Our RV Adventures

We decided to go out for breakfast this morning, but while we were getting ready, there was a knock at the door. It turned out to be Stan, the service manager here at Affinity RV, with some pretty good news.

After I had questioned some of the items on the original estimate that was submitted to the insurance company, they had come up with a new, cheaper, faster estimate. ‘Cheaper’ in that the estimate has now been cut in half, because the body panels and mirror are now ‘used’ parts from Colaw RV Salvage in Carthage, MO. And ‘faster’ in that the parts should be here this Monday or Tuesday instead of waiting 5 or 6 weeks for new parts to be manufactured. I certainly don’t’ have a problem with ‘used’ body panels, since both the new and used ones will have to be painted anyway.

In fact as it stands now, they plan on moving our rig over to the body shop area on Monday. Actually that only means we’re moving just a couple of spaces to the left to be in that area. So nothing much will change for us. But during the move we’ll dump our black tank at the dump out front rather than having to use the leaky Blue Boy. All right for grey, not so for the black tank.

But it will hopefully mean that we might be out of here in a month or less, but unfortunately, not in time to take the rig to Illinois next week for our family reunion, so we’ll still be going in the truck.

So, really good news to start the day.

For our breakfast, we decided to try Cowgirl in the Kitchen, a nearby breakfast / lunch place.with 4 stars on Yelp. And it was easy to see why.

This was another one of those ‘nondescript’ places that you really have to be looking for to notice.

Like our other recent favorites, BiGA and Speed’s Hanger Deli, it’s a relatively small place with only about a dozen tables.

One thing we both liked was the coffee. You have your choice of regular or dark roast. Jan started with regular to my dark roast. But then after she tasted mine, her refill was also the dark roast. It was that good.

Although we could have ordered lunch, we were still in time to get breakfast so that’s what we did.

Jan got an omelet with all the fixing’s,

while I got the Trails End. The buttermilk pancakes were some of the best I’ve had.

Jan and I agreed that we could probably be happy just alternating between Speed’s Hanger Deli and Cowgirl in the Kitchen the rest of our time here, but then we’d miss out on telling you about all the other great restaurants we find.

So, yeah, we’re doing it just for you.

Leaving Cowgirl’s, we drove over to the PO to drop off some mail. Looking down the road we saw the entrance to the Point of Rocks RV Park, so I decided to drop off some Gypsy Journal’s and look the place over.

From the A-Frame design of the office, I suspect this was originally a KOA park. Driving around, it kind of reminded me the Bend-Sunriver Thousand Trails, or the Park of the Sierras near Yosemite National Park.

Many of the sites are cut back into the woods, and are widely separated from the neighbors.

There seems to be a lot  of permanents here, but the place is well kept up and very nice.

Heading back to the rig, we made a CVS stop and then were home for the day.

So it now looks like there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. Just hope it’s not a train.

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Thought for the Day:

“A thing moderately good is not so good as it ought to be. Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice.” – Thomas Paine 1792

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First off, I want to thank everyone for their kind thoughts on the passing of my uncle. It is much appreciated.

It was supposed to rain all day today, and although we had a lot of thunder and lightning last night / this morning, the rain never really appeared, but mostly got pushed back until tomorrow. So now we’re looking at a 90% chance of rain over the next couple of days.

A little after 2pm, our friends Dennis and Carol Hill showed up for a visit.. They’re staying over in Congress, AZ, so it was only about a 50 mile trip. We haven’t seen them since the Escapade in Tucson this past March so it was good to catch up again. Dennis quickly bonded with Mister, or maybe Mister bonded with Dennis. But they seemed to be pretty happy with each other.

Hopefully we’ll be able to get together again before they leave the area. We’re certainly not going anywhere.

While we were back in the Houston area this past winter, my son-in-law Lowell gave me a jar of Scary Cherries.

These are Maraschino Cherries infused with extremely hot peppers, in this case, Moruga Scorpion Peppers, the 2nd hottest peppers in the world (the Carolina Reaper is now the hottest.). I really liked them, so much so that I went through them fairly quickly.

I was hoping they would have them at the Jerome Ghost Pepper Co when we visited Jerome about a month ago, but no luck. So I decide to make up a batch of my own.

I started by buying a large jar of Maraschino Cherries at the Fry’s across the street. I then dumped in a couple of tablespoons of one of my hot powder’s, in this case, pure oleo capsaicin. I then shook the jar for a while and tasted some of the liquid.

It was hot, but not hot enough. So I added a couple of more tablespoons. And after testing, then a couple of more. Finally it was right.

I figure that they’re now hot enough to just melt their way though an ice cream sundae all by themselves. We’ll see.

With all the furor over the new Apple Watch, I got to thinking about my first digital watch. It was the Sinclair Black Watch and it came out around 1975.

And even more attractive to me, was the fact that if was actually available as a kit.

If I remember correctly, it cost about $50 for the finished one, and about $30 for the kit.  So being a guy that built the first two color TV’s that we owned (Heathkit’s), I couldn’t resist getting a kit.

Despite all the parts, it only took a few hours to put it together and get it up and ticking. They even included the solder that you needed for the assembly.

It lasted for a couple of years, until the part of the case where the pins are inserted for the band finally broke out. But by that time Casio had digital watches on the market for $10. And no assembly required.

I wonder if I can get an Apple Watch kit?

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Thought for the Day:

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country. – Kurt Vonnegut

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