A Night Out For The CVCC

Tuesday evening was a night out that we tentatively scheduled before we left Arizona last spring. A group of residents here refer to themselves as the Canyon Vistas Culture Club and make it an annual event to attend a presentation of Charles Dickens’ play ‘A Christmas Carol’ every December at the Hale Theatre in Gilbert. As we’ve never been here in December before we’ve never had a chance to be a part of this rather exclusive cultural get together.

The group this year has grown to 22 members, with us being part of 6 new attendees. The first item on the evening’s agenda was a trip to the Tia Rosa restaurant in Gilbert where they set aside a private room for us. It turned out to be a good idea, as 22 rowdy seniors were quite a handful for the staff to deal with. We really do know how to have fun after all.

Soon we were on our way to the theatre, where we were all seated together in one side of the venue. The stage is actually on the floor and in the round, with seats that go up around the stage like a bowl. There isn’t a bad seat in the house and everyone gets to see everything  up close and personal.

The Culture Club filled up the first 4 rows of seats, but the two folks on the front left of the picture were not part of our group. It looks like they were trying to pretend they were elsewhere, but they did eventually join in the fun with us. The empty seat in the front row belonged to Frank. I think he got lost looking for the washroom. The play was pretty good and the entire evening was a blast. We figure that we’ll have to schedule another meeting of the CVCC before we leave this spring, as one event a year just doesn’t seem to be enough.

The weather has cooled off a bit with high temps approaching 60F, and the rains returned on Wednesday so we didn’t go hiking, but will be back on the trails on Friday. We’ve managed to fill out our time lately with a few days of Pickleball and a couple of Softball games. It’s still pretty warm in the sunshine when we’re playing our games, so you can be assured that it’s still shorts weather for me.

Wednesday afternoon we visited with our West Kelowna neighbours who own a place about 5 miles down the highway from us on the east side of Mesa. Terry and Debbie have owned a home in Las Palmas Grande for about 5 years, and gave us the grand tour and a bit of a background to their home purchase. It turns out that they were renting in the complex their first year here and while attending a community garage sale they ended up buying a home while looking through the stuff the people were desperate to get rid of, which included homes at that time.

Talking to them about housing down here just added to the list of questions we have about what we’re eventually going to do in regard to our future in Arizona. For the next few years we’ll probably continue to bring down our RV, but by the time we need to replace the trailer we’ll have to decide if we want a more permanent location or not. House prices are finally increasing here, but there are several cheaper options revolving around leasing the land a home is built on.

The prices involved in the various housing options really don’t make a lot of sense financially. The 1500 sq ft home that Terry and Debbie are in can be bought for roughly half the price of some of the existing 500 sq ft park models for sale here in Canyon Vistas. Their annual costs are not that much higher and a lot of the activities we partake in are also available in their complex. We seen to come up with more questions than answers each time we look at the different options. Good thing we don’t have to make a decision soon.

The rest of this post was written a day later, as I had to hold off on posting as we had a minor electrical problem in our RV. This morning as we were doing the breakfast dishes our power went out. No a problem, and not that unusual as we’ve experienced a few power outages here in the park. The highway that runs beside Canyon Vistas is the site of a number of vehicle accidents over the years that have resulted in power outages. We finished up the dishes and prepared to head to the pickleball courts for the morning games, and just before we left I started to shut down our laptop. There was a notification at the bottom of the screen that wifi signals were available in the area. Something didn’t compute (pardon the pun) as if there was a power outage, how could anyone in the area have working wireless routers.

I started to poke around at the power pedestal that feeds our site, and determined that our breaker was blown, and so proceeded to turn it on again. It didn’t hold, so then I figured I had a bigger problem. I pulled the power cord out from underneath the trailer and found that the connections between the cord attached to the trailer and the extension I use to reach the power pedestal was not looking good. It had been warm enough to melt and distort the connectors and when I pulled them apart the terminals just about fell out of the plug.

It turns out that the terminals inside one of the connectors had shorted out, and really made a mess of things. Incidentally, this is the second time this has happened with these cables, although the first time I chalked it up to finding the connectors sitting in a pool of water after a rainstorm. They just don’t make these things like they used to. I sent Sylvia off to play pickleball while I took off to the RV supply store to pick up some new connectors.

 

It took about an hour to re-wire the new connectors, and we were back in business. I did find a different manufacturer for one of these devices that has more substantial insulating properties, but had to replace the male end (which wasn’t the cause of the problem) with an identical unit. Hopefully things will hold up better this time.