New to Pahrump 12-5-08

Yesterday we got the trailer loaded up and the house emptied. Doing this a few times a year certainly keeps the level of unnecessary stuff to a minimum. I get rid of stuff as it comes into the house and I get rid of stuff as I load the trailer.

It still amazes us that everything always fits back into the trailer. The trailer is set up so efficiently and the stuff that is all spread out in the house just plugs back into its designated home in the trailer and as impossible as it seemed we actually have more empty spaces. We wanted to leave yesterday but Larry was waiting for something from UPS and it didn't show up so we left today.

We were up at 6:30. Had the last stuff to load up and as the house is still listed for sale I went around and beautified it. We were hooked up and pulling away from the house at 8:30.

We hit Tonopah around 11:30 and pulled into a station for fuel...it was $2.39...and then of course everywhere else after that we saw $2.29. As I got out of the truck to get into the trailer I saw our back trailer tire flattening...bummer...it was still hissing, so at least it had just happened. We pulled into the rest area right across the street and Larry got it changed. The trailer tires are easier to change than the truck. The trailer is double axel. He blocks up the good tire (I help by doing the driving onto the blocks) and then it is pretty easy to change the flat ...fortunately we have plenty of blocks for miscalculations...after taking off the bad tire we didn't have the other up high enough to get the good tire on the bolts, so another block and we were good to go. It took about a half hour to get the whole thing done, then we had to find someplace for air which we did pretty easily. The tire had picked up two nails...happily they both went into the same tire!

Then it was on down the road...Highway 95 south out of Fallon towards Las Vegas is the road we were on. Just after 2:30 we hit highway 160 to Pahrump. It was a nice day for driving today, sunny and no wind. We have never been to Pahrump before, it has about 35,000 people and is quite spread out in a high desert valley and is surrounded by mountains. Coming through town it has a Super Walmart and 5 or so Casinos and a couple of food markets and a lot of the other miscellaneous other businesses you see in a town this size...it also has a new looking Home Depot.

We had to get to the Escapee park by four which is when the office closed which we did by about 20 minutes. We will be here for a month. As we went to our designated home for the next month we discovered that this park has our least favorite of layouts, the sites are side by side. That means that the hook ups for two sites are next to each other so instead of them being, say on the left edge of every site and you have lots of space between you and your neighbors on either side, with side by side hookups we drive in one direction for our hook-ups and the person next to us comes in from the other direction and hooks up to their hookups which are right with ours, so we end up having a really close neighbor on one side and a distance to our neighbor on the other side. So far no one is right next to us. It isn't horrible, just not our favorite. Horrible is when they are side by side and you have no buffer space on the other side like we do here, then you feel like a sardine and worry about hearing your neighbors television shows from two sides! I'll try to remember to get a picture of the situation to show you later.

By the time we got all set up it was getting dark and we were hungry so we'll have to explore the park and clubhouse tomorrow.

We traveled 357 miles today, and Larry figured without having to change a tire it would have taken six and a half hours to Pahrump from Fallon instead of over seven hours.

The last picture is the view from our door.