First Day of our Next Adventure

Here we are - exactly one month since our last post to this journal.  We've been at home and really enjoyed being there. The weather wasn't wonderful, but we did feel good being home.  We are looking forward to seeing our Florida family and having friends and relatives visit us while we are there,  but I don't think either of us are quite ready yet for the cross country drive with the RV to get there.      

We are in Las Vegas tonight - same motel that we stayed in on our way home a month ago. They have a very pet friendly policy, which is a good thing, because I left the door just closed but not locked while Roger hauled in our stuff.  Maggie nosed her way out into the hall and was running up and down like a dog happy to be free of a leash and of the confines of the truck before I noticed she was missing.  We finally corralled her and got her back in the room but not before she visited with the maid who was cleaning a room.

It was 47 degrees and cloudy when we left this morning.  We stopped in Hawthorne and found a place with a picnic table for lunch but had to eat in the truck again - gale force winds and 50 degrees. We had wind all day - some of it pretty fierce.  We kept seeing RVs and hoping they were managing to stay on the road.  The temperature didn't get above 60 until we got just north of Las Vegas and then it was only 70 when we arrived about five o'clock.  Windy. Very windy.  It was a beautiful day, otherwise, with mostly sunshine. 

We had a few fun sitings today:

 - Outside of Fallon (about an hour from home) we saw a bison in a field with a bunch of beeves.  Just one, but he was a big one! 

 - South of Fallon there were lakes of water in the desert along the road.  Spring runoff?  Left over from the last rain?  It just looked weird seeing water in amongst the rabbit and sage brush.  

-  A little further south we spotted a pretty large herd of wild horses grazing on the cheatgrass that is prevalent right now due to the wet winter.

 - As we drove out of Goldfield we heard a helicopter flying low along the highway and watched it as it veered off to the east. It was an Army Apache helicopter and it had missiles strapped to it!!  It looked a little out of place there, but it really wasn't all that far from the Tonopah Test Range and Area 51 and was probably on a training mission.

 - Coming down the road towards us at a very slow speed were several NHP cars with their lights on.  In between the lead cars and the follow cars was a man jogging and carrying an American flag.  I spent some time on Google trying to figure out what was going on and I think it was the 17th Annual Relay Run from Las Vegas to Carson City in honor of fallen law enforcement officers.  That's the only explanation we could come up with.

 - Just north of Las Vegas, between the city and the Nevada Test Site is Creech Air Force Base.  Years ago it was just a little tiny reserve field with not much there.  It is now one of two drone bases in the United States.  It's where they direct the flight of the drones in Afghanistan and the rest of the Middle East.  Well, there was a peaceful protest of about twenty people going on across the highway from the main gate.  Lots of peace signs being waved at the cars as they went by.  

When we stopped for lunch in Hawthorne we noticed some Tesla charging stations.  Again, when we stopped in Beatty for a pit stop there was another one - with a car being charged.  We didn't see any in Tonopah, but we weren't looking.  Again, The Google came to our rescue when we tried to figure out how far a Tesla can go on a charge.  300 miles max and it takes an hour at one of these supercharging stations.  So, an eight hour drive from Reno to Las Vegas in a Tesla would need three hours of charging time to get here!  We think that because Tesla has a big presence in Nevada that it is one of the reasons there are so many charging stations around - that and the fact that the towns are so spread out.  

No food in the house last night for dinner resulted in us going out to eat.  We went for Chinese and deliberately brought home leftovers so that we could eat in our room tonight.  It was nice not having to go find food.  

Maggie was very hyper today and not wanting to travel well despite getting her anti-anxiety pill this morning. She didn't want to sit on her bed on the console but in my lap and after we stopped in Fallon to let her out before we headed south on US95, she didn't want to get back in.  She cried and whined and just bounced all over the place.  I gave her the other half of her pill to help settle her down.  This behavior resulted in another "duh" moment for us today.  We have had Maggie for four years now.  She won't ride in the back seat and we've always put her on the console.  Sometimes she is great and other times not so much.  It occurred to Roger that maybe she is up too high and having everything flash by her out the window was part of her upset.  That is maybe why she sits in my lap with her head either in my arm pit or down between my leg and the door.   He suggested we put up the console to form the third seat in the front and put her bed down on it between us.  That made sense and it would give her something behind her and perhaps make her feel safer. Duh! It only took four years to come up with this solution. Well, we will see tomorrow whether it was the changing of her bed or the second pill, but she was quite mellow the rest of the day!  

I've been trying to upload some photos I took today but the wifi in the motel isn't letting me and my phone has only got one bar of service here so nothing is happening.  I get the spinning beach ball forever.  Sorry - I actually got a couple good ones. I'll try to load them tomorrow as an addendum to this post.