Month: June 2021

The big RV road trip is almost upon us: only a couple more days to go!

Starting tomorrow (Saturday), Charlie and I will begin loading the motorhome with three times as much shit as we really need for the trip. It will be hot (100 degrees), muscles will get sore, and tempers will flare. Some bad words will be uttered. Ultimately, by Sunday night, we will have The Beast ready for the journey, we’ll have a few drinks, and we’ll be friends again.

Our plan for Monday is to drive about 260 miles to Tonapah, Nevada. It is a desolate, unattractive, piece-of-crap place where we will stay overnight in a large, gravel-paved parking lot with hook-ups. The air temperature will probably be 105 high, 85 low, so the air conditioner will be running from the time we hook up until Tuesday morning when we head to Winnemucca, Nevada, another 260-mile stretch. Again, a pretty miserable place out in the middle of nowhere, but…it’s on the way. We will again hunker down, enjoy the air conditioning, and count the hours until we can head 221 miles up the road to Burns, Oregon for another overnight stay.

Yeah, it’s going to be a crummy 3-day stretch of driving.

We are going to try out Bend, Oregon this trip. Our friends, Dan and Peggy Quinn, have stayed there and liked the resort (Crown Villa) and the town. We will be there for 6 nights. This will provide us a chance to catch our breath, give the dogs some opportunity to wander around, and I will be able to get the TV (satellite) running. We will do a couple of barbeques and maybe have a “date night” at a local restaurant. Hopefully, it will not be scorching hot in Bend.

I have a thermostatically controlled ceiling fan in the rig that needs to be replaced. A new one was delivered today by Amazon, and I’m thinking that I may try to install it in Bend. What could go wrong? Haha.

The only other item on the fix-it list, as we start this trip, is the horn: it has gone inoperative, for some reason. It is air-driven (operating off of the same compressed air system that operates the brakes and levels the coach), so I suspect that it was messed up when the air bags and air system was being overhauled last month at the diesel truck repair shop in St. George, Utah. I will have to find someone who is smarter than I to fix this thing. Until then, we are horn-less.

I’m taking a bicycle with me on the trip for the first time. Also, I’m taking my golf clubs just in case Dan Quinn wants a game up in Coos Bay or Brookings. My neighbor Galen (and his wife Sherry) will also be camping near us in Coos Bay and Brookings for a bit, and Galen will be bringing his clubs, as well. An easy, cheap public course would probably do us fine. I’m also bringing a tennis racket, because another neighbor, Sandy, will be staying at Coos Bay in a cabin for a short period: we may do some bicycling and tennis together.

We are doing the 2021 RV road trip in two segments: the Oregon portion, which will consume about two months, and the Southern California portion, which include a 30-day stay in Oceanside, California and some side trips to see friends and relatives. There will be a 5-day stopover in Mesquite, Nevada between the Oregon and California episodes where we can rejigger the camping supplies and our wardrobe to better accommodate the beach stay in Oceanside.

Charlie and I have been on a diet (Nutrisystem) since February: she’s lost 10 pounds and I’ve shed 16. We will be going off of Nutrisystem for this trip but will continue to watch our calories somewhat up in Oregon: Charlie wants to arrive in So Calif having lost an additional 5 pounds. I’m now at 180, which is about right, but might slim down an additional 2 or 3 pounds. I got down to 170 pounds several years ago (while on the annual RV trip) and I looked like Skeletor…way too lean. So, 177 might be a reasonable target for me: I will look okay and my clothes will still fit.

The dogs are ready to go. They are sick and tired of the 100 degree days and all the missed opportunities to go on walks with me. The cool beach up in Coos Bay is going to be Heaven to those mutts, and they will be able to enjoy several strolls on the sand each day with their best friend. “Off leash” is okay there, so it will be interesting to see how BonBon behaves: I hope that Baby will give her helpful cues.

Charlie is not bringing her “office” with her this year, which is a first. She will be able to communicate with Jonathan (her son and partner) via my laptop and help put out “fires”, if need be. But, for the most part, this should be my wife’s first RV road trip where she won’t be working most of the time. Hallelujah!

I’ve been digging into my family’s genealogy again.

