Boomerville, Week 2

Quartzsite, AZ

The desert has pretty much recovered from the rain we had on our first full day in the desert and so has our power generation. By mid-afternoon of day 9, our batteries reached 100% state of charge and easily returned to fully charged each day after that. As the days become longer and the sun gets higher in the sky, we will be having power to spare during the day. When we hooked up to leave on day 14, our fresh water tank was at 18% and both the grey and black tanks were around 60%. We exercised extreme water conservation and this experience shows us that we can boon dock 2 weeks but if we are only going a week or so, we can relax some of our restrictions with water usage.

On the first day of week two, we went out to dinner at the Silly Al’s Pizza in Quartzsite. Our friend, Corinne, left to spend a few days with her dad so we took Jim along with us to enjoy a good pizza and, equally important, some locally brewed beer. Given that this is the only pizza joint in town that we were aware of, we figured we better go early so we left for dinner at 3:30 pm. Of course, there was no parking left near the place so we had to park the big truck a block or two down the road. The place was already packed but we only had to wait a few minutes to be seated. The pizza was very good and so was the beer. If you are ever in the Quartzsite area with a hankering for pizza and a beer, Silly Al’s is the place to go.

We made several visits to the big tent at the RV show in the town of Quartzsite. There were lots of venders there but only about 40% of them were RV specific with a lot of venders selling health items, bedding, foodstuff, and kitchen items. We did purchase a couple items for our RV but for the most part, we window shopped. One of the more interesting vendors there was selling a propane conversion kit for the popular Honda generators (we have one). The kit looked relatively easy to install and would still allow the generator to run on gas as well as propane. When asked if the conversion would void the warranty from Honda the answer was a sheepish “Yes”.

One of the big activities that people like to do in the desert is four wheeling. Some of the ATVs out here are pretty impressive, with wheels that are taller and thinner than we’re used to on ATVs back east. I’ve been told the really fancy ones can cost more than a car. We saw many of these parked at the RV show and driving the streets of Quartzsite. Where they really like to go is on trails in the desert that is probably very similar to snowmobiling in the north but much warmer. We did some of our morning runs we took along one of these desert trails.

The big event of Boomerville was the auction where all proceeds are for CARE. This is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that is essentially an assisted living arrangement for full time RVers that may need help at some point during their full-time RVing life. The auction took all of Thursday afternoon as it built up to the big item, a refrigerator/freezer donated by Dometic, a major manufacturer of RV equipment. This item is of value for RVers because it runs on 12V power and did not use propane. The auction was a big success, raising more than of $11,000 for this worthy charity.