It is pretty near the end of the year and, foolishly, I thought there should be a final entry in 2018. We returned from our 2018 trip across the U.S.A. in early October and since then we genuinely made progress although not a lot. Peggy got rid of some property she used to own in Oregon, we got new propane tanks for the Barbarian Invader, we fixed both sides of the trailer demolished when our former set of tires inconveniently gave up the ghost – twice, we acquired new LED lighting for the trailer, we changed the truck’s oil, fooled around in Cabo for two weeks, spent Xmas with the kids and spotted a few of our old cronies. I got an inconvenient root canal and a crown after three trips across the border into Mexico to a better dentist there than my former dentist here.

Along about our third trip, Peggy mentioned that she had an issue with a tooth and ended up getting a root canal and a crown, just like me so we can encourage each other to only chew on one side. Quite a bit of our recent time has been spent sitting in long lines trying to cross the border back into the U.S. after our dental forays thanks to the Trump administration’s current vision of the Border Patrol, Customs and general fencing, walling or slatting. We must appear to the dutiful, bored Border Patrolmen at the frontier to be elderly, gray-haired, arthritic terrorists because they give us the fisheye as we hand over our passports.

We will be lingering in Southern California until we can head north toward the Pacific Northwest without freezing at night. As long as the nighttime temps are above about 50 degrees, we can maintain a pleasant temperature in the trailer with small electric heaters powered by the park’s electrical grid. Below 40 degrees outside means we have to use the trailer’s furnace which burns our propane. We don’t mind the cost of the propane but having to fill the tanks is a pain in the ass and we prefer to do it the easy way.

We also prefer to hang around our stomping grounds until we get some geezer healthcare, medical insurance and Medicare issues resolved. We would hate to be in Spokane with a heart attack only to find that our insurance will only pay if we check into our local San Diego Kaiser facility. We will see in the next few weeks how weird healthcare coverage can become since the government has declared a complete brain fart on the health of the ancient codgers like us. It was nice of the government to wait until we were eligible for Medicare to attempt to get rid of it. I imagine the Social Security Administration’s new, current policies involve killing everybody over retirement age so the government can forget about them, allowing the remaining population to worship the Cheeto Jesus full-time.

This is not really a blog entry or any real information. This is a short blurb about getting my son who is not an idiot to fix an issue with my hosting service that I, a bona fide computer idiot, is incapable of resolving. More info later.

We have again set up in the Thousand Trails facility called Pio Pico,located beyond Jamul on the east side of the San Diego and Chula Vista areas. Up until Thursday last week we were toughing it out in Cabo San Lucas for a couple weeks.

Like an idiot, I left for Cabo with a tooth that had forewarned me for a long time that it may go gunnybag at any time. It did. About halfway through our two weeks I chomped down on an ice cube and detected a sensation that was not reassuring. At the beginning of the fun it didn’t seem like it was going to be too bad but reality soon set in and I started hunting through Mexican pharmacies in a mostly fruitless search for pain killers that would get me through to my return to the States. I found many pills that alleged, in my tortured and erroneous translations of their labels printed in Spanish, that they were effective at reducing pain. Either the labels lie or my translations could be suspect. In any event, I found some pills called paracetamol that were slightly effective if you double the dosage and multiply the frequency at which you are supposed to take them by two.

When we got back to Pio Pico to release our fifth wheel from storage, we encountered some strange issues. Nobody had broken into our trailer but a vole or field mouse had snuck into our cheesy home only to drown in the toilet. We now know that the rubber gasket in our terlet is good because it held enough water for over two weeks that was sufficient to drown a rat. Getting our trailer out of the storage lot was a problem. When we put the trailer into the lot, the dirt road was bone dry due to years of drought here in Southern California.When we tried to remove it, however, it had rained a couple inches in a couple hours the night before and the formerly adequate road was under gooey mud and blocked with some crud left behind by flash flood conditions. After some shaky progress trying to pass through the goo,we backed out and got campground maintenance to show up with some equipment. Two hours later, our muddy truck and trailer emerged from the storage area leaving only about a half ton of muck on the newly rain-washed road. The fun was not over yet.

Once back in the campground and properly installed in our new camp spot for the immediately foreseeable future, I did a clumsy and broke off the site water supply below all valves, releasing another torrent of water across the campground. The same maintenance guys who had cleared the road came to fix the pipe. They asked if I missed them in the 20 minutes we had been separated.

Now we have been back in the States for a few days and we returned to Mexico, specifically the town of Tecate, to visit Veronica Hernandez, our new dentist now that my nifty former employer provided dental insurance is a thing of the past. A cost for a root canal and crown in our hometown of San Diego exceeds $2000. In Doc Hernandez’s practice in Tecate it costs $605. And to make things better, Tecate is closer.