At the time of our last blog entry we were just leaving Bishop, California, with a vague notion of heading south and east. We decided to head as far south as we could get without actually entering Mexico at risk of being walled out of our homeland forever. First destination: Yuma, Arizona, heading toward Organ Pipe National Monument.

We got a late start and only made it 40 miles outside of Bishop our first night. Having made no plans we wondered if we’d have trouble getting a campsite. We decided to stop and give it a try at a county campground in Independence, CA. There were about fifty campsites there, all situated on a pretty little stream, with a breathtaking view of the Sierras.

We were the only campers. The rest of the place was absolutely empty. 

We built a fire, ate our dinner, and went to bed. In the morning when we awakened it was pouring rain. We had left our camp chairs and tablecloth outside, so I ventured out, gathered them up, and threw them in a soaking wet pile on the floor of the rig. And we hit the road.

On our way south to Yuma, Arizona, somehow we turned right instead of left and ended up in La Jolla, California. Kate's toddler mom's group, formed 33 years ago, was having its annual get-together there that weekend. Originally we had thought we'd be long gone in some other part of the country by then, but we realized that we had meandered in the west for so long that it was possible for Kate to attend after all. On the way there we weathered a sandstorm.....

.....encountered dense fog that slowed traffic to a crawl.....

.....were pelted by heavy rain, and ran into high winds that hurled five-foot tumbleweeds at us while nearly pushing us off the road altogether. A whole new meaning of "untethered."

We survived. Kate joined her friends in La Jolla…..

.....and I headed (again) to stay with my friend Jim in La Canada, where I maintained the uncanny ability to find rain in places where it never rains. 

While the moms met in La Jolla, Jim and I predictably gravitated to Santa Anita Race Track.

We did OK and enjoyed the day, but it would be a lie to say we both came home winners this time. 

Jim expounding upon his expert handicapping approach – betting on Irish horses because they wouldn’t spend the money to bring them here if they weren’t fast.

Kate and I left La Canada (again) on President’s Day, and (again) set out for Yuma. On our way we passed close to the Salton Sea and decided to stop there to make lunch in the rig and have a look. We had heard that it was a place to avoid, but we thought it was quite pretty.

Salton Sea

The Salton Sea is California’s largest lake, 35 miles long and 15 miles wide. The desert lake fills a below-sea level depression extending from the Coachella Valley into the Imperial Valley. An accident spawned the lake. In 1905 there was a project to divert some of the Colorado river to convey water to irrigate lands in the Imperial valley. An unexpected flood caused the diversion to fail, and the entire Colorado river changed course. By the time the river was brought under control in 1907, the water had filled the depression to a depth of nearly 100 feet, creating the Salton Sea. Then it started evaporating.  By the1920’s the lake had all but disappeared.  In 1928, Congress acted to designate the Salton Sea as storage for water from irrigated lands in Imperial Valley. Since then, the sea has been used mainly as a repository for agricultural wastewaters, and the depth ranges from 30 to 50 feet. It once was a booming tourist trap that withered and died to leave a ghost town in its wake, all in the course of less than a century.

Back on the road. Nearing Yuma we were talking on the phone with Laura when suddenly we found ourselves face to face with a steamroller on the interstate on ramp.

We ended up on a 10-mile detour, mired in bumper-to-bumper traffic for an hour or so.

We picked up mail and medications in Yuma. One of the features of being untethered is that we never know where we’ll be until a day or two ahead of time, at best. This offers challenges to our friends staying in our Palo Alto house, who receive panicked messages to please overnight our mail to us – now!  And Walgreens has a habit of sending my prescriptions to the wrong city, which can complicate things.

Passing through Yuma, we stayed at Foothill Village RV Resort in Fortuna. It featured a recreation room with two pool tables, pool and spa open 24 hours a day, and four shuffleboard courts. This was a true snowbird RV community. Lots of ladies in sequined visors with deep tans. Lots of planned activities. We saw a shuffleboard class underway in the morning -- while we had our morning spa soak. When in Rome…..

