Feline Nursing Home

We live in and operate a feline nursing home.  We travel with two cats, who are 15 (Partner) and 16 (PC) years old.  They have been part of our household since they were each about 5 weeks old and we love them.  But caring for aging cats isn't much different from caring for an aging parent or spouse.

 

        When my mother was in the last couple of years of her life, she was wearing Depends.  When she came to visit our home, we covered a couple of chairs with plastic and made sure she sat there—both for the protection of our furniture and for her protection.  She often wouldn't realize she had to go to the bathroom until she had wet herself, and then she was very embarrassed.  It was a very difficult time for all of us.  Finally, she moved to an assisted living facility and then, at the last, to a hospice for about one month.

 

        We haven't seen assisted living facilities or nursing homes for cats.  Instead, we provide those facilities.  Our floors are covered with plastic.  PC suffers from dementia and often can't remember where the litter box is.  He regularly thinks it is a corner under the dining room table in our RV.  Partner has a very sensitive stomach and vomits often—sometimes from hair balls, more often because his food doesn't agree with him.  Hence—the plastic on the rugs.  We also have gates to limit the cats to certain areas of the RV or our stick house. 

 

        For the same reasons, we keep the cats off our upholstered furniture.  Mainly, because Partner vomits so often.

 

        The litter box was stored under one of the benches of the dining room table in our old RV.  In the new one, it is in a closet just inside the front door.  The area has to be lined with plastic, and then covered with newspaper.  They are old guys and their aim isn't what it used to be.

 

        One of the advantages of having cats in the family instead of dogs is that you can leave them for a couple of days and they will eat moderately and don't need to be taken outside.  But we can no longer leave our cats.  For five years PC has needed an insulin shot each morning for his diabetes.  Now Partner needs medicine with his food three times a day to prevent constipation.  So much for the flexibility that comes with adopting cats.

 

        Any of you who have pets can identify both with how difficult all of this is and why we put up with it.  Anyone who has never owned and loved a pet will think we are crazy.  No, we aren't.  We just love them—while counting the days till we are free again.

 

Las Vegas Contrasts

We have been in Las Vegas for a week now and it is a city of great contrasts.  The famed Las Vegas Strip is full of light, color, people and smiling faces.  Saturday afternoon the sidewalks and the aisles of the gaming floors were nearly wall-to-wall with tourists, both young and old, American and international visitors.  Each casino has its own atmosphere—whether it is the Knights of the Round Table, New York City, ancient Egypt, Venice, Parish, or a circus.  And everything is very posh.

 

        Friday we visited downtown, location of a number of old casinos.  The Fremont Experience is a covered street that has been made into a pedestrian mall.  Many of the signs take you back to the 1950s and 1960s.  The atmosphere is glitzy but not posh.  The Indian Chief Motel advertises "steam heat."  At the door of each casino there are Creole dancers or tuxedo-clad men trying to attract you inside.  Here you can even put real coins in the slot machines and carry around a cup for your winnings.  On the Strip, your winnings come out on a ticket with a bar code that you can spend in another machine or cash in.  And the machines only take bills or credit cards, not coins, even for the 1 cent games.

 

        We are staying in the northeast area, North Las Vegas, near Nellis Air Force Base.  Weekdays, squadrons of air force jets come and go throughout the daylight hours.  Across the street from our RV park, homeless people spend the night.  We encountered people panhandling even on the Strip.  And we saw a tent city for the homeless as we drove along I-15.  On the evening news, we heard that the tent city is being closed for the winter and shelters are being opened for men and for women.  Our section of the city seems to be mainly Hispanic.

 

        Everywhere we go, we see new construction and construction cranes.  And yet on the news we hear construction is really down.  Was there even more a year ago?  Or are the cranes sitting by unfinished buildings where construction has been put on hold?  We don't know.

 

        Las Vegas is an interesting place to visit—maybe once every 40 years.  It isn't a place we will return to anytime soon.  During our stay we maybe spent $5 in the slot machines and ate at one buffet and a snack of a Coney Island Dog and deep-friend Twinkie.  No one but the RV Park and Wal Mart will miss us if we don't come back soon.

 

Back After 40 Years

Our first outing since we arrived in Nevada was a visit to Cabelas, the outdoor provider. We have only once visited a Cabelas store, in Nebraska, though John often shops from their catalog. At Boomtown we found a casino, an RV park, and Cabelas. The wildlife display inside is amazing.

There we enjoyed shopping—and buying. We bought seat covers for our truck, to protect the vehicle from our cats.

