Man Plans and God Laughs...

,,,one of my favorite sayings of my mother. She said it often to me growing up, constantly warning about the dangers of that dreadful word...I think I may have to rename this entire blog to Learning the art of NON-planning!!  I have been getting better, but it's slow going...


Post burning man we had reservations at the Grand Sierra to stay in an upgraded suite for a night while we "decompressed" - ha ha ha! Little did we know that the entire place had been taken over by teenagers (or they looked & acted like them, anyway) to see some fabulous light show that night. The mass of altered people was really more than we could deal with and we couldn't even go hang out at the pool or jacuzzi which was a pretty cool spot. 


So we spent the night, cleaned ourselves up and took Bebe down to Carson to stay at an RV park to get her cleaned up and replace our carpets with wood flooring. I had found this guy that does flooring while we were in Tahoe - a co-worker had used him and he did good work, I met him and we set up a date post BM.  Unfortunately the product he was using was inferior and after spending 5 days getting it almost 80% in we were very unhappy and he felt the same. At this point we were supposed to be on our way to Utah and Colorado. But he generously offered to rip out all the flooring, get a better product, take the rig to his shop and just work round the clock and try to get it done in 3-4 days.  In the meantime my friend Jen was in the area and we went out for a scrumptious lunch together in Minden - on her way home there was a most interesting experience between her and a porta-potty, and sadly, the porta-potty won! She texted from the hospital that her ankle was broken and she was in a boot up to her knee....not good. AND Daniel, her lover/roomie was out of town for 10 days - she had just taken him to the airport that day! So here we were with no place to live for a few days and here she was almost totally incapacitated and needing some help, how mysteriously God works! So back we went to Tahoe....just can't get away from that place, hmmmm. It all worked out well, we helped Jen out a bit and got to say our last goodbyes one more time! Our flooring guy was working like a mad-man to get it all done and when we finally went to pick up our rig the floors were fabulous! Worth the wait and all the hassle, especially because we could be there for our friend.


So off we went on our mad dash across Utah, once again, totally bummed that this seemed to be the only way we could get to Colorado to see Bill's cousins before they left town & were swamped with other obligations. I WANT TO SEE UTAH!!!

an old army boot camp site in Green River, UT

Now that we had a year of traveling under our belt & a bit more experienced we were committed to try to boondock whenever possible. Boondocking is camping without any hookups, one can do this on the side of the road, in an approved rest stop or far away amongst nature and beauty. Most of the time you will not only save money but have a more interesting experience as well. At some point we hope to really outfit Bebe with a major solar array to do this for very long periods of time...but I digress...  I found the great website OvernightRVParking and for a small annual fee you can pop in your location or zip code and get information on all of the possible spots to park for free or for a very small fee. We used this our entire trip from CA to CO and loved it.