More interiors

We've come a long way with the interior --shortly after I posted the last update, we went on a "shakedown trip" - usually these are a short camping trip of a weekend to see how things work - ours ended up being 1024 miles with friends.  But Stardust performed beautifully, and we found out a few things that we know we want to do.

First of all, we took the camper to get it weighed. We wanted to be sure we weren't overloading it - it came in at 1520#.  I was hoping for 1200#, so a little heavier than I wanted. But I was also thinking that we had a limit of 1720, which our camper payload is listed at.  Then I got reading, and realized that the trailer itself weighs around 270#, and our total can be closer to 2000# when you combine the payload + trailer weight.  So we are closer to our 1200# than I thought. So all is good.  Which was nice, because I still had things to add --

So in the time since we returned, I've wallpapered:

this was some 1990s wallpaper I got in Indiana at a thrift store.  It's a dark hunter green, which works well with our general theme.  It also keeps it from being overly bright inside -- since all the woodwork is a creamy off-white.

Then I built in some more cabinets.  We realized that it's nice to have things back near the door, and the refrigerator counter was becoming a catch-all.  Building in a shallower shelf there made sense, so I added that.  When it came time to put the door on, I was concerned that it would: a. hit the curtain rod (that I haven't put up yet) and b. cause us to clear off the counter every time we needed to open the cabinet door.  Dale suggested using a slide, which was a great idea.  So that's what I did:

We had just changed out all the drawer slides under the sink - the wooden ones were not working well, even though we waxed them, they kept sticking, so we replaced them with drawer slides.  So we were happy with the slide action, and the new cabinet door works great.





I also picked up some small shelves - one from my friend Stacy, pictured above -- that will hold small bottles of paint -- and the one  over the sink, from a thrift store in Utah.




The sink area looks good - the shelf will hold hand soap, washcloths, other 'sink stuff" or anything else I can think of. I like the hooks also, for holding a variety of hats, towels, etc.






We also added a hook inside the door to hold keys for all the locks - the battery box, the "bee box" lock, the lock for the hitch, etc. This way, they're all right there inside the door.  The door itself needs some detailing - I'm thinking of adding a couple of shallow long bins for misc. things that we can just reach over and get -- putting our phones in, things we don't want to climb all the way in for.


I got the doors under the bed made finally -- and now the cabinetry is pretty much complete.  I still need to add knobs and touch up the paint.  The benches are dirty from us climbing on them to get various bits painted, patched, nailed  - they need another coat of paint.  I picked up some foam to make seat cushions, and I got fabric this week so I can get those sewed up. The lids on both seats lift for more storage underneath.  Under the bed we will be putting in our water tank - it's small, I think only 5 gallons, and then we'll run plumbing.  Mostly, it will be used to store our major large items, like chairs, blankets, canopy, etc.  I want to get a piece of carpet to fit the floor under there so things won't slide around too much.  

The view from the doorway is looking good:

Still a bit to go. I have some shelves to make for over the back window and over each side of the bed, I need to paint the inside of the window frames and some trim around the back window  I need to add curtains on this window as well, as well as make screens for all the windows.  I also need to add a threshhold.



We also have more bits and pieces for the outside - I picked up bumper stickers at all of the places we've gone to so far, and they are above the electrical box outside.  I think that'll be fun to add to as we go.  I also picked up a carriage style lamp for the outside, and I have to get that wired for 12v.



And of course, I have a ton of flowers, butterflies, birds and other nature stuff to paint inside!  Now that everything is all clean and white, it's my perfect blank canvas.  The inside will get as decorated as the outside soon!

So the inside is coming along. I am looking forward to some trips with just Dale and I - it's really a great size for just the two of us!  Another thing we want to do is have an 'open house' - our neighbors have been wondering what the heck we have been working on in the backyard, and I think having it open for a tour would be a lot of fun!

