Thursday, 27 through Sunday, 30 June 2019
By the time I got here I was already 10 days behind in my blog posts, and I also wanted to get things pulled together to be able to leave for Michigan. So I figured I'd go sightseeing if I could but my top priority would have to be getting those things taken care of. As it happens, it's taken these entire 4 days to do that. Which tells me I'll need to develop a better system for staying caught up with everything. Later.
Thursday the 27th
I'm still having a lot of trouble sleeping, what with the pains in my jaw and upper arms and so forth, so I woke up this morning - actually last night - at 11:30 and tried to go back to sleep until it was clear my mind was too awake and my body was too uncomfortable to stay in bed any longer. So I was actually up at midnight, which turned out to be a good thing because at 12:30 a serious storm moved through, with plenty of thunder and lightning that scared both dogs. So since I was up I could at least try to reassure them; they both crawled in under the table and lay on my feet.
Luckily, the storm moved on and was gone by the time of our first walk. In fact, we ended up with a lot of hot sun today.
To try to avoid the ant problem that I seem to be just now overcoming (the Raid traps seem to be working - I see far fewer ants in the cabin now), yesterday I went to some lengths to keep my hoses off the ground. Actually I might not have thought of it, but when I was first hooking up I saw several ant beds the hoses would have gone very close to and just didn't want to risk it. After all the rain overnight, I'm really glad I did.
The campground should have been much more empty last night, since Wednesdays are always the slowest day of the week at any campground I've seen during this whole trip. Instead, it was about 2/3 full. A lot of them left during the day, but even more came in so tonight there aren't many vacant spaces. But I guess that's to be expected on a Thursday. Especially a Thursday in June.
I've mentioned before how long it stays light after I go to bed, and today I finally looked it up. Today's sunrise here is 6:12 and sunset is 9:23. Contrast with Austin where sunrise is 6:31 and sunset is 8:36. A full hour difference, and most of it on the bedtime end. And of course it doesn't get dark when the sun goes down - the farther north we go, the longer daylight lingers.
I turn out the light around 7:30, and then cover up my eyes to try to block out the sunlight pouring in from the skylights and through the window shades; when I'm lucky I get to sleep around 8:00. Once I tried staying up till about 9:00, but I still woke up very early in the morning so I was just out more sleep than doing it this other way. But you can see why I'm glad solstice has passed.
Friday the 28th
I took the dogs out around 4:00 this morning while it was still dark and for the first time we met someone out as early as we were. It was a couple and their dog who had all gotten up early for a bathroom break, and when they were coming out of the lighted bathroom area they suddenly met us and probably couldn't really see us because of not having night vision back yet - we were all surprised, and my dogs started jumping around as usual, excited about the other dog, and Dexter was wearing the Gentle Leader, which pulls on his nose when he hauls on the leash, so the noise he made sounded a lot like a snarl, which really scared the couple (couldn't tell about the dog), who stepped double-time down the road toward their camper, looking back to see if we were following and what kind of wild animal I had on a leash. I'm sure they thought I took my dogs out that early because they couldn't be trusted in polite society. (Actually, that's half right.) It was all very exhilarating.
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| locust bark |
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| locust flowers |
remember that we had them in Texas, though that's probably just because I didn't know what to look for. But I've been seeing them often on this trip.
Now I'm starting to recognize the flowers, too. And they're wonderful. They've got a beautiful fragrance that makes walks really pleasant. There's a sort of grove of these here at this campground, and I've really been enjoying them.
Today on a walk I saw a young Robin who seemed to be learning to fly. He was hopping along the ground, which Robins do a lot, and he hopped up on the edge of a metal fire ring and looked out over the small valley ahead of him. Meanwhile, an adult Robin was sitting in the tree above him, giving a constant stream of instructions until finally the young bird took off and flew away over the little valley. Looked just like every other parent/teenager interaction to me. But very sweet.
Someone has brought in a brand of camper I haven't seen before, called a Flagstaff E-Pro. It's parked in a camping site but I never see a vehicle or a person around it so don't know what's up with it. It's one of those ultra tiny ones that looks like it has room for a bed and not much else.
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| See what I mean about tiny? |
I was up by 2:30 this morning. My jaw is feeling better, thanks to the heating pad and the soft diet, but I'm not used to dealing with the heating pad during the night so it wakes me up pretty often. And when I'm awake I can feel the various other pains and just generally feel like I'm my age. I'm ready to feel younger again.
Anyway, I figured since I was up I might as well do something constructive with the time, so after I walked the dogs once, I went off to the laundry room, having taken the precaution yesterday of getting some more quarters. It's a good thing I went early because I ended up using 3 of the 5 machines, for my clothes, sheets, and the dogs' towels. When I went back to the RV, the dogs said great! it's time for another walk, so like a sucker I took them out again.
By the time I got back to the laundry room, there was another couple saying they'd figured they'd be the first. Good thing I went back when I did because they needed one of my washers. I put stuff in the dryers and went back to the RV where Gracie tried to convince me it was time for yet another walk. Instead I gave them some breakfast, which Gracie isn't nearly as interested in as walks, but Dexter and Lily are. When I went back to check on the dryers, there was yet another person doing laundry, apparently also thinking he'd be the first. By now it still wasn't 7:00. So losing sleep has compensations.
