Lake Havasu City, AZ

Well, let me begin by saying that 10 days in Lake Havasu City with temperatures of 100 degrees or higher is way too long.

We left Las Vegas for two reasons. One was the fact that when we originally made these plans to use the membership parks, we needed to be out of the system for a week. The other reason was that Robyn and Scott were going to out of town for a weekend. Since the weekends were the main time that we saw them, we just decided that this would be a good time to check out the park in Lake Havasu City.



So off we drove, leaving behind temperatures of 60-70 degrees with gusty winds requiring us to wear sweatshirts and jackets and use the heat in the morning...........and on to Lake Havasu with temperatures of 106. We did not know this about this city before we left, but now we do know why the snowbirders are gone.

Our plan here was to take care of projects..............I fixed drawers and closet doors that were not staying shut and Barb caught up on all of our laundry. We also caught up on the huge stack of mail we received from Deb in SD. In addition to all of that we had an appointment with an RV dealer to work on our awning again. As much as we have enjoyed this motorhome, we have found this awning to be a continuous problem. I do not remember if I wrote about it not coming in on the day be fore Thanksgiving when we were leaving to fly to St. Louis. We had to scramble to find a mobile guy who would come out at the last minute and at least get it in. Any way, he fixed it for a few months and now it is winding up crooked and causing the rear arm not to align and so not close. So we arrived on Monday and on Tuesday brought the rig to a dealer to evaluate the problem. His belief was that we needed new fabric and a new roller. Since it is still under warranty, A&E had a say in this and they approved the fabric only. It has been ordered and we are hoping it comes in by tomorrow. That gives them Wed to work on it since we leave on Thursday. If we had it to do over again, we would never get an A&E awning !!! We have had something go wrong with it about once every 6 months !!!

So yesterday, we decided it was time to get out of the motorhome and away from projects. By the way, the fame of Lake Havasu is the fact that they have imported the London Bridge. That's right..........they took it apart piece by piece in London and put it together in lake havasu city. It is kind of a neat bridge and fun to drive or walk across............and good restuarants and tourist shops along the water underneath the bridge.

But we wanted to do something different, so we drove south of lake Havasu to the Parker Dam and the Bill Williams Wildlife Refuge. Now, for a bit of info, Hoover Dam may be the largest, but Parker Dam is the deepest. And we have seen them both!!!


The refuge was interesting.



We took some walks in the refuge.

We learned that the area that the refuge is in is on the border of the Sonoran Desert and the Mojave Desert and so the vegetations reflects this difference.





We also walked along the waters of Lake Havasu itself and then drove over to the bridge. It was a nice outing.




Today we are back to errands............Barb at Walmart and me on the computer.

Love to all of you,
Linda and Barb

Our Week in Vegas

Tamara left Vegas on Monday.

She had a late flight, so we spent the day touring Red Rock Canyon. And then took her to the airport in the evening to catch her flight home.

On Tuesday Barb's brother Doug, from California came to visit. He was really only here one night.

From Las Vegas 2007

We met him at the Wynn Casino where he was staying a had an interesting evening touring the casino. Both Barb and I felt that the Wynn was the nicest casino on the strip. It was set up in such a way that the stores and shopping were on the outside of a concentric circle and the casino itself was inside the circle. The decor was very classy without being gaudy and the ambience was quiet. At the various restuarants and dining areas in the casino there were huge and awesome waterfalls. One had figures of people standing in the water looking at the waterfall as the lighting changed as so the shadows changed. Very interesting effect.

We met Doug again on Wednesday morning and had breakfast with him before taking him to the airport.

And then on Thursday, we moved to a different RV park in Vegas, which took most of the day for us. we do move slowly!

After Doug left, we spent the rest of the week with the kids. The weekend was very busy as we spent Saturday at Zack's baseball game and Sunday at Ashley's birthday party.

Monday morning we left for Lake Havasu City, AZ for 10 days.

Love to all of you,
Barb and Linda

Our First Night in Vegas with Zack and Ashley

Our first night in Vegas we spent with Zack and Ashley. We brought them a rug size checkers game that they enjoyed playing. Oh, and we did see Robyn and Scott too.........

I will publish many more pictures of our activities with the kids in a later blog.

Thanks to all of you for your encouragement with regards to this blog. I am having fun writing in it and really do appreciate the positive comments I have been receiving from you.

Love to all of you,

Linda and Barb

Touring Vegas with Tamara

We have been in Vegas for a week now and are currently residing in our second RV Park. We spent the first week at the Oasis Rv Resort and are now at Thousand Trails Rv Park. Having memberships are great but do require moving whenever we are in a park that has a one week restriction. So yesterday we packed up everything and drove 10 miles to Thousand Trails. I think that is the shortest distance we have ever driven in one day.





My niece Tamara was here during the first weekend and we spent much of the time touring Vegas. This was the first time she has ever been in Vegas. I showed her the the strategies I use at the casinos................................the penny machines which are my favorites. Sometimes I will win $20-30 on them................... but most of the time we toured the "Disney World" charm of the casinos on the strip.




Standing outside the Bellagio with Paris in the background.






We also drove through Valley of Fire and Red Rock Canyon.

