Friday, January 24, 2014

Rally to rally to rally

We spent a lot of time with family this fall and holidays. It was wonderful! We have a very close family; our two children and their families literally live across the street from each other. It doesn’t get any better for a Mom and Dad. My Mom lives a short distance away in Fresno so all that closeness makes it hard to say goodbye.  But the hitch-itch was hitting us pretty hard and there were rallies to attend, so we hit the road on January 4th for the first of the 3 back-to-back rallies, the Western Family Motor Coach Association rally in Indio, California.  We always begin the trek south through Bakersfield into Boron. This time we met up with Nancy Kissack south of Fresno she followed us to Hodel’s Buffet where cousins, Ellen, friend Dennis, Susan and husband Gene joined us for lunch. Fun, fun, fun. I must mention that Nancy Kissack is a really great and regular blogger and photographer, so if any of my readers would like to read a really good tale of our travels, check out Kissack Adventures and member Dan Chances blog, Travel by Chance.  When we arrived in Boron several of our Golden Spike Chapter members were already parked and by 6:00 ten of us were munching on chips and salsa, catching up of our travels, and eating the delicious Mexican food at Domingos.

The next morning, Sunday, we traveled to the Wal-Mart parking lot in La Quinta.

Again, Chinese dinner with about 25 Golden Spikers. Monday morning 18 rigs and tow cars  all caravanned about 3.5 miles through 5-6 stop lights to the Riverside Fairgrounds in Indio.  I’ll bet those other cars who got caught in this string of behemoth vehicles were not very happy.

The FMCA rally was pretty typical of all the other FMCA rallies we’ve attended, the ice cream social,

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participating in the Chapter Faire where we were able to tell other rally goers how much fun we have riding trains and traveling to the western states with the friendliest RV’rs in FMCA.

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Of course we had nightly happy hours, a potluck, tours of new RV’s for sale (no we were not tempted), and perused the vendor tent.

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We enjoyed one of the best entertainment sessions, Three Guys and Thirty Instruments. Fabulous!

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We also sat through one of the worst entertainment evenings too. I will not mention that group’s name; maybe it was just an off night. 

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The theme of the rally this year was Dog Patch USA and the the chapters at the parade were definitely in the theme’s spirit.

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We finished the rally by driving the grounds in golf carts picking up trash. This is actually an easy job as the RV’ers all pick up after themselves. I think most of what we ‘bagged’ was from former visitors to the fairgrounds.

We stayed two more days at the fairgrounds recuperating, doing laundry,

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and stocking up on food for the next rally, dry camping in Quartzsite in an area called Boomerville. This is an area where members of the Escapee Boomers call home for two very busy weeks in January. It would take way too long to explain all we are doing here, but Cool Judy Rinehimer does a great job in her blog, CoolRVers on the Road

We have three more days here in Boomerville then we will move a short 2-3 miles to the other side of Scadden Wash to the Escapee Geocacher Rally. There are four of us on the Administrative Team that provide sessions on how to geocache and team up with the folks attending the Rally in Q in 2014 to help them find some of the nearly 2000 caches in and around Quartzsite.

We have had some spectacular sunsets on our trip so far but these two were the best; the first in Indio at the Fairgrounds and the second in Boomerville, AZ.

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Happy caching until next blog.