We have had an exciting but fairly intense week, including our ‘grand auto tour’ of the northern Wyoming Bighorn Mountains, so we had decided in advance that today would be a low key, stay at home day for us. Besides, there are some things that living in an RV does not change. At the top of the list (for us at least) are grocery shopping, doing laundry, and paying bills. (Some RVers avoid grocery shopping by eating all of their meals out. They usually have the largest, fanciest kitchens.) Tank dumping is not to be overlooked, of course, and we tend to throw that into the mix on a chore day if we are stationary for a while, such as we are at the moment. Taking care of our website/blog has become a daily task, but does not rise to the level of a chore as it is in no way necessary.
We had two rigs and three members of our team leave this morning. Steve, our intrepid co-leader, told the team on day 1 that he had a long-standing family obligation the second week of the build and would be leaving us. Bruce and Pam also had to leave unexpectedly as they got a call on Friday that their daughter, who has Multiple Sclerosis, had taken a turn for the worse. Every member of a team quickly becomes a unique piece of a puzzle, and the premature departure of these three leaves a hole that is felt as a genuine loss. Steve had made us feel welcome in a group where we might not have automatically fit in and worked with both of us at the job site. I had the pleasure of working closely with Bruce on some trickier aspects of the build and appreciated his knowledge, skill, and patience. We had a chance to say our “so long for now”s to Steve last night, but we did not get a chance to say goodbye to Bruce and Pam.
Our driver-side neighbors, Marvin, Leo, and their families, pulled out mid-morning. They had helped us early last week deal with our awnings when the wind suddenly came up very strong. By early afternoon there were quite a few vacant sites. We went to get groceries, but took a few minutes to first find and drive through Kendrick Park. On our way to Albertson’s we passed the Safeway so we stopped there instead. The store was nice enough but smaller, and their selection was not as extensive as Albertson’s, which has become our preferred grocery store out here.
In the course of the afternoon new campers arrived including a RoadTrek Class B that pulled in to the site on our driver’s side. They had just come from Cody via US-14 and were heading on to Gillette and then Sundance and Devil’s Tower, the opposite of what we have done the last four weeks.
We had our 4:30 PM SKP social, although it started a little later and was a bit smaller, with just me, Linda, Jack, Shirley, Kent, and Jan. Kathy, Mara, and Leota returned from shopping and other adventures, and Kathy and Mara joined the social until we all went home to have dinner. We compared notes about our program selling efforts the previous evening at the Sheridan Wyo Rodeo. Linda and I sold $201 dollars but Kathy and Mara sold $500, so they covered the Rodeo’s donation to the local HFH affiliate all by themselves. Good job.
After dinner we turned the TV on for the first time since we arrived in Sheridan a week ago as Linda wanted to watch Masterpiece Theater. We scanned for OTA signals with the antenna pointed in three different directions and finally found the local Wyoming PBS station, and most of the others, on the 3rd try. I watched out of the corner of my eye while I worked on uploading blog posts.