Our busy day

We had a busy day... 

First, friends Bob and Kate came over to share lunch with us (we placed orders at the BBQ place across the street and brought it over to eat at our lot). They live way over on the other side of Phoenix, so it was really nice that they came over here to visit us and meet Carl. Unfortunately, we totally forgot to get pictures!

Then, Venture Out had a "Poker Run" this afternoon.

There were 5 lots around the resort where the resident was providing cards in envelopes. We got a map and a list of the 5 addresses at the start time, and then figured out the route we wanted to take to get to all of the pick-up locations.

Each of the folks providing the cards had a little different way to provide them -- this household has a model train on the tables outside their park model, so they would place the envelopes on a train car and allow the participants to pick them up as the train headed around the end of the track!

Carl with his 5 envelopes...

Patti with her 5 envelopes...

At the end, we took our envelopes to a check-in station, and they opened our 5 envelopes to determine what hand we had drawn. Neither of us had a very good hand, so we didn't win... :-(  But, we had fun anyway!

This Porsche was parked next to where we parked our bicycles when we were checking in at the end -- I told Carl I thought it was the prize for the best hand!

Although it was called a Poker Run, we could walk, jog, run, bike, drive a golf cart -- we biked. It seemed about half the folks were in golf carts and half were biking. I think I only saw one person walking. We paid $4 to participate, and $3 of that went into a pot for the winner, and $1 went to the social club. We heard that the pot was $297, so I guess 99 people were participating!

Soon after we got back to the rig, a FedEx truck pulled up and stopped. We had ordered 2 additional solar panels last week, but I had requested that they ship via UPS... and the company had confirmed the order and said they would let us know when the order shipped, but we hadn't heard anything... so we were surprised to find that our 2 new solar panels had arrived!

We got the same brand and form-factor but higher wattage than the panels we currently have -- the wattage that we currently have is no longer available as the solar cells have improved in efficiency.

This illustrates where the optimum voltage and current is for this unit (I don't understand this... so that's all the explanation I can give!).

We headed up to the roof and figured out where we will put the two panels (measuring tape on the right side of the roof). We want to install them in such a way that we could add yet another 2 panels in the future if we need to...

Getting them onto the roof and screwed down is the task for Thursday, we think!

Finally, Carl was finishing up a job he had started on Tuesday -- replacing the light for the rear license plate. He has been doing a job of replacing almost all the bulbs on the exterior of Gracie with LEDs -- both for brightness and energy efficiency -- but I haven't gotten pictures of him doing most of them.

The new light fixture wasn't the exact same form factor as the old one so he had painted the surface which was exposed when the old light was removed (the surface had never been painted from the factory) -- today the paint was dry so he could complete the job of installing the new light.

He has finished updating all of the exterior lights now! What a productive man he is!