We're Not Slugabeds!

Dateline: August 18, 2011, Coleville, CA

Just because we haven't posted recently about a lot of wonderful activities doesn't mean we are slugabeds! Nosiree -- we've been very active.

For example: on Tuesday we visited daughter Kathie's home and did four loads of laundry. Turnabout is fair play: usually the kids come home to Mom's house to do laundry -- now as RVers we go to the kid's house to do laundry!

While we were there, we began to work on the repair job on our aging folding chairs -- had the camera, didn't use it. Also while we were there, I began printing out the fourth installment of our "Blog2Print" record of Our Life on Wheels. We learned about Blog2Print from another blogger some time back, and it sounded like a good thing. Our daughters had wanted to be certain all our blog stories weren't ever going to be lost, and a printed book is the way to go.

At www.blog2print.com we are able to design and print out a series of blog posts, more or less to our own specifications. They will take your blog posts (this time we are using all of our posts from the first six months of this year) and reproduce them in a book format, including text, pictures, and (optionally) comments. You are given editing possibilities, choice of cover design, and a few other options. Then come the printing options: they will produce and ship a hardcover book (too expensive for our budget), a soft cover book (quite a bit more reasonably), or our preference, a PDF format that they email to us for just $7.95. We can then print our own book, at our leisure. Yes, it uses a lot of paper -- this edition is 244 pages -- and printer ink, so buying the soft cover might really be a better bargain. Especially since we also shove those 244 pages into sheet protectors and a big binder. But we prefer it that way.

Back at the park, we found some problems with this Blog2Print printout, however, and were quick to sleuth them out. There are a number of pictures missing in the printouts that were originally on our blog posts! What good it that? No good, that's what! But before we jumped on Blog2Print's back, we wanted to get the details. Turns out that Blog2Print printed everything that was available on Blogger, but Blogger had dropped our photos! That's the story -- we went back to our blog posts of April 29, April 30 and found that several of our photos had disappeared from Blogger! So --- do we go back to Blogger and yell and scream? Do we go back and see what can be done to fix it? Whatever we want to do -- where do we go? To whom do we go? Any ideas?

On the way back to our RV park from Kathie's house, we saw this plume of smoke to the south.

It's called the Ray May fire, because it first threatened homes along Ray May Way south of Gardnerville. It's burning along US 395 south of Gardnerville; and 395, the primary north-south route in this part of the world, was closed in both directions Tuesday evening for six hours! Why is that important? Because on Thursday morning, we were to leave Carson City for a week at Coleville, CA. which is south of Gardnerville on US 395, that's why!

We later learned on the news that two 15 year-old boys had been arrested for starting the fire. They had built themselves a campfire and then abandoned it while it was still burning. The wind and nature took their course, and hundreds of acres have burned or are burning.

Now it is Thursday and we are safely in Coleville, just 43 miles from where we had been in Carson City. We'll tell you more about this place later. But you gotta see the fire! This first picture was taken as we traveled south through Gardnerville. The rest of the shots were taken as we moved further south.

The fire had burned right to the edge of the highway. No wonder it was closed!

The heavy black smoke was from the very oily and dry pinon pine that was burning.

Helicopters were circling back and forth from nearby Topaz Lake and other sources with water to douse the fire.

We could still see this from the outskirts of Coleville.

More pictures of the fire can be found in our web album, 2011 Ray May Fire.

That's enough excitement for this edition of ... Our Life on Wheels.