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♦ If this newsletter seems a little Mickey Mouse, that;s be-cause P.J, Melissa, and Allie just spent 10 days in Florida at Disneyworld and loved it. Now it’s back to reality, but for-tunately the sand season is close.

♦ There were some interesting new things to see at the Sand Sports Super show. Read about the highlights and check out the pictures on page 3.

♦ We are planning the first trip of the season for Dumont the weekend of October 11-13. We had such a fun time at Dumont to end the season that we decided that’s where we want to kick it off.

♦ The second annual Mona Bacon Memorial Spook Poker Run and Weenie roast will be the weekend of October 25-27. For more information, see page 5.

As always there was lots to see at this year’s Sand Sports Super Show. This was the 15th annual show, which is amazing for many of us who remember the very early ones. It still

filled the Orange County fairgrounds buildings, and had a lot (Continued on page 2)

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October 11-13: First Dumont trip of the

season.

October 20: Pomona Swap Meet

October 25-27: Mona Bacon Memorial

Spook Poker Run and Weenie

Roast at Anza. See page 5 for

more details.

October 28-November 3rd: Halloween at Glamis,

Wash 6.

November 22-December 2: Thanksgiving week at

Glamis

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to look at. Like last year (and years before) the side by sides were the most common vehicles, and there were quite of the new RZR XP 1000s to look at. Annual Glamis passes were for sale again, with this year’s pass costing $150 and since it is a window sticker, it can’t be transferred between vehicles. See more about this below. The crowds on Saturday seemed to get pretty big, indicating a lot of interest in the sport. It is fun to walk around the show and see friends we haven’t duned with in some time. The most exciting part of the show, though is that it means the sand season is just about here.

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New Glamis Season Pass Procedure After much debate and po-litical posturing, the Glamis season pass procedures are in place. The cost is now $150, and the “pass” is a sticker that goes on the outside of the window of your primary vehicle. Nobody at the sand show could adequately an-swer questions about what happens if you get a wind-shield replaced or if your sticker is vandalized, other than by saying it is your re-sponsibility to have a valid pass when you are at the dunes. Look for much campfire complaining over this issue in the season to come...

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Texas Or Bust! By Mike Bacon & Lisa Shea

As many of you know my daughter Ashley has been trying to re-start her career since helping take care of Mona last year. Those efforts finally paid off the end of July when she was offered a position of Facility Director for the DaVita Corporation, a provider of dialysis centers. The one stipulation in the offer was, she would take over a clinic in Houston, TX. She packed what she could in her car and headed east to start her job in mid-August. Once she found an apartment that meant she had to get all of her stuff to Texas. She looked at many alternatives however the cheap-est, simplest method was for Lisa and I to load up the toy hauler with all her stuff and head east. We took out all of our desert stuff, and packed all of Ashley's stuff in the trailer and left on Tuesday August 27th to be in Houston ready to unload on Friday before La-bor Day weekend. We stopped for fuel in Quartzite, AZ and while there discovered Lisa had left all her prescription meds at home. While I drove on to Phoenix Lisa spend time on the phone trying to arrange some replacements. We arrived in Phoenix and met some friends for dinner. After dinner we went to the local pharmacy where we found they would only give Lisa two pills of one prescription, but that was enough to get by. I talked with AJ at home and he arranged to overnight all her meds to Ashley so Lisa would have them when we arrived in Houston. Our first night on the road we slept in a rest area outside Bowie, AZ. Our second night we stayed in a rest area outside Fort Stockton, TX. It was much quieter than our first night as I chose our spot bet-ter. The first night we parked right between two big rigs with refer trailers, and with our generator and A/C, and their refer units run-ning, it was a very loud night! We rolled in to Houston on Thursday afternoon and got to the Red Dot Trailer Park in north Houston. We had booked Red Dot a couple weeks prior not knowing exactly what it was. It turned out to be a little trailer park in a rural area. Definitely not a RV resort, but it worked for us as it was only about ten miles from Ashley's apartment. We set up the trailer, cleaned up, and went to see Ash-ley's apartment. Included with all of Ashley's stuff we also took her dog, Swiffer. Ashley was thrilled to see Swiffer, and her apart-ment looked really good. We went off to have some dinner. Friday morning we hooked up the trailer and hauled it to Ashley's apartment and started to move everything in to her apartment. Of course, it was only 105 degrees and about 90% humidity, so my shirt was soaked through within the first 30 minutes. It took us most of the day to get the trailer unloaded, but we got it done.

Saturday Lisa and I left Ashley to move stuff around the apartment and we drove down to Galveston to visit the Gulf Coast. We walked along the sea wall for a little bit, but the heat started to get to us so we left Galves-ton (where we found gas was free! (not really!))

and drove along the Seawall Highway south looking at all the homes on stilts. There are a lot of areas where you can drive right out on the beach and spend the day. We went south as far as Freeport, then turned north and went back to Houston and met up with Ash-ley for dinner. We spent Sunday finishing up with Ashley, including a visit to IKEA, and Walmart, then had dinner with her again.

