Month: January 2026

Hanging around Quartzsite

[I somehow didn’t publish this on, just left it in draft. Not sure why, but here it is.]

We have just been doing normal Quartzsite stuff. Kevin  has been doing some 3D printing too. I now have a nice setup to keep my new jewelry box on the shelf while traveling instead of having to put it on the bed. He’s also made a some small fit samples for some more things he wants to print. He really loves his printer!! And the one we have with us is just his original Ender 3 printer, not one of his newer and nice ones which are at home.

After the “design choices” I made in the October Block of the Month (code name for “mistakes”), I figured it couldn’t get much worse. It did. First, I seem to have lost the pattern for November. I cut pieces for it a week ago and sewed a few components, but now I can’t find the card with the design. Oh well, I’ll just work on December. December did not like me! I can’t tell you how many components I sewed wrong. I ended up putting the block into time out for a couple of days before finally finishing it. I’ll get a picture of it and the November one together later. I have arranged for my two king sized quilt tops to be based with water soluble thread by the quilt shop in Havasu I like, Fabrics Unlimited. She is going to use a wool batting for them. One is for our bed at home and the other is for the bed in the motorhome. I have them carefully folded up, so no pictures of those either.

And for yet more disasters, the surface of my ukulele had a rather rough feel, and I realized it was getting really dry. Duh! Humidity has been running around 15-20%, so of course it is dry! I put the humidifiers I bought at the guitar shop before we left Iowa in the case, but they are really too big to fit in the sound hole. I ordered a new one which shows temperature and relative humidity too. But it was too late! The day after I added the humidifiers I found I had a tiny crack in the front of the ukulele! It runs from the bottom of the guitar to the bridge. I am heart broken. I am looking up luthiers now, and I will be calling one in Yuma tomorrow morning. The ukulele orchestra is going well, and I am even going to lead one song – “Down on the Boardwalk>” Turns out the leader didn’t know it very well, and I started singing out on it. That was enough to get me to lead that song LOL! Our concert is in 9 days, and I am hoping to get the ukulele fixed right after that.

One of the interesting things that we have seen here is a Vandenberg AFB satellite launch. Interesting views of the first stage coming back into the lower atmosphere for recovery. It took a 2 second capture to get this view, but wow! There are two other launches this week. I am hoping they have a better launch angle.

Blown up a LOT

Kevin and I took a ride northeast of Quartzsite to a mining area north of I-10 that was quite nice. I prefer mountains to dust, and this trip delivered.

Just nice rocky scenery.
A saguaro being very classically “saguaro!”
Cabin ruins. Note the little side rooms on the right.

We went on a UTV ride the SunRiders today after I went to quilt guild. We took a very round about route to the Cyprus Mine then drove around it. It is a big mostly open pit gold mine that is still actively being worked. It was HUGE! It was 2-3 miles to drive around the pile of overburden they had piled up. Sadly you can’t see the pit; that would have been nice. There were a few nice flowers like the sand verbena below, but it was mostly driving on sand/dust that wasn’t my favorite locale. Oh well, the mine was nice.

Water is pumped from the tunnels to here.
Sand verbena

And I will end with a classic Arizona sunrise. Absolutely stunning.

With just a thin crescent of moon

In the Southwest again thank goodness

I left off on 29 December in New Mexico. We spent the night of 30 December in another Elks Lodge parking lot, this time in Gila Bend, AZ.

Oh, and just outside Gila Bend the motorhome hit 100,000 miles! Not bad for 7.5 years almost exactly. I got a quick picture from the passenger seat, so excuse the quality of the picture.

Average of 13,000 plus miles a year

We made it to Quartzsite on New Year’s Eve, and we decided to stay at Rice Ranch, a full service campground right across the road from the legendary “Big Tent.” The price was just under $40 with tax since we still got December rates; I think the rates double in January! It is just a huge gravel lot with a few palm trees, but it is clean and relatively quiet this time of year. We asked for, and got, a spot as far from the road noise as possible which was nice. We got our laundry all done, our tanks cleaned out, our power at 100%, and we went into the LTVA area ready to boondock for quite a while. One of our RVing friends was already there.

We had a tiny spot of rain that first day, so we got a lovely rainbow.

Faint but nice

That first evening in in the LTVA we were treated to one of Arizona’s truly spectacular sunsets. The colors are real, not touched up. The skies are this color frequently.

Dust and clear air makes for beauty

We were also treated to a rocket launch from Vandenberg. All day long it was relatively clear, but the clouds came in an hour or so before sunset. Since I didn’t take a video, you will have to trust me that the bright spot the arrow points to is the rocket flare.

It might seem as it if is “all sky all the time,” particularly after the next picture, but we really do get beautiful skies in Arizona in the winter. In the summer, there is frequently a lot of smoke from fires which makes the colors intense but adds a haze. The sky was clear for this photo of the Goodyear blimp on its way to the Fiesta Bowl this weekend.

We did try to go on a UTV ride with our club, the Arizona SunRiders, but the office where we needed to pick up our Colorado River Indian Tribes (CRIT) permit was closed on Friday, 2 January, for the holiday. Sure would be nice if the CRIT ever published this information! But we did drive around the area some, just wandering through the various LTVAs. They are busier than they were last year at this time, and there are more and more tents, cars campers, and van campers than I have seen. I think housing prices are just so outrageous for renting or purchasing that a lot of people adopt a nomad lifestyle out of need, not desire. Lots of people obviously down on their luck. The local food pantry is trying desperately to handle the influx, but it just isn’t big enough.

Monday I went to my first meeting of the Greater Quartzsite Ukulele Orchestra, and it was great fun. Not at all professional, a bit on the uneven rhythm side, but enjoyable. I knew all but a few of the chords, and I caught up on those with my handy dandy chord chart. The vast majority of the players use standard ukulele tuning and chords, but my baritone ukulele uses guitar-like chords. I am enough of a musician I can handle playing with just the chord names, and I don’t require the tabs to be written on each song. Good thing, because they weren’t there LOL! Our next concert is 29 January, and I think I will be ready for it.

I did get to go to the Quartzsite Quilters sewing day on Tuesday though. I had cut all the pieces for the last three months of the Kona Block of the Month I still had to finish, and at the quilting group I pieced the October block. I also got part of November done, but by the time I had taken out the third poorly sewn seam, I decided it was time to stop for the day! October isn’t my best work either, but it is good enough for me. It will also look better when pressed.

Kona BOM for October

Wednesday, 7 January, we went to the SunRiders monthly meeting before packing up the motorhome for the short trip to Indio, CA and the Western Region FRVA rally. So far I am not impressed. There were not directions for which gate to use to enter the fairgrounds, and there were no signs directing us either. We got lucky and found our way. The organization is really quite poor at communication. I found out one of the sessions I wanted to attend had moved to a new location quite a bit away from the one in the program, and it was only know through word of mouth, not anything from the organizers. I could go on, but I won’t. I will say this isn’t a rally we will return to!

We are getting decent solar and we have enough water, so we are going to do at least one load of laundry tomorrow, probably just shirts. If I have enough water, we will also do towels, but that is quite tentative. But it is also nice to go into a boondock situation that anticipates weather swings knowing you have lots of both short sleeved and long sleeved tops. You never know in Quartzsite!