OMG!!!

Okay.  So my morning went sorta like this:

I head to the public shower to get ready for the day.  I'm in the shower and hear someone start taking a shower right next to me.  Having never had anyone ever come into the bathroom at all, that was weird enough.  But after about three minutes or so, I hear this, "Oh, my God!  Oh, my God!  Oh, my God!"  I'm thinking, okay, so I've got some wacko in the shower next to me.  So I didn't say anything.  A split second later she comes running out of the shower and headed toward the exit yelling, "Oh, my God!  Oh, my God!  Oh, my God!"  I'm like, "What's wrong?  What's going on?"  She yells, "There's a baby tarantula in the shower!"  Then I start yelling, "Oh, my God!  Oh, my God!  Oh, my God!"

I HATE spiders, let alone a stinkin tarantula!!!  No matter if it's a "baby" or not!  You've never seen, and will never see, a person dry off and get out of that shower stall as fast as I did.  I was beside myself, thinking that I'd see that big black leg come under the shower curtain and into my stall!

So I ran back to the RV, and guess what I did?  I grabbed my phone to take a picture!  Yes, I did this for you guys, as I would never WILLINGLY go back anywhere where there was a spider.   I tried to convince Dave to do it for me, but he wasn't buying it, using the excuse it was the ladies' room.  Yeah, right.  I know it was because he didn't care to be anywhere near the tarantula either!  So here is what will no doubt be in my nightmares tonight, and many, many nights to come:

I now freak out at the slightest breeze in my hair or movement out the side of my eye.  :(

I suppose this post should go into the "Smile and Take a Picture" category, but somehow I don't think I'll ever be smiling about this.

So we're here until this Saturday, when we will be headed back to Wilderness Thousand Trails, Menifee, CA.  It's been so wonderful being here with my family.  It will be so hard to leave, but we are also looking forward to the drive back up, and of course, getting back up to Seattle to see our other wonderful family and friends.  Miss you all!

Christmas and New Year's in San Diego

We hope everybody had a wonderful Christmas!  And here is to a fabulous New Year!  It's been wonderful visiting my mom and family here in San Diego.  It seems we have been just running around shopping for Christmas gifts and for food the whole time we've been here, and so we really haven't had a chance to do much else.  But we plan on going to Torrey Pines State Park on New Year's day and hiking there.  That will be a nice way to start the New Year!

We arrived here at Pio Pico Thousand Trails, Jamul, CA, on Saturday, the 20th.  We had planned on surprising my brother Kim for his birthday by showing up at the church he sings choir in.  But you know how it goes, the best laid plains and all of that.  He ended up getting too sick to sing, so we just decided to surprise him when he came over to Mom's house for his birthday dinner. 

The weird thing is that we sat around the table one night talking about scorpions, which happen to be in this area, and the next day I was in the public restroom and saw something crawling across the floor.  Having just talked about scorpions, I completely freaked out, as it did look like it could be a baby scorpion.  So I managed to get the courage up to take off my flip-flop and swat it.  Thinking I had killed a scorpion, I go the courage up to go back and take a picture.  Here it is:  

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• As wicked as the thing looks, it turned out to be just a Jerusalem grasshopper!

The weather has been really nice up until yesterday, when it started raining again, of course.  They are actually calling for snow!  Not down in San Diego, but up where we are, at an altitude of 3,700 feet.  We are hoping the roads are good today, as we are going to go to Mom's house for New Year's Eve and spend the night there so that we can get up early and go hiking at Torrey Pines State Reserve.

On another note, we finally got our FMCA (Family Motor Coach Association) plate that we've been waiting for.  It took over two months, but it is really nice.  The story behind that is that we are using Dave's parents' number that they had when they were RVing, which is 76,385.  Everybody else we see is in the 300,000s!  They put an "S" behind the 76,385, for son, and so I'm sure we'll be getting tons of inquiries about our low number.  Mom McGrath is very happy that their number lives on.   Here's a picture of the plate and our little Christmas tree.

We wish to all of you a wonderful new year filled with good health and much happiness!!!

Blog catch-up

Well, hello, everyone.  It's been awhile since we last checked in last.  Remote places and lack of Internet have kept us from blogging.  So here's a sum-up of the last couple of weeks:

We stayed in Morgan Hill from the 22nd of November until the 8th of December, and it felt like it was two months.  Morgan Hill Thousand Trails definitely does not make our favorite places to stay list.  But we did meet some wonderful people there, and we did have some good times.

