Part II of our Quartzsite Adventure started bright and early on Saturday, 28Jan, when we picked up new friend, Kathy, AKA Cakelady to fellow geocachers. We headed east about 50 miles to the start of the Eagle Eye Power Run, a series of 251 geocaches in a 25+ mile stretch of road. It was a great, paved road, with little traffic. We had been instructed to do the series heading north, so that all the caches would be on the right side of the road. (All four tires must be to the right of the white line when stopped.)
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| Eagle Eye Formation |
It was a fun day, with Katy doing the majority of the driving and Gary and Kathy taking turns jumping out of the car to find the cache, log the find, and get back in. While it wasn't a race, we wanted to keep moving quickly in order to complete the series. We started with the first cache at 9am and finished the series at about 3:05pm. That included a half-hour lunch break, and a couple of other short stops to walk the dogs. Rusty and Spicy loved having Kathy in the back seat with them and were quite put out when it was her turn to jump out and back in the car. That made no sense to them, but they put up with it until she stayed put for a while and Rusty could snuggle back up to her. We even found two other caches on our way back to Quartzsite.
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| Kathy (Cakelady) & Katy |
The Rally started with a "Z-circle." This was a way to meet each other in smaller groups. About 7 folks volunteered their rigs to be hosts and the others signed up to visit. Our able coordinator, Sue, assigned everyone a route to take and visit three rigs. As no two people had the same assignment, we met new people in each rig and in small groups of 8-9 people, it was easy to learn about each other. We brought refreshments to the first rig and left those there for the others coming later to enjoy, as we moved on to other rigs every 30 minutes. When rally activities started the next day, we all felt among friends.
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| Gary logging a geocahe find. |
Several seminars were held the first day. My favorite was "Caching with your Smartphone." I learned so much about c:geo, a free app on my phone, that I can now use it with ease. I had previously tried it, but been mystified about how it worked. That afternoon Gary and I set off to complete the Sunkist trail, a series of 14 caches along the old dirt road to Bouse. We capped the evening off with a potluck dinner and a program at the Pace Theatre. This is a rig with a large white space where movies and/or slides could be shown through a computer. We saw unique geocaches and learned a lot about geocaching.com.
Tuesday had been advertised as an official geocaching "event." That meant other cachers in the area, besides Escapees could attend and take credit for the event. We had about 40 other cachers join us for the day. While most of these folks were also RVers, they were camped in other Quartzsite areas. We played several games, including identifying geocaching acronyms, a poker run, and a great bingo game that had us all laughing as we searched for someone who had geocached in their pj's, had over 1,000 caches, solved 50 puzzle caches, drew blood while caching (I think all of us caching in AZ had done that), been stopped by the police while caching, and assorted other antics familiar to many of us.
That afternoon the dogs were delighted to be invited on another cache run with Kathy to find the 12 SKP caches placed out in the desert a few miles from the rally site. This was a real 4 wheel drive with many dips through washes, soft sand, and some mild boulder driving. Our Honda did great and we found all the caches! The public event ended with a dessert potluck and cake. It was a big hit with all and several cachers expressed interest in joining the whole rally next year.
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| Rally attendees enjoy a seminar in the sun. |
The next morning was full of hugs, as we all bid good-bye, until we meet down the road. Gary and I left, heading back to the Roost at Casa Grande. All in all, we had found 34 caches in Yuma, 253 on our power run, and 62 caches in Quartzsite, for a total of 349. That didn't seem quite right, so I convinced Gary to stop for one more on the way home to get an even 350. Our total now is 2,306. If that sounds like a lot, our friend Kathy was rapidly approaching 5,000 caches and hoped to hit that before she left AZ. Others at the rally had over 10,000 caches.
Besides all the rally activities, Gary managed to get in three pool tournaments in Quartzsite, finishing 2nd in two of them. Our new generator ran great and the weather was definitely the best we've ever had in Quartzsite with 1 bad day and the rest beautiful.
We arrived back at the Roost in time for our a great Super Bowl party. This was quickly followed by February Follies. These are five fun-filled days of games, skits, casino night, raffles annual meeting, food auction, many meals, and more laughter than I can possibly relate. I was one of three deputies, who along with our sheriff leveled fines on those not wearing RoVer's Roost shirts, nametags, or complaining in any way.
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| Katy contributes $1 . |
The goal of the Follies, besides all the fun, is to raise funds for our park. This was easily done with approximately $6,000 being raised. Gary wound up on the first place teams in the golf scramble and beanbag baseball. He also organized and held billiard tournaments for the ladies and men, placing first in the men. There was entertainment in the form of skits, a beauty pageant you had to see to believe, and a kangaroo court.
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| RoVer's Roost Clubhouse During Follies |
You can see we're not bored while wintering here. We've had a great year so far and look forward to another 2-3 months before heading north again. We'll be going North after meeting Gary's sister, Pam and her husband Jim at Goblin Valley State Park in Utah. With two grandsons graduating high school, one in Salt Lake and one in Evanston, we plan on being back there around the last week of May.
Dancing through the end of Winter............................ Hugs to all, Gary, Katy, Rusty, and Spicy
