Wanta date? Come to Yuma!

Date plantations are everywhere around us, except for the orange, lemon, grapefruit and tangelo orchards and the lettuce and alfalfa fields! Other than that, we're in date country.

I thought dates were dates but I discovered that's not so and my new favorite are Medjool dates - melt in your mouth goodness. Check out www.MarthasGardensDateFarm.com. We haven't been able to take the tour yet but we worked hard at buying out the store.

 This is a picture of a date palm in our RV park. It's the one on the right. The dates are growing in a cluster in the middle.

 Here's what they look like growing. These are just in a tree in the park. Date season is over so I think they didn't get cared for like you would if you were growing them for a crop and they're probably old and dried but I did get a picture. I had no idea how dates looked growing.

This is a young Medjool date plantation at Martha's Gardens. They also had quite a few date trees for sale in 5 gallon pots - about 2 years old and ready for transplant at only $249 apiece!

 Here's a picture of a palm. They have such an interesting cross-hatched pattern on their trunks. That's a palo verde tree behind, I think. They don't have leaves and apparently turn bright yellow in the fall.

 Here are some palm souvenirs Dick picked up for me to paint. We thought at first that they were cactus because they have such wicked points on them. The top "thing" is a piece of palm bark.

Here's my guy reading outside at 9:30 in the morning. He came in shortly after I took this picture to shed his shirt because he was too hot! It's 63 degrees but hotter in the sun. The water jug in the background is full. Fifty cents for 5 gallons at the water shop we went to. They have water shops like we have coffee stands back home! All the water in Yuma is alkaline and tastes terrible. Plus where we are there are nitrates and nitrites in the water, we've heard, because of the fertilizers and crop watering in the area.

We are really enjoying the park we're staying at. It's called Southern Mesa RV Park and is out in the country, about 8 miles south of the main drag into town. The parks in town are wall-to-wall RVs, not that we're not close to our neighbors, most of whom are Oregon transplants, but we don't really like the in-town atmosphere. We're liking the country.

I know these are random, probably disjointed thoughts, but I haven't been able to sit down and compute for awhile. Anyway, when we first got to SMRV we signed up for a week for $135, not knowing anything about the place. Then we extended and extended and have been doing some checking about another time. It would be cheaper to stay here for a month, which, since we got here on Feb. 15th, we're almost to. Monthly rate is $400 which includes water (don't drink it) electricity, sewer, wifi, and pretty good cell service (although they're close to Mexico and nobody wants to put a tower in this close, apparently, but we haven't had any trouble.) The people are friendly; they have a few activities we could participate in, a swimming pool. Bottom line, I think we'll come back.

Yuma has many interesting places to visit or you can just sit around and live in the sunshine! We have had a few windy days - yesterday for example the wind was terrible with lots of dust in it, but mostly sunny during the days, cooling in the evenings, chilly at night.

I've got to go back to the indoor market. There are three big ones in Yuma: the one by the airport is a lot like visiting Mexico and rates 3 fleas in my ranking system. (Shudder, shudder.) The outdoor one is set up in a huge parking lot and has booths with everything from soup to nuts, literally, and is comparable to Quartzsite but cleaner with lots of great stuff. The indoor one is in an old Mervin's store and is nice and clean and interesting, with possibly the best used book store I've seen. We bought a new shower head at the RV shop there but didn't buy a new cord, so we've got to go back!

Later, Lynn

Fun in the Yuma sun:

There's a lot of military activity in this area. We turn by the Marine Air Base to get home these days. Their jet fighters and harriers are often streaking through the air.

We drove out to Yuma Proving Grounds north of here the other day. They test military equipment in a vast area of desert to make sure it works before it is used. This was where they developed pontoon and other type of portable bridges for WWII. We were able to see simulated bridge approaches where they test tanks and armored personnel carriers. Many troops come to the area to learn how to use the equipment in simulated battle situations. They had a fascinating museum as well as all the stuff outside:.

This thing was huge.
General Patton did most of his training here before going to North Africa. We saw a museum dedicated to him in California on a side trip we took to Twenty-nine Palms. George C. Scott was standing outside it ready to shake our hands! (kidding)

I think what has been so strange about this entire trip is that all our lives we have known about this stuff but it's only been head knowledge. It's been really fun learning about a completely different part of the country than we've lived in all these years. For example: palm trees. They are all over the place. 29 Palms had more than they were laying claim to. That's a town around a military base and as we drove thru we saw many barber shops with big advertising for military haircuts.

My conclusion: when you-ma come to Yuma, don't miss Yuma Proving Grounds.

Y'all oughta come to Yuma!

I think all of the people in British Columbia, half of Alberta and most of Oregon have relocated in Yuma! We decided to come here after a snowy day in Tuscon.

 These had to be the biggest snowflakes that I'd ever seen!

The snow wasn't really that bad but because we'd been planning to move anyway we had to do some figuring. We had planned to head for a Roper Lake State Park, farther east and at a higher elevation and then go to Roosevelt Lake, farther north and at a still higher elevation but, when the snow came we check long term weather guesses, we decided to head towards the sun and that meant Yuma.,

With the help of our Passport America 1/2 price camping directory we selected Southern Mesa RV Park

Yuma has been a surprising place. There's still a lot of cactus but lots of palms as well. I'm loving the bougainvillea that is blooming everywhere.

