Out In The Arizona Desert

We made it out to the desert after traveling 1100 miles.  We drove a few hundred miles a day except for Sunday when we just had to have a down day so we could watch the football playoffs.  We’ve been traveling with Jim & Ellie and they like football as much as we do.  None of us root for the same team and NONE of our teams are in the Superbowl so we’re all still friends. 

While out here we don’t have any hookups.  For my non RV’ing friends, this is called “boondocking”.  We don’t have any electric hookups, no water hookups and we have to store our waste in our holding tanks.  We have a 2,000 watt inverter and a generator to power that. 

It takes quite awhile before we have to go to town to empty our holding tanks.  There is a city park here that charges $10 to dump our tanks and fill up with fresh water.  We went ahead and dumped our tanks because we had to fill up with propane anyway.  We figure we should be good for another week though.  Since this is all new to us too, we don’t know what our limitations are yet.  I didn’t want to experience this if we had to give up a whole lot and I didn’t want to pretend we were “camping”.  So far the only thing I don’t like is having to take “Navy showers”.  That’s where you get wet, shut off the water, soap up, shut off the water, rinse off.  Not a big fan of that but it’s a small price to pay for all this solitude.

Last stop to fill up with water before the desert

When we got to the desert the only ones that were there were JB & Brenda and Mike & Janna.  We scouted around until we found the perfect spot.  After putting up the satellite dish and leveling we headed over to JB & Brenda’s for Happy Hour and dinner.  They had prepared a feast for us.

Our sunset on the first night there

Soon after our group grew to fourteen!!  It’s such a beautiful spot out here I can see why others wanted to come.  Rollie & Gina,  Glenn & Sylvia and Mike & Pat all came on the same day.

Everybody was digging in to the buffet at Ellie’s birthday celebration!

Yummy cupcakes

A special one for Ellie

Rod and I have only been on one hike since we’ve been here.  It’s been so cold lately and then the wind kicked up bad so it’s just no fun to be out in it.

We found several beautiful saguaro cactus here

We also found a power pole but I don’t think it has any power….

Rod decided to take care of some dental work that really needed to be done and the closest place to have it done is in Lake Havasu City which is an hour and half drive from here.  Oh well, it had to be done.  He’d been putting it off long enough.

One of the perks of turning 62 (Ellie) is that you can sign up for a card to get into all the National Parks for free.  You pay a one time fee of $10 and they give you a what I call the “Geezer Card”.  Ellie & Jim decided to tag along with us to Lake Havasu City and while Rod was “relaxing” in the dentist chair we went over to the BLM office to get her card.

She looks so proud, doesn’t she??

The BLM office was somewhat of a museum with tanks of live snakes.  There was even a Gila Monster.  It was really cool looking at these things through the glass.  I had never seen a Gila Monster before.

Gila Monster!

Rattlesnake!

California King Snake

Another perk about going to Lake Havasu City

So, that about catches up to what we’ve been up to lately.  Mostly, potlucks, Happy Hours and shopping trips.  I think we’re going to move from our site again because we found another one that we like even better.  Although we love the spot we’re in right now it’s kinda soft and our front jacks are sinking into the sand below the rocks.

We can’t even see our “neighbors”