Down By The Riverside

Welcome back friends and followers, our story continues. Our previous chapter concluded on Wednesday, February 9th, after we arrived in Ehrenberg, Arizona, located on the Colorado River just off of I-10, across the river from Blythe, California. We are staying at the Colorado River Oasis RV Resort, one of our Western Horizon parks and we will be here for two weeks. Peggy and Vernon Bullock are still traveling with us and we got side by side spots at the back of the resort, only a couple hundred feet from the river. We spent most of the afternoon getting settled in. About 3:00 p.m. we got together in Peggy and Vernon’s coach along with Doug and Linda Stoudt, some other friends of ours. We spent the evening talking, catching up and having a light dinner of tacos and rice.

Thursday, February 10th we awoke to a little bit of a breeze and moderate temperatures. After lunch we drove into Blythe, California, just across the river, to do some shopping at Kmart and Albertsons. We were also scouting a laundromat because we have a bunch of laundry to do and don’t want to spend all day in the small laundry at the RV park. After we finished our shopping we went home where I finished “redecorating” the coach. When we cleaned out our storage unit in Indio back in December we kept a few pictures and art stuff the Jackie wanted to use in the coach. We had been making a few changes over the last few weeks and today I finished changing the pictures around so the place looks a little different.

Around cocktail hour we went out behind our coaches on the grass and watched the sun go down over the river. Doug and Linda joined us and the Bullocks and we sat outside for about an hour until it got too chilly. The day was good, just slightly cool, but as soon as the sun goes down it gets cold. We went into Peggy and Vernon’s rig and Peggy cooked up a meal of pasta and salad for the six of us. It was great and we had a good time until about 8:30 when everyone wandered off to their own coaches for the rest of the night.

Friday, February 11th we decided that it was time to do some laundry. We packed everything in the car and headed across the river into Blythe. Our first stop was Garcia’s Restaurant on Hobsonway and 2nd street. Peggy and Vernon had eaten there on Thursday and said the food was good. The restaurant is very small, but the food was excellent. I had a red chili burro and it was one of the best I have had. The service was also good and the prices reasonable. I would highly recommend the place. When we walked into the restaurant it was lunch time and the place was packed. I didn’t think we would get a seat until we noticed that our friends Linda and Doug were already there. They had just ordered, so we sat down and had lunch with them.

After lunch we went to a pretty decent coin laundry and spent a couple hours getting all of our clothes, towels and bed linens washed and dried. We then headed home and relaxed outside in the nice weather until sundown. At about 7:00 p.m. we went over to the recreation center here at the park for karaoke. We had been here last year and gone to the Friday night karaoke and it was a lot of fun. The park bought the equipment and it is pretty good stuff. The rotation of singers was fairly short, although nearly all were very good singers. Because of the short rotation I got to do about seven or eight songs, so we had a very good time. We didn’t quit until the place closed up about 10:30 at which time we headed back to the coach and went to bed.

Saturday, February 12th was another caching day with Peggy and Vernon. After lunch we drove over into California in search of some more First To Find (FTF) caches. When I checked the Blythe area I found two caches that had just been placed within the last week and neither showed any finds yet. The first cache was about 23 miles from the park, South of Blythe, and was out in a flat desert area that appears to have been used as a dumping ground for the last 50 years. There were hundreds of acres that just glistened with broken glass and trash. You could tell that a lot of it was old, for instance there were numerous rusty beer cans with holes in the top made by an old fashioned church key opener. I mean, how long has it been since beer cans were steel or tin? The coordinates took us to a point in the dump and then it was up to us to figure out where the cache might be. It turned out to be very clever and we searched for about 20 minutes before I finally spotted it. There was an old refrigerator lying on the ground, on its back with the door open. It was full of bullet holes from people doing target practice. I finally spotted a bolt screwed into one of the holes in the bottom of the fridge. When I took it out of the hole I saw a tiny version of the geocaching symbol printed on the head. The bolt came apart and inside was the log! And - we WERE the first to find! Yea! The cache was called “Wasteland” and it certainly was.

