The RV parks in the major cities of the valley, Indio, Palm Desert, La Quinta, Palm Springs and others, continue to raise their rates. They do it because they can, this is where people want to come when it’s cold in the other two thirds of the country. But it makes it tough for those of us who live on a fixed income. (I know, I HATE that phrase too, but it fits here. Sorry) Our only membership park in the east part of the valley,
Indian Waters in Indio, was sold last year and it is nearly impossible to get reservations there under any of the membership programs. They still have a few spaces available to membership folks, but they go fast and you have to be lucky when you call. All of this to explain why we are spending our first two weeks here, 20 miles south of Indio, and the next two weeks in Desert Hot Springs, 20 miles west of Indio. It’s simple economics. When we arrived on Sunday we just stayed around all day getting setup, including putting up all our Christmas decorations. We came a day early to beat a winter storm that was working it’s way into Southern California.Monday, December 12th, we woke up to clouds and by lunch time the rain had come. It was not raining especially hard, but it was steady and it was cold too. We decided that since we weren’t going to be able to do any geocaching for a few days that we would use today to do our chores. We packed up our laundry and drove north to Indio to a very nice laundromat that we use when we are in the area. We washed clothes and played cards while we waited. After our laundry was done we made a quick stop at nearby Cactus Jacks Bar and Grill, our old hang out when we lived here in Indio. We wanted to say hi to Kevin, the daytime bartender and a friend of ours. We were glad we stopped today because he told us he was leaving tomorrow for Utah for a week of skiing.
After one drink and chatting with Kevin we went down to Walmart to restock the grocery cabinets. By the time we got done it was after five and nearly dark, so we headed back home. It had rained most of the day and was still cold.
Tuesday, December 13th, we again left after lunch under cloudy skies and drove back north, this time to Palm Desert, for doctor’s appointments for the both of us. Nothing serious, just medication updates for the most part. I especially needed to get new prescriptions written for all my meds because in a month I will be on Medicare and need them for my new prescription plan. YEA Medicare! After our doctor’s appointments we made a stop at Jackie’s “adopted” niece’s house to see her Godson Shane Ryan. Shane’s grandmother Nancy was one of Jackie’s closest and oldest friends and she died a few months ago. This was the first time that Jackie has been able to see Shane since Nancy’s death. Vickie, Shane’s mom, was working, but Shane was home and we had a nice visit with him.
After visiting Shane we did a little shopping to kill some time before going over to visit our good friends Barry and Colleen Cohen. Regular readers will remember them as our dear friends who are also full time RVers, in that they have lived solely in their 40 foot coach a couple years longer than we have lived in ours. However, Barry is still working, so they don’t travel much. They live in the Motor Coach Country Club, which is a very nice, upscale RV resort in Indio. Barry just recently sold his transmission repair business and they are in the process of trying to sell their property at the resort so they can get out and travel like us.
We went over to the Cohen’s about 4:00, after Barry got home from work. We had a couple of drinks with them on the patio as we caught up. We last saw them back in August in Sante Fe, New Mexico. We crossed paths with them for two days as they were returning from visiting their daughter in Denver. After chatting with them for a while the four of us went to Cactus Jacks for dinner. After dinner we headed home for the rest of the night. It is nice to be back with friends again.
Wednesday, December 14th, we decided to just stay in for the day. The day was sunny, but still cold and the ground was still damp from the rain. This would make caching in this rural area messy, so we elected to wait a day or two before going out again. I spent a big part of the afternoon roughing out plans for our summer travels. Up to today we only had definite plans up to the Good Sam Rally in Phoenix in March. We finally settled on a “big circle” summer that will have us taking the southern route, I-10 mostly, east to New Orleans. We will then go north to see Jackie’s girlfriend Helen in Massachusetts, and then into Indiana for the rally circuit in August. After the rallies we will head back to Pahrump via the northern route, I-80. Still a lot of details to work on, but at least now we have the framework for the summer. Fun, fun, fun.
