Tuesday May 27, 2014 Hawthorne, NV

The motor home has been pretty much unused since the first week of December.  It did make a short trip to Quartzsite to have Kevin Mallory finish some work on the coach.  New batteries and he finished installing the Silverleaf system, new backup camera and radio.  I also had the leveling system repaired at Apache RV Service and all new tires put on by Redburn Tire Company.

While loading up for this trip I found that the front TV wouldn't turn on.  I have found out that the on/off switches on Samsung TV are notorious for this fault.  We replaced one last year with the same problem.

We were loaded up and ready to roll at 9 AM.  We went south to NV SR160 and the west to Pahrump, picking up US95 north of Johnny.  Since we got an early start we nixed stopping at Tonopah.  It was a good thing both parks we could see from the highway were full.  We also passed the one RV Park in Mina, opting to go on to Hawthorne.  We arrived at the Whiskey Flats RV Park at about 3:30 pm having driven 322 miles.

Recently I was criticized for not describing the scenery more.  Well, you know what it looks like around Las Vegas.  Well most of the trip was the same just think of more mountains and plant life that gets smaller and further apart as we approached Tonopah and didn't get any more plentiful on arrival in Hawthorne.  That is the scenery and plant life we saw.  There are occasionally large sand dunes and cinder  cones between Johnny and Goldfield.  Many people think this drive is boring.  I love the desert and the mountains and the interesting communities along the way.  My imagination runs wild to think what the places must have been like during their heydays.

After getting parked and set up. I only hooked up power, we relaxed for awhile.  A stiff wind was blowing from the west off the mountains.  Mt. Grant which is a little northwest of the RV park still has a little snow near the summit.  Mt. Grant is the highest peak in Mineral County, NV at 11280 feet.  Some public facilities in Hawthorne are named after the peak.

About five I looked up a nearby geocache and tried to load it on my GPS with no luck so I went for it armed with Gerri's phone.  The cache was a little over a tenth of a mile away.  It was still windy but it had cooled off considerably.  I wasn't able to find the cache because in the sun I couldn't read the screen off Gerri's phone.  I even tried standing in the shade and sheltering the phone with my hat.  I returned to the coach.

We had a supper made up with our leftover Spaghetti ala Nora and salad.

After supper I got the geocache to load onto my GPS and walked over to the area.  After I crossed the highway, I heard voices.  There were other cachers at the cache.  After introductions we walked to two more nearby caches.  When we returned to the park it turns out they were parked across the street from us.  They are also going to the same RV park in Verdi that we are headed for in the morning.  They will be there three days before heading home to Grass Valley, CA.

The rest of the evening was taken up by TV, computer time and Sudoku puzzles.  The rest of the evening?  I'm talking 9:45 here folks.  We were in bed early.  There was a lot of noise outside, the wind was blowing stronger with more gusting.  By then the coach had cooled off and the AC units had shut down for the night.  After a day in the sun and driving it sometimes takes quite awhile to cool down, especially the rear where the engine has heated the rear bedroom.