My Dad used to tell me that we Manning’s were related to “Uncle Dick” Wootton, a well-known frontiersman and mountain man of the Southwest. He provided me with a biography about Wootton that was published in 1890, I read it maybe 40 years ago, and didn’t follow up on it in any way. I loaned the book to one of my siblings and never saw it again.

Recently, as I’ve hiked and explored the mountains and trails of Utah, Arizona, and Nevada, I’ve come across some of the places that are prominent in the Wootton narrative like “The Old Spanish Trail”. My curiosity got the best of me and I purchased another copy of the biography and read it cover to cover.

Wootton was a member of the fraternity of mountain men who trapped for furs, traded with Indians, hunted buffalo, and served as expert guides for entrepreneurs and the military who came to the Southwest during the period from the late 1830’s through 1880. “Uncle Dick” counted among his friends Kit Carson, John Fremont, “Old Bill” Williams, Brigham Young, and Santa Fe Trail trading pioneers Charles Bent and Ceran St. Vrain.

During his life, Wootton herded 9,000 sheep from Santa Fe to California to feed Gold Rush miners, was the first man in the West to ranch-raise buffalo, built the first commercial building in Denver, and built a toll road through the Raton Pass in New Mexico which significantly enhanced the Santa Fe Trail for freight traffic and cattle drives. That Raton Pass tollway later evolved into a Santa Fe railroad route (including tunnel) and the current Interstate 25 connection between Colorado and New Mexico.

During his fifty years in the rugged Southwest, “Uncle Dick” fought many battles with hostile Indians, traded with and became friends with many other Indian tribes, fought hand-to-hand with grizzly bears and desperadoes, conducted massive wagon train expeditions, made and lost great amounts of money, and raised a large family. Of his twenty children (from four wives), ten of them were sired after his 56^th birthday, and his youngest son was born when Wootton was 66 years of age.

Quite a life.

When I was young, my Dad told me that we Mannings were related to “Old Dick” via my father’s mother, whose maiden name was Enz. Her family (the Enz’s) were all “railroad men”; in fact, her brother Lester (my Dad’s uncle who we called “Les”) was, at that time, the Engineer of the Santa Fe “City of Las Vegas” train that regularly traversed the Los Angeles-Las Vegas route.

(My Dad also told me that the Enz side of the family was related in some way to the Carillo family of early California fame. In fact, he related to me a story of him, as a young boy, being taken to a “big mansion” down in South Los Angeles somewhere, where he was introduced to the “matriarch” of a very influential family. My guess has always been one of the Dominguez daughters (the heirs of the Rancho San Pedro Spanish land grant). For some reason the Enz clan was known to this Early California family…perhaps through marriage by way of Leo Carrillo, the famous actor of the 1950’s. The Carillo family and the Dominguez families go back to the original Spanish exploration of California by Gaspar Portola, Father Junipero Serra, etc. A Dominguez family member was in that Portola expedition and, as a reward, received the first Spanish Land Grant in California, a 75,000 acre behemoth that encompassed what is now the L.A. Harbor, Los Angeles International Airport, Palos Verdes, the West Bay, Hawthorne, Signal Hill, Domonguez Hills, Compton, and so forth. A Carrillo was the Governor of Alta California, another Carrillo was Alcalde (Mayor) of Los Angeles three times, and the Carillo’s were related by marriage to Pio Pico, twice the Governor of California when it belonged to Mexico. Somewhere in that cobweb of intertwiningEarly California families, supposedly, there is an Enz-Carrillo-Dominguez connection…at least that is what my Dad implied many years ago. Of course, what did he know!)

Anyway, when I re-read the “Old Dick” Wootton biography I got interested in this passed-down family story and did some follow-up research on the Internet. Lo and behold, I found another book (No Time to Quit) which incorporated the “Uncle Dick” first-hand account into a broader historical narrative of the Old Soutwest and was written by Wootton’s great-great-granddaughter, Janelle Wootton McQuitty. So, I bought that one and read it.

It is a very absorbing work, particularly if the reader is interested in the history of Manifest Destiny and the expansion of the United States westward in the 1800’s. Lots of facts, interesting first-hand tales, and explanation of how and why history unfolded the way it did. The book tells it the way it was, which is not the politically correct way that the story is now told in school and in the movies. It is a “warts and all” version that paints the Indians, generally, as testosterone-charged groups who were constantly stealing, warring with each other, and who broke treaties as often as the White Man did. The early American frontiersmen and traders who dealt with the Indians (like “Uncle Dick”) required a significant skill set to thrive, i.e. conduct business, establish boundaries and trust, and keep from getting killed and scalped. They were brave fellows, for sure.