I've figured out that this campground isn't one where most people come intending to spend a lot of time. I've been staying so much in state and private campgrounds, where people often live long term, that I expected that here. And many KOAs I've been in are like that, but not this one. I'm not sure why - trees, grass, swimming pool, catch-and-release fishing, rec hall, pleasant staff, clean grounds, well-maintained. But only a few came in yesterday and are staying until tomorrow. Sadly, one of those few is a weird family group not far from me, who are in a regular-sized camper that has the outside completely covered in silvery, insulating-looking material. No windows at all, except for the non-opening one in the door. And it appears there are at least 2 adults and 4 kids in there, plus a large dog. They spend a lot of their time at the pool, and then go to the rec hall immediately behind me and play lots of games and shoot baskets, and then go hang out at their campsite - and in all of those places they make a lot of exuberant noise, having a whale of a time, and every bit of it terrifies Gracie.
Since this morning, every walk we've taken has included Gracie trying desperately to go somewhere else, sometimes because of kids, but other times for no reason I can figure. When she gets like this she has no idea where the somewhere else might be, she just wants to go there. Over the 3+ years I've had her, I've learned that most of the time I need to just insist that she go with Dexter and me. She doesn't want to give up her walk, she just wants it to not include noise from kids. Or the sight of kids. And in a campground, that's nearly impossible. I wish I knew what I could do to help her become easier with reality, but I haven't been able to figure it out on my own, and we still have 3 more years of traveling before we can have long-term professional help. Such a shame what that first family did to her.
I saw a Robin carrying nesting material. I guess now that the first crop is fledging it's time to start on the second round.
Many campgrounds advertise "buddy sites," which I only started hearing about last summer, but among some folks they're very popular. They're 2 campsites (I've seen 3 together in a few campgrounds) that can be configured so the campers can park with their doors facing each other, instead of facing away from each other as is usual to give people some semblance of privacy out-of-doors. (Most RVs these days have access to all their utilities on the driver's side, and the cabin door on the passenger side, which means campground utility hookups need to be designed for this.) The 2 campers that have pulled into the sites just opposite mine are clearly benefiting from this buddy system. They arrived at almost the same time and got their equipment set up right away, and are now being very buddy-buddy, sitting outside visiting. Hope they keep their congeniality down after dark.
Sunday the 30th
I was making toast for breakfast (butter softens it and I've got to put some fiber in my diet), when the smoke alarm went off. This was entirely unreasonable because I had every window and every skylight and the door all completely open so there couldn't possibly have been more air circulation, and the toast wasn't even beginning to burn, it was just toasting, and that smoke alarm is loud enough to wake an entire house, let alone a 24' RV of beings who are already awake. This is by no means the first time it's gone off, but it's the most unreasonable time. And every single time it makes me jump and leaves me feeling jumpy - gets my adrenaline going way too much, which would be fine if it ever went off when there was an actual fire, but that certainly hasn't happened. And it scares the critters as much as it does me, especially doing Gracie no good at all.
We've got a carbon monoxide alarm that's set in under the table. Sometimes during the night Gracie will set it off by lying up against it till it thinks there's no air left so it goes off. It isn't even in the same ball park of sound with the smoke alarm, yet it's woken me up every time. And sometimes when I go to turn it off, Gracie hasn't even heard it. But I just resent the idea that it's necessary to completely shake up the entire population of the RV just to alert us to the possibility of smoke. And anyway, there's never been any smoke when it goes off so I can't imagine what on earth is triggering it. It's just set way way too sensitive, in my view.
When we were out for one of our early walks I spotted a car with Alaska license plates, parked next to 2 small tents, one including a terrier-type dog (based on its bark). I'd figured it for 2 single people but happened to see them leave later and it turned out to be a family - 2 adults, 2 young teenage kids. Don't know how they fit in those tents.
Turns out the buddy-buddy group across the street are half of another group, and they all got together a little while ago and gathered around the picnic table in the unused site next door to mine, because the table's under a nice shade tree while their campsites are out in the full sun, which is getting quite warm. Nice that they've got the chance to get together, and nice that so far they've been quiet about it. I'm guessing they all farmed off their kids for the weekend, because they all look the age to have school-age kids at home. Probably need to gird up their loins for the family-oriented Fourth of July festivities.
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| all 3 of them, zonked out in the air conditioning |
Over the last four days, I've managed to write 10 blog entries, make an appointment for Monday the 1st to get Lily's claws clipped, make an appointment for Wednesday the 3rd to get Gracie a haircut and both dogs a bath, find a grocery store and a liquor store in Michigan (where once again the laws are different about where and when various alcoholic beverages can be purchased), and map out a route to take me from here to all those places on Monday. I did the laundry, took a shower, cleaned the windows, shook out the dog beds and swept the floor, rearranged some of the stuff in the cabin, and just generally took some of the pressure off that I'd been feeling.
I've been noticing lately that I've been feeling a sense of despair about the state of the world, and it's been increasingly coloring my view of everything. I finally decided to take the advice my Momma gave me when something similar happened when I was in high school: stop watching the news. Actually, I'm rarely able to watch the news, but I listen to it every chance I can pick up a public radio station and when I turn on my computer. But a few days ago I decided to keep the radio off - just not listen to it at all. And to ignore almost all the news that shows up on my computer, and to stop reading whatever I've succumbed to as soon as I feel my blood pressure go up. Sure enough, just a few days of this and I feel much more positive about things. I plan to keep it up for a while. Maybe until the next election, at least. We'll see.
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