Pauline's Happenings

*** 31st Aug @ 19:03

We are here in the Sequoia National Park, took so much longer to get here.  We didn’t realize that we would be climbing, climbing and climbing to over 6000 ft elevation while doing it on the very winding, cliff dropping road.  Lets just say that I rarely looked down…..icks.  But it was beautiful.

Our campsite.

One of our 1st views.

We just had a good dinner, have no internet, no biggie….so decided to work on our blog writings.  We have a fire going, of course, we have a 2 families camping together….must be about 6-8 kids….right in our view, and a group of about 5-6 men camping to the side of us.

We are only allowed to run the generators between 8am-11am and 5pm-8pm, so we have it going for the fridge and charging everything up.  There are no hook ups, but that was really to be expected.  We were informed that we have to sleep with the windows closed unless we moved all of our food into the bear box next to the site!  =)

We have 100ft tall trees all around and got to see a couple of the monster sequoia trees…..those were great.  But that was just driving by.  Tomorrow we are going to drive the RV to the next stop up so we can take a shuttle to deep forest. The shuttle doesn’t pick up from the camp site.  Afterwards we’ll be back to the campsite for one more night.

But I’m going out of order here……….

After White Sands it was on to the Petrified Forrest and the Painted Desert.  WOW!  WOW!  It was gorgeous.  For one, I didn’t know that it was one and the same. The colors were a lot more ranged then I thought it could be.  The Petrified Forrest reminded me of colored glass.  Then the sky was stunning with its clouds formations and reflection of colors off of the cliffs and rocks near by.  Words really don’t do it justice….so here are a ton of pictures.  =)

That is the shadow of the cliff on the other side of the road…..so cool.

Then it was one to the next stop, which was the Meteor Crater.  Well, if we were going to make it Flagstaff for the evening, we weren’t able to stop.  So we found a RV park right outside of the crater and canceled the other one.

That park was a story and a half.  We called, booked it and then arrived 30mins after they closed their check in!?!  Luckily they had security.  Took about 20mins of yelling to find him……annoying, but we got in.  And it was a really nice park.  They even had very soft grass right outside of their bathrooms…..I had to take my shoes off and put my feet into it!  I haven’t felt that since Indiana…..sure in hell didn’t get that in Florida.

That park was right out side of the crater.  Which we think it is privately owned for the pricing it had.  National and state parks aren’t that pricey.

The Meteor Crater was created about 50,000 yrs ago, by a piece of astro that was about 150ft wide, weighed several thousand tons and hit the earth at 26,000mph.  To walk the rim, it would be 2.25 miles around.  It didn’t look that big….until you learn that they put a cut out of a 6ft tall astronaut on the bottom, that you couldn’t see without binoculars or a great zoom……..there was a rock, that didn’t look that far or that big, but it was as big as a 2 story house, that is just to give you an idea how big it was.

That little spot in the middle of the crater is where the cut out of a 6ft tall astronaut is.

Harold going down to take a few more pictures.

Started 24th of Aug @ 11:00 AZ time

I really wanted to do one of this daily, but with all the site seeing, driving, situating (if that is a word) and fighting for interact connection to get work done it wasn’t happening…..I’m pretty disappointed by that.  =(

We picked up the RV on Monday the 20th.  We actually were able to get a hold of it a little earlier so we were feeling pretty good about the time.  Well good thing that we did get earlier, because it took longer to pack up the RV then we thought it would…..ggrrr  Then, of course, it was one of the hottest days of the year…….which is always our luck.

**Trying it again 30th of Aug @ 13:18 Pacific Time Malibu, CA

As I was saying, I can’t believe how long it took just to get everything into the RV.  It took 3-4 hrs!  It really didn’t seem as we had that much, but damn!

After loading it up, I had to finish the cleaning of the house….sweeping, mopping, wipe downs….etc.  It was so hot that I had to dump very cold water on me.

When all of that was done, we took one last jump into the pool just to cool off and enjoy.  It felt good.

Then it was on to the shower, so I can turn in the keys to the house and I was going to say one last good-bye at work, but ran out of time.  The rental car was due by 18:00 and it was 17:30 by now………….plus rush hour…..gggrrr  I knew there was a reason why I wanted to get things done faster.

So I totally didn’t get to stop by, which irritated the hell out of me, but I did get the car in 5 min late so I wait in the long slow line to check it in.  I figured if he saw that I waited, instead of the express, I wouldn’t be charged a late fee and I wasn’t.  So 15min was a good investment.

So we were on the road around 18:30, our goal was to get inside the Mississippi line before stopping for a few hours.  Well, that didn’t quite happen.  We ended up stopping on the other side of Pensacola for a few hours.  So we still did pretty good.

Honestly, that part was kind of a blur to me.  When we loaded the RV we just put stuff everywhere.  So I spent that evening and a good portion of the next day just trying to get things organized.  It was driving me nuts that I couldn’t find anything, especially when my hubby asked for it.

During this time, our cats went into major hiding mode………..especially the boy, Reggie. It wasn’t until the 2nd day when Harold closed off the bedroom area to the cats that we were able to get them out.  So we gave them some love.  Now Alexis will come out when driving, demand attention and will sleep on the chairs and couch.  Reggie, rarely comes out when driving, but will come out once we are stopped and settled.  They both have a thing for sleeping on the dash board and peeking their heads thru the curtains when we close them.  It is cute as hell…but, of course, to protect from claw marks we have put towels over the dash where they are currently stretched out sleeping very happily.

Trying to get back into bedroom.

Hiding under a chair.

Taking over the chair.

Chilling while we are stopped.

Loving the dash.

I know this may sound horrible about Florida, but it was so great to see actual vegetation when we hit Alabama, Mississippi & Louisiana.  It felt good to be headed west and out of that state. Florida was a good temp move, but we knew that we would never be staying there permanently.  Some how, we always knew we would head west.

We stayed our 1st night in an RV park in Alamogordo, NM, right before White Sands National Park.  Harold had been out here years ago with a bad camera and was never able to fully capture the beauty of it.  So it was on the must see list.

It was stunning; I still don’t think our high-end cameras fully got it.  The sand looked almost like black ice covered in snow on the roads and as bright as the freshly fallen snow.

We had a blast at White Sands.  We climbed one of the dunes in our bare feet, it was so, so hot out but the sand was surprisingly cool.  It felt great on my feet.  I was even able to climb without my feet hurting and it gave me a great work out.  So I need to put a sand dune in our back yard in Portland…….lol