Arizona 2012 Sunday (Jan 22)

Sunday January 22, 2012

We went to the Daybreak Cafe this morning for breakfast along with 500 of our closest friends! This cafe is just a block or two down Frontage Road from our resort and seems to be the most popular place in town. There were people standing inside and out, waiting for a table. Surprisingly, we only waited for about 20 minutes to be seated. The service was fast and the food was good so it was understandable why so many people were there. The cafe is open 24 hours and we have passed it many times and there is always a crowd waiting. Guess we will have to try dinner there sometime later.

 Mountains driving to Quartsite

We headed into Yuma thinking we would find the third flea market today. I put the address into the navigator but ended up at the Yuma Marketplace where we were yesterday, as I had picked the wrong address off Internet. We decided to forget the flea market and drive to a little town of Quartsite that we read about in one of the local papers. There was to be a large RV Show there today, which is just what we do NOT need to be looking at, but wanted to check out the town anyway. As with any Arizona trip, we drove through a million miles of NOTHING to get there. There were several proving grounds we passed along this route. We saw entrances for GM and another for a military proving grounds. This landscape would be the perfect choice for a proving ground as it is nothing but desert. There were several small mountain ranges around.  It made me think of the mountain scenes we had painted in our painting class in Mesa. Any type of mountain you choose to paint on your canvas would be fitting as these mountains were very diverse in their formations.

(RV's parked in desert-multiply this picture by 1,000)


As we neared Quartsite, there were hundreds of RV's parked out in the open dessert area. We could not figure out what could bring so many RV's to a place like this. I logged onto the Internet and saw where there are 750,000 to a million people who converge on this area in January and February as rock hounds!! They are all 'dry camped' in the middle of this dust pit on government land known as La Posa. Quartsite is known as the Rock and Mineral Capitol of the world. Looking at the hundred and hundreds of RV's I have to believe there is SOMETHING else besides looking for ROCKS?? Oh well, I guess I need to find a hobby that I would be passionate enough about to live like this for weeks!

Flea Market in Quartsite

We drove into Quartsite and it was packed with flea market vendors. Rows and rows of tents with hundreds of items. People were walking everywhere within about a 5 or 6 block area with vendors several rows deep on both sides of the street. The traffic was bumper to bumper and there were many quad runners and dessert buggy's driving along the sides of the street. Looking at the number of people here, I wondered if there was anyone left in the US that were NOT here.

Quartsite is very small with a normal population of about 3,400 and from what I read has a restaurant, two grocery stores, a bar called the Quartsite Yacht Club--in the middle of this dust pit--, a McDonald's and a hardware store. There are a couple of post office spots in town for 'general delivery' mail that, at times, has a line of people waiting up to an hour to claim their delivery. Wow what a culture shock this must be for the locals when this magnitude of people arrive!

There was also a huge RV Show going on near the flea market area but we didn't even walk over to this area as we spent so much time walking through the flea market. The vendor's here at least had worth wile merchandise, much different than the poverty stricken flea market we visited yesterday in Yuma. I bought my grand dog, Ava, a cute little ball hat at one of the shops today. They had some very cute pink fuzzy cowboy hats but none to fit her, so I settled for the not so unique, ball hat. We also found a vender selling sun shades for motor homes. There were several options but the ones we were interested in were one that fit the front window that is used to filter the sun when parked and also one that mounted inside to filter the sun while driving. We priced each, which were not cheap--nothing for a motor home ever is!! It seems we are always driving into the sun and even though the windshield is tinted part way down, we need the inside screen badly.  We took the guys card as he said we could measure and order later.

As we got near Yuma we saw a sign saying Frontage Road. We turned on this road and ended up within about 5 miles of our RV Resort. On our trip to Quartsite, we drove all the way to Yuma and then headed north out of town, so this defiantly was a shortcut and cut 20 miles off our trip back. We are still finding our way around this area and have found alternate routes to several areas.

When we drove back into the Foothills, we decided to go to Appleby's again for dinner. We sat in the bar and watched the rest of the football game while we had dinner, which was a plus for Larry. We had a nice meal and was surprised that the restaurant was not that crowded.