Tuesday January 28th 2020

Four weeks from tonight I will be in Arizona if all goes according to plan. The count down to the start of my 2020 travels is on. Over the next few weeks I need to accomplish the tasks I’ve been putting off and get everything ready to travel.

This morning I made reservations in Florida for the last few days of 2020 and the first ten days of 2021. I don’t have the entire year booked, but I’ve got more locked in reservations than I ever had before. On February fifth I’ll be able to book the last unbooked week in the first half of the year at a Utah State Park with a four month reservation window. My next block of open time starts at the end of July and runs through my reservation in the Florida Keys at the end of October. I really don’t like planning this far ahead. It makes spontaneity and changes difficult and potentially expensive.

My summer travels start with seven weeks in various parts of Arizona. I’ll see a few baseball spring training games in the Phoenix area followed by another visit to the Cottonwood/Sedona area and the south rim of the Grand Canyon. Continuing north as it warms up a little I’ll spend four weeks in Utah followed by three in the West Yellowstone area of Idaho and Montana. As I return south in June, I’ll spend another week in Utah followed by four weeks in Wyoming before moving south on the east side of the Rockies into Colorado in the middle of July. At that point I’ve run out of booked reservations, but plan to continue through Colorado into New Mexico in August. September should find me on an easterly course along the Interstate 40 corridor.

Today started and ended as a partly cloudy day. In the middle it was a cloudy day without any visible blue sky. The temperature in the valley is still running above normal around sixty five degrees. During all the changing weather I got some errands accomplished, completed a little online shopping, did a load of laundry and finished the day at Sam’s Town Casino for the senior day drawing. Of couse, I didn’t win, but it was a productive day overall.

Monday January 27th 2020

I’m still in a pattern of late starts to the day. While I was awake earlier, my day didn’t start until around 10am. Breakfast and catching up on various internet information sources takes at least a couple of hours, so the daylight was more than half gone before I really began my day.

It was a nice day. A ten to twenty mile an hour wind out of the north was an addition to the previous few days of bright sunshine. Somehow, the north wind brought additional warmth. The temperature peaked just shy of seventy.

Except for a couple of walks around the RV park, the computer caught my attention today. I used it for some travel research work, then migrated into more experiments indexing and annotating some of my many photographs. That lead to the inevitable question of “What can I do with all these pictures?” As an experiment I adjust and cropped one picture for printing. I sent it off to the local CVS for printing. I’ll pick up the print tomorrow. Right now it’s more of a curious experiment than any real plan. Maybe I’ll replace the stock artwork on my RV home wall with something from my travels.

Sunday January 26th 2020

It was another warm January day in the Las Vegas valley. Although it started cloudy and ended cloudy, the bright sunshine through the middle of the day allowed the temperature back into the upper sixties.

I hung around my RV home doing a few light chores for most of the day. Around 3PM, I needed some excitement, so I drove west and up hill a little to the Las Vegas strip. My mission was to see the Chinese New Year decorations from the center strip south. Starting with the Bellagio Conservatory, I found plenty of dragons in and around the hotel casinos. Here are some pictures of the fire breathing beasts.

Saturday January 25th 2020

The Las Vegas valley’s stretch of warmer than normal days continued with a bright sunny day with the temperature in the upper half of the sixties. Even the wind that often keeps things stirred up was calm. Overall it was another beautiful weather day.

My day began slow and never really got up to speed. Late night TV watching has skewed my start to the day a couple of hours. It was afternoon before I was finished with breakfast. Of course having to bake a package of muffins for breakfast, since I was out of just about everything else of substance, helped to drag out the meal time. The first order of business for the day was a resupply mission.

There is no right time to go shopping in this town. Peoples work schedules in this heavily tourist oriented city are extremely varied. Morning, afternoon and night of everyday of the week seems to be busy at the neighborhood Walmart. This afternoon was especially busy, but I had to go. I was out of bread, milk, eggs, meat and all the stuff that ties them together. It took about two hours to get in and out of the store. The checkout line was particularly slow. I got in a lane with a checkout clerk that had to pause and discuss the merits of this or that item with every shopper. It should be another week or ten days before I need to return.

