Saturday, February 15th, we woke to what was promised to be the warmest day of the winter so far, close to 80 degrees. Jackie was feeling really crappy still, so we decided that we needed to just stay at home for the day again. She even thought about going back to the urgent care center, but when she called she found they were not open on the weekend, so she just stayed home, took her meds, and tried to get to feeling better. It didn't work very well because she had a rough night and woke up Sunday morning feeling worse that she did yesterday. She decided she needed to get some medical attention, so we went to a different urgent care center. This one was close to the RV park as well, but it was associated with the Yuma Regional Medical Center hospital rather than a private company.
It took two hours for her to get in to see the doctor and she came out with news that she had severe allergies. The doctor gave another allergy shot and told her to just try to keep exposure to the allergens to a minimum and keep taking her meds, including an allergy medication. She said that the doctor told her that allergies here in Yuma, and Arizona in general, were very severe, so much so that he has seen a lot of people who lived here leave for other states. He said he has also been told that fewer winter visitors are coming because of the bad allergy climate. That is not especially good news since we are going to be in Arizona at least another six weeks.
After the doctor we went home and stayed in with the windows closed and the air conditioning running. I went out and got some pizza for dinner and we ate, then watched TV the rest of the night.
Monday, February 18th, Happy President's Day. Jackie was still down pretty hard, so after lunch I went out by myself and did the laundry at one of the local laundromats in the area. I then did some shopping at Walmart and CVS for meds before heading back home to check on Jackie.
She was a little better in the afternoon and about 5:30 we went over to the Babcocks for cocktails. Ray fixed dinner a little later for the four of us. He BBQed some pork chops on the grill and we had salad and scalloped potatoes. This was the first time in a number of days that we have socialized with the Babcocks. We are feeling badly because they will be leaving at the end of the week to go back home for a while and there a lot of things we wanted to do with them while they were here. We stayed at Ray and Suzie's for a couple of hours, then went back home and watched TV the rest of the night.
Tuesday, February 19th, we left the coach with Ray and Suzie after lunch to run into Yuma for a Sam's Club run. We were almost out of Absolute, which is absolutely not allowed, and Sam's is the cheapest place in town to get it. We spent about 90 minutes shopping before heading back towards the RV park. On the way back home we stopped and got one new geocache for us. It was one that the Babcock's had already found, but they thought it was cute and wanted us to see it. It was a little green maraca hanging in a bush and the name of it was Green Mexican Rattler. We were expecting a fake snake or something.
We hung around the park until about 5:00 or so when we drove back into Yuma with the Babcocks to go to dinner at a local Mexican restaurant. We were meeting Gary and Ramona Wilson for dinner. Gary and Ramona are often mentioned in the blog as good friends of ours who are also full time RVers. The last time we saw the Wilsons was in January in Indio at the FMCA Western Area rally. They had arrived in Pilot Knob, near Yuma, a couple of days ago and we wanted to get together and catch up.
We had a great dinner at a place called Mi Rancho. It is on 4th Avenue, the main drag in Yuma, just a few blocks south of 24th street. The food was wonderful, the service good and the prices reasonable. We had some great conversation and enjoyed meeting up again with old friends. After dinner we went back to the RV park for the night.
Wednesday, February 20th, we left the coach about 10:30 or so with Ray and Suzie in our car, and drove down to the Mexican border so we could cross over into Algodones, Mexico again. The Wilsons had gone down there early to get some dental work done and we had agreed to meet them for lunch and some shopping. None of the four of us needed any dental or optical work, so it was just a pleasure trip for us this time. We shopped for a while, then the six of us had lunch at the El Paraiso restaurant, one of our favorite spots. We spent almost two hours at lunch, enjoying the meal and talking.
After lunch we shopped some more and then Gary had to go back to his dentist for a quick followup. We and the Babcocks went back across the border and headed for home. One highlight of the trip was we all found a fairly new geocache that was hidden in Algodones. We have gotten a total of three down there over the years, and the one today makes four. This was the first Mexican cache for the Wilsons and we also took them to one of the other caches down there so they now have two in Algodones. We went back to the RV park and Jackie and I were kind of beat, so we just crashed the rest of the afternoon and evening.
Thursday, February 21st, we went out after lunch to take Jackie to her followup consultation with the pulmonary specialist she has been seeing here in Yuma. She went to him because her doctor in Indio wanted an evaluation for possible COPD and we couldn't get an appointment there before it was time to leave. The doctor here sent her to get an echo cardiogram and also did a breathing test on her. The bottom line is that the doctor said she didn't have COPD. She had slight restrictions in her breathing, but nothing life threatening. It was good news to find out that Jackie doesn't have anything serious wrong with her, even though her current state with the bronchitis and allergies makes her feel like she is going down for the count.
