Death Valley catchup (plus Iowa things)

Warning – this has a lot of time and variety in it!

To catch up on Death Valley and surroundings, we stayed at Sunset until the morning of 20 February. Since the cellular data service ixps extremely limited there, we were pleased to make full use of the monthly WiFi pass at the resort. $60 gives you 30 days of high speed Internet on up to two devices! I tried to get some pictures from Kevin’s fancy camera of the Funeral Mountains to the east of us, but I wasn’t terribly successful. The mountains are made up of rocks so old and confused they are called “Funeral Chaos”. Twisted, faulted, squeezed, faulted again – they show amazing patterns. I just couldn’t get a good picture though, so I guess I will try again next time.

Searching for phone service and a place to hunker down to care for Lily, we ended up at the Needles KOA. We have stayed there a few times before. The sites are big enough, and there is a resident group of quail that I find adorable. I tried to get a picture of the 20 or so who ran across the road as we were checking in, but they were too fast for me. You can hear them clicking away in the mornings if no one has taken their dogs out yet.

As I said in the previous post, we headed back to Iowa as soon as we knew about Lily’s condition. We stayed at Lavaland RV Park in Grants, NM the first night after we left Needles KOA, Tuesday 23 February. They had a nice brewery that concentrated on porters and stouts, my favorites. Sadly their kitchen was closed, but we did order some pizza delivered to the brewery. Nice to eat pizza and beer inside an almost empty place. Our next stop was Big Texan RV Park in Amarillo. It is a mile or so away from the famously advertised restaurant, but it was an easy in and out spot. We made it to the Wellington KOA on Thursday, much nicer than the dreadful place we stayed heading to Arizona in December. We then headed to the Lakeside Casino RV Park in Osceola, IA for our last night. It isn’t very suitable for big rigs since the turns are tight and the sites pretty short, but we found a spot we could fit into. It wasn’t the one the check in folks had us in initially, but with only 5-6 other rigs we had our choice. It is close enough to home to make it a good spot to winterize the rig, and thanks what we did on Saturday morning before heading out. We are pretty good at it these days, and it too, less than an hour. The ice maker is always the hardest!

We had gotten COVID vaccination appointments on Sunday, 28 February, and we had our follow up vaccination yesterday (Pfizer). I am anxiously awaiting my 2 week time for feeling comfortable again! We are having two of the kids and their families over for Easter (another son heads to his cabin every Easter), and I am soooooo wanting to hug them all!

Kevin’s big job this time was installing new LiFePO4 batteries. He chose three 200 amp hour LifeBlue batteries with their integrated heater. Lithium’s don’t charge below 35 degrees or so, and we stay in those temps too often to not get the more expensive heater version. He needed a new solar controller, and luckily this one has Bluetooth so it is much easier to see what is happening. They see to work fine, and I am anxious to try them out on a real trip, not just sitting outside the storage unit. Our solar system will be able to punch more power into the batteries because it won’t be throttled by the lead acid charging curve.

We have been doing work on the house too. We bought a pergola to go on our very hot west side deck. It has a nice adjustable shade cover that will help with keeping the house cooler too. We even bought a propane fire pit to put under it!

Plenty of room for two
Ignore the straps scattered around

i also finished the three quilt tops I sewed while we were out. I got them quilted pretty quickly, but I procrastinated on the binding because it is the task I like least. I got them into the wash yesterday though.

The first two were made from a layer cake I bought on sale. I love the water lilies and dragonfly theme.

Bound and backed with a green Grunge fabric
Bound and backed with a light turquoise fabric with yellow dots

This one was way outside my comfort zone! I just don’t “do” scrappy well. It will make a fun ”I Spy” quilt for some child though.

Mostly mask left overs – very scrappy!

Enough for now. More going on at home, but I will leave that for later.

Apologies for no new postings

It has been 3 weeks since I last posted, and I am still not quite ready. Posting from Death Valley itself is challenging due to the bad (well, almost non-existent) data service there, but that isn’t my real excuse. Turns out Lily, the cat who has been traveling with us for 12 years, turned very quickly into a critical care patient. We left DVNP, headed to Needles, CA and started calling vets on Friday, 19 February, after she showed distress Thursday night. In these COVID days, it is really hard to find a vet open on Friday and taking new patients! We expanded our search gradually, and we ended up with an emergency vet in Lake Havasu City, AZ. Blood work showed our fears were true: Lily had moved from having serious kidney disease to being in kidney failure. They gave her antibiotics, just in case, plus pain meds and bags of IV fluids we injected subcutaneously. After a few days it was obvious nothing was going to help, so we headed home. I just wanted to make it home before she left us, and we managed, though it took two fluid injections a day to get us there. We had her euthanized with our home vet on Monday. Here is the last picture I took of her, staring out the motorhome window at some bird. This had to be her favorite activity.

RIP

I am going off to cry a bit now. I will post more later.