Monday, January 25th we got up early and were on the road to San Diego by about 9:30 a.m. We needed to go down to see Jackie’s mom who had fallen a week or so back and broken her hip. She was in the hospital in San Diego, near where she had been living. Jackie’s brother Dennis had been in Thailand on vacation when the fall occurred and had just flown back to the States over the weekend. Since we missed most of the rush hour traffic the trip took a little less than 3 hours. We stopped at a nice restaurant for lunch (actually we both had omelets) and then headed over to the hospital. Beverly, Jackie’s mom, looked pretty good for someone with a broken hip. She was pretty chipper and said she didn’t have any real pain, just uncomfortable being in bed all the time. Shortly after we arrived in the room Dennis came in and we all had a nice visit.
Speaking of hospital visits, we were really taken aback when we arrived at Scripps Mercy Hospital. To get into the hospital you have to go through a security checkpoint where they check you for flu symptoms. Then you have to go to a desk and register to see a patient. Each patient is only allowed a total of four visitors for the entire hospital stay. When we checked in there were already three names on the list, so they initially told Jackie that only one of us could visit. I went out to sit in the lobby, but got a call from Jackie a couple minutes later telling me that I could come in because we were “out of state” relatives. That was one of the exceptions to the four visitor rule. When we arrived at Beverly’s room we had to put on sterile paper gowns and gloves before we could go in. I guess the swine flu and seasonal flu “pandemic” has really got hospitals concerned.
After our visit we talked to Dennis a while about Beverly’s future. He said that she will be transferred from the hospital to a nursing facility within the next couple of days. She is not a candidate for surgery because of her age, 91, and a heart problem. They said she had about a 10 percent chance of surviving a surgery. Basically she will go to a hospice facility and be bedridden for the rest of her days. Dennis said he would keep us posted. After that we headed back North to try and be out of San Diego before the rush hour started. After a stop at Costco in Moreno Valley we got back to the coach about 6:30 p.m. and settled in for the rest of the night.
Tuesday morning, the 26th, we headed out after lunch into La Quinta and Indio to do some shopping and our laundry. After our chores we went to Cactus Jack’s, our favorite bar in Indio, and met our best friends Barry and Colleen for a cocktail. While we were there we got some dinners to go because we were heading over to the Elk’s Lodge for a meeting our the Indio Elk’s RV Club, of which we are members. We knew by the time we got out of the meeting we would want to head home, so we wanted to have our dinner already made. The meeting was fun, we got to see a lot of our old friends. After the meeting we headed home and had our preplanned dinner. Yea! Good plan!
Wednesday we didn’t do much of anything. It was “yard sale” day at the park so we put a table out with a bunch of clothes that Jackie had cleaned out of her closet a couple weeks ago. We were originally going to take them to the Goodwill and donate them, but we figured we’d see if any of it sold. We made $11. Better than a sharp stick in the eye. We were going to go out and do some more shopping, but got lazy and just stayed in all day.
Thursday, January 28th we decided to do some caching. We hadn’t been caching in about week because of all the rally activities in Quartzsite. We had a pretty good afternoon, finding a total of eleven caches with NO DNF’s. Yippee! All of our cache finds were placed by the same caching team, The Wheeler-Dealers. This team has way over a thousand caches hidden in Southern California and we have been finding them since we first started right here in Desert Hot Springs two years ago. Their caches are fun because they are very clever in the way they hide them. They are very in to camouflage. For instance, they will make phoney hollow bolts and put them in a hole in a phone pole or they may take an old spring and hide a film canister inside of it. Two of the caches we found this day were phoney bolt heads made of Mighty Putty with a small magnetic cache container inside of it. In one case the pretend bolt head was stuck on a metal guard rail and looked just like all the other bolts on the rail. We had to wiggle each one to find the phoney one. Very clever these folks! Good job Wheeler Dealers! After caching we went to the grocery store and then back to the coach for the evening.
Friday afternoon we decided to had out and do some more caching. We knew that we had plans for the weekend that would preclude any caching, and we wanted to get some more finds in. The nice thing about this area with regard to caching is that there is a very active caching community. That means that there are always new caches being put out, so that even though we have cached in this area several times over the last couple of years, there are always numerous new caches to find. Wheeler-Dealer alone has put out dozens of new caches in just the last month or two. So we headed out and within about three hours had netted 12 more finds, again without any DNF’s.
