Back to Desert Pools

4/17/2010

We have a coupon that was given to us by a couple we met back in Arizona. The coupon says we can stay at the Desert Pools RV Resort for 4 days free if we agree to listen to a 90 minute sales pitch on buying a membership to an RV club that gives you discounts at various RV parks around the country. We have heard of such memberships but have been warned to be cautious. When we arrived here at Desert Hot Springs we went to the Desert Pools RV Resort and showed them our coupon, but, we were told that the sales agent was on vacation and would not be back for a week; so that is why we went to Caliente Springs RV Resort for 4 days till the agent returns from vacation. Today we are going back to Desert Pools RV Resort to use our coupon. After staying for 4 days free we went to the 90 min. sales pitch. The lady who we met was very nice and not high pressure. She told us she stayed free at the park each year for the entire winter season in exchange for doing the 90 presentations. She didn't receive any commission fees as her free stay was her compensation. Thus, she wasn't high pressure. The presentation was very interesting and sounded pretty good. Basically this club (Western Horizons) lets you stay at any of its private RV Resorts (there are about 20, mostly in the western states) for two weeks for only $9 per day. After two weeks you had to leave for at least 2 weeks before you could return for another 2 weeks. In addition to this, you were also given membership in 2 other clubs that were similar and charged either nothing for the two weeks or a small fee per day. There were around a hundred Resorts in these clubs scattered all across the U.S. To Join Western Horizons you paid an initial fee of $5000. Then, starting a year after you joined, you paid an annual membership fee of $400, plus annual membership fees of $139 and $100 for the other two clubs. At first this seems like a lot of money but I sat down and figured out if you are a full-timer and went from one park to another you would break even after a couple of years and would then start to save money every year. The problem for us is that we don't want to go to all the Resorts as many are in locations that we aren't currently interested in visiting and in some areas of the country there are very few Resorts in the Clubs. I roughly figured that it would take us about 5 years to break even if we just stayed at a few Resorts that were in places we wanted to visit. Needless to say, we thanked the nice lady but passed on joining.

Diane got a call from the rheumatologist that had blood work done on her. He said the re test of blood work that she had done in Ranch Mirage was not done right and she needed to have more blood work done preferable at Hogg Hospital in Newport Beach. At the Dolores Hope Out Patient Clinic the Elisa Lyme's test was done instead of the Western Blot. The Rheumatologist wanted the blood sent to Mayo Clinic and the Western Blot test done. Opps someone dropped the ball! on the orders. We decided to take a day drive to the coast and to get the blood work done at Hogg Hospital where Diane's Dr. said they would get it right. We pass all the wind turbines again as we go through the pass again. The drive is beautiful with the wild desert flowers. Desert yellow flowers in the valley and wind turbines on the mountains tops. The lighting was perfect for these shots. The drive to the coast is about a two hour drive. We got her blood work redone and took a stroll along one of Newport Beach's boardwalks. Diane forgot her camera in the car, so sorry no pictures! This is a picture on another day when we had a chances of rain. The clouds had a hard time trying to get over the mountains to bring us the rain. They just hung on the mountain ridge.