bobanddenisewanderlust

Saturday-  We had a nice pancake breakfast, put on by the Roadrunners, at the tennis pavilion. After breakfast, Bob went to Walmart to pick up the fixings for making the dogs food. I went to the sewing room to assist with the vests. I had finished ours yesterday and last evening I had completed the two table toppers.

So the first thing I did was to iron those. Then I assisted with pinning the vests and putting the binding onto other people’s vests. This is Susan sewing Marian’s vest that I had pinned together and pinned on the binding.

Above, Lorraine ironing binding and Mike in the background supervising. Here is Mike pretending to assist us, completed with sunglasses on!

The sewing/quilting room here is outstanding. It is completely furnished by the ladies selling quilts to raise money. The sewing/quilting machines are top of the line. There are large cutting tables the ironing tables and irons are great.

I had ridden my bike over, so at 12:15 I headed back to the motor home for lunch .Bob had completed cooking the dog food, so we put the food into the containers and transferred them into the basement freezer.

We both took a nice nap. At 4:30, we headed back to the tennis pavilion for happy hour. After happy hour, we returned to the motor home to eat leftovers.

Sunday- We went over for coffee and doughnuts this morning and ended up staying until almost 9:30 talking with some folks. RV’ers are very friendly people!

I went to Joanne’s with friends Susan Prichard and MaryAnne Balzer. We had great ‘girl’ time buying material and perusing the store. We returned to the motor home and I worked on making a pillow cover for one of the pillows on the couch. Bob’s belt is rubbing on this area. it turned out really well and matches the table cover.

 

I also made covers for the headrest on our recliners (outside). I am also going to make a table cover with this outdoor material.

We went to happy hour then over to the club house for the Sherriff’s Dinner. This was similar to the dinner we had in Quartzite in January. I guess since we had the largest group, they served us at 6:30. For some reason they delivered the desert first. Well life is short, so we all ate our desert first! Dinner was salad, lasagna, bread, and cheesecake for desert.

Before dinner, one of the Roadrunners played the accordion and sang. He was actually pretty good!

After dinner, the Sherriff started in on our infractions. No one knows who the Sherriff is, but you know that he is going to find something. This time it was Pat Prichard. We were careful to wear our name tags, but we were  fined for eating dessert first, establishing residency in South Dakota and I was fined because I put black contrasting piping on our vests, and something else, but I can’t remember what! The money goes to the Wounded Soldiers fund, so who cares! They raised $145 here and at Quartzite, with a lot less people, they raised $80. Pretty good when you consider it was mostly in quarters!

After that we played LCR( left, center, right) the same game we played in Ft. Collins in 2010. Neither of us won. The guy who won, received $117 dollars!  This was the end of the pre-rally.

Notice we are all wearing red shirts. That is the Roadrunner color. Other clubs have denim blue or yellow.

Monday- Let the Alfa National Annual Rally begin!  This is our first one!

The winds picked up today, with gusts to 35 mph, although the temp is in the 80’s.  There was not much going on today other than we went up to the clubhouse to pick up our mail and to go through registration for the rally.  We went to happy hour at the club house and stayed for dinner. Dinner was for all the clubs in the ballroom. We had our choice of salmon or chicken. We chose the salmon and that was a good choice; the chicken did not look all that great.

Tuesday-  The winds continued, but are less today. Bob went to learn to play lawn bowling.

He enjoyed the outing and can now join their club if we return to Palm Creek. Bob bowled in high school and used to be really good.

When I parked my bike I noticed this cute little car. Bob can’t quite figure out what it is. He thinks it is a Ford roadster, 1932, but it seems to be a compilation of various years.

This Cadillac golf cart was also parked there.

I worked on sewing a lot of items. I shortened some crops to capri length. Sewed our patches on our vests and finished the pillow covers.

We took a nap and went to happy hour. We had tickets for the prime rib dinner and the Mentalist show. The Mentalist, whose name I did not catch, was pretty good. None of us could figure out how he knew some of the things that he knew.

Bob won a $50 Pilot gas card!!

Wednesday-  Still breezy, but the temp has dropped into the 70’s. Since it is so dry, the weather feels cooler.

I was off to the craft class at 9AM and made this little origami box.

I am keeping my scan disks in  the blue one and I gave the pink one to Susan. She had picked up an address book for me at the Goodwill. ( I use them when I work as a place to keep notes). At 11:30 the doors opened for the Ladies Lunch. Lunch was a split burrito with a very nice chicken salad in one end and turkey in the other, with potato salad and coleslaw. Plus a great cupcake. The theme was black polka dots.

Aren’t these little shoes cute?

There was a fun fashion show, with the first clothes being casual and the send run dressy. Didn’t win a door prize! 

Next was the Microwave/Convection oven class. The instructor was  Dee Dee Czarnowski. She was an excellent instructor. I learned a lot and can’t wait to try some of her recipes.  Much better than the seminar I went to in Indio and left because the instructor was sooooo bad!

Meanwhile, Bob had gone to the Alfa Electrical System seminar, given by Vonis. We had met Vonis in Indio and he is known for his knowledge of the Alfa’s. We see his name on the Yahoo blog all the time.

