Home For Christmas

Our kids are grown.  Our youngest, Clara, just finished her first semester in college and got home for the holidays last night.  A normal two hour drive from San Diego to Pasadena took us five hours!

Christmas is different than when the kids were little but I still love being together as a family.

Clara finished her last final yesterday after a week of tests.  I remember what that was like when I was in college.  I was always ready to crash and burn at the end of each semester.  And that is exactly what Clara did.  She slept until well after noon today.

I quietly crept into her room around noon and took this picture with my iPhone.  About 45 minutes later I get a text message from Clara asking who took the picture of her.  Would she get out of bed to ask?  Of course not!  Clara is part of the millennial  generation., they just text or Facebook.  I responded.  Another 45 minutes go by and she texts again asking who took the picture.  I tell her she must have been dreaming.

I don't think she has still figured it out.  Post finals fatigue.

It is so great having my little girl home for Christmas!

Merry Christmas.

Family Vacation: RV'ing Turned ATV'ing

RV on Swett Ranch Loop Road - our new homestead

Notice fine print "road NOT maintained for low clearance vehicles"

Swett Ranch Loop Road - 8 miles!

Clara driving the boat on Flaming Gorge

Family vacations are great. They create such memories, and sometimes even family legends that your kids will tell to their kids someday.

We like to travel in our RV. This past week we made a trek to Flaming Gorge, Utah for five days. It was Joy, Clara and myself. Clara's two older brothers are off doing their "thing" so it was just her stuck with her parents in an RV for five days and no internet connection. And, she lost her phone a day before we left so no texting her friends!

But this is the making for a family legend.

We have been in some tight and precarious spots with our RV. I was a novice with an RV when we bought the rig in 2006 and still am only slightly better than a novice now. If you have watched the Robin Williams film RV, that is us. Well, maybe not exactly and to the extent that was depicted in the movie, but close!

I have gone around corners only to have dishes fly out of the cupboards. I even had a jar of spaghetti sauce come sailing out of the cupboard and the spicy red sauce shatter all over the inside of the rig. That took hours to clean up.

I have gotten pretty adept at hooking up the water, sewer and electrical. Normally I can do it in 12 minutes flat. However, once while flushing the "poop" tank, I got distracted and filled the tank to the point it overflowed out the toilet inside the rig. That took hours to clean up.

I came close to high-centering and low-centering the rig on a narrow road in the Smokey Mountains National Park on the 11 mile loop road to Cades Cove. I drove down a road in Tennessee that was so narrow with a rocky cliff on my left and a 30' drop down to the Nolichucky River on my right that one of the dual wheels on the rear was hanging over the edge. In the dark. And we had no choice but to continue because there was absolutely no place to turn around and there was no way I was going to backup the rig on this road for 5 miles....in the dark!

This week in Flaming Gorge we had another "RV story" but this one really tops the others.

I had it under high recommendation from a friend to visit the Swett Ranch while we where at the gorge. We took a drive on our second day to circle around the south end of the gorge, visit the Swett Ranch and go over the Flaming Gorge Dam.

Along the way we found the turnoff for the Swett Ranch. It was a dusty, gravel road but in good shape to accommodate an RV. We drove for about a mile and got to a closed gate with a sign posted "No RV's Beyond this Point." The Swett Ranch was closed for the day.

Since visiting the ranch was not an option, we decided to continue past the ranch road and proceeded along the gravel road knowing that it circled back to the highway. Joy kept insisting the road was paved. I told her to look out the window. The road wasn't paved. So much for her navigation and map reading skills.

As we progressed along, the road got worse. As I said, I have been in a few precarious spots in the RV but this was getting bad. I thought for sure I was going to high-center the rig or rip the top off from the tree branches any moment. If I didn't do one of those things, I certainly was going to break an axle or blow a tire on the spiky rocks below. We would be stuck and I would just have to homestead the property and live out our days there because no one was going to find us.

I was hunched white-knuckled over the steering wheel while Joy and Clara were in the back trying to catch things that were sailing out of the cupboards. Clara heard me swear for the first time in her life as I yelled "oh shit!" while we dipped down into a gully and up the other side. I inched the rig slowly over big boulders, up steep slate-rocked hills and washed out gully beds to finally reach the end of the road and the paved highway.

Once we got out into the parking lot, I got out to the read the signs leading into the road we just came out of. "ATVs and high clearance vehicles only." I pulled up the route we had just taken on my GPS and we traveled 8 miles on this rocky round trip route past Swett Ranch that we never got to visit.

But we made it out unscathed. The Rolling Bounder got us through another circumstance of our own stupidity without a scratch.

But it also created another family legend that will be told around campfires, family reunions and Thanksgiving dinners for years to come. And that makes it all worthwhile!

Cheers,

Dale