Videos

I'm in town at the internet cafe.  I don't have any blog post ready...so I took the time to upload a couple of videos.    One is of the military jets, and the other is of Cassie swimming with a beaver.    Enjoy!

 

More Days in Paradise; Sequoia National Forest

November 19-26, 2012

Monday:  We arrived at the internet café around 8:30 am…but sadly they were just closing up for the day.   Some kind of emergency coupled with a lack of back-up staff, I guess.   It kind of put a damper on our careful plans.   We decided to just go ahead with our shopping plans in Lake Isabella, and return to the café the next day.   We did stop at McDonalds to use their weak wifi for a little bit.   Then we filled a propane tank and got a new camp chair at True Value.   There, I was told that our propane tank was too old and past it’s inspection validity date.   The guy still filled it, but we’ll have to do a tank swap next time it’s empty.    After that stop, we went to the grocery store.  It was insanely busy.   I’m not sure if it’s because it was lunch time or if it was related to being Thanksgiving week, but we were glad to get out of that crush.    Since we got home earlier than expected, we went on a bike ride to explore the ends of the forest service road.

Tuesday: Luckily, the café was open today.   (BTW…this word processing program is autocorrecting to put the accent on the word café.   I would never be so presumptuous.  I would, however, be so lazy as to not undo it).  We spent about 6 hours again and got a lot accomplished.    Still wish there was good wifi at a library, though.  We’re spending guilt money on coffee and snacks to justify our time in the café.  Got back to the RV and discovered that Cassie had daredeviled herself access to a shelf she had previously left unmolested on ALL prior trips left home alone.   She and Buddy helped themselves to all of Missy’s mini-cinammon-coffee-cakes.   I was fairly annoyed at the dogs, but found it funny how sad Missy was at the loss of her snacks.    Lesson learned by humans.   From now on, we’ll put all the food away.  Even if it seems out of reach.   Sheesh.   Had a campfire after the sun went behind the mountain.

Wednesday: WINDY…that’s the word for the day.   Holy mackerel!   With no protection on our awesome bluff, the winds really buffeted us and the RV.   No matter how tightly we tried to close the windows, we still had howling in unseen cracks.    I hope this is the only windy day we’ll have to endure.   Apparently the military doesn’t practice flights on windy days, or else they’ve taken an early Thanksgiving holiday.   No air show today.  Bummer.

Thursday:  Happy Thanksgiving!   Missy snuck into town to see if she could sit in the parking lot of the (closed) café and get some more shows.   Turned out to work!  So she was gone most of the day.   I went on a walk with the dogs.   I got 2 loads of wood from a recently (but not too recently) downed tree by the main dirt road.  I’d say it’s about 100 yards from the clearing.    The wood is fantastically dry and makes for great fires.   I pretty much cleared it of what could be carried or dragged.   Now we’ll have to see if Missy gets around to using her chainsaw on the big trunk pieces. 

The weather today was perfection!   Sunny and upper 70s.  Perfect day to lie out in the lounger under the sun umbrella.   And we’re still lucky with the overnight temps.   Usually they end up in the upper 30s/lower 40s.  We haven’t had to use the furnace overnight for a good bit now.   (We do run it 10-15 minutes in the morning to warm up the rig when we get up).

Friday:  Well, it was tough to do, but we found a flaw with this campground.   Since it’s in the National Forest, people get to hunt here.   Suck.   Last weekend we heard shotguns a long ways off.   But today, there was a lot of activity close to home.   I saw hunters just across a gulch when I was out with Cassie.  I guess we’ll have to use our orange vests on future walks.   Twood suck if one of us got shot.  I don’t even get what they’re hunting.   Until yesterday, we hadn’t even seen any deer.   Actually, on that point, we didn’t actually hear any shots fired near us today.  So perhaps the hunters will figure out the “no deer” situation and move on.   Other than the increased “traffic” near us (defined as more than 2 cars), it was a great day.    We had a morning bonfire, helped out by Mother Nature doing the fanning.  Once the campfire was done, the wind died down and the weather was perfect.  

Saturday/Sunday:  Busy days for hunters.   We kept a low profile and hung around camp all day.   Still having great weather…sunny and warm/hot.  