On our drive to Las Vegas we saw a large area of the state of Nevada. The landscape is barren, but has its own beauty. The Nevada state map describes the state as the most mountainous in the country, with 314 individual ranges and hills. Our entire journey we drove through areas ringed by mountains. We saw many dry lakes and a couple with water, including Walker Lake.

As Dorothy said in The Wizard of Oz, "We're not in Kansas anymore, Toto."

Nevada allows prostitution and we saw at least four brothels as we drove south. They were named "Shady Ladies," "Pink Ladies," "Wild Cat," and "The Cherry Patch." This building advertising "Adult Entertainment" shared a parking lot with a gas station. It is open 24 hours a day.

Today on the streets of Las Vegas we saw this signboard driving around town again and again, advertising their wares.

All of this is very different from what we see in the rest of the country. It gives a real insight into the state.

We also drove through "Area 51," a top-secret US Air Force research facility. This is the billboard at the gas station on the south edge of that facility. Yucca Mountain, a nuclear waste storage facility is also nearby.

The Nevada Army Ammunition Depot is located on the edge of Hawthorne. It is huge. For miles we saw storage buildings and ammunition bunkers. According to Wikipedia, "The Hawthorne Army Depot stores reserve munitions to be used after the first 30 days of a major conflict."

Today we visited several Las Vegas casinos. It has been 40 years since we were here last. When our older son, Doug, was 9 months old, we left him with his Aunt Cindy and Cousin Craig and came to Las Vegas with my parents. We left Denver on a snowy day in October. Now it is October, 40 years later. Here the temperature is 90 and it is supposed to snow in Denver this weekend.

Many of the casinos are more glitzy, more sophisticated, and they include more fine shopping and good restaurants than they did where we were first here. This is where people come to escape the reality of their lives and live a fantasy. As we walked down the street, music even came out of the bushes. The front entrance to the newer casinos looks like the front gate of a private estate, or like a sea where pirates roam. The Mirage and the Venetian are really beautiful and elegant.

The orchids and tropical foliage at the Mirage are just beautiful.

The canals at the Venetian seem to flow under a night sky between the shops of Venice. Really, we were inside a large shopping mall. It is lovely, but surreal.

Our New Home

We're in the new trailer and somewhat settled. It has been an exciting and exhausting week. We love our new home on wheels and we are glad we survived the week.

Our living room

Our kitchen

Our dining room

Our bedroom

On Monday morning Alpine Recreation called and said the 5^th wheel had arrived. We immediately drove out there to look at it. We found it had everything we wanted except a second air conditioner. We ordered that and were told it would arrive late Tuesday or Wednesday. They needed 24 hours to prep the trailer, so we set our pre-delivery inspection for 12:30 on Tuesday.

At the same time we learned that, since we weren't paying California sales tax on the trailer, it is considered an out-of-state delivery. That means we couldn't hook it up to our truck till it was towed out of state. The closest place to do that was Boomtown, Nevada, just west of Reno. Since we wanted to stay in the trailer for a couple of days to be sure everything worked, we arranged to stay in a full hook-up site at the Alpine sales lot.

Tuesday we took our inspection walk-through and learned how most things work. Then they towed the new trailer to where we would be staying and parked our old trailer facing it so we could move our belongings from one space to the other. It wasn't till about 3:30 Tuesday afternoon that we could begin the move. So we took a few of the essentials and then went out to dinner.

On Wednesday we spent about seven hours moving and putting away "stuff." We live in our trailer seven to eight months of the year, so there is a lot of that. We would pick up a load, go down three steps, cross the three feet between the two trailers, walk up three steps, put the armload away, then down three steps, up three steps, pick up a load, down three steps, up three steps. You get the picture. By the end of the day we were exhausted, our legs were killing us. And almost everything had been moved. About 3 pm we learned the air conditioner had arrived, so we scheduled that installation for 8:30 am Thursday.

Thursday we mainly rested, hanging out in the old trailer with the cats, reading, surfing the internet, napping. We were so tired we found it hard to sleep the night before. PC really enjoyed the time we spent in the old trailer. He isn't the least bit sure he likes our new home and he had spent much of Wednesday meowing and trying to go outside and back to his old home.

We got acquainted with the employees at the sales lot. One fellow was trimming the trees and bushes near our trailers and trying to find a chicken that is hiding out there. Another man drives the forklift they use to move RVs. They are both busy all day.

