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Trip06

Monday I really like this place. Buildings scattered all around with wandering pathways, crossovers, shortcuts, long cuts, hidden courtyards, swimming pools, fountains. It’s always interesting to walk from one place to another. It’s well planted and well kept. We have great-tailed grackles, mockingbirds, hummingbirds, mourning doves, and a roadrunner. A hundred ten degrees is not really all that hot. It is so dry here that you still get an evaporative cooling chill when you get out of the water. And besides, it cools down to less than a hundred degrees at night. OK. This place is great. I’m not leaving. Just send all my mail here from now on. Let’s see. Monday. Today I learned about succession planning. Yesterday I learned about staffing. CPAs are still concerned about staffing, just like they have been for years. It is the issue most on our minds. Except this year, comments have shifted from: “I can’t get good people.” Or “I can’t get good people to stay.” To “All of my people have been with me so long now, and are so well paid, I can’t make any money any more.” Sucks huh? Sure glad I don’t live in their world. Succession planning. Everyone needs a succession plan. They all seem to revolve around how to get your partners to give you money when you want out, though. Maybe I don’t get to have one at all. Not having a partner, I don’t get to pick who should give me money. This is a conference of CPA firm owners and partners. Looks like 15% of CPA conference attendees are women. Looks like 5% are minority. No-one answered the challenge on the conference message board. However, know how lucky I am? Tonight is challenge night at the racquetball court. They open the club to local players who come here practically every night to play. I got one of them tonight. Young left handed guy. Hit it pretty hard. I got to play a few other people too, but I got thumped by Lefty. We got to talking, and he was kind enough to agree to come back tomorrow night and do it again for an hour.

Here are a couple pictures of the lazy river we floated.
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Trip05

Sunday. I just have a half-day of class today. Judy was kind enough this morning to be today’s racquetball victim. After that, I went to my class session. I got out at 2pm, so we lathered up with sunscreen and spent the afternoon in the water park. The water park is great. Grass, lounge chairs, chair-side service, streams, bridges, fountains, waterfalls, water jets, palm trees, cabanas, waves, bubbles, and slides. There is a lazy river. It winds its way through the water park at a leisurely pace while you float along on a tube. Judy and I selected a double tube and circled the endless loop together for an hour. What a nice thing to do. We laid in the sun, drifted down the river, bobbed about in the wave pool, and went down the water slide. The water slide. This is a serious water slide. A speed slide. This water slide is 60 feet high. Six stories. Going down the speed slide is easy, really. You just climb to the top of the tower and sit down on the ledge at the top. Looking down to the bottom, you can see the bottom of the slide, but nothing in between the top and the bottom. You just let go, slip over the edge, and trust that the middle part of the slide truly is there, and it’s not all just a terrible. Awful. Sick. Trick. You keep your legs extended straight out and crossed at the ankles. Fold your arms across your chest. Then hold that position as you fall out of the sky, accelerating to about 40 mph, your body keeping touch with the slide every now and then on the way down. Now you might think that sliding down the slide is about letting go to start, and the thrill of the slide down, and you would be right. But there is more. There is re-entry. Somehow all that falling energy has to be converted back to earth molecules as we know them. This is accomplished amid a great roar and spectacular spray on the run-out at the end. The run-out starts with about an inch of standing water, and gets progressively deeper until it is several inches deep. This is the reason for keeping your legs crossed at the ankles. It is very important to keep your legs crossed at the ankles. We don’t want to lose any parts along the way. But there is something else that is important to do that they don’t tell you about at the top. When you hit the standing water at the end, focus. Shift your mind from, “Oh Shit! I’m going to die. I can’t breathe. Who’ll take care of the children?” to “Keep your feet down. Hit the water with your feet.” Something has to absorb the energy of this progressive impact. I know from personal experience that if your feet don’t absorb it, the next body part in line will. I can also tell you that all the little fat particles in your butt vibrating at supersonic speed can leave you a little sore the next day. After going down the slide once, I wasn’t sure I actually remembered all of it, so I felt I needed to do it a few more times, to be sure I had absorbed the entire experience. I’m now certain that I’ve absorbed enough. I never did feel I completely mastered the part about keeping your feet down at the end, though.
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Trip04

