What’s that racket?

What a nice dinner we had last evening at ‘Top of the Falls’, 5 star restaurant in Motorcoach Country Club in Palm Springs, California! We had booked a 6:30pm dinner reservation and we’re really glad we did, because the place was quite busy when we arrived. The menu last evening was ‘Italian Night’, but the menu was pretty broad even if we didn’t feel like having pasta. The deal of the evening was the $5 glass of Italian red blend! The menu said a ‘generous pour’ for a glass of red and the pour was definitely generous!

The wine was fantastic too!

I had a delicious lasagne which came with a wonderful Caesar salad, warm rolls and butter. Richard had the spaghetti and meatballs and he also finished off my lasagne. The portion sizes are definitely generous!

Lasagne with meat sauce.

Spaghetti with meat sauce and meatballs.

We had no room for dessert after this yummy meal. And the good thing was we had a nice long walk back to Newman, to walk off our dinner. With not having a golf cart or car in this resort, it is definitely a long walk to the clubhouse for us! The restaurant felt just like eating at a nice country club and we really enjoyed our night out.

This morning we had to get up early, since Richard had to get to the car rental office in Palm Desert, to pick up our Hertz rental car for the week. Richard had arranged a Lyft to come and get him today at 8:20am outside the gates of the RV resort. While I was getting my stuff together to have a proper workout at the resort’s fitness centre, we both heard a pick ax on stone, sawing and singing! What on earth was going on outside?

Oh my goodness! The lot next door was having some sand delivered for an interlocking driveway. You can see Newman is the RV on the left side of the photo.

The workers were singing and joking around this morning as they were working on completing the driveway.

I said to Richard “Great, we’ve come all this way to relax and I was really hoping we wouldn’t have to be woken up with noise every morning. This definitely was not disclosed to me when I agreed to rent this RV site.“. So as we walked down to the entrance of the Motorcoach Country Club, Richard started formulating his tactics with how he was going to handle this situation with the RV resort management.

I said goodbye to Richard and went to the fitness centre. Amazing! There was no one in the place on a Monday morning, so I had the place to myself to work out.

I always start with 20 minutes on the recumbent bicycle.

I see the squat rack calling my name! I was happy to be able to do some squats, as well as leg press and other leg exercises. It’s great to have access to a gym again, I’ve missed a gym on our trip!

When I walked back to our RV site, there were even more cars and trucks parked everywhere working on the lot next to us. An undeveloped RV lot in this park sells for about $90,000 USD and then you have to spend the money to have the pavers installed and a casita, outdoor kitchen, pergola etc, if you so desire. Some people, just do the pavers and then live in their RV, while others are really over the top with what they’ve done to upgrade their lots. The monthly maintenance on these lots is $523 USD which give the owners access to all amenities in the resort including the pools, laundry, golf - with no tee times, bocce ball, tennis and the fitness centre. Members also get better pricing in the restaurant ‘Top of the Falls’ and as renters for the week, we also got Member’s prices in the restaurant, which was nice!

When I got back to Newman, I was tidying up the counter and noticed that the bag of flour in a plastic bag on the counter had been nibbled on and there was paper on the back of the couch. OH NO….MY WORST NIGHTMARE AGAIN! A MOUSE!

I quickly texted Richard and said ”Stop and get more MOUSE Traps please!” Richard has mouse traps set up in the basement of Newman as something chewed the nose of my Mickey Mouse head cover on my 5 wood in my golf bag! Now we seem to have a visitor indoors too! This is NOT good! I’m absolutely petrified of mice!

When Richard got home with our rental car (which I have dubbed ‘Izzy’ the hybrid IONIQ by Hyundai), he quickly got to work setting up the mouse traps, while I went to take a shower in our beautiful casita bathroom. It sure was nice to have a nice long, hot shower and not worry about running out of hot water today!

I was very curious as to how Richard’s discussion with the management of the RV Resort went over the noise situation next door. When I had originally booked this RV resort, I thought I had booked for 5 nights, but when we arrived, we were only showing 4 nights on the confirmation. Since the office was closed on the weekend, we were going to need to have a discussion about the extra night in question anyway, so Richard took that on as well. Richard explained that nothing had been disclosed to us about work going on next door and since we were woken up before 8am with the noise of pick axes, was there anything that the RV Resort management could do for us? And we also wanted to stay an extra night. The person Richard was speaking to had to go and check with their boss, but it turns out that the RV resort is full this week, so we can’t move sites, but we can move to another lot on Thursday, for one night. I was so curious about the site we were moving to because it is a ‘Platinum’ site, vs the ‘Gold’ site we are in, I had to take some photos!

Site 129 is where we are moving to. This RV moved out today. We will have our own heated pool and hot tub on Thursday and we also back onto the water and the golf course! Richard sure is good about getting compensation! And we got the one night complimentary too from the RV Resort management!

While it was nice and sunny and 66F Richard decided he would go up on Newman’s roof to see what was going on with our Wineguard wifi system. Yesterday when we got to the RV resort, he tried to connect our Wineguard system on the roof, to the internet and all he got was an error message saying we had no SIM card inserted. Richard thought that maybe the SIM card had ‘jiggled’ its way out of the Wineguard system on the very bad cement roads driving through Los Angeles yesterday. As much as Richard doesn’t like heights, he had to go up on the roof with his Ipad and see what the situation was with the Wineguard. The RV resort only has complimentary wifi in the clubhouse area of the resort, so we couldn’t spend all our time here using up our data plans on our phones.

