Arizona

Today we are at Arizona Oasis RV Park on the Colorado River poised to go into California. We are stopped here because of the cable television which is necessary in order to watch all NCAA Basketball Tournament games. This is a beautiful green valley in the midst of the desert so calling it an oasis is apt. Yesterday we took a foray into California with our car so that we could check out the “California Welcome Center”, pick up a road map and learn a little about the state. Turns out the “welcome center” is a check point to make sure that we don’t take any unwanted bugs on our produce. I’m worried about Kelsey’s jade plant as I think it is infested with a pest. What if they confiscate that? How will I tell Kelsey? I will treat it with Mark’s recommended Dawn dish soap spray and hope that they don’t actually inspect my camper. (See FB conversation on this subject.)

It is getting hot here in the desert. Every day in the foreseeable future is forecast in the 90’s or more. Yesterday I found out just how cold the 90’s can feel when I stepped out of the swimming pool with the wind blowing on me at 18% humidity. Goosebumps! The Yuma TV meteorologists debated whether this is warm spring or if it is really starting to get hot. They finally agreed that it is just a “warm spring”.

Turns out there are no rest areas in California and a local tourist information office in Blythe was closed for a 3 hour lunch when we stopped there. Apparently, we will be dependent on our Google to find out about this state. After all, it is California. The Flying J on this side of the river is always backed up both in diesel and regular gasoline as no one wants to enter California without a full tank. The price jumps by 80 cents as soon as you cross over.

Enough about California… we aren’t even there yet. Arizona is a pretty amazing state. We’ve spent the better part of the last month here. Kelly arrived in Phoenix on our anniversary, March 18. It was really thoughtful of her to plan her trip so she could help us celebrate 43 years together. We had spent the night in an “inner city” RV park (Green Acres) in Phoenix so that we could be near the airport. After we picked her up, had breakfast and stocked up on groceries at Whole Foods, we headed up north and stayed at the County Fairgrounds in Prescott Valley.. Beautiful country… We are learning at much higher elevations that we have to adjust the settings on our Sleep Number bed. It gets rock hard at 5000 feet and turns into mush at 200 feet. Once we got set up in Prescott Valley we helped Kelly make her bracket picks. She has apparently done well with this in the past. I don’t think she is doing so well this year with our help. We fried up some of the red snapper from our freezer and enjoyed a gourmet meal with the addition of the veggies we picked up in Phoenix.

On Thursday we took a car trip to Grand Canyon National Park where we walked the rim for about 4 miles, took pictures and enjoyed a beautiful sunny cool day. I will include a picture here of us on the rim. Also a picture of an elk in the park. It was a fine day. 

Then on Friday we drove to Sedona where we went for a short walk and ate a most interesting meal at a vegan restaurant ChocolaTree Organic Oasis. We have pictures of us walking and we have pictures of red rocks but not of us with the red rocks. There are lots of pictures out there of the red rock that are much better than my pictures but I will try to post one anyway. After lunch we went back to Prescott Valley, picked up the camper and returned to Phoenix so that we could drop Kelly off on Saturday morning. We were at the Cotton Lane RV Park in Goodyear where Kelly took the picture of us enjoying the basketball game with palm trees in the background. We were not actually watching Wisconsin as she said on FB though we would have if we had cable. That was a fine few days.

After Kelly left, we contacted friends Marv and Elaine who moved here from the Chicago area for the winter. Marv is an old friend of Don’s with whom he worked at Impact Sales. They have had some bad luck and Marv is still recovering from a car accident. It was good to see him in good spirits and get to know Elaine a little better. We enjoyed some more red snapper with them in the shade of the camper. On Sunday, we took a day to watch some basketball and take it easy. On Monday, we had breakfast with Marv and Elaine before heading west.

We spent 2 nights at Park Place RV Park in Quartzsite. We had heard a lot about Quartzsite when we were at the Escapade in Tucson and were curious. Turns out that Quartzsite is pretty deserted by now but in January and February there are probably about 100,000 (my estimate) RV’s that converge there. Not much interesting there at this time of year. We did laundry and fixed a few things before coming here. There was only karaoke on Friday night and since everyone else was gone I didn’t care to listen to Don sing.