Today was a nice day to celebrate Charlene being a Mom to two wonderful people that each have wonderful spouses. We went into Coarsegold to their Farmer’s Market. We bought some wonderful biscotti last week at a Farmer’s Market in Oakhurst and the woman who made it had a booth at the Coarsegold Farmer’s Market today. We told her how much we loved what we bought last week. Today we bought Chocolate Walnut Biscotti and Lemon Blueberry Biscotti. They should be heavenly!

There was another vendor that was selling different goat’s milk soaps. He brought two little goats with him. One goat was 10 days old and one was 6 days old. They were incredibly cute! The 6 day old goat was a little shaky on his legs. Although the goats were being bottle fed, but they were nibbling at the grass in their pen. Charlene enjoyed petting the goats.

After the Farmer’s Market, we went to have Mexican food for lunch. We almost ordered dessert for Mother’s Day, but then Charlene remembered a dessert shop in nearby Oakhurst. Once inside, they were giving away chocolate covered strawberries to mothers. Charlene ordered a chocolate gelato and Ed ordered blackberry ice cream. Both were fantastic!

Today we discovered a local family farm. The couple running it have had it for 5 years and they now grow and raise all kinds of things. The most fun discovery was all the artichokes. We have seen them in the grocery store, and we have eaten them many times over the years, but we have never actually seen artichokes growing in real life. They grow on a bush and we bought 4 large artichokes cut right from the bush! Awesome!

We had fun learning about all their chickens. They have had bears and coyotes kill their chickens on several occasions. Charlene especially loved holding a chicken and learning about all their eggs.

They grow pomegranates, avocados, strawberries, and blackberries too.

Today was sort of strange. It started off with Ed giving a lecture through the Internet beginning at 6:00 am. The unique feature about this is that a group of the audience was in London, England and another group was in India. His colleague giving the lecture with him was in North Carolina. So, sitting at the table in our motorhome in a very tiny town, Ed used his cellular phone to create a hotspot to connect his laptop to the webinar. He used headphones with a microphone to lecture and answer questions from the people in India and London. It is amazing because this would not have been possible only a few years ago. Cellular phones and the Internet have really facilitated communications and have enabled people to travel and still be very connected. This RV life is so nice.

When Ed concluded his lecture, he called a local dentist since he got a chipped tooth in the past week. A disadvantage of traveling is that you cannot just run over to your local dentist. The dentist office said they had an opening if he could be there in 10 minutes. The dentist said he needed a crown and that it could be made TODAY. We agreed and Ed walked out of the dentist office 3.5 hours later with a brand new crown. No temporary crown was needed. The computer technology used by the office took electronic photos of his mouth and then designed a crown. The dentist office had a milling machine onsite that actually made the crown from a small block of material. He said the technology to make crowns that quickly in their office has only been on the market for 2 years. It was quite amazing to see the second episode of technologies’ improvements before noon today. We are in a tiny town in the High Sierras and were able to get a new crown without an appointment, only dropping in as a walk-in patient. Amazing.

We received a packet of mail from the last several weeks and discovered that for some reason our health insurance policy had been incorrectly cancelled. That is a scary realization. We together then spent over 3 hours on the phone re-signing up for a temporary and permanent medical insurance policy that will begin tomorrow. It was a hassle to go through, but we are certainly glad to know we have health insurance again.

Today is our 35^th anniversary. That sounds like a big number, but it sure does not seem like it has been that long. We gave each other anniversary cards and then packed up the motorhome, hit the road and drove through Fresno and stopped in Coarsegold. It is a small town, but beautiful with many, many trees. We absolutely LOVE our campsite. We have been in some RV parks where the sites are crammed together. This site is unbelievably large and roomy. We are on a cul-de-sac with only one other rig (the owner of the park). After Charlene set up the outside mat and chairs, we had a beautiful outdoor “living room.”

Charlene’s first agenda item after seeing such a beautiful site was to head to a hardware store where we bought bird food to set up next to our rig. We also bought some cookies and two cupcakes to celebrate our anniversary from a veterans group selling items outside the hardware store. We next walked through the quirky, fun antique shops in Coarsegold.

While in one of the shops, we met a woman (Gina) from Oregon that has been a solo RVer for 3 years. She is a member of Escapees and we compared Escapees parks which we had each visited. She described some RV rallies in Georgia, Florida, and Arizona that she had attended. She kept saying over and over how much she loved traveling in her motorhome. Although we had never met, we knew a number of the same people. She will be a camp host this summer at an RV park just outside of Yosemite National Park. We do not know when, but I am sure we will run into her again at an RV rally or RV park someplace in the future.

Using her smart phone, Charlene found a barbeque restaurant in Oakhurst (a nearby town) that was highly recommended in some reviews on the Internet. Barbeque pork is so yummy!