After caching we headed over to the Desert Hot Springs Elks Lodge. We know quite a few people who belong to the lodge, and we are members of their RV group, the Desert Roadrunners. Since it was Friday night we expected that we might run into a few folks we know. We got there about 4:30 and were the first customers in the bar. We did remember the bartender, Ron, from last year. After a while people started drifting in, but we only had one other person we knew come in. We thought about staying for Friday night dinner, but then discovered that everything they were serving was fried. They had chicken, fish shrimp, all fried and all served with French fries. It seems that last year a disgruntled member notified the Riverside County Health Department that the lodge was operating an unlicensed kitchen for commercial purposes. The Health Department came out all pissed off and closed the kitchen and set out all kinds of demands for any reconstruction. The bottom line was that they are going to have to spend over $60,000 to remodel their kitchen. So right not the only food they can prepare on premises are on the BBQ or in the deep fryer, both of which are located out on the patio. Everything else, cole slaw, potato salad, etc., need to be cooked at someone’s home and then brought in.
After deciding we didn’t want dinner at the lodge we started home trying to decide what to have for dinner. We hadn’t taken anything out of the freezer and we finally settled on trying a little Mexican restaurant located just down the street from the RV park we were staying in. We have seen a lot of cars in the parking lot of Manuel’s Restaurant over the last week and figured it must be OK to have the number of customers they seem to have. We pulled up and found only a couple of cars, but it was almost 7 p.m. and most RVers (this part of Desert Hot Springs is wall to wall RV parks) eat early. From the outside I almost expected it to be a bit of a dump and more like a taqueria than a restaurant. However, when we got inside we found a very clean, albeit simple, restaurant with a very extensive menu. They even had an Italian section on the menu, something you don’t see in a Mexican restaurant very often, if at all. The salsa was homemade and VERY good. Jackie had chicken fajitas and I had carne asada and both were excellent. For those of you who read that blog that occasionally find themselves in the Desert Hot Springs area I would strongly recommend that you give Manuel’s a try if you like Mexican food. It is located next to the market on the corner of Dillon and Corkill Roads.
Saturday, January 30th we headed down into Indio mid afternoon to run some errands and do some shopping. Late afternoon we went over to the Motorcoach Country Club (former Outdoor Resorts) to spend some time with Barry and Colleen. We got there in time to fix a cocktail and get on their little electric boat and spend an hour or so out on the waterway. The weather was great, no wind and about 70 degrees. Considering what I saw on the morning news was going on in most of the rest of the U.S. weather-wise, it made it even more pleasant. We spent the rest of the afternoon and evening visiting and having a nice dinner with just the four of us. They did have some good news for us, they are finally getting what seem to be fairly serious nibbles on their lot. They want so much to be able to sell their lot, retire and hit the road like us. They have no offers on the table yet, but all our fingers are crossed.
Sunday morning we got up and out early to head South to San Diego and another visit with Jackie’s mom. A couple of days prior she was transferred from the hospital to a convalescent home in El Cajon, a few miles East of San Diego on I-8. We stopped for lunch and then headed over to the Granite Hills Convalescent Home about 1:00 or so. Jackie’s brother Dennis had told her that one of their cousin’s and his wife were down from the Los Angeles area visiting Jackie’s mom. Howard Rosen and his wife Carol were in Beverly’s room when we arrived. Howard is the son of Jackie’s dad’s youngest brother and is the same age as Jackie. Jackie said that she had not seen Howard since the early 1960's. Howard and Carol were very nice and we had a very pleasant visit. Howard is the self-appointed historian for the Rosen family and he had a lot of stories and pictures going back to the 40's and 50's. He also did a little bit of a “living history” interview with Beverly, trying to garner some additional family history. Jackie’s brother Dennis arrived not too long after we did so the room was pretty full.