Monday:  We left camp early to get water at a nearby Nat. Forest campground.   It was completely deserted.   Strange.   Today was shower day.   We’ve finally figured out the right recipe for our hair (with the no champoo technique).   Everybody has different needs with regards to strengths of the baking soda and vinegar rinse.   You’ve just got to be patient and mess around until you find what works for you.   The trouble for us is, we’re on restricted water use.  So each time we get it wrong, we have to wait until the next shower day to try again.   However, that’s the good thing about having a twin.  Double the experiments!   Each time, we’d both do something different.   So that made it easier to nail down what works.    Hip, Hip, Hooray!

Pictures of the Military Jets!

These suckers are hard to document!

Not too bad a shot

Um...this is a complete miss, and shaky to boot

If you like "Where's Waldo", you'll love this example of "Where's the jet in the tree?"

Here's the zoomed out shot...

Here's the zoomed in shot.  :-)

No jet here.  Just wanted to get the rainbow picture into the blog.   This is LITERALLY the view from our living room

Pictures

Our New Home!   See the tiny white RV in the center?

Zoomed in shot

Tina and Cassie on a Rock, with Buddy nearby

Just another stunning view on our walk

Re-creating the shot from before...the rig is the small white thing in the center

Zoomed in shot.   See how totally private this spot is?

Another zoomed out shot of the RV

Missy and Dogs on the walk; Tina represented in Shadow-Mode

I made Cassie pose here because I thought it would be a neat shot

New Kickstand Works Great!

Cassie likes it when I give her "drinks"



From my hike on the Rincon Trail, right off the back of our new home

Clearing Campsite

November 14-18, 2012

This campsite is amazing!   Truly one of a kind.    We’ve never had such sweeping all around views, coupled with perfect privacy.   We are so lucky to have found this spot and to have been able to get into it.  The only downside is that we don’t have any phone signal.   But that’s just a minor ding.   I was curious about how this clearing came into existence.   There doesn’t seem to be any need for this giant circle clearing, from a forest service perspective.    Missy finally came up with a possible answer: it’s probably an old helipad.   There are actually a couple of marked helipads along the highway, so maybe this one was decommissioned because it’s a little harder to get to.

There really isn’t much I can say about how fantastic our campsite is.    I’ll put up pictures, so hopefully you’ll get a sense of the lovely scenery we are treated to all day long.   Even when we had 2 days of rain, it wasn’t a downer because we still had amazing views out the windows.   Speaking to that, it was really cool and kind of creepy having the cloud ceiling lower so much that we were almost in the clouds.   The back, higher set of mountains disappeared from view.     And, a couple of times some sun broke through, and we had gorgeous valley-wide rainbows that were pretty much at eye-level.    So neat!

Since we’re tucked away off a dead-end forest service road, we have free rein for walking the dogs, biking and hiking.    (A few times we’ll get a jeep or pickup driving by, but not too often).   With the solitude, we get to enjoy the benefits of having the dogs off leash all the time too.    I love that!   So far the weather has been great.   The overnight lows rarely get to a point where the furnace is needed.    I’m not sure that the average temps are for this area at this time of the year, but I’m hopeful it will stay nice enough to allow us to stay here a long time.

Perhaps one of the best perks of this campsite: daily (weekday) private airshows!   Anywhere from 4 to 8 jets a day.   It’s strange;  no matter how many times we watch the military jets streak by, it’s still fun to watch.  They have some usual time ranges during the day that they fly by, but once or twice a day we’ll get some outside of those ranges.    It’s an art, learning how to enjoy the jets.   Because they are soooo much faster than the speed of sound, you really need to be watching the horizon for the approach.   If you hear the jet first, then you know that it’s already hundreds of feet past you.    The best action comes about 1 in 4 jets.    These are the low-fliers.   Amazing!   They are so low, it really feels like you could touch them with a broom from the top of the RV.   I like to call these guys “Nap Killers”, because the sonic boom and vibration from the low jets is 50 times more powerful than the usual jets.    And they always pull some kind of Top Gun maneuver to weave around and next to the mountainsides.  We’ve tried a couple times to get it on video, but it’s hard.   The low fliers MUST be spotted first, or you’ll miss them if you hear them first.    One time, a couple of weeks ago, one flew over us as we were getting in the truck with the dogs after a hike.    Buddy caught sight of it and was incensed!   He started chasing after it, which led him right onto the highway.   Luckily, there were no cars, because there was no way we could yell louder than the jet to call him back.

