Today our wanderings took us into Tucson’s Desert Park, a gorgeous example of Sonoran desert with an amazing variety of cacti and birds. We spotted a new bird today – a phainopepla which is also called a silky flycatcher for those with pronunciation problems. We fooled around in the park, just south of the western Saguaro National Park unit west of Tucson, for a couple hours before driving into town to shop for food.
The contrast between where we are, out in pristine desert with spectacular nighttime skies, and Tucson is dramatic. There is almost total silence here and there is very knotty traffic in town. I’m delighted to be in this part of the world.
Got a few bird pix. Click here

We did not get a lot of stuff done today. About the only things we performed today were I put up the slide-out stabilizers and we drove into the Tucson Camping World.
At Camping World, we bought a new GPS system for our truck and a plastic soap thingy for Peggy so she can keep the soap from wandering off its shelf in the shower. We were quite dull. The good part is that we have excellent satellite reception and terrific wifi here at Justin’s Diamond J RV Park. Between satellite TV, Netflix and Amazon Prime movies, we are well supplied with good stuff to watch.

We were up pretty early, for us, and split from Yuma quickly this morning. On the way out of the park, we passed by the park clubhouse where the Idaho Yodeler was wowwing the probably small crowd with his caterwauling. It was a frightening sound. I initially thought something was wrong with the truck.
We got back on I-8 eastbound for another long haul across a predominately featureless landscape with the exception of the jagged but pretty mountains visible on both sides of the highway. After more than four hours of uninhabited desert terrain, we pulled into Tucson where we headed into Justin’s Diamond J RV Park southwest of the city. The Diamond J is a very well tended desert park with shade trees, full hookups, paved main roads, speedy wifi and lots of birds and silence. It is quite nice. There are lots of Saguaro cacti near here, letting us know we are in the Sonoran desert.
The lady at the desk, Christine, seems to be from an oriental country because she speaks pidgen so fast that it is almost incomprehensible to me. She is very nice and took care of all our needs and questions, quickly. We have very nice views of mountains and mature shade trees from our camping spot. We set up for a week’s stay and then promptly climbed into the Barbarian Invader for cocktails to reward ourselves for making the successful drive across terrain where a breakdown would be not only inconvenient but possibly deadly.

Gathering up all our stuff and putting it in its designated place preceded our departure from Stagecoach Trails in Shelter Valley and the Anza-Borrego State Park. We drove south on S-2 to Interstate 8 and then headed east. The part on S-2 is a squirrely drive over some little rock ridges and through some very scenic desert with jagged, gorgeous mountain ranges making up the horizons.
In Ocotillo, we connected up with I-8 and started the descent to below sea level through the massive Imperial Valley, home to abundant crop land, gigantic wind turbines, irrigation projects and a funny odor. We blasted through El Centro at right about the California speed limit of 55 mph for trucks towing trailers, prolonging our enjoyment of the strange smells.
After a couple hours, we arrived in Yuma, Arizona, another area of extensive agriculture and the piquant odor of animal shit. We set up at a campground called Yuma Lakes which seems to only have one small pond but lots of birds enjoying the wet spot in the middle of a scenic but hellish desert. The pioneers who originally came through this landscape must have been some tough hombres because there is no water other than the currently very skinny Colorado River, poisonous snakes, nasty bugs, vegetation that has prickly defenses against contact and rocky, broken terrain.
We took a spin into Yuma to get a new tail light bulb for the truck which only took two long stops at parts stores to acquire. We filled up the fuel tank and stopped at In-N-Out for some double-doubles before heading back to Yuma Lakes. We won’t be in this locale for long. We did note that we would probably miss an opportunity to see one Robert “Buzz” Goertzen, called “The Idaho Yodeler,” at tomorrow’s non-denominational church service at the park. Drat!

