Faywood Hot Springs

Having Facebook friends who travel is great for getting ideas. Sometime last year I noticed a post from friends about Faywood Hot Springs in New Mexico and they liked it. We love hot springs and I knew that Faywood would be somewhere near our route headed from the west coast back to Florida so I put it on our list.
We made it!

Faywood Hot Springs in New Mexico

They had a full service RV park right there at the hot springs. All we had to do was wrap a towel around us and walk past a couple of sites to these pools. You could also call them the Goldilocks tubs: the one on the left is too HOT, the one in the middle is too cold, and the last one is just right! Actually we spent most of our time in the HOT one!

We figured on one night here because Sunday was the next day and we needed to be in a good Internet area to do our webcast show. Lo and behold, there was a Verizon tower within line of sight of the hot springs! We stayed 3 nights!  Here's the show we did that week - it was an especially good one I think! We demonstrated Google Now.


Then, since we had time to spare, we visited a local winery and a State Park called City of Rocks.

There is an RV park here also, but it's too far from the Verizon tower. If we had decided to stay here, we would have had to move on.

Fantastic day! It was a snapshot of what this lifestyle is all about. Work all morning, present our webinar on smartphones and tablets, then soak in hot spring pool in campground where we're staying. Icing on the cake, take a drive to attraction City of Rocks, then a nearby winery (Esperanzas) then dinner at a wonderful cafe Diane's in a historic town (Silver City, NM), back home, one more soak before bed.

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Tombstone

After leaving Malibu, we retraced our steps back - something I hate to do! We stayed at Thousand Trails in Palm Springs, then Leaf Verde in Buckeye. Then, we were hoping to take a different route east from Phoenix since we've traveled I-10 between Phoenix and Tucson so many times this season!

But ... as it turns out, we just hired a company to help us renovate our website and the consultant assigned to us lives in Tucson! I love that so much can get done with a team online, but I'll never pass up an opportunity to meet face to face. So, we traveled I-10 to Tucson ... again ... and had a nice meeting with Leigh while staying at Catalina State park.

Our destination was Faywood Hot Springs in New Mexico (because we saw it on a friend's Facebook posts!) so, after leaving Tucson we stayed on I-10 east. When Jim saw a sign saying "Tombstone Next Exit" he said, I want to go there. I said, "OK." That's all there was to it!

I checked my Allstays Camp and RV app on my phone to see what campgrounds were available and found one right in the middle of historic Tombstone called Wells Fargo. Cool. We checked in about 2pm, figured we could do a little sightseeing, have dinner, and leave in the morning. But Jim had to call Dr. Jay first. Dr. Jay is someone Jim met at the FMCA rally in Redmond, Oregon last summer. He held on to Dr. Jay's card with a note that said, if you're ever in Tombstone, look him up and take a tour. Jim called and got such a warm welcome from Dr. Jay that we just had to stay another day in order to take his tour in the morning. I sooo love having the flexibility to do this kind of thing.

Although Tombstone is known as the place where Wyatt Earp had the shootout at the OK Corral, that was just a tiny blip in it's history as a mining town. So, we took the mine tour as well as the re-enactment of the shootout. And, at home during the evening, we rented the movie Tombstone with Kurt Russell. GREAT movie, and what a treat to get the live tour of the place the next day! We love watching movies filmed in the places we're visiting.

Great fun. We really enjoyed stopping in Tombstone.

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From Sea to Shining Sea

We started our trek east on April 2. Since we started from Malibu beach, overlooking the Pacific ocean, and we'll be ending when we reach Fort Lauderdale, Florida, I can't resist calling it "From Sea to Shining Sea!"

And, I recorded the GPS turning directions for posterity!

If I remember, I'll come back to this post and complete it when we've reached the other ocean!

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OK ... here's a video made after we got to Florida:

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Malibu Beach

After the FMCA rally in Pomona, we wanted to take Lynne to some nice campground before she had to fly back to Oregon. We picked Malibu Beach RV park. The short drive turned out to be pretty long thru all that traffic and I was wondering if this had been a bad idea after all. 
Then we got there!

What a view! Looking out our back window over the Pacific Ocean.

A very nice last night together.


We could just walk down the hill to a fresh seafood restaurant. And, just across the street to take a walk on the beach.

Jim even took this quadcopter video (https://youtu.be/f9vFo6-V5-w) at sunset one evening. Pretty, pretty spot. Not cheap though. I don’t think we’ve ever paid $60 before for a campsite! But, it was worth it. This was our reward for all the work of the last few months.

FMCA Rally in Pomona

This is the 3d time we’ve presented seminars at the FMCA in Pomona. The first was in March, 2006 when we were still working for Coach Connect. The owners of Coach Connect didn’t even come to this one, they left us on our own to run the Wi-Fi hotspot and present the Wi-Fi seminars. The seminar coordinator also asked us to do an additional seminar on communications on the road. After that, Coach Connect didn’t go to the rallies any more, but the seminar coordinator (Mary Ann Crowley) still asked us to come and present anyway. The next time we went to Pomona was February 2008 we were Geeks on Tour by then and we gave Blogging, Picasa, Photo Story seminars in addition to Internet connections on the road. That was also the first time we saw Herman’s Hermits and loved them! So, we were extra excited this year that Herman’s Hermits were performing again.

Here we are presenting one of our seminars this year:

The special thing this year was that we enlisted help at our table. Our good friend Lynne flew down from Oregon and stayed with us. She was a great help both at our table during the day, and for having fun at night!

 

Here are the two Geeks on Tour and one ‘Geek for a Week” – Lynne always comes up with the best words!

We had a very special parking spot right by the seminar buildings. So we hosted happy hour a couple of evenings. Lots of friends here, Phil and Tracey of TechnoRV, Kim and Don of Harvest Hosts, Curtis of RVillage, and more.

Attendance was down this year, but we still had some nice seminars. Smartphones is the most popular right now. We teach basic terminology as well as demonstrating a few of the ‘oh-wow’ features like the ability to use the front-facing camera to put yourself into a picture that you’re taking of the audience. And, we had the Samsung All Cast device set up so that whatever was on our phone’s screen could be seen on the big screen projected to the audience.

I always especially like it when we teach hands-on workshops. We limit attendance to 20 and have them learn by doing. Here they’re exploring the features of their cameras by doing exercises we give them. Even if they already know the basics of the exercise, they discover other things in the process.

The weather was beautiful and everything went smoothly as planned. The best part for me was Herman’s Hermits playing again. Peter Noone may be getting older but he’s still just as cute as ever, and even cuter when he makes fun of himself for getting old. In one bit he said how exciting it was to be playing at the Fairplex in Pomona … he remembers having a discussion with fellow British musician Mick Jagger that “someday we’ll know we’ve made it, when we play the Fairplex in Pomona!” He had the audience roaring with laughter, and several of us standing in the aisles were dancing up a storm to the music. FUN time.