Quartzsite, AZ

Quartzsite, Arizona or as many call it – Q -- if you are an RVer, you know Quartzsite.  And if you are not an RVer, you likely never have heard of Quartzsite.  Ever since we became full time RVers, others have been asking us, “have you been to Quartzite” or, “are you going to Quartzsite”.  And when we said, “no, we will be in Florida this first winter, Texas next winter and then we will be in Arizona”, we just received the blank stares of, “how can you possibly wait three winters to get to Quartzsite”.

So, here we finally are in Quartzsite.  So, for you non-RVers, what is it all about?  Well, it is somewhat difficult to explain.  We are parked in the desert.  We are not parked in a campground in the desert, we are just parked on public desert land administered by the Bureau of Land Management – no electrical hookups, no water, no sewer,

In our immediate area, there are 60 or so RVs where the Escapees Happy Hours are taking place this week.  Spread out in all the desert around this small little dusty town are perhaps 500,000 rigs.  Why has this area become the winter gathering point for so many RVers?  Part has to do with the abundance of  public lands you can camp on and another part is the “big tent” RV show that is held here each January.  Somehow it has evolved such that there are not only all these RVers here, but there are all these vendors and dealers selling RVs, parts and accessories, and services to the RVers.  And then apparently you throw in several flea market and swap meet areas, vendors of rocks and minerals, and vendors selling all kinds of other goodies and now you have “Quartzsite”.

This is a test for us.  Except for the occasional overnight in a Walmart, we have not been dry campers.  We are loaded with fuel so we can run our generator as needed and keep our batteries charged.  We are loaded with water which we are using as sparingly as possible.  We don’t know exactly how long we will be here but it likely will be for at least two weeks with one sewer dump and water refill somewhere in the middle of our stay.

This week are the happy hours, potlucks, bonfires, fleas markets and the occasional free breakfast or lunch at the RV dealer who serves free food just to get people in the door.  Next week will be the big tent stuff.  And there will be plenty of socializing then as well.

To The Moon And Beyond

We have been tidying up the belly of our motor home while camped here in Congress, AZ.  One rule of thumb is that if you haven’t used a particular item within the last year then it is time to get rid of it.  We have rid ourselves of a number of things here leaving them on the donation table in the clubhouse.

But there was one item we were loathe to shed – our telescope.  I received the telescope as my last big anniversary present at Ford.  They reached the point on the anniversary gifts where they just handed you a catalog and told you to pick the item you wanted.  I picked a telescope as it was something we thought we would use while out camping.

We tried setting it up before we loaded it into the motor home to go fulltiming, but we didn’t know quite what we were doing and so we really never had it set up.  And for nearly two and a half years now we have been procrastinating about using it.

We invited Ranger Steve and his service dog Jin of Escapees internet forum fame over for dinner one night.  Ranger Steve said he would bring along his telescope and after dinner we would have a good look at Jupiter which he said was about the brightest thing in the night sky right now.  That lead to a conversation about how we weren’t using our telescope and he volunteered that he would help us get it set up.

Gary set up our telescope as best he could and Ranger Steve dialed in the setup for us, and without a whole lot to it.  Here we hadn’t been using it over a failed setup that was very easily rectified.  Soon, we were looking at craters on the moon and observing five of the many moons orbiting around Jupiter.

So the telescope is not going to be one of the items to leave the motorhome’s belly.  But we did discover through Ranger Steve that there are these reflecting telescopes such as the one he uses that through a whole series of mirrors greatly reduces the overall size of the unit and makes them much easier to pack away.  It could be time for another Craigslist buy and sell.

A Guitar-Picking Classmate

Gary participates in an email group with a few of his high school classmates.  They sometimes “talk” about whatever happened to this or that classmate.  And that is a bit challenging as half of their school mates came from an Air Force Base and the AF was constantly reassigning personnel in and out of the Base.

One day they happened to mention a classmate named Steve Shockley who they remembered being a budding guitar player from the AFB.  No one had seen or heard of him since his family was transferred out during his junior year.  Gary subsequently googled him and found one big clue.  There was a YouTube clip of a guy with the same name who was playing guitar and appearing twice weekly at an old west saloon in Scottsdale, Arizona.  Gary said if we ever got that way our in our travels we would go look him up and see if he was the long lost classmate.

After Gary’s win in the poker tournament (will I ever stop hearing about that), we drove on over to old historic downtown section of Scottsdale.  (We will go back there on another trip as it really looked like it would be a fun area to explore with all its old western buildings and shops.)  We easily found the Rusty Spur Saloon, walked in, and the same guy as from the video clip was up playing a guitar on stage.

