Quartzsite Rocks!

Hello from Salome AZ. It was about a two hour drive south from Lake Havasu City through the town of Quartzsite to Salome which is just a small dot on the map and an even smaller dot on the desert. We dropped the trailer in the Desert Gem RV Park and went back to Quartzsite to check it out. It's indescribable, but I'll try. Imagine the biggest flea market you've ever seen on steroids; imagine all the vendors at the Oregon State Fair times 50, or times 250 would be more realistic. It's huge. Some of it is organized into established booths but there are lots and lots of vendors who just have their RVs sitting along the road with stuff displayed to look at - and it's all half priced.

Yesterday we looked at RV mats, ate Texas barbeque and  bought some beads and had some apple pie. Today we went back to the Gem and Mineral Show and saw fabulous opals, turquoise, fossils, petrified wood, crystals. The jewelry and polished stones were all beautiful and the rough stones were fun to look at and imagine how much beauty we've walked over and never seen, We talked to a lady who has a turquoise mine in Elko NV and another man who mines opals near Boise.

We've been having a great time, meeting many other people escaping the frigid weather at home for the sunshine in Arizona. The folks from Alberta who reported 3 degrees as the high at home and the ones who reported a foot of snow at their place in Idaho are tied for first place so far!

Here are some pictures we've enjoyed taking:

This is one of the many orange trees in our campground. The grapefruit tree next to it got hit by the frost. We bought some sweet juicy oranges at a stand down the road and need to go back tomorrow to find some more.

We saw lots of these flowers blooming while in LHC but we're in the desert now and haven't noticed any flowers yet, although it's starting to green up.

More cactus from LHC.

We stopped along the road to Oatman, an old gold mining town to visit with these wild burros.

Dick was wondering if they rounded up all the burros and gelded the males as they can get pretty mean and raunchy and the animals are all over the town of Oatman. They even sell burro food - carrots. But, apparently not as these little guys showed up.








Enough adventures for today.

Fun in the Sun = January 10th

I love it when a plan comes together but yesterday it just didn't happen.

I decided to make biscuits for breakfast. I make good biscuits and have been making them for years. My recipe makes 8 biscuits which was great when the kids were home, 2 apiece, but long ago I cut it in half so that I wasn't tempting myself to eat more than 2 or throwing out a lot of food. I grew up with a waste-not attitude inherited from my mother who lived through the depression.I particularly like to make them when I'm camping because the oven in the trailer is gas, heats up fast and I like the way it cooks.

I had a ziplock bag of biscuit mixings in the cupboard from another camping trip - you know, one of those unlabeled efficiency maneuvers as in I'm mixing up one batch, I may as well mix up two and save one for another day. Anyway, I got it out, lit the pilot on the oven and then decided to practice saving water by mixing the biscuits in the bag rather than in a bowl I would have to wash. I added oil and milk to the bag, zipped it back together and mixed my ingredients Everything was going fine up to that point.

It was impossible to get the dough to cling together. It just coated the inside of the bag. I turned the bag inside out, scraped it off as best I could but by this time both my hands were completely covered with sticky dough. I couldn't open the cupboard to get a paper towel so I grabbed a kleenex that was popped up out of the box and used it as a glove so I could open the door to wipe my hands off. Anyway, I stuck the 4 misshapen lumps I was calling biscuits into the oven finally and used all the water I had saved from washing the bowl to clean my hands and the mess I'd made of the kitchen.

My never-fail recipe turned out to be a total flop. The biscuits didn't turn out light and fluffy; instead they were heavy and doughy. It is possible that there was no baking powder and salt with the flour after all; I just don't know. Suffice it to say that we had toast for breakfast! Today I'm making biscuits again but this time from a can!

We had two days of real hard winds and decided to stay put at Lake Havasu until the weather settled down. I think we've talked ourselves into taking a tour north to Oatman today so we'll stay another day and head south tomorrow.

Here's a picture of my nephew Dennis Zipprich who just graduated from bootcamp and starts Sub School in a couple of days.

I guess that Navy pictures are like football pictures - no smiling!

Snowbirds - Arizona bound

The first time we actually saw any snowbirds (retired people looking for sun and fun with their RVs) was when we toured the Olympic Peninsula on a Spring Vacation 20+ years ago. Now we've joined their ranks. We hooked up our Wildcat 5th wheel and headed south on January 2nd arriving at Dick's sister's house in Grants Pass in time to watch the Rose Bowl.

The Ducks won but my personal opinion is that they need to work on their defense. Having watched football for 42 years now (our anniversary was in December) I feel entitled to an opinion and that's mine. I prefer big wins. Enough with this just winning by a touchdown.

We saw a bald eagle sitting in a tree along I-5 on the way to GP. I'll summarize California: horrible roads.
GP to a KOA in Lodi; The GPS does not recognize KOA as a legitimate entry which was challenging. From  Lodi to Bakersfield, A Country RV Park - strategically located between two freeways and a railroad track; nice cacti, lots of palm trees. Many dairies along the way. Mile after mile of dying orchards due to loss of farm water for irrigation. From Bakersfield to another KOA in Barstow. We went by Edwards AFB where the space shuttles used to land. From Barstow to Lake Havasu City, AZ. We've packed away most of our coats and are wearing our sunglasses everywhere.

