RV Stuff – Page 6 – The Sandcastle

Camp Fire

Our campsite in the Arizona desert came with a ring of rocks that just cry out to hold a fire.

But, we are not allowed to gather wood from the nearby forest.

We can buy wood in town for $5.00 a bundle.

Buying several bundles at once brings the price down some. Lee can load his truck for $40. That’s still expensive fire wood. Mike found a place to scavenge cable roll tops and brought back a bunch of them. The gas to bring these back, though, costs about the same as buying a load of bundled wood locally.

IYQ, Mary Jane, and neighbor Bud spent most of a day disassembling one top. There had to be a better way. So, IYQ figured out this set up.

The fire on the cable roll top starts it burning, too. When it starts to break up, we shove the remains of it into the fire ring.

And we all sit around and enjoy our fire and conversation.

Except Mike. He was home sick the evening this picture was taken and Julie hadn’t yet come to the fire. We burned their cable roll top anyway.

From left to right: me, IYQ (another Lee), Mary Jane, Lee, Jeri, and Terry. Dave is, of course, behind the camera.

TTYL,

Linda

Run Around Day

Our permit to camp in the BLM’s Long Term Visitor Area expires today so we used that to get us moving. It has become very easy to just stay in camp visiting with neighbors and hanging out in our RV. But errands need to be run sometimes. For us that’s at least once every five days because that’s as long as we can make our 32 gallons of water last for the two of us.

I find that last number interesting. The Department of Homeland Security says each adult needs to be storing three gallons of water per day. I always wondered if that could possibly be enough. Apparently it is if you use ALL our water conserving techniques. That includes drinking diet soda instead of water. If we drank water we’d have to give up our showers to make it on three gallons a day.

Now back to our regularly scheduled topic of the day.

Our first stop once we left camp was the dumpsters here in the LTVA to drop off today’s garbage. Most days Dave walks the half mile to the dumpster with one WalMart bag of trash. Some days that bag is more full than others depending mostly on what type of packaging our food came in the previous day. Today we also had a large kitchen garbage bag of pop cans to recycle. When we got to the dumpsters three young adults were dumpster diving for recyclables. I disapprove of dumpster diving but I also know how it is to need money. So we gave them our bag of cans instead of taking it to a recycling center as planned.

Then we stopped at the LTVA office to buy a new permit. We bought a 28 day one for $80 instead of the 14 day one for $40 we had before. We probably won’t stay here the entire 28 days but we don’t want to have to buy another one in 14 days when many, many people will be arriving here just in time for the big show. We’ve been told the lines to do anything here become horrendous when 40 to 50 thousand people come for the main two weeks.

Then we went into Quartzsite to buy propane. The Pit Stop had been recommended to us as the place to do that and it was great. You drive up onto a indoor/outdoor carpet and they use a hose to fill your propane tank much like buying gas or diesel. You go in to pay and they give you a couple of hard candies as a thank you. You don’t even get your shoes dirty since you walk on the red carpet. We were down to two gallons of propane. Since we typically burn two gallons a day here heating our RV during the cold desert nights, it was surely time to fill. I hate running out during the night.

Going west on I-10 we came to another of those California Agricultural Inspection Stations. This one waved us right though. Maybe the Sunday morning staff really doesn’t care what you are bringing in?

In Blythe, California, our first stop was for lunch. We went to the Cakes ‘N Steaks restaurant. We picked it because signs out front said the Lions, Kiwanis, and Rotary all meet there. We like to go where the locals go because you usually get good food for good prices. This place was no exception to that rule. Dave’s pancakes were light and fluffy and still hot enough to melt the butter. I had a hot beef sandwich piled with so much meat I couldn’t eat it all. And I really tried to do so.

On the way to the restaurant we made note of the location of a laundromat we planned to go to after lunch. But while we were eating, its parking lot filled up. So we went to the grocery store instead.

We sat in the parking lot of Albertson’s working on our grocery list. It’s had to make a list for unknowns. How many potlucks do we need to prepare for? How do we plan meals scheduled around campfires when we never know when there’s going to be a fire? So we made a massive list and Dave managed to buy most of the things on it. Of course, not being able to buy one ingredient of a recipe pretty much makes the rest of the ingredients irrelevant. Maybe next time we’ll be able to get the rest of them.