There were only a handful of people in the place at the time so when he finished his song, Gary walked up and asked, “was your family in the Air Force”?  And with an affirmative answer to that question, it was, “and in the mid to late 1960’s you were stationed at a base in the cornfields of north central Indiana?”  At about that point, the guitar player was probably getting real worried about just what question was going to come next, so instead of another question, Gary told him that they were likely classmates together in school which they proceeded to confirm and then carried on a bit of reminiscing.

Over the next hour or two, Steve showed that over the years he had gone from budding to very accomplished guitar player.  The two of them tried to jog each other’s memories a bit between songs,  And during a break, the three of us had a nice conversation.  Steve appears every Monday and Tuesday afternoon at the Rusty Spur and told us that on weekends he plays in a band at a place called Geasewood Flat.  We will pass back through that area in a couple of months and will get over and enjoy some more of Steve’s guitar.

So just what did Steve think of someone from the 1960s coming to the Rusty Spur to look him up?  On balance, it seemed he got quite a good kick out of it.

And we know there are a few of Gary’s classmates who follow our blog so if any of them wish to see the video of Steve, click on the link below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjM4xbaZJI0

The Poker Pro Strikes………..

Did Gary, our self-proclaimed poker pro, strike or did he strike out in his latest poker foray?   He was needing a poker fix.  He hadn’t played since before Thanksgiving.  The online play money tournaments are just not the same as a real money game.  So, he had to find a place to play.  There are a number of Indian casinos here in Arizona.  He chose for us go travel to Scottsdale, a part of the Phoenix metro area.  We wanted to get down to that area for a couple other reasons as well.

We went to the Talking Stick Casino Resort owned and operated by the Pima and Maricopa Indians.  This is no hole-in-the-wall casino.  It has a 500 room hotel and 240,000 square feet of casino space making it the size of some of the smaller Vegas properties.

 

The poker room was even more impressive.  When you name a poker room The Arena and have a “scoreboard” hanging from the middle of it, you know it will be something big,  This one had 47 poker tables.  There were hundreds of players on a Tuesday morning.  This has to be one of the premier poker rooms in the country

We arrived a bit early and after checking out the poker room, we walked through the casino a bit.  There on the base of a slot machine Gary spotted a penny which he picked up and stuck in his pocket for good luck.

Gary entered the poker room and paid his $100 along with 79 other players.  About $6,500 went into the prize pool (the house takes a nice fee of course).  There was a break each hour.  At the end of hour one the report was, “I lost half my stake within the first five hands and I don’t know how long I can last”.  At the second break it was “I won some hands and now I have nearly an average chip stack”.  At the end of the third hour it was, “my pair of Jacks held up against an Ace King and I now have an above average chip stack”.  At the end of the fourth hour it was, “we are going to the final table and I am the chip leader”.  By nearly the end of the fifth hour I finally had to see just what was going on, so I entered the poker room and walked toward the back where the tournament players were and Gary was standing with one other player and the dealer and as I approached, he thrust his arms into the air.  He and the other player had agreed to “chop” (evenly split) the first and second place prize money.  But Gary held somewhat more chips so was officially the tournament winner.  He outlasted the other 79 players and won over $1,150, his biggest tournament win both in terms of tournament size and money ever.

The poker pro has become nearly insufferable, but as long as he keeps winning money playing poker he can be as insufferable as he wants

A Ton Of New Technology To Learn

Yay, all kinds of new “toys” to play with.  We have been planning an upgrade to our phones for awhile now and we finally pulled the trigger.  Top right is my new phone, a Samsung Galaxy S4.  This is my first “smart phone”.  When we ordered our last set of phones, I felt I wanted to keep my phone fairly simple so I purchased one that had only very rudimentary data capabilities.  I could essentially make calls, read my email, and take some pictures and that that was about it.  Meanwhile, I had to watch for about three years as Gary surfed the internet from almost any location with his Droid X.   “My crappy little phone” became a bit of a running joke between us.

Gary’s new phone had a slight back order so I received mine about a week before his new one arrived.  It was his turn to cry about his “crappy little phone” watching me surf with super 4g speed while he remained with 3g.   But not to be outdone, he had ordered up an even bigger higher capability phone than mine, a Samsung Galaxy Note 3.  This thing is massive.  I certainly didn’t want one of those as I can barely hang onto it with my hand.  It is so big it sometimes is referred to as a”phablet” – a cross between and phone and a tablet.

