Past and Present

Day one of our four day garage sale was underway today.  All went well and we actually sold things that I, seriously, didn't think would sell.  No accounting for people's taste.  But at least we can see the end of the road on Karl's aunt's house.  It's been a long time coming - almost two years, in fact.  The hard parts done - the sorting and tagging - and the rest is downhill from here.  We will do day two tomorrow and then again a weekend in August when we get back to WA.  After that things go to Goodwill or the (gasp!) dump.  Just a word of advice to children of parents that are getting up in years - start cleaning out their houses NOW!  You will thank yourselves later, trust me!  You would be surprised what parents will keep and not remember.  Anyway, that is the present.

As for the past - we were having lunch the other day with a friend of Karl's and we started to tell her of the horrible start of 2010 when I realized that I never really told my blog readers what was going on - starting in September of last year.  So I will entertain you of our wonderful times starting in 2009.

Most of my travel blog readers are also my Sadie blog readers so I won't really go into a lot of the details of the saga of Sadie which happened in mid January.  I will go back to the month of September 2009 as a preface to the "fun" we had at the beginning of 2010.

So in comes September 2009 and we are traveling from Colorado to NM where we were going to be for the months of Sep and Oct because we were having two couples coming over the beginning of Oct for the balloon fiesta.  I had been having stomach pains on and off for about 25 years , but never could find the source of it.  So I would just live with it.  Well as we were travelling to NM my pains were so bad one morning that I couldn't even get out of bed.  If you've ever ridden in a diesel motor home you know you really don't want to be in the back where the bedroom is while on the road because it is very noisy.  I was so sick at the time that I didn't care.  Finally after a few hours it stopped hurting and I could at least come up front with Karl, but was too weak to drive.  Get to NM and I am fine for a while.  I work through the small pain and get on with my life.  The first part of Oct our friends show up and I had planned a great week for them with plenty of things to do in and around Albuquerque including the balloon fiesta.  I ended up making 2/3 of them.  On top of the stomach pains I kept having nose bleeds.  I was having such "fun".  To give you the Reader's Digest version of this story, by the middle of December I was in the hospital getting a foot of my colon removed.  I was released on Christmas Eve and the doctor had the nerve to tell me that I couldn't travel for a while.  What?  NO WAY!  I had a grandbaby being born (at that time) the 12th of January and I HAD to get to Phoenix!  So he gave me permission to leave on the 10th of January with the strict instructions to Karl that he had to stop every 1-1 1/2 hours so that I could get out and walk for 5-10 minutes to stop the threat of blood clots.  No problem.  Got to Phoenix on the 13th and was there for Sadie's birth on the 19th.

Now the problem with our delay in leaving CA was that in the summer of 2009 while up at the farm in WA we did some great crabbing.  Got a lot of fresh Dungeness crabs and had some in the RV freezer for good eating.  We moved the RV over to NM to Phoenix in November because Karl's son-in-law was graduating from U of Phoenix and a baby shower was being thrown for Sadie.  We left the beginning of Nov with the RV staying at our RV lot in Phoenix plugged in and safe.  Or so we thought.  For those who don't know RV's, a short lesson on power.  An RV will run on either 12V power (a generator) or what we call shore power (plugged into an electrical outlet).  Everything in the RV will run off of either - EXCEPT the refrigerator.  That needs both 12V AND shore power.  And what happens when one doesn't work?  It drains all six of the house batteries and both of the engine batteries.  And what happens when the batteries die?  Everything SHUTS OFF!  Including the refrigerator.  And what happens when the refrigerator shuts off?  Everything DEFROSTS.  Have you ever smelled crab that has defrosted and sat in it's own crab juice in a warm freezer in a warm RV in a warm climate?  It ain't pretty, believe me. 

We arrived back at our RV in mid January and the freezer was out since, probably - we're not sure , since the end of November.  Karl opened the freezer door and dropped to his knees because of the smell.  It permeated the whole coach.  I tried everything anybody recommended on how to get rid of dead fish smell to a little bit of success.  It didn't get rid of it, but it made it tolerable to open the door for a few seconds without knocking you out.  The other problem was that our ice maker was in the same compartment.  If we left the ice in there it would pick up the odor and we would end up throwing it out.  Having a drink that smells like crab is not great.  We thought we could handle it, but then we got to thinking that we are traveling across Canada this summer and couldn't see living with the smell.  Plus if the freezer ever got warm again that smell would increase again.  So we decided to take it to the RV repair shop and get a new refrigerator.  We call that our $4600 accident.  On top of that, when we got to AZ in November and I tried to level the coach with the electric jacks, one of the jacks malfunctioned and wouldn't extend.  We call that our $1000 accident.  Then in the morning we started the engine to increase the air pressure in the air bags so that the coach wouldn't move so much since the jacks weren't down to stabilize it and the air bags wouldn't inflate.  Come to find out a rock was thrown up under the coach and punctured a hole in the air line.  We call that our $300 accident.  The total bill for all this?  $6400.  Oh well, that is the price you pay for having a home on wheels, I guess.

For those of you who have read my blog last year about the freeway cat, I hope you got as much  enjoyment out of this blog this year as well.  Notice that something major starts our travel year each time?  Makes me kinda wonder.