Today we took another trip through Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area. We found a highway system that runs all the way around the Vegas metro area and took it instead of driving straight through the city. The roundabout way may be quite a bit longer in terms of mileage but in terms of time, it is much shorter. Stay out of downtown around here.
In almost record time, we arrived at the entrance station for Red Rock Canyon and showed them our ancient human federal park pass and were passed free of charge. We then stopped in at the park visitor center where there are interpretive displays, maps, restrooms, water and a gift shop.
After finding the circuitous way out of the visitor center, we started on the amazing 13 mile loop road through this gorgeous area. In addition to magnificent rock formations, we were fortunate enough to spot some reptiles, birds and a very brave kit fox who was invading a picnic area where some assholes had left their trash at their picnic table. It was maybe 10 feet from the picnic table to the secure trash container but, apparently, the folks who left their trash at the table were too terrific to get their garbage into the trash can. It made for superb fox viewing but the bagged garbage didn’t look like regular fox fare so one of the folks standing with us headed into the table, cleaned up the torn-apart bags and packaging and disposed of it properly. The fox found some stuff still sticking to the table and spent quite a bit of time licking up the residue. Good picture opportunities although I’m pretty sure it ain’t good for the fox.
There are other great views available around Red Rock Canyon like Red Spring which is just down the road. This area was all created by a massive upthrust fault 600 million years ago and, although I wouldn’t care to be there when the fault was being created, it certainly left a magnificent landscape that we can enjoy now.
Wew took a few pictures in Red Rock Canyon and you can see some of them if you click here
The first 3 pictures are actually from yesterday but I’m too stupid to figure out how to properly file them.

Our journey today was undefined when we departed from Las Vegas RV Resort. We drove south on Boulder Highway which is a highway as far as width is concerned but the myriad of signals make progress along the road drudgery. After about 10 miles and some frustration about slow progress, we ran out of signals and city and the road became US-93. We continued on 93 to Hoover Dam. The west end of the dam is in Nevada and the east end is in Arizona.
Hoover Dam is 86 years old but it was certainly an amazing engineering project. It was built is a very rocky gorge through which the Colorado River used to run unimpeded. Lake Mead is the artificial lake created by the dam and it looks like a bright blue gem in the midst of colorful Mojave Desert valleys and mountains. We crossed the dam twice before leaving the area and heading along the north shore of Lake Mead on, surprisingly, a road named Northshore Road. We followed it for about 50 miles until we entered Valley of Fire State Park.
Valley of Fire is an amazing area filled with massive spectacular colorful rock formations. There is a visitor center within the park that has tons of interpretive information about how the formations were created where we stopped and got the scoop. The park offers both primitive and RV camp spots but even day visitors will have ample places to hike between the magnificent formations.
We completed our circle back to Las Vegas by driving west from Valley of Fire to I-15 and turning south for about half an hour. Then we turned off on Las Vegas city roads which had the same sort of signal concentration we encountered thia morning when we left town.
The loop through the Hoover Dam area, Lake Mead, Northshore Road and Valley of Fire took us about five hours but the road runs through amazing desert landscapes and is definitely worth the trip.
We got a few pix of this stuff and you can see them if you click here

We ended up spending almost the whole month of October fooling around in San Diego. We were reunited with some of our old friends and cronies, got to see our kids, serviced the truck and the fifth wheel and spent too much dining out. It was great. We finally departed on October 28.
Now we are in Las Vegas RV Resort / Thousand Trails which is a very tight park with trailers and motor homes parked in big phalanxes, side by side with spaces about 18 or 20 feet wide. There are full hookups, 30 or 50 amp power and paved roads. Initially, I thought there were no animals of any type around but right after the sun went below the mountains to the west, the delightful sounds from flocks of birds in the park trees could be heard over the TV. The lights here are amazing at night unless you are trying any stargazing.
The night before last we spent in Shady Oasis Kampground in Victorville. It is shady but it is also located right next to I-15 which is open for business 24/7. There are also nearby train tracks with multiple grade crossings so the air horn concerts can be quite lengthy. Victorville and adjacent Apple Valley are located in between some gorgeous rock formations but we only stayed for one night so we didn’t go into either town.
As we pulled into Shady Oasis, the message center on the dash of the truck indicated there was some kind of wiring fault on the trailer. The message came and went and the trailer brakes were working when we left Victorville. We headed north on I-15, passing through some breathtaking desert scenery, zipping by a town called Zzyzx and passing by the world’s largest thermometer in Baker, CA. After scurrying across the Mojave to Vegas, the nasty message started to come back and by the time I pulled into the park, we had no trailer brakes. We set up the trailer, turned on the air conditioning and called a mobile RV repairman.
Today, since we were free of the trailer, we took a spin to Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area. It is located west of Vegas and offers a pretty spectacular 13 mile drive through very pretty and colorful dry desert canyons and mountains. It was midday during our pass through today so the only animals we saw were a lizard and some pet dogs. We will come back either in the early AM or near dusk to see if we can spot more critters.
Back in the RV park this evening, the birds put on another performance and it was quite nice. There was also a truly magnificent sunset out the trailer back window. Mountains and pink clouds in the distance and razor wire on top of a masonry wall in the foreground. It appears unlikely we will encounter intruders coming from that way.
There are some pictures from the last two days you can see if you click here