After that find we continued South, heading into the hilly desert at the North end of the Imperial Dunes area. We drove about eight miles on a desert Jeep trail to an area where rockhounds looked for a type of rock called Pastolite, a pastel colored granite. This was where the other FTF cache was supposed to be. We found the cache, however, someone else had beat us to it earlier in the day, so we missed getting the FTF. On the way back we spotted one of the wild burros that inhabit the area. After that cache we did a bunch of caches in the Blythe area, ending up with a total of ten finds for the afternoon. After we got home the four of us went over to Doug and Linda’s coach for dinner. Linda had made a batch of spaghetti, along with both a meat and sausage red sauce, and a shrimp white sauce. Both were excellent. We had a great meal, chatted for a couple of hours and enjoyed the evening. After dinner we went back to our coach for the rest of the night.

Sunday, February 13th was a day of leisure. Other than going outside around sunset for an hour or so of evening cocktails with the Bullocks, we didn’t go anywhere. Monday was Valentine’s Day and again we decided on a quiet day at home. Jackie and I exchanged cards and had a very pleasant day. Jackie was watching the Emmy awards on TV when Barbra Streisand came on singing her song “Evergreen,” which was one of our first romantic songs from back in the seventies when we first met. We had a very nice romantic dance in the kitchen of the motor home as Barbra sang. Later Jackie played a song called “Connected at the Heart” by a group called Ricochet, which was one of our later romantic songs. Once again we danced. We concluded the day with a nice steak dinner on the BBQ with just the two of us. All in all, it was a very quiet, romantic day.

Tuesday, February 15th, we went out with the Bullocks after lunch to do some geocaching in the Blythe area. The caches were pretty far apart, and some were difficult to get to, so we only ended up finding five caches, along with one DNF, for the afternoon. One of the caches took us to the California side of the river, right across from our RV park. After our caching we went into downtown Blythe to try and visit the Elks Lodge there. By way of background, we have been trying to get into the Blythe Elks Lodge for the last five years. We have never been able to find it open, or even figure out conclusively when it is open. Our Elks travel book, which is a couple of years old, says it is open on Tuesday evenings before Lodge meetings, and on Friday evenings for meals. We figured that it would open about five or so on Tuesdays, but nope. Closed, even at 5:30 p.m. We will try one more time on Friday evening to see if we can get in for a visit. After our attempt at the Elks we headed back to the park for cocktails, dinner and relaxing the rest of the night.

Wednesday, February 16th we woke up to cloudy skies and brisk winds. The weather forecast called for a chance of showers and wind all day, so we decided not to try and go out to do any caching. I spent a couple of hours doing our taxes and cleaning up the records for 2010. For the first time in a couple of years we don’t have to pay any additional Federal tax. Yea! Late in the afternoon we started making dinner for the group. We had picked up a couple packages of chicken at the store a few days ago and decided that this was the day we would do a BBQ for everyone. In addition to the Bullocks and the Stoudts, our friends Dave and Karen were coming over. We met Dave and Karen last month at Quartzsite during our campout with Peggy and Vernon’s friends. After Quartzsite Dave and Karen had gone to Yuma, Parker and Lake Havasu, and had just arrived here in Ehrenberg today. We had some snacks with cocktails and then I BBQed the chicken for dinner. Jackie also made a batch of wasabi cole slaw and some broccoli. All eight of us ate inside our coach because it was too cool outside. It was a tight fit, but we got it done. Dinner was great and everyone seemed to enjoy themselves. For desert we had ice cream and some of the strawberries that we had gotten direct from the field in Santa Maria back in June of last year. We froze them fresh and they kept great. After everyone left we watched TV the rest of the night.

Thursday, February 17th we stayed around the coach for the day. I spent some time getting five new travel bugs ready for distribution the next time we go caching. Jackie spent a few hours with Peggy doing some sewing and clothing alterations. At 4:00 p.m. the four of us went down to the clubhouse to listen to Doug and Linda give their travelog talk for Fantasy RV Tours. You may recall we met Doug and Linda when they were the “tailgunners” for our Alaska tour in 2009. A few years back Fantasy was bought out from Western Horizons by the employees and Doug and Linda are now among the owners as well as employees of the company. The talk they gave this afternoon was about the 45 day Mexico Yucatan tour, which looked pretty interesting. Although I would not want to do it for a couple of years yet, that is one Mexico tour I might be convinced to embark on. We will see how things go in Mexico. After cocktail hour all of us gathered in Dave and Karen’s rig for dinner. She fixed pork steaks with sauerkraut, mashed potatoes and salad. The dinner was wonderful and we all hung around and chatted until about 8:30 when everyone headed off to their own coaches for the night.