Thursday, December 15th, appeared to be a great day for caching. Sunny but cool, with just a little wind. We left the coach after lunch to try to do some caching in the general area. I say general area because there are actually very few caches close by to where we are staying. This was confirmed when we were about ninety minutes into caching and only had two finds! We had been to four caches, but one of the we couldn’t find, our only DNF for the day. Another turned out to be a half mile walk into the desert after we got to the coordinates. That one was a ten minute drive east of Mecca in the wilderness. We finally struck pay dirt when we started on a series of caches that run along an off-road trail south of Lake Cahilla in La Quinta. It is a fairly decent SUV trail that runs south into the foothills of the mountains south of the desert and the caches are located every five or six hundred feet. Once
we got on this trail we quickly got eight more finds, including number 3,200! Yea! A couple of them required climbing hills, which I did but Jackie skipped. She is not real good with hills, especially those with loose rocks. We finally quit at ten finds, about half way through the trail, when it started to get dark. We wanted to be back on the paved roads before it got completely dark. We headed home for the rest of the night. We will come back another day to finish the SUV trail series.Friday, December 16th dawned with skies that appeared to be planning for rain. We had heard brief periods of rain overnight, but it was only cloudy when we got up. We had made plans to meet friends for dinner at the Indio Elks Lodge tonight, so we decided to do some caching up in town in the afternoon, weather permitting. This would put us Indio come dinner time. We were able to find ten new caches, along with logging one new DNF, in a few hours of caching. After caching we went to the Indio Elks Lodge for cocktails and dinner. Many of our friends and other regular readers will remember that both Jackie and I joined the Elks through the Indio Lodge and were members there until we changed our residency to Nevada back in 2007. At that time we demitted (Elk for transferred our membership) to the Pahrump, Nevada lodge. The bar was pretty full and there were a couple of people in there that we knew from our “previous” life here in Indio. Among them were Pat and Monty Montez, the couple that we crossed paths with in Amarillo, Texas back in August of this year.
About 5:30 our dinner companions, Bev and Jerry King, came into the lodge and we headed into the dining room. Bev and Jerry are a couple that are fellow coach travelers that we met on the road several years ago at a Monaco International rally and have crossed paths with many times since. They are not full timers, but are on the road quite a lot. They have a home near Pomona, but also have a lot in Desert Shores, a very exclusive RV community here in Indio. Bev is the secretary for the Military Veteran’s Chapter of FMCA and we are charter members of that chapter and have been to a lot of their events. They are staying in the valley for a while and called us to arrange to have dinner.
We had a very nice dinner and chatted with the King’s. We last saw them in Farmington, New Mexico back in October at the Rocky Mountain Area rally. Dinner was quite good, the Elks in Indio has a pretty good Friday night dinner menu. One of the chefs in the kitchen was an old friend of ours, Big Willy. Jackie has known Willy since the 80' when she met him through her work in the personal finance industry. Willy is a great cook and has had a couple of restaurants here in the valley serving mostly Southern cooking. Like many small restaurant business’, he couldn’t make a go of them, but he does still have a successful catering business in the desert and likes to help out at the Elks. He is a member of the Indio lodge. We had a very nice dinner and were able to catch up with the Kings, which was great. We will probably see them a few more times during our stay here in the Coachella Valley. After dinner we headed back to the RV park for the rest of the night.
Saturday, December 17th, we had another cloudy morning that looked a little like rain might be in the forecast. We decided that we would go up into Palm Desert early today to go to the College of the Desert (COD) street fair. The COD street fair has been going on every weekend since well before I came to the Desert in 1998. It has several hundred vendors, many of them selling fairly high end stuff. Pretty much what you would expect from a street fair in an affluent area. We enjoy walking around looking at the stuff. We rarely buy much, but enjoy the exercise and experience. About the only thing we did do at the street fair was drop a couple of pieces of jewelry off with a jeweler for repair. Normally we wouldn’t do that, but it turns out that he and Jackie had several friends in common, which legitimized him for us.