After our home was returned to our hook-up site, we learned that Rafael, the driver who would take us to Boomtown, would arrive at 5 am. That meant we would have to be up by 4.

We had another short, poor night's sleep, followed by five hours of driving. John and I and our cats traveled in our truck; Rafael pulled the RV with his truck. When we met up in Boomtown, we all drove to the UPS store to have notarized the paper work asserting we were buying the trailer for out-of-state delivery and we wouldn't return to California with it for 365 days.

Rafael with his truck and our new trailer. Our truck is parked beside them.

We are spending two nights here at Boomtown, getting more things properly put away. Tomorrow we head south to Hawthorne, then on to Las Vegas.

Again We Wait

But this time we don't mind. On Tuesday we ordered a new trailer. We have been talking about it for a year. We bought a new truck last December so we could pull a new, larger and heavier 5^th wheel. We planned to wait till 2009, but our recent repair problems, as well as the depressed state of RV sales, led us to do some shopping. We knew exactly the model Montana we wanted.

We looked while we were in Bend, Oregon, but they didn't offer us a price we thought was good enough. This week, we went shopping at Alpine RV in Morgan Hill, where our current repair work is being done. After an hour or so, we reached a deal that was really good, so we placed the order, and now we wait—till sometime next week when the brand new unit arrives from the factory. We are so excited! This is what it will look like on the outside.

Today was a really fun way to wait. We drove to Monterey, California. What a beautiful place! We ate a great lunch at the Old Fisherman's Grotto on Old Fisherman's Warf. John had fish and chips, I had a sourdough clam chowder bowl.

We enjoyed seeing the fishing boats,

the private sail boats

the pelicans

and the sea gulls.

As we arrived, some local people were distributing food and supplies to a group of homeless people. We don't know where these people spend the night, but they must know to expect food and help at the same place each morning.

It is harvest time in this part of California. We aren't seeing hay and wheat harvested as much as various vegetables. We aren't always sure what we see growing, but today we saw artichokes being harvested and probably tomatoes and peppers. It is so different from what we are used to. In the past week or so, we have also seen fields of cotton and romaine lettuce

Today we drove through a grove of eucalyptus trees and enjoyed the typical California landscape of brown grass and green trees. We also saw some cows—are they the happy cows that produce good cheese?

This Is Getting Old

Saturday morning we left Redding feeling really good that our trailer had been repaired and everything was working correctly. When we started to unhitch and set up in Chowchilla, I pushed the button to raise the trailer off the truck and we heard strange noises. Guess what? The motor mount for the landing gear broke again! We decided to make an appointment with the Fresno Montana dealer, about 40 miles from here, for Monday. Their service department is closed on Saturdays. So instead we found a dealer in Morgan Hill, on Highway 101 near the coast, that could give us a Monday morning appointment.

Obviously, the motor mount wasn't the only problem. Hopefully,

tomorrow they will find the underlying problem and we can safely travel on our way. We have changed our plans. We will explore the California coast as we travel south, instead of visiting the National Parks along I-5.

Like Night and Day

 

        We are no longer sitting in Klamath Falls, waiting for someone to repair the landing gear on our RV.  Last Friday, we discovered it wasn't working and we called Mike's RV, a repair facility listed in the brochure at our RV park.  When we described what had happened, Mike said it was probably the gears that were stripped.  After we determined the manufacturer, Mike talked to a Keystone dealer in Colorado, who called Keystone in Indiana, leaving a voice mail.  By the end of the day, we learned the part was ordered and it would be shipped on Monday.  We had told Mike several times we would pay for overnight shipping.

 

        Since we were stuck in Klamath Falls, we found things to do and ways to explore the area till at least Tuesday.  If the parts were shipped overnight Monday, it should arrive Tuesday.  Right?  On Monday we learned it had been shipped that day, second day air.  It sounded like it should arrive Tuesday.  Mike said he expected it Tuesday or Wednesday.

 

        On Wednesday we talked to Mike and he said he had traced the package, which was shipped second day air, but UPS said it would be delivered Thursday.  We asked if he would bring it to the RV park and install it as soon as it arrived.  He assured us he would.

 

        At about 2:30 Thursday, when we had heard nothing from Mike, we decided to drive to his business and check on it.  We had been praying for days for God's help in solving this problem.  He answered our prayers when we drove out there.  We walked in the door and asked for Mike.  His wife, the receptionist, reported he was gone for the weekend on a hunting trip.  We were dumbfounded.  She said she thought our part had arrived that day.  When we asked who would install it if Mike wasn't there, she said, "Oh, the mechanic can do that.  But it will have to be today.  He doesn't work tomorrow."  Our response was, "We expect it to be done today."

