As you can see Leslie and Yvonne finished the quilt just in time as we leave tommorow for Desert Hot Springs. We got some material in town yesterday, so Yvonne will have a reversible Dora and Ariel quilt for her bed when we get home. We had a great time in Yuma as the people are open and friendly here. Yesterday my neigbour was backing in to pick up his wood and smashed into our slideout. Thank goodness it was a small pickup and he only bent the bottom moulding and the upright moulding. He felt pretty bad but we have all the insurance stuff taken care of and a body man came in and staightened out the moulding until I can get them replaced. About a thousand bucks I'll bet. But we are mobile and the slide works and the guy did a great job at straightening it out.

The day before yesterday we took a drive out to the Imperial Sand Dunes. The weekend warriors were out there with their sand buggies and atv's. Unbelievable. On the holiday weekend there are thousands out here . Thanksgiving week this place becomes a city. There are 280,000 people living in the desert without services. I am glad I missed it. What a zoo. The dunes are pretty impressive though. Take care everyone. Jim

Crafting at Pilot Knob RV Park. This park has a lot going on and crafting is a major pastime. The ladies here make 600 quilts a year to send to the poor in Mexico and Leslie and Yvonne are helping out. They have also got into making Bead Jewellery and bead dolls.

We had a wind storm here in the past 24 hrs and the temperatures have plummeted to to the low 60's. Brrrrrr. Today rebounded though and it was back up tp 70f today. Supposed to get warmer tommorow.

Yuma Az has 4055 hours out of a possible 4456 hours of sunshine. Hard to believe aye. No wonder half of Bc and Alta folks are down here. I do not know how many Canadian's are down here but some days you see more BC plates than Az plates. Nonetheless, even with the wind storm and cool temps we are finding things to keep us busy. We will be off in the morning to pick some citrus and hopefully some fresh strawbs. Till next time. Jim

Yvonne with a native mexican dancer
The average Mexican home

Hola, amigos!!! We took a trip down to Algadones, Mexico today. The border crossing is less than 5 minutes away from our RV park. We parked in a huge parking lot and walked across the border. The town starts immediately, so it was an easy walk. They have dentists and optometrists all over the place. There's guys handing out their cards along the sidewalk coming in. We walked through all the vendors, then took a side road out to go see some of the surrounding area. The first home picture above is an example of what we all typically think about these Mexican border towns. The people are very poor, the streets are full of garbage. But then you walk around a corner and see a house like the third picture. As in any developing countries, there are no middle class. Just dirt poor and the rich. We managed to get a ton of vanilla. The Mexican vanilla can't be beat. We also bought a bottle of coffee flavoured tequila and one that's amaretto flavoured. It's 20% alcohol. I tried a sample from our neighbour last night in the middle of a couple glasses of wine. I ended up passing out at the same time as Yvonne. What a cheap drunk I am.

Our RV park has an organized quilt sewing room. The ladies here sew 600 quilts every year for the poor in Mexico. Yvonne and I went in yesterday for a couple hours and learned their system. They have everything tagged and piled in stages of completion, so anyone can go into the room and work for a while. It's a fabulous feeling to do something useful for the people who need it so much. The bonus of it is we get to learn how to make quilts.

The atmosphere here is so influenced by Mexico. This morning, we had a farmer bring fresh produce right into the RV park. It was so nice to stroll down and pick up fresh fruit and veggies. We bought a basket of strawberries, a head of lettuce, a bunch of green onions, a head of broccolli, two bunches of radishes, and six oranges for $8.

We are so enjoying the desert. Jim and I both love this dry climate. We are fortunate to be able to spend our afternoons in a lovely pool.

Warm and dry in Casa Grande. we are staying at Western Horizon's Resort here. We stayed here as guests for 4 nights. Very nice park. We went to the ruins in Casa Grande today. Yvonne earned her second Junior Ranger Badge and learned a great deal along the way. The water table here has dropped a 100 feet since the ancient Hohokam tribe lived here, so they had to move on as the water dried up.

I would not want to live here in the summer but a this time of year it is wonderful. 84f today and it is 8:30pm and still 75f. Finally the warm stuff. I love the desert.

Monday we are off to Yuma in our resort park for nine days and we are taking a day trip or 2 into Mexico to get some real Vanilla. Then we are off to Desert Hot Springs for 2 weeks. Membership does have its privlege's.

