Palm Springs, California
Monday – Thursday
June 18-21, 2018
Clear, 102° to 110°
“Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all people cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends” – Maya Angelou
This post is going to be more in the category of “interesting people” more than anything about the place being visited.
With temperatures over one hundred degrees remote camping did not seem logical in Joshua Tree National Park. On my previous visit to the Park, when I left Alaska two years ago, I spent one night in July where the temperature was 117° when I entered the Cottonwood entrance. It made for a pretty hot night and the only consolation, after the sun went down, was the desert night air cooled things to a more comfortable 105°. It was still pretty miserable but once the sun set and the darkness came over everything, the Heavens opened up and there were more stars than you could imagine.
I decided that four nights in the heat would not make any sense so visited all the places to see and headed to Palm Springs, California for a couple of days of “down time” to work on the RV and do a little maintenance since the mileage had passed the 8,500 mile mark a few days earlier. It would be a good time to take care of it before heading into the desert.
Happy Trails RV Park is mainly a place for “Snowbirds” who come south to warm temperatures and good weather for the winter. There were a few people who live there full time in their RV, travel trailer, or have a permanent single wide on site. The park was mostly deserted as I only saw a few people here and there. There were a couple of RV’s that came in for the night and were gone the next day, like the “traveler gypsy” Italians who were parked in the next spot across the hedges.
There were some chores to do like getting the oil changed and buying groceries so I had left the space for a couple of hours, unhooking the water and sewer lines from the RV. I left them connected to the water fill point and the sewer dump point and had my sewer hose and the supports under the hose when I left. I moved them under a hedge so I would not run over them backing back into the space.
Returning a couple hours later, I go to hook everything back up and notice the support for the sewer hose is missing. It is a long accordion plastic support which has a notch on top that gives the sewer hose a downhill slope to the sewer dump point connection. It was gone; I knew it was there several hours ago. Did the doves or squirrels decide they needed something for their nest, an eclectic piece perhaps to show off to other squirrels? Or . . . I noticed another RV had pulled into the next space across the hedge. I went behind the RV and looked at my “neighbor’s” hook ups. What did I see on this “Cruise America” rental RV? A nicely supported sewer hose with my support underneath it! This large, shirtless man was coming out the door of the RV and noticed me behind his rig and I asked him quite frankly if the sewer hose support belonged to him. I asked specifically if it was his and he told me no it was in the bushes where his connections were. I told him I had left a couple hours ago and my connections were under the hedge on my side with my sewer hose on top of the support and now they were missing. He tried in his Italian, broken English voice to say “he found it”, I told him he did, “under my sewer hose” and asked why he would take something from another site. He then proceeded to act like he did not understand me and grabbed his wife and headed to the pool.
I went and talked to Gertie; the manager who was from Germany and told her what I thought had happened and was going to take back my property. She said she did see the support under my hose and to go get it. Another traveler who was with this couple came up and started talking to Gertie in German. I think she explained to him I was talking my supports back. The rest of that day and into the evening all I got were stares from them as I walked by.
Late in the night and again very the next morning you could hear noises coming from their campsite. My thoughts were they were stealing things from the campsites before they took their early departure. Later that morning I looked around the campsite only to discover that my cap to hold my sewer line was now missing.
I was talking with Gertie and another man who lives in the park and told them that I was traveling around the country and writing stories about interesting people and places.
Gertie says she has a story to tell me and proceeded to share her life experience with me. As a young girl, about seven and half years old during WWII, she lived and was in school in Germany at the time the Nazis were the governing party in the country. She told me, as a little girl, she had long red hair and the other kids did not like her since she “was different”. During the war she said Adolph Hitler came to her school; all the kids had to line up and salute with “Heil Hitler.” Later, he walked up to her, touched a lock of her red hair on the right side and told her she had beautiful hair.
Later when the American tanks rolled into her town and freed her village the town’s people were in the streets celebrating when the tank commander came up to her, grabbed the same lock of red hair on her right side and told her she had beautiful red hair. She said that was her first encounter with Americans at age nine and many years later she came to live in America. She was a pretty neat and interesting woman to meet while Traveling Life’s Highways.