While Richard was up on the roof he decided to look around to see if he could find out why the roof was still leaking over the passenger’s chair. And look what he found!

The new roof membrane seems to have a hole in it!

Right behind the air horn on the right side of Newman, the roof membrane has a hole. Maybe one of those stupid birds in Fanny Bay dropped an oyster shell on it! I wouldn’t be surprised!!

Richard went back up on the roof with his caulking gun and some dicor and fixed that hole on the roof. That part of the roof won’t be leaking again anytime soon!

The roof has been sealed up….again! Let’s hope this time it lasts.

After the roof was sealed, and Richard had set the mouse traps, it was time to head out. I was anxious to get going with so little time we are staying here in the Palm Springs area.

Our first stop was to visit Roger Dunn’s Golf Shop. The Palm Springs/Indio area has a ton of golf courses and of course a lot of nice golf shops too. Richard had only brought his Foot Joy golf boots with him for Vancouver Island, so he needed a new pair of golf shoes to be able to wear with shorts.

I was able to get Richard a nice pair of Footjoy Contour leather golf shoes with soft spikes, which are warranted for one year if they start to leak on the sale rack! I found a nice pair of Sketchers women’s golf shoes too!

I bought Richard some new golf balls too. I liked the packaging so why not try them?

Cut Blue has adopted the motto to create ’A Ball for the People’, and at $19.99 a dozen, not a bad price either. At 42% cheaper than Pro V1x, they had 1.4% more driver carry distance (5.4% more than the ProV1); equal iron distance; 4.5% less wedge spin than the ProV1x and (2.8% less than the ProV1). Compression on the balls is 90, with a urethane cover and a 4 piece ball. In testing, this is the first time that a ball has gone up against a Pro V1 or Pro V1x and was actually better than Titelist’s more expensive ball. Now I didn’t know any of this when we bought the golf balls, so it will be interesting to see how we actually play with them. We’ll give you a full report after we’ve played a round with them!

I was in desperate need of a pedicure. My feet actually hurt in my shoes, because my nails were so long!

The very first Nail spa we saw was able to take me, so off I went for a pedicure.

The lady doing my nails had her third covid 19 shot last week. She knew that being Canadian I had to have had my shots too, to get into the U.S. The salon has many Canadians coming back this year, who didn’t come down last winter. The salon was large, left the door open, had ceiling fans and also had 2 large industrial fans running throughout the salon, which was great, as not every customer inside the salon were wearing masks.

While I had my pedicure Richard napped in ’Izzy’ the Ioniq, with the windows open. It is so nice to be able to walk around without a coat on! We both were pretty hungry though after I got my pedicure, and we have both wanted to go to this one spot that is a California institution, so I programmed the GPS and we headed the 3 miles down the road in La Quinta for some lunch!

The iconic In-N-Out burger! Celebrating 73 years now, this California based chain of restaurants was the first drive-thru hamburger stand. The original owner created the two way speaker box in 1948 to enable guests to order and receive their meals without leaving their cars. In-N-Out burger is now in six states: California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Texas and Oregon. The chain is family owned and is now guided by the grandchildren of the original founders. We both had visited In-N-Out before, but it was a long time ago and we felt like cheeseburgers today.

The meat is never frozen, the lettuce and tomatoes are fresh daily, and the buns are toasted!

Now that’s a cheeseburger!

Delicious at 480 calories a cheeseburger!

Just behind In-n-Out burger was Trader Joe’s!

We did not buy this huge bottle of Incanto Pinot Grigio and Chardonnay mixture from Italy. I think this large bottle was only $12.99 and it is rated 4/5 stars. The reviewer says “Its a steal people! Get it!“ We may have to go back now and get a bottle!

I didn’t know I had any sisters that made wine, but Trader Joes seems to have found some!

We didn’t buy this either, but it is a new product to Trader Joe’s. As we were walking around Trader Joe’s today Richard looks at me and says “Wouldn’t it be amazing if Trader Joe’s opened in Plant City, Florida?!” I’m not sure that would ever happen, but yes it would be amazing!

When we got home I prepped our dinner for cooking on the gas BBQ on our RV site. We have an outdoor kitchen at our RV site, and a gas BBQ too, so while we are staying here we are definitely going to make good use of the amenities for cooking outside!

We had a nice FaceTime with our grandson Owen Benjamin today too before we started cooking up our dinner. Owen is now walking up a storm and really enjoys reading books to himself!

Owen and his mommy and daddy will be flying to Ottawa for Christmas with family, so we hope Owen is a good boy on his first airplane ride!

As I’m writing tonight’s blog, we’re enjoying some wonderful instrumental jazz Christmas music and there is no more racket from next door, thank goodness! It looks like the workers quit at 3:30pm every day, so it gave us some time to still enjoy some outdoor living time, with the patio heater on full blast, and a blanket wrapped around my legs. The desert is cold at night and as soon as the sun goes down, it quickly gets cool! We’ve got a Wind Advisory in effect now until Tuesday night at midnight, and there is an 80% chance of rain tomorrow. Who says it never rains in the desert?! Richard is hoping to wash Newman tomorrow and I’m sure no one will say a word to him if he’s outside in the rain washing the RV.

It might be time for some more retail therapy to check out some more golf shops tomorrow if it rains all day!