It’s been a long while since we updated the travel blog, and that’s mostly because we haven’t been traveling! We spent the last 4 months camped at Park of the Sierras SKP waiting for our name to come to the top of the list for a permanent membership, and it finally did! On December 9 we made the big move to our new permanent base of operations, site 114. It doesn’t look like much right now, but we have some plans to add a little landscaping and patio extension to make it much more comfortable. And we have a shed for storage!

The new digs at Site 114

A paved drive AND a shed!

Wendy and I have made lots of new friends here. Park Sierra, located in Coarsegold CA about an hour south of Yosemite’s south entrance, is a Co-op SKP park, which means that all of the members volunteer to provide services for upkeep to keep the costs of running the park low. We pay $110 per month for our site, and that includes all of the amenities except electricity and propane. We have a spacious site, a 9X12 shed, two friendly neighbors (Hi Becky and Paul!), a paved driveway, a huge clubhouse with a giant commercial kitchen, a huge Pole Barn with a large selection of woodworking, welding, blacksmithing, and general tools for our use, 4 miles of walking trails (wandering through an old-growth oak forest), and a ton of wildlife (mostly woodpeckers, squirrels and gophers, but also including bobcats, raccoons, and an occasional mountain lion). These gals spend most of every Tuesday quilting, and not just for themselves. They participate in Quilts of Valor, a project to donate high quality quilts to returning veterans as an appreciation for their service.

Quilting buddies at Park Sierra

Wendy has also taken up Beading. She caught the bug from her new friends, and has been cranking out these beautiful bracelets like crazy, giving me plenty of football-watching time!

Beaded bracelets are the latest new hobby

This place is a real treat, one of the finest RV campgrounds we have ever been in. It’s a private park (membership only). The founders followed their vision to carve this park out of a weed-choked oak forest 20 years ago, and now it’s home to about 500 retirees enjoying 254 spacious campsites spread over 160 acres in the Gold Country. We don’t worry about intruders much because the road in is a little rough.

A driveway it ain't!

Just kidding. That’s a photo of a bridge that washed out in a flood before the Friant Dam was built to create Millerton Lake, the main source of the San Joaquin River. We’ve done a lot of local sightseeing to get more up-close-and-personal with our new digs.

We are on a 2 month road trip right now, camped at Evergreen RV in Oxnard, CA. Because of the holidays (and because I didn’t book a site in time) this is a close as we can get to family in the San Fernando Valley and Beverly Hills. It’s a LOT warmer than Coarsegold where the nighttime temps were dropping into the high 20’s, so it isn’t so bad making the 45 minute drive in to see them.

We’ll be off in mid-January to San Diego to visit more family, and then off to southern Arizona for a few weeks of more warm weather to visit some friends at the largest gathering of RV’s in the world. Quartzsite AZ is host to approximately 750,000 RVs during January, an event that has been going on for more than 30 years. That’s an average of about 1.5 MILLION campers in one spot, all dry-camping in the desert (no water, electricity or sewage, although strangely the cell and internet service is excellent). We’ll stay until the water runs out or the waste tanks fill up, then we’ll skedaddle back to our new home base!

Oh yeah, here’s Tippy! Are you happy now Dan?