More McDowell Mountain Park

We'll be calling this home for a couple of weeks, one of our most favorite parks anywhere. We were married here in 2003. The views are expansive and peaceful. The wind is rocking us tonight and it's chilly outside but my sister in IL and brother & sister-in-law in CO are being buried in snow and frozen in below zero temps so I'm not complaining! We just hole up with books and computers...

Outside our windows, in what I claim as our "yard", the migrating cardinals are here every day - gorgeous. Sometimes 3 bright red males at a time in a tree.

The horses appeared one day in the temporary corral right next to us. The Ranger explained that the corral was for trapping horses that ranchers let loose to browse in the desert. But these two showed up with saddles and no riders. Sheriff did a search and rescue and didn't find anyone the first day but on the second day a man and trailer showed up to take them home. Apparently horses and riders had somehow become separated somehow though we never heard the entire story of it. Was nice to have 2 horses as neighbors for two days!

Q Boomerville

This is a site I like to see...our rig right next to our last rig, our beloved Bounder. That means we're camping with our good friends Dean and Judy.

Reflections in Luke's RV - great time of day for a photo.

A trek across the desert one Friday took us to Bouse for a great all-you-can-eat fish fry.

A first for me RVing - I met another member of PEO, my women's organization. Small world, Beth happens to know my sister Jeri in IL who is in her mother's chapter in IL!
I taught necklace making with yarns one day. Each made a $5 donation to CARE, the RVer's assisted living facility in TX that we all support. Over the course of Boomerville's life this year, I think the group raised over $2,500 for CARE from things like pancake breakfasts, a magic show and auctions.


Me and my girlfriends - Beth, Judy, Dee and Jan. They make GREAT neighbors!






An Escapee tradition is a skit put on by newcomers to Boomerville, written and joyfully produced by Deb and Mark. We all had little parts to play, costumes to design, had a ball doing it and ended up with a crazy little ditty running through our heads for days.

I played the part of an Opera singer and Gregg the part of a TSA Agent. He loved getting to grope me and prod me in public...

AZ desert

So we are now in our 2nd state this 2011 year - Arizona. Thoroughly enjoyed CA but it's time to be on the move again.

We are in Quartzsite, AZ or alternately known as Q when you tire of typing out the entire long name. Vast areas of desert and BLM lands with small mountain backdrops, just across the CA border from Blythe on I-10. Q is a town with a population of about 3300 folks if you do not count the itinerants like us. Count us and the population reaches something like 100,000. Over 1 million people visit Q in the months of January and February for RV, vacation, gem, mineral shows and flea markets. Hotels and motels do NOT abound for this. RV's do. It is said to be the largest gathering of RV's anywhere in the world. This aerial photo above was taken by a member of our group, the Escapees Boomers. He flies a power parachute each morning here. What you see, we call Boomerville. Our first trip here, but some of our friends here have done this for years. Days are full of activities, campfires, happy hours, pot lucks, seminars, hikes, 4-wheel drive trips, night-time outdoor slide shows of members' trips, bike rides and trips into town for the incredible RV show and flea market.

Boomerville has had about 100 rigs this past week, some coming and going, but a pretty big core group of us making up our little town. You can see in the picture that there are other little towns of RV's throughout the desert. Rallys of all kinds of clubs and groups and lots of tiny groups. They spread for miles and miles and into other little AZ towns like Bouse and Brenda. Fine place to spend a winter or a part of it, lots of snowbirds here, lots of Canadians.

Still in the desert...

First time we've ever been parked right next to a Joshua Tree. Nice campground in Joshua Tree National Park. Absolutely beautiful clear day. We took a drive in the park that took us nearly a mile high and we could see across the Salton Sea all the way to the mountains on the Mexico border.

This is a beautiful park where the Sonoran and Mohave deserts meet, where you can see Pinon pines, Joshua trees and Yuccas together among huge granite boulders.

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Find Waldo in this picture to get a feel for the vastness.

We also hiked in Palm Canyon just outside of Palm Springs. Gorgeous, enormous Washingtonian Fan Palms. This was incredibly beautiful and very humid and rainforest-like. (Thanks Cousin Jeff for pointing us in this direction.)

Oh yes, my Cousin Jeff... Actually my first cousin once removed. His dad Dan is my cousin. Jeff renovates houses and showed us some of his work in Palm Springs...what a trip! We had the best time with Jeff, Dan, Jim and Nancy at their house with the Chandelier That Ate the Living Room. Here's a look at a current project - I'll just leave that caption-less for you to wonder why he has those huge rocks in this room...

California Desert Cities

Took a fun drive through Joshua Tree National Park in the Jeep on an un-maintained road. I got to do all the driving for the first time on one of these jaunts. Got rather exciting for the last half hour in the dark when the roads were at their worst...but we made it through. I loved it. Gregg sweated it...

Had a personal RV driving lesson today - wow! I learned SO much. Now I can back up, turn corners, get into parking spaces, drive on city streets. Great teacher and fun learning. I highly recommend this to all my RVing girlfriends.

Also had Gregg teach me all the procedures for unhooking and hooking up to utilities, etc, everything needed for me to make a trip on my own. Which I plan to do in Feb and take my kids over to NM to visit my sister. Road trip!!!

Celebrated our 8th wedding anniversary yesterday. Gregg took me to his favorite restaurant for lunch. I got to help choose a dinner restaurant. The Chop House was great.

Saw the Palm Springs Follies which is a great show - 20 years old now. The singers and dancers are all 50+ years old, some in their 70's and 80's and they look, and dance, great! Lots of comedy, wonderful songs from 40's, 50's, 60's, fantastic costumes. We loved it!

Lesley Gore was special guest star, did several numbers and met the audience in the lobby after. She is no taller than me! Said she took the words "short" and "old" out of her vocabulary. Good idea!

Enjoying Orange County

We're in an RV park just a 1 mile walk from Disneyland so we HAD to go there for a day...and I loved it while Gregg tolerated it OK.













Did some old classics like Autopia and I never pass up a carousel ride - one of my rules for enjoying life.

Re-visited some old favorite places from when I lived here in the 80's like the Balboa Island Ferry.


Still on our Presidential Library quest, we visited our 9th of 12 in Yorba Linda at the Nixon Library. These life-size statues of world leaders were great. Here's Gregg with Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer. The room was full with Golda Meier, Anwar El-Sadat, Chou En-lai, Mao Tse-tung, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Yoshida.

One thing we love in these libraries are the surprising little things that are found. This is a note to Nixon from Elvis Presley with his phone numbers. He was offering to help combat drug abuse.

Had a great evening with a lot of Gregg's cousins from his mother's family that live in this area. Big group of us and we all had so much fun together, we are planning a McDonald family reunion in Iowa in August.

2010 Rand McNally

I love coloring these maps as we move around each year. We get a new one for each year and have quite a collection now. Of course, we get the Walmart edition, only $6.97 and includes listings of all Walmarts and Sam's all over the US, Canada and Mexico.
Did a good job of covering the US in '10!
2011 only has a little speck in CA so far but we'll start moving eastward again soon...