Wootton, during his lifetime, interacted and traded with the Cheyenne, the Pawnee, the Kiowa, the Pawnee, the Utes, the Piutes, the Comanche, the Apache, the Pueblo, the Navajo, the Sioux, the Crow, and others. He was held in high regard by the Arapahoe Indians because he had rescued one of the tribe’s young maidens from certain death. According to Wooton, the most hostile and nasty Indians were the Comanche: he avoided them like the plague.

The author (great-great-grandaughter Janelle Wooton McQuitty) concluded her book with some mini-biographies of key historical figures that played a role in Uncle Dick’s life and a genealogy of the Wootton clan.

Wootton and Kit Carson were close friends who lived in the Rocky Mountain communities of Taos/Santa in New Mexico and Pueblo in Colorado. Their wives and families helped each other out when “Uncle Dick” or Kit were on scouting or trading expeditions.

One of the historical figures whom “Uncle Dick” interacted with was John C. Fremont, who has gone down in history as “The Great Pathfinder”. He conducted several expeditions in the mid-19^th century which explored routes from the Midwest to the West Coast. On each trip, he engaged expert guides like “Old Bill” Williams, Kit Carson, and “Uncle Dick” Wooton. These guys already knew the viable routes: they’d been traversing them for decades. Fremont comes across as something of a know-it-all who regularly disregards the advice of the mountain men. On one occasion, he did this and almost lost his entire expedition to exposure when the group got bogged down in a Winter storm. He later, unfairly, blamed his failure on one of the guides, “Old Bill” Williams…which both Kit Carson and “Uncle Dick”  knew to be a boldfaced lie.

Coincidentally, my best friend in high school was John “Pat” Freemon. His father was also named “John”, and I was informed that the Freemon family name was a modified form of the Fremont name and that, in fact, the Freemons were part of the Fremont lineage going back to The Great Pathfinder. Who was I to judge?

Also interesting was the Wootton genealogy as sketched out by the author.

It so happens that the second wife of “Uncle Dick” Wootton, a widow that he met on a wagon train, was named Mary Ann Manning. My wife’s legal name is Mary (Charlene) Manning. What a coincidence! Poor Mary Ann Wootton died giving birth to the couple’s third child.

Look as I might, I was unable to find a direct crossover from Wootton to Enz, thus frustrating my quest. I did, however, discover that “Uncle Dick” and Mary Ann Manning spawned three children, including William Michael “Bill” Wootton who was born in 1858. He and his wife Mary Elizabeth McDougall had several children, among which was a daughter, “Lillie Mae”, who was born in 1882. She later married and had children, although the author is unclear as to her married surname.

Interestingly, my grandmother’s maiden name was “Lylia Mae” Enz. It is possible that this is the connection that I’ve been searching for. Could “Lillie Mae” Wootton have married some guy with a last name of Enz and named their daughter after herself, with a minor modification in the spelling? Stranger things have happened: every female child in my wife’s family (all good Catholics) was given a first name of “Mary” or a middle name of “Marie” to honor the mother, whose first name was Mary… and the Virgin Mary, of course.

They did things different back in the day.

I’ve written a letter to Janelle Wootton McQuitty to see if she can shed any light on the genealogical “missing link”. Hopefully, she might also know something about the Californio “Carillo” legacy.

It’s worth a shot.

My best friend Lloyd Chartrand’s home is in escrow.

Lloyd is a 72-year-old single guy who is lonely. He has a girlfriend who lives in South Africa and can’t resettle in the United States due to immigration policies. Charlie and I have met her (“Juanita”) and she is a very nice divorced lady who is maybe a dozen years younger than Lloyd. She’s also athletic and good-looking. Why should he hook up with her?

Lloyd likes adventure and is contemplating moving to Merida, Mexico (in the Yucatan peninsula). It is a nice colonial town with low crime, cost of living is reasonable, there are lots of things to do and see, and Juanita would not have the immigration issues if she decided to move there.

The climate in Merida is tropical wet and dry, which is much different than that of Mesquite. Lloyd served in Vietnam, so he knows the drill. Instead of dodging horned toads and rattlesnakes in the Nevada desert, he will be dodging bombardment from iguanas in trees.

