Up until now we have stubbornly refused to have a pet. We adore our friends’ dogs and cats. We even keep a bag of doggie treats in the front window so we can run out and pet their dogs as they walk them. One, it is a great way to meet people, and two, we don’t have to get up with them at 5:30 to go on the morning walk.
Well guess what? We now have a pet of our own. She is pretty independent. She catches her own food and neatly packs it for a rainy day. We picked her up somewhere around Michigan as a wee tiny baby. She has been traveling with us ever since. That is something like 5,000 miles already. We are giving her the name Charlotte.

Charlotte lives between the screen door and the front door of the coach. You must have guessed by now…Charlotte is a spider. When we are cruising down the road she is safely sheltered inside the coach. When we stop we often open the outside door and latch the screen. Charlotte hangs in the center of her web waiting for the stray fly to drop in. She races over to cocoon each tasty morsel. In the evening she disappears into the extruded aluminum channel around the window and her window is vacant. Early in the morning she is busy cleaning and re-spinning her web.
It is a bit startling to step down into the stair well to open the door and come face to face with Charlotte. She has gotten to be a fairly good sized spider by now, and on her perch she is right at eye level as you start to open the door.
She seems to enjoy the weather where we go. I suspect she would be shivering in her web if she had stayed in Michigan. We just visited Death Valley and Charlotte picked up a nice miller in the warm desert air. From a hundred feet below sea level to over 5,000 feet at the passes she rides along watching the scenery go by. We arrived in Needles, California this evening and opened the outer door for some fresh air. Charlotte buzzed right out to the center of her web to enjoy the evening breeze. Right now she is back in the channel out of sight as I sit here in the Co-Pilot seat typing on the laptop.

In Death Valley we spent a week at the Death Valley 49’ers Encampment at Furnace Creek. There were lots of activities and there were music events every day and every evening: Lots of western and old country music.
I will try to get a photo of Charlotte to post on the web-site, meanwhile I have a nice photo of a sidewinder we met up in Titus Canyon. No! We didn’t try to adopt him.

Love to all,
Gary and Judy