A Little Idaho Wandering

The start of this post will be a bit boring for all you non-blogger types out there, I give you fair warning. So if you are so inclined you will probably want to skip forward to the photos. And to top all of my incompetence off, I see my photo captions are not appearing in the blog itself. Great! More headache to deal with, so bear with me. At least you can see the pictures!

I am the furthest from being computer savvy that a human can possibly get, so why I let Jeanne talk me into doing a blog in the first place just boggles my mind. But I had managed to fake my way through it for the past almost 8 years, so there’s that going for me. We started with Blogpost, but quickly switched over to WordPress and chose to let WP be our hosted server. When we wanted to access certain effects (fonts, schemes, colors, etc.) we had to upgrade to the WP business plan which was running us $300 per year plus having to renew our domain name independently (another $18 for the year, through Wild West Domains). I put up with all the occasional “upgrades” that WP kept putting out, having to decipher and relearn how to do some of the simple stuff (managing media-photos, learning the new “block editing” style, etc.). Now, we are thinking hard about coming off the road and “landing” somewhere, maybe going part-time instead of full-time RVing. We’re not in much of a hurry, but are giving serious consideration to a couple of particular areas. In anticipation of all that, I wanted to capture my entire 8 year blog onto some type of printable format. My computer advisor (Jeanne) found a plug-in at WordPress, “Print My Blog”, and looking into it, I thought it just might work. Alas, how I was wrong! I fiddle-farted with it for days trying to get a successful result, but all I got was a haphazard mish-mash of text and photos that were cut in half between pages and it threw me into a cyber rage! I wasn’t able to figure out if or how to edit the mish-mash into something usable. Again, my computer advisor (cooler heads always prevail!) hit me with something she found while surfing the ‘net called blogbooker.com run through WP. Blogbooker turns blogs into a book format, at least for those that really are savvy. In my exploring Blogbooker, I took a chance and $30 later had the standard plan loaded up. It did not take long to complete, however the PDF version that appeared was a mess as well. My photos were no longer in their original arrangement, there was a fancy table of contents page that had a strange numbering system for my “chapters”, there were long spaces, sometimes entire blank pages between posts and pix, and the pix were of a large variety. Again, I don’t know how to edit a PDF, but I figured out enough to copy & paste what I wanted into a Pages document, then spent a couple of weeks editing that document into something that makes sense and is manageable. Because of all that hassle, and after consulting my computer advisor, we decided to change our WordPress hosting over to Bluehost shared hosting. That just created a whole ‘nother series of cyber-rage-blowouts with me schooling Jeanne on my vast vocabulary of 4-letter words. I transferred my domain registration from Wild West Domains to Bluehost (many hours spent on hold with their tech support getting secret codes and whatnot to unlock MY domain name and allow the transfer), then signed up for the Bluehost Choice Plus plan. In some circumstances, you can actually migrate your entire existing blog over to Bluehost, and after another few hours on hold and talking with tech support, I found they offer to migrate your blog (for a $150 fee) for you. That would be handy to a skilled computer expert such as I (NOT!), but then the tech also clued me in that they do not recommend migrating WordPress blogs such as mine due to loss of certain functionalities and possibly some material (great, just my luck). So I sucked it up and decided to start off anew, having the peace of mind that I captured my previous 8 years onto something printable. That does no good for any of you who wish to go back and visit some of our past haunts, and for that I sincerely apologize. Also, I apologize if the “notify by e-mail” function has been interfered with or deleted for those of you who actually signed up for it. So, that brings us to current events, ending all this breathless bloviating.

Southern Idaho is our current focus on possible landing zones. One, it IS NOT Kalifornia. Two, it is within a doable striking distance to all our family still residing in Gavin’s Autocracy (aka: Kalifornia). Three, the weather is tolerable. And four, it IS NOT Kalifornia. We spent a few busy days back at the Ambassador RV Resort in Caldwell, getting some chores done. While there we had a local outfit wash & wax Rosie the MH. We also had just completed moving our stuff from a little 5×5 storage still in Santa Rosa, CA ($103/month), up to a 5×10 storage unit in Star, ID ($63/month), so we needed to get things organized and arranged. We also downloaded some unnecessary “ballast” from the bus (stuff we don’t use or need on the road).

We wanted to check out the area of Moscow, ID, so it was north on Hwy. 95 from Ontario, ID. We picked Canyon Pines RV Resort for an overnight stay in the area of Pollock, ID. This is out in the middle of nowhere right on the Little Salmon River. It was a very nice RV park just south of Riggins, ID. One of the reasons we chose the area was we really wanted to go see the Hell’s Canyon area, however in talking to the locals, every which way we turned it was a spread out area with just enough driving time to get to for us to be discouraged enough to cancel that thought.