Here we are on a hike at Valley of Fire.





We also hiked at Red Rock Canyon and then had a picnic afterwards.





Some additional pictures from Valley of Fire:





Petroglyphs from the Valley of Fire:

Love to all of you,

Linda and Barb

Update on "crashed laptop" and new GPS

It is always interesting to me how events seem to line up and occur and either the best or worst time. In this case the crashing of my laptop , if it had to happen, was certainly well timed.

About a month ago, Barb and I started talking about her getting a laptop so that she can learn to write e-mails and communicate with all of you. We both acknowledged that I am very negligent in responding and when I do , it is often brief. She likes to say alot more and give more detail, so that when she dictates e-mails to me , I feel they are much too long. We began a process of visualizing a new laptop and believing that we would find one...........ie, the perfect opportunity would show itself. And so it did, we found a great sale on a Toshiba, with Vista Premium, dual core, 1 gb RAM and 160 gb hard drive. It had everything I wanted and we were both thrilled. And then, don't you know, 3 days later, the old computer crashed. I guess it was jealous and wanted some attention. It just did not boot into Windows and no matter what I did in restore, recovery, reboot, reinstall, reformat, etc., nothing worked. I spent one day on it myself and then, our friend, Kath, spent two days, including nights, trying to figure it out. Even talked to Gateway for hours to no avail. So we had to send it to Gateway for their "expert" repair services. And you see, fortunately, we had the new laptop to use. But Barb had to wait again to get to do e-mails. I was busy on the new one getting all of my programs and data back on this hard drive. And figuring our what will run on Vista and what will not. And updating Vista on what seems like a daily event. So while in Needles, Barb played poker each afternoon and I played Vista each afternoon.

The other new tech-toy I have been wanting is a GPS, but at the price of $700-$1000, it seemed much too price for us. And then, wow, we are at Costco, and there is one for $299. Seemed like a gift thrown in our lap and in fact, it was, since Robyn had been wanting to buy us a Chanukah present from last December and we could not figure out what to tell her. So I called her to say she had just bought our Chanukah present. It is a great little GPS, but is limited on RV spots. So also while in Needles, I downloaded all of the RV resorts that are in our membership parks. Plus, of course, I had to add all of the Walmarts!! So now we are experimenting with Sally, yes, we have named the voice that speaks to us. She does pretty good but does at times give misguided directions (or maybe we are misguided??).

So we are now in Vegas!!! Tamara is here from New York staying with us. We have had two days with Robyn, Scott, Zack and Ashley. Will add pictures and stories in a few days.

Love and hugs to all of you,
Linda and Barb

Yes, We Are Alive!!!

Yes, We are alive! Yes, I did recuperate from the cough and cold but it did take a month. Yes, I have been negligent in keeping all of you updated with our activities for the past two months.

So, here goes a summary of our activities. We have become very involved with the social and physical activities at the Superstition Mountain Resort where we were staying. Our routine activities have included poker 3 times a week for Barb and a photoshop elements class for me once a week. In addition, we went to classes to learn line dancing and square dancing. So we are novices at all of it, but have had a fun time trying to learn. In addition, we began taking lessons in playing pickleball and even participated in tournement. No we did not qualify for any medals but every one thought we looked cute in our matching outfits.

Other organized activities included the Mind Games and the Cactus Classic. The mind games were in January and Barb was involved in the planning for our "neighborhood" (our team). The park is divided into 5 neighborhoods that compete in challenging mind games such as sudoku, scrabble, jigsaw puzzles, and several card games. This competition lasts a week and is quite a bit of fun.

Then in February we had a week of physical competition in the Cactus classic. Again we were divided into our neighborhoods as teams. Barb and I competed in Bocce Ball and did look cute again in our matching outfits. We also attempted ring toss. I was on the photo shoot commitee and was busy taking pictures of as many activities as I could.

So our time was busy with planned events as those above and with unplanned dinners, cocktail hours and other gatherings. It seemed that Barb and I had very little time to just sit back and relax.............but being busy and being with friends is wonderful. We are grateful for all of the good times we had with everyone and look forward to returning in November of 2007 for a new season.

We left SMR on last Sunday, spent two nights at the Freightliner parking lot, so that they could do some recall and other maintenance work on the motorhome.

We are now in Needles, CA. We are staying at the NorthShore Resort which is a affiliated with the membership park program that we bought into last year. We can stay at this park or any of the others for two weeks and then have to leave for a week. Then back again for two weeks if we want. We chose this park because it is close to Laughlin and Barb can relax and play poker for the week. And I now have the time to update this Blog as well as other programs that have been ignored.

We will stay here until April 12 and then move on to Las Vegas and stay at the $8/night membership park. Vegas, as you know, is where Robyn, Scott and the grandkids, Zack and Ashley, live. So we are really looking forward to spending time with them.

In addition, my niece, Tamara, will be coming to Vegas a few days to visit with us and Doug, Barb's brother, will also be there for a few days. So that should be fun busy times.

More to come..................more about us.............and more pictures. Oh, by the way, my computer crashed. Had to send it back to Gateway. I am using the new laptop we purchased just 3 days before the crash. How about that for timing!!!!

Love and hugs to all of you,
Linda and Barb