Well, after a brief run, I’m back to my slacking ways. What can I say, I’ve been just super busy. I guess I could say that, but it wouldn’t be true. I’ve been a bit “disengaged,” as they say in the business world. We’ve done a few fun things though! Went to our first CA State Fair, saw a few good concerts, (O.A.R. and Hozier, namely,) took a trip to Tahoe, and also to Old Station, CA. I think I’ll skip coverage of most of those events and just jump ahead to Old Station, as that’s where we are now. These days, my memory is pretty much limited to what’s currently going on. So yeah, we took off in the RV and headed up to Old Station CA for a 10 day trip on July 27th. It’s a very nice park; huge RV spots, nice amenities, and lots of things to do nearby. The nearest town is 30-40 minutes away, so it’s a bit of a nuisance if you need to go get something, but we’ve got the Jeep with us so no big deal. The RV park sits on a nice creek, which fishermen seem pretty fond of. There is a great national park 15 minutes away, with a big lake to take my kayak to. (Haven’t actually DONE that yet, mind you, but I’ve got it with me. We’ve just been there and checked it out a few times.) It’s also right on the famed PCT trail, which is kind of cool. I went ahead and hiked it while we’re here, so I can check that off my bucket list. Well, actually I went about 2.5 miles. I figure I’ll do it in sections; 2.5 miles down, 2647.5 to go. Several people who actually are through-hiking it stop by here for a break though, they’re an interesting lot.

So, for those who are into that whole math thing, you might wonder why we are still here if we left on a 10 day trip back in July. Yeah, funny story. We have some friends who are working here for the summer, and they mentioned that there might be a few jobs still open. We got to talking with the park manager, and bada-bing, we have jobs until October. Sorta. In the interests of full disclosure, (which we at pkenagy.com ALWAYS strive for,) only one of us passed the interview and got hired. And, much like all the other interviews I’ve had this year, it wasn’t me. Oops, back to the full disclosure: I didn’t want a job, and I didn’t interview, only the wife did. The pay is rather… “nominal,” but we get a free campsite, Wi-Fi, laundry, ice, and a discount at the little store they have. Most importantly, at 5,000 ft elevation, it’s a solid 20 degrees cooler than at home. Kinda hated to walk away from the garden, it’s really doing great this year, but what can ya’ do.

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Happy 4th of July! We actually psuedo-celebrated this year. No fireworks, unfortunately. I really miss shooting off some loud stuff, but that’s a big no-no up here. Pretty sure the neighbors would show up with swords and pitchforks if they heard a firecracker go off. You COULD cross the county line and get some “safe and sane” fireworks, (i.e. “boring,”) but even those are illegal up here. Can’t argue really. It hasn’t rained since April, it wouldn’t end well. We did actually attend the Pleasant Valley parade this year though, and that was a blast. It’s an annual event, but we’ve never quite made it the mile up the road to watch it. Not much of an excuse this year though. We had nothing better to do, and it was like 70 degrees out. Not sure what happened with the cool weather, but I ain’t asking questions, just enjoying it. So yeah, the parade was a lot of fun. Very small town, local thing. Mostly kids riding decorated bikes, horses and cows, people throwing candy out the back of trucks, that sort of stuff. It only lasted about 30 minutes, which is roughly the same as my attention span. After it ended the weather was just too nice to leave, so we sat around on the patio at Bones until traffic cleared. Solid holiday for us!

Unfortunately, such a strong start to weekend completely knocked the wind out of us for the next few days. We didn’t leave the house Saturday or Sunday, just kind of sat around. Did some (very) light chores, watched some baseball, and spent ample time just sitting on the patio. We did talk about joining a motorcycle ride on Saturday, but I chickened out. The ride email started out “This is a challenging ride,” and I quit reading. We’ll get ’em next weekend.

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I was a veritable social butterfly last weekend, or at least I played the part of one. Activities every day, which is quite unusual for me. (None of it was at my suggestion, but that’s OK.) We kicked off the weekend on Friday at the nearby American Legion Hall. They open it up for a “social hour” on Fridays, which we’ve heard good things about, so we decided to give it a try. Definitely worth the short drive to El Dorado, it was fun. Met a few people, and had a great dinner. Grilled tri tip, corn on the cob, and slaw for the whopping price tag of $10. That’s at least a $25 plate anywhere else around here, probably more. It was very good, too. I had it in my head it would be the prepackaged sliced stuff you can buy at the warehouse stores, but nope, it was hot off the grill and sliced to order. Great deal and a good time, we’re in for that.