Kate and I discussed staying another night or two and lounging by the pool, taking it easy. I wanted to stay; Kate wanted to move on to do some rustic camping. After a thorough discussion we decided to move on to do some rustic camping.

Before we left though, more slice-of-life experiences. We had to bring in a mobile RV repair guy to fix our ailing hot water heater, We stopped in at the local RV supply place and bought a new sewer hose, and we went to the RV wash. 

Fortuna is awash in RV’s. There are RV parks, RV dealers, RV repair places, gated RV developments, RV “boondockers” camping alone out in the desert.

Leaving Yuma-Fortuna, we arrived at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in late February. 

Organ Pipe is a hidden gem we found out about from two camping couples – first at Glacier, and again at Death Valley. Located in Arizona a few miles from the Mexican border, Organ Pipe seems to be a place that no one has heard of. The campground here is smack in the middle of a vast expanse of glorious desert. It’s well maintained, clean, and sports modern facilities including hot and cold water, showers, and a really nice amphitheater with a projection screen and sound system for ranger talks.  It also has the requisite sunsets.

And we had our own dedicated curved bill thrasher who sang his heart out every day next to our rig in the campsite.

The main attraction here is of course the organ pipe cactus.

We took several desert hikes through the organ pipe and saguaro cactus and the ocotillo trees. Kate was heard to say: “The beauty of cactus was an acquired taste for me. I acquired it 50 years ago.”

Saguaros look kind of like goofy people.

At Organ Pipe we attended a ranger talk about predators in the park, including coyotes and bobcats. Very interesting.

 Bobcat Pelt

            Coyote Skull

On one of our hikes we took the park shuttle to the departure point and ended up hiking with a few companions: Ranger Lauren, who was on her day off but we sort of drafted her as our unofficial guide; Betsy, a Connecticut Yankee who married an Aussie, has lived much of her life in Austrailia and works for ABC (Australian Broadcasting Company); and her friend Jeannie, an Aussie here researching the Mexican and Arizonan desert for a children’s book she’s working on. 

                              Betsy, Lauren, Kate

                 Internal structure of a dead Saguaro

                                 Ocotillo blossom

Later that evening Jeannie and Betsy joined us for cocktails. We had planned to sit outside, but It was too cold out. We had already taken down our table inside the rig and put up the bed, so we ended up all piling into the bed under the sleeping bags. It was our first ever cocktail-slumber party. 

                         Betsy & Jeannie partying in bed

It’s getting to be a regular thing: A seeming setback on the road turns out to have a terrific outcome. On one day we had signed up for a van tour of the Ajo Mountain Road, a 14-mile trip with a guide to point out the interesting features of the area. We arrived early to meet the van – but it had left without us. We hiked two miles to the information center and whined. An interpretive ranger in the back office overheard, and volunteered to take us on our own private tour, just with her.  Once again, lemons turned into lemonade.

Our private guide was Ranger Anna, and she was wonderful.

                                    Kate & Anna

Anna started in the national park realm as a waitress at Yosemite after graduating from Humboldt State University. She liked it, and became a ranger five years ago. She’s now enrolled in a masters program in environmental education; she was able to get a permanent job assignment through the Pathways program – the same program that enabled Ranger Sarah Jane, our ranger guide at Joshua Tree, to land her job.  

 From Anna we learned that saguaro and organ pipe cacti absorb moisture through their roots, store it up, and use it for six months between rainy seasons (the Sonora Desert gets two rainy seasons a year, the Mojave only one). In both varieties of cactus, their ribs expand and stretch the skin when water is abundant, and then slowly contract as the plant uses the water to survive between rainy periods.  

                                Kate & organ pipe

Anna also told us that creosote is oldest living plant on earth, sort of. It's a long story. Literally.  And now we know that the Sonora Pronghorn Antelope is the second fastest animal on earth. Other animals: The lesser long nosed bat eats and pollinates flowers of organ pipe and saguaro cactus; Ferruginous pigmy owls and many other varieties of birds live in nests originally pecked out of saguaro by gila woodpeckers. 

