Month: March 2018

Today we got up early, took Maverick to day care and headed to the San Diego Zoo. What a beautiful zoo. The animals were great but the grounds are equally fantastic. It’s a botanical garden with a zoo in it. The zoo has lots of elevation change so by the end of the day we were pretty tired. This is one of the few zoos to have the Great Panda’s which are Donnas’ favorites. Unfortunately when we were there they were sleeping and so we could only see their butts. Our ticket included a nice bus tour that we took at the end. The crowds were pretty crazy for a Monday morning. It must be a madhouse on the weekends. We ate back at Fuddruckers (easy) and all crashed the rest of the night.

Got up late (daylights savings time). We drove downtown to the Gaslamp District. We picked the Gaslamp Tavern as our lunch spot. It was pretty good and not crowded. We then walked a few blocks around the area. Because we are glutens for punishment we went back to the Ocean Dog Beach. Being the weekend it was super crowded with both people and dogs. Mav had a great time until one aggressive dog attacked. The owner quickly separated them but not before Maverick got a bloody lip. Not too bad, but we were done. We decided to drive to Coronado Island just to see what was there. Lots of beautiful homes and a pretty beach. Since we just came from the beach we simply enjoyed driving around with the windows down. We came back to the coach and Donna went shopping while I started taxes and did other work stuff.

Today as we left it was sprinkling. We headed off with no real direction at first and ended up at Old Town. This is the “old” historic San Diego with lots of restaurants and tourist shops. We ate a Miguel’s Mexican restaurant just before the crowds arrived. This had the added benefit of a parking spot. Maverick, Donna, and I walked the streets in a light rain. Donna shopped the tourist shops. Maverick was invited into one of the bigger tourist shops and enjoyed his admirers. Maverick was invited into the train shop but did not like the sounds so he and I quickly left while Donna spent time looking at the very elaborate model train setup.

Leaving old town I surprised Donna with a trip to La Jolla. The coastline here is very picturesque and populated with sea lions and harbor seals. It was really crowded but still lots of fun to see. Maverick was very curious about the sea lions and seals.

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This morning we headed downtown to see the Midway aircraft carrier. Maverick waited in the car for the 3 hours required to see the Midway. When I got back to the car, Mav and I played on the nearby grass for a while. I decided I could fund our trip by simply putting out a panhandle bucket and letting people pet Maverick. He is super popular everywhere we go. After play time Donna and I ate lunch at the Fish Market restaurant on the parking lot/bay. On the patio it was a great view of the harbor and the Midway. The prices weren’t terrible and the food pretty good. Next we wandered along the harbor until we came to Point Loma. There we discovered the Ocean Dog Beach. Maverick got to play with other dogs and run in the surf. He had a fantastic time. Now our car and coach are covered in sand. That’s the price we pay

Today we traveled to San Diego. The trip took a little less than 3 hours. The KOA campground is nice but we don’t have a clear line of sight for satellite TV. Yuck. It wouldn’t be so bad but we are here for a full week. I tried our over the air antenna and we only get 3rd world or Spanish channels. Bummer. First order of business was lunch. We ate at the Fuddruckers in the historic Chula Vista downtown. Afterwards we went to Silver Strand State Beach to see the ocean. The weather here is awesome. Temperatures are in the low 70’s. Maverick loved the dog park with real grass for a change.

Today was all about Joshua Tree National Park. We stopped and picked up a sandwich to eat later in the park and then went to the Joshua Tree (town) Visitor Center. This visitor center is in town a few miles outside of the park entrance. After a quick stop there we headed into the park. We kind of had low expectations. We had seen a Joshua Tree forest in the Mojave desert and expected more of the same. What we did not expect was the many very cool rock formations that were easily accessible from picnic areas. The rock formations in the North portion of the park make the trip worthwhile. Many people were scaling the rocks both using easy approaches and using true mountain climbing approaches. Maverick, Donna, and I explored a number of these formations and it was a lot of fun. We continued on to exit the South side of the park. From about the middle of the park to the South we found the park pretty dull and uninteresting. I’m sure some people really like it but it wasn’t for us. At the south entrance there is Cottonwood Springs with a stand of enormous and old palm trees. The springs was very cool. It looks like there is a similar feature near the 29 Palms (north) entrance but due to our route we didn’t see it. If we were to return we would only bother with the path between the Joshua Tree (town) entrance and the 29 Palms entrance. That route would take you by all of the interesting portions without a long tedious drive in the southern portion.

The park namesake, Joshua Tree Cacti and cool rock formations. Note pick-nick table for scale

After the park we decided to go downtown Palm Springs and see the historic shopping area. It was pretty cool and very popular with many restaurants and high end shops. We didn’t feel like fighting the crowds and didn’t have much use for the high end shops so we simply drove by it all. We did drive through one of the older very nice neighborhoods known for the renovated mid-century modern homes. It was neat to see if you like that sort of thing (which we do).

