Blythe, California. We managed to get two very nice spots right next to each other and basically just spent the rest of the day getting set up. We had happy hour with the Bullocks about 5:00 p.m. and then went into our coach for dinner and TV for the rest of the night.
Thursday, February 24th was a shopping day for us. We hadn’t been to a Walmart since we went to the one in Parker a couple weeks ago. Yuma also has a Sam’s Club and we needed a few things from there. After lunch we went out and hit both of those, plus a quick stop at a Target and a JoAnn’s Fabric store. You could tell it had been a while since we did any shopping. Once we got our shopping done we headed back to the coach. By the time we got everything put away it was happy hour. We went over to the Bullocks for cocktails, and then we each made dinner and brought it over to our coach so we could eat together. We had some T-bones and the Bullocks had lamb, which made Jackie happy because they shared. After dinner we watched TV for the rest of the night.
Friday we went out with the Bullocks before lunch to do some local caching. We did a couple of caches right around the area of the RV park, then we drove into Yuma for lunch. We had lunch at an old diner right on old Highway 80, near old town Yuma. The place was called Brownie’s, and Jackie and I have talked about trying it ever since we started coming to Yuma back in 2007. The place has been open since the 50's, before the freeway when Highway 80 was the road through town. Except for Friday’s, when it is open until 9:00 p.m., the place is only open for breakfast and lunch. The menu is not large and is typical diner fare. Jackie was disappointed with the taste of the gravy on her breakfast chicken fried steak. My burger was OK, but nothing special. Same with the Bullock’s meal. Probably wouldn’t go out of my way to go again.
After lunch we started some caching in the central Yuma area and ended up about 4:00 p.m. with an even dozen finds. We then went to the Yuma Elks Lodge so the Bullocks would know where is was and could get a lodge pin. They were having a rummage sale on the patio, so Jackie and Peggy did some shopping while Vernon and I started drinking. After a cocktail we headed home for a light dinner of hors d'oeuvres with the Bullocks. We then relaxed the rest of the night in the coach.
Saturday, February 26th we went into Yuma around 12:30 or so to attend a geocaching event at a restaurant in old town Yuma. The Yuma area has a very active and very large geocaching association called SWAG, or Southwest Arizona Geocachers. They put on a big annual event every February. They do it in the winter because a lot of their members are snowbirds who only come down to the area in the winter. When we were in Pilot Knob last February we attended the Saturday event, which was held in the same restaurant, Lute’s Casino, right on main street in old town. The place is very quirky, with old crap all over the ceiling and walls, but the food is very good. The Bullocks went with us and we got into the restaurant early, so we were able to get a decent table. This event, which was Yuma Event #8,
was a two day deal, just like year’s past. The Saturday get together is just a lunch meet and greet with no activities. We ran into several people we know, including Nellie and Russ from Grants Pass, Oregon. We visited them last year when were up there in the summer. We also met several caching teams whose names we have seen on logs in various caches in the area. After a very nice lunch Peggy and Vernon headed out to do some chores and Jackie and I walked around main street for an hour so looking in the antique stores. After that we headed back to the coach for a quiet evening at home.
Sunday, February 27th we again left early, this time about 9:30 a.m., and drove into downtown Yuma for the main geocaching event. The event was held at the Gateway park, which is right downtown on the bank of the Colorado River.
It is located in the area between the new I-8 freeway bridge across the river and the old Highway 80 and railroad bridges across the river. It is a very nice park with a lot of grass, covered pavilions and tables. There were probably 400 people at the gathering, which is a lot. It really reinforces what we already knew, that geocaching is a very popular hobby, especially with retired people. There was one guy there who has found over 33,000 caches. The sport is only 10 years old, so he has been busy. After signing in for the event, along with the Bullocks, we participated in the poker run. They had hidden five ammo boxes
around the park area that had a bunch of envelopes in them. The GPS coordinates for each box were on a piece of paper and each team had to find each of the five boxes and take one envelope from each. After you got back to the pavilion a member of the organizing committee would open your envelopes and see what your poker hand was. We had a busted straight, i.e., nuttin honey. The Bullocks ended up with a pair of kings, also not much of a hand. The top three winning hands were a full house, an ace high flush and a queen high flush. Oh well, it was fun.