              Gila woodpecker making nest in a saguaro

“Saguaro boots,” hardened cavities inside the cactus resulting from the woodpeckers’ work, serve as nests and eventually fall to the ground when the cactus dies. Before pottery was developed, the native tribes would use cactus boots as water jugs. See how it all fits together? 

                                    Saguaro boot

Aside about interpersonal dynamics, while I'm thinking about it. Kate has a far-ranging curiosity about the geology, ecology, and history of the places we visit – especially about the relationships among the different animal, mineral, and plant forms. I’m not so curious – kind of a lump, actually. But I benefit from overhearing Kate’s conversations and musings, learning about our surroundings without doing the impossible (for me) work of actually noticing things about which to be curious. My interests run more to the people we encounter. Who are these rangers? How do they decide to be rangers? How do government politics impact them personally? Who are our fellow campers and hikers? How have their life stories led them to this place at this time? I’m not sure anyone shares this interest with me, but oh, well…..

  

People We’ve Met Department: In the parking lot of the Organ Pipe Visitor Center, we met a very young couple. I mean, the guy was in his early twenties and his girlfriend seemed even younger. They told us they had worked in the North Dakota oil fields for a couple of years and saved up a lot of money. Now they’re taking six years off (!) to travel the country. So far they’ve been on the road three years and have visited 46 states. He’s a landscape photographer and wants to “end up in Vegas where all the big boys exhibit their work.” They were traveling in a 1989 Roadtrek, “The best motor home ever made,” he said. 

                                    1989 Roadtrek

These young folks were a little mysterious about some aspects of their travels (e.g., where exactly they were staying in their rig, what their names are, etc.). They were the only people so far who have declined when I asked to photograph them. “We try to keep a low profile on the web.”  We wonder if they’re pursuing a sideline, like robbing banks. But we had a couple of nice conversations with them, swapping stories of the road. They’re the only people we’ve met thus far who have had a scary experience on the road. They were parked on a Chicago street one night and the girl was alone in their rig. Someone tried to break in, she called 911, and the problem was averted.  We never learned their names, but they did offer us some good ideas for places to stay, including the Desert Diamond Casino in Tucson. “We met someone who’d been living in their parking lot for two months, no hassle. We got free drinks in the casino, swam in their pool, and got all you can eat buffet dinners for $5.00.” The Desert Diamond rose to the top of our list.

On one of our days at Organ Pipe we drove the 70 mile round trip to Ajo, Arizona to do laundry and marketing, and to sightsee. Ajo was founded in 1914 as a company town for the New Cornelia Mining Company, which mined copper there continuously until 1984 when the mine closed. In the 60’s Ajo had a population of 7,000 (now about 3,300). The town was designed in 1914 “to keep the miners happy and productive,” and is still attractive today with its town square reminiscent of a graceful Mexican plaza and an “Artists’ Alley” full of colorful murals. 

                                            Ajo Plaza

We took a walking tour of town and visited the Mine Overlook, which commands a view of the crater created by blasting away rock for seventy years. It’s 1100 feet deep and in its heyday was the third largest open pit mine in the country.

While at the small information center at the overlook we met Bob, who is more or less the curator of the overlook mini-museum. Bob worked in the mine for 33 years, and has much knowledge of local history and lore.

Bob, Former Miner

                      Bob fills in Kate on Mine History

Another visitor was eager to ask questions; he said he had been born in Ajo in 1941 and both his father and grandfather had worked in the mine. He had lived in “Mexican Town.” Ajo was strictly segregated and all nonwhites (including Mexicans, Indians, Chinese, and Italians) lived separate from whites and their children attended separate schools. 

Kate asked the visitor if he had memories of his time in Ajo. He said his family left when he was only three, but he did remember when his mother put him in the yard on a little commode to toilet train him and “a scorpion came and bit me on the butt.” Memorable.

Leo and Mirjam were our camping neighbors for a few days at Organ Pipe. 