By the time we did all that the laundromat’s parking wasn’t so full so we did two loads of laundry. Mostly because we don’t have very many long sleeve shirts and we need them here. I still can’t believe how cold the nights get. I wear more layers to the campfires than I wore most of the time in Minnesota.

Then back to the LTVA where we did the dump and fill routine on our way back to camp. Thus ends another day of running around.

TTYL,

Linda

Resource Saving Tips for RV (and other) Living

I started this list for a friend who is new to RVing then decided maybe you’d all like to read it as well.

Water:

Put a bowl in the bathroom sink to catch rinse water. Use that water to wet your hands for washing. When the bowl gets too full, use it to flush the toilet

Put your toilet flushing water into a spray bottle for cleaning your toilet. Adding the spray power to the soapy water increases it effectiveness.

When brushing your teeth, first remove the bowl from the sink. Fill a coffee cup with water. Use that to brush your teeth. You can wet your brush in it. Rinse your mouth from it. Rinse your brush in it. Splash it over the edge of the cup to rinse the cup. Then swirl it down the sink to rinse the sink. Remember to put the bowl back.

If you brush your teeth before taking a shower you won’t need to run the shower as long for the water to get hot.

When taking a shower, use a washcloth. Put your sink bowl in the shower before you begin. Wet the washcloth in that saved water, soap it well and use it to wash with. You won’t need to turn on the shower until you are ready to rinse. Again save the cold water in the bowl and use it to flush the toilet.

If you keep a separate washcloth for your face, you won’t need to rinse the soap out of the one you use for your shower.

Use hand sanitizer and moist towelettes instead of water when appropriate.

Anytime you need to run water in your kitchen sink for it to get hot, catch the cold water while you are waiting in a clean bowl or bottle. If you can put that water back into your fresh water system do so. If not, use that water for cooking or washing.

If you can burn or compost trash, you might want to use paper plates when water is at a premium.

Electricity:

Use daylight as much as possible.

Figure out which lights to use for what. LEDs take less energy than halogens. Halogens takes less than incancesdents. Halogens produce a lot of heat; think about that when deciding where to use them.

WalMart sells LED lights that look like UFOs and run off small batteries. You can hang those under your cabinets and have lights that don’t use your house electric.

Turn off lights when you finish the task you turned them on for.

Only turn on your TV when you plan to watch a specific program.

Turn off as many things as you can so as not to drain your batteries. Any appliance that has a clock is using energy. Anything that is checking to see if you want it yet is using electricity. Anything that has a standby mode is using electricity.

If you have solar panels, clean them with something that leaves no residue.

When running off 12 volt use 12 volt appliances rather than convert to 110.

Propane:

Plan meals for minimal cooking time:

Eat cereal for breakfast and salads/sandwiches for lunch.

Eat fresh fruits and vegetables for side dishes instead of ones that need to be cooked.

When you cook, cook extra of things that the leftovers can be eaten cold. Like meatloaf.

Cook over a campfire. A pie iron can be used to make egg sandwiches for breakfast.

Your furnace is the biggest user of propane. Put on more clothes and turn down the thermostat.

Do your generator and/or furnace maintenance to maximize efficiency.

Put a fan in your RV refrigerator to maximize its efficiency.

A full refrigerator/freezer is more efficient than an empty one as long as the air can circulate.

Find out if a space heater would be best for you.

TTYL,

Linda

Yuma

La Posa LTVA is in the desert. The nearest town, Quartzsite, is a small town. If you need to do major shopping you need to go the a city. The nearest, Yuma, Arizona, is about 90 miles south on Highway 95. So, once Lee and Mary Jane came to protect our class graduation site from potential intruders, we headed to Yuma.

More or less. First we visited a bit with Lee and Mary Jane, then Jeri & Terry showed up so we visited some more–long enough for me to sunburn my neck. I need to pay more attention to my time in the sun.

So it was after 1:00 p.m. by the time we pulled out of our campsite. Then we needed to wait at a desert road for an Allegro Bus to cross. I wished it was Steve & Carol in Bessy Bus but it wasn’t. Then we stopped at La Posa’s service center to dump and fill and get rid of trash.

