Where Did The Week Go?

Wow!  A whole week gone by in  a flash.  Full timing makes time fly .

Rosie was able to return to her former exercise routine this week; aquatic exercise in the local pool on Tuesday and Thursday, and Yoga on Monday, Wednesday & Friday.  I kept working on the camper to-do list along with reorganizing the basement for the umpteenth time.  One of these days I will get it right, but it may take a while.

On Friday, some friends has organized a “Bon Voyage” get together for us at the Green Belt on the Snake River in downtown Idaho Falls.  We didn’t know so many people would miss us ; about 40 of our friends showed up for burgers and other picnic type items.  Our good friend, Doug Skinner, did the grilling and we all had a great time.  Five fur kids in attendance also.

 

  The first arrivals.                                                            Burgers on the grill.

 

A great setting.                                                         Our fur kids, Sammy and Annie

Technology Note*  I have been looking at the Samsung Galaxy Tab tablet at the Verizon store for about 6 months.  In addition to the usual Tablet features, it works as a Wi-Fi connection for up to five laptops providing a 3G connection to the internet where ever we can get a Verizon signal.  The store price on this was $229.00.  Wednesday evening I was surfing the Verizon Wireless web site when I notice there was a web only “special” on this unit for $49.99.  Way to good a deal to pass up.  This was a “web only” discount, so I had to do the whole process on the web site, with a little help from a “chat salesperson”.  At 2:45 on Friday afternoon, Fed Ex delivered said unit to the UPS store we are using for a mail forwarding service.  I am a little nutso about new technology items, so I was hanging around the UPS store waiting for it.  Got it back to the camper, but only had time to activate it and play with it for a bit before we had to leave for the party mentioned above.

Saturday morning I set up the Wi-Fi connection, established a password to log on and connected both of our laptops to the Galaxy Tab.  Setting a password on a Wi-Fi unit is important.  Your fellow campers can “see” this connection up to 100’ away.  I have heard stories of people not setting a secure password access and then they are surprised when they surpass their Gigabyte limit of 5 GB or 10GB in a short period of time.  Other people are logging onto their system and downloading all kinds of cool stuff to their computers, unknown to them.  Verizon charges $50 month for 5GB and $80 month for 10GB.  Anyway, the system works great at this location.  Download speeds are much faster than the campground Wi-fi.  However, we are in a full 3G area.  I am sure speeds will diminish in areas with lower signal strength.  I have seen other blogger complain about Verizon Mi-fi equipment (not tablet type, just a connection device), so I will continue to report on how it works.

Saturday afternoon we were walking the dogs around the park when we noticed a rental RV with a flag from Austria attached to the radio antenna.  We really enjoy meeting Europeans vacationing in the USA and went over to say Hi.   Rosie greeted them in German (the language in Austria) and that got things of to a great start.  They were on a 4 month trip through the western US and were having a great time.   Later in the evening, Rosie hosted them at our camper and had a long conversation with them.  They exchanged cards with us; they write a blog in German so I can’t fully understand it, but Rosie is a good translator.  I had a meeting to go to, so I missed out on the evening with them, but they may be back here for another evening before we leave here on Friday.

Our next destination is a campground at the base of the Palisades Dam in Swan Valley, ID; about 15 miles from the Wyoming border.  Thanks for stopping by.