Saturday morning I rode the motorcycle down to Diamond Springs and met up with the club we went out with last weekend. I went by myself this time though. I’m a lot more comfortable riding that thing solo, at least for the time being. (Plus, the odds of the wife being ready to go at 9:00 in the morning two weeks in row are rather remote.) Another good ride. Quite a bit longer than last weekend, we ended up at a little over 100 miles. The roads were a little tamer this time too, which was quite welcome. (Although “tamer” seemed to equal “faster.”) We wound our way over to Jackson, then turned east on highway 88 and started going up. Very scenic ride, you could tell from the number of bikes it was a popular route. We kept climbing until we stopped for lunch at Cooks Station, which was a nice little diner at about 6,000 feet. Lunch was… OK. I was a little underwhelmed by my burger, but the price was right and they were super busy, so I have to cut them some slack. The outdoor seating was an added bonus, because it was great weather at that altitude. After lunch, we continued east to Peddler Hill Overlook at about 7,100 feet, where we stopped for some pictures. It has a great view of the Bear River Reservoir, and made for a nice stop and more cool weather enjoyment. We left there and climbed a short while longer, and then turned out at Mormon Emigrant Trail to start heading home. I’ve been down this road in the convertible before, which is fun, but it was a really fun time on the motorcycle. It’s not really much of a “road,” more like a nice paved trail, but there are occasional cars on it to watch out for. It is closed to traffic in the winter time, and it’s a popular motorcycle ride when open. It drops you about 4,000 feet over 30 miles down to Sly Park, which is the lake near my house I go to a lot. Made for a rather convenient route for me! A short drive (and another 1,000 feet) later, I was back at my house. I was pretty much spent for the day, but we’d told some friends we would come watch their band back up at Sly Park, so we headed back up the hill. It was worth the extra effort, had a good time and it’s quite a bit cooler than at our house.

Sunday we lazed around all morning, then decided to head out to enjoy some of the local wineries. Maybe a little on the warm side, but not unbearable and we haven’t done that circuit in a while. We started in downtown Placerville at Cappelli’s. It’s an indoor spot, which is sort of different than our usual places, but it’s nearby and the a/c was definitely welcome. From there we headed back over to our home area, and went to Miraflores. It’s a really nice outdoor patio, and somehow it manages to stay comfortably cool for most of the summer. Two stops was enough for one day, so we headed back to the house and grilled up some sausages and corn for dinner. After eating, the busy weekend caught up with me. Turned on the TV and promptly fell asleep on the couch.

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Rhetorical question… If you don’t really work during the week, do you still observe weekend festivities? Boy, that’s deep. Currently we vote “yes.” Probably just a force of habit, but I really look forward to the weekend and being able to relax. As opposed to, say, a regular ol’ weekday and being able to relax. Like I said, probably force of habit, because it doesn’t really make any sense. For the time being, I shall continue with my regularly scheduled habits though.

We kicked things off with our regular “social time” at Bones Roadhouse on Friday. As per my regular ritual, I invited some people, none of them showed up, and I enjoyed myself anyway. In a bit of a twist on the usual events though, our favorite waitress did a “gender reveal” for her soon-to-be little ‘un as soon as her shift was over. It really added to the festivities of the day! I’d never seen one of these “reveals,” and it was good fun. They’d taken a video of the actual reveal at home, and they put it on the TV’s for everybody to watch. The California-approved fire-safe (i.e. “lame”) pyrotechnics turned out blue, it’s a boy! For the record, as is always the case, I put my money on the “girl” bet, further improving my gambling record to 0-for-everything.