Lloyd bought his house here in Mesquite a little over 3 years ago, paid $240,000 and put another $15,000 into the place, so he’s $255,000 all in right now. He just accepted an offer on his home for $381,000 (plus the buyer is going to assume Lloyd’s community facilities bond obligation for another $4,000). So, he stands to net around $125,000 from the deal. He’s an ex-C.P.A. and financial consultant, so this is not his first rodeo. He’s going to plunk it in the bank, wait for the real estate bubble to pop, and then snatch up a bargain property in the States or elsewhere.

If Lloyd resettles in the Yucatan like he’s contemplating, I’m sure Charlie and I will go visit him. We’ve traveled there before (via cruises to Cozumel and Belize and land-based vacations in Cancun and Tulum) and we like it down there. It is hot and muggy, but that’s what showers and iced drinks are for, right?

I will certainly miss Lloyd, as will Charlie. He and I golf, play tennis, and hike together in the local mountains. The three of us have a weekly dinner/card game which alternates between his house and ours, and sometimes we go out to dinner here in Mesquite. Lloyd likes Charlie and he loves our dogs.

As I say, Lloyd is my best friend, although he and I don’t see things through the same lens: he’s very conservative, believes in a lot of conspiracy theories, and is racist, to be blunt. I try to ignore the propaganda that he puts out and concentrate on the things we have in common, like love of adventure, Old West history, ribald humor, and good-natured ball-busting, which we do almost constantly. It will be difficult replacing this component of my life, but I’ll have to try.

Lloyd will close escrow in early July, as I understand. We will be on our RV road trip to Oregon by then, so our house will be unoccupied and we’ve offered it to Lloyd while he tidies up his affairs here in Mesquite. He will have to put all of his household goods in storage while he goes down to Mexico to survey opportunities.

Charlie and I hope that Lloyd finds happiness wherever he ends up.

We’re in the midst of another heat wave…our second this year.

At the end of May, the temperature in Mesquite got up to 110 degrees, which is roughly ten to twenty degrees above normal. That is the temperature “breaking point” for most people out here: activity pretty much stays indoors and the air conditioners and iced drinks take over.

This week is forecast to be a scorcher, with temperatures exceeding 110 degrees for seven days straight and a high temperature of 118 degrees on Wednesday, June 16^th. Yipes, that is some serious HOT!

The earth’s atmospheric temperature is warming…of that there is no doubt. 2011 to 2020 was the warmest decade ever recorded, and the six warmest years ever recorded have occurred since 2015. Air temperatures have been recorded throughout the world since the 1880’s, and since that time the overall mean temperature of the earth has increased by two degrees. That doesn’t sound like much, but that small difference has begun to shrink the polar ice caps and affect ocean currents.

Some of the by-products of this “global warming effect” have been increased droughts, increased number of severe weather events (tornadoes, hurricanes, ice/hail storms and floods) and a steadily rising sea level as polar ice sheets melt. Many people want to pretend that these changes to our climate are natural (particularly lobbyists and apologists for Big Oil), but the scientific data indicates clearly that the world’s slide toward climatological Hell coincided with the advent of the Industrial Age. We have polluted the earth’s atmosphere with exhaust from the burning of fossil fuels and this has upset the natural chemistry of the skies above us.

Out here in the Nevada high desert, we’re used to warm temperatures and low humidity. It’s a nice place to live, away from the “maddening crowds” of Southern California and other urban areas. Unfortunately, as a by-product of the Covid-19 pandemic, there is significant exodus from those urban areas (note: coughing, sneezing multitudes in crowded buildings) to more remote areas like ours with lots of elbow room and clean air. Properties are being snatched up with “California money”…there’s a friggin’ bidding war going on right now!

My best friend Lloyd has decided to cash out before the price bubble bursts. He put his home on the market last week and has received a half dozen offers already…I think he’s going to decide today. He should pocket a $150,000 profit after living here for three years.

One big problem that this retirement “paradise” will be facing, sooner or later, is the availability of water. This is the desert, after all, and there’s only one river nearby (the Virgin River). It normally flows all year round, draining the southwest corner of Utah and a bit of Arizona (the “Arizona Strip”), but that flow is normally quite modest. This year, as we begin the Summer, the Virgin River is barely flowing.

