5C's Que Pasa

*****sorry for the delay in my post today but my site was down most of the day so I could not publish till now.

Eric worked for 5 hours Friday.  He did end up redoing both slideouts 😥   At least they are redone and we so hope that all will be well today as we begin our journey home.  It wasn’t as relaxing a day as we thought it would be but we did get to observe some huge waves down the beach on our morning walk.  The large waves continued throughout the day.  By 8:30PM all was packed up and we hit the bed about 9PM.

Difficult to get up @ 5:00AM but with 500 miles ahead of us we had no choice.

Always sad to leave our winter home but we certainly will be back sometime in November.

Somehow I had failed a few of my bougainvilleas and they had gone dormant or maybe dead. About 2 weeks ago I decided to flood them with water and they came back.

One of the things that I will miss the most is the blooming of my plumeria tree. The scent of those blossoms brings Hawaii to mind, very similar to my Isla paradise.  Yesterday I had Colin pick that bloom for me and I have been enjoying the scent each time I passed by.  Late Friday I had three new flowers.  How I wish I was here to see the tree in full bloom.

A sunset from within the last two weeks.

So we are off at 5:30AM.  Hope to be able to send a new post from San Carlos, 500 miles north of here.

Stay safe my little piece of paradise, hasta Noviembre!

Happy April Fools day…..not 🙁

Eric our RV tech arrived at 9:15PM last night.  Meanwhile  we had a good dinner and had both showered.  The RV was ready to go other than the problem with the bedroom slide.  The good news is that the termites passed us by.

First problem, detected within 3 minutes is that the on/off  switch  in the bedroom slide is not working as in the spring is not working properly.  Not a big deal.  The main slide problem is due to the new slide out rubber Eric had installed in January.  Hard to explain but it has something to do with the rubber expanding and the memory the rubber has.  Seems he has to cut some rubber off.  Likely we will have to have him do the same thing with the living room slide.

By now we would have been in bed due to the 5AM wake up call.  The girls and I slept on the living room sofa while two guys went in and out as well as Colin trying to fix the problem.  I woke up about 11PM so discover that they were leaving.

We apparently are not.  Good thing I slept through it all as I would have been rather stressed.

So today we await the return of Eric, after he completes other jobs he had scheduled for this morning.  No idea when he will arrive.  No idea on when the slide/slides will be repaired.  Apparently the consensus is that it can be fixed but when?  No idea when we will be leaving here.  No idea how far we will be going if we can even leave today.  Or do we wait until 5:30AM tomorrow?  Likely we won’t be leaving today but hopefully tomorrow.  As Lucy commented on my last post, things happen for a reason.  We can only hope that our delay was for a good reason.

What I do know is that I will be spending the day changing all of our reservations and plans for the next week.  I had planned a few relax and enjoy days but those will now become travel days.  One of those relax and enjoy days had already been scheduled to do all the flea bedding at a laundromat with hot water.  We do have to be in Vancouver, B.C. for April 15th to get the RV serviced and as that is a Friday the date can’t be delayed.  The next day we will head home where a slew of appointments await us for our first two weeks there.

Meanwhile we get to enjoy yet another final beach walk and celebrate Caeli’s 11th birthday today.

Caeli on an earlier beach walk, not wanting to get hosed off.

Carmeh being sweet. Colin was reaching under the sofa into our storage there and she was too relaxed to move.

Amusingly this is yet another pack up and then a bit of a mini set up again this season 😕

Our dust screen really protects us. We still get dust from horses passing by on the road next to as but not as bad as it could be.  I love to power wash things 🙂

We had so much propane left in one of our tanks that we had to burn off the fuel otherwise it would expand from all the heat in Arizona and we could have had a problem.  We did not sit and enjoy the flames as we were packing up inside.

Carmeh finds a spot to rest.

Caeli also finds a place to nap under all the chaos during pour pack up.

So now we just wait and see what comes next.

We did have a fabulous last day beach walk.  It seems that the girls knew it was that last time.  We so enjoyed their playing and running.  Back to the RV for the final run to the bodega storage area.  Final packing up and time to move the RV.  We like to turn it around and park the car behind so we can hook it up.  As we leave so early in morning ( 5:30AM  is the plan ) we want to check that all systems are go.