 This is a huge agricultural area with grapefruit, tangelo, lemon and orange orchards, date plantations, huge fields of lettuce (it's the salad capital of the world), asparagus, & broccoli. Someone told me that they have three annual harvests of the lettuce. Most seems to be flood irrigated.

Many fellow travelers have recommended seeing the Yuma Territorial Prison so we did.

Built in 1875 by the prisoners who had to live there it was outgrown and closed in 1909. After that it housed the Yuma High School! It was unbelievably harsh; the prisoners called it the Hell Hole of Arizona but the people of Yuma called it the Country Club because it had more amenities than their homes did - running water and electricity and a big library. The warden's wife, who started the library, repulsed a prisoner outbreak by grabbing the Gatling Gun in the guard tower after the guard was killed and shooting at the rioting prisoners. She must have been quite a gal.

We're enjoying the sunshine again but I have to move away from the computer. More adventures later.

Go home, Oregonian!

We arrived in Yuma Wednesday at Southern Mesa RV Park about 3 miles as the crow flies from Mexico. Blue skies, warm temperatures and a couple of old classmates of Dick's all welcomed us but yesterday they changed their tune: did you bring this weather with you! It was rainy and cold all day. Today, though, we're back to what we'd like to consider our new normal - sunny and in the 70's.

Yuma's a surprise to us - palm trees, lemon groves, lettuce, broccoli and asparagus fields.We bought a sack of 10 grapefruit for $2 from a roadside stand and I treated myself to a date shake, the first ever. We going to ease into the warm here for a while.

I'll post some pictures when I get a chance.

Happy Valentine's Day

My Valentine bought me a new laptop to replace my little notebook which was way too small and slow so to reciprocate, I made him our traditional Valentine's dinner - heart-shaped meatloaf and baked potatoes. I'm checking out the ease of loading pictures on by blog. Hope you enjoy.

Lisa and the boys picked up us at the airport two weeks ago. We had to stop for a photo of Alex and Mater just across from the falls in Oregon City on 99E.

 It was so good to see family and friends. It had only been a month but both Alex and especially Mark had really grown.

Sorry, Mark about the red eye. The program for that is on the computer at home.

Dick, Betty and Bill - a family reunion at a hard time, the passing of Bill's wife Bev. We were glad that we could come home.

We had left our trailer at an RV Park in Catalina, AZ, NE of Tuscon. We flew the milk run both ways and just needed to hang out here when we got back and get some of this lovely AZ sunshine back in our bones. Here's a picture of Dick making brownies when we got back.

I saw this roadrunner - not running on a road, but running along the top of a wall - one day as we were getting fuel.  I was thrilled to get a picture of a cardinal in Sabino Canyon. Can you see him?

We really haven't seen too much wildlife.Maybe they go south for the winter too! But what we have seen has been pretty interesting: A coyote walking through the state park just behind our trailer, some antelope yesterday outside of Tombstone, burros up in Oatman. There's a couple of cottontails living in our RV park.

We're totally loving the desert around Tuscon. It's lush with cacti. Here's a picture of the mountain Jim and Sharon Maben (Patsy Kozera's brother) call their mountain from the Ironwood National Park

 

These are the beautiful Catalina Mountains that we can see from our campground.

Here's a barrel cactus blooming under what is called a nurse tree. The nurse trees protect the cactus and they grow up through them. It's cool.

Saguaros are everywhere - on the license plates, the median strips, everyone's front yard or back yard or both. They stand up so majestically and march to the tops of the mountainsides. And, don't you love that blue, blue sky?

By for now. 

Watch your back!

As I was taking pictures of the Lavender Pit Mine just south of Bisbee, Arizona yesterday, I noticed a man talking to Dick. He appeared out of nowhere and introduced himself as a Chiricahua Apache related to Geronimo who did art work and had some silver bracelets for sale. (Kind of like the Rolex guy with watches up his arm!) Dick's immune to that kind of salesmanship even with the provenance.

This huge pit is what is left after 380 million tons of copper ore were removed.

Although we were too late for the reenactment of the shootout at the OK Corral in Tombstone I did get a picture of one of the leading citizens:

It was really windy yesterday but it's calm today and sunny again. Wish you were here too!

Sunny Saturday

We parked our trailer at Wishing Well RV Park in the town of Catalina, a suburb of Tuscon before we made our flying trip home. Plan A was to finish out the week here and move farther east but we've heard reports of snow and are thinking seriously about sacrificing the $5 deposit required to book a place at Roper Lake State Park [http://azstateparks.com/parks/rola/gallery.html] and stay put here in the sunshine!

We scrounged enough quarters to wash all 4 loads of laundry but didn't have enough for the dryer, so we took advantage of all our sun and hung everything out to dry. Haven't done that for a long while. Waiting for the clothes to dry I took a stroll and got a picture of this interesting tree/bush at the gate to the park:

 I don't know if that's a giant yucca or what, also some sort of palm and cactus in the picture.

I've picked up some turquoise jewelry and some turquoise from a lady who has her own mine in Nevada:

Dick found a guy who had some rattlesnake skin belt buckles that he liked:

It was good to be home for a week but also good to be back. Speaking of back - Dick's back is responding pretty well to the dry & warm as opposed to the wet and cold. Praise the Lord!!