They benefit from the European notion of vacation – they have ten weeks of paid time off every year. Currently they’re camping throughout the Southwest and West on a three-month tour. Twice in the past they have taken a full year to travel, once bicycling through India, Pakistan, and Malaysia and once driving the length of South America. Miriam also mentioned in passing the time she saved Leo from a cobra attack on a hike in Kenya.  They pointed out that Trump’s slogan should be America Second, not America First – because the Dutch already built a wall to keep the ocean out years ago. Kate, of course, had a connection to them. Kate can generally find one degree of separation or less from anyone she meets, anywhere in the world. In this case: Leo and Mirjam live a few kilometers from the small town in the Netherlands where Kate’s grandfather was born and raised.

One evening at Organ Pipe, our Aussie friends Betsy and Jeannie invited us to their primitive campsite in the foothills for a pop-up dinner (BYO snacks and a can opener). We were joined as well by Casey, a writer and solo wanderer, and Dorner, a full time traveler and currently a volunteer worker at the national park. Betsy and Jeannie cooked, Casey supplied Southern Comfort, and we had a really good time. In fact one of the neighboring campers dropped by to complain that we were laughing too loudly.

             Kate, Casey, Jeannie, Betsy, and Dorner

After Organ Pipe we decided to detour a bit and travel to Puerto Penasco, Mexico. We met Ellen, a retired nurse practitioner from Denver as soon as we landed at Playa de Oro RV Park (after we wandered lost for a while, looking for a different RV park but finding instead a road made of sand apparently leading nowhere). Ellen happened to be walking her dog through the park and started right out asking about our rig -- we get that a lot. As we chatted she began telling us about good restaurants, the best market, etc. and asked of we'd like to take a walking tour of Puerto Penasco with her. Four hours and nine miles later she had shown us her nice little two bedroom house, her favorite place to buy insurance, the harbor and fishing boats, the best fish vendors, the center of tourist activity, her friend the real estate agent who also takes care of sick wayward dogs, her favorite art gallery, and her favorite pottery shop. We had lunch with her at one of her favorite restaurants 

                   Kate and Ellen window shopping

Playa de Oro RV Park is quite an operation.  There are slots for more than 230 Rv’s, plus an RV storage lot adjacent that must store a thousand RV’s and trailers. Lots of people from Arizona keep their rigs there and have them towed into the park and set up whenever they want to visit. The combination of barbed wire and bougainvillea is a little disconcerting, but on the other hand there is very good security, and the beach is beautiful. 

Our first night we had dinner at the Pink Cadillac.  The Monday night special was $1 margaritas, and $5 combo platters. They were good.

Our next door RV neighbors at  Playa de Oro were Paul and Tischa.

                                   Paul and Tischa

They founded and eventually sold three companies related to credit card processing. They retired 16 years ago at age 52 after Paul had a stroke, and have traveled since then to 188 countries. Now they're ranging around the US and Mexico in a very huge RV, occasionally buying a house or two (A 5,000 square foot penthouse in Cabo San Lucas, a farmhouse in Burney, CA, a house on the beach in Puerto Panasco, and more). They had endless stories about their travels. My favorite was the one about attending the wedding of their Bedouin archaeologist friend. They flew to meet him in Amman, Jordan, and met his large extended family who had all traveled by camel from all over the Middle East to gather for the wedding. Once Paul and Tischa arrived they all folded up their tents and rode miles into the desert and celebrated he wedding for a week.

We had a terrific dinner with Paul and Tischa, watching the sunset over the Sea of Cortez and drinking WAY to many margaritas (speaking for myself). 

         Paul is proud of his lovingly restored 1969 Jeep.

On our way out of Mexico I bought some of my most expensive medications. They cost $72.00 instead of my normal co-pay at Walgreens of $1,400. Hope it doesn't kill me.

Back in the States, we drove to Tucson 115 miles across the Toho O'Dahm Indian Reservation (second largest in the country). A long, straight stretch of road with very little sign of human habitation except the occasional seemingly random scattering of double-wide homes, lonely outposts in the desert where many tribe members live.

