The best laid plans...

My mom's favorite saying to me as a kid, "man plans and god laughs," I've always been a planner - must give me some small feeling of being in control and I really worked hard to make sure we didn't have a summer like last summer, where we were on the road, crashing at friend's homes here and there, but even the best laid plans...

Not sure if I had mentioned it here or not, but last fall, right around this time, I found a great AirBnB in the Crestline Area (close to Lake Arrowhead in southern California). We wanted to be close to my daughter and grandson, in LA, but not be in LA...preferably something within an hour and a half so that I could drive down for the day, once a week, and help out my daughter with some babysitting. We had booked the place for 4 months and asked if they would put wifi in for us as the internet in the area totally sucks. They happily agreed since we were doing a long-term rental, we exchanged a few emails and I paid them the first months rent, plus fees - 10 months before we were to rent in June. Once we decided to build our little casita we realized we didn't want to be gone for so long and I asked them if I could change the rental to 3 months, starting July 1st. They agreed but asked if we could start it July 6th so they could rent it out over the holiday - not a problem, we were all good. Then in early June I got a message from AirBnB telling me that my reservation was cancelled, the reason being that the owners didn't want to put in the wifi. Well, our rental was not conditional on that fact and now, right before the summer, and less than a month before we were to leave, all of the rentals were twice as much, and guess, what, so was their place. They must have realized they could get a lot more for their rental at this point, so cancelled us. I couldn't find anything in the area we could afford so we started working on Plan B. We had a few friends reach out to us, through Facebook, offering places to stay, mostly short-term, but late in the game a friend actually had a connection to a very reasonable place in SoCal for a couple of months, but by this time we had made all kinds of other plans. Not sure that we wanted to start all over again with the planning, we basically found ourselves in the same position as last year. 2 nights here, 2 nights there, 2 weeks here, on the road...traveling, traveling...something we're very used to after living in our motorhome for 4+ years, but this time around, all we had was our truck, Bessie.

Bill and I really wanted to throw in the towel and just stay home, we felt it was important to be home that first summer after building to see what happened to our place during the rainy season. But we needed to get up to Tahoe and empty our storage unit. When we moved into our motorhome in 2010, from our 2800 sq ft home, we sold and donated most everything we owned, except for my parents antiques and a few other pieces of furniture and other items we felt we could not part with. I mean we had no idea if we were going to be rv-ing 6 months or 6 years. But alas, it was now 2016, 6 years of paying storage fees that we needed to stop. It wasn't a fortune at $500 per year, but we also wanted our stuff in one place. So we stuck to the ridiculous plan I hatched up and off we went, albeit with great trepidation...

We made it up to Tahoe and the lovely Suzanne provided us with a fabulous place to nest while we traveled up and down Kingsbury Grade daily dealing with our storage unit in Minden, Nevada.

My work set up at Suzanne's

Daniel threw us a great welcome home happy hour and all our Tahoe folks stayed well into the wee hours, just like they always do, 

and got to see my son a couple of times.

One of several visits to Sidellis Brewery

Pool with Jacob at The Cue...

Our best buds Maria and Brian, made it up the hill to hang out for awhile, there were beach get-togethers, concerts, dinners, and brewery visits. 

Poopa traveled to both Tahoe and Nevada City for beaching and hashing!

Our friend Brown offered us her garage and yard when we decided we just had tooooo much good stuff and must have a garage sale - she lives in our old neighborhood in Tahoe, which is an awesome location for this. We did great and had very little left to give away. 

Daniel and Tuesday joined in the garage sale fun

And Flea stopped by to entertain us!

We sold a few pieces of furniture to one buyer on Craigslist, who picked it all up from our storage unit - everything went swimmingly well! And we were WIPED OUT!!!!!!! But we had a schedule to keep! We had to get down to Palm Desert to deliver all of the antiques to my parents and for me to take my mom to LA for a birthday celebration weekend! AM I FREAKING CRAAAAZY?!! Oh and then we were supposed to be in Coeur d'Alene for Labor Day Weekend....we were leaving Tahoe on August 25th!!

.....to be continued