After Bob returned to the motor home, the guys from Tank Techs arrived to wash out our gray and black tanks. We had heard from others that this needed to be done. Evidently, the minerals build up and become stones. Plus we have had two episodes of bad toilet paper. This was an easy, non-smelly process. They have some clear tubing, so Bob was able to see what came out of the tanks. We had rocks! So we are really glad that we had this done!

We skipped happy hour and went to dinner at 5:30. The dinner was held on the pool patio, which is huge! Dinner was cooked by the Alfateers. When Alfa Leisure closed their doors in 2008, the employees bought what they could at the bankruptcy sale and went into the RV repair  business. They fix all brands of RV’s. but specialize in Alfa’s. So all the owners try to keep them in business.  Each year they do a dinner or breakfast at the annual rally.

The dinner was burger and brats, potato salad, macaroni salad, fruit salad, chips and drinks.

The entertainment was Bunky, the cowboy. He was very good, but it was really cold with the wind blowing, so after the door prizes were drawn, we headed home to add on some clothes!

When we arrived back at the motor home, Bob realized that the Alfateers had arrived and completed our repairs. Not sure when they did that, but obviously while we were gone. We will have to hunt them down to pay them! They fixed the wind sensor for the main awning and replaced the door window seal.

Thursday- Bob woke up at 3:30 AM with the A-fib. We had quiet day today. We worked around the motor home,  pulling out items to sell at the yard sale tomorrow. Then when we went to eat lunch, we discovered that the bread was green. So we went to Cracker Barrel for lunch. I brought  home half of the meal. We stopped at Wells Fargo for some cash and Kohl’s to see if we could buy Bob some black sandals. They did not have any, so we returned to the motor home and Bob went to the Alfateers seminar at 2:30. We went to happy hour at 4, then dinner in the ballroom. We sat with other folks who are going to Alaska this summer, Barbara & Ray and Nona & Jim. Dinner was garden salad with Vidalia onion dressing, ham with cherry sauce, scallop potatoes, and green beans with bacon. Carmel topped cheesecake for dessert.  Most of it came home with us. We have lots of left overs for after we leave here!

Friday-  At 9 AM Bob went to the Alfa Tech Talk with Ed Burrows as the instructor. Bob really enjoyed this seminar and felt that he learned a lot. At 10:30 he had the Freightliner seminar. One thing that he learned was at Pilot/Flying J offices were swarmed last week by the FBI. Hmmm, they allegedly were keeping some of the discounts that they were supposed to be giving the truckers!

I made a cute little tissue pack get well card. I have not completely put it together so that I can make a copy for future use. I returned to the motor home, cleaned, and walked the dogs. At 11:30, I ate lunch, and packed up a sandwich for Bob. I rode my bike over to meet up with him. At 12:00 we had the Emergency Escape seminar, given by Mac McCoy, The Fire Guy. Mac started by discussing the Norcold refrigerator in the Alfa that he was using to do the demonstration. Norcold refrigerators have a history of fires. ( We have a Dometic). He showed us that even though Norcold does a recall, they are not really fixing the problem. People are having the recall done, then having fires. Glad we do not have one of them!

Then we walked around the coach and he had some of the ladies go into the coach to climb out the emergency window in the bedroom.

This is a lot harder than it looks. There is an open space next to the bed and you have to be able to get your legs up and slide out on your stomach. In the Alfa’s, according to Alfateers ( remember they built the coaches) you have to  open the window a certain way and the way to close it is to slam it shut. So Mac did not want to push the window out. The first thing that you have to do is make sure that you can get your hips out the window. He told a story of a fire where the man went first to assist the two women who were in the coach and he got stuck in the window, when it closed on his back and his belt buckle got caught. They all died. You only have a few seconds to evacuate.

None of us have tried to push the window out. So the first thing we did when we returned to the motor home to make sure that we could push the window out. We were also able to get the window locked again. We both think we can get out the window, just by opening it. We may add a bar outside to hold on to if we need it. One couple even added a door in their bedroom in case of a fire!

We returned to the motor home and cleaned some more! Then at 2 PM it was time for the coach walk and the yard sale. We sold a couple of items and we are donating the rest. We had a few more ideas for changes to the motor home. A lot of people went through rig!  At least 40!

Happy hour was at 4:30, then we headed over to the clubhouse for dinner with just the Roadrunners. Tonight was a turkey dinner, stuffing, gravy, mash red potatoes, and  nice fresh yeast rolls. Dessert was an apple cake. Again, most of the food came home with us!

We had our annual meeting, electing the new officers. Bob had worked this afternoon as one of the auditors of the treasurer. All seemed to be in order.

We returned home and discussed our travel plans. We are planning to head to Tuscon on Sunday, where we have 2 free nights at the Lazy Days campground. Bob is still having the A-fib, so he is going to call on Monday and see if he can get his appointment at the cardiologist moved up. He has been having too many episodes and they are lasting longer, so we are going to make a change to our plans, once we find out when he can get an new appointment.

An advantage of living in a motor home is that you can move anytime!

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