 

        Right then the mechanic came back from lunch.  When we made it clear we had been waiting seven days to get the landing gear fixed, he agreed to come out and install the gears.  Less than an hour later, he was at our trailer.  But what he found was that the gears weren't the problem.  Mike had never come to check out the problem so he hadn't seen that the motor mount for the landing gear was broken.

 

        Tom, the mechanic, was the first person who really cared about our problem.  He couldn't really fix it, but he did jerry-rig a fix so we could drive to a proper repair facility.  We were so grateful when we were able to hook up the trailer before he left.  We had spent $235.63 in RV park charges, waiting for the part that wasn't needed. 

 

        All of this has been the night experience.  Friday we saw daylight.  While Tom was doing the temporary fix, I located Montana RV dealers in Redding and Sacrament, California.  As we drove out this morning, I called the dealer in Redding and they had the part we needed.

 

        We arrived at Cousin Gary's RV as 10:30 am.  By noon the landing gear and some other minor problems had been repaired and our extended warranty company had been contacted.  They covered the repair of the landing gear. 

 

        Seven days versus one and one-half hours.  And the people in Redding really care about serving their customers. 

 

        You can believe Mike will hear from us on Monday when he returns from hunting.  So will the local newspaper, Chamber of Commerce, and Better Business Bureau.

 

        We found a number of interesting and fun things to do in Klamath Falls.  But now we don't feel we can take time to hike in Lassen Volcanic National Park or visit Reno, Nevada, as we head south, after this one-week delay. 

 

        We thank God for leading us to visit Mike's at the right time Thursday and for leading us to Cousin Gary's in Redding.  Our prayers have been answered and there are good people out there, serving their customers.  We are blessed when we find them. 

 

We Haven't Twiddled Our Thumbs

We certainly haven't twiddled our thumbs while we wait in Klamath Falls for our trailer to be repaired. On Saturday we attended the Blues Festival in downtown Klamath Falls, on the shore of Lake Ewauna. We try to attend local festivals whenever we can, so we were delighted something was scheduled for that day. The entry fee was $15 per person, pretty high when you consider we aren't really fans of blues music. However, part of the proceeds benefit the local VFW and we thought that was worthwhile. We enjoyed watching the performers and we noticed that most of those attending looked like aging hippies or long-haired Viet Nam War vets.

On Sunday we attended the 10:30 am service at St. Paul's Episcopal Church here in town. The congregation was one of the friendliest we have met in a long time and we enjoyed the worship, the music and the sermon. In the evening we shared a glass of wine and good conversation with our neighbors in the RV park, Dave and Iris from Grand Junction, Colorado. When we are on the road, we often go many days without connecting to others. We are delighted when we encounter people we can enjoy.

Monday we drove to the Collier Logging Museum, about 20 miles north of Klamath Falls. We saw and learned a lot about logging in Oregon during our stay at Gnat Creek Hatchery near Astoria. All around us we saw the effects of the December 2007 blowdown and we started watching the TV program "Axe Man." All that helped us understand a lot of what we saw at the museum. They have so many pieces of old equipment for logging and road grading there.

Tuesday we biked 16 miles on the Oregon, California and Eastern bike trail. The old railroad right-of-way has been converted by the Oregon State Parks into a bike trail. It begins about one mile from our RV park.

This is the "tattle-tale" bridge (why is it called that?) where we started on the O C and E Woods Trail.

Here I am at Olene, the community where the paved trail ends.

We biked the 7+ miles of paved trail, then returned. It has been over two and one-half months since we last biked, so we were pretty tired when we got back to the RV. After lunch we did our shopping—groceries, fuel, liquor and cat food. We buy prescription cat food for PC, our diabetic cat. So I called the Klamath Falls Animal Clinic, who advertise in the brochure for our RV park, and found they carry PC's food. We went in with a copy of the prescription for the food and picked up two cases. That may get us back to our house in Colorado.

Today we were ready for some down time. In addition to all I have described, we have run 9 miles and weight trained two mornings since we discovered the RV landing gear wouldn't work. After our run today, we both wanted to sit around as much as possible. John worked on his carving; I printed pictures for the scrapbook and did the laundry. We also played some gin rummy.

The part for our RV still hasn't been delivered. The repair shop says the UPS tracking website reports it is enroute and due tomorrow. We certainly hope it arrives then. We would like to be on our way south.