Hiking

We are getting ready to go on a short trip to Sequoia National Park and Yosemite, and one of the things we'll be packing is Dale's hiking stick.  We got this last year when we were on our cross country national park tour with our friends Eric and Herbert.  Dale is struggling with some back issues and found that it was easier to hike with a walking stick - we picked this one up at Grand Canyon in the tourist shops, it was plain pine with Grand Canyon burnt into it.  Not the most thrilling thing.  But I knew I'd bring it home and make it a little more fun later.

I finally got to it over the winter, I used acrylic paints and painted bands of patterns up and down the entire stick.  After I got it done, it looked a little too colorful, so I brought it out to the garage and toned it down with a coat of stain, which did the trick.  Afterwards, I gave it a nice coat of poly so the colors wouldn't get rubbed off too easily.

In most of the parks we visited last year, we picked up a small metal emblem that is made to  hammer onto a walking stick.  Somehow we managed to misplace a couple (yellowstone?  where are you?), but they'll turn up eventually.  The ones we do have are:







Death Valley.  Dale and I went there over the winter when the weather was somewhat reasonable.  Still hot, but not bad. 










Arches National Park - this park was beautiful, but we ended up on a hike that was a little over our heads!  It was super hot that day, but we eventually got back to the car and drank down all our water!







Antelope Island - this is in the Great Salt Lake in Utah, we saw bison and antelopes and went swimming in the lake, which was absolutely hilarious.








Bryce Canyon. Dale and I visited Bryce Canyon on our way home from Indiana this past Christmas.  We only spent a day at the park, it was snow covered, we didn't want to go hiking in the snow, but we did enjoy doing sightseeing.  We'll have to go back sometime!









Mount Rushmore -- this emblem's pretty fancy schmancy, but we did enjoy this historic site, too. We spent a full day there, doing the hikes and learning about the historical aspects. 













So we'll add a couple of emblems to his walking stick this summer, and now he's got soemthing that's a little person and a lot more stylish!

our summer adventure plan

Last summer, we had a fantastic trip across the US with our best friends Eric and Herbert.  This year, our travel plans are a little more local - we would like to visit a few parks in CA and also, we plan on visiting all of the 21 missions in California.  Up until this year, we'd only visited one, the Mission San Juan Capistrano, which is a really beautiful place ---

This is the mission that the swallows come back to every year in March.  We haven't had the opportunity to witness that yet, but maybe this next year.  We did see swallows last month on our way down to San Diego, but not at the mission.

We visited this mission way back in 2012, but we still counted it for our total.  For this summer, that still leaves us with 20 to go.

We took a day trip down to San Diego and visited the two down south - the first mission in the California mission chain, Mission San Diego de Alcala.

Beautiful garden, and of course, those iconic bells.   At each mission, we're taking the tours, picking up a few souvenirs and taking lots of pictures.  I have an art project in mind that I'm going to work on....

Next up was Mission San Luis Rey de Francia, which is in Oceanside.  This mission was pretty massive, with an extensive cemetery which was pretty cool. 

One of things that caught our eye was the cemetery gate, in the picture above, just to the right of the church.  Here's a closeup -- a cool skull and cross bones above the arch. 

At this mission, there was a lot of historical sites - original adobe barracks and the lavendaria (washing site) down by the river. 








We also took a day to go see the two missions in the Los Angeles area -- Mission San Fernando Rey de España in LA (mission hills).  This one had two weddings going on, so we didnt get a lot of pictures.  This mission also doesn't have some of the more classic looks ---

There were various outer buildings to look at, and this shot shows off the difference in size of people in this region -- Dale is 6'2"  and clearly he doesn't fit under the doorway arch!






The strangest (to me) aspect of this mission is that Bob Hope was a big financial supporter of the restoration.  He and his wife are buried on the grounds, as are other members of his family.  There's a little Bob Hope Garden, which was just so odd to us.

That's their grave on the right.








The other LA area mission is Mission San Gabriel Arcángel. 