Our last day in St. David, Arizona gave us the prettiest / ugliest morning. The morning started up sunny with big, low black clouds coming in from the west. I went for my walk early to beat the rain and captured this picture of the sun hitting the mountains and the black clouds rolling in. This is the view from the top oval of the RV park. This area is just surrounded by these beautiful mountain ranges. It feels so free yet majestic for some reason, to see mountains in the distance. We have met the greatest bunch of people. We met Pat and Bill from Merritt and got talking to them about moving to that area. We shortly found out that both Bill and Jim are BC Hydro guys. They knew another couple coming here today that the husband worked for Hydro and Jim knew him well, so we went to surprise them. We ended up having happy hour with them and yet another couple from Merritt. They are all in this area at the same time totally by accident. It is such a small world and these kind of experiences are what we love most about travelling.

Tombstone. The old wild west town where Doc Holiday ,Wyatt Earp, and whoever else had the big shootout at the OK Corral. It is now a tourist trap but done well . They have a wild west show and the showdown at the OK Corral. We were out site seeing and stopped to take in the sights of Tombstone.

The top picture is the town of Bisbee, AZ. There is a silver mine there and the town as you can see is built in a canyon. All the houses are built on the hills and go up at quite and angle. Neat looking place but very hot in the summer. I can't imagine being here then.

It sure is nice to be in dry, warm weather again. We spent a couple of days laying around the pool which was great after the cold wet weather in the rest of the south. Yesterday was cool so we caught up on shopping and I managed to get the trailer cleaned a bit as it was starting to look a little worse for the wear. The front was filthy but I got it all cleaned and will wax it tomorrow.

We are in St. David, Az about 45 miles out of Tucson. We are here till Thursday, then up to Casa Grande for 3 days, Yuma for a week or so and then we are in Desert Hot Springs and Indio for a couple of weeks. Take care all. Jim

White Sands National Monument

Yes, that's snow on the mountains. To get to White Sands from Las Cruces, we travelled over the San Agustin pass at 5,719 ft. We were at the snow level. It was amazing to see snow still left on the ground from two weeks ago and it was 68F outside. The vistas were breathtaking. Once we crested over that pass, the valley opened up with another mountain range in the distance. This entire area is a NASA missile testing area so there's lots of nothing around and gates keeping you out of it. We travelled virtually right to the end of the line before we could even see White Sands. It's amazing that over 200 square miles of gypsum sand dunes could hide until the last second.

They had a Junior Ranger program, so we got the brochure and started working with Yvonne to complete all the tasks. She started on one at Gettysburg and one in Henderson Beach, but never completed them to get the badge and certificate. Well, today she took it very seriously and found all the things in nature to play a Bingo game, she drew an awesome picture of herself sliding down the dunes and a picture of a bird and its tracks. They had a lot about safety in the desert and it was a great learning experience for us all. We bought and then resold a saucer-sled. They sell them for $11 and buy them back for $5. This was the best $6 we've spent in a long time. We all got a chance to fly down a dune and climb back up. We all have sore legs and hips from climbing for a couple hours. We went on two different hikes and were very fortunate to witness a playa with water in it and the gypsum crystals formed that slowly break down and create the sand. At the end of the day, we went in to have the ranger review Yvonne's work and award her Junior Dune Ranger status. She had to do a "repeat after me" pledge to take care of nature, etc. She was very happy to get a cool badge. We're hoping she will now get into doing these things at the National Parks as it's a great way to really learn about the special places we have in North America.

Las Cruces, New Mexico

Yvonne serving the latest gluten-free creation
The view from the roof of our RV

Well, we safely put 600 miles of the USA behind us over the last two days. We went from San Antonio to Fort Stockton yesterday, then to Las Cruces, New Mexico today via I-10. Everything went well except for one small slip up by moi. I thought I had lots of fuel and passed a gas station at 1/4 tank. Next thing I knew, I was on the little amber gas pump and still 10 miles from our destination. I ended up having to pull over 4 miles before our destination and Jim rode his bike 4 miles each way to fill up our spare gas can. How embarassing. Good thing out of it is we can tell you west Texas has good samaritans. There were two different guys who went out of their way to turn around on the freeway and come back to check we were OK. I couldn't help but be nervous as here I sat with a dead vehicle and a 4 year old. I had all the doors locked and the window only part way down and cell phone ready for 911. How can you tell I've lived in the big city too long. Turned out both were just concerned people. Today we saw a guy stopped and helping an RV owner change a tire. We have to give Texas the big thumbs up for roadwise citizens and the best toll-free highway system we've hit so far.

