Bye bye Boomerville, Hello Plomosa

We have had a great time this last week in Boomerville, a piece of BLM land 1.5 miles on a dirt road south of Quartzsite.  Some of the things that we have been doing all week are:  we attended a session on Smart Phones. Cool Judy Rinehimer and I probably did more than our share of contributing – but everyone seemed appreciative.  I guess we just love our Droids and think everyone should own one.  I also went to a session on tablets.  We have a Xoom, Sue Pace has a Tab, others have I-pads, Galaxies, and some in the group we just thinking about buying a tablet.  We sure learned a lot from each other; I guess that is the best reason that Boomers get together.
Boomers are so generous with their knowledge and expertise, and also generous with their dollars.  One of the activities that we participated in was the CARE auction.  I was able to put together an Excel program to track the bids and payments made at the auction.  There were cheese cakes, hand carved walking sticks, embroidered towels, and lots of other donated stuff.  We collected over $2,800 for the CARE facility in Livingston, TX.

CARE Auction VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

We got to know some of our fellow Boomers at a Z-circle.  When there are over 130 rigs it is hard to meet everyone.  A Z-circle helps us meet new people.  Three to four couples get together for 45 minutes to discuss our RV’ing life style and get to know each other better.  After the 45 minutes, that goes way too fast, the couples move to another table with 3 completely different couples for another 45 minute round of talking.  There are 4 rounds of meeting together.  Tina the Turtle joined our table and enjoyed herself.  To read about Tina and Ted the traveling Turtles, check out their blog. 

Every afternoon at 4 pm the whole group gets together for announcements, snacks, and sometimes other activities, like dancing.  That is Ken & Sue Pace dancing to ‘their song’. Then there was line dancing, too,

Every evening at 6:30 pm we gather at Ken & Sue Pace’s RV for “Pace Theater”.  A slide show is shown by one of the group about their travels,  We saw shows on Newfoundland & Labrador, Panama Canal, Burning Man and a show given by Tom (can’t remember his last name) who flies an experimental 2 seat plane that looks like an ultra-light. He flew over us almost every day taking pictures.

He also showed some awesome pictures of mountains in Oregon and Utah, wild animals, and of course Quartzsite.  When he can fly 200 to 11,000 feet above the earth, he got some amazing images. In the picture below of Boomerville, our rig is in the center, just to the right of the fire pit.

Today we dumped our tanks, filled our water tank and moved to Plomosa Rd, 5 miles north of Quartzsite on Hwy 95, to get parked for the SKP Geocacher BOF (Bird of Feather) rally starting tomorrow and the Cache Evert Tuesday.   We then drove up to Parker for some shopping, laundry and a delicious BBQ lunch.

Then it was back to the SKP Geocacher rally site to get acquainted with some of the cachers who have arrived early. Currently there are 10 rigs here. We expect about 40 RV’s before the end of Sunday. That’s all for now. I better get rested up for the next 4 days, so nighty night for now.

What can you count on?

The one thing you can count on as an RV’er is weather… changing!  And change it did. Today.  For the last several days we have had perfect weather. In fact everyone was commenting on how perfect the weather was. Sunny, warm but not hot during the day, and cool but not freezing at night. No wind. UNTIL today! Now we are being buffeted by winds from the south. We are cozy though. Tom – reading his Kindle, and me – on the computer or Xoom.

The wonderful view out our front window.  It is so nice and close to the fire pit/Happy Hour area too.

We came to Quartzsite last Tuesday and have been busy ever since.  We have heard talks on genealogy, and on batteries and solar panels.  We have participated in a talk on geocaching.  We go to Happy Hour at 4 each day.  Pam and Steve Ritchie do the announcements.

We went to the Chili Cook-off yesterday

and drove into Parker on Thursday. We even stopped by the Escapee Happy Hour to see Sharon and Don Del Rosario and Dennis Hill.  All in all, we have not been bored.  Tom even finished Redfield Farm and really enjoyed it.  We got a nice surprise this week when our friend Cool Judy and Luke Rinehimer were free to travel and came in just in time for Happy Hour last night.

This morning Tom cooked breakfast and I just enjoyed it.  Blueberry waffles with real butter and Vermont maple syrup.  What a nice start to a weekend.  Too bad the wind came up.  Now if it will only die down, maybe we can get some caching in.  That’s all for now.