By the time we got to Yuma I was HUNGRY since we didn’t eat lunch before we left. So we made In N Out Burger be our first stop. One of the ways this place lives up to its name is by limiting your choices. Do you want a hamburger, cheeseburger, or double? Onions? Fries? Soda pop or milk shake? What flavor? That’s it. If you want something else, go somewhere else. But, what they have is so good, people line up at all hours of the day to get some. At the drive through, they have someone outside taking orders to help move the line faster. They really do get you in and out quickly.

Then we tried several gas stations before we found one selling propane. For those of you headed this way, Barney’s at the Fortuna exit from I-8 sells propane.

Then we went to the Escapee’s Kofa Ko-op to camp and to check it out as a potential future place to stay. We were really looking forward to a couple of nights of full hookups to get everything fully charged without having to think all the time about what electricity we are using. Except their office closes at 3:30 on Sunday so all we could do there was boondock until they reopened on Monday. It looked like a nice park but I had my heart set on hookups so we moved on.

We went to the Cocopah Golf Resort instead. Much more expensive than Kofa but very nice. Except they have their roads labeled backwards so all the one ways go the wrong way for getting into and out of their sites. And their idea of close to the laundry didn’t match ours. But we could have all the electricity we wanted. So we plugged in my Segway to recharge it.

The next day we ran errands.

We went to Arby’s for lunch and I ordered extra sandwiches to have leftovers. Dave says this is expensive grocery shopping but he sure eats those leftovers.

Then we went to Plaza Coin Laundry where we did six loads of laundry in a couple of hours. They have no machines out of order there; instead they have machine labeled, “My day off.”

Then we went to WalMart for groceries.

Then we went to Outback Steakhouse for our 42nd wedding anniversary dinner. Outback is not as good as Timberlodge but the steak itself was wonderful. I missed my traditional wild rice soup, though.

Then we went looking for a place for me to get a haircut. We found a SharpCuts but it had closed for the day.

So we went back to Cocopah for the night.

I badly need a haircut. It’s hard to comb wet hair this length after my morning shower. It curls around my ears in weird ways then sticks out when it dries. Then I remembered we have shore power. I used my hair dryer! For the first time in the six months we’ve been traveling. I only use it when my hair is too long to let it dry naturally and so far I’ve been getting it cut often enough to not need to dry it.

Then I went over to the park’s library to exchange books. There were two women in there. Each one was working her own jigsaw puzzle. They didn’t even look up. Apparently they are not friends.

Then we went back to the SuperCuts we found last night and I got a really good haircut. I like it when the stylists at the cheap places are good ones.

Then we went back to the coin laundry. We are missing a hand towel. They hadn’t found it, though.

Then we went to IHOP. Dave is a waffle freak and he likes theirs. Today they had a new offering: coffee cake pancakes. I tried the apple streusel and they were really good. This place only serves half the meat we are used to getting at IHOP, though.

Then we went to Target to buy a towel to replace the one we lost. We don’t carry backups of things like that so losing something we use regularly means shopping for a new one.

Then we went to Best Buy so Dave could buy a new backup system for his computer. He’s been backing it up to his iPod but since he bought a new camera the iPod no longer has enough capacity for all his photos.

With all our big city shopping done, we headed back to Quartzsite. We’ll come back to Yuma sometime and do the tourist things here. We saw signs pointing to lots of the ones I have on my to-do list but we would need to stay more nights to do them all and we’d prefer to be camped someplace cheaper when we do that.

One the road we saw a silver pickup truck with a purple scorpion on the side. That menacing look was spoiled by the bumper sticker that said, “I heart my beagle.”

Around here they have worker buses. These are school buses that have been painted white. You can tell they are worker buses because they each pull a flatbed trailer with two port-a-pots on it. They take the workers to and from the fields.

I guess I’ve been south long enough for new behaviors to develop. When I saw bus #16, my mind said, “diez y seis”, which is Spanish for sixteen. I don’t understand most of the conversations going on around us but some of my high school Spanish is, apparently, coming back to me.

Robert says I don’t take enough pictures now and he’s right So these are for Robert. The first is the “bridge to nowhere” and the second is the canons at the entrance to the Yuma Proving Grounds.

