Well the time has come again to fill you in on what’s been happening down here in Southwest Arizona. I’ll just let you know what we’ve been up to since the last post. 

On Thursday the 30th of November, the 6 people remaining in our group packed ourselves into Deb K’s truck to travel south for the day to go to Los Algodones, Mexico for a few hours and do a little shopping in Yuma. We left reasonably early since it was a 90 minutes to the border with Mexico. As I’ve related in other blogs, when going to Los Algodones you park your car in a parking lot on the USA side and walk across the border checkpoint. There is no screening when going to Mexico but on the way back you have to clear the border checkpoint. It’s never a problem but sometimes the line returning to the USA can be long and we have waited in line for quite some time in the past. We spent our time in Mexico doing a little shopping and stopped for lunch at El Paraiso. Before leaving Mexico we stopped and picked up a few things at one of the Pharmacies. Many things there are much cheaper than buying at home or the US. 

I took one afternoon to drive around some of the trails in the desert near us. There is one kind of main trail that follows the gas line called…… Pipe Line Road. The Equinox (that’s our car) did pretty good through the bumpy terrain, down and up through the washes. The AWD was able to handle pretty much everything.  It was a fun ride, but on the last wash my front clearance wasn’t high enough and I scraped the bottom of the front fascia as I was coming up out of the wash. Bummer…. No serious damage just cosmetic. 

A few days later Tom took me out for a ride in his Jeep. We headed over to the mountains on the west side of the La Posa area. We spent a couple hours travelling all kinds of trails and the Jeep was more than able to handle it. It certainly has a lot more clearance than the Equinox.

We weren’t many more days near Quartzsite before we all moved down to the Yuma area. There is a BLM area west of Yuma in California that is on Ogilby Rd. that our friends like to stay at, and that is where we headed to. The move happened on December 5th. It’s a nice area and Kim and I hadn’t been there before. Where we are staying is about 6 miles north off of I-8, close to the Imperial Dunes on the west and is bordered by the Cargo Muchachos mountains on the north. It’s about a 15 minute drive into Yuma. There are just a few Rver’s in our area with lots of space between us and any neighbours. As I’ve mentioned before BLM land is Federal government owned land that, in many areas, RVers are allowed to dry camp on. There are no services like electricity and water. So in our case at Ogilby Rd., there is a Chevron Gas station about 4 miles east on I-8 that has a dump station where we can dump our holding tanks for a fee ..$15.  So we drive there every 10 days or so to dump our tanks. After that we drive 4 miles west of Ogilby Rd. to a rest area that has water. That’s where we fill our fresh water tank. It is a bit of an inconvenience, no doubt, but it is part of the boondocking experience. 

Our days here at Olgilby Road have been pretty laid back. Kim and I did a little Christmas shopping for each other. We’ve done the normal routine type things like grocery shopping and laundry and those types of things. We went to the Arizona market one Thursday morning. Most of us have fallen victim to a cold bug that one of us (me) picked up somewhere. We’re all mostly past it now. 

We met some new friends at one of our happy hours on December 12…. John and Brenda Brown. They are Albertans who spend their winters in Arizona as well. I met John on our first trip to Arizona around January 2019 at a blogger fest in La Posa South. We visited Mexico again with John and Brenda on the 15th of December.

On the 17th of December some of us travelled to Welton, which is east of Yuma to do do a little trail riding. We drove to Elva and Gerry Shannon’s place in the morning. After a short visit Gerry took Deb K. and I in his Jeep and Tom and Deb D. were in their Jeep and we headed off on the trails to our first stop at the Naked Date. This is a restaurant south of Welton that serves light fare and has Date Shakes. I had never had a date shake before so I was eager to try one. They are fantastic. After a quick bite we were off again. We headed off through the desert on various trails and Gerry took us back to the Barry Goldwater Air Force Range. This is an active Air Force facility so you have to stay on the trails and you must have a permit to enter. Our first stop in the range was at Baker Tanks. This is a natural formation of rock that captures water during periods of rain and is able to contain it and the coolness of the rock helps to avoid as much evaporation. Still water in them. Eventually we came to a spot that had a few old Tanks that you could have a look at. I climbed one to get a good look. It was a lot easier to do this stuff when I was a little younger. It was a great excursion and I appreciated that Gerry was willing to take us out.

I’m going to end my update right here as it was getting quite long.  The second part of the update will get posted later today or tomorrow. Stayed tuned. Don’t panic…. it’s pretty much done….I won’t make you wait for another month….