Do you believe in magic?

 8:12 am - Friday - March 4th - Anza Borrego Desert, CA - 59° F, 45% humidity, wind 13 mph out of the west....partly cloudy today with a chance of rain, and a forecast high of 68° F.  The view about 7 am this morning.......↴

Only one other RV here

.....back in the beautiful, mystical, glorious Anza Borrego Desert!  On this date in 2013 we were takingr  a sunset flight with friend Elliott Walsh who lives with his wife Ann on the coast of Georgia in a 'fly in' neighborhood.....↴

Click on picture to enlarge.....inside the red circle is our Newell and trailer

I was out of bed around 6:45 am Thursday in anticipation of departure day.  We wanted to be on the road heading for the Anza Borrego Desert between 8 and 9 am.  All I had to do was clean the front windshield (forgot to do that Wednesday), put away the tool bag table (forgot to do that Wednesday night), and unplug.  By 8:20 am we were ready to roll, and saying our 'until next times' to Tom, Darlene and Wade.  We will miss them, and we will miss Newell House, and all the things which come from being there, but it is time to scratch the 'hitch itch' and return to our beloved boondocking site in the Anza Borrego Desert for another month.

We rolled though the gate at exactly 8:30 am, and were on our way to our first scheduled stop of the day......Safeway's Fuel Station on Bell Road and the 303 loop to take on 130+ gallons of diesel. Thursday, March 3rd, was the first time we have filled our diesel tank since October 21st in Minden, NV (we did add 58 gallons in Parker, AZ on January 15th to get us this far). The price at Safeway on Tuesday was $3.75/gallon for diesel.  On Wednesday it had risen to $3.86/gallon, and when we arrived Thursday around 9 am it had gone up again to $3.99/gallon......24 cents in less than 3 days.....Let's Go Brandon!  I asked TLE to give the cashier $600 in cash as I believed it would take somewhere between $500 and $600 to fill our tank.  She returned a few minutes later advising he would only sell us $200 worth of diesel....wait, what?  I've never run into that before.....well, whatever.  It just meant we would have to stop again before we crossed back into California to top off our tank.  $200 gave us just a tad over 50 gallons of #2 diesel, and filled our 180 gallon tank to the 1/2 mark on the fuel gauge.  Within 20 minutes we were on our way once again heading south on the 303 loop to pick up west bound I-10 to Highway 85, which would take us south to I-8.

The drive to Yuma was uneventful and mostly windless, just as we like travel to be, until we were about 15 miles from Yuma where we picked up a cross wind from the east after we crossed the last range of mountains separating us from Yuma.  Yuma is the last place to get diesel before you cross the California border, so we exited I-8 at Fortuna Road and found diesel for "just" $4.07/gallon at the local Chevron.....across the street at Flying J and Speedway diesel was selling for $4.69/gallon, so we were grateful for the $4.07/gallon.  We gave the cashier the final $400, and began to pump diesel.  When the pumped clicked off at $400 we were full, and now had enough diesel to get us back into Nevada (Gardnerville, NV) where we will top off our tank for the final 200 miles to Likely Place RV and Golf Resort, and our summer job sometime in early April....right now diesel is going for $3.59/gallon there....who knows where it will be in 4 weeks, right?

Once we had finished the fueling process it was time to make a decision.  Do we continue on to Anza Borrego, or spend the night at the Quechan Casino?  I was feeling pretty good, and it was not even noon time yet, so we decided to pound out the final 122 miles.  By this point the winds out of the east had abated, and the rest of our drive was great.

We arrived at the Salton City Travel center at the intersection of Highway 86, and S-22 (Marina Drive), and took a 30 minute break while we went inside to buy a (for me) Mocha Frappuccino, and for TLE a vanilla ice coffee.  That was just the 'pick me up' I needed for final 20 miles west to our boondocking site.

Since there are no reservations for boondocking sites we never know until we are about 1/2 mile away if our preferred spot is available, but as we topped the last rise between us and the site we could see our site was vacant, and there was just one other RV there, the same one that was there when we left back on January 12th....YAY for us!

By this time it was around 2:40 pm, and we had about 3 hours of daylight left.  Normally we would have pulled the VW out of the trailer, along with the artificial turf, and dropped the trailer before pulling forward about 6 feet, but were both tired, so we just parked.  I had the solar panels tilted within an hour, and TLE had the interior ready for occupancy, so I just went inside, sat in my recliner and heaved a sigh of relief....the long 310 mile day was over, and we were back in our beloved Anza Borrego Desert boondock site for the next 3+ weeks.....

.....feels like we never left!  On Friday we'll spend a few hours setting up the 'lido deck' complete with a couple of anti gravity chairs, and soak in the beauty that is the Anza Borrego Desert.

'Do you believe in magic by the Lovin' Spoonful

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