After the appointment we drove back to the desert area south of the RV park and met up with the Wilsons and Babcocks who had been out geocaching for most of the morning. The six of us then continued caching for about two hours. We ended up with eleven for the afternoon and they both ended up with 29 for the day, a pretty good count for them.
We went back to the RV park and relaxed for a little while and the Wilsons went back to Pilot Knob. About 5:00 the four of us drove back to Yuma to meet the Wilsons one more time for dinner at the Olive Garden restaurant. This was sort of a send off dinner for the Babcocks who are leaving Yuma tomorrow to back home to Menifee in Southern California for a while. The Wilsons are going to be in Yuma until early next month, the same as us. We will see the Babcocks again in Tucson in just about four weeks at the FMCA International Area rally. We had a great dinner at Olive Garden. I had the lobster cannelloni that was to die for. Very rich, but very tasty. After dinner the we all went back to our coaches for the rest of the night.
Friday, February 22nd, about 9:30 we said goodbye to our neighbors for the last two weeks, the Babcocks, as they left to head back to their house. We always have a good time traveling with them and we will miss their company. After lunch we went out to some local geocaching and got ten new finds in less than two hours. One of the finds was number 4,800 for us. Yea! After caching we drove to the Supercuts in Yuma where we both got our hair cut. Jackie tries to get her's cut every month or so. I haven't had a haircut for nearly a year and my pony tail was getting kind of long. Now it's pretty short, but it will grow back. By the time we got done at the hair salon it was getting close to cocktail hour, so we drove back home and stayed in the rest of the night.
Saturday, February 23rd, I had a rough night with my allergies and didn't get much sleep. Jackie is still not feeling well, so we decided to stay home. Both of us did get a few chores done around the house, but neither of us strayed outside where the allergies live. Sunday was more of the same. Stay in the house, try to get better. I did watch the first NASCAR race of the season from Daytona.
Monday, February 25th, we were both feeling slightly better this morning and decided we needed to get out and about a little bit. We left the coach after lunch and went out to do some geocaching near the RV park. We managed to get nine new finds within about 90 minutes or so. We later picked up another cache making the total for day ten.
One of the finds was pretty unique in that the cache was a large piece of five inch PVC pipe, about two feet long, with caps on both ends. It was painted cammo green and was ten feet up in a tree at the cache site. To get the cache you had to unhook a loop of rope from a latch tied to the tree, then bring the pipe down to eye level on a pulley system. When we were done we pulled the pipe back up to the high branch, tied off the rope and it was rehid. Interesting cache. Ray and Suzie had told us about their finding it a week or so ago, but they only remember what the cache looked like, not which one it was. As soon as we saw it we knew it was the one they had told us about.
Another cache we found was out in the desert near the railroad tracks that go through the Yuma area. The first time we tried to get it we were on the wrong side of the tracks and didn't want to cross over because there was a train parked there. We came at it from a different direction and were blocked by a canal. We finally followed a power line trail in from another direction and got to the cache. The cache was pretty simple, but a couple hundred feet from the cache, under one of the power poles, was a very neat pet cemetery. Based on the dates on some of the tombstones it had been there close to twenty years. It was all bordered with white painted rocks and there were several pretty nice tombstones, as well as a lot of more modest, wooden crosses and such. Very touching that people thought enough of their pets to create this little oasis in the desert for them.After our caching we drove to the shopping center near downtown and did some shopping. We stopped at Jo Ann's so Jackie could get some new fabric to cover the driver and passenger seats in the coach. We also stopped at Dollar Tree and Penny's before driving back out to the foothills area where the RV park is located. We made one last stop at Fry's for groceries and then went back to the coach for the rest of the evening.
Tuesday, February 26th, we left the coach about 1:00 and drove into central Yuma to a brand new Chinese restaurant called Lin's. The place is right across the street from the main shopping center and we have been watching them work on it over the last month we have been here in Yuma. The place finally opened last Monday and we decided that we needed to give it a try before we left Yuma.
We met our friends Gary and Ramona Wilson, who are staying out in Pilot Knob across the river, at the restaurant about 1:30. Even at that late into the lunch hour the place was packed. We had trouble finding a place to park. Luckily, Gary and Ramona had gotten there a little early and had already put their name in, so we only had to wait another fifteen minutes before we got seated.