Saturday turned out to be a fun day. The wife got up at a reasonably early hour and declared she wanted to go on a group motorcycle ride we’d seen a flyer for a few days before. Despite a little skepticism, it was pretty hard to say no to this suggestion. I’d just washed my motorcycle the day before, the weather had dropped 20 degrees from the previous week, and we honestly had nothing better to do. We gassed up the ride and headed over to the starting area, which was a nice short ride from our house. I was pretty nervous about riding in a huge group, it’s just not something I’ve done before. (OK, once, back in KC.) My anxiety was further escalated when they gave us a ride map, and I saw the first stretch was up highway 193 to Georgetown. The only other time I’ve ridden that road was just over two years ago, when we went up to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. After that trip I made a solemn vow to never travel that stretch of road again, and I honestly almost hopped right back on the bike and went home. I was able to come down off the ledge when I noticed that there were only about two dozen bikes there, so not really that huge of a group, and I was given assurances that they were all very safe riders. Given the way I’ve seen people ride around here, I took that promise with a large grain of salt, but agreed to give it a go. Everything turned out fine, with the exception that I still abhor that stretch of wicked switchbacks. Everybody was, indeed, very accommodating and easy to ride with. Turned out to be a fun time. Donette was advocating for me to join their club, but I’m holding off on that for the time being. Great bunch of guys and I had a lot of fun, but you know, “motorcycle gang” just has a negative connotation to it. While it might improve my street cred at the aforementioned Bones, (big biker hang out that it is,) that would instantly be erased by the fact that I was the single rider in the entire group on a non-American motorcycle. While everybody was courteous enough to not make fun of me (to my face,) I was still rather self-conscious of the situation.

Sunday we were a bit worn out from our big outing the day before, so we took it easy. Hit the grocery store for the upcoming week, enjoyed lunch at Geartooth BBQ, and headed back home for the (horrible, awful, pathetic) Royals game. In a somewhat tragic turn of events, we were shocked to discover that Geartooth has removed jalapeno poppers from their menu. You might think that statement a bit overly dramatic, but they happened to be the best jalapeno poppers in the universe. Bold claim, but arguably true. Heck, it’s not even arguable, it’s fact. I really look forward to them when we go there. While I do not normally voice my input to restaurant owners, even regarding their BBQ, I made sure they were aware of my extreme displeasure. They were kind enough to acknowledge my concerns by announcing their extreme indifference. Hmmph. Something about they were too labor intensive, and didn’t always sell out so they had to throw a few away. They were not even swayed by my generous offer to drive over and take the extras off their hands. I don’t know, it just seems like they could have contacted me before making such a radical decision. They will NOT be getting any more of my business in the near future. (As in, probably before next weekend…)

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Last weekend we took a trip to South Padre Island for my niece’s wedding. It was a great, if perhaps a bit warm, event. We took off Thursday morning on the cheapest flight we could scrape up, which of course meant good ol’ Southwest. (I love to hate that airline apparently.) By the way, when I say “Thursday morning,” I mean bright and early at 5:00 AM. I don’t know why, but this departure time came as kind of an unpleasant, last-minute surprise to us. Despite having purchased the tickets several weeks ago, we somehow overlooked this bit of info until a few days before check-in. Oops. Being rather adaptable though, we got a hotel room down at the airport the night before to kind of cushion the blow. We still had to get on a shuttle at 3:30 in the morning, but that’s better than getting up and making the hour-long drive from our house at that time of morning. The good news about leaving so early was it gave us plenty of time to make our connecting flight in Dallas. The bad news was, we didn’t really need extra time because it was a five hour layover. Geez, did we look at this itinerary at all when we bought these tickets? Oh well, you have to make a few concessions to save a buck or two. At least everything stayed close to on time for a change, which was welcome after our last few flight debacles.

The second leg of the trip took us to our destination of Harlingen, TX, which I’ve never heard of. Nice airport though, very small and easy to get in and out of. Luckily my sister was able to pick us up for the hour-ish drive to Padre, as we opted to skip a rental car for the weekend. She dropped us at the condo we’d rented, and we stumbled in for a much-needed nap. The condo was… “acceptable.” I would characterize it as pretty run down and basic, but it was clean and comfy which are the highest attributes on our priority list. It was also in a great location, with easy walking distances to the beach, several restaurants, and the wedding events. Unfortunately, although the distances were very manageable, the humidity was NOT. Holy smokes. I think we are perhaps too acclimated to our arid home climate, which usually hovers around 40% humidity. We stepped out the door into the 85% sauna that was Padre and very nearly fainted. I’m honestly not sure how people live there, it is just quite inhospitable. But hey, I guess that’s why A/C was invented.

Overall, a great trip. The wedding was really nice, not to mention fun, and we got to see some old friends/family and meet some new ones. Had a pleasantly uneventful journey home, readjusted to our local weather and time zone, and are now resting comfortably in our familiar rut.

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