And as a Christmas present Gary purchased me -- the designated navigator as I don’t do much of the driving -- a new GPS unit.  And if I was doing a lot of complaining about the “crappy little phone”, that complaining was nothing compared with the way I was cursing that old GPS.  It had developed a ton of problems from its battery being shot to a power cord that was always causing the unit to cycle off and on (I had to constantly hold the unit in my hand in a certain way to try to minimize the power cycling.)   Further, the maps were out of date but it wasn’t worth investing in new ones as the unit had too many problems.  It really confounded “Sammy” (short for Samantha, the name of our GPS voice) when she thought we were driving off road when we hit new stretches of pavement.  Our new unit is the Garmin 760 RV GPS which has myriad new features beyond those of our prior trucker model.

The last piece of tech shown in the picture is a little device Andy bought us for Christmas – Chromecast.   You plug it into a HDMI port on the TV and you can broadcast from Google applications on your laptop or phone to the TV screen.

And finally, this picture was taken with our new camera, a Nikon point and shoot model with 26X optical zoom, more than twice the zoom we had with the camera it replaced.  Unfortunately, the old one had hit the ground too many times.  We could live with the “baling wire” holding it together, but the last drop had caused the electronics to go crazy and at times it simply wouldn’t shoot or would be out of focus.  We got an incredible “Black Friday” deal on the camera at a store we rarely ever shop at, one that we only went to because of this exceptional deal – Target.  Yep, you guessed it.  Our once a year at most Target purchase was exactly during the time for which their transaction files were hacked.  We now monitor our credit card account daily.

There is just one problem with all this wonderful new technology and especially with it all coming at once.  We have to learn how to use all of it.  And there is just so much to learn.  We’ll probably never figure it all out,   Hopefully we will have fun(and patience) trying.

A Traditional New Year’s Dinner

As we were back in Arizona for New Year’s, we took in the New Year’s eve party in the clubhouse at the campground.  A couple from the park served as DJs.  It seems line dancing is a favorite pastime of campers.  There would be two or three couples on the dance floor for couples dancing, but an entire herd of line dancers for those numbers.  We aren’t line dancers, nor much of any kind of dancers for that matter so we had a nice chat with a couple originally from Oregon, until they packed up and called it a night at about 9 pm.  As we had sat at their table when we came in seeing that they were the only ones at that table, we now were left with a table all to ourselves.  Rather that try to move to another table, we called it a night for the Escapees party.  Back at the motor home, we expected at 10pm Mountain Time to see the ball drop in Times Square.  Nope, apparently the local TV affiliates time delay the ball drop to coincide with midnight in the local time zone.  We headed off to the Arrowhead, which has become our local watering hole here in Congress.  They had advertised they would have snacks, which turned out to be cheese puff balls.  We were back in time to see the tape delay of Sonia Sotomayor launching the descent of the Waterford Crystal ball.

On New Year’s Day, it suddenly dawned on me that we hadn’t made any plans for a traditional New Year’s Day dinner.  So, off I went to the grocery to see what I could find at the last minute.  I scored the very last corned beef brisket they had in the store.  It was a fiver pounder, way too much for two people, but then we like leftovers for making Rueben sandwiches.  Pictured are our two huge platters of food, corned beef, carrots and onions in the background and cabbage and potatoes in the foreground along with bowls of juices and horseradish sauce.  The last minute plan came together quite well.

Back Home

Home is wherever we park the motor home.  It stayed parked in Congress while we were in the Midwest for Christmas so now we are back home in……..Arizona.

We went to Christmas dinner at my Mom and Dad’s home.  She has been making a Christmas buffet dinner for a number of years for whomever of the extended family, friends, and neighbors can come.  This year there were about 25 people that came.  We were the ones who traveled the farthest but not by a huge margin as one of my Aunts was there from Florida.

From Detroit we drove in our little rental car to Columbus to see son Andy and daughter-in law-Natasha.  We were there for two nights and went out with them a couple of times even though they had to work both days.

It was then back to Detroit for one last night before we were up early on Sunday to pack up, return the rental car, and check in at the airport.  As a partial offset to our earlier travel delays, we actually left the gate a bit early, didn’t use any of the extra time built in the schedule and arrived more than half an hour early in Phoenix…….and they had a gate available for us.  The bags came off in reasonable time.  It was a quick trip to the parking lot.  The roads were fairly empty on the drive back, maybe because the Arizona Cardinals were playing football at the time.  It all allowed us to get back with enough daylight to re-establish camp before it became dark.

Early the next morning I was off the to Vet’s office where the kennels are to pick up our little girl.  It didn’t take her long before she was comfortable and settled into the new bowl she received as a gift from her “Aunt Nancy”, a friend of ours and cat lover in Michigan.  So far she is being rather mum about her adventures at “camp”.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!