Lewiston, ID was next on the itinerary. We found the Clearwater River Casino & Resort to spend a few days at while exploring the area. The RV lot associated with the casino is really a dump, but at least it had FHU’s. The location was good for us, what with Lewiston ID and Clarkston, WA right there at the confluence of the Clearwater River and Snake River (which acts as the border here between ID and WA). We got to get some shopping for supplies done (Walmart, Costco, etc.), and we chose to do the short roadtrip into Moscow in the Jeep, sans Rosie. And of course, we had to donate to the local economy of the Nez Perce tribe…

Having already inspected Moscow, we drove on past and landed back in Core-dee-ay-lean, ID (OK, aka: CD’A or Coeur d’Alene). We stuck out a few days at the Elk’s Lodge there (nice weather, by the way!), then spent 5 days at the Blackwell Island RV Resort right on the Spokane River at Lake Coeur d’Alene. This is a very nice resort park with both human and dog beach areas, boat dock, and even a small dirt BMX track for smaller kids. We spent some more time checking out CD’A (we thinks maybe a bit more snow than we would like to see in wintertime, and talking to some locals it appears Fall time the sun tends to disappear 3-4ish in the young afternoons). We also tried out a few more of the local breweries, this round “Daft Badger Brewing” and “Trail’s End Brewing” both had some tasty offerings. Daft Badger had a half order of nachos that was absolutely huge (very tasty) & we ended up boxing up about 2/3 of it for take-home!

Our bicycles have been feeling neglected for quite a while (inanimate objects “feeling”?????), so we hit the Prairie/Centennial trails that follow along the Spokane River. We meandered along the path for a 3-hour ride, then took a short jaunt into the marina area of CD’A and McEuen Park. After our bicycle trek, I needed to fabricate some type of bicycle rack we could carry with us in the bus (I forgot and left our old store-bought one at one of our stops in Montana). So a run into the local Lowe’s scored me some PVC pipes & joints. 30 minutes of manual labor and voila!, one bicycle rack in hand.

The weather was very pleasurable in CD’A, clear skies, 80-90’s in temperature, and our Sea Eagle kayak was yelling out our names from it’s dust gathering position in our storage bays. We launched from the RV park boat ramp/beach area and cruised up the Spokane River for about an hour, cruising through some pretty fancy riverside homes, before discovering our inflatable floor section was losing air. So we turned around and returned to the park. An inspection of the air valve for the floor section revealed a nick in the plastic rim was causing the leak. Hello again, Lowe’s! No luck finding some type of rubber seal/washer that I could use to seal the leak, good ol’ Google to the rescue sent me to the local Ace Hardware establishment. They had a plethora of different types of seals & washers. I picked a few different types and found the good old-fashioned O-ring did the trick. Good to go for the next ocean voyage…

Finished at Blackwell, we made the arduous journey (OK, 30 miles away) over to the Coeur d’Alene Resort & Casino near Worley, ID for a couple of days of boondocking (free) in their parking lot for RV’s. They do have numerous 50A hookups for which they ask $20/night, then refund some of that onto a Player’s Card if you so choose to get one inside the casino. And yes, again, we donated to the local economy of the Coeur d’Alene Reservation. This is a nice Casino/Resort which has an 18-hole golf course which I guess is used in the LPGA tour (or so their signage tells us).

So, our plans are to kinda circle back on down to Caldwell, ID through Kennewick, WA, where we are going to do some more sorting through the storage stuff and prepare for a run into Redding, CA to pick up Jeanne’s mother & bring her back to Idaho for a couple weeks or so. It’s all tentative, never know when something attracts our eye…Until next post!

****OK. So this is an edit added at the end. I’m trying to solve my lack of captions and thinking maybe the artsy-fartsy mosaic type of format isn’t supporting the use of captions. So here I will add pix into the standard “gallery” block in WP. I can’t cross my fingers any more than they are now, they look like one big Gordian Knot. I see the captions appear at the bottom of these pix in the edit, I’m assuming they will show up on the blog once I update the post. If you find no other edit additions in the waning seconds after I publish this one, I have solved that issue, WHEW! But now I am disappointed I cannot caption my pix in the mosaic mode. Baby steps…

****OK, so I lied. This addition to the addition is to inform y’all that I went back and changed my artistic mosaic format of my photo blocks into a standard “gallery” block and added the captions back in, it drove me nuts having certain types of photos with no explanation (aka:caption). I will reserve my future use of the mosaic style for those series of photos that need no caption…Now, I really mean it, “until next post…”