Walking around the RV park late today, I saw the usual complement of dogs getting walked or pushed in dog carriages to the dog run. Today, I saw a new pet out for a walk. A cockatoo was taking a walk on his keepers shoulder. I’ve seen a few birds in cages outside RVs and it there windows, but this is the first one I’ve seen out for a walk around an RV park. I hope it was well trained to stay with the man, since I didn’t see any signs of a restraint. A lost bird in greater Las Vegas could ruin a trip quickly.

Friday January 24th 2020

I got a new neighbor the yesterday while I was out. When I got home yesterday evening, I started hearing their gas furnace running. The unusually load appliance sounds like a jet engine running. It managed to disrupt my sleep for quite a while last night. How they could tolerate the noise for unnecessary heat is beyond any guess I have. I woke up every time it cycled on until well into the night.

This morning shortly before 7AM, a new disturbance woke me up. The neighbors with the loud furnace were packing to depart. The good news is I won’t have to deal with the loud furnace anymore, but the noise they made packing up sure did a number on any thoughts of sleeping in. I think they slammed every door they had and ran the loud diesel truck at fast idle for half an hour. It was just another one of the things you need to deal with when staying in tight winter quarters like these.

Today’s weather was great like the last few days. The bright blue sky allowed the temperature to return to the upper sixties. Tomorrow is forecast to be a similar day with Sunday warmer with a chance of rain. It’s nothing to complain about.

Today was occupied with various tasks around my RV home. In addition to cleaning, I also completed a couple of maintenance tasks that have cropped up. The hinges on one of my closet doors became loose preventing the door from latching correctly. The door would randomly pop open and turn on the closet light. Waking up in the middle of the night with a strange glow coming from the bedroom closet can be very disorienting. Today I adjusted and tighten each of the hinges. Everything is working now, but I suspect that I’ll need to adjust the latches as well.

On my walk around the RV park this evening to find a picture of the sunset for this blog, I had a pleasant observation. The days are getting longer. Sunset is more than half an hour later than near the winter solstice. The location of the sunset is also a little more to the north in the western sky. The bottom line is spring and summer are coming.

Thursday January 23rd 2020

The very nice weather trend continued today. It was bright and sunny with a high temperature in the upper half of the sixties. The TV weather reporter pronounced the day seven degrees higher than the fifty nine degree norm.

I made use of the Sam’s Town shuttle for another tourist mode excursion today. This time I used the shuttle to travel to downtown Las Vegas. I spent most of the afternoon wandering in and out of the casinos along Fremont Street. A few things have changed since my last visit two years ago. The hole in the ground that used to be the Las Vegas Club casino hotel is now a mass of steel work many stories high of the new Circa Casino. It will be the tallest hotel casino north of the strip when it is finished.

Other changes are more subtle. The interior of the California hotel and casino has been refreshed and looks more modern. I think they actually sacrificed some gaming space to accomplish the remodel. It may be just my imagination, but I think several of the casinos have removed some machines to make more open space.

Out under the Fremont Street Experience LED canopy the usual compliment of entertainers and weirdos was present. In this case a weirdo is an entrepreneur that dresses in strange or provocative attire to obtain money from tourists. The women in showgirl outfits fit the location, but who wants to have there picture taken with Mini Mouse in Las Vegas. You go to Disney for that. The shirtless guys trying to get people to dance with them was a new observation for me. They seem to get a lot of takers for some of the less acrobatic moves.

I was back at Sam’s Town around five and home shortly after that. I only lost fifteen dollars to the downtown machines. There is always the risk of spending a lot more when you have wait too long for the shuttle. This time everything worked out well. I will probably drive downtown and park in one of the garages some night before I leave the area to see the upgraded Viva Vision LED light canopy. It is now much brighter and is even visible during the daylight hours.