The home that Beverly is in is a little depressing, but I think all of those types of places are. The hallways are full of very old, frail women puttering around in wheelchairs. Some of the women are clearly suffering from various stages of dementia. Although the place is clean, it looks a little tired - in need of paint and new carpet. At least the rooms are large and Beverly is in a room with just one bed. I am not sure how she would react if told she had to have a roommate. Don’t want to be around if that announcement is ever made. Beverly is looking very frail now, although she still seems to be in fairly good spirits, at least while everyone
was in the room. She did exhibit signs that she is having some pain from her hip which she had not had during our past visit. I suspect that the healing process is starting and movement disturbs that process. As I mentioned earlier, she will not be having any surgery on the hip because of other health issues, so she will be bed ridden for a long time. One little highlight of the visit was a birthday celebration for Beverly. She turned 91 today. We brought a dozen small cupcakes and some birthday candles so we lit the candles and all sang happy birthday to her. She seemed very pleased to have everyone there to celebrate her birthday. After visiting with Jackie’s relatives we stopped at the care home where Beverly was living before she fell to pick up some odds and ends and then headed back North to Desert Hot Springs.Monday, February 1st was the day that I planned to finally do my annual (sort of) cleaning out of the storage bays under the coach. When I do this I try to get rid of anything that hasn’t been used in the last year or two or that I feel we don’t need anymore. It took me four hours to complete, but I was very happy with the results. I would guess that I eliminated a couple of hundred pounds of weight (very important to a full time motorhomer) and cleared a lot of the clutter in the bays. It also gave me the opportunity to clean out some of the dust that accumulated in the bays during our trip to Alaska this summer. We went through some pretty dusty conditions and a fair amount of it found it’s way into the bays despite the door seals. We also went through our big Tupperware tubs of dressy clothes and managed to get down to a single tub. It’s big, probably four foot long, but when we first started in 2005 we had four of them full of clothes down in the bay. A couple years ago we pared it down to two and now we have only one. I got rid of my tux and all the accessories as well as a couple of sport coats. A couple of years ago I adopted a no tie policy and it worked out well on our last two cruises. I kept one suit, one sport coat and a few dressy Hawaiian shirts that I only use on cruises. Jackie only kept a couple of dressy jackets. Most of the stuff I cleaned out got thrown away, but we have a couple things that need to go into storage and a couple of bags of clothes that we will take to a charity. Although I am pretty stiff and sore, I feel good about my day’s work.
Tuesday we headed down into Indio after lunch to visit our storage unit and one of the thrift stores to get rid of the stuff that we cleaned out of the coach the day before. We had a whole backseat full of stuff to get rid of. Most of it went to the thrift store, but I did have couple of items for storage. Later on in the afternoon we headed over to the Jackalope Ranch Restaurant for an early dinner with our friends Jay and Donna Blumenthal. We have been acquainted with Jay and Donna for about three years, having met them at an FMCA rally. At the time Jay was the President of the International Area of FMCA. We had several mutual friends as well as some other commonalities. We both have Monaco coaches and they are also Elks. As a matter of fact, their “home” lodge is the Indio Lodge, which we belonged to before we “moved” to Nevada. They are also full timers. Jay is no longer President of the Area, having served two terms, so they are free to travel a little more on their own schedule rather than wrapped around the schedule of various FMCA rallies and meetings. Although they are originally from New York, they try to spend all of their winters in Southern California and Arizona as we do. Jay and Donna had been assistant rally masters at the INTO rally in Quartzsite, so we saw a lot of them for the week we were there, but they were busy with the rally and we never had time to really visit.
We met at the Jackalope Ranch, a new restaurant in Indio. It was built a couple of years ago, originally to be a new Babe’s BBQ restaurant. There is a Babe’s in Rancho Mirage that has been very successful. However, when the recession hit Babe’s backed out and another company purchased the nearly completed building. They opened it as the Jackalope Ranch, a general casual dining restaurant. At the time it was built it had the distinction of being the most expensive restaurant building ever built in Indio. Their current claim to fame is their happy hour, which runs from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. every day where drinks are discounted and all of the bar food is half price. The place has developed a reputation for good food and seems to be packed most days. We have been dying to go there, and we had several meetings with friends scheduled there over the last year, but all of them fell through. This time we made it and we were not disappointed. The food was plentiful and excellent and the drinks were pretty good size. Jackie and I both agree that the Jackalope Ranch may be our new favorite spot in Indio to eat and drink. For those that want to try it and are in the area, it is on Highway 111, just East of Jefferson Street in Indio. You won’t be sorry you tried it.