We had the best day-trip ever, and it was to Monterey and Carmel By The Sea.  We LOVED it there, and it IS on our list of top places to return to.  Here are a couple of pictures that Dave took.

This one is of the Point Pinos Lighthouse, right past Monterey.  It was so quaint. 

This is a picture is a part of the Pebble Beach Golf Course that we saw as we were walking on the beach, down the street from the restaurant we ate at, Il Fornaio, the same restaurant we loved to eat at in Seattle.

Here is the beautiful sunset in Carmel.

And here is a picture of our new house on the beach in Carmel!

Yeah, just wishful thinking.  :)

From Morgan Hill, we drove to San Luis Opisbo and stayed at the Pacific Dunes Ranch.  We hiked along the cliffs of Bluffs Trail in Montana de Oso State Park.  It was really pretty.  We think we saw some whale waterspouts out in the ocean, but, unfortunately, not close enough to see the whales.

We also visited Morro Bay and the big rock.  That was really cool.  You could see the ocean pounding the big jetty they had built to protect the city, and we saw falcons on the big Morro Bay rock.  We also saw tons of seals in the water.

From San Luis Opisbo, we drove to Rancho Oso, in the foothills of Santa Barbara, right into a major storm that everybody has probably heard about that hit the coast, the likes of which California hadn't seen since 2009!!!  We had 50-mile-an-hour wind gusts and rain like we've never seen or heard before, and, of course, that brought with it, you guessed it, our second power outage.   I know California needs the rain, but, jeez, give us a break on this weather already!  But that's okay.  Dave and I had a great time, hunkering in and waiting for the storm to pass.  We brought in our slideouts, just to make sure the wind didn't tear off any of our awnings.

The next morning, this is what we awoke to!

We didn't get to see much of Santa Barbara, but we'll come back to this area again to visit.

We then drove the longest distance we have driven since we began this journey, 200 miles, to where we are now, Wilderness Resort, Menifee, CA.  We really like this place.  It's huge, with over 500 RV spots.  But, since we can't just pull into a place and have just a normal day, we were just getting  ready to settle down this morning and enjoy watching some football when, you guessed it, the electricity went out!!!  This time we have no idea what caused it, but we sure are getting suspicious that it's us!

Here's a picture of the welcoming committee in Menifee:

Okay.  So hopefully we won't take such a long time to update the blog.  We are heading to Pio Pico, near San Diego, to have a great Christmas and New Year's Eve visiting Kari's family.

Finally in sunny weather!

We are in Morgan Hill, CA, and it's sunny and beautiful.  It's a welcome relief, as we had about three days of sunshine out of 22 days.  The rain followed us into California, which was welcome by all who live here, but not by us.

We've passed through and stayed at some absolutely beautiful country.  Since we left Bandon, we stayed at the Riverwalk RV Park in Fortuna, CA,  and then right in the heart of the Avenue of the Giants, with the beautiful towering Redwood trees all around, at a really nice RV site, tucked away in the trees.  We met the owner, a feisty English lady that used to drive her own 35-foot RV, but has owned the Redwoods River Resort, in Leggett, for the last 16 years.  They had a great hiking path down to the river.  Here's a picture Dave took of the river bed.

We hiked an area right out of the quaint little Victorian town of Ferndale.

Jeff, this one is for you.  We saw this while hiking.  See if you can spot the bird!

Next was the Russian River Thousand Trails park in Cloverdale, CA.  And when we left Cloverdale and drove to the KOA in Pentaluma, Highway 101 was so bad that we thought our RV would shake apart!  Please, CA, fix your highways!

We arrived in Morgan Hills Thousand Trails on Saturday, with the never-ending rain.   We ended up parking next to a group of guys that had come for the 49ers game!  They were a hoot.  They invited us to come eat some ribs with them, and we listened to them play guitar and sing.  Here's our new 49er friends!

So of course we couldn't just have a smooth ride, right?  We always seem to have some sort of adventure/calamity in store for us.  So the first spot we were in, the power failed us.  We got by for the night and next day by hooking up to our 49er friends' electricity, but after they left, we  ended up moving to a new spot, only to wake up at 3:30 a.m. with no electricity again!  We were starting to think it was our RV, but we saw that everybody was without electricity.  Turns out that there was a one-car accident on the road outside the RV park, and the car had taken down the power pole!