With the atmosphere getting hotter, we can expect droughts (like the one that we’re experiencing now) to be longer and more severe. Meanwhile, there are approved plans to build thousands of additional homes in Mesquite to accommodate those ex-pats from California and other states.

Question: Where are all those new folks going to get their water?

No one seems to be asking that question, not even the State or local officials that approve new residential development. Don’t they read the news? It’s getting hotter and drier…and the river is drying up! Wake up, Folks…we got problems here in River City!

Here in the Manning household we have a plan to deal with these heat waves and the inevitable water shortage: (Short-Term) We will absent ourselves from the frypan during the Summer months and enjoy the coastal air up in Oregon; and, (Long Term) We will, hopefully, die before water runs out here in Mesquite, Nevada.

Hopefully, we have ten years before the place goes to Hell.

We’ve taken a 3-night motorhome vacation to Cedar City, Utah with our neighbors, the Carnicellis.

Galen and Sherri Carnicelli just recently bought a 2018 38’ Coachmen Mirada rig. It has a Ford V-10 powerplant and all the modern fixins’.

They paid $93,000 for it and everything seems to work. It appears rather puny inside compared to ours, and the materials used for flooring, cabinets, etc. look inexpensive. The Carnicellis aren’t large people and, with their one dog, there is plenty of room.  It is their first motorhome and they asked us if we would do the 3-day trip to help them through the freshman jitters.

The place we’re staying is called Iron Springs Resort. It is about ten miles from I-15 (Cedar City), out near some old mines and just down the road from the city dump. We have water and sewer hook-ups but no cable, no picnic tables, no BBQs, no restrooms, no showers, and no groundcover other than gravel. Cell service is marginal.

Camping here is basically boondocking, as far as I am concerned.

Galen asks a lot of questions about RVing and I’m happy to give him all the information that I know. He is an ex-Navy electronics guy, so he is going to have a much easier time diagnosing and fixing the little annoyances that come with traveling in a motorhome. The Carnicellis are going to do a big road trip this Summer and, in fact, are going to stay at some of the same places we are (Coos Bay and Brookings, Oregon). It will be interesting to see how they like the lifestyle.

We just recently got The Beast shipshape in terms of air bags and (compressed) air lines: the RV rides nice and levels fine. Of course, there are always things that crop up as soon as the rig leaves storage. On this trip, I realized that the horn doesn’t work, and the thermostat that runs one of our automatic ceiling fans is not functioning. Galen may help me troubleshoot those items today.

Something that really panicked me was the Norcold refrigerator, which wasn’t working right when we left town. The freezer bays were ice cold, but the refrigerator compartment was not cooling, for some reason. When we got to Cedar City (a two-hour drive), the refrigerator bay was still room temp. This had us highly annoyed for the rest of that day. However, by the next morning, everything was working correctly. I don’t know what the problem was: I’ll have to research it.

We’ve been here in Iron Springs for three days now and the wind has howled each day for most of the day. We can’t put up our awning and sit outside in camp chairs like we normally would, so we’re hunkered down in the RV, reading and watching TV.

I also did some Web research on a lady who is the great-great granddaughter of “Uncle Dick” Wooton, a pioneer mountain man in the Old West. I believe that I may also be one of his great-great grandchildren (on my father’s mother’s side), so I’m going to send the lady (Janelle Wootton McQuitty) a letter inquiring about potential common genealogy. She’s a writer and historian, so she probably has some stuff that would interest me. I hope we can connect.

Last night, the Carnicellis had us over for dinner (delicious meatloaf, mashed potatoes and corn) and we later played a board game called Sequence.

Tonight, it is my turn to cook the meal. I’m going to grill a marinated pork tenderloin and serve with scalloped potatoes and spinach salad. And, then, we’ll probably play some more Sequence, which they liked.

Tomorrow morning, we will head back down the I-15 to Mesquite in the morning and stow the rig. In a little over two weeks, we will pack it up and head off toward the Oregon coast for Summer. I can hardly wait to enjoy the cool climate and the beach sand in my feet.

As far as Iron Springs Resort is concerned, on a 1 to 10 scale (with 10 being excellent), I would give this place a 2…something to avoid unless you are desperate for an overnight stay. In that case, you’d be better off parking at a WalMart and saving $65.