Leaving California

We left Fresno 10 days ago, after a great dinner out with our whole family at BJ’s Brew Pub.  We were traveling with ‘D’ and Bill Hall, fellow FMCA Golden Spike Chapter RV friends heading to Indio via Boron for the Western Area Family Motor Coach Assn. (FMCA) Rally.  We usually make this trip in 2 days so we can eat at our favorite Mexican restaurant, Domingo’s in Boron.  We met more Golden Spikers, Betty and Kurt Simon and Ray Egan, who also were staying at the Arabian RV park in Boron and we all had a delicious dinner together.

The next morning we drove about 1 1/2 hours to the vacant Sam’s Club parking lot in LaQuinta meeting up with the other 19 rigs of Golden Spike Chapter.  Most of us walked to the nearby Chinese Restaurant. Really good food, sorry no pictures.

On Sunday morning we lined up with Kurt Simon in the lead followed closely by 19 RV’s and 18 tow cars.  We were quite an impressive parade as we traveled the 3 miles from LaQuinta to the Riverside Fairgrounds in Indio. We were arriving 2 days before the rally started. I had accidently cracked the screen of my new Panasonic 16X camera Sunday morning. I only had it one month and luckily had purchased it at Costco. I had saved the box so I pack it all up and took it back and got another just like it.  I LOVE Costco’s no questions asked return policy. 

The week passed so fast.  We attended the Volunteer Dinner and participated in the Chapter Fair, an event to attract new members to our fun Railroad Riding Chapter. That is the sign our granddaughter, Julie, arranged to have made for us in back of Tom, who is now the president or Conductor of the Golden Spike. That’s Bob Poole, our treasurer on the right. Hopefully Tom is signing up a new member.

We toured new and used coaches and were not even remotely tempted to buy one. I participated in a play at the ladies luncheon about the suffragist movement. I played Mary Ware Dennett. It was a great play. There were 4 ladies from our Chapter that participated, Betty Simon, far left; next to her was Anita Price; Dotty Poole was Clara Barton with the red cross on her apron, and of course, me in the funny hat on the right.

We passed out 5,000 ice cream bars and sandwiches on Friday and Saturday at the Ice Cream Social. All for free thanks to the sponsorship of Miller Insurance.

We saw a seminar on brakes and tires, and were part of the cleanup crew.  Our fellow Golden Spiker, Dan Chance, who Blogs every day did a great job documenting our time at the rally.  http://travelbychance.blogspot.com.   This is our whole group. It is tough getting everyone in the picture at the same time so we took 2 versions.  Can you tell where I am going to stitch the two pictures together?

With the rally over yesterday we went geocaching.  We found an old Indian trail, Boo Hoff, where there were many caches along the dirt road.  Our little traveling companion, Tina the Traveling Turtle, http://tedthetravelingturtle.wordpress.com, even enjoyed geocaching. Hint: the cache is called The Dead Tree Hugger. I’m not going to tell where the cache is, but Tina found it very quickly.

When we found the first cache on the road we discovered our caching friends, CokeCachers, were finding caches just ahead of us.  What a small world!  We never caught up with them as it was getting dark, so we headed back to the paved road and went to Winco to pick up some provisions for our trip to Quartzsite. 

This morning we left Indio traveling along I-10.  While we had quite a bit of wind last night, the trip from California to Arizona we calm and uneventful. 

We filled up with propane in Ehrenberg at the FlyingJ and drove into Bommerville. This is how you get to Boomerville: take the frontage road along I-10 east until it dead ends;

turn right and drive and drive and drive on a dirt road until it dead ends;

turn right and you are at Bommerville, a piece of BLM land outside of Quartzsite, AZ, where we are number 65 on the list of Escapee Boomers parked out on the desert.

We pulled into Boomerville just at 4 pm… Happy Hour. After meeting our old friends Theta and Jerry Brentnel and Donna Huffer and Bob Parker and new friends too, we talked mostly about geocaching. So what else is new?  We were pretty pooped so we parked the rig, ate leftovers, watched Nova, and are now heading to bed.

So we are back Caching on the Road Again… Finally!!!!!!!!!!!!!