We had a very nice meal and a very nice visit with the Blumenthal’s. We will cross paths with them again down in Yuma in a couple of weeks, and I am sure that we will see them at the FMCA rally in Redmond, Oregon in August. Ordinarily, we would also see them in Albuquerque in April for the FMCA rally. However, they told us that for the first time in many years they were skipping a major FMCA event to stay in the Coachella Valley for the big tennis tournament. They are big tennis fans and their FMCA responsibilities have caused them to miss many good matches they would have like to have seen. This year they get to see one. Good for them. Since they were from New York and had lived their most of their lives we also got some good hints from them for our tentative summer 2011 exploration of New England and Eastern Canada. We haven’t set any hard plans in place yet, but that is an area we have been wanting to see for quite some time. After dinner we headed back to DHS and relaxed for the rest of the evening.
Wednesday, February 3rd was a chores day. On Thursday we are driving the car up to Las Vegas to meet Helen, Jackie’s lifelong girlfriend who lives back in Massachusetts. She had called us several months ago and told us that she was coming out to Las Vegas for the Super Bowl and wanted us to come up and spend a few days with her. Since we knew we were going to be staying in Desert Hot Springs, less than 300 miles away, we told her we could come up on Thursday and stay two nights. We have to leave the park in Desert Hot Springs on Sunday, so we have to drive back from Vegas on Saturday. She is staying at the Mandalay Bay on the Strip and has a double room, so we will just stay with her for the two nights.
So on Wednesday I had to take down some of the outside decorations like the flagpole, lights and patio mats and put them away so I wouldn’t have so much to do on Sunday when we leave. I also wanted to get any items that might blow around if the wind came up while we are gone. The cat will be fine for two days with his food and water. I also took the car down to Cathedral City, a few miles South of where we are staying, to have my friend Barry check the transmission fluid. He owns and operates a transmission shop so I thought I would take advantage of his expertise before the long trip. The fluid was fine. The rest of the day we spent relaxing and packing, although we don’t need much for a three day, two night casual trip.
Thursday, February 4th we headed out of Desert Hot Springs about 10 a.m. on our way to Las Vegas. We had 277 miles to drive, but since we were in the car and it was freeway all the way up, we figured between four and five hours. We stopped in
Barstow for lunch at a Carl’s Jr. and ended up arriving in Las Vegas about 2:30. Since Helen’s plane didn’t arrive until 7 p.m. we had some time to kill so we went downtown to see if we could catch my brother Russ at work. He is a box man at a craps table at the Golden Nugget on Fremont Street. We were lucky to catch him on his break and got to visit with him for a little while before he had to go back to work. After visiting with him we spent a couple hours walking around the old downtown Vegas, hitting a number of the old, original casinos. I was very disappointed to see that except for the Nugget and the Four Queens, all the rest of the downtown casinos have become very run down and dingy looking. The Plaza, which was one of the nicest casinos downtown 25 years ago is a complete rathole.
After spending some time downtown we drove down the strip towards the Mandalay Bay, which is on the far South end of the strip near the airport. The traffic was surprisingly light on the strip and we made good time, so we decided to run out to the Bass Pro Shop sporting goods store a couple of miles South of the Mandalay Bay. I have been trying to find new .32 caliber ammunition for the Colt automatic I decided to carry in the car. The ammo that I got with the gun had to be at least 20 years old, if not way older. I know that my dad got the gun in the 50's and some of the ammo could go all the way back to then. Unfortunately, handgun ammo is getting very hard to find. I could not find any gun shop in California that had any .32 caliber ammunition. Since Bass Pro Shops is one of the largest sporting goods stores in the country, I hoped that they would have some. Luckily, they did have some ammo and I was also able to get a light holster to put the gun in to keep it from getting scratched up while in the glove box of the car. As we were leaving the store we got a call from Helen that her plane had just landed and she was waiting for her luggage. We told her we would try to get to the airport to pick her up since we were pretty close by. We drove into the Las Vegas Airport and found that we had no idea where to go to pick up passengers. The airport is huge and the signs are very confusing, especially since we had never driven into there before. We finally said the heck with it and called Helen back and told her to take a cab to the hotel and we would meet her there. She told us that the hotel had sent a couple of limos to pick up their party, so we would not need to try and find her anyway.
