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!!!!!!!!!!!!!