#2 Sunday Morning Musings and Mimosas 1/15/23

And We Are Off...

Cheers! Welcome back to Sunday Morning Musings and Mimosas!

It’s been quite a week, one filled with awesome memories and our first mechanical challenge and a need for a possible revamp of our travel itinerary. More about this later, but the good news is that Peder and I kept our cool, troubleshooted the problem and brainstormed our options-and did all of that without snapping at each other or losing our tempers! Gotta love that!

Hot Tip #1-Leaving on a year-long adventure is maybe not the best idea during the most torrential series of rain storms that California has seen in the last 100 years! We have been gone for a week and a half and it has rained almost every day! I feel like the rain is chasing us and it looks like we have another series of storms coming our way when we head out to Arizona and New Mexico. We have had a smooth and fun start in spite of the rain!

We arrived in San Dimas, CA at Bonelli Bluffs RV. We purposefully picked this campground because it was so close to where my dad lives and we wanted to spend some time with him before we left California. What a BEAUTIFUL campground. We had an amazing site that overlooked a portion of Puddingstone Lake and provided us with a beautiful sunset on the day that it didn’t rain. We spent 4 nights here and thoroughly enjoyed our time with my dad-Peder even got to play handyman and fix a couple of things at Dad’s house before we head out on our adventure.

...and you can't go to Glendora without a trip to the The Donut Man on Route 66!

We headed to Joshua Tree National Park on Thursday and will spend four nights here. Excited, as this was the first time that we had guests stay over night and sleep in Coach Addy. As you know, we have entertained a lot in the Coach (which can be challenging when it rains and you don’t have access to the outdoor space)! Our son Jake and his wife, Maddie arrived on Friday late afternoon and are here for the weekend. Peder and I spent Friday morning driving Park Boulevard which meanders throughout Joshua Tree National Park. The total drive is about two hours and is filled with amazing scenery and many hiking trails. Jake and Maddie hiked the park on Saturday before the rain came. The rest of the weekend was filled with football. Maddie is a 49ers fan and Peder is a Charger fan…some happy fans and some unhappy fans on Coach Addie this weekend! Jake is a Giant’s fan and we’ll see what happens there. As for me, uh…I’m a Broncos fan, enough said!

Hot Tip #2- Plan ahead, way ahead and book a site within the Park. It’s dry camping, but so worth it. We were not able to book a site inside the park and stayed at the Joshua Tree KOA, which is a nice RV Resort, but you can’t compare it to staying within a National Park!

I continue to be amazed at how much storage the Tiffin 34 PA has and how comfortable we are “living” in the coach. We seem to be settling into a nice routine and have been practicing something that I read about while researching our trip-”Don’t try and consume the same space at the same time!” If I’m getting ready in the bedroom, Peder stays in the family room; If Peder is baking or cooking in the kitchen I stay out of the kitchen, etc…This practice ensures that you aren’t in each other’s way and helps you not feel the space limitations of living in under 400 square feet. We have also made the commitment to have a place for everything and to put everything in its place as soon as you are done using it. The kitchen is very easy to prep and cook in. All in all, the small space has been less of an issue than I thought it would be.

Hot Tip #3-Have fun with cooking on the road! Part of cooking outdoors is BBQing the traditional fare of hamburgers, bratwurst and steaks, but get creative-take a risk! One of our favorite dishes to prepare for guests is Paella, a Spanish dish from the Valencia region. The dish gets its name from the wide, shallow traditional pan used to cook the dish over an open fire, paella being the name for a frying pan in Valencian/Catalan language. The rice is bomba rice and the secret ingredient that you cannot skimp on is the spice Saffron. (Side note: we are staying at Meraki Meadows, a Saffron farm in Texas, and we are going to make Paella for the owners of the farm while we are staying there.) See the pictures below for the various steps of the process and the final product. So delicious!

Bummer of the Week: We were just settling in to watch the Seahawk/49er’s wildcard game and I made mistake…We are in a site with only 30 amp hookup and Peder had told me that we would be ok…we just need to be mindful of how much electricity we are using at the same time and he even gave me the example of you probably shouldn’t run the microwave and the Keurig at the same time…Well, anyway when Jake and Maddie came back from hiking, we had the BMWi3 charging, Jake was brewing a cup of coffee on the Keurig and I started the microwave for a cup of tea…Yep, you guessed it, we tripped the circuit breaker. Which shouldn’t be a big deal, right? WRONG! We tried everything to get the 110v to work again…with no luck. The best that we can tell is that the Transfer Switch is not working. We spent all of Saturday troubleshooting and then looking for a mobile RV repair man. Definitely a bummer! Lesson Learned-Don’t run the microwave and Keurig while charging your electric car at the same time when hooked up to 30 amp service! ARGH!

Itinerary adjustment: We believe that we can work around for the Transfer Switch. We can run the electric “stuff” on the battery with the inverter on and we can charge the battery when we drive. Soooo, the plan is to adjust our timeline for getting to our daughter’s house in Texas . We will cancel our time in Alamogordo NM and adjust some of our Harvest Host dates, which will get us to Betina’s house in Boerne , TX sooner and allow us to work with an RV repair shop to fix the electric issue before we head out for the second leg of our trip.

Highlight(s) of the Week: Setting up our Palm Tree! Our daughter gave us this LED Rope Light Palm Tree for Christmas. We saw one when we were camping at Carlsbad State Beach and thought this would be great to bring along on our adventures and remind us of our California home. The irony of this is that we have all native plants at Herons’ House, but the palm tree is traditionally associated with Southern California, so it seems appropriate. The palm tree has been the talk of the campground. Everybody loves it AND it is quite the conversation starter!

Next stop Catalina State Park, Arizona!

Cheers,

Julie