To arrive in Tucson in March is to arrive in high season.  Almost all the campgrounds were full to the brim. Our first night in town we ended up in the Desert Diamond Casino parking lot (thanks to the tip from our anonymous young friends).

                 Desert Diamond as seen from the rig

At first blush it seemed like a heck of a deal. It had free, designated parking for RV’s and big rigs in a well-lighted area, free drinks in the casino, and dinner for two cost us $12.00. After dinner we hunkered down to watch our downloaded episodes of Homeland and drifted off to sleep. What we hadn’t registered was the characteristics of the immediate neighborhood.  Every hour or so through the night we were treated to the passing of a very long freight train, with horn blaring throughout its passage.  Then sometime before dawn (well before), commercial jets started taking off from the adjacent Tucson International Airport, and jet fighters began their day’s exercises from the nearby Air Force base.  The noise level was about what you’d expect if you were camped on a runway and the noise from each takeoff routinely activated eight or ten car alarms in the parking lot. I found myself wide awake, listening to the orchestration of train horns, jets, car alarms – and Kate’s gentle snoring. Kate is a sound sleeper.

We decided to look harder for a real campsite.  The best bet seemed to be Catalina State Park, in the foothills of the Catalina Mountains just outside Tucson. We drove there and were told that the campgrounds were absolutely full. Undaunted, we drove through several of the RV camping areas and chatted up the camp hosts. Finally, just before sunset we found a host who took pity on us. We were assigned to a beautiful large group campsite that we had all to ourselves.

This turned out to be a short-lived victory; the next day we had to move on. 

While still in Mexico I had contacted a little known, little used (I thought) Tucson County campground called Colossal Cave Mountain Park. I reached someone there by phone and asked if there would be any available campsites in early March. “You’ll have to talk to Gary.” “Who is Gary?” “He does the camp sites.” “How do I talk to him?” “Oh. I’ll give you his cell phone number.”  Eventually I reached Gary, who was a little vague about availability but in the end said he thought he could set us up with something.  Having lost our brief claim to a haven at Catalina, we set out on the hour-and-a-half drive to the outskirts on the far other side of Tucson, in search of Colossal Cave and Gary.

We drove up a desert road that wound steeply to a parking lot and a stone building. No campground in sight.  I called Gary. Voicemail. I called the main number and asked if we indeed had a reservation. “Call Gary.” “I did, and got his voicemail.” “Oh. Drive back down the road a bit toward the ranch and look for a little sign that says ‘campground.’ If you have a reservation you should see some cones.”  We had no idea which road to drive down, or where or even what the ranch was. But we attempted to follow these directions and, Eureka! We found our well-labeled spot.

No sooner had we arrived at our campsite than we looked up and there, hiking up the road, were TJ and Mark (who actually hail from Eureka).

                                     
                                      TJ and Mark

It developed that they were on foot, hiking the Arizona Trail from the Mexican border to Utah. They had left the trail for the night. They called Uber, got a ride in from the desert, stayed in a Tucson hotel overnight, and took Uber back to the trail.  TJ and Mark planned to hike the southern 400 miles of the Arizona Trail now, and the northern 400 miles from the other end, starting in Utah, in the fall. So far they had covered the first 120 miles. Who knew Uber had backpackers covered?

Next thing we knew we had a new campsite neighbor, Robert.

                                          Robert

Robert is a freshly retired high school math teacher from Oklahoma who taught for years at an inner-city high school in Tulsa, and has just finished a ten-year stint teaching at an armed services school in Okinawa. He sold his house in Oklahoma, bought an RV, and hit the road. An apparent optimist, he’s traveling with two guitars, a keyboard, a star finder, a telescope, and the complete works of Proust. He plans to learn to play guitar, re-learn piano, memorize the heavens, and fully absorb Proust, for beginners. On the other hand, Robert is even greener than we are at the RV-ing game, and he’s had his own instances of screw-ups – starting when he dumped sewage for the first time and discovered that his brand-new RV had been delivered to him with the valves open, so he immediately spewed sewage all over himself and everything nearby at his RV park campsite. We can’t top that – yet. We spent some enjoyable time at the campfire with Robert for the next few evenings, trading stories of the road.

