day we didn’t have much to deal with. The first part of our route was pretty curvy as we followed the Truckee River, and then we came into a big valley with salt flats as far as the eye could see. We zipped past this barren landscape in no time at all, but it took the pioneers of the Donner Party six days to cross the salt flats.

Miss Terry was taking pictures out the window as we motored along, and she managed to capture this smiley face somebody made to welcome travelers.

Some of the mountains off in the distance still had snow on top of them, but down on the highway it was over 90 degrees!

Part of our route had some steep climbs and downhill grades, but nothing compared to crossing the Sierras the day before. Both days, the Winnebago had no problems, the big Cummins diesel engine never started to get too warm, and carried us over the top as fast as I wanted to go. After years of being passed by eighteen wheelers in our old bus on even small grades, it’s sure nice to pull over into the left lane and pass them by as they labor up the hills!

We stopped at the Flying J in Winnemucca for fuel, but their RV pumps were out of order, and there was a long line of trucks at the truck islands.  We continued on another 50 miles to Battle Mountain. I don’t think the Flying J there was a company store, but rather an affiliate, but it was easy to get in and out.

We saw some nice rock formations alongside the highway!

We arrived at Crossroads RV Park in Wells, Nevada about 4:30 p.m., with  346 miles under our belt for the day. Crossroads is a small Passport America park, nothing much but a gravel lot with 30 amp full hookup RV sites. But at just $10 a night, it’s a good bargain. We have four bars of high speed EVDO internet service, which is always nice.

One of our subscribers recommended Crossroads to us, and said the managers, Dennis and Irma Sayers, were wonderful people. When I checked the place out on RV Park Reviews, their friendliness was mentioned in the first three reviews I read. So I was looking forward to meeting this nice couple.

Sure enough, they were just as nice and helpful as could be; Irma checked us in and chatted for a while, then Dennis got us parked and made sure we were hooked up okay. I asked about restaurants, and Irma got right on the phone to call the shuttle van from a local casino to come and pick us up and take us to the restaurant. You don’t get that kind of service very often!

When we got back from dinner, Dennis and Irma stopped by to check on us, and Terry gave them a tour of our motorhome. I think Dennis was thinking about going RV shopping by the time they left!

We have about 180 miles to go today to reach Pony Express RV Resort in Salt Lake City, and then we’ll have a few days to relax, do some genealogy research, and we have a couple of technical issues on the motorhome that we need to look into. Nothing major, but apparently the gremlins have been at work.

Thought For The Day – A true friend is someone who sees the pain in your eyes while everyone else believes the fake smile.

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America really is a land of contrasts, and probably no more so than in the American West. That fact was brought home to us yesterday in our drive from Williams, Arizona to Bakersfield, California.

We left Williams, at almost 7,000 feet, about 9:30 in the morning, and before long we had begun to drop down into the desert, with scrub brush and cactus replacing pine trees.

A few miles outside of Kingman we stopped for fuel at the Loves truck stop, and then we continued west on Interstate 40. Just before we crossed the Colorado River into California, we came to a long construction zone, with traffic down to one lane as they painted new centerline stripes.

Unfortunately, whoever they gave the job of placing those orange plastic cones on the roadway to must have been having a bad day, because the cones were about 1/3 of the way into the only lane we had left, forcing big rigs to run with their left wheels on the narrow shoulder. Most of the cones has been run over and were laying down, several right in the road where there was no way to avoid hitting them. Most were crushed flat, but one stuck up enough to thump the front of the motorhome, leaving a scratch that we hope we can rub out.

It was 72 degrees in Williams, and in Needles, California it was 106. We sure were glad we had our air conditioner to keep us cool! Interstate 40 through the Mojave Desert is mile upon mile of nothing. Some mountains, lots of semis, bumpy roads, and not much else.

Interstate 40 ends in Barstow, and from there we took State Route 58 west past  a stretch of black lava beds, then an expanse of desert covered by salt/gypsum deposits, near Boron. 

We passed Edwards Air Force Base, and then began the long uphill climb to Tehachapi. Here the scenery became much better, as the barren desert gave way to yellow grass covered hillsides.  In the spring, when they have had some rain, this area is green and beautiful. But even now, the scenery is pretty dramatic.

Lines of windmills top the hills, generating electrical power, and railroad fans love to come here and watch the trains wind their way up and downhill, and through the tunnels.

From  Tehachapi Summit, we had a series of 5% and 6% downhill grades, and our exhaust brake did a fine job of holding our speed in check. I just stayed in the right lane and let faster traffic go around me.

As we dropped down into the Central Valley, we entered a land of irrigated farms where they grow everything from grapes, almonds, and citrus, to every kind of produce.

Traffic was frantic in Bakersfield, where we got on State Route 99, and we were glad to get through it safely and put the city behind us. A few miles north of Bakersfield we stopped at the Flying J to top off our fuel tank, and they had one of the tightest entrances I have ever seen at an RV fuel island. The entrance was narrow, there was a deep hole cut into the pavement, and sawhorses were intruding into the entrance to make matters worse. Even though I tried to avoid it, my rear tires ran over the curb getting in. We’ll avoid this stop in the future.

From the Flying J, it was just a few miles to the Elks lodge outside of Wasco, where we got a back-in RV site with water and 30 amp electric for $10 a night. Nothing fancy here, just blacktop, and unfortunately, lots of dog crap around where you have to plug in your utilities. Why can’t some people clean up after their critters?

According to our cell phones, we have excellent high speed Verizon EVDO signals here, but we had a terrible time trying to make or receive calls, and even with our Wilson external antenna and amplifier, we could not stay online for more than a minute or two at a time.

There were three other RVs at the Elks lodge, but except for brief hellos with our neighbors, we didn’t have time to visit. I had covered 468 miles since we left Williams, but we weren’t done yet. We drove the van back 15 miles to Bakersfield for dinner at Hodel’s Restaurant, a very nice buffet style place that has been in business for decades.

Ben Langworthy and Sandy Atwood from Teepee Creepers met us at the restaurant. Terry has been corresponding with Ben ever since she ordered us both a pair of his super comfortable moccasin style slippers a while back. Ben and Sandy have a fifth wheel, and we had a nice visit as we discussed their company, the RV lifestyle, and life in general.

I’m afraid I wasn’t great company. I was worn out from the long miles behind the wheel, and my energy level still is way down from the crud I had over the weekend. After we said our goodbyes to Ben and Sandy, Terry drove back to the Elks lodge, and I wrote the blog and tried to get it to post on the poor internet connection.

Today we only have about 130 miles to Oceano, and if we can indeed get into the Elks campground, as the host assured us we could, we plan to play tourist, eat more seafood than they can catch, and just have fun for a few days.

Thought For The Day – Every mother hopes that her daughter will snag a better husband than she managed to do, but she’s certain that her boy will never get as great a wife as his father did.

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