This one looks a little imposing from the outside, kind of jail-like, but it was calm and cool inside. 

Saint Gabriel the Arcangel is in the center top over the altar, with his wings holding him aloft.  The carvings in this church were in great shape.

The thing that fascinated us, for some reason, was the opening/closing system of the windows. The windows are high up for a couple reasons - security and because the adobe walls are incredibly heavy and thick at the base, so the window openings have to be high so the wall remains supported.  So the windows are kind of unreachable, but they have glass frames that are on a pivot - they can pull one side of the chain and it pivots open, pull the other way, and it closes.  The adobe buildings are really cool and usually a little dark inside, but this church felt light because it's extra tall.




The other mission we've visited so far is Mission Santa Barbara. Every year, this mission is the site of a sidewalk drawing competition/exhibition/fundraiser for the locals arts groups, and we went during that event.  There were big crowds, and we got to see not only the mission, which is beautiful, but a lot of really cool art, listen to some live music, and eat some yummy pasta.

It was really crowded, but fun!

 The gardens were really beautiful, and peaceful. 

These are just a couple of the chalk drawings - it was really fun to watch the artists drawing.  The one above is on it's way to being one of those cool 3-D looking things - there's a certain place you stand to get the full effect.  There were several of these in progress, and some of them had a tape X or footsteps drawn in where you should stand to take a picture.

So that's where we are so far -- we have 6 visited, 15 to go.  They extend up as far as just above San Francisco, (mission San Rafael) so we'll have to go on a multi-day trip later this month to check out those.  I'll share what I'm doing with all these later!

Slacker!

Well, I'm a slacker about posting anyway.  I have been doing things, just been very bad about recording them.  But after a long day of working on the yard, I am going to update my project status first.

First, the labyrinth.  It's mostly done, although after getting the path laid and the plants in, I have decided it would look awesome to have a nice hedge around it, so I'll be looking for a deal on some boxwoods in the near future.  But for now, this one can be considered 90% complete.

 So, the last time I posted about this, I'd just started by marking out the path.  Then I went through and tamped down the walk path.  Above you can see how the compacted dirt path looks with the soft, turned soil for the borders all fluffy and nice.

 Then we got a load of decomposed granite.  I wanted the path to stay unpaved, but it'll get weeds and it'll get muddy, so a load of DG as everyone out here calls it, was just what we needed.  I spread that out, then compacted that, too.  Unfortunately, now I can't walk on it barefoot, because the DG isn't soft.  Boo.  I might have to put some sand on top of that.  Anyway, we also planted and then mulched the plants, and then put some starter food on it.  This picture about was from about 3 weeks ago, by the end of summer, I think most of the plants will have grown and merged together to create a living border.  At least that's the plan.  And again, I think a nice little hedge around it would look really cool.  I was hoping to find a cool fountain for the middle, but I'm trying to do this really super cheap, so I am just lurking around craigslist free hoping to snap one up.  Missed one the other day, but I'm persistent!

Another thing Dale and I are doing this summer is trying to fit in some little mini-trips to places we've not yet visited.  So we took a spur of the moment trip to Las Vegas and Hoover Dam, because I had one free night from my hotels.com acct.  We upgraded, and stayed at the Bellagio.   And we ended up going on the HOTTEST week of the year!

Whew! and that wasn't even the hottest temperature we experienced, it got up another degree, but my picture of that is blurry.

First, we went to Hoover Dam, and went on the tour.  We wanted to go on the deluxe longer tour, but it was booked and we would have had to have waited another 3 hours, so we just went on the shorter one through the power plant.  It was really interesting, and nice and cool inside.


I won't put all the pictures on here, but here's a cool shot:

A panorama of the Lake Mead side of the dam.  The water is down about 50 feet, which is really apparent when you visit, but not sure if you can tell in this picture.  Oh, and it was HOT!  We walked part way across the dam, but decided to drive across in our nice, air conditioned car.  We looked at all the outdoor exhibits briefly, then scurried back to the cool car. 