We are getting ready now for Thanksgiving Day, and we wish all of you the very best Thanksgiving Day!!!

Miracles do happen!!!

So to continue our lock saga, we left Whaler's Rest, South Beach, OR, and had contacted Thor, the manufacturer of our RV, to overnight us a new lock.  We had them send it to our next stop, which was Bandon, OR.  We got up on Tuesday and got the tracking number and saw that it was on the truck for delivery, but then we also realized that it was Veteran's Day, and the Post Office was closed!  We managed to contact the UPS store and asked them to hold it for pickup.  The driver must have known it was for the Post Office and that it was closed, so they had it there.  It was a 45-minute trip there to pick it up, but at least we had it, although it did not look like the right lock.  It was oval, when the other was square, and so the decals on our RV wouldn't match.  

Then we were racking our brains on where to go to get it put on.  It's hard to figure that out when you're on the road and don't quite know the times you will be in a different area, and they all require appointments.  So we went ahead to our next destination, which was Cresent City, CA.  We pulled into our RV site, which was #49!  First RV stall site in California, and it was the number of our beloved 49ers!  

We figured our luck had to be changing, and, sure enough, not two minutes later this truck pulls up to the camper two sites down.  We read on the side, "Mobile RV."  We told him our ordeal with the lock and asked if he could put it on, and he could!!!  He had it on within half an hour of arriving, and also was able to carve out our decals to match the new lock.  Unbelievable!  What are the odds of a traveling RV mechanic pulling up to our site right after we arrived??!!

After it was replaced, we could not stop using it, so relieved it worked again!!!  Here's a picture of our knight in shining armor:

The rain is still with us, ever present, but we will be heading to Fortuna in the morning.  Let's see what other adventures await us.

Locked in, but still cruising

Oh, my, we've had quite the adventure (ordeal) the last few days.  We came from Seaside, OR, to Newport, OR, and were 10 miles from Newport when we decided to fill up on gas.  Well, Dave wanted me to go out and make sure the tow car was okay, and I couldn't get out of the RV!  Dave thought it was me, of course, so he tried, and he couldn't get out.  We tried for about 15 minutes and finally flagged down the gas guy.  He tried to open it from outside.  Nope.  We handed him our keys, and, no, no go.  We finally had to call a locksmith to get us out.  He couldn't do it from the outside and had to climb through our front passenger window!  We have the pictures in our "Smile, and take a picture" page.

So it was a two-hour ordeal, but he finally busted us out of the RV.  We thought he had "fixed" the problem, but, no, our ordeal continued all weekend.  First Dave got locked in, after I went to bed, and it took him 20 minutes to unlock the door.  Then we both got locked in and it took us flagging down another unsuspecting passerby.  He managed to get us out with our keys.  So Dave went and bought a ladder that we could keep handy in case we get locked in again, and then he could climb out the passenger window with it.  But he spent a couple hours messing with the lock and filing things down, and, knock on wood, it's worked so far.  But we are actually sleeping without locking the door and going away without locking the door, for fear we'll get locked in or out.  It's super stressful, praying that every time you try the handle it will open!

But we are having a wonderful time.  We are in Bandon by the Sea until Wednesday, and today it was a beautiful, sunny day for traveling.

We did manage to go walk on the beach in the morning and at sunset.  Here's a picture of the beautiful sunset at Newport Beach.

We made it!!!

First day of our journey from Chehalis to Seaside, OR, was a beautiful day!  Not only did we get our first 100 miles under our belt, but we enjoyed gorgeous weather.  But ever since then, it feels like we're still in Seattle, as it's been nothing but rain!  But that's okay.  Life is great, and we are enjoying ourselves!

Just having some fun in my new duds!  It don't matter what I wear.  I'm still stylin!

1 day left!!!

We can't believe it…we're almost there!!!

Just testing out the new blog

Okay.  Just thought I'd try to upload another picture and write something else to make sure this blog is up and running when we take off.  :)

Dave's parents, Jim and Dee, RV'd for 20 years.  This is a picture of an RV that Jim gave Dave years ago when Dave said he wanted an RV.  Dave, knowing his dad would do something funny, told him it had to come with a key, though.  So Jim made sure it came with a key, which he taped to the bottom of it! We wish Jim could be here to see that we really did finally get a real RV.

Our journey begins November 1, 2014!!!

We're super excited and can't wait to begin our journey!!!