Year: 2022

Spring Snow

When we arrived back home last Sunday it was snowing or freezing raining. That type of weather kept up for literally the next three days. But the ground was already too warm for it to accumulate. The only place it did stick was on the grass and even there it didn’t stay around long because the daytime temps were above freezing.

The winds and temps kept us inside and shaking our heads. Talk to the folks who’ve lived here all their lives, or at least for more than the time we’ve been here, this is a pretty typical weather behavior for early April…

To the left is what the CX-5 looked like when we got up Monday morning. This was the day we needed to return it back to Enterprise, so during a brief respite from the snow/rain I went outside to clean it off. Donna was to follow me there in the Mini, but 2 weeks of sitting still in the garage sapped the battery just enough that it wouldn’t start. I guess I left the battery tender on the wrong car. Fortunately Enterprise’s slogan of “We’ll Pick You Up” applies on the other end as well, so I returned the car and a rep drove me back to our house.

Lottery Ticket Fun

We’ve been buying lottery tickets for a very long time. But just a ticket for each drawing of the big guys. We started playing Powerball, but switched to Mega Millions when the Powerball lottery went up to two bucks a ticket. When Mega Millions went to $2 a ticket we just stayed with it. We’ve never won anything more than say $10 at it, but hope springs eternal.

Currently we spend twenty dollars and that covers us for 5 weeks of drawings. I have also set up a reoccurring event on the fun to let me know when it is time to buy a ticket. When we were in Santa Fe my phone reminded me that it was time to buy a new five week Mega Millions ticket as the one at home expired after the Tuesday the fifth’s drawing. I can’t remember where we were, but the was a lottery dispenser machine there and I had a crisp $20 bill in my wallet. I slid the bill in and selected Mega Millions. I selected quick pick, but when I went to select the next 5 drawings that option wasn’t available. The vending machine didn’t have a cancel button anywhere, so there was no way to get the money back, so I ended up with 10 sets of numbers for the Friday the 8th’s drawing.

When we got home on Sunday afternoon and finished unpacking and doing some laundry, we went grocery shopping where I could buy a Mega Millions ticket good for 5 weeks, starting on Tuesday the 12th. Before going though I thought it would be smart to see how well we did in the Friday drawing with our 10 chances at winning. Turns out all we had was the Mega Ball in one of our sets of numbers. Hey, two bucks is two bucks. So, on entering Fred Meyers I hit the machine and bought our new ticket and for the heck of it I scanned the ticket we bought in New Mexico. “Invalid Ticket” was the machines response, so I went up to the Service Desk and asked them to cash it in. The counter person got the same response as I did.

Turns out that even though Mega Millions is played practically everywhere, if you buy a ticket and it hits you only get paid out in that state. I guess I could mail it to Sally in Santa Fe and she could mail the two dollars back, but if I paid for postage both ways (two 55¢ stamps) I’d net only ninety cents in winnings. And probably that 90¢ should go to her for schlepping to the store and standing in line to cash it in. If we hit the big money we’d probably pack a bag and head back to claim it, but not for two bucks. Donna suggested we just hold on to it because we’ll probably be going back in the fall. Let’s see if we remember to take it, if it doesn’t get misplaced in the interim.

I pulled our old expired Mega Millions ticket off where we hang it and hung up the new one. I figured I’d check to see if the old one was worth anything. That is when I noticed that the ticket was good all the way until the 12th… This meant that we didn’t even need to spend $20 on a ticket in New Mexico at all. And now that the new ticket starts on the 12th that meant we had two chances on hitting it big yesterday.

We hit nothing on Tuesday, but when I ran the old ticket we did have the Mega Ball back earlier in March, so I guess that takes a little sting on not being able to get the two dollars from New Mexico.

Televisions On The Road

Here is a round up of televisions we encountered in the various places we stayed on our recent road trip. Why? Because, why not?

Carson City – Holiday Inn Express – A decade old LG 27″ TV without an onscreen guide or even a cheesy little printed and laminated one. We were reduced to scrolling through endlessly, hoping to come in on something that would identify what channel we were on.

Ely – Holiday Inn Express – A nice newer LG 43″ TV that must have been connected via satellite because there was about a 5 second delay between settling on a channel and getting a picture. Once again no onscreen guide or printed one, but at least the TV showed the channel name in the upper left.

Moab – Scenic View Inn – Beautiful new 50″ Samsung TV hampered by being paired with the lowest tier cable package that didn’t have any HD channels. And with what is becoming a standard, no onscreen guide or printed one.

Santa Fe – La Casa de Sally – A nice new 43″ LG TV with no cable that is usually set on YouTube with round the world web cams accompanied by soft background music. No channel guide required as all it had were some apps.

Flagstaff – Holiday Inn Express – An older LG 43″ TV that is HD with HD channels and an onscreen guide, but it has a replacement remote. The down side was that it had a volume that is either too soft on 2 or too loud on 3, I don’t know if it is the remote or the TV.

Beatty – Death Valley Inn – A 27″ Westinghouse TV that looks like it is the same vintage as that TV back in Carson City. Looks similar in shape too, maybe even made in the same Chinese factory. The remote seems to only work less than 5 feet away from the TV, but we did get an laminated channel guide…for all 12 channels.

Carson City – Holiday Inn Express – A decade old LG 27″ TV just like the first one at this hotel on the way down, but with one key improvement, it does display the channel names. But, we don’t care because we are watching a replay of the 3rd round of the Masters on the laptop.