We spent some time trading travel bugs. One of the standard things at geocaching events is that everyone brings their travel bugs, coins and other trackables with them and they trade them off to other cachers. We traded off all of our new ones that we had just created and published, as well as a couple of others that we have had for a couple months. We now have a nice new stock of trackables. We visited with a lot of very nice people. One thing about a gathering of this type, you know you have something in common with everyone else there.
Around 12:00 they served a very nice lunch, which was BBQ tri-tip, beans and cole slaw. The nice thing is that there was no charge for the event, even for cachers who were not members of SWAG. They do fund raisers and 50/50 drawings all year to get the money to put on the event. They also had a whole bunch of very nice door prizes. The grand prize was a new $500 GPSrx. Unfortunately, we didn’t win anything, but we had a great time and met a lot of great people.
After the event Jackie and I went out to do some geocaching and managed to get five finds in an hour or so. We then headed back to the RV park and had cocktails with the Bullocks, who had also gone out caching on their own after the event. After happy hour we settled into the coach and watched the Oscar show on TV.
Monday, February 28th, another month of the new year almost gone. We decided that we needed a day off after the busy weekend so we stayed around the coach for most of the day. I did all my routine maintenance checks and some minor repairs in the morning. After lunch we and the Bullocks took a quick drive into town to the Marine Corps Air Station to get our range passes for caching on the Barry Goldwater military gunnery range. Regular readers may recall back in December of 2008 we did some geocaching out on the gunnery range with our friend John Ham. It is a military reservation, but it is open to the public by permit. The permit doesn’t cost anything but is only needed to help keep track of people who go out on the range. We always laugh and say it just makes it easier for the Border Patrol or Military Police to identify you body if you die out there. We plan to go out on the range with the Bullocks sometime in the next few days so we decided to get our permits early.
We came back to the coach after getting our permits and I did a few more chores. Later we had cocktails and then dinner with the Bullocks in our coach. I made some pulled pork and fries. After dinner we just watched TV until bedtime.
Tuesday, March 1st, we left the coach around 10:00 a.m. with the Bullocks and drove the three miles South to Algadones, Mexico. Regular readers will know that Algadones is a small Mexican border town near Yuma that is “dedicated” to dentists, optometrists, pharmacies and liquor stores. At least ninety-five percent of the clientele are older, usually retired, folks. We have been there numerous times and get all our dental work and eyeglasses there. The Bullocks had never been there, so we took them today just for a taste. We walked around and did a little shopping. We bought a new bag for our caching stuff, I got a couple of tee shirts. Peggy bought some nice silver jewelry at our favorite store down there, The Mine. It is the only place in Algadones where I would buy jewelry because you know what you get there is real silver and gemstones. Peggy and Vernon also visited a vet down there to get some medications for their puppy Belle. We had lunch at our favorite restaurant, La Ranchito, bought some booze and headed back into the U.S. around 2:00 p.m. We also did the three geocaches that are down in Algadones. One was new to us, we had done the other two, but the Bullocks had not. These are their first foreign caches. The line was really long and it took about an hour to get back across the border.
After caching we were pooped. We had walked a lot, stood around a lot, and it was starting to get warm, actually almost hit 80 today. I actually laid down and napped for about 20 minutes when we got back, and I never take naps. We had happy hour with the Bullocks and then went down to the clubhouse to play Texas Hold’Em. Our Canadian friends Marc and Shannon, and Jim and Lorraine, were back at the park and we played cards with them. I lost most of my five dollars, Jackie almost broke even, but we had a great time.
