March Travels

Our entertainment in the California desert continued through the middle of March....card playing, ATV riding, BBQ cookouts, the Arizona market and campfires in the evening.   Our tourist travel included the Peanut Patch, the Cloud Museum, the Imperial Date ranch, and the Sanguinetti House Museum (picture of one of the rooms in the home).  Some RVers in our camp headed home and some came to spend some time ~ new friends we met were Shelley and Jim from Oregon.

Before Linda & Mike left we had this picture taken with time exposure from Tony's camera.  Left to right:  Linda (Tony's cousin), Mike (Linda's husband), Jeanne (Dan's wife), Tony, Sharon, Dan (Mike's dad).

A trip with Dan and Jeanne found an entrepreneur on the side of a street in Winter Haven, California ....selling oranges (picture shows Dan as a customer).

All was very quiet in our little portion of the world until Sunday, March 7th when the rain came ~ along with massive amounts of water running rapidly through what down here they call the "wash".....a ditch right behind our campsites.  The picture shows the road we would ordinarily travel to the highway on....now looking like a river bed.  We were landlocked....unable to get out of our area for about four hours except on our ATV....we attempted to leave in three different directions with no luck.  When the water subsided we were able to go to town to do laundry, stock up on groceries, dump the RV and refill with water and propane...all in anticipation for my uncles to arrive on my birthday, March 8th.  The road just off the interstate was closed but they allowed us to travel back and forth on the five mile stretch of road to our campsite

On Monday, March 8th, Cousin Janice and Archie returned to spend more time on the desert with us in the middle of the afternoon.  What a birthday I had.....I have never heard from so many people .... phone calls, voice mail, text messages, facebook messages (thank you all for all of the "Happy Birthday" wishes) and the biggest surprise of all......when Uncles Bob (Janice's dad from South Dakota) and Leo (Nebraska) called to say they had arrived at the designated spot a mile from our campsite where we were to meet them.  We jumped in the car to go direct them to our campsite.....much to our surprise there were two cars waiting at the spot....brother Ray and his wife Judi (from Seattle, Washington) also had driven down to spend a few days with us.  I cooked a huge pot of spaghetti and Janice made a salad.  Jeanne and Dan had gotten cake and ice cream....and I had one great birthday.  Fourteen friends and relatives in our RV singing "Happy Birthday"  Thank you everyone!!!!  This is one I will never forget!!  Picture is of me with too many candles!!

We all went to the Cloud Museum (over 100 Model Ts and much other old memorabilia)

This is a picture of an old sink and cabinets like my Mom used to have in her kitchen in Alliance before updating.

... and a picture of Leo, Ray, Bob, Janice, Judi, and Archie at the Cloud Museum.

..... just a sample of the memoriabilia at the Cloud Museum.

We traveled on down to the Imperial Date Farm.  Somewhere along the way Bob ended up with a nail in his tire....this necessitated a trip to our favorite tire repair shop (pictured are Leo, Ray, Archie, Tony & Bob and Bob's car getting repaired).

Leo's daughter, Julie, drove over on Wednesday from Redlands, California, to spend a couple days with us also... our RV living room was wall to wall people .  This is a picture of our "parking lot" in the desert (Tony's, Bob's, Ray's and Julie's car with Archie and Janice's 5th wheel in the background)

Tony and I took Bob and Leo to the Plank Road and the USA/Mexico border fence and then on into Yuma to see the Old Town Yuma and the prison.  Later we picked up Julie and we all went to the Arizona market.  Ray and Judi followed us in their car for part of the day and later we all met at the market before coming back to the campsite.  This is a picture of Bob and I with Bob wearing my purple sunglasses because he forgot his own.

One breakfast in our motorhome necessitated this picture ~ Janice & Archie always brought the coffee (not everyone was impressed with Tony's instant coffee).  This is Janice in her "come as you are" outfit.  Beside Janice is the boot saver cane that Bob brought to show the rest of the campers on our site.  Behind Janice is Judi's " motor home closet"....one special quote of the whole ordeal from Judi ~ "This is hard on me and I'm doing really good!"  I did agree, Judi did very good under the boondocking conditions that she was not accustomed to.

One night dinner steaks were provided by Judi & Ray.  Thankfully, Dan and Jeanne stayed over a few days to meet all the relatives and agreed to barbeque the steaks.  This is a picture of thawing the steaks in the motor home windshield prior to our feast.

Here is a picture of Bob trying to find something in his trunk....he brought many of his fun things ~ gave poor man's wine racks to several of the campers and spatulas to the women in the campsite.

And....a picture of all nine of us....taken with a time exposure, thanks to Tony.  Front row, Tony, Sharon and Julie.  Back row, Janice, Archie, Leo, Bob, Judi and Ray.






When everyone left on Friday about noon (March 12th), Janice and Archie and Tony and I took a nap and then went into town for a great dinner at the Texas Roadhouse.  The next morning the four of us left the familiar campsite to move on to BLM (Bureau of Land Management) property near Tucson, Arizona.  We drove through Gila Bend, Arizona (this little town has a sign just as you enter "Gila Bend, 1700 people and 5 crabs live here")  Another learning curve for us ~ we filled the RV with diesel, around the back of the service station where the semi trucks fill up ~ seemed logical to us ~ until we found that these commercial vehicles pay thirteen cents more per gallon!!  Janice and Archie, Tony and I got set up side by side by the middle of the afternoon.

Sunday the four of us took off exploring.  We came across the Mission San Xavier, a National Historic Landmark, founded as a Catholic mission by Father Eusebio Kino in 1692.

There was a very decorated Mexican cemetery on the road to the mission.

It just happened to be the day of a Native American Pow Wow so there were a lot of people there...and a lot of Native American food vendors cooking on very primitive wood fired barbeque pits.

Archie and Janice were low on water so we went looking to fill two five gallon cans.....snapped this picture as Tony and Archie were getting water from a tap on the side of a huge casino (Desert Diamond Casino near Green Valley, Arizona).

The following day we went to the Pima Air and Space Museum (80 acres, 300 planes and 100 yeas of aviation history (one of the largest air and space museums in the world).  There were five indoor hangars and the 309th Memorial Museum (a unique museum constructed by the veterans and dedicated to one of World War II's most successful heavy bombardment groups).  We drove around to see some of the 4400 airplanes in the airplane graveyard.  The picture is of the Bumble Bee (very small plane).

This is the plaque about the Bumble Bee

Notice the "Hawaii" on the dollar bill and read the information about why on the plaque.

An interesting two pictures of why there were hundreds of patches displayed.

Later in the afternoon we visited two couples from Alliance, Nebraska who were vacationing north of Tucson (Dan and Donna Contonis and Gloria and Jim Clark).   They fed us a fantastic meal and we had an enjoyable evening with them.  Thanks to our GPS we were able to find our way back to our desert campspot in the dark.

The next day Tony and I went down to Green Valley to have lunch with my cousin Roy and to meet his friend, Judy.









That's all for now, but stay tuned for the rest of our 2010 yearly adventure in the south.