Quartzsite, 2016 (January 25, 2016)

Yes, I know, I said I wasn’t going to blog.  But I wanted to post about Quartzsite, so here I am. 


Most RVers know what Quartzsite is- a small desert town in Arizona that swells to a population of hundreds of thousands of people when the RVers show up in January every year. 

We arrive in droves for the privilege of parking in the desert, with no amenities, with a bunch of friends who want to sit in the desert too.  And it’s always a great time!

It’s an opportunity to kick back and socialize with friends….and eat.

This year, along with Mike and Julie, we hosted our 3rd annual Quesadilla/Margarita night.  A smaller crowd this time, but still, we fed about 25 people.

Of course there are plenty of outings - Silly Al’s for some of the best pizza you’ll ever have, and the Desert Bar…just for the fun of driving miles down a small dirt road to have a beer.

Each night usually finds us sitting around a campfire, watching a beautiful sunset.  This particular night we lit a luminario and listened to The Eagles music, in honor of Glenn Frey, who had passed away that day.

This year was different for us.  With the house located just an hour or so from Q, I drove the Jeep down and Paul drove the truck- and our best adventure was the day we went “Jeeping”. 


Barbara and Wayne also have a Jeep so we all packed a lunch, piled people into both vehicles and took off for the hills.









Literally- whatever hills Paul could find, he was willing to explore.  Wayne took this picture after our Jeep crested a small hill…












….and we discovered that getting back down would be an interesting proposition, involving a 20 point turn. 

Good times!

We had two goals- to see Dripping Springs, which we found pretty easily (although you really needed patience if you wanted to see the infrequent drip) and to find Apache Chief Mine.  There is a ton of old mining sites out here and we stopped to explore anything that looked interesting.










We did some serious off roading along the way, really enjoying both testing the Jeep to see what it could do-













and the fact that we had a second vehicle with us….just in case…

Eventually, in our search for the old Miner’s cabin, we had to do some road building, and began to wonder if we were headed on the right path.

It was gonna take some fancy footwork to get the Jeep past this section of the wash….

Several ATVers offered their help and even tried to lift the rear end of the Jeep to move it over just an inch or two, so we could make it around the rock outcropping.  Although they had the strength to lift it, the rear end is plastic and we decided it wouldn’t be a good idea.

We did eventually make it through that section (the only difficult part) and made it to the miner’s cabin.

All in all, quite a fun day!










We’ve been back home now for about a week, but we both came down with a nasty cold that’s been making the rounds through our group that was in Quartzsite, so we haven’t been doing much of anything. 

House Update

In the next day or so I will post the final pictures of the interior of the house.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year (01-04-16)

Christmas at the Porter Party Place was a crazy, fun filled time....

 Our "Boomerang" RVing friends, Mike, Julie, Dave and Nancy came back for the holiday but left their rigs behind.

A fun filled time filled with games, music and craziness ensued.

Although it was disappointingly too cool to hang out in the pool, the spa did get some use!









Before our friends left, our house got even fuller when Jess and Kellan arrived for a few days before their trip to Mexico. Kellan had never seen Havasu so we took them on a tour of London Bridge

Naturally, no tour of the area is complete unless you spend some time at the lake...

Too soon it was time for them to be on their way, and it seems that the minute the house was empty, we packed up and left too!

Our New Year's was spent at Paul's brother's house.  Since he had a house full, we took the camper for our 3 day visit.  Lots of fun and games were had by all.

Now that we are back at the house, we are unpacking more boxes and organizing more of our stuff, in addition to working in the yard.

We decided to get some brown gravel to put around the travertine, thinking it would look nicer than the plain gray in the rest of the yard.

Mike and Julie arrived back soon after we did, so they were nice enough to help us spread the stuff around. It looks great!  (Pictures taken by Mike)

Next week we leave for Quartzsite for a week, to visit with friends out in the desert.  It's actually only an hour and a half from here, so I am driving the Jeep and Paul will tow the trailer.  

Note:

Blogging is not much fun when you are working around the house doing chores, which causes a dilemma for me. If a blogger goes too long without posting (like I have, recently) people lose interest and stop reading, but by the same token, no one wants to read about what we buy for the house, and how we are organizing the garage- and I certainly don't want to write about those things, either.

I started my blog for two reasons- to share the new places we were exploring, and to have a record for myself of all the interesting things we saw along the way.  I kept the blog going so I could share the build of the new house.  Now that we are almost done with that, I am thinking I won't be blogging unless we are on the road, traveling. 

I will have one more House Update, when I get around to taking pictures of what each of the finished rooms looks like. 

We are hoping to spend some time this spring in Utah, one of my favorite places, and of course, we plan on leaving Havasu for the entire summer- possibly heading to the Pacific North West this year- but who knows?

My suggestion would be that if you are still interested in reading about the places we visit, there is a spot on the right hand side of my blog page where you can sign up to receive an email whenever I write a post.  That way you won't have to keep checking for something new.

Thanks for following along with me!