Chapter Seven Quartzsite continued

My first remembrance of camping is the Saskatoon Sailing Club at Redberry Lake.  I might have been as old as six, Renee and I slept in the back of mom and dad's Volvo station wagon while they enjoyed sleeping in a musty old canvas tent, until we graduated to a home build trailer dad found somewhere.  We hauled water and used the outhouses that were, it seems, everywhere.  As a young couple, we slept in a one-man pup tent that we hauled on the back of our motorcycle.  When Steven and Collin came along we camped in everything from a pop-up tent trailer to a class A motor home.  Our kids grew up spoiled, we found a chunk of heaven, a private beach/camping spot we shared only with our closest friends and family.  Jace, Casey, Steven, and Collin would get up at 9:00 in the morning and run out the front door into the lake skinny dipping, and do what they wanted, when they wanted, without having to worry about any neighbors complaining.  Marie and I would dig holes in the bush, empty the tanks into buckets, haul them to our holes, dump, and repeat every few days during the 3 weeks we stayed there every summer. That was camping.  Why am I sharing all this you ask?  Because, now that we are retired, travelling, and exploring, "camping" in these Luxury RV parks in the middle of the desert, I think, this is the life!  Within this RV Resort there are activities every day (craft classes, the spa, cards, pool, to name a few), and in the evenings (concerts, bingo, dances, potlucks, and more) if you want to partake, it is a long way from the bush camping we are used to. Everybody says hello or waves when they walk by, to me, it's what I think living in a small town would be like.

We arrived here on January 18th and have settled into our new way of life, Larry finds someone to chat with every day and I have discovered the beading classes on Monday afternoons.  Some of the reasons we stuck around here for the month, was because the Big Tent RV show that started the weekend we arrived, for a week, then the Jem show, for 2 weeks, and finally the car show.  We enjoyed going into Quartzsite every day for the first 2 and 1/2 weeks, walking around for 5 or 6 hours every day seeing all the stuff, noticing new stuff every time and of coarse buying all kinds of stuff!  During these 3 weeks Quartzsite swells (with RV's of every shape and form parking absolutely everywhere) from a population of around 1,000 to I'm guessing, over 20,000.  It is truly something that can't be described-I still have a hard time imagining it-maybe it's what Larry encounters when he goes to Sturgis!  I have no pictures to share, you'll just have to trust me on this one.

Now that the excitement is over in town, we are hanging around home more, getting caught up on all we have been neglecting here. In the park here they have lots of trips you can partake in for free, everything from shopping in Parker, Blythe, or Phoenix, to tours of Wickenburg, Lake Havesu or the desert. On Thursday February 3rd we joined the monthly desert tour, known as the Pinzgauer tour, that took us to the old mine/town sites of Swansea.  Pinzgauers are Army trucks, that they have brought from Sweden, that come pick up those adventurous people waiting at 8:00 am with their water and lunches for the 7 hour tour of different historical sites around this area.  It was a riot!  We drove 105 miles, in 4 and 1/2 hours, over all kinds of terrain and were gone for 8 hours in total.  We walked though box canyons, picnicked by a river (yes, in the middle of the desert we found a river to lunch by), toured the copper mine and town remnants of Swansea, and we even managed to see the ever illusive wild burrows we've heard so much about.  Of this I have pictures, lots of pictures!