Texas Country Oaks Dance Hall, Edna, TX, New Years 2012

Sunday, April 6, 2014

April 6, 2014

03/21/2014

On the 12th we drove up to Hemet to visit our friend Sheryl Cain, who is in the process of moving to Hawaii.  It was good to see her again.  Hey Sheryl…get our room ready for a visit!

03/27/2014

On Tuesday we made the drive to Long Beach to tour the RMS Queen Mary, which is now a hotel and museum.  Since it was almost a four hour drive to Long Beach and we wanted to take a couple of tours, we decided to get a room on the ship and spend the night.  “Part of the experience”, so to speak.

Joyce booked us one of the first class stateroom and I have to say, it was worth the experience.  The room was a mixture of many of the “old” features but there were modern convinces also, like a LCD TV and a very comfortable king size bed.

The bathroom still had some of the old controls for the the bathtub.  Back in the day you could get both fresh and salt hot and cold water.  The original fan and environmental controls were still in place and there was much more closet storage than you have on the cruise ships today.

We took two tours offered; the Diana: Legacy Of A Princess and The Glory Days, both of which we enjoyed.  We also did the self-guided walking (and a lot of it) tour.

We had dinner at the at the Chelsea Chowder House and Bar on the ship and all-in-all, we were not impressed.  Very pricey and the food was not all that good.

Would we do that again?  Probably, but with changes.  We would get one of the less pricey staterooms and we would probably not eat on the ship at all.  The hotel has a free shuttle to the downtown area so we would use that.  Also, we would plan to arrive there before 10 AM, even though you can’t check-in until later.  To see everything on the ship you need more that just a couple of hours.


 Our Stateroom





The Hallway.  Notice the handrails.  The Queen Mary had no stabilizers so the ship rocked and rolled in high seas.





 Duck Press's
 Wood used on the ship
 Grand Hall

 The Bridge

 The Auto Pilot

 Radio Room
 Liberace.  He played on the ship several times but never for the 1st class passengers.  He said that 2nd and 3rd class folks needed to have good entertainment as well.

04/01/2014

We left El Centro on Sunday and headed up to Ontario Elks Lodge.  Our original plan was to go over the hills to Edwards AFB but there was high wind warnings through the pass on I-15.  It is no fun pulling a 5th-wheel in winds gusting to 50 mph.

After leaving the park, we jumped on Hwy 86 north and immediately ran into fairly strong cross winds and blowing sand, especially in the Salton Sea area.  When we got up on I-10 in Indio, all hell broke loose.  Very strong headwinds with blowing sand/dust greeted us all the way through Desert Hot Springs.  A few times we actually had to slow down to 5 mph in visibility less than 50 feet.  Of course, the crazies were out driving like their butts were on fire and cutting us off a lot.  Most folks have no idea what it takes to stop a 15,000 lb. 5th-wheel trailer and I don’t think they even care.

After a restful night there, we then made a very rough and bumpy drive to Tulare, CA.  We had planned to stay at the Bakersfield Elks Lodge but since we are members of Passport America, we got a nice RV park here with full hookups for $18.50 vice $20 for electric only in Bakersfield.  Hey, and it actually rained last night.  No, really.  It did!

04/06/2014

We’re now in Fresno, CA visiting my mother, brother and the rest of the family.

When we were getting ready to leave Tulare, the bedroom slide would not retract all the way.  It would go in about two feet and stall.  I did some troubleshooting and discovered the cable connector blocks were hitting each other and stalling the motor.  Since the blocks were behind the bed frame and not having all the tools necessary to get into that area, we called Total RV Service, a mobile RV repair service out of Visalia.

After they showed up and did some further checking, the determined that they would need more time than we had in Tulare to get the issue fixed.  So, they got the slide retracted, made an appointment for them to come to Fresno and do a permanent repair.  The work has been done and we don’t expect to have any more problems with that slide….hopefully

Enough for now.

Barry & Joyce