HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!!!

We want to take this time to wish all our friends and readers a very Happy New Year and wish you a prosperous 2009. We also want to thank you for visiting our Blog and hope you will continue to follow our travels in this new year.

On New Years eve we departed Desert Hot Springs and headed to Ocotillo Wells California, where we are now at Leapin’ Lizard R.V. Ranch. We found it listed by doing a Google search of “RV parks Borrego Springs California”. Not sure what we would find here so we only scheduled a 3 night stay. As it turned out it is a nice family-owned (Siegfried & Deborah Traviss) park, 75 acres, with lots of trees and in the middle of the desert where there are thousands of campers dry camping in the surrounding area with their 4 wheelers, sand hogs and motorcycles. They are not allowed to start them in this park. Those that have them must push them out the gate before starting. Great for us as it keeps it pretty quiet around here.

They set out tables, chairs and lots of food for all the guests and gave away a table load of gifts for New Year’s Eve. It was quite fun getting to know new people and Jackie ended up playing Old Maid and Crazy 8s with adults and kids. The party was BYOB and it was nice to see very little drinking. At midnight we celebrated with several bottle of Champaign and then the owners passed out noisemakers and we all paraded around the park wishing all those trying to sleep a Happy New Year.

Well 2008 was a fun filled trip. We departed Ephrata Washington on May 1 and headed into not only a new lifestyle but also an opportunity to travel and see our great country. With our 2007 16,000-pound Montana Big Sky hooked to the back of our 2004 1-ton Dodge truck we headed south into Oregon, then California, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Arizona, and we are still in California at the end of the year. We also visited Wyoming but did not take the rig or spend the night during our visits to Yellowstone.

We pulled our Big Sky 5,445 miles in 8 months (681 miles/month), we were on the road 275 days or 39.3 weeks. We traveled about another 11,905 miles seeing the sights around where we camped for a total of 17,350 miles (2,169/month average or 63/day). We start 2009 with 40,350 miles on our truck; lets see what we do this year.

We camped at 49 places; the shortest stay was one night at the top of LoLo pass in Montana and the longest was about 3 weeks at Miracle Ranch in Washington. We moved an average of every 5.6 days. We paid as little as $0.00 to about $30.00 per night. We have been where there is not any television, Internet or telephone connection, like right now except we do have our DirecTV so we can watch the Bowl games. Hate to be inside when it’s in the 70s but we have to suffer every once in a while. Oh, what we do for football.

Dick took over 3000 photographs, or about 12 per day. We posted 73 times to our Blog and started the counter several weeks after we left and still had 3,575 hits.

Thanks again for visiting us and please take the time to drop us a note now and then.

Dick & Jackie Driver



To be continued...