Friday, February 18th we went out after lunch to do some geocaching. Peggy and Vernon took Dave and Karen, who are fairly new to caching, in their Jeep and Jackie and I went out in ours. We took a route South down the Arizona side of the Colorado river to do a series of caches that are hidden along that route. The levee road we were on was gravel, but it was fairly smooth. Ultimately, we ended going about 25 miles or so South of Ehrenberg, as far as the town of Cibola and the Cibola National Wildlife Refuge, and ended up finding nine caches for the afternoon. One of the caches was Dave and Karen’s 200th milestone cache. We also discovered that there is an old one lane bridge across the Colorado that is still in service just North of Cibola. This is also a place where the course of the Colorado River has changed and there is a small piece of ground, a few square miles perhaps, that is on the West side of the river, but is part of the State of Arizona. There is a county park over there, so there is a La Paz County park on the West side of the Colorado. There was a cache right by the old bridge and while we were looking for it we saw a La Paz County Ranger come across the bridge from the park. A nice piece of trivia to use in a bar game sometime.

After caching we went back to the RV park for a quick dinner and then went over to the clubhouse at the park for karaoke. While we were out caching two of the other couples we met at our outing in quartzsite arrived at the park. Curt and Sharon, and Ray and Del were parked just across the road from us. All of us ended up at the karaoke and Sharon, who you may recall is a former professional singer, sang a couple of songs. The rotation was a little longer tonight than it had been last week, but I still got in about six songs for the night. Sang and danced until about 10:30 when we headed home for bed. While we were in karaoke the rain we have been expecting came in and the ground was already a little wet.

Saturday, February 19th started out as a very wet day. It rained the entire night, sometimes fairly heavy. Sometime in the early morning hours there was even a thunderstorm that rolled through. I had my window open just a little so I could hear the thunder, and the rolling echoes off of the mountains to the East. I only saw slight flashes of lightning, so the storm was not directly over us, but I enjoyed listening to the show for a while. It continued to rain hard until shortly after lunch when the skies started to clear. Because it was still pretty cool, and the ground was very wet, we didn’t try to go out and do anything today. In the early evening we went over to Peggy and Vernon’s coach for dinner, along with the rest of group. We had a total of ten people. She fixed a pork roast, stuffed with greens, along with rice and beans and it was wonderful. We stayed over visiting with them after dinner until about 10:30 when we went home and went to bed.

Sunday we stayed at home all day because I wanted to watch the Daytona 500 NASCAR Sprint Cup race. This is the first race of the season for the Cup cars and is usually a pretty good race. Today’s was no exception. The race was won by a rookie driver named Trevor Bayne who had just turned 20 the day before. This was only his second Cup race start and he is the youngest driver ever to win at Daytona. Great race! My favorite, Mark Martin finished in the top ten and had a good day too. We had afternoon cocktails outdoors again now that the wet weather has passed. For dinner we got a couple of pizzas from a little lunch trailer that is parked inside of the RV park. For evening entertainment we went over to Doug and Linda’s coach, along with Peggy and Sharon, to play some cards. We played Hand and Foot, which I haven’t played for over 20 years. My ex and I used to play with my parents a couple times a month when I lived back in Phoenix. It took a couple rounds to remember the game, but Jackie and I came in second. Had a very enjoyable evening.

Monday, February 21st promised to be a nice day, so we decided to do a final day of caching in the Blythe area. When I downloaded the results of my query for the day’s caching I noticed that two days prior someone had put out seven new caches along Highway 95, just North of Blythe. As of the time the query ran no one had logged them yet, so there were seven potential First To Finds (FTF) out there! We also decided that we wanted to have lunch one more time at Garcia’s Mexican restaurant in Blythe, the great little restaurant we found the first week we were here. We went out as a crew, with Doug and Linda in our car, and Karen and Dave with Peggy and Vernon in their Jeep. We all met at Garcia’s, along with Curt and Sharon who just wanted to try the restaurant. After lunch, which was once again great, Curt and Sharon went off to do some errands, while the other four couples headed North to try and catch the FTF’s. When we reached the first one we were disappointed to find that two other caching teams had hit the cache at about 8:30 in the morning, thus earning the FTF. Oh well, at least we got the cache. All seven of the new caches were along about a six mile stretch of the highway and they were all very easy caches. After all four of our teams had found the seven new caches we split up. Peggy and Vernon took Karen and Dave to some caches in the area that were new to Karen and Dave, although Peggy and Vernon, and us, had already found them. This was to help Karen and Dave get their numbers up. Meanwhile, we, along with Doug and Linda, headed Northwest of Blythe along Midland road to some caches about 20 miles away that were new to us.