Colossal Cave is a quite primitive campground. No electricity, no water, no sewage dump. And the rules are kind of like a youth hostel. They lock the gates at 5:00 pm, and if you’re not in the campground by then you’re out of luck. They unlock them again at 8:00 am; before that you can’t get out.  We asked why. “To keep out the hooligans.”

To our great delight, daughter Sarah joined us for a few days at Colossal Cave, flying in from Missoula to escape winter. She brought her tent with her and set up in a little site next to our rig.

During Sarah’s two-plus days on the ground, we went to the Arizona High Desert Museum, which we really enjoyed. We also hiked, visited the ranch and petting zoo, went on a sunset horseback ride, and got in a little swimming time.

And we found Gary! 

                                     Sarah & Gary

We’d been expecting to see him at the outset, but no one seemed to want to talk about him. Turned out he’d been away at a gun show for a few days, but he returned the day before we left. Nice guy.

                                Last hour in Tucson

After Sarah returned to Montana, Kate and I went to ground for a few days in Tucson. We needed to devote some time to laundry, taxes, taking on propane, mail drop pickup, RV repairs and supplies, blogging, gym workouts, arranging for repairs back home in Palo Alto after rain leak damage, blood tests, medications, etc. All part of the carefree life on the road.

We did take time for the Pima Air & Space Museum’s bus tour of the “Boneyard,” where more than 4,000 military planes are stored, preserved, repaired, disposed of, and in some cases “regenerated” and returned to the air in military service.  

The sight of all those planes was overwhelming. The tour was also overwhelming: An hour-long bus ride among the stored planes with about 20 seconds of description devoted to each. We had a whirlwind look at planes including the B-29, C-47, B-49, B-52, F-4, F-15, F-16, C-5, C-135, P-3, and many, many more. My head is still spinning.

Vignette time: During our recent travels, the rig’s hot water heater stopped working. We arranged ahead of time to have it looked at and hopefully repaired at Sandy’s West R.V. Center in Tucson. Sandy himself is the 92-year-old retired founder of the family business. The day we brought in our rig, Sandy had recently driven from his condo in Florida to Tucson in 36 hours, sleeping for two hours in the car enroute (while stopped, one assumes). While our rig was attended to that day, Sandy told us the history of the family and the business, beginning with Sandy’s father, a sea captain.  

                   Sandy fills in Kate on family history

Sandy himself had spent years in the merchant marine, ferrying World War II troops from the U.S. to Europe. Since crews were civilians, these merchant ships were required to have a few U.S. Navy personnel on board for protection. Sandy said the crews referred to them as “’Seagulls,’ because all they did was eat, shit, and squawk.” But I digress.

Sandy’s daughter-in-law Marian now runs the business, and his grandson Sean is “boss in training.” Sean and a mechanic worked over our water heater while we spent three hours chatting with Marian and Sandy. Between customers, Marian gave us a training course on critical things to know and do about motor homes. She pointed out that she takes their work very seriously, because “We don’t really get a chance to say we’re sorry if you blow up on the road.” Point taken. 

Kate and Marian have a good laugh about disasters that routinely befall RV owners

Sean found several things wrong with the water heater. As just one example, the “anode rod” was completely shot. Its purpose is to prevent minerals in the water from rotting out the tank. The rod is supposed to be replaced once or twice a year. From appearances, ours was about 12 years overdue. A new rod is a fat cylinder. Ours looked like a 4^th of July sparkler.  

                   Sean and Marian go into shock at 
                        the sight of our anode rod 

A fat, new anode rod and our pathetic, decimated one.

As a result of the tragically inadequate condition of our anode rod (who knew there was such a thing as an anode rod?) the glass lining of our water heater tank was being eaten away by minerals and corrosion. 

                Sean grabs a handful of our tank lining.

And there were other issues. But in the end, the repairs were a success and we’re headed back on the road safely, and with hot water.

Now we strike out for New Mexico, Texas, and beyond.