Thanksgiving

We had a nice visit with Don's brother Ernie over Thanksgiving week. Ernie is a long haul trucker living in his truck most of the time. He calls Las Vegas home. He is an excellent cook and always does a great job preparing Thanksgiving dinner, as well as the rest of the meals while he's here. Lou loves this. The kitchens in trucks aren't as nice as ours at home.

Wolfie, Ernie, and Walter. Walter, Wolfie, and Ernie

Walter. Wolfie.
The weather was nice and it didn't rain until the last day so the dogs didn't track too much mud inside. Usually it gets pretty dirty. It's nice to have the dogies visit, and nice to see them go. Our cat, Mr milo doesn't care for the visit though. He gets banished to the rear of the house for his own protection.

Home Again

Had to return to civilization again, darn.

Pinnacles South Wilderness

Yesterday Don took a walk down the creek bed. Much nicer than the trail. A coyote thought so too. Dawn Joined us on Saturday. Sunday morning we all hiked out the South Wilderness Trail a few miles. This is a really nice hike. We saw no one else until we got back to the beginning of the trail.

The fall colors are looking good in the above two pictures.

We even saw a lonely California Poppy bloom, only one. This area must be golden in the spring. The Pinnacles can be seen above and between these oak trees above right.

Pinnacles Balconies Trail

There are turkeys at our campground. Not weird campers but real wild turkeys. They pass through the campground before 8am each morning. On the right above is the obligatory view of the RV at a new campsite.

There is a little fall color here. These trees by the camp store are a good sample.

A view of the ridge of Pinnacles.

A view of the Balconies Trail. Balconies Cave East entrance.


Cliff overhang near Balconies Cave. A couple of views from the Balconies trail. A tarantula spider seen on the trail. There are road signs that say to avoid running over them.


The above pictures show balls that were all along the trail. They look like finely finished wooden balls when dry. They start out looking like lemons on the trees and the hull splits off to reveal light brown colored balls which darken in the sun. The two top left are examples of being fresh out of the hull and look exactly like ripe peaches. ......Lunch!

Mr Milo, our illustrious cat, takes possession of the dinette seat.

Pinnacles, National Monument

Here we are at the Pinnacles again. This is a great winter park. It's overcast and was raining earlier today but nice this afternoon. There aren't many people here, about a half dozen trailers in the campground. There are three rings of campsites for RV's that have electrical. There aren't any full hookups, just electrical.
The reason this is such a nice place is all the wildlife. The deer came in just before dusk. Evidently many of the campers are long term. One of them has a dog that looked up at the deer and did nothing and the deer weren't bothered by the dog either. They must know each other.

I proved it again!

I think there must be some scientific formula relating the status of computer backups to computer failure. My laptop's hard drive failed yesterday and it's in the shop getting a new drive. I was worried I may have lost some pictures but fortunately they all seem to be backed up. Loosing those would have been bad, but I just got a bunch of programs setup for a project I'm working on and now I get to do that again. The laptop won't be back for a week so I expedited obtaining laptop #2. It's been on the list but I hadn't found one that was just right. #1 is a large multimedia laptop, more like a luggable, that does everything. #2 needed to be smaller, have a good sized hard drive, 802.11g WiFi, lightweight, etc. I found a 3200 Series Averatec that met all the requirements including costing around $1000. I get to use it for a while until #1 comes back and #2 should also cut the queue length down for computer users. Now to remember, "backup, backup, backup."

A New Toy, A WebCam

I've had it for months and it's finally working. A webcam. I got the Motosat satellite setup with a public IP address to allow it to connect the camera to the web. Now, all I have to do is get it mounted. It's not too exciting now since we're parked at home, but it should be interesting when we're out at a good campsite. Next week we'll be going to the Pinnacles for a long weekend and we'll see how it works.