Saturday. 04 Got up and just hung out today. No hurry leaving. We only have a hundred miles to go to Phoenix, check in time isn’t until two or three, and I don’t want to leave anyway. Why would I want to leave this to stay in some crummy fancy resort? This park just feels way too good. We’re parked next to some small mulberry trees, and some other trees and bushes I don’t recognize. Not pure desert landscape at this altitude. We’re not down into the Saguaros yet. And today I got the perfect run. Now that’s what runs are supposed to feel like. Ninety degrees, light wind, hot and sweaty out running in the desert. It felt great. Saw a phainopepla. Same size and shape as a cardinal, except it’s black and has red eyes. Neat bird. Haven’t seen a phainopepla in fifteen years. We don’t spend as much time in the desert southwest as we used to. Met another couple about our age; Steve and Linda. They’re the ones camped under the giant sycamore trees. They have a little Cockapoo kind of dog, so Judy got her puppy fix. This is a business trip. Annie and Rags didn’t get to come with us on this trip. Steve and Linda are just here for the weekend, then back to Phoenix and back to work. Somebody gave Steve a really good windsurfer, but he doesn’t windsurf, and he doesn’t have any lakes around. He said if I wanted to stop by he’d give it to me. A windsurfer with two masts, five sails, three dagger boards; who could pass that up? We don’t have the tow car, and we don’t have anyplace to hang it on the outside, but we’ll think of something. We’ll call him before we leave, and stop on the way out. There are two ways you can attach the tow car to the back of the motorhome. You can have a tow setup that resides on the back of the motorhome and hooks or unhooks from the tow car, or you can get a setup that resides on the tow car and hooks and unhooks from the back of the motorhome. I thought it would be a no-brainer to get the one that resides on the motorhome, so the tow car is clean while you’re out driving around, but my brother Tom said no. He said there was good reason to want the one that resides on the tow car, and in fact most people choose that configuration. We’re now conducting our own tow survey, inventorying all the tow setups we see on this trip. So far we have seen twelve, and to our surprise, they are perfectly divided, six each. I actually thought my brother Tom might be wrong. Made the drive to Pointe South Mountain Resort for the conference. Very fancy. Lots of fountains. A golf course. An entire workout gym. Six restaurants. A water park. AND A RACQUETBALL COURT. TWO RACQUETBALL COURTS! I had just happened to throw my racquetball gear in the motorhome for this trip. Hate to miss an opportunity, you know. Now if I can only find a racquetball victim. I left a note at the gym in case anyone wants to play. I almost got the kid at the front desk to play with me but it turns out he didn’t have any court shoes with him. The conference starts tomorrow. I’ll post a challenge on the message board for the conference attendees as well.

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Trip03

Friday. Got our twelve. Now that felt about right. We were up and about and washed and off by eleven. Rolled down the highway, across the Great Divide (all 7,200 feet of it), and out of New Mexico. Drove through Gallup, Holbrook, Winslow, and Flagstaff. Got to Oak Creek Canyon early Friday afternoon. Oak Creek Canyon is so beautiful, and they have several campgrounds there, but still, we got shut out. We wanted to stop for the night at the one closest to the top of the canyon. Then we kept checking each campground as we went farther down the canyon. By the time we got down to Sedona, Sedona was so crazy with traffic and people, we just wanted to get out. Come to think of it, we had the same reaction the other time we drove through Sedona. We drove on, and found a nice quiet RV Park outside Camp Verde Arizona: Zane Gray RV Park. Down at that low an altitude, 4,000 feet, we really needed to plug in for the night so we could run the air conditioner. This RV Park is a place Dad would have admired. It was the neatest place we’ve ever seen. Every site was perfectly level with freshly laid gravel. The freshly laid gravel in every site was freshly raked. There are only fifty sites, but there must have been six people raking, trimming, spraying, and picking up, all day long. Saw several nice birds: western kingbirds, black-chinned hummers, a hooded oriole, a peregrine falcon, and a hepatic tanager. We hadn’t ever seen the hooded oriole or the hepatic tanager before this. Oreo cookies. Has anyone else noticed how much of a pain the packages are for Oreo cookies? They are really hard to open. And once you do get them open, can you close them to protect the rest of the cookies from getting stale? Have you ever been able to? Well, finally, Oreo has improved their packaging. Now there is lots more plastic to protect the cookies from getting broken. But was that the biggest problem in the first place? But have they figured out how to make the package open without ripping to shreds? Did they figure out how to make it resealable? I can buy flour tortillas in a resealable bag. I can buy shredded cheese in a resealable package. Oreos? No way. I know what it is. It’s a conspiracy to get me to eat the entire package all in one sitting because the rest will just go stale anyway.