Monday Lisa and I packed up the trailer and headed out of Houston. We were going to the Hamilton Pools, a cavern complex just west of Austin. We arrived late afternoon to find there was an hour and a half wait to get in, plus they

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wouldn't let us in with the trailer, or Lisa's dog, so we passed and moved on. We ended up at Horde Creek Lake just outside Cole-man, TX where we camped next to the lake and shared the campground with a herd of deer.

Tuesday we finally left Texas and ended up at the Carlsbad Caverns, but too late to visit the caverns so we set up in the RV park and had dinner. Wednesday morning we visited the Carlsbad Caverns touring the Big Room, then had lunch and took the Kings Palace tour in the afternoon. I have to say I was fascinated!

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We spent the night again at the RV park and left Thursday morning. We worked our way across New Mexico and went up through Silver City. I had heard Silver City would be a great place to visit, but we found nothing special about it, except we got lost in the city and had to do a little work to get back to the main highway. Thank the GPS app on my iPad! We continued on and found a nice, lakefront campground just over the border in Arizona. We were going to go for a walk after we set up, but the place was inundated with mosquitoes so we went to bed.

After a nice walk down by the lake on Friday morning we left and worked our way up to Highway 40 at Holbrook, stopping at the Petrified Forest National Park on the way. We cut across Arizona and ended up in the RV park in Laughlin for the night. We had a great dinner at the Aquarius Casino and went to bed. We went back to the Aquarius for breakfast Saturday morning, then Lisa wanted to try her luck at the slot machines. By noon we were both out of gambling money so we packed up and headed for home.

We arrived back home Saturday night about 6PM, cleaned up and went to dinner. After dinner we loaded up all Lisa's stuff, along with her dogs who had stayed at my house while we were gone, and were on our way to Lisa's house when we discovered she didn't have a key to get in! AJ had been watching both places while we were gone and he had the keys, and he was working at Disneyland! So Lisa was stuck staying with me another night. AJ brought the keys out after work Saturday night so Lisa finally got home Sunday morning. It was a long trip, nearly 4000 miles, and $1,500 in fuel. We had a great time seeing the country, and seeing Ashley get settled in her new digs.

-Mike Bacon and Lisa Shea

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1. New color scheme and flatter looking icons. This is what the home screen looks like after the upgrade. Another interesting feature is that as you move the device around, the picture behind moves relative to the icons, which gives it a strange feeling of depth. It isn’t a big deal, but you will notice it. 2. New Search Location Instead of being located to the left of the first set of app icons in the home screen, now search is accessed by swiping downward on any page of home screen icons.

3. New Quick Access Settings By swiping up from the center bottom of any home screen, you can access a quick control panel that gives you links to com-monly used settings (like Airplane mode, Bluetooth, Brightness and WiFi, as well as some common apps like Timer, Calculator

and Camera, and a new built in flashlight app) 4. Multi-Tabbed Web Browsing You are no longer limited to only 8 open web pages, and switch-ing between the pages you have open is easier thanks to the new graphical interface. By clicking on the same “switch pages” icon as before in the lower loft while in the Safari browser, you will open a window where you can scroll between open pages, then tap to go to any one of them. It really does work nicer

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This month Apple released their latest version of the iOS operating sys-tem for iPhones and iPads, and it includes significant changes to the look and feel, as well as how common tasks get done. Here is a brief preview:

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This month we’d like to thank Mike Bacon and Lisa Shea for contributing an article. The season is super close, so we should have more good content soon. We have a variety of events in October leading up to a first Glamis trip for Halloween. We can’t wait to see you all there. -PJ, Melissa and of course Allison

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than the old method. 5. Search and Web Address Fields are Unified This really should make life easier once you get used to al-ways typing in the same place, whether you are entering a web address or searching the web for a term. A side effect of this is the different keyboard for entering web addresses (that was miss-ing the space bar, since spaces aren’t allowed in URLs) is gone, so you will never again be typing in the wrong place. One place,

one keyboard, more simplicity. 6. Revised Camera App Now you can see all the options for the camera app from the screen while you are shooting, instead of having to open up the options form. It looks different, but works very similar to before, it just gives you quicker access to change the options. 7. New Multitasking Access Before when you double tapped the home button, the list of running apps would appear across the bottom of the screen. Now, this brings up the icons and page images of the apps thar

are running across the whole screen. To close a running app, swipe upward on it from this view. So, now that you’ve seen some of the features of iOS7, how can you get it? Unfortunately, it is only available for iPhone 4 and later, and iPad 2 and later. This means that the original iPads and iPhone 3GS and earlier are left out of the update. Apple says that you will be able to download the latest compatible version of apps for these devices (so that you can still install apps that have newer versions optimized for iOS7), but the writing is on the wall that these devices are getting older and won’t be supported forever. If the upgrade is available to you, you can access it by going to the Settings App, then General, then Software Update. If you are connected to WiFi and plugged in, you can perform the update direct from the device. Otherwise you can update it on your computer through iTunes.

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