Wednesday, March 2nd I stayed around the coach all day doing various small chores. Jackie and Peggy drove into Yuma after lunch to get pedicures and do some shopping. Later on in the evening we got together for happy hour and then a BBQ of beef and chicken carne with all the trimmings. Had a great dinner and then relaxed the rest of the night.
Thursday morning we got an early start for a big day of caching. We and the Bullocks and their geo-dog Belle, got into the car and left the park about 9:00 a.m. headed for the Goldwater military range South of the Foothills area of Yuma. The Foothills is an unincorporated retirement area East of the City of Yuma and is about 20 miles from our location at Pilot Knob.
As I have explained in the past, the Goldwater range is a military gunnery range for Air Force, Marine and Navy aircraft. There are two parts, the West range, which runs East from the Yuma city limits for about 140 miles, almost to Casa Grande, Arizona. The East range is further North, just South of Gila Bend, Near Phoenix and runs South nearly to Tucson. The entire range is over 3,000 square miles, the vast majority of which are closed to the public. The area we go into just East of Yuma is only a few hundred square miles, but there are hundreds upon hundreds of geocaches hidden there. We were on the range about five hours and managed to get 25 finds, which makes our personal best day yet! While we were out on the range, having the picnic lunch we packed, a couple of Marine AV-8 Harrier attack jets came out and were making low level passes over the area we were
caching in. They were actually using the target range South of where we were, but they had to pass over us to get there. We got our own personal air show for about 20 minutes, with the aircraft no more than a couple hundred feet off the ground. Pretty neat stuff. Also pretty neat were some of the caches we found. Since there is no a lot of traffic down on the range some folks were pretty ingenious with their caches. There were a couple of very cute wooden cache containers that someone clearly spent a lot of time and effort in making.
After caching we went back to the park and pretty much crashed. The temperatures were in the high seventies, low eighties, so we were pretty wore out. Peggy cooked a nice dinner of green chili chicken enchiladas, which was wonderful. After dinner we watched TV until bedtime.
Friday, March 4th we stayed around the coach until about 3:00 p.m. when we and the Bullocks drove into Yuma to watch the Midnight at the Oasis classic car cruise. Midnight at the Oasis is Yuma’s big weekend-long classic car event and is held every year. We have never been here during the event in the past.
It is similar to Hot August Nights in Reno and other big classic car gatherings around the country. On Thursday the organizers had set up a huge inflatable movie screen and created a “drive-in” and on Friday was the cruise, basically a parade. I have been to a lot of car shows where you walk around and look at the cars, but I have never been able to attend a cruise, where you can see and hear the cars as they drive. We got to the parade route early enough to be able to
get front row parking in an old Kmart parking lot and set our chairs out on the sidewalk to “claim” our territory. We had some time to kill before the parade, so we found a couple of geocaches in the parking lot. Once the parade started it ran for about an hour. We found out later that there were 500 cars in the parade. Every kind of restored car, hot rod, and cruiser you could imagine was in the parade. It was very enjoyable. After the parade we stopped and picked up a pizza and went back to the coach for a late dinner with the Bullocks.
Saturday, March 5th we went out with the Bullocks after lunch for some geocaching and managed to get nine more finds. The Bullocks reached the 300 find milestone. Congratulations to Team 2 B’s! After caching we went back to the coach to get ready for dinner. Our friends Ray and Suzie Babcock were back in Yuma and they came over about 4:30 to have dinner with we and the Bullocks. Jackie made a big batch of her risotto with shrimp, mushrooms and asparagus and it was great. The six of us had a great time catching up and enjoyed a wonderful dinner. We have not seen the Babcocks since December back in Indio. After dinner we played a few rounds of the game “Catch Phrase” which we had first been introduced to back in Ehrenberg by Ray and Del Menard. After we played the game with them we went out a few days later and bought one for ourselves. We had a great evening. About 8:30 everyone left and we relaxed the rest of the night.