We had initially thought of having lunch at the street fair, they have a fairly extensive food court, but decided to have a late lunch at one of our favorite local Mexican restaurants, La Casita. In my estimation they have one of the best taco salads anywhere and we always manage to have a couple when we come to the Desert. After lunch we went out to do a little caching before it got too dark. We managed to find five in about an hour. We then stopped at Costco for supplies before heading back to the RV park for the night.
Sunday, December 18th, we had a nice relaxing day at the coach. Jackie caught up on some of the TV shows she had on the DVR and I did some work on the computer. I also spent a little time in the park’s hot tub, which really felt good. Monday we decided to do some caching near the west shore of the Salton Sea, to the south of the RV park. We cached primarily in Salton Sea Beach and Salton City, two communities along the northern part of the Salton Sea on the west side. When talking about the Coachella Valley to non-Californian’s I am often asked where and/or what is the Salton Sea, so I will digress for a little lesson in the geology, geography and history of the Salton Sea.
The geological depression, or valley, that includes both the Gulf of Mexico, also known as the Sea of Cortez, and the Salton Sea were once part of a single, long ocean gulf. About three million years ago the Colorado River delta created a large dam which cut off the Sea of Cortez from the valley where the Salton Sea currently lies. Where it not for
this dam the Sea of Cortez would actually go all the way up to Indio. Ocean front property would probably have been a big boost to the eastern end of the Coachella Valley. As a result, the Salton Sink or Salton Basin has been alternately a fresh water lake or a dry desert basin, depending on random river flows and the balance between inflow and evaporative loss. Several rivers feed into the lake, but there is no natural outflow point, the water is trapped in the basin. A lake would exist only when it was replenished by the river and rainfall, a cycle that repeated itself countless times over hundreds of thousands of years. The last of the ancient lakes to occupy the basin is known as Lake Cahuilla by geologists. This lake disappeared as part of the cycle several thousand years ago.The creation of the what is now the Salton Sea was a complete accident. In 1905 heavy rainfall and snow melt caused the Colorado River to swell, overrunning a set of gates for the Alamo Canal, a local irrigation project. The resulting flood poured down the canal and breached an Imperial Valley dike, eroding two watercourses, the New River in the west, and the Alamo River in the east, each about 60 miles long. Over a period of approximately two years these two newly created rivers sporadically carried the entire volume of the Colorado River into the Salton Sink. The sudden influx of water and the lack of any drainage from the basin resulted in the formation of the Salton Sea, the largest lake in California.
In the 1920s, the Salton Sea developed into a tourist attraction, because of its water recreation, and waterfowl attracted to the area. The Salton Sea has had some success as a resort area, with Salton City, Salton Sea Beach, and Desert Shores on the western shore and Desert Beach, North Shore, and Bombay Beach built on the eastern shore in the 1950s. In the 50's and 60's the Salton Sea was a well known area for water recreation, such as boat races, water skiing, and fishing, and the communities along the lake shore envisioned tremendous growth. Speculative land sales boomed in the area. However, the lack of an outflow means that the Salton Sea collects everything that flows into it. It soon became apparent that sea was becoming increasingly saline and polluted from the agricultural runoff flowing into it. There were also a series of floods in the 1960's which inundated many of the shoreline communities.
