Until next time, part two

7:45 am - Tuesday - March 3rd - Winterhaven, CA - 51° F, 42% humidity, wind 9 mph out of the north.....clear, blue skies today with a forecast high of 80° F.  The view this morning......↴

Our Jello plan for Monday morning was to haul anchor by 11 am at the latest, and be rolling south to Winterhaven, CA for my dental appointment in Los Algodones, Mexico Tuesday morning.  While I wrote my latest missive, and stowed away the rest of our 'stuff' TLE drove into Borrego Springs to do one more wash.....we didn't have a lot to wash, but she had a lot of tokens left over, which would have no value to us anywhere else.  By the time she returned at 8:30 am I had stowed the solar panels, put away the portable fireplace, and turned on the big Kohler 7.5 kilowatt genset to run the block heater for 30 minutes.  We haven't used her in a while, but will be on our trip to and from Alaska, so it seemed like time to give her some exercise.  As always, she purred like a kitten, and did her job.

By 9:15 we had dropped the trailer upon our 13,000 lb. hitch, pulled forward 45' to bring the rear of the trailer even with our artificial turf which we had folded the night prior.  Within minutes we had both the turf, and VW inserted, and were saying our 'until next times' to Tom and Martha Ann.  They are now the sole possessors of our Anza Borrego oasis.

Our first stop was 20 miles down S-22 to the ARCO Travel Center where we dumped our rather amply loaded waste tanks, took on 120 gallons of fresh water, dump 10 days worth of trash, and finally took on 24.2 gallons of propane at $2.44/gallon.  All of that took the better part of an hour, so when we finally merged onto Highway 86 southbound it was just 10:55 am.

The remainder of the 120 miles into Winterhaven was idyllic and, very importantly, uneventful.  We arrived at the 'Q' (Quechan Casino) at 1:15 pm California time, but we are so close to Arizona our phones immediately changed over to Arizona time, 2:15 pm, meaning we have essentially already gone through DST one week in advance.  By next Sunday Arizona and California will be on the same time once again......

The 'Q'

.....we quickly found a parking spot in the large RV lot behind the casino, and then walked into the Casino to pay for two nights.  The first time we were here 4 years ago we paid $3 for three days.  The last time we were here they were not charging anything.  It is now $10/night, or $25 for three nights.  Predictably this fee increase has thinned out the dry camping herd, and there is much more room to maneuver around in the parking lot.   You have to have a member, or player card before you can pay, which I already had from our first visit here.  Once we paid for our stay we walked over to the food court to get a snack....neither of us had eaten breakfast!  By the time we began our walk back to the Newell we saw this coming fast on the horizon.....

.....looks ominous, right?  Well it was, and it became a good old fashioned 'toad strangler' within minutes.......

.....there was lightning, thunder, and torrential rain for about 30 minutes when it settled into a nice downpour for another hour......

.....within 10 minutes of the rain stopping the ground seemed totally dry once again, and we were treated to a nice sunset.......

.....TLE made one of my favorite meals, Chicken Alfredo, for dinner while we settled into our new view for the next two days. So, we have successfully repositioned ourselves to Winterhaven for a couple of days, then on to Wittmann, AZ for a month with our friends Tom and Darlene, and a lot of Newell projects to accomplish!

Thanks for stopping by!

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