We made another 30 mile trip from our RV park through Anza-Borrego State Park and into the town of Borrego Springs, primarily to get fuel since we are bugging out tomorrow. We didn’t expect to see any wildlife because we were traveling at midday but had just skirted Tamarisk Campground at the south end of Yaqui Pass when eagle-eyed Peggy spotted some Desert Bighorn Sheep. We shot a few pix of the endangered critters before continuing on our quest for diesel.
Once we got to Borrego Springs, we decided we had enough time to do some exploring so we passed through town and took the very twisty and steep S-22 west. The bottom mile or two is pretty straight and flat but soon the 10% grades and 20 mph corners start as the road screws itself up the side of some very steep rock mountainsides. Very close to the top of the grade is a pullout where there are magnificent views east over the town, the park and the surrounding desert. Way out at the horizon we could see the azure blue but grossly polluted Salton Sea glistening in the sun. It is pretty spectacular.
After seeing the big picture, we started back down the couple thousand feet into Borrego Springs when Peggy spotted a larger group of endangered Desert Bighorn Sheep. We pulled over along the edge of the cliff but soon others spotted us and they stopped, too. Two groups we were chatting with indicated they have been coming out here since 1969 in one case and 30 years in another and had never seen the elusive critters before. After much ogling, we continued into town where we filled up the tank and then went for a tasty lunch at a place called the Red Ocotillo. Nice outside and inside dining, pretty good food and about $50 for two lunches, two Negra Modelos and tip.
We returned to Stagecoach Trails, dumped the tanks, disconnected the water and poured drinks. Tomorrow morning we go!
We got some sheep pictures. Click here

Today we took a spin out to the Salton Sea, California’s largest, albeit mistaken, lake. We have seen it many times before but always from a distance. From the top of the Laguna Mountains, maybe 50 miles away to the southwest, the Sea looks like a shimmering jewel in the midst of a brilliant, colorful desert.
We hopped onto CA-78 from our RV park in Shelter Valley and followed it through Ocotillo Wells and across much desert badland until we got to the shore of the lake. Up close, the Salton Sea is a testament to men screwing up nature and having it ultimately strike back. We went through Salton City, a seaside community of some nice but mostly grubby little desert dwellings. Some of them are hard to see through the enormous screening junk piles some folks have in their yards. We drove down to the rapidly receding shoreline and gazed out across the long beach of heavy metal and agricultural chemical residues mixed in with the dirt.
The Salton Sea was created when some levees on the Colorado River failed and the water ran downhill into the deep, way below sea level sump that now is the bottom of the Sea. Our GPS at the seashore indicated we were more than 250 feet below sea level. Take that, Death Valley. Virtually no new water, except runoff from agriculture, replenishes the Sea. Lotsa Selenium here for those interested. The salt level is higher than the ocean, so buoyant stuff floats very high in the water until the stuff dissolves and sinks into the chemical stew. Prolonged drought is evaporating the fraction of the stew that is water, leaving the other, not water, stuff behind. A brown cloud of nasty crud fills the sky when the wind blows. Up close the Salton Sea is not a shimmering jewel.
We bailed from Salton City pretty quickly and headed back toward Borrego Springs on S-22, a lumpy and curvy path through the Borrego Badlands. The terrain, geology and desert plant scenery along the way are fascinating. The Badlands here are every bit as bad as the Badlands in South Dakota except the Badlands here have all the convoluted terrain AND nasty pricker bushes and cactus. But no water.
We continued through Borrego Springs, checking out the houses, golf courses in the middle of a desert and some more roadside metal sculptures before heading over Yaqui Pass back to Stagecoach Trails RV. It was a very nice loop drive although we probably could have left out our the up-close and intimate visit to the Salton Sea. The rest of the drive was gorgeous.
Check the pix. Click here