Sadly they were not.  The  bedroom slide out would not come in all the way.  Fortunately we were able to call Eric our RV go to guy.  He said he could not get here till after dark but he would come.  Shortly thereafter I ran out of minutes on my phone.  Because the car was already behind the RV we could not drive out to put money on it.  Eventually I got Ishmael to go out on his bike and of course I paid him very well for his trouble.

Shortly thereafter a transformer just out on the street literally blew up.   That meant no electricity.  No one knows when it will be restored.  Meanwhile we are living off our inverter and I was smart enough earlier today to put some money on my Telcel SIM card so I have very limited internet.

So here we sit at sunset packed up waiting for the RV tech.  We are also on termite watch.  It was confirmed to us today that last night was a major invasion so tonight will be a good show of them.  What is that saying, that it never just rains but it pours?  None of this would be so bad if we were only traveling 250 miles tomorrow but instead we are driving 500 miles.  Yes it is our annual longest drive, 501 miles in one day!  There is no sense stopping between here and San Carlos.  Besides the RV park in Los Mochis closes April 1st.

Adios to our ‘stuff’ until November and if we never make it back here, it is not a great loss.

We have had grey skies since last Friday, not a great way to end our vacation but at least it was cooler to pack up.

Our last fabulous sunset Wednesday evening when we went out to dinner….before the termite attack.

Taken from the Playa Sur embarcadero. All we can say is WOW !

Our final beach walk this morning. That is Carmeh with her ears in the air as well as her back legs.

Well here it is 7:20PM and no RV tech.  We should be eating dinner, having a shower and going to bed…..

Colin says that everything is crossed off the to do list and now we wait.  We still hope to be leaving at 5:30AM but it is no longer in our hands.  Certainly a crazy way to end our time here on the Isla.  However it has been a most unusual year for us.

Good news, the electricity is back, still no RV tech…….going to go ahead with dinner, getting late.  No worries, the wine has been open for a while, even Colin said that there were days when when wine was the order of the day.

We are in our final major pack up.  About 11AM today it came to my attention that the girls have fleas.  Of course they are on monthly flea meds but as happened 2 years ago ( also the end of March ) they have fleas.  I insisted that the vet see us ASAP and they did and they did the flea bath, poor girls were so stressed.  Well so were we.  The hard part is the cleaning and disinfecting and fumigation of everything.  It takes hours and needs to be done every few days.  As we are leaving Friday AM there is no way to get our bedding laundered nor the girls bedding and blankets on the sofa, etc.  At the moment things are in plastic garbage bags.  Seems like I will be spending my time in Yuma cleaning rather than shopping.

Finally got the first round of disinfecting done and went out to dinner with friends.  Got back to see that the termites had come through.  We spent the last hour killing over 300 of them and are still on patrol.

I had a lovely post lined up but no time…..

Tomorrow is going to be a busy day trying to complete today to dos with tomorrows.  Colin keeps killing as I am typing.

Time for showers and an early bedtime.  We are exhausted.  Not a fun way to spend our last two days here.  Just got an email from our vet back in Canada, she is going to check with the rep who sells the Advantix 2 and see what he has to say about the situation.

Good Friday and our first beach overniters.

14 lanchas on the Mazatlan side at Playa Sur transporting visitors non stop to Stone Island.

By noonish police were called in to direct traffic outside the RV gates.  The new road certainly brought in a huge amount of vehicles.

Traffic never slowed until sunset.

It was amazing to watch an empty beach transform moment by moment.

Taken from the roof of our RV.

The girls only went out on the beach early in the AM before the crowds arrived.

Not quite as many folks on the Saturday.

The weather became cloudy on the Saturday and quite overcast on  Sunday morning with sun later in the day but that never stopped anyone from having a great time.

At one point I counted 15 banana boats going non stop.

A constant patrol of military and lifeguards and the occasional Federales helicopter.

A grand time was had by all including us. We are so glad that Easter was early this year and we were able to stay and enjoy the fun.

Sadly tons of garbage was left behind.  Everyday many of the RVers went out early in the morning to clean the beach, day after day.  Sad to see such a mess.  One morning as I was toting 4 large bags of garbage back to our place a Mexican woman stopped me and said ” I am sorry “.  She was pointing to the garbage I was carrying and said that some people were stupid.  Over a bit of conversation she told me that she was a teacher visiting Mazatlan for the weekend and that she was teaching her classes to not litter.  The garbage did go from one end of the beach to the other, most areas have been cleaned but some as of this morning, way down the beach was still a mess.  Piece by piece it will be cleaned, mostly by us gringos.