20 March Ajo to Desert Hot Springs

20 March Ajo to Yuma and Desert Hot Springs. 

No rush setting off this morning; destination? Where ever we get to. Yuma? Desert Hot Springs? We have some FMCA Vancouver Islander Chapter friends who may be still in Yuma. If not we'll press on to Desert Hot Springs.

After breakfast and walking the dogs Art began to tidy up a little—make the bed, dishes etc, and getting ready to pullout while Gillian walked across the road to the grocery store. She soon returned struggling with a shopping cart on the gravel drive so Art fired up the rig and went to meet her near the entrance to the park.

 

By 10:00 AM (pretty good since we weren't in a rush!) we were rolling north on 85 again towards Gila Bend where we would turn west on I-8 for Yuma. The road climbed through a few hills but we made good time over all.

We needed an AT&T store in Yuma where we could buy a phone card to reactivate our US cell phone. We found the address somewhere and when we approached in Yuma we set off following the GPS directions.

Things started off well enough but soon we seemed to be driving through a residential area, turning left or right every other block. We finally came to a large stone wall built across the now dead end street! A resident told us that the road had been closed for ages—the wall had been there at least 15 years! Thanks Garmin!

So back to a familiar routine: Disconnect the jeep, turn the rig (not easy in this residential cul-de-sac but we have doen it in worse places. We made free use of someone's driveway and now facing the right way set off for the nearest Shopping Centre (sorry, Shopping Center in the US!) We managed to finally get the phone sorted out. Also on the urgent list was dog food as we had run out of Trekker's grain free food and had been mixing food for him using chicken, potato etc. Poor Trekker! Back to the kibble!

Needless to say by now it was now time for lunch. A nearby restaurant did fine. We had arrived in Yuma at 12:30 and three hours later were back on the road for Desert Hot Springs to spend a few days with yet more friends that we had first met in Zihuatanejo! Peter and Celine now winter here in the Sands RV Park and had arranged a space next to theirs.

Scenery along the way was different than we had encountered previously, particularly the spectacular sand dunes followed by dead straight flat roads.

We arrived at about 7:30 and were greeted by Peter. The site is beautiful with a nice golf course (too bad we don't golf) and spectacular mountain views.

Next day we were taken on a great tour of the area, the best being to San Jacinto State Park and San Bernadino National Forest, wonderful scenery, excellent lunch in the village of Idylwild, even to seeing snow on the ground--Tia was not impressed!

Here, after a few days of watching weather reports for the various routes home we finally decided to take the coast route home to avoid the forecasts of snow and ice on every other route! Once more it seemed that we would be cruising Los Angeles freeways in the motorhome.  Having done that last year we were much more confident this time round.