Lone Pine is more than a dot on hwy 395

Tuesday, August 11, 2015

 

My humans have captured me and put me in the little house that moves.  What could this mean?

 

This year's big adventure is all about a golf tournament in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho.  Our idea is to head up 395 and do some fishing and hiking and such,  visit peeps in Reno, then head up to Idaho.  Then visit some peeps in the Seattle area, Portland area, etc. making it home probably by the end of September.

 

Getting ready for these trips are always an ordeal.  Getting Hannah ready could take a day, or it could take a year once Spouse thinks about things.  Not much more than a week ago, I asked Spouse what we needed to do to ready Hannah.  He said some basic cleaning.  Ok, I can go with that.  Then, all of a sudden, she needs rubbing compound and wax, and she needs this and that...  How we went from a basic clean job to the job from hell escapes me, but we got her ready and that is all that counts.

 

Now we have to load our valuable possessions.  Don't forget the generator, Spouse.  Do we have all the food?  Clothes? Cat supplies?  Spouse... did you turn on the propane so that the stuff in the refrigerator and freezer doesn't rot?  (He did turn it on, only after we got to Lone Pine several hours later).    Are all my plants watered?  Spa topped off and clean?  Ok...  let's go. 

 

We only needed to turn around once, and we were only a half mile away when Spouse realized he left some food scraps in his car for the dog next door.  That could have gotten ugly sitting in a hot garage...  But then we were off.  Later than we expected (it was after 11am).

 

Rudy settled in on his cushion.   My spouse is a fidgeter.  And when he is driving, he can't fidget as much as he wants so he delegates his fidgeting to me.  Check the GPS for this, look this up, call so and so.  I am not a fidgeter so I get quite annoyed by being his fidgetee.  Argh... 

 

Our first stop is Lone Pine.  We have passed through LP a gazillion times going to Mammoth.  But there are a series of arches in the Alabama Hills that we heard about and we figured it was time to actually STOP there and check it out.  Lone Pine is the gateway to Mount Whitney.  The town itself is pretty small, but its tentacles reach out for miles, up to Whitney, and even over to Death Valley.

 

There are a lot of campgrounds, but  only a few RV parks.  We are ok staying in campgrounds without hookups, however, we need electricity to run the air conditioner and since it was 96 degrees, we opted for an RV park (Boulder Creek).  We set Hannah up, let Rudy roll in the dirt and went about finding ourselves around Hannah.  The first couple of days are always weird trying to find our routines, but it will come to us.  Rudy has already settled in.

 

After dinner, we went on a reconnaissance mission to check out some of the arches.  The rock formations are phenomenal and there is a creek that looks like it might need to be fished.  We may be here longer than expected...  Let the fun begin!

I am having problems posting pictures right now, so I am done for th night.  Pix will have to wait til the morrow!