roadquill1

Day 1 of our journey towards home has ended. We are now at Brown’s Millpond RV Park, just north of Bishop, CA. It was a beautiful…sort of day, but more on that later.

Yesterday, after a quick stop just outside of Lake Havasu City, we headed towards Needles, and then Boulder City. The plan was to get an RV site at Boulder Beach Campground. The weather was fabulous and skies clear. As we pulled up to the registration gate at BBC the lady asked if we had a reservation. Uh…no! The website that we looked at said “First Come, First Served”. “Sorry sir, that is no longer the policy…you must have a reservation online. If you pull a U-ey ahead and leave the park area you can pull off the road and use your phone to book a site – if there are any available.” This was perhaps the most frustrating time for us. We would seem to find an available site, only to mess up on one of the other details. For example, when entering a date, it asked for Arrival and Departure dates. If you put in those two, you would be charged for 2 nights! If you didn’t put in two dates, you wouldn’t find an available site. After about 3/4 of a very frustrating hour, we gave up and headed out. Our original intention had been to go to Tonopah, but that now seemed like a rather distant destination given that we had already driven over 2 hours.

So…we opted for Pahrump, NV! We had stayed there a number of years ago when the place we stayed at was called “Terrible’s Casino at Pahrump! And…at that time, Sandy had played slots while we waited for a dinner seat, and she had won about $130 – plenty to cover our RV site, and our meal! It really wasn’t terrible…that is the name used by Jerry Herbst who financed the place. I found this reference on the internet…

“Herbst founded Terrible Herbst in 1959. The name repurposed an old slight toward his father, Ed, who opened Martin Oil in Chicago in 1938.
“Back in Chicago, every time my dad would open a new service station, the competition would say, ‘Here comes that terrible Herbst,’” Jerry Herbst said in 2014.
Since the brand’s arrival, the Terrible name has existed in the Las Vegas Valley atop gas stations, casinos and the family’s motorsports team, with some of those ventures controlled by Jerry Herbst and others by his sons Ed, Tim and Troy. Pahrump Valley Times – November, 2016.”

Off we headed following “Roada’s” instructions on the Map App. Usually, we work together through heavy traffic, but as we headed through Las Vegas, Sandy was busy and occupied trying to register us at the newly named place of “Lakeside Casino and RV Park”. Traffic and overpasses, exits and entrances, lanes and speedsters kind of had me on edge, and I missed the proper turn off to head West on Hwy 215. So, we had to work our way through more main street traffic and occasional construction to get back onto our path.

The Lakeside Casino RV park is still very beautiful. We stayed out of the casino because of the smoking, and unfortunately had a dead 30 Amp connection that we didn’t notice until bedtime. No problem. Everything else worked on DC power.

Yesterday (Tuesday) we continued our journey, opting to go through Death Valley to Bishop and then up Hwy 395 towards Reno, rather than the less scenic route to Tonopah. What a beautiful travel day – beautifully clear skies, with temperatures up to 21º and sparse traffic.

Since we have been through this route previously, we didn’t stop anywhere, but we had both forgotten the length of the climbing route out of Death Valley, and the subsequent twisting and narrow climbing route over the Malpass Mesa Wilderness that finally leads down to Owen Valley and Lone Pine. Sandy was literally “on edge” throughout this second climb.

The Brown’s Millpond RV Park just north of Bishop was a good place to stay last night. A lively creek wanders between the sites, and the views of the Sierra Nevada snow-capped peaks are fabulous.

Anyway, today has a possible encounter with snow as we get further north towards Susanville. We are trying our first “Harvest Host” site tonight at J.D. Hemphill Ranch near Buntingville.

Love and best wishes to everyone, and we so appreciate your comments, as always.

Tony, the Quill, and Sandy, soon to be a Quilter again!