With that we headed over to the Mandalay Bay, left the car with the valet and went inside to wait for Helen. Finally, about 40 minutes later, Helen and her group came in. It turns out that the entire trip was comped by the hotel to Helen’s cousin Michael because he is a high roller at the Mandalay. They flew eight people out from Massachusetts and were providing four rooms, including a penthouse suite for Michael and his wife. Their whole group also had tickets to a big Super Bowl party on Sunday. Everything for the weekend, rooms, meals and the party, were comped. After Helen registered we went up to the room which was a nice big room on the 33rd floor facing North up the strip. After we got settled in we went down to the casino and had dinner in the coffee shop. We then spent the rest of the evening in the Mandalay Bay casino. I managed to get through the entire evening without losing any money. I didn’t win big, but I broke even, which is winning in Las Vegas!
Friday, February 5th was my birthday. Jackie and Helen were kidding me about waking up on my birthday in a hotel room with two women. After lunch we spent some time wandering around the Mandalay Bay, then went over to a couple of other casinos nearby, including the New York and the Luxor. Jackie and I were just doing light gambling, nothing spectacular. When we finally went back to the room Friday night I was even for the weekend and Jackie was only down a couple hundred dollars. We did have a chance to meet the rest of Helen’s group for cocktails. They were a nice friendly group. Michael is actually Helen’s late husband Joe’s cousin.
Saturday morning we were up and back in the car headed South by 10 a.m. again. This time we stopped in Baker at The Mad Greek, a restaurant that Jackie had heard about. The food was very good, especially for a restaurant in a podunk desert town like Baker. We arrived back in Desert Hot Springs by 3 p.m. despite driving in poor weather much of the way. We were in and out of the rain for the entire trip, with some of the rain very heavy. We were fortunate that it was a warm storm and there was no snow in the Cajon Pass on Interstate 15. The Cajon Pass is notorious for being closed in storms because of snow fall. By the way, for those following the saga of the new Jeep - it ran great! We went both ways (about 525 miles total) at freeway speeds and the car performed superbly. I think I am beginning to love this car again!
Sunday, February 7th we woke up in Desert Hot Springs to clear weather and prepared the coach for travel. We were leaving DHS and heading Southeast to Winterhaven, near Yuma, Arizona. It was only about 140 miles and we got on the road about 10 a.m. This was also our sixth wedding anniversary, so we exchanged cards before heading out on the road. We got into the Pilot Knob RV park about 2:30 and had plenty of time to get set up before the Super Bowl game started. We spent the rest of the afternoon watching the game. Go Saints! Yea!
Monday we decided to have a “veg” day and just stayed around the coach playing and doing busy work. Tuesday we decided we were still lazy and had a second veg day. Not too often we have two stay-in days in a row, but it just felt right.
Wednesday we headed into Yuma to take care of some errands. Our first stop was the Verizon Wireless store. We had been notified that we were eligible for our “new every two” upgrade allowance so we wanted to see what kind of options we might have. Jackie had expressed an interest in getting one of the new “smart” phones with data service so she could get emails on her phone and also for our geocaching. We found that there were applications for the Blackberry phone from Verizon which would enable us to quickly check for caches anywhere we were. That way if we found ourselves somewhere with some time on our hands and no prearranged cache list, we would be able to check to see if there were any nearby. Our friends Jay and Donna have that application on their iPhones and we have seen it work. After talking to the guy at the store for a while we found that we could get the Blackberry Storm, a very nice phone similar in appearance to the iPhone, for only $40 after our upgrade allowance and rebates, and only an additional $30 a month for the data service. We decided that we only needed one “smart” phone, I could get by with just a regular old phone. We did the deal and now Jackie has a cool new toy. After the phone store we did a little more shopping and then headed home. We also stopped by the Yuma Elks Lodge to pick up a schedule, but we just ran in and got the schedule, didn’t even stop for a drink this trip. That evening we spent several hours playing with the new phone and learning all the features. We also did some setup on some of the features.
Thursday, February 11th we headed into Yuma again in the middle of the afternoon. We had to run by the Best Buy store to get some gadgets for the new phone, car charger, screen protector, that sort of thing. We also had to find someplace that had income tax forms. The government used to have them at post offices, but when we stopped at the Yuma main post office yesterday there were no forms. We stopped at the Winterhaven, California post office on the way into town and found they didn’t have any either. I talked to the clerk and she said that the post office no longer handles tax forms, but she thought the main library in Yuma had them. She told me where the library was. After hitting Best Buy we went to the library and they did have all the forms we needed. We used to have our taxes done by the accountant in Indiana that handled a corporation that Jackie was a limited partner of. However, that corporation was closed last year and we no longer have the complications of capital gains or losses, so I decided I could do our taxes myself this year instead of having the accountant do them for $250.