Sunday, March 6th Jackie and I went into Yuma after lunch for a quick Sam’s Club shopping trip. On the way back home we decided to stop at the Quechan Casino, which is on I-8 just a mile from our park, for a little gaming. It didn’t take us too long to spend our $25 each, a little less than an hour. Oh well, hard to win in these places. Our plan had been to do some caching, but by the time we got home it was 3:00, so we decided to just stay around the coach. Not too long after we got home we saw a coach stop in the road in front of us, presumably to park in the empty space next to us. Another quick look and low and behold it was our friends Gary and Ramona Wilson! They were coming into the park for a week and the office put them in the spot next to us just by chance. We last saw Gary and Ramona back in January when we drove up to Silent Valley with Peggy and Vernon to visit them and Ray and Suzie. Gary and Ramona have been up in the Northwest visiting family and we knew they were headed back to this area, but we didn’t expect them to show up next door.
Later on in the evening we had happy hour with the six of us. We then all got together in Peggy and Vernon’s coach for dinner. Peggy made a great salad and we BBQed some chicken. After dinner we played about an hour of “Catch Phrase” again. Gary and Ramona had never played it before and they enjoyed it as much as we did the first time we saw the game. About 9:00 everyone went back to their own coaches for the rest of the night.
Monday, March 7th we woke up to howling winds. Actually, the winds had blown all night and were still going 25 or 30 MPH. We had originally decided to cache today, but the wind, along with the dust it was stirring up, put the kibosh on that idea. We decided to just go into town with Peggy and Vernon for lunch and some last minute shopping. We went to a nice Chinese buffet called the Grand Buffet. Very inexpensive, but very good. Not as extensive a selection as some buffets we have been to, but what they did have was excellent. After lunch we went to Walmart and then made another stop at Sam’s Club for Peggy and Vernon. They are leaving tomorrow and needed some stuff. We went back home for the rest of the afternoon and then had a nice happy hour with the six of us again. We didn’t do dinner because we were full from lunch.
Tuesday morning we sadly had to say goodbye to Peggy and Vernon and Miss Belle. We have been traveling with them since early January and had a wonderful time. They left this morning heading for Casa Grande, Arizona and then points East for a while. We will see them again in October at the Balloon Fiesta in Albuquerque. We headed into Yuma late morning to do our
laundry and some other chores. The first stop was a hair salon where I got my first haircut in nearly six years. My last haircut was sometime in April of 2005, when we knew that we were retiring. My hair got down to my waist and had to be braided
every day by Jackie. The first thing the girl at the salon did was cut off a little over ten inches of the braid so we could donate it to “Locks of Love”, a group that makes wigs for cancer victims. She then trimmed everything up, leaving a nice five or six inch pony tail. I don’t think I will let it get that long again. It was fun once, but I think I will just keep a nice “tail” from now on. There are some before and after pics posted here.
After that we grabbed a bite to eat and then did our laundry. It has been fourteen days since we last did it, so it was beginning to pile up. After laundry we headed back to the coach and I spent some time putting away the outside stuff in preparation for our departure in the morning. We had a last happy hour with Gary and Ramona and then went down to the clubhouse to play Texas Hold’Em. I had a good night for a change and ended up about five dollars up. Jackie lost just a dollar or so. Had a good time playing with our Canadian friends.
Wednesday, March 9th we were up early and had the coach packed up and ready to travel by 9:30. Today we are going about 170 miles Northwest, back to Desert Hot Springs. We had an uneventful drive, except for having to put in fifty gallons of diesel at over $4 a gallon. Yikes. Them Arabs need to settle down or we’ll have to turn our coach into a park model. We arrived at Desert Pools, one of our Western Horizons parks, about 12:30. We gained an hour coming into California,
but we will have to give it back on Sunday when daylight savings time kicks in. We got a nice site near the clubhouse, just a couple down from where we were in November. I spent the afternoon getting set up and moved in. We will be here for two weeks.
With our arrival at Desert Hot Springs I will end this Chapter of the story. I will publish again in a couple of weeks. Until then, keep the faith, dance like no one is watching and enjoy every day to the fullest.
