Moving On To Next Gig

 

          

 

I left a beautiful State Park.  I really enjoyed staying there for the last 6 months, however it was time to leave.  It was beginning to get warm and busy.  I picked Ted up in the city of San Francisco on Wednesday when he got off of work. 

After stopping for something to eat in Sausalito (to wait for traffic to clear) we got back to China Camp and started to prepare to leave in the morning.  I had most of the packing and securing done already.  Ted unhooked everything except the power. 

Slide was in and we were ready to roll out at sunup.  Oh no! the engine wouldn’t start.  Ted checked everything, the batteries were fully charged.  as it turned out the connection wasn’t good.  He finally got it started and we were on our way.

We headed east over the I 580 bridge to Hayward where we picked up a car dolly for my Mini Cooper.  We made good time and our goal was Kingman AZ for the day.  We stopped for gas once before we got there.  I believe that we were getting decent mileage for the size of rig that I have.  We got into Kingman just after dark.  We tried to find a place to park in a truck stop, but they were all crowded and noisy.  Fortunately, we found a lot that said truck parking (not sure what it was for), but there was only one truck and an RV parked, so we stayed and had dinner at JB’s.  We must have been really tired, because we slept through all the noise of the trains going by 200 yards away.

In the morning Ted got out some tools and fixed the battery connection.  It now works every time.  We were back on the road early and got into Flagstaff about 10 am.  The only mishap that we had was with the high winds.  I’m sure they were at least 50mph+.  All of a sudden the whole rig started to shake.  We thought that we had a tire blowout.  I had just replaced the two front tires ($606.00) I couldn’t replace all 6 at the same time.  Fortunately, it wasn’t a tire.  With the high crosswinds, they went under the cowling covering of the awning and that was what was vibrating.  Of course Ted pulled over immediately and checked the tires.  When he figured out that it was the awning, he got out some zip ties and climbed onto the roof.  It was so windy that he had to crawl or be blown off the roof.  Talk about scary.  He zip tied the cowl in several place in addition adding more ties to the supports and carefully climbed down.  That seemed to work as we had no more problems.

We arrived at the Ranger Station at 10 am.  I had a meeting scheduled at noon with Brian who would help me get into my site.  Since we had to wait, we found Mary’s Cafe  about a mile away where we had breakfast and then drove around to see what was available in the area.

We went back to the Rangers Station to wait for Brian.  When he got back, I met with him for a few minutes where he gave me an overview of the job and then he showed us to my site and got us parked.  The site is big, with the only level concrete pad.  They got everything hooked up except connecting the water.  It was turned off in the entire campground because of the freezing nights. When it gets turned on all I need to do is turn it on at my spigot.  I set up all the chairs and stuff outside and then went inside to start putting everything away. It was almost done when Brian came back to give us a tour of Camp Elden and the rest of the facility where I will be working when I’m not in the field. 

I think that I will like this gig. There will be a lot of public contact and a lot more challenging than any of my previous gigs.

To be continued………..

In the meantime

Thanks for visiting

Susan and Angel