The turnoff to the Proving Grounds also says you can turn there and go 6 miles to the Imperial Dam Recreation Area. I wonder if that would be a better route than taking S24 was?

We passed a guy wearing just shorts and cap stopped by the side of the road. No one had yet stopped to check on him. Is this a case of “No shirt. No shoes. No service.”?

We saw a pickup truck pulling a double load. He had a trailer of off road toys behind his fifth wheel. I wonder if his truck is rated to pull, or more importantly stop, that heavy a load? And if he understands the implications of turning that complicated a setup? But, we got safely past him so now he’s only a potential danger to himself and others.

And now we are back at the La Posa LTVA where IYQ arrived while we are gone. So we all sat outside and talked until the sun went down and it got suddenly cold. It’s nice to have warm shelters to go into when that happens.

TTYL,

Linda

Catching Up

It’s been a week since I posted here. Yes, we are fine. I’ve just been too busy reading and doing other things to write. I have lots of new websites and blogs I am following and they take more time than I had anticipated. Plus, we are now in La Posa LTVA near Quartzsite, Arizona, where the Escapee Class of ’08 will have our graduation gathering so we keep having visitors. It’s fun meeting other class members. But, yesterday I didn’t finish my “morning” computer stuff until 5:20 p.m. Part of that is we don’t have the high speed connection we got used to having so every download takes longer.

Here’s some of what we’ve been doing for the last week.

We finally made a departure checklist and started using it. It helps. We don’t always do everything in the order listed but at least we get everything done. I print them from my computer. The first day we make a check mark by items as we complete them. The next day we turn that check into an X. The third time we use them we circle the X. The fourth time we cross the item off. Then I print new ones and we start again. I need to print some today.

WalMart has their online prescription refills system relating to my prescriptions as messed up as I had feared and we were not able to get the pharmacist to straighten it out. We couldn’t make her understand that what we see on our computer is not what she sees on hers. She insisted they are all there on hers so I should be able to see them all on mine. Maybe next time I’ll bring my computer into the store to show them what I see.

In places, I-8 runs so close to the border with Mexico we could see the fence. It’s pretty ugly.

There’s a rest area in the Imperial Dunes Recreation Area. Here’s the dunes and some dune buggy riders. The border fence is just on the other side of those dunes.

Nearby is the BLM LTVA field office with lots of people boondocking near it. That would be a safe place in spite of being this close to the border because it is so well patrolled.

Going up S24 toward the Imperial Dam LTVA area we passed lots of farm fields. If I tell you the products without adding proper punctuation we get, “Lettuce date lemons.”

Imperial Dam is one of those places where you can met friendly people. One guy told us there would be a parade of decorated vehicles about 6:15 and another told us there would be Christmas Carol singing at 6:30. We didn’t realize this place in California is on Arizona time so we nearly missed the parade and did miss the caroling because we were eating supper then. The parade went by too quickly to get decent photos but here’s the best one we got.

And here’s what camping at the North Mesa area of the Imperial Dam LTVA looks like in December.

Lots of elbow room but lousy Internet. We checked out the Coyote Ridge area but it was much the same. So when we went into town to buy groceries, I talked Dave into going north on Hwy 95 to La Posa LTVA instead of S24 back to Imperial Dam LTVA. S24 is lousy driving; we actually saw them plowing the mud off that road. And La Posa is closer to a town so the odds of getting good Internet reception are better there.

We went through our first Boarder Patrol road block check. The guy looked in our window, asked if we were both U.S. citizens, and waved us on. It wasn’t nearly as interesting as I thought it might be.

We are now at the class graduation site, protecting it from non-class members until someone else from the class comes to relieve us. That’s probably going to happen Sunday. Our whole class writes our plans in chalk so we can erase them easily. Apparently, we’re all commitment phobic. I think it’s mostly that there so much new stuff for us that we don’t yet know how to plan where we’ll be when. We make lots of plans, we just don’t follow them very well.

We had Christmas dinner here, just the two of us. We had turkey, potatoes & gravy, and cranberry sauce. The pumpkin pie was not edible. We need to learn how to use our convection oven.

Other than the pie, life is good.

TTYL,

Linda