Wednesday, April 11th - One Year on the Road!!!

Today, we celebrate one year of full-time RV'ing. It was on April 11th, 2006 that we sold our Monroe, Louisiana home and hit the road in Blaze, our 40' rolling home. It has been a great experience and adventure! MA committed to one year on the road. But, in December she came to me and said that she wanted to do a second year. Of course, this was great news to me. We celebrated by trying Swedish Pancakes for breakfast in the town of Kingsburg. We ate at the Dala Horse, named for the Swedish town, Dalarna, where the wooden horses originated. The pancakes, similar to crepes, were covered in butter and powdered sugar and came with a side of ligonberry preserves. Ligonberries are native to Sweden. The breakfast was very good, especially the pancakes.

We drove up to the Sun-Maid Growers headquarters here in Kingsburg. 93% of the grapes used to make the world's raisins are grown within 10 miles of Kingsburg, CA. Sun-Maid Growers is a co-operative, owned by the growers producing the grapes. Sun-Maid Growers is a processing, packaging, distribution and marketing operation. This is a pic of the largest Sun-Maid box.


In our driving around this area, we have been noticing that many of the older homes have these short wooden towers near the rear of the house. We could not figure this out so, we stopped in Orange Cove, CA at a hardware store and a local grower named Donna told us all about it. Turns out that these towers once housed a huge water tanks before underground plumbing was brought to this part of the valley. Many homeowners have converted them into mother-in-law suites, studios, etc.

Back in Kingsburg, this is a pic of their unique water tower near downtown.

Here is some useless information that may interest only me: in this past year, we have driven the coach 12,500 miles, driven thru 33 states, camped in 30 states, Canada and Mexico, purchased 1,828 gallons of diesel fuel, run the generator for 358 hours (= more than two weeks of continuous operation).