We have completed our trip through the Great Basin for 2016. This morning we left unremarkable Menifee and drove the hour and a half south on I-15 to Pio Pico RV Resort, a Thousand Trails facility. We are TT members so staying there for up to 21 days at a time is free.
We were pretty quick about getting here and setting up so we had the whole afternoon off. We elected to go to see our son and his fiance at our former residence. Sam was there when we got there and it was nice to see him after 10 months away. Another special treat was to see our dogs.
When we left, we had two dogs; Jezebel and Jack. Jezebel is what someone said was a Mexican wolf (do wolves live in Mexico?) and Jack was a Doberman with ears that had not been cropped so he looked like a big bitey hound dog. While we were gone, cancer took Jack. Jezebel was without a companion and did not like it. However, my son and his lady, Kate, rented out one of the rooms at our former residence to a dog owner. Now Jezebel has a companion named Lupin, a abundantly rambunctious lab/shepherd mix who is very sweet. Jezebel and Lupin are buddies except when there is a dispute over which toy belongs to which dog. There is some snapping and snarly sounds when disputes arise but other than that, the dogs get along fine.
It is nice to be back in my home town for a bit. Our daughter is coming from Washington on the 8th of October so soon the whole family will be together for the first time in quite a while. The bad part about being at home is that I have to be productive and follow up on the maintenance tasks for the Barbarian Invader and Charlotte the truck before our next foray into the hinterlands.

Sometimes, our desire to stay on our travelling schedule backfires. There have been times when we scheduled ourselves into a particular locale and RV park for only two nights and found we did not have enough time to see all the interesting local stuff. We have had a few incidents when we booked ourselves into some place for more than three days and found our schedule retentiveness has subjected us to extended boredom. Since we are actually quite new at this and have not really been that many places, we schedule our travels with considerable ignorance and occasionally trap ourselves.
Menifee has turned out to be one of the places where we scheduled poorly. I hold myself to blame because I set up our current visit. We reserved a space at Wilderness Lakes RV Resort for three nights this time through. It seems three nights are at least one night too many because there is not really anything around here that piques our interest. We must be visually-oriented folks since most places we have visited have some sort of natural wonders that command our attention. That is not the case here in Menifee.
Next time we come this way I will try to remember to keep our stay in this uninteresting community short. This place is not as bleak as Hesperia but it runs a close second.
Tomorrow we head south to San Diego where we have lots of family, friends and maintenance tasks to perform before we leave our hometown for our next adventure. We will get to see our dogs for the first time in 10 months. We will get to see our kids. We will hobnob with our friends and cronies. I can hardly wait.

Today we had shopping on the agenda so we departed our nice quiet space at Wilderness Lakes RV Resort and headed down I-15 a bit to Costco in Temecula. It was miserably hot on the way there and it only got worse. Fortunately, the Costco was air conditioned.
We wandered around inside the store, picking up much tasty loot before checking out and making a visit to the store snack bar. They have great Caesar salads available. Strangely, the snack bar is outside the store in the torrid weather and, since this is a very popular Costco, lines were long. Peggy and I finally got away from the grocery section only to pull into the Costco gas station. The Temecula Costco is one of only a few Costcos that sell diesel and it is downright cheap compared with the surrounding gas stations.
We returned to Wilderness Lakes and the air temperature was 95 but it was kind of a dry heat with humidity hovering around 35 percent. We chickened out on going back outdoors until the weather gets more reasonable. Soon we will be in San Diego, our home city, and I will be not nearly as diligent about keeping up daily blogs until we depart the area sometime in mid-October. We will be visiting relatives and friends and I’m pretty sure nobody wants to read about that. I will fire up again once we get back on the road.

We were fortunate today in that we departed from Hesperia and its abundant nothingness. We pulled out of the trailer park and got on I-15 southbound, leaving US-395 which has taken us through spectacular scenery for the last 1,000 miles.
I-15 climbs a bit from Hesperia until it reaches Cajon Pass at about 4.200′ elevation. From there, it is all downhill into the metropolitan San Bernardino/Riverside area. We took I-215 (which runs parallel and east of I-15) around the big, bad metro traffic and cruised without slowdown all the way to Menifee. In Menifee we turned east a few miles and pulled into Wilderness Lakes RV Resort, a Thousand Trails (free, for us) campground.
Wilderness Lakes has pretty spacious RV spots, full hookups, paid wi-fi and some big ditches full of water which the operators claim are lakes. The local waterfowl like the ditches. There are nearby good stores like Trader Joe’s, Costco, Home Depot and Lowe’s. In late September of 2016, it is also very hot here; it was 91 when we pulled into our space. TGFA/C – thank god for air conditioning.