Yesterday’s rain gave way to crystal-clear skies with big puffy clouds but the wind was still quite brisk. It seemed a perfect day to take a spin through Anza-Borrego State Park. Our initial wandering was southeast along S-2, a county road that skirts the eastern edge of the Laguna Mountains. We continued for about 20 miles until we arrived at Vallecitos County Park and Stage Station where I, my spouse, our kids and some friends went camping about 25 years ago. It was the camping trip from Hell. We tried to cook a Thanksgiving meal and have a spiffy celebration but the weather turned viciously cold, the Weber failed on the cooking and one of the dogs got into the cholla cactus and ended up looking like a pincushion. Our cheap air beds failed and we ended up trying to sleep on the nearly frozen ground. We did have a good game of cold-on-one-side charades with everyone just about as close to the fire as possible and turning regularly to keep the other side from being like the dark side of the moon.
At the county park we turned around and headed for Borrego Springs, an interesting but weird community right next to the Anza-Borrego State Park visitor center and Borrego Palm Canyon campground. On the way but quite close to Borrego Springs, there is a section of road with wildlife sculptures dotted around the stark landscape. We spotted metal mammoths, horses, saber-toothed cats, some big hawks and a small collection of T. Rex guys in the distance. The campground is very nice and the views therefrom are stunning. The visitor center is built underground and is quite appealing with good exhibits about the local wildlife, plants and geology. They even have a little theater with some neat movies about the park, one of which shows quick time-lapse clips with the desert vegetation putting on a year’s worth of show in about 15 seconds.
By the time we had lingered too long in the park, we headed back over Yaqui Pass toward our campground in Shelter Valley, getting back to our trailer just before it went black. The scenery out here in the Borrego area is magnificent and spectacularly varied as the sun moves and the light changes. We intend to go fool around and ogle in this area again tomorrow.
There are pix. Click here

Yahoo! We are back on the road again.
The last few weeks have been a flurry of meetings with old friends, visits with our son and his wonderful spouse and a bunch of tending to chores regarding our disgusting old bodies, our vehicles and finances.
The hobnobbing with our kids and friends was great. We probably overstayed our welcome at the kids’ house because we spent six days and nights there while our trailer was having a new toilet installed, bearings packed, brakes serviced and some phantom interior potable and drain water leaks fixed at San Diego RV Center. We also foisted ourselves on them every so often during our stay, particularly when we may have had something to drink.
So all our gear should be up to snuff or at least that is what we probably erroneously believe. We are headed mostly east for the first half of this year’s expedition because during the second half we will be on the way back. Our intent is to return to some of the states we passed through in 2015 when our trip took us up the east coast. If everything goes according to plan, we will skirt the west side of the Appalachians in the spring, the east side in the fall and mosey back to the toasty, sometimes ablaze or afloat state of California.
We picked up the the Barbarian Invader this morning at San Diego RV Center (which, strangely, is not in San Diego but in distant Lakeside, CA) and hooked up our F-250, Charlotte, to the kingpin on the trailer in drizzling rain. We gave the maintenance guys $1500 for their time and parts and headed on our first leg of 2018’s excursion. Maybe leg isn’t the right term because we only towed our moving home to a spot near Anza-Borrego State Park about 60 or 70 miles from where we started.
Although it was raining on our first pull of 2018, the views as we passed through San Diego County’s back country were very nice. We started on I-8, turned north up CA-67 through Ramona and up into the coastal range of mountains, crossing above 3000′ near Santa Ysabel. We turned north from there on CA-79 toward Warner Springs but before we got there, we turned off the ridge and easterly down into the desert on a road called S-2. After a slow drop down to about 2000′ and a complete change of climate zone, we pulled into the Stagecoach Trails RV campground near a small clump of residences called Shelter Valley.
The park has full hookups and almost glacially slow wifi but the surrounding desert and mountain scenery looks like it will be spectacular once the storm quits and the skies clear. Today the wind is only blowing about 50 mph so working outside the trailer has a sandblasting-like effect on any exposed flesh. We are so happy to be back on the road, however, that we were quite comfy just climbing into our trailer with our new crapper and sheltering from the breeze. I tried to be the first, inaugural happy camper with the john but Peggy was faster. It is a very nice terlet.