We had never been up in this area before and we found that the paved road out of Blythe ended in the foothills of the mountains about 20 miles or so Northwest of Blythe at what used to be the community of Midland. From 1925 to the late 1960's Midland was a U. S. Gypsum company town. It was started as a tent city with miners in the middle of the Mojave desert digging gypsum out of the Little Maria Mountains to meet the demands of movie studios. All the winter scenes during the golden age of Hollywood were filmed with “snowflakes” from Midland. The population was approximately one thousand and there were approximately three hundred and thirteen houses. The gypsum plant was leveled in the 1970’s and the houses were sold and moved to Blythe, California and Parker, Arizona. All that is left of the town are some cement foundations left from houses, tennis courts, and some of the mining buildings, and the tallest thing in the area is the elementary school smoke stack. The cache was placed by a woman who’s family lived in Midland most of the time the town was in existence. She was the one who provided most of this history.

After our caching, which netted us ten finds, we went back to the RV park for cocktails and dinner. Dinner tonight was served by Ray and Del in their 5th Wheel and was salad and scratch made lasagna. The lasagna was wonderful. We also played about an hour of a game called “Catch Phrase”, which is kind of like the old “Password” TV show. Give hints to try to get your team guess the phrase you are trying to convey. We had some really good laughs, especially when Doug used the hint “oral sex” to try and get us to guess “Sodom and Gomorrah”. By the way, once he added “biblical cities” I got the answer! After dinner we headed home for the rest of the night.

Tuesday, February 22nd we spent the afternoon getting ready to leave on Wednesday. We did our laundry at the park’s laundry and then I spent a couple hours packing up the outside decorations. We had our usual happy hour on the grass behind the coaches watching the river roll by. We were surprised to find that Darrel Larson had come to the park yesterday. We had met Darrel last April when we were here in Ehrenberg. He was a couple coaches down from us and we had cocktails with him and several other couples almost every night. He is a single traveler who used to be a commercial fisherman in Alaska. When his last boat sank in a storm he decided to retire and travel in warmer climes. We knew he was in town because he is now caching and he picked up one of our travel bugs. We get notified when someone moves a bug we own, and on the log he mentioned that he met us last year here in Ehrenberg. We asked him to come to happy hour and he did. It seems that back in April we talked so much about geocaching that he got interested and became hooked. He already has over a thousand finds. We got another convert! Yea us.

After happy hour we all went over to Curt and Sharon’s coach for dinner. They have a Knight like ours but a year newer. The twelve of us had a pot luck dinner that was very good. Around 9:00 or so we called it a night and headed back to our coach.

Wednesday, February 23rd was another travel day. We packed up the coach and left Ehrenberg about 10:00 a.m. on our way to the Yuma area. We are actually going to Pilot Knob, one of our membership parks, which is located about nine miles West of Yuma on the California side of the border, in a town called Winterhaven. We have been to Pilot Knob many times in the past and we really like the Yuma, Arizona area. The trip was about 110 miles South on U.S. 95 and took us a couple of hours. We arrived at Pilot Knob around noon and managed to get two very nice North-facing spots side by side with the Bullocks, who moved down to Winterhaven with us. We will be here for two weeks.

With our arrival here in the Yuma, Arizona area I will close this episode out and get it on line. Thanks for reading our story and until the next Chapter, stay happy, be safe, and enjoy every moment of life.

Chilling (Literally) In the Arizona Desert

Greetings again readers. Welcome back to our story. Our previous episode ended on Thursday, January 27th with our arrival in Salome, Arizona at the Desert Vista RV Resort. This is one of our membership parks in the Resorts of Distinction (ROD) network. It was recently sold to a company called Encore Resorts, but they kept the ROD affiliation. We were happy about that because, even though the place is pretty remote, we enjoy coming here for a couple weeks each year. There is a lot of desert to explore and it can be a relaxing place. The RV park is actually located a couple of miles South of Salome on U.S. Highway 60 in a community called Harcuvar, named after a local mountain range. Salome is a small ranching community, founded in 1904 by a guy named Charles Pratt and two brothers, Earnest and Dick Wick Hall. Pratt was founding the town as a support base for a new railroad through the Eastern Arizona Territory and was speculating on where the railroad would lay its tracks, Unfortunately, he miscalculated by a mile so the community had to be moved to its present location a couple years later. The Post Office was established April 14th, 1905, and later moved to the current town site in 1906.