We have had our Barbarian Invader trailer set up for two weeks at Pio Pico TT near Jamul, CA. We have performed some maintenance on the trailer by ourselves but it is going into the shop on the 21st for the yearly brake check/replacement, wheel bearing re-pack and a sniff at the equalizer(?) between the axles. I have completely replaced the drinking water system to make our lives easier and wetter.
I performed the every other month battery service in the trailer. We replaced the microwave oven that failed at Monument Valley last June when our electrical system went kaput. The original model microwave that came with the Invader is no longer available, of course, but we did find a model that would fit in the same cabinet space and would accommodate the trim without being ugly. We acquired a ladder that will support my massive weight without collapsing at the most embarrassing moment. I should be able to conveniently access the roof now without taxing the cheesy, flimsy ladder screwed to the body panel at the back of the trailer.
We will also be taking Charlotte Taylor Wilson, our beloved Ford F-250 in for a yearly check-up which looks like it will at least involve new ball joints which no longer are built with the ability to be lubricated. Charlotte has faithfully pulled us around 70,000 miles in the last 26 months and, hopefully, keeping on top of maintenance will get a few more thousand miles out of her.
We also got to see many friends still living in our hometown of San Diego. We were fortunate in that we got to enjoy the marriage of our friends, the Merbacks’ son, Trevor, to Gina, a longtime crony of Kathleen, my son Sam’s fiance. We probably drank too much liquor a few times but we’ll get over it.
When we finally leave Pio Pico on about the 28th, we suspect we are going east, maybe to Arizona, New Mexico and, perhaps, Texas before we come back to go to Mexico for a week in early December. I hope we get out of California for another year or so after that. We do love the road.

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.

We have been on the road for some 26 months and have found that virtually everywhere we have visited has some redeeming features. In Advance, NC, we found a place called the “Bull Hole” which was an abandoned textile facility which left a big masonry dam and some great lagoons full of turtles. In Lake Medina, TX, we could easily drive to San Antonio and go to the River Walk and the fascinating downtown area around the Alamo. In Canon City, CO, we could take the frightening Skyline Drive and see magnificent views.
Now we are in Hesperia, CA, and it may be the only place we have visited in the last 70,000 miles that possesses absolutely no redeeming features. The town merchants have decided mini-malls are the only place to do business so there is no real downtown area. The area around town is a brown wasteland with a bit of sagebrush and some immature Joshua trees but little else. Traffic is bad although I cannot fathom why there would be a lot of cars here. This place is downright unattractive. The RV park where we are staying has a good number of shade trees and may be the garden spot of the entire area.
The closest thing we may wish to see is Big Bear which is 60 miles distant. Lake Arrowhead, another southern California former hotspot, is a mere 50 miles away. Considering the wonders of this place, I am surprised it is not called Despairea or Hysteria because those titles would be more appropriate. Fortunately, we leave this Mecca of Nothingness tomorrow. There are no pictures.

Today was a travel day. We departed Boulder Creek RV Park in Lone Pine and continued our travel south. Right outside the park, we turned south on US-395 and dropped down into the desert. Most of the road down into the desert has great scenery of desert between two impressive mountain ranges. From Lone Pine south to Inyokern the highway is great; two lanes each way, relatively flat and well paved. From Inyokern south to Adelanto the road is single lane each way, no divider, substantial uphill grades, slow unpassable trucks and rotten paving.
We continued on 395 all the way to Hesperia which is a foreign word meaning Bleak Wasteland. There was not much to see on the way to Desert Willow RV Resort, our RV spot for tonight and tomorrow. The park has a pool, many RV spaces, full hookups including cable TV, wi-fi and good roads. There was a problem with the cable TV once I got it hooked up.
It was over 90 degrees when we were setting up but I took the time out in the inferno to hook my cable to their connection and went inside to set up the TV. I input commands to use the cable TV signal as the source and to program all available channels. The TV started chugging along, programming channels and after a while I noticed that it had programmed 486 digital TV channels and two cable channels. Then the TV went through a long sequence of removing all the scrambled channels from the programming. Finally, after about 20 minutes, the TV put up a dialog box that stated the TV had finished and we had 2 cable and 1 digital TV channels. One of the cable channels was a green screen. The other was a purple screen. The digital channel was an actual TV picture but it was very tiny, filling up about 1/8 of my TV’s screen. I went back into Hell outside and hooked up the Dish.