January 1-14, 2021

Yup. December 31st, New Years Eve, I started feeling like crap! Took my temperature and it was 101.8. Oh No! Could it be The Covid? Stayed in the van resting, drinking fluids and taking Tylenol. That night fever went up to 102.8. Sweating like a pig all night. Threw up twice. (Ugghh) The morning, the fever was down to 99.7. Repeat that scenario again the next day and night and then the third day fever broke. Still felt pretty crappy though so continued to just rest, fluid and moving around every two hours or so. Easing off on the aspirin and Tylenol as my stomach was feeling queasy. Today, January 3rd, I’m feeling so much better. I’m assuming it wasn’t the COVid or maybe a shortened down version of it. Either way, it was really easy to quarantine in this vast desert that we are currently parked in.

Jan, 4th, headed to the Loves Travel Center to wash all the germs off of my body. $13 for one of the best showers. Those truckers are really spoiled. The bathroom was spotless and cleaned and disinfected between each patron. After our showers, we masked up and Greg did some food shopping while I stayed quarantined in the van, just Incase it was the COVid that I had.

We headed back to the desert for the night but made a pit stop at the sand dunes down the road. It was a beautiful sunset tonight.

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Decided to head a little bit north to a new area. They have these Long Term Visitor Area here where you can camp for two weeks for $40 so we thought we would go check it out. It totally was not our thing. There was plenty of spots and plenty of space but holy crap, so many people everywhere. I have a feeling that is what Quartzite, Arizona is going to be like once we head over there next week.

In order to get to that location we had to drive through some Army area. I’m glad we did. It was very cool to see some really old tanks that the army has used in past wars.

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We drove all around the LTVA but couldn’t find any decent spots so we left that area and headed toward Mittry Lake BLM where we currently are. We got lucky and found a pretty decent spot at the end of the road. I forgot to mention that when we were in town shopping, Greg went to Home Depot to buy some lumber to extend the shelves above the couch. He worked on that last night and it came out awesome, giving us at-least 20 inches of more space!!! That’s a lot of space when your living space is only 60 square feet.

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We didn’t think we would like this spot here too much. The bombs don’t go off once the sun sets so that’s a bonus, plus you start getting used to explosions after a while. It’s actually nicer than we thought. We took a little bike ride to the lake. There are some really nice spots around the lake if your lucky enough to get your camper in. All the really good spots are taken but that’s ok, it’s a short walk or bike ride from where we parked the van. The weather has been amazing these past few days. It’s not as cold in the evenings and in the morning. That makes a big difference. It’s been nice in the mid 70’s all week. Loving it! Oh, and no wind!

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Oh No!!! I spoke too soon. woke up this morning (January 9th) to crazy strong winds rocking the van!! We had to go out into it and take in our outdoor rug and our portable outhouse. Also our portable 100 watt solar panel that we set up on the ground blew over and ripped one of the wires out so hopefully Greg will be able to fix that because that solar panel is an important part of our set up. We still have the two panels on the roof of the van but in this winter sun, they don’t bring in as much power as they should, so the portable one is a game changer because it can be tilted to face the low rising winter sun. So clearly today is an indoor the van day! Maybe some Netflix or YouTube until we get totally bored, then the beauty of having a house on wheels is we can leave here and drive back to Yuma and go to a museum or something until the wind dies down.

Yup, the wind never died down. Lol. We packed everything up and headed to CVS to pick up a prescription and find a new home. We saw this place on the map called Fishers Landing. It’s dry camping for $10 a person but they had showers and laundry and a general store and a restaurant. So it was about an hour away and we pretty much had nothing else going on. That is the best part of retirement. To be able to do anything we want without having any plans. So, we arrived there in the afternoon, the office was closed so we just found a spot in the desert next to a Mesquite tree, parked the van and headed to the restaurant. We ordered a cheese pie and an order of Buffalo chicken fries. The fries were amazing, the pizza was interesting. I don’t think I have ever, in all my years of loving and eating pizza ever had a pizza like this. It was sooooooooo much cheese on a very thin crust. It was just weird. Don’t get me wrong, I ate two slices but for real it was like a half inch of cheese on this thing.

The showers here were as strange as the pizza. There was no controlling the water temperature. You just inserted your quarter and hoped for the best. The quarter slot by the way was outside of the shower and there was no indication how long $.25 would get ya. It was very stressful, I just had this vision of soaping up my face and then the water turns off and I have to go out of the shower, naked to insert another quarter, which by the way was so high up on the wall, I couldn’t even see the slot where the quarter went. I don’t think I have ever showered so fast in my life!! One quarter and done!!! Greg went next and I was telling him about my experience and how one quarter was enough as long as you shower fast. I fell asleep by the time he came back that’s how long he took. HE USED THREE QUARTERS!!! We are so different. Hahahaha

Anyway, next morning we paid our camping bill and did some laundry and headed out. Drove another hour to Palm Canyon. Plenty of choices to camp in that area. Both BLM land and National wildlife land plus Greg found this really cool hike that we went on.

So this hike was in a canyon and at the end of the hike there’s an area that has a bunch of palm trees. We were expecting them to be down in the canyon but they were actually up in the cliffs growing out of the side of the rocks. It was so cool.

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After the hike we headed to find our camping spot. We got lucky and found a nice spot with lots of privacy and no other campers nearby. The sky here is super dark for star gazing and the sunset was unbelievable!

We went for a bike ride and found this cool spiral labyrinth on the middle of the desert. I had completed a smaller version of one of these a few years back at St Joseph’s convent in Brentwood but this one was 4 times the size. I walked it anyway cause it’s not like I had anything better to do. In the center of this one, people left things which was pretty cool to look at.

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That day we also saw our first wildlife. A giant desert hare with huge long ears went darting out in front of us. Super fast. And then later on we saw a kangaroo rat. He was very cute, nothing like NY rats. And then later on, we saw a hawk.

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I wish I would have had the drone with me when we came upon the spiral labyrinth, but I didn’t. I’m still a little chicken to fly the drone too far away from where we are. I sent up the drone later that day and was thinking about flying it towards the labyrinth but I chickened out. Anyway, here’s some pretty decent drone footage of our camping spot.

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We headed out of Palm Canyon and drove to Quartzite today. (January 13th) This place is flea markets galore. I can’t even describe it. We didn’t even make a small dent walking up and down the rows of all the different vendors. We got a spot 7 miles out of town in the Roadrunner BLM. We are gonna head back to the vendor tents tomorrow to get a better feel for it. We didn’t want to rush it. We had an amazing lunch at a roadside taco stand. Probably the best meal we have had since being on the road.

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Well today Is January 14th. That was the fastest 2 weeks since we have been on the road. Gonna pack up the van and head back to Quartzite to look at more flea market stuff that we aren’t going to buy. Hope everyone is having a good 2021 so far.