Dick Wick Hall was a widely known wit who published many stories in the Saturday Evening Post. Born in 1877 in Creston, Iowa, Dick's given name was DeForest Hall, He was a well known journalist and "political operative." In honor of his mentor, Henry Wickenburg, the miner after whom the town of Wickenburg, Arizona is named, he changed his name to "Dick Wick Hall." Hall died suddenly in 1926. You can find Dick Wick Hall's grave site in Salome on Center Street 2 blocks North of Hwy 60.

After settling in on Thursday we decided to just stay in for the rest of the day. We did some house cleaning to get rid of the dust we accumulated during our stay in Quartzsite. We got together with Peggy and Vernon Bullock, our friends who have been traveling with us for the last month, for cocktails and a dinner of leftover sushi and Halibut chowder which Jackie had made for the group in Quartzsite.

Friday, January 28th was also designated a day of leisure. It seems like we have been on the run and busy ever since our arrival in Indio before Christmas, so we felt we needed a down day. Salome is a great place to do that and the weather was perfect, temperatures in the low seventies and clear blue skies. We spent the entire day around the coach, just playing games and watching TV. Jackie made an enchilada casserole for dinner and we had cocktails and dinner with the Bullocks.

Saturday we loaded the car with us, Peggy and Vernon and their puppy Belle and left before lunch for a road trip. We needed to do some light shopping and wanted to go to a Walmart, the closest of which was in Parker, Arizona, on the Colorado River about 50 miles Northwest of Salome. We decided to make a day of it and did some caching along the way to Parker. When we got into town we stopped for lunch at a great Mexican restaurant called El Serape. We didn’t know where to eat and while we were looking for cache in a city park in Parker there was a Border Patrol agent parked in the parking lot watching traffic. Jackie and Peggy walked over and asked her where to eat. She said that there always seemed to be a lot of cars in the parking lot of the El Serape, but she had never eaten there. Since we all love Mexican food, and a lot of cars is usually a good sign, we went there. The food was excellent, as was the service. It was also reasonably priced. We would highly recommend the place which is right on U.S. 95, which is Riverside Drive, South of the airport.

After lunch we did some more caching in the Parker area. We ended up with a total of eight caches with no DNFs. We then made a quick stop at the Parker Elks Lodge for a refreshment. We had been to this lodge back in 2005, but had not been back since. Peggy and Vernon got a lodge pin for their budding collection, however, we already have one on our banner. After the lodge visit we hit Walmart and then drove the hour back to Salome. The lunch was so good, and so filling we didn’t even do dinner.

Monday, January 31st - Holy cow, the first month of the new year already ending! The weather this morning was cool and very windy, not good caching weather in the desert. We decided to do our laundry after lunch right here at the park. Later in the evening we joined Peggy and Vernon for cocktails and then BBQed some burgers for dinner. Peggy and Vernon had gone out in the afternoon to do some geocaching on their own. After finding their first cache in Salome, they headed out into the desert for their second and ended up punching a hole in one of their Jeep’s tires. End of caching for the day. Bummer. When he took it to a local place for repair they told him the tear was in the sidewall and was not repairable. I guess we will be out with them looking for a tire somewhere in the next day or two.

Tuesday, the 1st day of February already. The morning was again cool (40 degrees) and windy. Vernon has decided to just wait until we get to Ehrenburg, Arizona, near Blythe, California, next week to get tires. There is no where close to where we are in Salome to get a used tire of the right size to use as a spare. After lunch, when it warmed up a bit, the four of us went out to do some caching. We were doing desert caching which greatly increases the time between finds, so we were only able to get six caches in a about three hours. Nonetheless, we had fun and rode some interesting Jeep trails out in the desert, including one that led to an old mine site. The cache was inside of the remains of an old rock cabin. Very cool. After caching we went back to the RV park, had cocktails with the Bullocks and then spent a relaxing night at home.

