Desert Hot Springs, CA

Population: 28,585 Elevation: 1,076

I didn't blog about Castiac because we were only there one day and I can write about it in one paragraph. Here is the view from the trailer at Desert Hot Springs.

Here is a morning and night shot from our door.

While we were setting up the trailer, this little guy came walking by.

The curse of California strikes again. The trailer tires have a load leveler between them and they are supposed to be straight up and down, but they have been tilted. I crawled under the trailer to take a look around and found this.

What you can't see is that the bottom leaves of the leaf springs are shifted out toward the tires. It's not supposed be that way. You can also see where the weld broke and the leaves separated. That's another set of leaf springs gone bad. Luckily, a repair guy was able to come today and fix it. After he took off the tires, he saw that the leaf spring on the other side was straight flat. It is supposed to be bowed. That's 2 leaf springs to be changed in one day. Fun. Changing 2 leaf springs here was cheaper than when I had it done in Sacramento. This guy knew what he was doing and did it in 2 hours instead of the 5 hours it took 2 guys in Sacramento. And he did it himself, he didn't need a helper.

While we had the tires off, I had him check the brakes. It's time to change them too. This will cost more than the leaf springs.

The stay in Castiac was only one night. The only interesting thing about it was our neighbor. His name is Mack and he is a retired fireman from Sacramento. Our neighbor at Pismo Beach was from Placerville. It's a small world (or everyone from the Sacramento area hopped in their RV's and left). Mack is a LA Ram's fan and has season tickets. He was at Castiac because the Rams had a home game last week and will have a play off game this weekend. We talked a long time because I was setting up the trailer and he was fixing his hot water heater (it was a rusted out clamp on one of the hoses).

We are going to be here for 18 days so I brewed up a batch of beer. I made a batch of Bewitched amber ale. Instead of bottling it, I will put it in 2 pressurized growlers. Growlerwerks was having a sale on growlers for 50% off so I bought another 128oz growler. I can get a whole batch of beer in two 128 oz growlers. With the growlers, I only have to wait 3 to 5 days for carbonation instead of the 2 to 3 weeks of bottle carbonation. I will let you guys know how it goes.