We had seen that there were already two reviews of the restaurant on the TripAdvisor website, and both of them were positive. On the up side, the place is very big, and very pretty inside with lots of seating. There are four long, two sided buffet tables for most of the food, plus another counter in the back with a sushi bar, cook to order Mongolian beef, and a steak bar, presumably for the evening crowd. There were all the usual choices of Chinese, along with quite a bit of American cuisine. The service, which, because it is a buffet is basically drinks and whatever extras you might want, was spotty at best. I wrote that off to new staff and the first couple weeks of business. I don't think they have all the staffing profiles worked out yet, and may not have been expecting the huge crowds they have been seeing.
The other three people in our party thought the food was excellent. I found almost all the selections to be bland, with little flavor and mushy texture. The beef in the pepper beef dish was almost slimy, pretty ugly stuff. The egg drop soup was good and some of the non-Chinese stuff I had, like the shrimp, was pretty tasty. This place is part of a chain and I was very disappointed to find that they didn't provide any hot mustard except for the mild, tasteless crap that comes in the little plastic pouches. To me that is a sign that they don't really value quality over quantity. Get the people in, get them out, collect the bucks. I might try the place one more time next year if we come through here to see if they get the growing pains out, but I was not overly impressed.
We spent about two and a half hours at lunch, visiting with the Wilsons and had a good time. We probably will see them one more time before we leave and then will likely not cross paths with them again until mid-summer. After lunch we stopped at a couple of Walmarts so Jackie could try to return a little cat house we bought for Benji that he didn't like. We also made a stop at the Salvation Army so I could drop off some donations. We also tried one geocache, but it turned out to be a toughy that we ended up DNFing because we couldn't find it. We then went back to the RV park and watched TV the rest of the evening.
Wednesday, February 27th, we woke up feeling a little better than in past days. Both of us are sleeping better at night with a lot less coughing and nose blowing. Not sure of the allergies are going away, or we are just getting acclimated, or the medications are finally kicking in. I don't care as long as I feel better. Jackie's bronchitis seems to be getting better every day.
Thursday, February 28th, my brother Russ's birthday. Happy Birthday Russ! He lives in Las Vegas and we usually get to see him at least once a year when we go through the area. We left the coach early, about 10:00 and drove west into California and back to the Pilot Knob RV resort where our friends Gary and Ramona Wilson are staying. We had made plans to have a long day of caching in the desert with them.
After our caching we headed back to the RV park because Gary and Ramona were going to go out and do a couple more so they would have a big “most finds” day in their stats page. I think they ended the day with 56 finds, better even than our best day. We stopped at Walmart on the way home for some supplies and then back to the RV park for the rest of the night. A great day caching with friends and the allergies didn't kick up too bad at all for either of us.
Friday, March 1st, . I spent an hour or so in the morning putting away some of the outside stuff we had put out, mostly decorations and such, in preparation for our leaving in the morning. We left the coach about noon and drove to a nearby Mexican restaurant called Pepe's, actually Los Manjares De Pepe, to have lunch with Jon and Rita Ham, some motor home friends who have a winter place here in the Foothills area of Yuma.
John is a very dedicated geocacher who has over 10,000 finds to his credit now, as well as a lot of hides he has placed in the Yuma area. His real passion is FTFs, or first to finds. He has an app on his phone that lets him know the second a new cache is published within fifty miles of his location. He then immediately goes out to find the cache so he can claim the first to find. Right now he has over 1,500 FTFs. I think we have four to our credit after five years of caching.
John and Rita are also members of a number of the same FMCA chapters as us and we come across them often when we are doing rallies around the country. We didn't want to leave the Yuma area without having at least had some time with them to chat and catch up. The restaurant, which was a very small place in the shopping center at I-8 and Fortuna Road, had very good food at reasonable prices. The place had gotten very good ratings on the ratings sites and we now see why. I had the red chili and it was excellent. We spent over an hour at lunch, chatting and enjoying John and Rita's company.
After lunch we drove west for another stop at the Arizona Market Place outdoor market to walk around and look at stuff some more. We shopped for about ninety minutes and bought a few things before leaving and driving into Yuma proper to watch the Midnight at the Oasis classic car parade. Midnight at the Oasis is an annual car show in Yuma that is one of the larger in the west, drawing over 1,000 classic cars and hot rods. It is an all weekend event with cars on display during the day and concerts at night. The event always kicks off on Friday night with a parade. Not all the cars in the show participate, but they do have about 600 in the parade. We were in Yuma two years ago during the event and came to the parade with our friends Peggy and Vernon Bullock and had a great time.
