After a very nice vacation from retirement(?), we are once again parked in the RV drive behind our little house in Wickenburg. The drive home from Palm Desert was uneventful, although we had gusty winds most of the way until crossing into Arizona which put an extra workload on me as the driver. We did manage to keep the high profile RV between the lines and got home without incident.

Overall, Damsel and I are very pleased with our excursion. We saw beautiful scenery in Arizona, Utah, Nevada and California and we were able to have an extended family reunion with Damsel’s sisters and a brother while we were in California.

Damsel managed the housekeeping in the RV including feeding us with fantastic cuisine along the way and when we camped in Stockton, she and her sister took turns at preparing wonderful meals. We both will be going on diets to get back to where we were before we took off on the excursion. Meanwhile, we are resting and contented.

Tonight, we are at Emerald Desert RV Park in Palm Desert, CA. We have been coming to this facility for over a year now on just about a monthly basis to visit with the kids and the now one year old grandson. We will be here for two nights at this five star campground and heading back to Wickenburg on Sunday.

While we are relaxing and blogging about being here, getting here was quite another story. We left Bakersfield this morning at about 10:30 AM expecting about a four and one-half hour drive. Alas, when we got to Boron, CA, on the high desert we encountered an extreme traffic jam. When I say extreme, I mean the sort of delay where we went 6.2 miles from Boron to Kramer Junction in an hour and a half. That’s 4⅓ miles per hour on average.

The delay getting past the traffic threw us enough off schedule that when we got to the Inland Empire (San Berdoo, etc.) we were greeted with rush hour slowdowns on I-15, I-215 and I-10. The net result was that we had a late check-in at the campground (office closes at six and we were here at ten after). In spite of all that, we’re relaxed and unwinding from a rather unpleasant commute.

We’re camped in a place called Orange Grove RV Park a bit east of Bakersfield proper. They really do have orange trees throughout the campground, albeit not as dense as one might expect in a commercial orchard. The ladies in the office told us to come back in December when the oranges will be ripe and are free for the picking.

Our itinerary for tomorrow takes us to Palm Desert, CA. We are going to cross over the mountain range east of here through Tehachapi, CA, thence via high desert routing through Kramer Junction and on down through Cajon Pass where we will get on I-10 going toward the low desert.

I labeled the camping day as “A” because this end of the schedule was not as easily numerated as the trip going from Arizona, through Utah and Nevada and on into Central California. I used alpha designators for the last legs of the excursion to keep it simple and flexible for use in the GPS trip planning application while not having to pin down an exact number of days out for a given leg.

Today marks the eleventh anniversary of Cap’n Bob & the Damsel blog. We are still here although our posting has become sporadic and our commenting on politics has become almost painful in these days of the most berserk political landscape ever.

I was planning on a more elaborate post for this anniversary, but we are still on the road with our relatives and interfacing with them is very important. Our travels will resume later today as we begin to head back toward the southern branch of relatives and then on home to Arizona.

I found the image of dice on-line and thought it would be appropriate to post since our daily blogging has become somewhat of a crapshoot. Thanks to our regulars for hanging in there with us.

This beautiful red rose was fully open yesterday at my sister’s place in the Central California area. The rose bush is beside the driveway where our RV is parked while we are visiting with family here. Click on the image to enlarge.

We will be headed towards the southern part of the state in a couple of days for another visit with the southern branch of our California family as we make our way back home. We will see our newest grandbaby for a short window of time over the weekend. It has been a couple of months and we are anxious to see him.

We have arrived at the family reunion location in Stockton, CA. We’re not at a campground, but at Damsel’s Sister’s place where we were just about a year ago. We had a good drive today over Donner Pass and then down through CA Hwy 49, the California gold rush highway and then on to our terminus for the day.

We plan on being here for a while for the family reunion which will take place over the weekend. We will probably be here for a week and unless there is some very compelling reason to blog about something, we will unlikely post anything during that time.

In about a week, we will head south through California’s Central Valley, stopping to camp in another couple of places on our way back to Arizona. See you then . . .

We made pretty good time today driving most of the way across the mountains and valleys of Northern Nevada along Interstate 80. We started from Elko, where it was still raining a little bit and ended up in Fernley, where it was quite a bit warmer and mostly sunny.

The trip was a bit tedious for me as the driver and for Damsel as the co-pilot, since there were areas of gusty winds along the route. That makes me tense and my arms and shoulders get fatigued and sore after a while. However, after arriving at Desert Rose, setting up camp and having late lunch and a beer, all is good with both of us.

Damsel took quite a few photos along an otherwise boring highway: there were a few interesting rock formations, an interstate tunnel pair, several casino/gas stops and a truck with a happy load.

Tomorrow, we will be traveling to an undisclosed location in the Sacramento Valley. Our route will take us over Donner Pass (still on I-80) and thence via gold rush country to our destination where we will spend several days with family in a long-overdue reunion. Blogging may be light for a week or so.