The lake is now so saline, more so than the Great Salt Lake of Utah, and polluted, that most sea life has gone. The lake still supports a population of Tilapia, a hardy freshwater fish, as well as huge flocks of migrating waterfowl. Scientists believe that even the Tilapia will be gone in a few years unless something changes. Although the lake was accidentally created, environmentalists are united in a desire to “save” the lake by finding a way to reduce the pollution and salinity. Restrictions
have been imposed on local agriculture to try and reduce the amount of junk coming into the lake and millions have been spent on developing some type of plan to save the lake. A lot of the communities that sprung up during the mid century heyday of the lake still have residents, but their numbers are greatly reduced and the towns are littered with abandoned buildings
and mobile homes. Salton City has hundreds of miles of streets which were built and lots laid out which were never utilized. While we were caching we found many of the caches hidden near abandoned properties. Most of Salton Sea Beach looked like the set from some sort of apocalypse movie. Since there were a lot of caches in the area we were able to find 14 new caches, with one DNF, in just a few hours. After caching we headed back to the coach for the rest of the night.Tuesday, December 20, Happy Hanukkah to all our Hebrew friends. One of my first tasks of the day was to call my best friend Barry Cohen and wish him a Happy Hanukkah. I have to call him on all of the Jewish holidays lest he forget. Great guy, but not an especially observant Jew. We left the coach about 11:30 and started towards the eastern side of the Salton Sea to an area where we used to hang out. There is a cluster of RV resorts on the east side of the lake, up in the foothills of the nearby mountains, in an area that is well known for their extensive natural hot springs. The area is about 30 miles south of Indio, near the communities of Bombay Beach and Niland. Back before we sold the house and went out on the road full time we used to camp with the Indio Elks RV club at one of the resorts called Imperial Spa. It was a pretty rugged desert park, but they had great facilities, including wonderful hot spring water baths.
In the spring of 2007, our first full year of full timing we spent two months parked at Imperial Spa. While we were there we got to know a lot of the regular winter visitors who stayed at the Spa most of the season. They were a very social group and we really got to know the one’s who enjoyed karaoke because I ended up running the karaoke on Friday nights. Among the people we got to know well, and have stayed in touch with over the years, were Russ and Darlene Haberman, who lived in Grants Pass, Oregon during the summer. Russ and Darlene have been battling health problems for the last couple years, so we never we able to get together with them during our visits to Oregon. When we found out that they were down in the desert again this winter we made arrangements to get with them today. They are now staying at another RV resort called Bashford’s, which is across the street from the old Imperial Spa. Imperial was sold a couple years ago and became a KOA which no longer courted annual lot rentals and long term winter visitors.
When we arrived we were pleased to see that Russ and Darlene looked well and had a nice place at the new resort. Also there was another old friend from our time at the Spa, Jim Anderson. Jim, who goes by the nickname “No Fish”, was the guy who was supposed to do the karaoke at the Spa back in 2007, but his equipment broke and had to be repaired. That is how I ended up doing the karaoke for two months. We have also stayed in touch with Jim over the years, and actually visited him at his house in White Salmon, Washington, back in the summer of 2007 when we were up in the area. We had a great time catching up with our friends and were very happy to hear that Darlene is recovering well from surgery for lung cancer last summer. The five of us went to lunch at one of the other nearby resorts and continued our visit. We finally left Russ and Darlene’s place about 3:00 and took an hour or so to do some caching on the east side of the lake.
In the course of an hour we were able to add five new finds to our total. One of them should have been a First To Find (FTF) and would have been had we taken the time to look for it prior to going to Russ and Darlene’s house. Friends come first though, and by the time we got to it another cacher had found it and claimed the FTF. After caching we went back to our coach for the rest of the night.
Wednesday, December 21st, we awoke to another beautiful desert winter morning. Clear skies with lots of sunshine and a little on the cool side, upper 40's. Of course, to folks in Oklahoma who are under three feet of snow the upper 40's would seem balmy at the least. We left the coach about 1:30 or so and headed north into town to meet with some friends of ours who are staying at Indian Waters RV Resort in Indio. Jay and Donna Blumenthal are also full time motor home travelers that we met several years ago as a result of our participation in FMCA rallies and activities. At that time Jay was the President of the International Area of FMCA and one of the members of FMCA’s Board of Directors. We have remained friends and cross paths with them frequently, many times here in the Coachella Valley where they try to spend their winters now that Jay does not hold an FMCA executive position and no longer has to travel all the time. They are from New York and usually spend their summers back in the east.
