El Centro (01/30/2005)

A couple of after effects of the record rain in southern California -
1) Green hills with beautiful roadside and hillside flowers (california poppies?)
2) After a decade of drought resulted in Lake Arrowhead being at -23 feet, 2 weeks of rain resulted in the lake being up 19 feet at -4 feet. Amazing!
This week we moved from Temecula, California to El Centro, California. The road between Temecula and El Centro is made up of rugged rocky mountains and open empty land with piles of huge rocks. The imperial valley when we first saw it was empty green desert with some flowers. Later on it became lush farm land. The park where we are staying in El Centro is really nice. It is a snowbird park, that is, many people come and stay for the winter season. As a result the park has many activities such as: golf (they have a course), horseshoes, and softball tournaments; water aerobics, poker, bridge, and pinochle sessions; arts and craft classes including water color, oil, fabric painting and quilting; ballroom and line dancing; movies and ice cream socials. Unfortunately, we are not here long enough to really participate in much of anything but my hope is that we will be staying in more parks like this one in the near future.
Max got into a box of chocolates and was one sick puppy. Luckily, it looks like one day of being ill took care of the him and the chocolate. Apparently we still have things to learn about keeping things out of his reach. We spent one day getting the RV repaired (we had had to replace a tire and were concerned as to what had happened to it. Turned the concern was justified as the repairman fixed two brakes). We spent a couple of days cleaning up the RV and truck (inside and outside), a couple of lazy days, and one day driving the truck south to San Felipe, Mexico and back to El Centro. We were reluctant to take the RV without a good sense of the roads etc. Baja California is a real desert and the roads can be pretty difficult. San Felipe is pretty, a nice fishing and tourist town. We enjoyed the day although returning through the border crossing was time consuming.
I started wearing a pedometer again. It's amazing but just putting the thing on makes me want to walk. I want to see that step counter go up. The goal is 10,000 a day.
Average steps for week: 7,980. It was a good beginning.
Tomorrow we drive to Yuma, Arizona and another snow bird roost. Talk at you soon.