The Joy of Walking

One of the things we have done since our emancipation three weeks ago is walk. Just about every day. In fact, I think we've just missed one day, maybe two. 

At home, we have a 3-mile loop up and down hills that we really enjoy. While we've been traveling, we head out from wherever we are and walk for an hour or so. It's great. 

Walking is one of those things we've always loved to do. But, when we were working it was hard to find the time. What a pleasure it is to bring it to the top of our daily to-do list. They say it makes 21 days to make a habit. I think we're just about there. We can't really imagine a day without walking. 

And, what about the results of this new aerobic routine? We've both dropped 5 pounds in the last three weeks.  

One more big plus in the "what we love about our sabbatical" column. 

A "Bleh" Travel Day, and a Treat!

I have just a few words to say: 3 1/2 hours, uphill, steady headwind, running a generator that's sucking gas, pulling a toad on a busy freeway, arriving at home 2 hours later than we planned.

It was that kind of day. 

With the painters planning to work at our house until 4:30 or 5:00 today, we took our time leaving Pismo this morning. With plans to leave by 11, I delayed those plans by about an hour when an innocent trip to the recycling bin turned into a fun conversation with new friends who own a 32H like ours. We had eyed this twin of ours motorhome all week and had high hopes of meeting its owners. They were never around, until the trip to recycling bin. Figures! Though our visit with these new friends would wreak total havoc on our day, it was worth it! 

As you loyal readers know, I am not the primary driver of our motorhome. But, today seemed like the perfect day for me to take the wheel for the first leg. As we pulled out of Pismo Coast Village at noon, we felt like salmon swimming upstream as we met a pod of Dolphins (motorhomes, not sea mammals) coming into the park for a weekend rally. To say it was a mess would be an understatement. There's a reason why check out is a noon and check IN is at 4PM. But, that just didn't seem to matter much today. And, I should've taken it as a sign. 

Usually, I'm good for driving an hour or two.  Then, I need a break. And, Boris is ready to provide. But, today there just wasn't a good spot to stop. Before I knew it three hours had gone by. I headed for the one place I knew would be RV accessible: Camping World. We had lunch there at 3:30. Yep. It was that kind of day. 

From there, Boris took over and guided us through really crappy Thursday afternoon traffic to our storage spot, which we arrived at around 5:00. We schlepped the stuff from the moose to the squirrel (I can't wait 'til we don't have to do that anymore) and were home around 6:30.

When we arrived home, we were reminded of the reason for our trip to the beach. While we were away, the painters were at work. The inside of our place looks gorgeous! Not gorgeous enough to stay, mind you. But, definitely gorgeous enough to sell! What a treat! The place looks great.  The exterior painters were delayed by rain while we were away, but it looks like they were able to do some priming today.  

Despite one less than stellar travel day, we are definitely making progress!

Going Paperless

We celebrated a geocaching milestone yesterday. (Details at Bullwinkle's place.) In addition to picking up a "big round number" cache, for the first time we cached without any paper.

Our one and only complaint about caching has been the inordinate amount of time required to prepare for each caching outing. Every cache in the world has its own page at geocaching.com. And, each page contains gobs of information, from coordinates to descriptions to log entries to helpful hints when you need them. Capturing all of that information for use in the field has been a bit of trial and error for us over the years. We've written pages of notes, compiled Excel spreadsheets, and printed off sheets and sheets of cache pages (and sometimes even bound them into little notebooks). No matter which method you choose, it involves a lot of paper. In the last year or so, we've been able to download coordinates directly from the site to our GPS receiver, but we've continued to tote the paper to provide all of the other info (especially the hints). 

On our emancipation day, we had to turn in all of our company equipment, which included our cell phones. That afternoon, we headed straight for the Apple store and treated ourselves to two cute little i-phones. Since then, we've had a blast playing with these amazing little computers. One of our favorite spots is the App Store, which offers thousands of titles that offer fun and excitement. Over 1 billion apps have been downloaded in the store's first nine months, and we understand why. 

Yesterday, we downloaded the Groundspeak geocaching app. With one click, we greatly improved our caching productivity. And, that's the kind of stuff we care about these days! Now we have everything we used to search for and print from our home computer available to us on the i-phone.  

From here on out, our caching will be paper-free. And, we'll double the number of caches we have today in half the time. 

How very efficient!

Pool Repairs

It's been a great winter for swimming pool repair people.

How do we know? In every park we've visited recently that has one, the swimming pool has been the subject of recent, current or very near future renovations. At Flag City, they had just wrapped up the work. At Bethel Island, we arrived to see (and hear) jackhammers at work for two days turning the bottom of the pool to dust. At Pismo Beach, though the work is nearly finished it's delayed by weeks. The pool opening here as been pushed back to mid May, and at various times of the day we've caught a whiff of "plastic" smell that reminds Boris of the model building days of his youth.

All this activity has made us wonder what's up. At the various parks we've heard people mumble something about "new regulations." So, as we heard the pool contractor's generator fire up at 8AM sharp, we did a little investigating. Turns out all this noise, dust and odor is brought about by a law enacted in December 2007.

The Virginia Graeme Baker Pool and Safety Act requires that public pools – including those at schools, health clubs, recreation centers, hotels and apartments – and other recreational water attractions retrofit drains that could suck someone underwater. The law required pools to be compliant by December 2008, or opening day of the 2009 season. 

A life saving law, or is legislation getting in the way of Darwinism? We'll let you be the judge. 