Once through with Palm Springs we went back to the RV resort. We decided to try the mineral hot springs fed swimming pool and hot tub. The pool was beautiful and super relaxing. Very warm and beautifully lit. There weren’t too many people and we regretted not trying it the night before. All in all this is a super nice resort. Unfortunately we plan on moving on tomorrow morning. Why? If we wait any longer we will head to San Diego on the weekend and don’t want to fight the crowds. We could stay here until after the weekend but simply didn’t find enough to make us want to stay 4 more days.

This is our last full day in Las Vegas. I had arranged to have the coach exterior detailed today. This includes washing, scotchbrite abrasive on the oxidized fiberglass, two coats of wax, and wheel polishing. Not cheap, but I personally never completed even a single pass wax due to the size and difficulty of the task. It seemed like good preventative to have at least a one time thorough preventative cleaning. We went to Camping World once again to see if they had the furnace fan I mentioned during our stay in Carlsbad. Neither Las Vegas Camping World had it in stock. I will order from Amazon once we are in San Diego.

We went today to the Lion Habitat. Here they have the MGM lions that used to in the Casino and showed up in film titles. These lions are Barbary lions with black manes. These type of lions are extinct and have not real chance of reintroduction due to habitat loss. The habitat was pretty nice and the head lion keeper was informative and entertaining. Beautiful animals that seem well cared for.

This morning I installed some new Satellite TV gear I received while in Park City. If you are interested see the “Technical Break” below. We had an excellent lunch at Outback and we went back to Camping World to pick up an item I forgot yesterday. We then went to Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area. This is a very cool park and was the highlight of our time in Las Vegas for me. Our annual National Park pass got us in for “free”. I was surprised at the very long line to get in. Most were paying $15 per car to enter. It took about 15 minutes to clear the entrance gate. The park features a 15 mile scenic drive with trail head and scenic areas all along the route. The first turn out was Calico Hills and was my favorite area.

Technical Break …. Ok, if you’re not interested in tech stuff skip this…. Before we left on this trip we were frustrated with the RV satellite receiver. It is a single tuner which means we could not record one channel and watch another. The house receiver is a 3-tuner device so you can record 3 programs at once or watch one and record two. Before we left I asked Dish if I could upgrade the RV to the same as the house and they said it was against their policy to allow that receiver in mobile applications. Arggh! I read on the forums where people took their home receiver on the road when they left. So before we left I tried out our home receiver in the RV and the RV receiver in the house. The swap seemed to work fine. We quickly discovered on the road however the home receiver was not happy on the road. Only one tuner was working, many channels were not available at all, and there was no signal from two of the three satellites. Crud! I researched the problem and found that for the home receiver to work properly I needed a device called a solo-node in between the antenna and the receiver. Back in Anthony TX I bought a HD over the air antenna to attempt to watch the Olympics. No-go. The HD antenna worked OK but couldn’t receive NBC where we were. Before leaving for Park City I ordered the RG6 coax and solo-node so I could attempt to restore full functionality. The solo-node requires two coax inputs from the antenna versus the one input required by the RV receiver. I received the coax and solo-node while at the Wyndham in Park City. Yesterday we went to Camping World and bought the roof sealant to run the new coax lines to the solo node in the RV. Today I installed it. The good news is the receiver is now much happier. I receive all satellites and the self check no longer shows errors. The bad news is, we still don’t get local channels. I think this may be a result of no longer being in the Dallas area but I’m not totally sure. This afternoon I reconnected the OTA antenna and we get all of the Las Vegas broadcast channels. Why did I bother? Donna really wanted to watch the Academy Awards and it was on a “local” channel. Well at least that worked….for a while. Just as the Academy awards were getting to the main awards the ABC channel went dead. The rest of the channels remained OK. Some kind of popular show “blackout”? Kind of similar to the Olympics where we could get other channels but not NBC. Dish also makes an OTA antenna to USB adapter to integrate OTA channels with the Dish programming, including recording. I guess I’ll try that soon.
Back to our regularly scheduled blog.

We got up early this morning and picked up Maverick from the pet resort. He was happy to see us and us to see him. We left at 8am and got to the RV storage facility about 2pm. With Donna’s help I was able to get the RV out of its space with no damage. If you recall from my previous post on 2/24, the parking spot was exceedingly tight but I got out in one try. I worried about the coach all day and was very relieved to have it start right up. We checked back in to the Las Vegas RV Resort. We discovered the house batteries must have run out late the previous day (my guess). The freezer was about half unfrozen and the refrigerator was not very cold. The fridge runs on propane but uses some 12VDC to run fans, and its controller. I had shut down everything except the fridge but the batteries weren’t quite enough for a week. We threw out most perishables just in case, though most was probably fine. We thoroughly cleaned the fridge and reset it. After plugging in at the resort the batteries were back to full charge about bed time. We had a couple of things to pick-up at Camping World, our RV go-to store.