Welcome to Red Dog Adventures

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.

Today we just bummed around Park City. We also saw the movie Peter Rabbit. We chilled in the condo, ate leftovers and packed the car for an early departure tomorrow morning.

We did it! The first month of RV’ing is in the bag, and this marks the end of my second month of retirement. We had to modify plans along the way but we still managed to visit everywhere we planned except for Corpus Christi, TX.

Just a short recap. We left McKinney on the 28th of January. Our first stop was McKinney Falls State Park near Austin Texas for one night.  We discovered a major power steering failure and spent the next week in Fleet Maintenance in Austin TX getting the steering repaired and upgraded. Since then we’ve been to Big Bend National Park, Carlsbad Caverns National Park, Tucson AZ, Quartzsite AZ, Lake Havasu City AZ, Las Vegas NV, and skiing in Park City UT.  Wow, that’s a lot in one month.   We can’t wait to see whats in store for March.

 

No skiing today. Got up late and worked on securing an RV wash for Monday in Las Vegas, and reserved a resort in Palm Springs CA for Tuesday and Wednesday of next week. We chose Palm Springs as the base for Joshua Tree National Park because there wasn’t much promising at the park itself. We could probably have found a BLM dry camping spot but we decided to treat ourselves to more luxury than that. We ate at the Red Rock Cafe and the fish and chips were great. The restaurant is really close to the cinema and we saw Game Night.

Today was my last day of skiing. The weather was warmer, there was fresh snow last night, and the conditions were great. My goal was to traverse the entire width of the ski area. I managed to get to nearly the most southern ski lift and the most northern ski lift. By the end of the day I had made 19 runs, traveled 29.2 miles, traveled 22,869 feet vertically, and hit a max skiing speed of 50.8 mph. My longest single run was 3.3 miles with 2,324 feet vertical distance. I used a cool new to me ski app, can you tell? Hah! I was actually pretty impressed with the stats. I was able to ski much better today. Just in time to leave as usual.

Tonight we went downtown Park City and ate at the Blue Iguana Mexican restaurant. It was pretty good and we were literally the only customers due to the early time (about 5pm). After eating we saw the movie Black Panther. We really enjoyed it.

Day 2 of skiing. The slopes were a bit icy today making it a challenge. I wiped out three times in the first two runs. Ugh, I did manage to keep it together the rest of the day. Again, we chilled in the condo and ate leftovers.

Day 1 of skiing. The slopes were great, if a little cold today. This ski area is huge. There are 42 lifts. I stayed on the North end of the ski area today. I returned to the condo for a light lunch but decided tomorrow and Wednesday I would probably eat on the slopes. While I can ski to the condo it takes a lot of time out of the day. Tonight we cooked and stayed in.