Lake Havasu is the location of the London Bridge. It was purchased by Mr. McCullough (the chain saw guy) who thought it would make a good tourist attraction. Apparently it was sinking several inches each year in London but since the relocation it's holding it's own. I thought it would have shops on it but, no, it's just an arched bridge. It seems odd to see the huge Christmas wreaths still in place on it.Some people here still have their Christmas decorations up.

Right now we're at Campbell Cove RV Park. This is really not our idea of camping - lots of RVs and what little view we had just got usurped by new neighbors to our right and right behind us. We've extended our stay here though because of strong winds that kicked up last night. Actually I'm hoping that we get a new neighbor on the left because the winds have been slamming us from that direction and I'm sure a huge motorhome would block for us!

We're meeting people from everywhere - the joint's jumping with RVs and their snowbird occupants. This place is a sunshine seeker's mecca. It was kind of funny when we dropped by the Walmart today and saw families with children. Not seeing too many kids but plenty of grey-haired people with little dogs!

 I have laughed and laughed over this sign.

 This is the first of a collection of photos I want to take of the interesting plants.

The sign just before we got here was one of those flashing ones that said BURRO CROSSING. We didn't see any but I hope we do.

We're having a great time and learning a lot. I'm going to use my blog as a sort of journal so I won't forget our trip. You're welcome to read along.

Tell-tale clock

My clock chimes every quarter hour and I am so used to it that I tend not to hear it. Of late, however, I am made aware every quarter hour that I need a new battery. Ding squawk ding dong, ding squawk, squawk, dong.

Heads up!

As the officer's lights began to flash in my rear view mirror, I pulled over with the assurance of a life well-lived and a youth well-spent, so he could speed by to arrest some crazed drug felon wreaking havoc on the streets of Canby. Instead, he pulled ME over!

He'd been keeping pace with me through a couple of lights coming along 99E on the way into Canby from a very nice trip to Vancouver to play with grandkids. I'd been extremely careful to slow to the exact speed limit and kept it there, yet he didn't go by through the first light or the second. I had to turn left so I stepped on the gas a little, turned on my signal and changed lanes ahead of him and his lights flipped on. My life flashed in rhythm with his lights: I hadn't cut him off, hadn't sped, had used my signal appropriately, was driving with shoes on, had brushed my teeth and was wearing clean underwear. What else could it be?

I rolled the window down as he approached the car and he says "Are you Lynn?" Unbelievable! The name police!

He had run our plates as standard practice because our car is a kind that has made the top ten list of "most likely to be stolen" and discovered that though I was legally driving my car, I was doing so with a license that expired almost a year ago!

I ended up with a citation that will be rescinded when I show up with my renewed license,and the officer let me drive home (since Dick was hopped up on oxycodone) after discussing his relatives and our friends the Abbotts and what a good driver I must be to have been driving all this year with an expired license.

Since that fateful day, I have gotten my license renewed and have to say that the new picture is much better than the old one.

Also, I am positive that I did not get a license renewal form in the mail. I am on top of that kind of stuff. My advice to all of you, my friends, is check your license expiration date. I'm not at all sure that the DMV is holding up their end of things. And, if you have to renew, you need to show a birth certificate or passport and something with your social security number on it.

Memories of Summer

I guess we did have summer:

Tractor races while we were waiting for Mark to arrive in May

 The Rose Festival fleet as well as the huge barges on the Columbia in June.

A trip to the zoo in July as well as Sacramento and Yosemite.

Rocket launches in August and watching the lilies open.
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Rock hunting and rock painting in September

Home again for a breather!

Would a rose by another name still smell?

It was just brought to my attention that Weedeater is the brand name of a particular type of string trimmer and not an action verb. It's ok to say I need to weedeat my garden, for example. Or, tomorrow I'll need to do some weedeating. But what about yesterday? I weed-ate the front flowerbed just doesn't work. Neither does weedeated. Instead I've been avoiding the whole issue by another comment: Tony loves to weedeat and he sure has been keeping the yard looking nice. That works for me!

It's important what you call things. The right name makes all the difference. I can remember that my mom, who loved to dance, wouldn't dance with a really cute guy because his last name was Junk! Praise God I didn't have Lynn Junk to overcome!

This brings me to Funtime RV from whom we bought our trailer. We left the awning rolled out on the trailer last night so I went out this morning after all that rain we had to retract it. It worked fine but was too wet to leave rolled up so I extended it again and left it out all day to dry. This evening when I went out again to retract it, it didn't retract. When I pressed the button, nothing happened. (I'm a big one on things working when you press the button.) That's the problem that the Funtime folks were supposed to have fixed during the three weeks they had it sitting on their lot and we're not really excited about hauling it clear to the other side of Tualatin yet again. So I find myself asking myself, and now you, where's the fun in Funtime? Perhaps they should have called it Floyd's RV - there's no great expectations there.