Wednesday, February 2nd we woke up with no water because the supply hose outside was frozen solid! The outside thermometer said it was 27 degrees and there were icicles hanging down from under the coach near the bay where the water and sewer connections go in. I have a slight water leak and when the water hit the outside air it froze. Yikes. The wind is still blowing too, so I am guessing the wind chill temperature is in the teens. Way too cold for Arizona. Fortunately, the furnaces worked to heat up the coach and I had water in the fresh water tank so we were able to turn on our internal water source and didn’t have to rely on the outside supply. I also ran down to the store and bought an inexpensive automotive work light and a 100 watt bulb to use to keep the bay with the water pump and bottom of the fresh water tank, from freezing. Since the bay is closed in, putting a lit 100 bulb inside produces enough heat to keep the interior above freezing, which would be bad for the internal plumbing of the coach since it is all plastic piping.

We decided it was way too cold and windy to do anything, the weather forecast said it was only going to get up to 42 today. We stayed in until after lunch when the four of us, we and Peggy and Vernon, went down to the park’s pool/card room and we taught them how to play Texas hold’em poker. They knew basic poker, but had never played the hold’em variety. We played for a couple of hours and had a good time. I then went home and made a big pot of chili for dinner. Peggy and Vernon came over for cocktails and dinner with us. The chili turned out great, especially nice on a cold day. After dinner we chatted for a bit and after Peggy and Vernon left we relaxed the rest of the evening.

Thursday, February 3rd was another very cold morning, 25 degrees this time. The outside water supply was disconnected so we didn’t have to worry about not having water this time. My light bulb heater in the water bay kept everything down there from freezing, so we still had water for showers and such. About 10:00 a.m. the four of us got in our car for a day of caching and sightseeing in Wickenburg, Arizona, about 55 miles Northeast of Salome. We had a little issue when we first started out because the tire pressure monitoring system on our Jeep was showing a low tire. I was fairly certain that it was only because it was so cold outside - tire pressure is temperature sensitive, getting lower with the cold. The indicator showed it was only one pound below the “low air” threshold, so I drove the car on the highway for a mile or so and watched as the pressure came up like it should as the tire warmed up from the driving. I stopped for fuel and afterwards all the tires showed normal pressure, but my warning light was still flashing. I really didn’t want to drive over 50 miles with a warning light, even though I was fairly certain the pressures were OK, so I started back towards the park. About halfway there the sensors finally decided the pressures were OK and the light went out. I then turned back around and started towards Wickenburg.

We did one geocache about halfway between Salome and Wickenburg, but after arrival in town headed for the Horseshoe Café in downtown Wickenburg for lunch. We had eaten here last year and found it to be a great little café. It is a small, hometown type place with a dozen tables that seemed to be a favorite of the locals. It has also been cited by Arizona Highways, a very respected publication, as one of the ten best places to eat in Arizona. We again had a great meal, with great prices and wonderful, friendly service. Peggy and Vernon agreed that it was a great place to eat. Anyone in Wickenburg around breakfast or lunch (not open at night) could not do better than the Horseshoe Café right on Highway 60, a block East of the Highway 93 turnoff.

After lunch we started doing some geocaching in the Wickenburg area. We ended up with a total of 10 caches for the afternoon, including the one we did on the way to town. We found a couple of interesting places including the Hassayampa River Preserve, just South of town on Highway 60. The Preserve is on the site of a turn of the century dude ranch and includes a visitor’s center with nice exhibits on the flora and fauna of the central Arizona desert, and a series of nice hiking trails. We toured the visitor’s center to get the clues we needed for the cache find, but didn’t do any hiking. It was still in the low 40's so it was a little chilly for walking around. We also did a cache on the site of one of the original Arizona highway rest stops. Highway 60, which runs Northwest out of the Phoenix area to Wickenburg, and then back Southwest out of Wickenburg back towards I-10 and into California, was the main route from Phoenix to Los Angeles up until the 1980's when they finally put I-10 through from Quartzsite to Phoenix. Back before freeways Arizona used to put up rest areas along the main highways which consisted of a parking area with a couple of ramadas with picnic tables which had palm fronds on the roof for shade. Some had BBQ grills for cooking lunch. The one along Highway 60 about ten miles South of Wickenburg still has the original low stone wall which used to separate the rest area from the road, along with two large stone BBQ fireplaces. The ramadas and picnic tables are no longer there and the rest area is located on what appears to be a hill above the road. Actually, when they built the new four lane divided road back in the 70's they cut through the hill, so the rest area is actually on the original grade of the road. We would have never noticed the rest area except for the cache because it is a dozen feet above the current road grade. After caching we did a little light shopping and then headed home where we crashed for the night. By the way, our caching efforts today put us over the 2,100 finds milestone. Yea!

