Nelson

So here we are, in a new home, a new year, and a new town.

Dawn and I rolled the two-and-a-half hours from Quartzsite to Tempe today in our new motor home, “Myrtle”. Our new motor home got its name because it’s like a comforting grandmother who will take care of us. Well, that and we saw a street tonight in Tempe named “Myrtle”, and thought it sounded like a good name for the motor home.

It’s kind of weird to be in Tempe tonight. It’s the eve of the annual Tostitos Fiesta Bowl – one of the major bowl games that make up college football’s postseason. Tomorrow, Notre Dame and Ohio State will play each other in Sun Devil Stadium on the campus of Arizona State University. Sure seems like everything in sports has a title sponsor these days. The Phoenix area has America West Airlines Arena, BankOne Ballpark, Chase Field, and the Wells Fargo Arena, among undoubtedly more that we’ll come across while we’re here. While the bowl gets big time money from Tostitos (more accurately, Frito Lay), and their name is everywhere at the stadium, it is kind of refreshing that it’s not Budweiser-Coppertone Field at Ruffles Sour Cream and Onion Sun Devil Stadium presented by Coors, or something ridiculous like that. Just some of the random thoughts I had today. I know…I’m kind of weird for those random thoughts, but the point really is that while sponsors are footing the bill for all sports stuff, and tickets are still so expensive that the regular-Joe family of four can’t go to very many games, it’s nice to see that ASU didn’t sell out its football stadium like the rest of Phoenix’s sports did.

Tonight we went to dinner at Chili’s in downtown Tempe and a large majority of the people in the restaurant was pretty clearly Ohio State fans. There really weren’t a lot of noticeable Notre Dame fans – speaking of which, I wonder if Regis Philbin (sp?) is in town – in the restaurant. That’s weird, too, because we heard a report on the news the other night that Notre Dame had sold a record 60,000 tickets to the bowl game. I think the stadium only seats something like 80,000. Oh well. Whatever.

I had been here a couple of times before, when I’d travel with the Washington State women’s basketball team 10 years ago, but tonight the town had a different feel. I guess there isn’t much comparison between the Fiesta Bowl and a regular season Pac-10 women’s basketball game between two teams that (back then) sucked.

We were kind of disappointed this afternoon when we got to the RV Park. The space we were assigned had been taken by someone with a rental RV that had Ohio State flags and stuff all over it, so we had to settle in to another. Which, all-in-all, was fine except that we’d called ahead for reservations, and if for some reason (say a major bowl game in town) we hadn't been able to find a place, we'd have been in trouble. We also were under the impression that this place had cable TV rolled in to its rate for staying here. It doesn’t. We can get it, and high speed Internet, if we order it on our own as if we were residents here…which I guess we are, part time. Even the RV Park in Quartzsite had cable included in its rates. We’re going to check in to that tomorrow. But that’s not the end of it. We also have to pay a deposit for the electricity that we use while we’re here. I guess that’s not so bad because it seems like a lot of parks have that rule for folks who live in their RVs on more than a daily or weekly basis like we are. But still. For the amount we’re paying this place each month we get a place to park, a sewer line, and water. And it’s not even really as nice as we somehow remembered it being. On the other hand, there’s always the sun. There’s always a bright side.

You’ll notice that I mentioned high-speed Internet in the last paragraph. We’ve decided that this dial-up stuff we’re doing with the cell phone just isn’t going to be good enough for us when we’re staying in one place for two months at a time. We’re exploring our options for high speed. We’re not finding RV Parks with wireless Internet as abundant as we had thought we would.

Oh yeah! I almost forgot the excitement we had this morning before we left Quartzsite this morning. We were having breakfast at Sweet Darlene’s, probably one of the three better restaurants in town (though we liked the Quartzite Yacht Club and Silly Al’s pizza and Italian better), and just as we were getting ready to pay our check and leave, a fireman came into the restaurant and told us a gas tanker truck had overturned just up the road and gasoline was spilling into the street and into storm drains, and that it was a dangerous situation. He evacuated the entire restaurant and told us to go to the other end of town, which thankfully, was where our RV was. So we left our money on the table, evacuated, got the car hooked up to “Myrtle” and blew town. Sorry Gladys, we didn’t have a chance to get a picture of the naked man, but I scared one up on the Internet that we’ll try to post ASAP for you.

Not counting fire drills and bus drills in school, neither of us had never been evacuated from anything ever before, which was kind of interesting. They just showed footage of the accident on the news, and they said more than 12,000 gallons of gas spilled. Like one of the men leaving the restaurant said at the time, “dang, why didn’t we bring a bucket.”

Well…that’s about it for now. I guess I wrote a lot tonight. Maybe that makes up for my lack of writing the last week or so. Happy New Year everyone!