Wednesday January 22nd 2020

The weather outside was great today. Inside, I seemed to have a black cloud hovering above my head. Lots of little things went wrong this morning. I had to spend a few minutes fussing with my cell phone to get it to start charging. Two hours later I had a charged phone again. While waiting for the phone I had to figure out why I wasn’t getting a full flow of water into my RV. To get enough flow and pressure for my morning shower I had to use my internal tank and pump. The problem must have been with the RV Park’s plumbing, because the problem went away before I found a cause. Several other smaller annoyances also took time to chase down or work around.

This afternoon I escaped to my local happy place, the Clark County Wetlands Park. It was a nice quiet day at the park. The workers had finished removing the grass and reeds from one of the ponds. The sun now reaches some of the areas that were previously in the shade. The turtles have taken over the rock the Great Blue Heron was using for fishing. I spotted the heron in a tree back from the edge of the pond watching everything. I also saw a couple of new birds that I haven’t identified yet.

I spent more time at the park than usual, but covered a lot less ground. Several times I sat on the benches beside the trails and ponds just watching nature at work. By the time I got back to my RV home the black cloud over my head seems to have lifted. The high number of little things going wrong has subsided for now.

Tuesday January 21st 2020

The weather people called today partly cloudy, but it really depended on when you looked. The day started out partly cloudy with only a little bit of blue. This was followed by increasing sunshine reaching the ground and more blue appearing in the sky. The pendulum swung and a sky full of clouds very similar to yesterday was the dominant feature for a couple of hours. The daylight hours ended with the clouds giving way to the most sunshine and blue sky of the day. All of this allowed the temperature to reach the low sixties.

On my way back to the RV park from running a few errands, I stopped at the Ethel M Chocolate Factory Cactus Gardens. This was my first visit to the garden since it was fully decorated for Christmas. The Christmas decorations and lights have been replaced by decorations and lights for Valentines day. The reindeer have been replaced by unicorns and the lights are all shades of red and white. The night time presentation formally begins on February 1st.

My daytime visit to the garden showed many of the cactus starting to display their spring blossoms. Some of the ground cover bushes and plants were in full blossom. It was nice to see some natural color in the landscape. As the season gets closer the garden will only get prettier. I’ll be back to see the garden lite for Valentines day and again before I leave the area to see the blossoms during the day.

Monday January 20th 2020

I woke up this morning to find a very cloudy day. It was still a warm day, by comparison to the normal high temperature for the day. The temperature peaked just above sixty. Near the end of the day some indicators of sunlight were visible to the north, but it was still cloudy and gloomy in the other directions.

The combination of the gloomy day and the possibility that I may be fighting off the onset of a cold, resulted in a very relaxed day. Other than a brief errand out of the park, I spent most of the day watching TV and napping. It was a very poor day for blog fodder. Even the number of walks around the RV park was reduced to one as the sunset.

Sunday January 19th 2020

The temperature reached the mid sixties today. Combined with high sparse clouds most of the day, it made for a very nice day. As the day went by the cloud cover got thicker, but it didn’t impact the quality of the day.

I got caught up watching football again today. That’s probably the last time I’ll use that excuse for inactivity until fall. Between each half and between games I got a three walks in around the RV park. There were many noisy fans for the Chiefs, the 49ers and the Packers. I didn’t here or see any fans of the Titans even at RVs with Tennessee license plates. The Chiefs and the Packer fans were the most vocal, but I heard one woman screaming for the Packers. She was inside her trailer with the doors and windows closed, but I could still here her cheering for Aaron Rodgers. A big Green Bay flag flew above the trailer. I’m glad I wasn’t around when they lost the game.

It wasn’t all football watching today. I got a few other tasks accomplished while the games were on. During the second game I even managed to cook another big pot of beef stew. It will provide a few meals this week, even though the warmer temperatures predicted might be better served with less cold weather food.