May 31, 2013 Verdi, NV

What great weather we are having. Nice cool air and this park is fairly quiet, sometimes we can hear noise from Interstate 80, but it is muted.  There is also an occasional train whistle.

Another unusual morning, I was up earlier than Gerri.  We had our coffee and computer time and headed out to a Verizon store in south Reno.  We had been there yesterday inquiring about the spotty service on our MiFi unit.  With the MiFi we are on is an old plan that includes unlimited data.  Our device is now old technology, 3g. If we upgrade to a 4g unit we lose the unlimited data.  The upside of changing is that 4g is faster and Verizon is expanding the 4g network and not the 3g.  That probably means that 3g will be eventually phased out.  Have you ever heard of 2g?  The tech had given us some instructions yesterday to upgrade the coverage on the old unit that didn't work for me.  Once at the store the tech, Russell, did the upgrade.  We decided to keep the 3g MiFi and also buy the 4g Jet-pack.  Our plan is to use RV Park WiFi when or the MiFi when available.  When those fail we will try the Jet-pack with the limited data usage which is shared with our phones. and when those fail, I also took a step forward in technology and upgraded my flip phone to a smart phone.  Now I won't have to borrow Gerri's phone to find caches at rest stops or other places we stop while traveling. We bought a monthly plan that will allow us to use our phones in Canada.  Unfortunately they have no similar plan for data usage.

The visit to the Verizon store took quite awhile and of course cost us plenty since we also bought a Garmin Vivofit activity tracker for Gerri.

Our next stop was a visit with retired Lieutenant Ed Pitchford at his home in Verdi.  We visited for quite  awhile with him and his wife Judy.  After the customary medical/aging and telling of war stories we talked of both ours and their travels.  It is always a pleasure to renew old acquaintances.

We got to Kathleen's at about 4 PM.  By vote we decided on an early supper at Mel's diner in downtown Reno.  We had quite a crowd; Gerri and I, Kathleen, Maddy, Milana, Sean, Shannon and Maddy's boyfriend Hennessy.  Most of us had some variety of hamburger and fries. a couple of the girls had chicken wings or fingers.

Shannon, Milana and Maddy

After supper it was back to Kathleen's.  Gerri and Shannon played video games, I played World of Warcraft with Sean.  Hennessy practiced his sale pitch for a line of cutlery he has started selling.  He is a polite well spoken young man.  I don't envy him his job with that type of selling but that is probably because I was never good at it.  I never quite understood what Milana and Maddy were doing, it resembled straightening up the house.

We went back to the coach at about 9 PM.