Friday, February 4th, the freeze has finally lifted! We woke up to a temperature over the freezing mark. Not very far mind you, 34 degrees, but nonetheless above the ice point. We decided to have a “home” day, so we just stayed in, watched TV, working on the computers, and took care of some light chores.

Saturday, February 5th - Happy Birthday to Me! I woke up this morning with “will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m sixty-four,” the lyrics to Paul McCartney’s “When I’m 64," going through my head. They stuck with me all day. That, and the thought that in a 360 days I will be on Medicare! Yea! About 1:30 in the afternoon we got in the car, along with the Bullocks, and headed for Quartzsite for some caching and my birthday dinner. We cached for a couple hours, finding a total of five caches. We also made a couple of shopping stops in Quartzsite. Around 4:00 we stopped for dinner. I had decided that I wanted to go to a place called The Grubstake in Quartzsite. It’s a rugged cowboy bar and restaurant on the North end of town that we have eaten at a couple times during previous visits to Quartzsite they have a lot of stuff on the menu, but I haven’t had anything other than the fish and chips, which is their trademark item. On Fridays during the RV show period, which is when we are normally in Quartzsite, the line to get in the place is an hour or more for their all you can eat fish dinner. It is, by far, the best fish and chips dinner I have had, anywhere, ever! Although it is all you can eat on Fridays, I don’t believe I have ever seen anyone order more. The initial order, which is the normal portion (available anytime), is two huge pieces of Haddock, a giant pile of fries, and some coleslaw. It is more than enough for most people, including me. I managed to finish mine, but Jackie took some home with her. After dinner we drove back to Salome, about 40 miles, and made it home before dark. Weather point, it made it up to 70 today - the cold spell has passed. Yippee.

Super Bowl Sunday, February 6th, dawned showing promise of another mild day. We spent the morning and early afternoon relaxing in the coach. About 4:00 p.m. Peggy and Vernon came over to watch the big game with us. We would have liked to watch it on the big screen outside, but with the game being late in the afternoon it would be a bit too chilly. We set out the snacks and cocktails and watched my Green Bay Packers take the Steelers to school! I think they did quite well for an underdog team. Although I grew up for the most part in Arizona, I was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and have always been a Packers fan. I mean, it’s not like I am a huge football fan - the super bowl is probably the only game I watch end to end all year - but if someone had asked who I was rooting for, it would have been the Packers. Go Cheeseheads! After the game Peggy and Vernon headed back to their coach and we chilled the rest of the night.

Monday, February 7th was our seventh wedding anniversary. We don’t exchange gifts on any holidays, birthdays or anniversaries, but we did exchange cards. Happy, happy us!! After lunch we got into Peggy and Vernon’s Jeep for an afternoon of caching. Peggy and Vernon have a Jeep Wrangler, the four door version, and enjoy getting out on the back roads. Unfortunately, they have been hobbled for the last week without a spare tire. As I mentioned about a week ago, they went out geocaching on their own one morning and cut a tire and have had problems finding a replacement spare. Saturday, while we were in Quartzsite we stopped at a tire shop and found that they had a used tire of the right size. Yesterday Vernon took the Jeep in and had it mounted and now they are back in business, so today we are going out to do some “real” Jeeping. (Some Wrangler owners don’t think Grand Cherokees are “real Jeeps”)