Tomorrow we’re planning on a trip into town.   We’ll spend some time at the internet café, where I can get these posts up.   Then we need to get some groceries and fill a propane tank.  Then it will be back to our paradise for another week.   So Happy Thanksgiving in advance!    I know we’ll be continually grateful for our lovely Clearing Campsite.

Edited: The café was unexpectedly closed.   I am posting this using McDs wifi.  Sadly, I can’t get pictures uploaded with this connection.  We’ll try the café again tomorrow.

Moving Day, aka, We got Frickin Lucky Day

November 12-13, 2012

After having access to the internet,  I researched more closely into the expected weather of our chosen forest campsite.   Previously, I’d looked up the weather for Ducor, CA, since that had been listed on a campground review as being the closest city.    I was pleased with the upcoming sunny and warm weather.    However, when I realized that the forecast for the elevation of 6000 feet was 5-10 degrees better than the forecast for Kernville, 2000 feet…I got concerned.    So I googled the elevation of Ducor: 200 feet.    Shit.   It seems that technically it is kind of close to our campground.   Just much lower down.    After some digging, I finally was able to get an accurate forecast.    It was for lower to mid 50s in the day and 20s in the night.   Brrr.    Now, I might have still gone for it; but I’ve been anxious about getting caught up the mountain in a freak snow storm.    So we agreed to forego that lovely spot in favor of our other boondocking find, which is both warmer and closer to town.   Funnily enough…when we were driving to our “Clearing Campground”, there was a sign up saying the road was closed at Johnsonville.   This meant that we could NOT have gone to the forest campground after all.   I guess the light snow we’d enjoyed the past few days had dumped significant inches of snow up the mountain.

We did some café internet until noonish, and then we headed back to ripoff RV to load up and pull out.   I was starting to get nervous.   I was scared we wouldn’t clear the powerlines.   And Missy was nervous too; her concern was making the turnaround.   Funny, because neither of us was worried about the other’s concern.    As it turned out…we were both foolish to have not considered the true potential for boondoggle.    (I’d love to end on a dramatic cliffhanger here….)

So the forest service road up the mountain went pretty much the straight opposite of the way we were driving.   Since the highway is next to the river, I’ll go ahead and use upstream and downstream to describe.    There was a large pullout on the side of the highway at the start of the Forest Service Road.   Heading upstream, I  pulled over into that spot and Missy hopped out.   She was going to hike up to the campsite to make sure it was unoccupied and that the route was still clear.    I continued on the highway upstream for about 5 miles to a big parking lot where I could turnaround and head back downstream.    I was extremely nervous about heading to the campsite.   I figured our chances for getting stuck or for disaster were 30%.     And the exit strategy was almost non-existent.   We’d either have to back up blind downhill onto a main highway…or leave the rig permanently on the dirt road.  Missy got back in the car, reported all was clear, and we headed up the steep mountainside road.  (Note: we were in 4WD).

When we previously scouted this drive (twice), we both carefully considered the turnaround and the steep curbside/drop down driveway into the campsite.    We had neglected to consider the one heinous ‘S’ turn in the road, nor the approach to the turnaround.    Sigh.   The turnaround is shaped like an AIDS ribbon.   You drive up one leg, go into a loop-di-loop and head up the mountain on the other leg.    This arrangement is how to handle the switchback.    As it turns out, the transition from the narrow forest service road into the loop was un-makeable.   I pulled forward and soon was brushing up against the rock sides with the passenger side wheels of the RV.   We needed to pull straight for about 20 feet before turning the wheel sharply to the right to get into the loop.   But, the opposing bank was only 15 feet away.    We decided to try anyway.    Inch by agonizing inch, we shifted forward and back and forward to try to gain clearance from the rocks.    Missy left her spot in front of the truck to go watch for clearance at the RV wheel.    I snuck forward as far as we could and then turned the wheel.   I didn’t think we’d made enough space, but there was nothing left to try.    So I gunned it….spun the wheels in soft sand(or so I thought)….gunned it harder….and we made it!   Juuuuuuust enough clearance to get into the loop!    As I turned to the right, I was shocked when I felt the truck plummeting a few feet to the ground.    Oops!    It turns out there was a large boulder in the front of the truck.   I couldn’t see it from the truck.   Missy had assumed I could see it, and would know to avoid it.   Nope.   I ended up driving right over that sucker.    If I’d known it was there, we never would have made it into the loop because I would certainly have nixed driving over it.    Fool-hardy and lucky for once!    I guess the universe is paying us back for all the tire troubles we’ve had.