Sport, Off-Road, Touring

Spring Snow Edition of SORT
As of Monday, April 11, 2022 at 6:00 PM pacific time:

Sport Off-Road Touring
2016 Lamborghini Aventador 2021 Ford Bronco 1956 Continental Mark II
If this was matte black instead of Maronne Apus (AKA dark gray) it could be confused with a Batmobile. Ford’s Wrangler competitor, it’s optioned up compared to the base Bronco, but $60k! This is a big car. It doesn’t look it in this picture, but it is almost 3 feet longer than a 1956 Thunderbird.

These cars, while very interesting, are not the most interesting of the cars available right now on BAT, this 1981 Honda Prelude 5-Speed is because of the personal connection, in 1981 we bought a new Prelude. We had our choice of maroon or this blue and we picked the maroon over blue because we didn’t want a white interior (the maroon car had a maroon interior.)

Here is what last week’s cars sold for, or bid to, if the reserve was not met.
Sports: 1974 Porsche 914 Sold for $61,500 on 4/5/22
Off-Road: 1991 Land Rover Defender 90 Sold for $106,000 on 4/6/22
Touring: 1969 Volkswagen Karmann Ghia Sold for $26,000 on 4/6/22

Back Home

We got back home from Santa Fe at about 1:00pm and then proceeded to take the next four hours or so unpacking, doing laundry and getting a bit of grocery shopping done. All that and still watch the final round of the Masters.

I usually leave the desktop PC on all the time, but for some reason I thought it would be a good idea to give it a 2 week vacation while we were on ours. When I went to turn the HP Pavilion 590 back on, it just wouldn’t do anything. Tried to start it by holding down the power button for 15 to seconds before letting go, but that didn’t work. So I tried a trick that has worked in the past on computers, maybe even this one, unplug the power cord, hold down the power button while replugging in the cord. Didn’t work. Is it the power supply? The power switch itself? The motherboard? Or the little bitty board the switch plugs into? Where have the days gone where the switch was just a switch?

Our new Dell Inspiron Desktop 3891 by Tuesday.

26,000 Square Miles Of Desert

Geocaching in the Desert

Last November when we stopped in Beatty, Nevada for the night we stayed at the Motel 6 and we were very unhappy, so this time we booked a room in the Death Valley Inn and RV Park. It is pretty much a standard motel accommodation, but it was leaps and bounds above the Motel 6.

Side Note: Turns out we have been pronouncing the name of the town of Beatty wrong. We have always pronounced it like it looks, ‘beat-e’. We had stopped at a quick mart just north of Las Vegas and while Donna was chatting with a tribal police officer outside the store waiting for me to fill up he pronounced it ‘bait-e’. Later, when we checked in at the Death Valley Inn, I asked the clerk how the town name was pronounced and he confirmed it, ‘bait-e’.

Also, the last time we were here, we ate at Mel’s Diner for breakfast and we weren’t very happy with it either. So this time we tried the Denny’s inside the Stagecoach Hotel & Casino. While this is pretty much a standard Denny’s, the food was leaps and bounds above Mel’s Diner. The big problem with this place is that you had to walk quite a distance through a casino that still allowed smoking and it smelt it.

Side Note: When we ate at Mel’s back in 2018 and it was run by a kindly old man and the food was great, but by last November a different younger couple had bought him out and their food was below average.

Today’s drive was similar to the Loneliest Road in America, AKA US-50, in that it is 300 miles of empty desert with a couple of 100 mile stretches where there is no place to get gas. It was very dissimilar in that there was copious traffic in both directions, including about 25% of it being 18-wheelers that needed passing.

We had a couple of geocaching travel bugs that needed moving along, so I picked out a few caches with regular sized containers to find, and it didn’t take long to drop one of them. We stopped at the first cache only 40 miles north of Beatty.

The photo above is of the CX-5 from that cache that was about a 100 yards off the road. That CX-5 had just passed the 26,000 mile mark 32 miles back.

Last Time

Nevada Desert

This morning’s breakfast was at Mike and Rondas The Place, which we ate at the last time we were in Flagstaff in November of 2021. We were very pleased with that meal, but this time not so much. It was the eastside location of the restaurant that we ate at then and I don’t know if it was just this downtown location or what, but this time the food was bland and turned cold before we finished eating it. We have vowed that this was the last time we eat at Mike & Rhonda’s.

This might be an easy vow not to break because of Las Vegas. In November when we traveled this route back home we got into heavy traffic on I-515 into downtown and it was a major pain. So, this time I thought that maybe if we got on I-215 which looped around the west of the city it would be better even if it was a dozen miles longer. Ha, not so much, and it might have been worse. We have vowed not to come this way at all ever again. From now on when we make this trip we will just drive home the way we came via the Loneliest Road.

The shift to this ‘there and back on the same route’ plan was also enhanced by the negatives of having to drive in through downtown Albuquerque in the morning to catch I-40 west. Plus I-40 presents its own negatives as well, what with the shear amount of truck traffic that uses this cross country highway and the rough road surface cause by all these heavy vehicles.

On the plus side of the Klamath Falls to Carson City to Ely to Moab to Santa Fe route is it will give us an opportunity, on one of the legs, to visit the lower portion of Canyonlands National Park. Come back in November of this year and see how we do.