After I got the forms we tried out the new phone app for caching. We turned it on in the parking lot of the library and it found several caches nearby. We went to one of them which was in a park near the library. It took us a while to find it, but we finally located it on an old tractor that was sitting on display. Our first ‘instant” cache! Yea! After a quick stop at Wally World, we headed home for the evening.
Friday, February 12th we went into Yuma to do our laundry and a little bit of caching afterwards. We found six caches fairly quickly, including two which had eluded us back in December when we were here. It’s always good to “make up” DNF’s on a later visit. Later in the afternoon we went to the Quechan Casino, located just a few miles from our RV park. It’s a brand new casino, just open this past fall, and they have a great Friday seafood buffet. Unlike a lot of seafood buffets, this one is not all fried foods. Among other things they have real steamed King Crab legs. It’s about $15 a person, but well worth it considering the quality of the food. We had agreed to meet the Babcock’s and Wilson’s there for dinner. Because the place was so crowded we couldn’t get a table for six so we didn’t get to sit with the Wilson’s, only Ray and Suzie. We did have a great meal though - I ate way too much crab, as if that can happen!
Saturday we headed into town again, this time to go to the big swap meet near the airport. I say swap meet, but it is really 99% new stuff. We enjoyed spending a couple of hours strolling though the booths, and even bought a few odds and ends. After the swap meet we went back to the Verizon store to get my phone. When we got Jackie’s new phone on Wednesday they didn’t have any of the basic LG flip phones in stock for my upgrade. I got the new phone and we also signed up for Verizon’s wireless internet service. We have used T-Mobile for our internet since we started full time in 2005, but it is slow and their internet coverage is somewhat spotty. Most of the people we have talked to with the Verizon service have been very happy, so we decided to switch. Hopefully, we will be happy as well because we rely on our cell internet for consistent internet access. Without the internet it would be hard for us to pay our bills and stay in touch with family and friends. Fulltimers live by the internet and cell phone!
Sunday, February 14th, Valentine’s Day. We got up early this morning to head West to El Cajon, near San Diego, to visit with Jackie’s mom. She is still laid up in bed with her broken hip in a convalescent home in El Cajon. We found it was actually a couple of miles less to drive than it was when we were up in Desert Hot Springs, only 144 miles. And, all of it was freeway so we made good time. We got to El Cajon in a little over two hours. Before we went to the home we stopped for lunch at a place called the Antique Row Café in El Cajon. A couple of weeks prior we had been reading an article in one of our RV magazines about old Highway 80, which was the first true transcontinental Federal highway, running from Los Angeles to Jacksonville, Florida. The article was highlighting the first stretch of the old road from San Diego to Yuma and had a write-up about the Antique Row Café in El Cajon. It sounded like a neat place, and it was only a few blocks from the place where Jackie’s mom is staying. When we got to the café we found a lot of people waiting, however, it only took about 25 minutes for us to get a booth, not too bad for noon on a Sunday, and Valentine’s Day no less. The place is a true café, only serving breakfast and lunch, but there was a pretty extensive menu, especially the breakfast items. We were surprised to be served our food in about 10 minutes despite the packed house. The service was excellent and the food was fantastic. The portions on everything we saw being served were huge, some of the largest I have seen. Jackie had a gigantic veggie omelet and I had a beef dip. I think there was over a half pound of roast beef on my sandwich, along with a huge plate of fries. I had all I could do to finish everything on my plate and the taste was excellent. Best of all, the bill was under $20 for the both of us. I would highly recommend the Antique Row Café for anyone who finds themselves in the El Cajon, California area looking for good service, good food and lots of it. The café is on Main Street and Ballard, a couple blocks off the I-8 freeway.
After lunch we headed over to the home and had a nice visit with Jackie’s mom and her brother Dennis who was also visiting. Beverly still seems to be in pretty good spirits, although, not surprisingly, she is getting tired of being in bed 24/7. We spent a couple of hours with her and then headed back East to Winterhaven and our RV. We didn’t even have a full dinner because we were still full from the big lunch.
