A Couple of Gorgeous Days, Silly Al’s Once More, Moving out of Quartzsite

Sunday, Monday and Tuesday kind of all jumbled together. I’m talking about Jan. 29^th, 30^th and 31^st. The weather straightened up in Quartzsite, giving us what long-timers have been talking about, finally.

Our days were filled with lots of reading, lazing, a few trips into town, a bit of spending, eating out and some fantasy ‘window’ shopping. I told you about Bill and I climbing the mountain with Gerry and Melinda on Saturday, so the only thing we didn’t do that day was take Bill’s drone to the base of the mountain and get some sky-view shots of the apex and the flag.

But here is the tip top of the mountain captured on Monday

Also, I think I mentioned that we drove around Q Mountain Vista and saw many properties for sale. When four curious minds get together, look out, you never know what might transpire. We encouraged each other enough that we made a call to the realtor and made an appointment to view the property we liked. Just for fun.

Top of Q Mountain from the drones point of view

I had a great long walk, over 3 miles, part of it with Gayle, my big sister on Sunday morning. She and her hubby were pulling out Monday to go to Imperial Dam so we might not see each other for a while. It was a good time spent together.

Early in the afternoon, she texted and invited Bill and I to go to Silly Al’s with them as a goodbye dinner. I thought it was nice that she also invited ‘the group’ of our friends that they met at Pilot Knob over Christmas and a few times at Quartzsite. We all met around 4:15 and easily got a table for 10. Lots of laughs, great food and we left around 5:30 with full tummies and the odd doggy bag.

Even though the show in Quartzsite was officially done Sunday night and a lot of rv’ers left, the internet feed for us in our Suite still left a lot to be desired. I didn’t have the patience to fight with it long enough to post on my blog for a couple of days. Life was happening outside in the sunshine and I took advantage of it out of doors for a couple of days.

I'm not sure why the smug look but this was how I spent
a lot of these last two days

Monday, Bill called the realtor and made an appointment to view the property mentioned earlier and the four fantasy-filled friends met him in town. We knew it was a pipe dream, but sometimes if you don’t have those, nothing at all ever happens. These side by side lots were awesome with a park model on one lot and an rv shelter on the other. Oh well, we always have fun with Gerry and Melinda no matter what we do. Even if it is dreaming the impossible dream.

                                                                 

The rest of that beautiful day was more reading, dozing and relaxing in the sun. I can’t believe after all those windy days, I was grateful to turn my face into the breeze on this hot one.

Bill and I hosted Happy Hour at 3 and the gang joined us and toasted to our last day, our last Happy Hour at the Q this winter and the good times we’ve had. The stories continued and it was nice to see the 3 dogs starting to get along. The ‘party’ broke up around 5, time for dinner and another beautiful sunset.

Bill and I packed up what we could before it was time to turn in. That left it really quick on Monday morning to finish up, grab a bite to eat and get on the road. The hardest part was saying goodbye to our friends, but we know we’ll see a couple of them before the journey home again.

All packed up and ready to go

Leaving our good friends behind

The Whites' and The Rousseaus'

We made a stop at the Extreme Clean Truck Wash off I-10 at Ehrenberg, Az and got both the truck and the Suite washed.

Shiny like new, ready to go

This is something we knew we would take care of before much longer. While waiting, we popped over to Wendy’s beside the Flying J and ate things for lunch that taste good but are not so good for me.

 I’ll have to work it off this week. We had to share with Clemson of course under the watchful eyes of these birds. Pesky things!

Beautiful sights

We arrived at Banning, California around 2:15 and started the 9-mile trek UP the winding 2-lane highway 243 towards Idyllwild. It didn’t take long to realize that I wasn’t going to like this route. A quick glance at my confident driver

 told me that he wasn’t crazy about it either. However, we took it slow and made it to Poppet Flats Rd. to Silent Valley Resort and we were set up on our site by 3.

Snow covered mountains and turbines galore

Looking over the cliff - sneakily

Huge rocks on the trek up to 4000 elevation

Arrival at the park

 There were a few disappointments when we started learning about this ROD park. We were quite anxious to get into a park after boondocking for a month. You know, full hookups, longer hotter showers, all the electrical you need without worrying about sunshine providing solar power and not having to think about how full the tanks are getting and where do you need to get water. It sounded really good.

Here, in this park, we have all that. We have a great site, facing the east south direction so I’ll get as much as sun as the sky provides. The temperature was 66F when we arrived and before long I was changing into shorts to cool down. The park is very pretty, what we’ve seen of it and it was a bonus that we were able to pick our own site. I like that especially.

Just a few pictures here of our fun drive to the park.

check out the low elevation
We are now at 3500 '

It didn’t take long to realize that we did not have any cell service on our Roam Mobility. Strike One.

Our own fault, but we neglected to pick up bottled water before we came as we understood they have a store and we were arriving in good time. We were informed upon check in (on a Tuesday) that the store, the Lounge, the Restaurant, the Family Centre and Snack Bar are not open Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Strike Two.

Strike Three hit when Bill tried to find the co-ordinates for his satellite dish. After way too long fiddling with this, we still were unable to get a connection. We missed our Tuesday night shows. This Strike hurt our social calendar!

Anyway, the biggest disappointment is the phone service. Luckily, we have good Verizon wi-fi so I was able to email family and a few friends so they wouldn’t worry about us.

Tomorrow, we’ll have to take the truck down that drive and perhaps this time take advantage of the beautiful scenery over that cliff. We need to head into town and pick up a few groceries, including bottled water for our pooch.

Just a few of the many pictures I took today

Tonight, we’re watching Jag re-runs from our dvd collection and we’re happy. I hope your past few days were good ones.

Thank you for reading and feel free to comment anytime.