Back on the Road

Well, this blog certainly looks pretty much dead. Not a single entry in nearly 6 months after a small clutch of posts during a vacation trip. Clearly the guy that started this enterprise simply was not in it for the long haul. Rest in peace Rainsbow Road, we hardly knew ye.

But wait, can it be? A defunct travel journal rising from the grave? Surely your eyes deceive you and yet… There does appear to be a new post appearing. What can this mean?

It means that it has finally happened. We're both jobless and homeless and proud of it. We are living in our motorhome and have been for an entire two days. Our house is sold and escrow is supposed to close on May 2. On May 3, we are leaving Southern California and not looking back (at least, neither of us is looking back while the other is watching.)

I will try to bring you up to date to let you know know how we got into this state of affairs as briefly as possible. I may fill in some of the blanks later if I'm desperate for material.

When we last left our stalwart heroes they had just returned from their trip to South Dakota last September. I went back to work in my office, seeing patients and dreaming of not seeing patients. Vicki, who had already left her job at Vitas Hospice started the process of decreasing our property holdings, ruthlessly eliminating those items in our 14 closets that we had not laid eyes on in 15 years. In around mid-December I met for the first time with Dr. José Sanchez. He and his wife, both family practitioners, were interested in taking over my practice, and I was interested in having it taken over. It seemed like a match made in heaven.

We started making arrangements for a transition, but it seemed like every time we talked about it the solution was to start the process "next week". Ultimately I decided the only way to get things moving was to set a date by which the process had to be finished and let that dictate when it would start. The date selected was the end of March. Since by this time it was mid-February, that did not give us a lot of time. The process was pretty straightforward since I was not trying to "sell" the practice, just pass it on. The deal was I would give them my office equipment, my office space, the medical group would transfer the patients to their name and we were done. On their end, they would take over my lease agreement and become the de facto custodians of my records. It seems like I should've been able to just hand them the keys and walk away but what with notifying insurance companies, vendors, patients, landlords and other odd and sundry interested parties it took what seemed like a lot of time and work.

The South Dakota House

We put our home on the market in January but got no offers for three months. I worked my last day in the office on 29 March. The next morning our realtor called telling us we had an offer on the house. After some minor negotiating we agreed on a price. The only sticking point was the buyers really wanted a 30 day escrow. In order for that to happen, a lot of things had to occur very quickly. So for the past four weeks we've been running around like mad people, throwing things away, giving things away, trying to decrease our inventory. In the meanwhile there were appraisals and inspections to be done and repairs to be made, some of which are not quite finished. But the movers arrived regardless, packed everything in boxes two days ago and hauled it all away yesterday. It's all going to a house in Lead, South Dakota, which we will be renting out to vacationers. That is another long story and I may try to con Vicki into telling it.


So two nights ago we piled into our Allegro along with a greatly diminished  but still too large subset of our personal belongings and our two confused and probably somewhat depressed schnoodles and drove to a small campground in Cherry Valley to wait for escrow to close. We went back to the house this morning and picked up the loose junk lying around. Over the past week we had collected about 10 bags of stuff we had to get rid of and it was too late to find some sucker to dump it on, so I threw the bags in the back of my Toyota and our various small accoutrements, paper supplies, duplicate tools, etc. all became just more landfill. There was also a fairly healthy collection of half-empty paint cans, flammables, pressurized spray cans and other assorted items the movers refused to deal with that had to be taken to the "hazardous waste" collection area which is only open on Saturday mornings. Over the course of a couple of weeks, 20 years of haphazard accumulation headed down the drain.


After escrow closes, we plan to gradually make our way north to meet my brother Lyle and his wife the last week of May in Portland. The plan then is to go east on I 90 back to the Black Hills to take delivery of our belongings and set up the rental home. We have thought only minimally about life thereafter and plan to travel wherever the mood takes us. And I will, hopefully, be dictating a note into the computer every few days to keep our friends, relatives and many admirers updated on our situation. Off we go!

St. George

St. George with its Mormon temple

St. George is a town in the southwest corner of Utah that is the financial center of Washington County. The area is nicknamed the "Dixie of Utah" and the city of St. George lies just south of the Dixie National Forest. Why Dixie you ask? Because it was supposed to be the Mormons' cotton capital.

At the start of the Civil War, Brigham Young was concerned that cotton supplies from the Southeast would become unavailable, so he sent a contingency of 300 volunteer families south from Salt Lake City to establish cotton plantations around the Virgin River. Of course, most of the families had no idea they were volunteers until their names were read from the pulpit at the announcement of the project, but who was going to argue with Brigham?  The "St. George" of the town's name, by the way, was not a dragonslayer. He was George Smith, an apostle of The Church who led the expedition. They did manage to grow some cotton but because of the arid conditions it was difficult and prohibitively expensive. It was never produced at competitive market rates and the project was eventually abandoned.

Snow Canyon

I had always considered St. George to be a place that you drive through in order to get someplace else more interesting, but it turns out there are some nice areas around the city. Just north of town, for example, is Snow Canyon State Park. Don't expect to see much of the white stuff here, the canyon is actually named after early Mormon settlers Lorenzo and Erastus Snow and hardly ever gets any fluffy precipitation. It is carved out of the red and white Navajo sandstone that makes up so much of the area. There is a single campground that accommodates RVs with water and electric hookups and a central dump station. We did not stay here but we drove through the campground and it looks reasonably nice.

Red & white Navajo sandstone

Pine Valley group campground

A little farther north, you run into the aforementioned Dixie National Forest. It contains the tiny community of Pine Valley and just beyond lies the Pine Valley Recreation Area. This turned out to be a small valley filled with beautiful pine forest. I don't know how far you would have to drive to find another pine forest in this area, which is mostly red rock desert. The recreation area is quite beautiful and has about 50 RV campsites up to 60 feet long. There are no hookups but the camping areas are recently renovated and quite nice. There is a small reservoir with fishing available. We did not see anyone with any actual fish, but that's the way I prefer my fishing. It seems like a perfect place to dry camp for a few days if you're in the area and at $12 a night it's a bargain.

Campers going through the motions of fishing

How to live in 300+ square feet, part one

First you need to have slide outs so it adds additional square footage. One nice feature of our Allegro is that both of the slide outs are on the driver side of the RV.  The passenger side constitutes the outdoor living space in most RV parks.  Our previous RV, a Fleetwood Bounder, had the bedroom slide out on the the passenger side.  At the end of one tourist day I was walking to the door from my car with a hat on. I was also looking down.  Suddenly I collided with the slide out, bent my glasses and bruised my face (Yes I had a shiner.)  So now with our Allegro my clumsiness will hopefully have less negative consequences.

One advantage of RVs is that they have built in furniture.  However, we don't always use it as intended.  The dinette makes a good surface to do my beading, sewing, etc.  It also now contains the dog kennel where Ziva and Abby, our 10 and 12 pound Schnoodles sleep.  Yes, they are coming with us full timing.  Under the table we store our 2 portable tables, a fold out chair and the dog toys.

So where do we eat?  Roger and I got into the habit of eating in front of the TV when we got our giant HDTV.  We intend to do that in our RV.  Roger's place is the Lazy Boy recliner we moved in from our home and mine is the couch.  We do all of our computer work there, as well.

 There's a lot of counter space to prepare food on until we need to use the sink or the stove.  That's why we bring portable tables.

We bought a set of RV/boat stackable pots and pans because of the reduced amount of storage space.  They're heavy and for every bit of weight you add you lose gas mileage.  So to make up for that we got silicone bake ware. 

In part 2 we'll discuss the bedroom, bathrooms, basement, and oh, don't forget the 3 TV's.