Monday, February 15th we went into Yuma to have lunch with our friends Gary and Ramona. We had met them, along with Ray and Suzie, several years ago at a Monaco rally. Like Ray and Suzy they have a Diplomat. Gary and Ramona and Ray and Suzy hang out a lot and are parked together in an RV park near Yuma. We had a very nice lunch at Mimi’s Café and enjoyed our conversation with them. Gary and Ramona spent last summer work-camping for the U.S. Forest Service in Northern Colorado. They had to work five months, 40 hours per day each. They made minimum wage and got free camping, so they were able to both make and save money for the summer. Their jobs involved maintenance at a number of Forest Service campgrounds in the area. While the idea of being able to put aside some money is enticing, neither Jackie nor I really want to do that kind of work right now. We are enjoying our full retirement
too much right now. After lunch we elected to head out in the afternoon to do some geocaching. We decided to go after a series of caches set in the farming country along the California side of the Colorado River, North of Yuma. The caches were placed several miles apart, however we were still able to collect seven in a couple of hours without any DNF’s. We did see a couple of interesting sights while caching. One of the caches was hidden on an old tractor in large equipment museum. One would not expect to see such a cool collection of antique equipment out in the middle of
nowhere, but there it was. We also came around the back side of the U.S. Army Proving Grounds, which is on the Arizona side of the river, and found a big display of tanks and other Army vehicles. The proving grounds is where the Army does desert testing of a lot of their equipment. After caching we headed home for the evening.Tuesday morning we got up early and headed to Algodones, Mexico for the day. Before heading to the border we picked up Ray Babcock at his RV park so he could go with us. Suzie, his wife, doesn’t care for Mexico much so she elected to stay home. We got into Mexico about 10:30 a.m. and took Ray over to our dentist to see if he could get an appointment to get his teeth cleaned. We had told him we liked our dentist down there and he needed a cleaning. While he was getting his teeth cleaned I headed over to the optician to get an eye exam and new glasses. The nice thing about Algodones is that not only are the glasses much less expensive than in the states, you can get them the same day. The exam revealed that my prescription had changed just a little in the last two years, but I went ahead and got new glasses anyway because my old one’s were getting scratched and hazy with age. While we were waiting for the glasses to be made we went to lunch at an excellent restaurant called the El Rancharito, had some good food and a more than a couple of margaritas and beers. We then went out and did some shopping around town. We only bought some booze and I got a t-shirt. I also went to the jewelry shop we visit in Algodones, called The Mine. In my opinion it is the ONLY reputable place in Algadones to buy jewelry. Everything they make there is real silver and well made. They also back their products. I had pulled apart a weld on a ring I bought there several years ago and they fixed it for me at no charge, plus gave us free beer and tequila! Over the years Jackie and I have bought a number of items there and have always been happy. One of the owners, a guy who goes by the nickname Memo, remembers us and calls us “the happy campers” because of the motorhome picture on our card.
After I picked up my glasses we headed for the border to go across and found the line to cross stretched for about a half mile. It took us about and hour and a half to get through the border. Jackie and I passed with no problems but Ray got pulled aside because he had bought a carton of cigarettes and when the customs agent asked him when the last time he brought in cigarettes was he said, “two or three weeks ago”. Turns out you can only bring in one carton per month, so they pulled him aside and made him pay a $10 duty on the carton. After we dropped Ray the Smuggler off at his coach we headed home for the rest of the night.
Wednesday, February 17th was a fairly relaxing day. We had made plans to meet with Ray and Suzie and Gary and Ramona over at their RV park late afternoon for cocktails and dinner. Until then, we had no plans. About 3:30 p.m. we headed over to Ray’s coach for the evening. We had some drinks and then Ray served up a great taco salad buffet. The six of us just sat and talked until about 8:00 or so before we headed home. When we first got to Ray’s coach there was a group of amateur musicians that were playing country music at a coach behind Ray’s. They were actually pretty good and we enjoyed listening to the music. Ray said that it was just a group of snowbirds who all came to this same park every winter and who get together once a week or so to play and enjoy their music. We had a very nice evening visiting with our friends. Thanks Ray and Suzy.