We are now in New Mexico for tonight and tomorrow night. Our plan is to visit White Sands National Park tomorrow and toboggan down the sand. We aren't spending much time here as we know we can come back here anytime. We are planning the rest of our trip around the times we can get into our resort parks in Tucson and Palm Springs.

The land here has changed so much. We are now in desert with 6 to 7,000 foot high mountains. Ground level is 3,800 feet above sea level. We both love this type of country. It's magesty has some attraction to us that we can't describe. The weather is lovely. Mid 60's F and sunny and dry. Dry is our favourite word.

San Antonio Stock Show and Rodeo Brooks and Dunn

Bull Riding
My Feet Hurt (this is 20 feet from the truck)
THOR - the tallest living horse in the world

Calf Roping

We had a great day at the San Antonio Stock Show and Rodeo today. It turned out to be a lot longer than planned, but we saw it all. The one thing they were lacking is general information for the ignorant public such as us. We found that everything said the concert by Brooks and Dunn was to start at 7PM, well the real rodeo started then and they followed. So we got there at 10 AM and ended up putting in a 12 hour day. Luckily, Yvonne's feet hurt in her cowboy boots right away, so before we got too far, we got her into running shoes.

We started the day with a few animal shows, puppet shows, and bouncy inflatable kid things. There were quite a few school groups there in the morning, so it was busy for a while. After they left, Yvonne could go from one bouncy thing to another. She was in heaven. We somehow got ourselves to 3:30 without realizing it, so we went back to the truck and just lay our heads down a while to rest. We then went to the Midway where they had a PNE type thing set up with carnival rides. Yvonne and Jim went on the carousel. Yvonne went on a few other rides by herself. We also stopped and viewed some of the livestock that were up for judging. Yvonne got to pet an angora goat - they look like blonde rastafarian sheep. We also got to see THOR - the tallest living horse - he's a Fresian. Our interesting tidbit of the day is that a goat has a rectangular pupil rather than round. Wierd.

We managed to get ourselves to 7 PM and climbed up to our nose-bleeder seats. Actually, they gave us a great view, but also gave us the weird feeling of sitting on a cliff. The rodeo was absolutely amazing. They have hundreds of contestants from all over the world competing each night for two weeks. They have bare-back and saddled bucking broncos, bull riding, calf roping, team calf roping, calf scramble, and barrel racing. It was quite exciting and so well done. The USA sure knows how to do that primal type entertainment well. They had big screens, special song snippets and laser shows just like hockey at home - actually more like basketball while we had it.

Brooks and Dunn put on a great show. We got to see about 5 songs before Yvonne couldn't handle it anymore. We went down to the mezzanine and managed to listen to a couple more away from the really loud music in the stadium.

We're off tomorrow to do a long day to Ft. Stockton, then another to Las Crucas, NM.

Natural Bridge Caverns are a very interesting spot to stop. They are half way between New Braunfels and San Antonio. We went on an hour and a half tour of the caverns and went down 180 feet below ground. It was very warm and moist down there. This is one of very few "live" caverns which are still in the process of growing stalagmites and stalactites. It takes 100 years for them to grow one inch, so you can imagine the millions of years this cave has been growing to look as it does now. Pictures do not do the experience justice. The second picture is of a "fried egg" stalagmite. The different crystals being deposited and the wettness in the middle give it a yellow in the middle look and white on the outside. This is well worth the stop.

New Braunfels, Texas. This is such a cool little community in the hill country just north of San Antonio - thanks for the advice, Mike!!! We are just half an hour out of San Antonio and the flat lands have become rolling hills. There's cactus and scrub brush. Very pretty. We are in a little town that follows the Guadalupe River. I kept seeing signs that said "New Braunfels - Jump In". I had no idea what it meant until we got here. They have places all along the river that you can go tubing and there's shuttles to go pick you up. People have cabins all along the river with long staircases and decks along the river banks. It must be pretty cool in the summer time. Right now it's us and about 10 other RV's. It's down to just above freezing at night here and just over 60F during the day. It was a lovely day but not warm enough to go river tubing. We had a nice bike ride and look forward to a couple of quiet days. We have no cell service or air card, but there's WIFI that works if we sit in the truck with the door open.
Yvonne is becoming quite the photographer. I couldn't resist including the picture she took of me by the river.