Today’s destination was Alamo Lake, a large manmade lake about 45 miles North of Salome on the Bill Williams River. Back in the 80's I used to go fishing at Alamo Lake a lot. It is (or at least used to be) one of the best big mouth bass lakes in the state. I also recall from camping up there a couple times that it is also the rattlesnake capital of Arizona, at least in the winter. I saw more rattlers up there in one weekend than I saw all the rest of the time I lived and camped in Arizona. We picked up one cache off the road on the way up to the lake and then got seven more around the lake itself. Surprisingly, we found three FTF caches up there. FTF means “first to find” and in caching is considered a big deal. The first person to find a new cache after it is published gets the FTF. In all of our caching we only have two and both were from back in 2008 in Iowa. I had seen these FTFs almost a week ago, but we didn’t think we would get up to Alamo. When we decided to go up there the caches still did not show anyone having found them. Sure enough, when we found the caches there were no signatures on the logs. YEA! Since Peggy and Vernon are fairly new to caching we let them take two of the FTFs and we took one. On the way back from caching we stopped at two other caches just to round out the numbers to ten finds. After we got back to the RV park we sat outside with Peggy and Vernon until sunset having cocktails and chatting. This was the first time it was nice enough in the late afternoon to sit outside and enjoy it. After dark we went in the coach for dinner and TV.

Tuesday, February 8th was another anniversary of sorts for us. February 8th was the day I reunited with Jackie after being out of contact for 21 years. I had first met her in Hawthorne, California back in 1976 while on a prisoner transportation trip. I worked for the Sheriff’s Office in Phoenix and was assigned to the fugitive apprehension unit. We saw each other off and on over the course of a year or so until I was transferred to narcotics enforcement and stopped traveling out of state. In early 1998 I relocated her on the internet through her real estate license, which I remembered she had, contacted her and ultimately went to visit her on February 8th, 1998. Six months later I moved from Phoenix to Indio to be with her. We have always celebrated this “reunion” anniversary.

Around mid-morning we climbed back into Peggy and Vernon’s Jeep and went out to do some back country caching. Vernon likes to visit old mines and ghost towns and we had told him about a cache located near an old mine called the Yuma Mine. I told him it was a couple of miles up into the mountains on some rough trails, but that we had visited it last year and enjoyed it. It was also only about 20 miles or so from the RV park. They were game so we headed up there, ultimately arriving at the Yuma Mine. We found the cache and were looking around the mine area when a big four wheel drive truck came up the road and stopped. Since the road dead ends at the mine, we knew they were coming here. It turned out to be a couple of older guys who have leased the mine, along with a number of other mining claims in the area. We chatted with them for quite a while, learning the history of the mine, which we had never known. It turns out that the mine, which was a horizontal shaft into the mountain rather than the more common vertical shaft, was a copper mine. It was originally started during WW-II and produced copper ore for the war effort. The usable copper ran out, but the owners continued until the 90's working the mine for semi precious stones such as malachite and chrysocolla. The guys we were talking to were looking for more veins of these type of stones in a number of them mines in the area.

After the mine trip we drove back down towards the RV park and did a couple of other caches before driving into Salome and eating a late lunch/early dinner at the diner there. The restaurant, now called the Salome Café, started out as Sheffler’s Café and Soda Fountain back in the 40's when Highway 60 was the primary route from Phoenix to Los Angeles. There is still a Sheffler’s motel right across the street from the café. The food was pretty simple diner fare, but pretty tasty. After lunch we went back to the park and I spent a hour or so packing things up in preparation for our departure the next day.

Wednesday, February 9th was another travel day. We were only going 54 miles, from Salome, Arizona to Ehrenberg, Arizona located on the Colorado River just off of I-10, across the river from Blythe, California. We left Salome about 10:00 and arrived an hour or so later at the Colorado River Oasis RV Resort in Ehrenberg. Since the distance was so short we didn’t even hook up the car in tow - Jackie just followed me. This park is another one of our Western Horizon parks and we will be here for two weeks. We got a nice spot at the back of the resort, only a couple hundred feet from the river. I can see the river flowing by out of the back window of the coach as I write this. Very soothing. Peggy and Vernon, who are still traveling with us, got a spot right next to ours. We spent most of the afternoon getting settled in. About 3:00 p.m. we got together in Peggy and Vernon’s coach along with Doug and Linda Stoudt, some other friends of ours. Regular readers may recall that Doug and Linda were our “tail gunners” on the Alaska trip back in 2009. The tail gunner is part of the staff that takes care of the caravan participants. This was the same trip that we first met Peggy and Vernon on, so it was a reunion of sorts. We spent the evening talking, catching up and having a light dinner of tacos and rice.

Our arrival here in Ehrenburg will close this episode of our travel chronicle. We will publish again in a couple weeks when we leave here and head South to the Yuma area. Until our next chapter, stay safe, be happy and enjoy every day to the fullest.