Thursday we headed into Yuma to have lunch with some other friends at Chretin’s Mexican Restaurant, one of the better Mexican places in Yuma. Charlie and Sharon are fellow Monaco owners who we meet on the road periodically, most recently here in Yuma when we were here in December. When we had mentioned Charlie and Sharon at last night’s get together Ray and Gary indicated that they would like to come to lunch to because they also know Charlie and Sharon and haven’t seen them since the last Monaco rally in Tucson back in October. The eight of us had a very nice lunch and then went back out to the Yuma Market Place swap meet to do some shopping. We had been there last Saturday, but we got a late start and hadn’t been able to get through the whole place before they closed. In addition, Jackie had a blouse she had bought there that she wanted to exchange. We spent a couple of hours walking around the market place, then headed out to Wally World for some shopping before heading back to the coach for the evening. Friday was a stay at home and veg day. I managed to get our taxes done (ugh!) as well as some other administrative stuff. Other than that, we didn’t go anywhere and we managed to have two meals in the coach for the first time in a week.
Saturday, February 20th, our last day in the Yuma area. We had previously made plans to attend a geocaching event this afternoon at a place called Lute’s Casino, in old town Yuma. Yesterday we got a call from Ray Babcock asking if we wanted to have lunch with them and Gary and Ramona one last time before we leave. They
suggested, of all places, Lute’s Casino in old town. We told them about the event and that it would work out perfectly. So we headed into Yuma and had a wonderful lunch at Lute’s. The building that Lute’s is in used to be a pool hall and had been built at the turn of the century. The place had a bad reputation. This is what it says on their web site about the history of the building. Built in 1901 right in the heart of old downtown Yuma Arizona. It looks old, like old places should. It was built as a general store with a hotel located on the second floor, with the hotel balcony overlooking main street. You ask one of the Lutes why they named the place a casino? "There's no gambling now, of course, but years ago there used to be gambling in here. They paid off the local authorities, and there was a trap door right behind you that went down to the basement where the gambling took place." The place inside looks like there'd be fights and derelicts and stuff hanging around, but there's never any trouble. Everyone's mostly congenial. In the past decade it's become "chic", you might say, to come here. We got to the place about 12:30 and there was a long line to get in. Lute’s is a very popular place. We got in after about 15 minutes and all six of us were served inside of 30 minutes. The inside of the restaurant is worth the wait to get in. They have all kinds of old stuff on the walls and hanging from the ceiling. They have a lot of celebrity posters and their web site claims that many of them have actually visited the bar. They have a very large staff and the service is excellent. The food is typical bar food, burgers, fries, sandwiches, that sort of thing, but it was very tasty. And the best part, the meals are relatively inexpensive. We had a great meal and some nice conversation with our friends.
After lunch we did a little shopping on Main Street and got ready for our caching event. We have been to several events over the last couple of years we have been caching. They are really just gatherings, “meet and greet” they call them, for geocachers in the area. The local caching club, the “Southwest Arizona Geocachers - SWAG” was putting on the event. The events are published on the international caching website, geocaching.com so everyone is aware of events in their area. Although we are not members of SWAG, all cachers were welcome at this event.
The caching event was preceded by what they call a “flash mob” event. The “flash mob” phenomenon started several years ago when phone texting become widely available and used. The idea is to announce some sort of silly public event or gathering by texting your friends, who then text their friends, and so on. The idea is to get a large group of people to just show up at some public place at a specific time, do
something, and then disperse as if nothing happened. I have read about nude flash mobs, silly costume flash mobs, all sorts of things. This one happened to be a bubble event. Everyone was told to bring something to blow soap bubbles with, show up near the fountain in front of Lute’s on Main Street in Yuma at 2:45 p.m. and make bubbles. At 2:45 there were over a hundred people around the fountain. Someone blew a horn and everybody started making bubbles. It was really a pretty cool, albeit silly, event. After 15 minutes they blew another horn and the flash mob event was over. Normally a real flash mob with just disperse. In this case most everyone headed into Lute’s Casino for the actual caching event. There were a couple of hundred cachers in there and we got to meet a few of the caching teams that we have seen as
signatures on logs in caches we have found. We also talked to a couple of caching teams that we already knew who live in this area. Since we didn’t know a lot of people we only stayed about an hour, but we got credit on the web site for attending the event. We had a great time and it was by far the largest caching event we have been to.After the event we did some shopping and then headed home for the night. I finished cleaning up the outside stuff, sun shades, chairs etc., in preparation for tomorrow’s travels. Sunday we pack up and leave Winterhaven, California and the Yuma, Arizona area and head Northeast to Casa Grande, Arizona, in the central part of the state. And with the end of this day I will close this episode of our travels. It has been four weeks in two different locations and it is time to put this on the blog and start a new chapter. Until the next time you hear from us, happy trails and wonderful days to all of you.