One of the things that I really liked was the terrazzo floor inside the power plant - they had inlaid designs that paid homage to the Native American history of the place.  This is a picture of a turbine, with a Native American influence:

 and an electrical outlet design , that looks somewhat like a rug:






We also got out and walked across the bypass bridge (the Mike O'Callahan-Pat Tillman bridge), which was crazy because we had to climb up eleventy billion stairs in the hot sun and then walk out across the burning hot sidewalk, but we did get this cool shot:

So that was worth it. 

We also saw this cool sculpture that pays homage to all the workers who completed this dam in only 5 years, 2 years ahead of schedule.  They worked 7 days a week, 24 hours a day and only got two days off a year.  But it was the Depression and they were glad to have a job.  And you know it had to be ridiculously hot like it was while we were out there, except they had no air conditioning to escape to!

This sculpture is huge, BTW, I don't have anything in it for scale, but it's really giant. 


We originally thought we'd also go to the Grand Canyon, but after realizing we were going during the biggest heat wave of the year, and there's really nothing at the Grand Canyon other than hiking, which would be completely idiotic in this heat, we decided we'd do that another time.  It's about 9 hours away. (Las Vegas is 3.5 hours from our house, and the Hoover Dam is 30 minutes from Las Vegas).  So that makes it a pretty easy trip.

Another big project we wanted to do this summer was sell (*sob*) my Karmann Ghia and buy a truck.  We've rented trucks so many times from Home Depot to do all kinds of things, and really, as cute as the Karmann Ghia was  (see! Look how cute:)

but it is not a very practical car for us right now.  And I've been taking the bus to work quite a bit, and driving it very minimally.  So it's been a bit of a luxury item, when what we could really use is a truck.  I listed it, had a bunch of people come and look at it, some really annoying people who want to low-ball bid, but finally sold it to a guy who was very happy to have a cute little car.  I think he's going to fix it up to make it more of a hot rod, but whatever! 

Then we had to go find a truck.  We looked at a bunch of really crappy ones, but got a really great deal on this 2002 Tundra.  It is in pristine condition, the guy we got it from really maintained it well, so hopefully it'll be a good deal.   And the best part is that we got the truck for $1200 less than we got for the Ghia, so we can buy a few extra things for it, and also pay for some of the yard projects.

We've already picked up a bunch of heavy stuff in it, so it's been earning its keep already.  And, like the Ghia, I will probably drive this only once or twice a week when school starts up again, as I plan on taking the bus often.  A full sized truck like this doesn't get great mileage, so it will be the vehicle we use the least.

OK, finally, what we got done today on our front yard.  In the past month, I've gotten the new walk path dug out, which was back breaking work but I've been doing it a bit at a time.  I somehow managed not to get any pictures of the dug out part, but a couple of days ago we got a free load of DG for the compacted sub-base, and this is what that looks like:

 This is during our process of spreading and compacting the decomposed granite.  EXHAUSTING, backbreaking work!  And after we got the DG compacted, we had our concrete pavers delivered.  We used 18 x 36s and 12 x 12s.  We alternated them so we had an irregular pattern.  There's a space in this first picture below, we have to re-route a sprinkler head tomorrow, and two of the large pavers arrived broken, so we have to return those and get a new one for this spot on Monday.  Tomorrow, we'll pick up another load of gravel (in our handy truck!) and fill the rest of the spaces between the pavers.  We originally thought we'd put groundcover here, but we really like the look of the little gravel, so we'll fill with gravel, and then gradually introduce the ground cover in between.

You can see the two cracked pavers above. 

We are pretty much exhausted, but we want to get this part done, it'll be a big boost for us to have part of this going!  We also can start planting the section between the path and the driveway, we have tons of plants ready to go!  We also have the drip system for that section, so that'll be the next part of our project.  And I'll try to get more pictures and posts on a regular basis!