On the way to meet with Jay and Donna we took a drive through the nearby Indian Palms Country Club, where we used to have our house before we sold it in 2005. We like to drive through once a year or so to see what, if any, changes have been made in the neighborhood and to our house. Essentially, the house looks the same today as it did when we sold it with the exception of the landscaping. The new residents took out some of the bushes and trees we had in the front, and painted the wood trim on the house. The neighborhood did not appear to have changed at all. We look at the house, but neither of us looks back on our decision with anything other than satisfaction that we did the right thing. We don’t miss having a house and love our lifestyle.
We then drove over to Indian Waters RV Park and took a drive through there prior to going to Jay and Donna’s site. Indian Waters used to be a Western Horizon’s park and part of our membership package with the company. We used to stay at Indian Waters at least once per year, sometimes more. However, last year Western Horizon’s sold the property to a private company that has turned it into a public RV resort. We have heard a lot of stories about the changes they were making to the park and wanted to have a look for ourselves. We also wanted to check into whether we would still have some privileges here based on our Western Horizon’s membership. We have heard lots of stories about that also, some saying no, some saying yes. A few weeks ago I had tried to make reservations through Western Horizon’s central reservations and, although they said they were handling reservations for the park, told us that there were no sites available.
We drove around the park and noted that they have resurfaced the streets, cleaned up the landscaping and built a new pool and “pickle ball” court. We also noticed that the park was less than 25 percent occupied, which was confusing considering I had been told that there were no sites available. I decided to go into the office and check for myself what, if any, ability we would have to stay there in the future. What I found was that just in the last week the park has opened up the entire park to Western Horizons members at greatly reduced rates. To the public sites are priced anywhere from $48 up to the $70's, depending on the location in the park. For us the sites were $11 to $15 per night. Not a bad deal, especially when you consider that even under our WHR membership we had to pay $6 a night facilities surcharge. We were originally going to leave the park we are currently in on December 26th and go to the WHR park in Desert Hot Springs. Desert Hot Springs is as far to the north and west from Indio as where we are now is south, so we were still going to be a long way off from where we like to be during the holidays. With the new information I decided to make the reservation at Indian Waters for our next two week stay and cancelled our reservation in Desert Hot Springs. This will give us two weeks right in Indio instead of having to commute like we are now.
Once we finished our tour of the park we went to see Jay and Donna. They have a very nice site overlooking a pond and fountain, and have a nice patio area set up since they are going to be in the same place until April. We sat outside and talked and caught up on what we each have been doing since the last time we saw them, which was actually last January here in Indio. About 5:00 or so we left to go to dinner in La Quinta, the next town over from Indio. We went to a restaurant called Hog’s Breath which is located in downtown La Quinta. The original Hog’s Breath Bar and Grill was in Carmel, California and was opened by Clint Eastwood back in the 70's. There are now restaurants with the name here in La Quinta, as well as Florida, although Eastwood no longer owns them.
Even on a Wednesday night the place was pretty full for happy hour and we ended up sitting at the bar for dinner. One of the reasons Jay wanted to come here was that the piano player was apparently one of the original members of the 60's rock group, The Turtles. I don’t know his name, or if he was really with the Turtles, but we were at the restaurant for nearly two hours and he never stopped playing 60's and 70's tunes on the piano. He really was fun to listen to, although it would have been better had he not been stuck in a corner of the bar so people could see him and sing along. The food was quite good and we finally left about 7:00 or so to head back to home.
