Earp, CA/Parker, AZ (02-10-14)

We say we are staying in Parker Arizona, even though technically we are in Earp California, across the Colorado River from Parker.  There’s not much in the town of Earp, so even the RV park uses Parker TIme.  The problem is that there’s a time difference between the two towns. CA is in the  Pacific time zone and Arizona is Mountain TIme.  To complicate matters, I really have to use my watch to tell time, because our cell phones keep bouncing back between the two time zones, so we never know if they are accurate for what we need.


The town of Parker is a small desert town of about 3000 people.  There is one Wal-Mart and one grocery store that we could find.   Although the average temperature right now is a wonderful 74 degrees, I’d hate to be here in July, when that number skyrockets to 110. Once you leave the downtown area, the view quickly becomes a desert landscape, with blowing dust a daily occurrence.





What Parker does have, is the Colorado River.  The river water is crystal clear, beautiful, and unfortunately…frigid.  The temperature right now is somewhere in the 50s- definitely not warm enough for swimming!

As soon as we got here, Paul and I put the boat together, just to make sure we’d take advantage of the river.

 Our friends Carol and Steve also have a dinghy similar to ours, so the 4 of us took off down the river in search of adventure and….lunch.

There are several restaurants on the water-we chose the Roadrunner Bar, where we ate lunch on the dock overlooking the water.

There was enough activity on the water to keep our interest while we munched on lunch.  Whoever was towing this Para sailor kept teasing her by bringing her down close to the water. 

The scenery along the river is beautiful.  Strange to see the desert and the river meet.

The Colorado has several dams along its length, and the area we are in is about 15-18 miles long, from one dam to the next.  Our goal the first day was to see the dam upriver.

We came close, but had to “pull over” so Paul could do  some urgent automobile diagnosis for our daughter.  She’s having coolant issues with her car, so Paul checked it out with her on the phone. Aren't cell phones wonderful?!! 

The Last of Quartzsite (02-05-14)

There’s a billboard in town that says if you haven’t been to Silly Al’s Pizza, you haven’t been to Quartzsite.  I really have to agree, because Silly Al’s has some of the best pizza I have ever had.  Therefore, we ate there- not once, but twice- and I had to talk myself out of going a third time.  That’s impressive for me, since I only eat pizza a few times a year.







Once we left the La Posa South camping area, we went to the other side of town, in the desert off of Plomosa Rd., where we stayed for about a week, hanging out with Julie and Mike.

In between the beautiful nightly sunsets, we found time to do……well, honestly, not much.  We had several campfires and some great meals together.

We managed to make some trips back into town in between the campfires and desert walks.  While there we picked up a few groceries and ate lunch listening to some live music.








Finally though, having been to Silly Al’s twice, it was time to leave Quartzsite behind.  Doing that is more work than you would think, because the desert dust and dirt gets into everything. Once we had better electricity in Parker, I ran the vacuum for what seemed like hours. While I did that, Paul washed the outside of the rig.  Oh wait, no he didn’t.  He paid someone else to wash the rig.


Naturally, Mike followed suit. Here’s Mike’s rig getting washed.  See Paul and Mike on the right side of the picture? 







Here’s a close up:

I can’t blame them- it’s so cheap to get the trailer washed here that it would be tough to find a reason to do it yourself.

Several of our friends from Quartzsite are also here in Parker for the week, and a few of us will head up to Lake Havasu next week for the Fireworks competition.  In the meantime, we are hoping to put the boat in the water, since we are 100 feet from the Colorado River.

Not All That Glitters is….. (01-31-14)

….Gold….or crystal, for that matter.

Some of the people in our group enjoy panning for gold and spent a fair amount of time panning through the mud, looking for the stuff that glitters.  Unfortunately, as far as I know, they didn’t find any, but I’m sure they had fun looking and teaching other people how to do it.

Meanwhile, Paul and I made two trips to Crystal Mountain, looking for…crystals.  The first day we went it was pretty cloudy so we decided we needed to go back a second time, in case it was the cloud cover that was causing us to not find anything.

The views from Crystal Hill are pretty nice and the weather was perfect.

Searching for crystals reminds me of searching for sea glass- You are constantly looking down, checking for anything that glints in the sunshine. At Crystal Hill, you’re not allowed to dig for them, you can only take what you can see sitting on the surface.

In the end, we did find a few nice pieces- two that are pretty good size.

In addition to all the fun, of course we have the usual chores to do.

  It was time to move to a new spot when it was time to empty our tanks.  The line can be quite long so we kept an eye on it and timed it so we had a short wait.  Exciting, eh? We did have a little excitement though.

While we were putting fresh water in our tank a woman told us she had just lost her little dog, who had jumped out of her rig.  I got out the binoculars to start searching, and called our friends who were still nearby and they came out to help search.  About 40 minutes later the dog was found and everyone was happy again.

 

The laundry piled up to the point where we made a trip into town to get it done.  It was a large Laundromat, with about 50 dryers, so several women got the brilliant idea of writing down which dryers their clothes were in.  Apparently they had no paper, because they all wrote the numbers on their hands.  Too funny. (Hey, we’re easily entertained)

With not much TV available, Paul was running out of reading material, so we went on the hunt for more books by one of our favorite authors.  We went to several book stores, then ended up at this place.  This is a famous bookstore, but we’ve never been here before, nor did we realize what it was until we got out of the truck.  See, the man who runs this bookstore is a nudist- and he wears only what the town requires of him, which apparently, is a sock.

I say apparently because we happened to show up on a day when the store was closed.  Oh well.