It is New Year’s Day and our preparations for 2018’s proposed adventures are almost complete. The tow vehicle, our 2008 Ford F-250 pickup truck dubbed “Charlotte” by our daughter, has had the brakes replaced, some exhaust sensor work, oil changed and some electrical conductor replacement. It should be good for the next 25,000 miles except for oil changes.
The trailer, reverentially referred to as the “Barbarian Invader”, goes into the shop on the 4th of January for a brake system check, the bearings will be repacked, the toilet will be replaced and some drain piping minor issues will be addressed. We should be able to pick the trailer up at the shop and leave town on the 9th. We will stock up on groceries and liquor while waiting for the trailer to be made sound. We will have seen all our homeland cronies at least once and it is time to bugger off on another tour through the U.S.
Our proposed strategy for this year is to move fast through places we have seen before and take our time with opportunities for exploring in strange locales. We have a problem, right off the bat, with this year’s winter travel. We have taken the road east from San Diego through El Centro, Yuma and Tucson several times and we have seen almost all we want to see. We have traveled to San Antonio a few times and we have seen that country, too. Unfortunately, we want to cross out of Texas into the City of Natchez, in Louisiana, around March 20 for our initial run up the Natchez Trace. We will need to be creative in order to chew up the 80-some days along routes we have recently traversed multiple times (2015 and winter 2016/2017) between San Diego and East Texas. I’m sure we will figure out something. In my mind, we are pretty resourceful in our dotage.
To show how creative we believe we are, our first leg will be all the way from San Diego to the Anza-Borrego State Park, a blip of a drive at about 58 miles. The road there passes through some rugged coastal mountain ranges before dropping down into the desert. It isn’t like we jumped in the rig and took off on a long drive the first day. After Borrego, we’ll see where we go next.

The night before last we were on our way home from visiting our son and his wife in San Diego when our truck did a nasty. It was nighttime and we had just made the transition from poorly lighted freeway to completely unlit road when the “check engine” light came on. About 5 seconds later the display on the dash brought up a message that said “STOP SAFELY NOW.” The message should say “imminent failure” or “prepare for disaster” because about 5 seconds after the message came up, the truck stalled. Fortunately, we made it to the side of the pitch-black road before the thing quit rolling.
We called our rotten insurance carrier, let’s call them 21st Century, and started the process to activate our towing coverage. The idiots selected a towing company called Reliable Towing and allegedly dispatched them to our location. They said it would be 65 minutes before the tow truck arrived. An hour and five minutes later, the tow truck had not arrived. We started calling both the insurance company and Reliable Towing and were given numerous estimates of arrival time, all of them short. Two and a quarter hours finally elapsed and soon after that the truck arrived. The tow driver stated that he only got the dispatch 30 minutes prior to getting to our location. Numerous people have been lying. Perhaps Reliable Towing should adopt a motto like “You will be left in abject terror alongside a heavily-traveled pitch-black curve while we ignore you” or “We were only fooling when we chose our name.” If we did this again, Reliable would be our last choice.
After the maximum towing distance had been exhausted, we only had to cough up $50 in excess of our insurance coverage to get our F-250 dropped at our home Ford dealership. It was late Saturday night, long after the service department had closed, so we filled out an envelope with our poop written on it, tucked in a key and dropped it in the night box. Of course the service department is closed on Sunday as well although we did drive by to determine that they were still selling lemons to suckers. Fortunately we were then near our son’s place and he picked us up at the dealership.
This morning (Monday), we finally got ahold of the service writer and, after a few hours of patience, were rewarded with an estimate of around $1500 to fix some components that I was blissfully unaware of until today. They alleged it was something called an exhaust gas temperature sensor that must be vitally important since it shut down our in-motion truck with scant warning. We are quite happy this component did not fail while we were partway down a serpentine, steep grade with our 12.000 pound trailer pushing us along.
We have rented a spiffy-looking black Dodge Charger to get around while the truck is in the shop. It has a very perky motor and alarmingly touchy brakes but it is also has very uncomfortable seats and insufficient room for fat guys, like me. The odometer has only 81 miles on it so maybe we are the first unsatisfied drivers of this vehicle. Nothing has fallen off, like normally occurs with Mopar products, and we hope the car remains intact until we return it tomorrow.