This is normally where I would close the tale of the day by saying we went back to the coach for the rest of the night. However, this evening we had a very scary experience. The drive from La Quinta back our RV park was just over 20 miles, almost all of it on two lane farm roads. Of course, by this time in the winter it is very dark and the streets are not lit. We were driving east on Avenue 52, approaching the town of Coachella, when we were very nearly hit head on. I saw a line of four or five cars coming our way when the second or third car in line suddenly came out of line into my lane, probably a couple hundred yards in front of us. At first I though it was someone making a dumb passing move and that they would pull back in line, or at least stay on the road. I slowed a little and pulled to the right, off the pavement onto the shoulder. I then realized that the car was not only coming into my lane, it was actually moving even further to the left, my right, onto the shoulder. I took a quick look around and saw that I had an escape path to my right up a two foot dirt berm into a farm field. I just got up onto the berm, now about eight or ten feet off the road, and slowed down when I saw the car out of the corner of my eye go by us and heard a loud crash. At first I though the guy had actually hit us a glancing blow as he went by, but when I stopped and got out I saw that he had missed us by about six inches and mowed down a traffic sign that was on the shoulder of the road right next to where we had stopped. Had I not reacted as quickly we would have been hit head on and probably not escaped without serious injury. I guess my years of driving police cars and the training we received still pays off. I also taught pursuit driving for a while back I the 80's and still remember most of that also. After we caught our breath we continued on to the coach. By the way, the guy hit the sign and never even slowed down. He just kept on going, as did all the other cars that were on the road too. I would have thought someone would have at least stopped to see if we had been hit. Drunks. Hate em’.
Thursday, December 22nd, the day was nice and clear, but the winds came up again. Not as bad as they were a few weeks ago, when we were up in Fresno, but still a little too harsh to go caching. We decided we needed a down day, so we just stayed home for the entire day.
Friday, December 23rd, we left the coach after lunch and went back up to Palm Desert and the COD street fair. We needed to pick up the two pieces of jewelry we had left for repair. Although only two days before Christmas, there were only about half the normal number of vendors set up, and very few customers. We got our jewelry, nicely repaired and cleaned, and walked around until they closed up shop at 2:00. We then spent an hour or so doing some geocaching. We were only able to add four new finds to our total, along with one new DNF. After caching we stopped at Walmart to get some groceries, especially our turkey breast for Christmas dinner, and then went back to the coach for the rest of the evening. Saturday was another relaxation day. The only time I left the coach was to go to the hot tub for about twenty minutes.
Sunday, December 25th, Merry Christmas! We decided that since we were so far away from town, and celebrating Christmas without being around family or friends, that we would spend the afternoon in our favorite pastime, geocaching. We drove a few miles south to the Salton City area again and cached for several hours, adding another dozen finds to our tally. We had a great afternoon, with mild weather and no traffic or “muggles”
wandering around. After caching we went back to the coach and had our very own Christmas feast. Turkey, stuffing, potatoes, cranberries and green beans. Had a very pleasant Christmas. As always, Jackie and I exchanged only cards and our love. Neither of us goes without during the year, so we have never seen much point in stressing out trying to find gifts for each other on birthdays or holidays. Might not work for everyone, but it sure is right for us. Merry Christmas from the Salton Sea!Monday, December 26th, we were up and packing up the Christmas decorations and other stuff in the coach getting ready for our relocation to Indio. We had 25 miles to go, so Jackie just drove the car. We stopped on the way for fuel for both the car and coach, as well as to fill up the propane in the coach. This is in preparation for our dry camping stints at the rally in Indio and in Quartzsite later in January. We left Oasis about 10:30 and by noon we were in Indio at the newly remodeled and renovated Indian Waters RV Resort. We have a very nice site next to a pond with a fountain. Although we are in the newer section of the park, which is all gravel, we are adjacent to a green space with a nice lawn. We also found out that the Bullocks, who are coming tomorrow, will be right next to us. Yea! Our friends the Blumenthals are just down the street. Once we got the coach settled in we gathered up our two weeks worth of dirty laundry and headed to the Laundromat.
We had thought that being a Monday the laundromat would not be busy. We forgot that since Christmas was on a Sunday this year, the actual Federal holiday is today. The place was packed with people doing their laundry on their day off. Oh well, we got washers and dryers and put up with the screaming kids and trash all over the floor, for a couple hours and got the work done. After that we went back to the coach for the rest of the evening. Jay and Donna Blumenthal came over for a quick visit in the late afternoon when they saw that we had moved in just a few sites away.
With our arrival in Indio I will close this chapter of our story and get it online. We will be here for two weeks and I will publish again before we head into the rally. Until the next time, have a safe New Years and stay happy. Bye.
