January 16-31, 2024 Arizona and California

We check the weather every day, sometimes several times a day. From the looks of it, we will be staying put in Quartzite for a bit longer. The rest of the country, including every southern state is freezing. Even Florida is colder than us, which is unusual. Plus there’s just never ending events going on in this area. Most of the events involve rocks. It’s kind of weird. Thousand of rocks for sale here. I’m not buying a rock and don’t understand people that buy rocks. But we have walked among the rock sales several times. One of the places where they have a pretty large rock sale and display is at the Quartzsite improvement Center. They have a great cafeteria over there so we headed over for lunch. After lunch we headed to the Dorothy and Toto icecream place for a date shake and peanut butter sundae. Yum

Then we decided to do another YouTube meet up. A lot of the people that we subscribe to on YouTube are here this time of year, chasing the warm weather, just like us. So we met up at a fun outdoor bar called Beer Bellies. They have live music there pretty much all day long. It was a fun meet up for sure.

The Beer Bellies Bar is right by the Rv Show so we walked around there and explored a bunch of huge fifth wheel campers. 

After a full day out of fun we stopped and got some water and headed back to the Plomosa Rd public land. We enjoyed yet another beautiful sunset, had some dinner and called it a night. 

Next day we did some chores around the van. Greg needed to tighten up the thermostat switch for our heater and also install a new USB charger so we had to empty out the closet in order to get to the wiring if those two things. That’s the good part of building out your own van, you know where everything is located and how to make improvements or fix things.  I took a nice desert walk and came back to Greg cleaning off the solar panels. They do get dusty around here.

Today we are heading back to the library. Shout out to our friend Lynn Coffey. She’s been taking in our mail at Raquette and sent us some PDF’s of our tax bills. So today we will head over to the library to print them out and get some checks in the mail for our property taxes.

While we were at the library, I decided to get a library card so that I can start using Libby again to download audio books. The Islip library finally caught up to us no longer living there and cancelled our library card. It was so easy to get a card. Just needed my ID and to tell them what land I was staying on in Quartzsite. From there we walked over to the RTR to have lunch at one of the food trucks over there. I wish I would have taken a picture of our food because it was sooo good. After lunch we headed for laundry and showers and then walked around the Tyson Wells tent area again. It really is never ending flea market and the big tent hasn’t even opened yet. 

The Public land is really filling up. When we got back we had a little bit of a hard time finding a spot but just kept traveling and eventually found a decent spot. Back this far though and the cell signal is not as good plus there’s like millions more people connecting. There are so many groups here now. Groups of giant RV’s and Fifth wheels. I should really send the drone up to give you all a better perspective of this place. 

Greg currently has 114 subscribers on his YouTube channel. If you have a YouTube account, please head over to his page and subscribe. The name of his YouTube channel is Parkyacar.

https://www.youtube.com/@Parkyacar

I cannot believe how long we have stayed put here in Quartzsite. This is definitely not the norm for us. But there’s just so much to do here this time of year. We headed back to the Big Tent. This time we went over at 8 am because last time we went, it took us half an a hour to park. At 9 am, we zipped right in to a spot. We took our time this time, enjoying all the outdoor tents in Tyson Wells and then went to the Big Tent in search of new solar panels. We decided to buy two new panels and a new battery from the Tent show because they had some amazing sales going on.  Now that we have the new panels and batteries we have to find an RV park with electric so that we can pump up our current batteries before connect the new one to our system. This will not be an easy task around here this time of year. But today we will head into town to see if we can find a spot for tonight within walking distance of the Hardware Store so Greg can get to work upgrading our system. 

The first two Rv parks were  booked till February but lucky for us we got a spot at 88Shades RV park with is right across the street from Solar Bills. Solar Bills has every wire imaginable that Greg might need. The bad news is that  it’s 55 dollars a night but atleast we have electric and before ya know it, we’ll have an updated battery bank. This place also has Bingo here tonight and I plan on winning big. 

Yup, Not a winning night for me and Bingo. I had fun though. It was the first time ever playing Card Bingo. (Its played with a deck of cards) I came close to winning twice. But didn’t win. 

When I got back to the Van, Greg was still working very hard on the Battery Update. The problem was trying to fit three batteries in a space made for two. I wished him luck and went to bed. Woke up the next day to an upgraded system. I knew he could do it, just took a little finesse. We also bought two new solar panels from the big tent and have been able to hang them on the side of the van with magnetic hooks. These two solar panels plus the two up on the roof will keep our batteries in tip top shape. 

He still has some carpentry work ahead of him to extend the lip of the upper cabinets so that the doors shut better. After two extremely hot showers we hit the road at noon checkout. We decided to head west to California. Made sure to fill up the tank first while still in Arizona and then off we went. First stop over the border was a casino called Fantasy Springs. There’s a bunch of Casinos in this area on the way to Palm Springs but this casino was the only one with a buffet and we LOVE Casino Buffets. 

Unfortunately we didn’t win but had a fun time anyway. They have a huge dirt lot here for Rv’s and Campers to spend the night. I went for a walk in the morning and came home with a zillion thorns from cactus attached to the bottom of my sneakers. I had to individually remove them with plyers. They are called Goat Heads.

From there we headed to the Salton Sea. We had been there in 2022 and loved it. Camped on the beach and watched the powered paragliders. We wanted to check that out again. When we arrived there were all kinds of No Trespassing signs up and Penal Codes. I guess they put an end to camping on the beach there. What a bummer. Well we continued on another half an hour or so and came upon an awesome location. It’s an ATV dream come true. This place is a playground for those side by side vehicles. We found a spot up on a cliff overlooking all the off road drivers. This is definitely one of my favorite spots. Hopefully we can stay a few nights. We settled in, I made tacos and we watched the sun set. Such a great spot.

Woke up to a beautiful sunrise over the Salton Sea. The off road people were up late riding through the desert. It was cool to watch because the majority of them have fun colorful blinking lights and flags on their side by sides. They all seem to be late risers too which is nice for a quiet peaceful morning. Seems a lot of people around us up here in the cliff are packing up. So we just might have the whole place to ourselves tonight. 

Next stop for us was Borrego Springs and Anza -Borrego Desert State Park. The town was pretty awesome with these huge metal sculptures throughout the desert we waled to most of them but not all.

We spent the night about ten minutes out of town at The Peg Leg Smith recreation area. It was free and pretty uneventful. Next day was a laundry day and then a trip to the State Park for a nice three mile hike.

We really like this town a lot and would have loved to stay longer but theres a big storm coming and we have been getting warnings on our phones about flash floods for the past two days so we want to get out of this area before the rain hits. We drove inland about 90 minutes back to the other side of the Salton Sea. Camping basically on the beach except no one in their right mind will go swim in the Salton Sea. The sites are basically dry camping and run parralel to the train tracks. The train comes by a lot. Doesn’t bother us but would bother a lot of people looking for peace and quiet. You got the train on one side and this magnificent view on the other.

The finances for the month of January were very minimal. This is another reason why we just love to travel to the west coast. Our total for camping fees for the entire month was a grand total of $105!! and our gas bill for the entire month was only $153 because we barely did any driving. Heres our calendar view for January.