Arrival in Palm Springs

We had everything ready to go and hitched up by noon yesterday. We stopped at the office - actually, Mike and Sharon's trailer behind the office - to wish them luck and say goodbye. They invited us in to have coffee and a cherry pie a-la-mode to travel on. Their new workplace will be pretty close to ours as they found a job off rt 111 on the other side of the Salton Sea. It is unbelievable how they found their job. Sharon was in a long line at Walmart in Brawley one day last week and struck up a conversation with the gentleman in front of her. It turns out he is from a small spa and mature adult community that was desperate for a manager. She and Mike hooked up with him on Tuesday and they signed a contract to begin next Tuesday. Talk about being in the right place at the right time. Anyway, we took a picture of Mike and Sharon (below), exchanged email addresses and mailing addresses and we were on our way by 1 PM.


We arrived at Thousand Trails a little after 2 PM which was the check in time. The Ranger said we could park the truck and fifth wheel behind the clubhouse while we drove around the campground in the Jeep to locate a suitable vacant site that we could take. There weren't a lot of sites to choose from, but we settled on a back-in site (vs a pull thru close to the highway) that would provide a much quieter stay. Below is a shot of the site which was tricky to back into because of all the palm trees.

The palm trees actually created another problem for us and that is with our satellite. We can't use the satellite positioned the way we are on the space because the trees block the signal. We thought about hitching up the fifth wheel again and slowly moving forward or back until we got a signal but we are getting all the local stations with our roof antenna and the signal is excellent, so we will stay where we are. The only stations we will miss are the movie channels (sorry, Josie) and we will not be able to copy any shows since we don't have use of the DirecTV digital recorder. It's only 6 days, so we will survive.

It's interesting to note that campgrounds that are in, or near cities, have much smaller sites than those in the boonies. It will take a little getting used to our much smaller spaces here than we had at Blu In or Happy Jack. The trade off is we get to save lots of gas. We also get a free newspaper delivered to us because of our membership level. We haven't read a newspaper since we left Surprise. We got all the news we needed from the internet.

After getting settled in and organizing the rig for our stay, we went to Olive Garden for dinner which was a real joy - and it was only a couple miles away. We will enjoy being close to everything while we are here. Josie is looking forward to some relaxation before she goes to work at Palm Springs Floral late next week, and I get to shop for work...