Meanwhile, know that part of your nightly rate at your neighborhood park with a pool is making the pool safer. And, if you need a loan during this credit crisis, you might look for a swimming pool contractor near you. Like we said, they've had a banner year.

A Day at the Beach

It's been 18 days since our employer pulled the plug. We think today may have been the best day so far! 

We're hanging out in Pismo Beach for a few days while the painters do their thing at our stick house. Details of the day are at Bullwinkle's Place. 

So, what's made this day so great? First off, we had basically nothing to do. Sure, I had a couple of phone calls to make, and Boris had something to drop off in the mail. But, other than that, absolutely nada. 

So, what did we do?  Basically, absolutely nada! 

We slept in a bit, then enjoyed a great breakfast. The morning started cool and foggy, so we hung out and relaxed as we watched many campers make their Monday morning exodus. What a treat for us to be able to stay! The rest of the morning featured lazy computering and a nap or two (how much do we love this?), then lunch.  After lunch, the fog cleared. So, we strolled into "downtown" Pismo Beach, walked the pier and admired the beach. Before dinner, we made a quick trip for groceries for a great dinner followed by a sunset stroll on the beach.  Is this the makings for a best day yet, or what?

Yes, folks. We could definitely get used to this. 

What's That Sound?

Greetings from beautiful Pismo Beach, CA. We're parked here at the Pismo Coast Village for a few days while painters do their thing to the inside and outside of our house. What a treat to be pulling IN to an RV park on a Sunday night for a change! And, for that simple act, this park rewards us for a free fourth night. So, we're here until Thursday!

Check in here is 4PM, so we weren't in a big hurry to leave our sticks and bricks. It was 12:30 when we hooked the squirrel to the moose and set out on the 250-ish mile drive south. We traveled in intermittent mist and rain about halfway. Then, Mother Nature decided to cooperate and give us a nice dry drive.

Just after we got underway, we heard a strange, but somewhat familiar sound. A high pitched "alarm-ish" tone coming from the driver's side front speaker. We'd heard it before when we were heading back from our Thanksgiving trip down south. Back then, we were convinced it was our satellite radio going through some kind of strange gyrations. We turned the radio off and noise stopped. Simple as that. So when we heard the sound early this afternoon, we did the same thing. Off went the radio and the noise was silenced.

About one hundred miles down the road, we stopped to fill up and break for lunch. Back on the freeway, we heard the sound again. So, off went the radio. Grrrrrr! But, minutes later, the tone blared once again. Boris checked the the dashboard. No lights, no warnings. I checked the fridge and various alarms in the coach, and all was well. We both checked on the squirrel in the rear view camera and all was well. As far as alarms go, we had to admit this was half-assed. It was as if the thing was trying to tell us something was wrong, but it was so intermittent we couldn't figure out what it was.

So it went for the next 30 miles. The weak alarm would sound for a few seconds and we'd do our best to rule out or figure out what was the problem. We rode along in silence because we still weren't sure it wasn't the satellite radio. Grrrrr! When we hit one particular bump, the noise started again. OK, we thought. We're on to something. As the alarm sounded, Boris cupped his hand around the brake controller...and the sound was muffled.

"Holy shit," we exclaimed. Something was wrong with our tow setup! While Boris looked for an exit, I dumped the entire contents of our huge black Winnebago bag on the floor. There wasn't a scrap of paper anywhere about this damn brake controller. With the alarm sounding on and off in a random, meaningless pattern, we spotted the perfect spot to pull off and suss things out. As we began to slow down, the alarm became a constant. We were definitely on to something. As we pulled to a stop, Boris watched the controller. It wasn't working.

As we pulled to a stop along a rather desolate section of 101 in central California, we both had visions of spending the night far away from our intended destination. We hopped out and checked the connections. The pigtail that supplies power from the moose to the squirrel had jiggled loose. Boris secured it again and went inside the coach to hit the brakes. The friendly buzz of the brake controller in the Jeep sounded and we breathed a collective sigh of relief. Within minutes we were back on the road, and the random alarm was silenced.

So, now we know. That sound is our brake controller sounding the alarm that we have lost the power connection to our toad.

And that, as it turns out, is a very good thing.

A Week of Accomplishments

TGIF!

I wouldn't think it would really matter that much these days, but I really am glad it's Friday. It's been quite a week. We've accomplished much in the last few days. Here's a quick recap:

It's raining, which of course we have nothing to do with. But, what's important about that is we see no leaks. Our recent roof repair gets a big thumbs up!

Boris met with many painters. As soon as the rain stops, the exterior painter will get to work on making the outside of house look fresh as a daisy. And, the work on the inside starts Monday morning. 

We need to be out of the way for a few days next week, so we made reservations for a little weekday camping.

We made arrangements for health insurance. What a relief to know we're covered!

We got rid of a truck load of stuff this week. There's more to do, of course. But, we have a real sense of accomplishment in the purging department!

We met with an attorney today and got some great advice on how to wrap up our "separation" from our ex-employer.

I finally finished the top for the queen-size double wedding ring quilt that's been in the works for something like five years. I had one last curvy seam to pin and sew today. What a sense of accomplishment when that was done!

Whew!!!  That's a lot!  It's amazing what you can do when work doesn't get in the way. And, when the sun comes up tomorrow it'll be a relaxing Saturday for most. But, for us it'll be another busy day on the road to fulltiming. 

For now, though, we're gonna kick back, relax and enjoy our Friday night. We've definitely earned it.

Happy weekend!