The outer edge of the loop is comprised of mostly deep soft sand.   Of course, the outer edge is where we needed to be to clear the rv around.   Luckily, 4WD worked great.   And as I’d told Missy, backing up as needed worked perfectly.   That was part of the RV driving lesson I remembered from Jeremiah: don’t be afraid to back up to gain clearance in turns.  You’d be surprised how much more room you’ll gain then you think is possible.    When we headed up the mountainside, we both let out big sighs of relief.   We’d gotten sooooo lucky!    We did have an issue with the bad S turn.   I slowed down to a snail’s pace and had Missy get out and watch.   She said that a piece of paper wouldn’t even fit between our tire and the rock.   Phew!

We got to the “driveway” of our new home and it was touch and go getting in.    There was a big curb leading into quite a drop-off.  We did not make it without some major scraping.   But no permanent damage done.    Missy thinks the RV was almost going to tip over, but as the driver, I never felt that things were unsafe.    Once on the driveway, Missy climbed up onto the roof of the RV while I drove under the powerline.    Luckily, we cleared it just fine!    We parked the rig and then both needed some time to recover from this adrenaline-filled adventure.

Tuesday:   Lazy/recovery day today.   The only thing we accomplished other than relaxing was cleaning all the windows to maximize on the amazing views.

Ripoff RV Park

November 10-11, 2012

Saturday was the same weather as the day before.   Blustery and cold, with alternating periods of snow and sun.   We were planning on making our move to an RV park on Monday (so as to best avoid crowds and traffic).   But, alas, our black tank filled up so we clearly had to plan on moving the next morning.   Still quite cold overnight…mid 20s.   But, the new batteries worked great and we had furnace heat all night.    Not only did the batteries run the furnace all night, but they got us coffee made the next morning and the slides moved in and the landing gear moved.  All still without need of a genny boost.   Hooray!     It’s really quite a relief over the despair we felt when things didn’t work as expected.   It used to suck not having heat in the middle of the night.

Sunday: we left camp around 8:30 and drove the 7 miles into Kernville to hit up the Laundromat.   We wanted to get pillowcases done now that we’ve successfully finished our icky portion of going “no champoo”.   This is something we’ve read about on other RV blogs…training your hair to become accustomed to being without shampoo.   When you plan to be boondocking most of the time, it’s really pretty crucial to be able to save water by not having to shampoo every 3^rd day.    We both get pretty oily hair after a day or 2 of not showering.   When you go off the champoo, you’re supposed to expect 2 weeks of disgusting, oily, hideous hair.  But you have to suffer through it to get to the point where your hair stops overproducing oils.   So…we’ve been champoo free for this whole road trip.   It wasn’t pretty, which is why there have been no pictures (or close pictures) of either of us.   It’s kind of amazing how it’s actually worked.   We use baking soda to rub into our roots when we need to clean our hair.   We’ve been told to expect to get by with only cleaning once a week.   We’ll have to see if that time frame works for us.   For now…we’re optimistic that this will work for us and we’ll be able to extend our time off the grid

After doing laundry, we stopped at the RV park we’d picked out.   It’s the only one that had wifi.   When we paid for our night ($50!), we found out that they don’t allow any downloading on the wifi.   WTF????   We’re getting cockblocked at every turn in California.   (Where cock=decent wifi).   This hampers our plan of loading up on shows before heading into the boonies again for 3 weeks.   Seems we’ll have to visit the internet café tomorrow morning and see what we can get in the few hours before we have to check out.   The other thing that sucks about this place is that the showers are coin operated.  We were both pissed at finding that out.   That was the other thing we were expecting to get for our fee…unlimited hot-water showers.   This place is a total rip off.    At least I’m making some of my money back in doggy do-do bags.   And I’m tempted to leave the TV running all night just to waste some of their electricity.   Hmph.