Quartzsite

We got settled in here on Wednesday and had a very lazy day. I read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair this week. It was very good, but with it being an accurate depiction of the time period, it is pretty gruesome at times. In case anyone does not know, it is about Chicago at the turn of the 20th century. It is mostly about the meat packing industry, the start of labor unions, and the living conditions for immigrants at the time. 

Quartzsite has been bustling this week. They have been preparing for the big RV show that started today (Saturday). We went to town on Thursday and walked around all day browsing all of the vendor's wares. We got our greasy food fix for the week and had a fried onion blossom, curly fries, and fried alligator. 

We were walking along when one of the vendors that was selling clothes (a surly looking man of about 60) said "How's it going gentlemen?". We realized he was speaking to us but were both too stunned to reply. After walking to the next booth I started laughing uncontrollably at the fact that Whit had just been mistaken for a man. She, on the other hand, was not amused. She was wearing her riding jacket which has protective shoulder pads, has really short hair, and was wearing sunglasses so I can see how he made that mistake with just a cursory glance at us. Needless to say, her day was ruined for about 10 minutes and I felt weird about holding her hand in public for the rest of the day. We also saw some really cool old rigs and some interesting hacked together ones. The one below was by far the coolest. 

We forgot to bring lawn chairs with us so after shopping all day we finally decided to purchase a pair of really nice recliners. We could not have gotten a better deal anywhere else, but we had one problem. We were on the bikes and these chairs were pretty bulky and all I had were 3 bungees to try to tie them down to the rack on Whit's bike. We managed to tie them down and Whit really wanted them so she decided to try it. 

Thankfully, we made it back no problemo and immediately set them up and have enjoyed them every day since then.

Yesterday (Friday) we decided to go for our first big off road ride. We set the route in the GPS, gassed up, threw on our gear, and took off. We rode a pretty trail through the Plomosa mountain range. We decided to take a less used side trail to see where it went and Whit had her first run in with a cactus. 

The reason there are only cactus needles on the end of the grip is because her hand shielded the rest of it. By the time I turned around  and came back she had pulled most of the big clumps of needles out of her hand so I could not get a good picture. I scolded her for this and told her that our readers want to see things like this and next time she needs to wait :). We spent the next 10 minutes on the side of trail picking needles out and discussing the ever useful "What did you learn?" routine. 

She fell a bit later and bruised her ankle, but her boots took most of the impact. I ride much faster than she does so every few minutes I stop and wait for her to catch up. One of these times, on the most difficult part of the ride, she did not catch up. I turned my bike off so I could hear and I heard a blood curdling scream somewhere far behind me. I hauled ass as fast as I could back down the trail with every kind of horrible thought going through my head (namely coming around a corner and seeing her with her leg twisted around every different direction). I came around a corner and she was standing next to her bike trying to pick it up. She was still screaming. I soon found out that they were screams of rage at herself that she had fallen again. Needless to say I was relieved. We got the bike back up and after bending the shifter back to where it should be it was good to go again. I asked her politely not to scream like that anymore unless she was seriously injured unless she wanted her husband to have a heart attack in the near future. We decided this was a good time to get a picture with this cool mountain in the background. 

We also found an old abandoned mine on a side trail. 

We got back to camp and had a campfire before dinner. 

Whit is not the only one to sustain injuries thus far. I have been made aware that RV entryways are the bane of all canines. There is a small crack between the aluminum threshold and the rubber flooring at the bottom step of our entryway that Nala got one of her claws stuck in and almost tore it off. She has been hobbling for a couple days now but is getting better. We make her go out the door much slower and in a somewhat orderly fashion now. Ivy got a little crazy playing with her toy last night and fell down the entryway stairs. I call them stairs, but there are two - just barely making the minimum to be plural. She scraped her leg and was not happy about it and tried to make us believe that the entryway had accosted her just like it had done to Nala. I tried to explain that the entryway did not have a personal vendetta against either of them but they would have none of it. I have so far been the only one not to suffer any injuries (fingers crossed).

We tried to make calzones last night but the oven did not work. I spent over an hour figuring out that the pilot light had been installed upside down which caused the gas line to kink and develop a small hole. I will be going in to town today to try to find a part for it and hopefully we will have calzones tonight.