Saturday, March 2nd, we spent the morning packing up the coach and about 10:30 we were on the road for an eleven mile trip from Caravan Oasis RV Resort to Yuma Lakes RV Resort. Yuma Lakes is a membership resort affiliated with the company Colorado River Adventures. They have eight resorts in their system, five along the Colorado River, spread from Needles, California down to Yuma, Arizona, two in other California locations, and one in Mexico on the Gulf of California. We are not members of this system and had “won” a drawing from a recent rally where they were offering three free nights of camping, a notebook computer, a $200 gas card, and another $200 bonus gift. Of course, we would have to sit through their presentation and sales pitch to get our gifts, but we figured we were strong enough to resist the pitch.
We had been to Emerald Cove, their first resort, in California across the river from Parker, Arizona, back about ten years ago. Our friends the Cohen's had bought into the system and we went for a weekend with them. This was way before we sold the house and bought our big coach. We were not impressed with the campground then, although we were guests of the Cohen's and didn't get the sales pitch.
It only took us about forty minutes to make the trip and we checked in at the gate only to find out from the lady manning the check in booth that we would not be getting the tour or sales talk because the sales office at this resort had closed for the season on Friday. Of course, this also meant that we wouldn't be getting our gifts. She did say we could still stay for the three nights for free, so we at least had a place to park. Even though neither of us were crazy about being subjected to the strong sales talk, we were very upset that we wouldn't have the opportunity to get our gifts as promised. It's not like they didn't know we were coming. We had a letter with our stay dates in writing, and Jackie had called on Thursday to confirm our arrival and had been told that they were looking forward to our coming for the tour.
We were assigned our spot and got parked pretty quickly. It didn't take us too long to set up since we are only going to be here for three nights. Usually for these short stays I don't put up the sun screens or any of the decorations. I park, hook up the utilities, level the coach and put out the slides. We put the insides back to normal and that's it. Once got setup and had a quick lunch we left to drive back to the Arizona Market Place again. When we were there there yesterday Jackie had seen some salt lamps that she thought she might like to have. She talked last night with Ramona Wilson who told her that they have two in their coach and they love them. They supposedly produce ions which are good for your breathing health and disposition. I am not sure I believe that, but they are pretty, so I told Jackie to get one if she still wanted one. We went to the Market Place and got a real nice one that looks like a bowl. They have a light bulb in them and are translucent, so they put out a very pretty orange glow.
After the market place we stopped at Wamart to pick up a couple things for a dinner that Jackie was making tonight. We had invited the Wilsons over for dinner, our last chance to see them since they are leaving the area on Sunday and we won't see them again until late summer. The Wilson's arrived about 4:30 and we had cocktails and chatted. Gary was also doing some cleanup work on Jackie's laptop to try and speed it up a little. He has a couple of cleanup programs that he keeps on a flash drive so he can fix other people's computers. About 6:30 we had dinner, a nice chili relleno casserole that Jackie had put together. The Wilson's left about 8:00 and we just relaxed the rest of the evening with the TV.
Sunday, March 3rd, we awoke to pretty much overcast skies, which surprised us since the weather forecast had called for clear skies and temperatures in the 80's. I guess Mother Nature didn't watch TV last night. We decided that since we weren't going to have to hang around for a sales presentation from the resort today that we might as well go out do some geocaching. This resort is located on a small lake, really just a pond, between the desert and agricultural land north of Yuma proper. It is about six miles north of Interstate 8. The area to the north of the resort is low hills and desert and I had seen that there were a lot of caches fairly close to the park.
Monday, March 4th, our last day in the Yuma area. We left the coach after lunch and drove into town to do our laundry. The RV park had a small laundry, but we usually have two weeks worth of clothes and you normally can't do that much at one time in the small RV park facilities. After our laundry we made a stop at an RV supply store to try and get a couple of parts I need for some minor repair work. We also stopped along the route home at a couple of geocaches. We found one and had to DNF one. We then went home to the coach and stayed in the rest of the afternoon and evening.
Tuesday, March 5th, we had the coach packed up, the car hooked up, and were out on the road by 10:15. We are headed to Casa Grande, Arizona, about 180 east of Yuma on Interstate 8. We made a stop for fuel before getting on the Interstate and, after a quick lunch stop along the way, arrived at the Casa Grande RV Resort about 2:30. This resort used to be called Desert Shadows and was one of our Western Horizons membership parks. About 18 months ago it was sold by Western Horizons to the same guy who bought the old Western Horizons parks in Pahrump and Indio. We have been to those two since the new owner took over, but this was our first visit to the “new” Casa Grande resort. As with the other two parks, the new owner is still offering very favorable rates to Western Horizons members, so we aim to take advantage of them.
This marks an ideal place to close this episode and get it published. We will put something out again after our stay in Casa Grande. Until next time, keep the faith and find the joy in life. See ya.
