All Part of the Fun

Ok, where were we? Leaving Yuma, Arizona on a Friday afternoon.

Because I work during the week, there isn’t much travel time after work, especially in a state with such wide, expansive spaces like Arizona, where going from one town to the next can take hours. I travel Friday afternoons or Saturdays, staying a week at each location.

From Yuma, I drove 82 miles after work Friday, destination Quartzsite, Arizona. The drive was glorious. Spring desert in the late afternoon through the giant Saguaro cactus, their iconic arms reaching skyward, leaving me to develop elaborate anthropomorphic fantasies about them talking to each other and gesturing wildly. The wildflowers bloomed in wafts of yellow, orange and purple.

This is not a Saguaro. It is an Opuntia, nopal or prickly pear.

A cafe where you can play board games. No snakes were involved.

The Tempe Arts festival had great music, and I bought too much fun stuff – a necklace, some tie-dye, and bottles of craft drink mixers I can make refreshing sodas with.

Quartzsite is the geographic equivalent of those sponge dinosaur pills you soak in water until they become huge.  For 80 percent of the year, it is a little desert outpost where two highways meet, population 3,700. In January and February, the population explodes to 250,000 or more, with more than 2 million visitors passing through in those months.

Quartzsite is a modern Silk Road trading outpost, except instead of spices and carpets, the trade is in rocks, gems, RV accessories and things As Seen On TV. Most of the people who visit bring RVs, and the tiny town has about 20 RV parks and miles of flat area under Bureau of Land Management control where people can camp.

I got in late and left early. Sorry for the lack of photos. You’ll just have to visit the bazaar yourself.

Now I am in Phoenix, trapped temporarily by a common RV issue – I needed a repair and the part had to be ordered, so I was here for a week. Then I broke something else, and another part had to be ordered. Here I am, waiting. I am trying to get out of town before it gets really hot. It has crept into the mid 80’s, which people around here call “a mild spring.”

My first stop was the Phoenix Art Museum, of course.

On the positive side, I’m at an Elks lodge with nice folks, probably the friendliest bar around. The bartender introduces everyone at the bar to everyone else by name. I have only bought a couple drinks because people keep buying them for me.

I’m discovering things to love about the area Phoenix Art Museum, a couple Toastmasters clubs (one on the beautiful campus of ASU), the local Center for Spiritual Living, and the Tempe Festival of the Arts. All that Suebobian stuff.

I also got to hang out with my internet cousin Christine Burke and her cutie-pie almost-3-year-old son Rob. I “met” Christine in 2006 or so when I began reading her blog and she mine. We hadn’t met in person until this, though, so this was a special delight. She felt so familiar, even though I had never laid eyes on her before – a side effect of this odd internet life.

Really could be worse.

Because the RV is parked, I am learning the local transit system very well. It’s pretty great. They have free small circulator buses and a crosstown light rail train, plus regular buses with a $4 per day pass. It’s great but not perfect – this town is huge and getting to church this morning would have taken me 2 hours and 3 minutes, so I’ll blog instead. WordPress is a different kind of church.

Where to next? I can’t wait to see.

(I know there is a weird formatting error. I CAN’T FIX IT. It looks fine in the draft and pops up when I publish. Argh.)