A Little Desert Rain

The pictures today are from our hike to Palm Canyon – the dogs enjoyed themselves endlessly.  They love getting to run around off leash!

               

Yes, it rained today, not much, but we did get enough to wet the ground.  Mostly we got wind.  But the skies cleared and the wind finally died down just before sunset.

Jim went to Parker this morning to pick up a few last minute items for our get-together this evening with Janna, Mike and Dave, who is camped a ways up the road.  I stayed home and cleaned the Castle.  I’ve noticed we don’t get as much dust and dirt here as we did in Santee, even though we’re out in the boonies.  That makes it much easier to clean.  On the subject of cleaning,  even though we’re careful with water use, I can still do a pretty thorough job of cleaning.  I run the vacuum cleaner when the generator is running, and I use a lot of anti-bacterial wipes.  Left over dish water becomes scrub water.

We’ve also found that we don’t have to be quite as stingy with water use as we first thought.  With our four 5-gallon collapsible water jugs and the nifty pump Jim fixed up, we can pump an extra 20 gallons into our fresh water tank when we need to.  We have plenty of capacity in the gray tank, especially when I water the bushes with left-over dish washing water.  We also have enough black tank capacity to last at least 2 weeks.  We’ve been getting drinking water jugs refilled at the RO station either in Quartzsite or Parker, and we use that for making coffee, giving to the dogs, cooking and drinking.

Dave arrived right on time at 5 this evening with a bottle of wine, a tray of cocktail shrimp and a special liqueur for an after-dinner sip.  Janna and Mike arrived just a couple of minutes later.  Janna made a spinach dip and brought veggies for dipping. Jim lit the charcoal grill and grilled the most wonderful burgers.  Janna also contributed a bowl of fresh strawberries and we had angel food cake with those for dessert.  Wonderful dinner!  We watched the Olympics for awhile before everyone made their way home.

I thought I would comment on my post from yesterday, about neighbors.  I got to thinking, maybe I gave the impression I don’t like neighbors, and that’s not true.  I appreciate neighbors, after all, we don’t live in a vacuum.  We’re all very interconnected in so many ways, and I certainly would not want to be completely isolated.  It’s just that a person needs a little space around them, and we haven’t experienced this feeling of wide open spaces for a long time now.  Since we’ve been here, we’ve really enjoyed the freedom from being squished in an RV Park where you can hear your neighbor sneeze.  When I saw that another RV had arrived and parked within our view, I was a little disappointed (well, ok, maybe more than a little) to lose some of our wide open space.  It just brought up my realization that I know I’ll be a 50-Amp Pavement Princess again one of these days.  However, we plan to do a lot more research about boondocking possibilities from now on.   I have a feeling we will also be more willing to stay in limited or no-hook up federal and state park camp grounds where we can enjoy more of these open spaces. (At least those areas that can accommodate big rigs).  Limiting our stays in RV parks will help our budget and our nerves, I’m sure!