Month: September 2015

Cathedral Gorge State Park, NV – Tuesday September 29, 2015


We are again at Cathedral Gorge State Park on our way towards The Carlsbad Caverns.  Last year we spent 9 days here waiting out the weather while heading south.  Significant thunder storms where in this area and we decided this was the safest place to stay.  The major north/south road, Highway 15, was washed out just south of here and was closed for several days.
Nice day, 90+ outside and 82 inside.

Late additions:

Campsite from the other side.

In the late evening I went out and took a bunch of plant pictures, here are two.

Highway 50, NV – Monday September 28, 2015

This morning I got an email from Verizon saying they had made a change to my cell phone plan.  I logged onto Verizon and I have my “Unlimited Data” plan.  This is good however Jean does not have a txt plan and will pay $0.20 per txt, now that’s a deal for Verizon.

Today’s travel plan is to drive halfway across Nevada on Highway 50 and stay in a rest stop out in the middle of no where.   We decided to give a trip to a Verizon Store and see if they can fix Jean’s txt plan.  At the Spark’s store Caesar said oh yes I can fix that with no problem.  Jean watched he face as he was working through all the computer screens to get the txt plan added “BACK” on our plan.  He worked on it for twenty minutes or so, we will see in a couple of days how successful Caesar was.
Rest stop campsite.
At home we don’t have neat clouds so I have to take sunset and cloud pictures when we are traveling.

William Kent FS Campground, Lake Tahoe – Sunday, September 27, 2015

1:30 p.m.  watching the Seahawks game on my Ipad and NFL Gameday.  This year all I can find is a text of the game action.  Last year and last week I had a text and football field view of the game.  The internet connection I have is so bad and slow I don’t want to spend any more time looking for the better website or I might loose everything I have.

Getting my camera gear ready to take pictures of the Blood Red moon tonight.  There are clouds in the sky so hopefully I’ll get some pictures.
Walked to the lake at 6:45 p.m., the clouds cleared just enough for my first view of the moon at 8:11.  8:11 was the time Lake Tahoe was to get the full eclipse.  Here are some of the pictures I took, none of them are any good.

William Kent FS Campground, Lake Tahoe – Friday, September 25, 2015

This is a really nice campground on the shores of Lake Tahoe.  It was a challenge getting into  the campground.

Driving down the road at 25 mph which way would you turn into the campground, here is the signage on the road.
Here is the one on the RIGHT.
Here is the one on the LEFT.
If you said left you win and get drive into the campground if you said right you’ll need to figure out how to go down a narrow two lane road with cars parked on both sides and not turn into the road with the little sign that says limited access no turn around.  After a couple of tries we made it.

We are in site 16 and here are the campsite pictures.

Great weather, sunny and 80 degrees low of 45 at night.

Winnemucca, NV and Verizon – Wednesday September 23, 2015

We are at an RV park in Winnemucca, Nv.   One of the significant live events happened today 30 miles north of Winnemucca, the “RV” achieved 80,000 miles.

Today on the way down from Owyhee River Jean was unable to get any of her text’s to go through.  When got to Frontier RV Park in Winnemucca I tried to call home and my phone said it was inactive.  Thank goodness Frontier has a good WIFI network, I got onto Verizon’s website and a chat with a rep for an hour and a half to get our phones reactivated.  We had been hacked, our phones changed to two Blackberry Curves and my unlimited txt plan changed to 6 gigs on each phone.   The first answer from the rep was he would US mail or UPS us the information to reactivate the two phones.  After we discussed how this was not a current option he walked me through re-activating the phones, thus the hour and a half.

After the phones were activated I found on the website about the change in my data plan.  This added an additional two hours on the phone and web chats.  The fifth person I talked to actually wanted (at least sounded like it) to help me get my data plan back.  I had two dropped chats and two phone calls dropped ( miss transferred and put on eternal hold).  The fifth person I think will help, she could not reinstate my  plan ( I could go over the reasons however they  are too stupid to actually type out) but would summit the request form to get the unlimited data back.   I followed up this morning (Thursday 9/24/2015) with an additional hour on the phone with a customer service “MANAGER” who also could not personally fix anything and a “FRAUD” department person who I believe is a fraud.  We’ll see what happens over the next couple of days.

Our travels are great and Hank is having fun.
Site 51, New Frontier RV Park
This is a new park and only a quarter full, used Passport America and got two nights for half price.

Owyhee River, ID – Tuesday September 22, 2015

On our way to Owyhee State Park we had a little adventure.  We have driven through Boise, Idaho a bunch of times and we either stay at a rest stop or a couple of state or COE parks south of Boise. This trip I was looking for something north Boise because we are going to be dropping down into Nevada from here.  Using ultimatecampground.com I found this state park.  What I didn’t research enough was the road to the campground.  Owyhee State Park is on a reservoir and the road to the base of the dam is pretty good, mostly a narrow one and a half lane road.  It follows the river for 22 miles and we saw a quite a few people fishing in the river.

The challenge comes when you reach the dam.  The road Y’s, right to dam office and visitor’s center and left to dam and campground.  This is a true Y with no place to turn around, remember with the car behind the motorhome I cannot back up.  To the right has a bridge 50 hundred yards down the road, I was not to sure I wanted to take my motorhome across.  It is not a huge motorhome but is 32 feet and weighs 22,000 pounds.  Left is a narrow road to the dam and campground, even has a narrow road sign.  We went left.  Narrow is 10 feet wide cut into the steep hillside with at least a 10% grade for the last quarter mile of a half mile stretch to the top of the dam.  Just past the top is a 50 foot wide parking lot and a two door out house.  At this point the narrow road continues on 3.5 miles to the campground.  I could see the road cut into the hillside and after 3 or 4 minutes of looking and thinking I decided this is a good place to turn around and camp on the river.  I talked to a guy in this parking lot, he said it is a scenic drive out to the campground but he wasn’t sure he would drive a motorhome out there.  I unhooked the car and after jocking back and forth a couple of times I got the motorhome turned around, car hooked up and headed back down the dam in first gear.  Found a great spot in the valley and on the river with enough view of the southern sky to watch SYFY’s Face Off.

Campsite by the river:
Today’s drive:
Sent from Harry’s iPad