Quartzsite, AZ

I am starting to realize that there are quite a few people that read our blog, since I am starting to get e-mails requesting to be a little bit more up to date with our blog. I promise I will try to do better. Therefore, I am sitting in the campground laundromat doing laundry and writing another article.

As some of you know Doug's and Dave's mother passed away in January after a very sudden and brief illness. We had planned on going out to California to have a memorial service with her old RV group, but do to our accident on Route 10 we decided not to go that far west. Dave and Michele suggested Quartzsite, since they had been RVing with mom there a few years earlier. So from Laughlin, NV we headed south to Quartzsite.

Now, Quartzsite is a very small town, know for its huge rock and mineral stone show in January every year and RVers come from everywhere to attend and mingle. There is a few campgrounds, but to do it right you should be boondocking, which means no electric, water or sewer. The government has provided a big area of land were you can park for free for up to two weeks. So we decided to do that. Doug and I really had not done any boondocking before, other then spending a night in a Walmart parking lot when it was getting to late to drive anymore. Dave and Michele have a generator built into their rig, we don't. It is amazing how many appliances frun only on 110V, starting with my coffee maker in the morning, the microwave, the TV and so on. I should have paid more attention in school when they were teaching about electricity. I am getting a very fast lesson now, every time I wonder why something will not work (including my computer, since the battery does not last that long). We do have two small generators that we use when really needed, but they are not attached to the rig and don't last that long.



Within about two hours of being parked in the middle of nowhere, we began to realize that our rig apparently had a problem with the battery. Our fridge started beeping, the water pump would not run anymore and so the guys started looking into it. It is a good thing that we were able to plug into Dave and Michele's rig for power or we would have had to leave, since our heat at night also needs electricity to run.

As hot as the desert is in the daytime, as soon as the sun sets, it gets really cold. We stayed for three days, watching beautiful sunrises, breathtaking sunsets and I got a great lesson about the stars and night, while we were sitting at the campfire.





We said our goodbyes to mom and started heading east, since Dave and Michele needed to get back to New Jersey.