quartzsite – Veness Travel Media

Today marks six months since we locked the door to our house in Florida and set off for a year-long adventure in an RV. Here’s what we learned during the past month:

Know your limitations. No matter how much you want to camp overnight in the middle of the desert at Quartzsite, when the ground temperature is 107 and you don’t have the ability to run at least one air conditioner (never mind your fridge) it’s time to re-think things. The fact there’s no one else out there and the locals are complaining about the heat are hints, too. Find a way to get the “flavor” of the experience and book that night in a campground with hookups.

Know the difference between a true limitation and fear.

When you can’t change the situation, change the inner dialogue. Yeah, yeah, we’ve all heard that, but the worst that can happen if you give it a try is that you’ll be right where you were before you tried. Start with “You can do this! You’re awesome, and you’re going to feel fantastic about yourself when you get through it! Go you!” and add to it as needed. Be your own giddy cheerleader.

Have a dear friend who texts you and says, “YOU CAN DO HARD THINGS!” That reminder is priceless. (Thank you, Katie!)

You’re going to see a lot of signs in the Southwest that read, “Watch For Rattlesnakes.” It will occur to you at some point that you don’t actually know how to watch for rattlesnakes.

Sedona, Arizona will get straight to the heart of whatever you’re struggling with. Don’t believe in spiritualism or an afterlife or any of that crap? Too bad. Sedona, Arizona has news for you, and even though it might take months or years of sitting with what it’s telling you, Sedona is going to tell you. Do believe in all that crap? You’ll get there quicker.

There is so much more history in the American West than we ever imagined, especially in Arizona. It’s astonishing to discover places like Tuzigoot and Casa Grande, which had vibrant, thriving communities more than a thousand years ago. It’s so much more than just “cowboys and Indians.”

If you clean up the dust in the morning, you won’t have to dust again until noon, and again before dinner, and once more before bedtime, and when you get up to pee at night, and it’s like that every single day, because there is so much more dust out West than we ever thought possible.

Your understanding of “be flexible” will change. At first, it meant you might drive further on any given day than you thought you would, or you’d have dinner out rather than cooking in, or you’d have to figure out how to stop that annoying whistling sound through the window when you move from one campground to the next. Now, it’s a philosophy for life. Combined with “forget about blame and focus only on a solution,” it’s pretty powerful.

Wave at everyone when you’re taking a stroll around the campground, and when one of them comes knocking on your door and asks you over for drinks, go. Oh, the happy evenings sharing travel stories! It’ll make leaving the campground very, very hard when it’s time to move on, and there will be tears, but those memories from the trip will be among your best.

When you hit that half-way mark in your Year on the Road, it’ll feel like you’ve been away from home forever, and also that it’s all gone so fast. On to the next six months!

Quartzsite, Arizona is known for two things, and both of them have to do with the state’s 12.1 million acres of Bureau of Land Management land. With so much open real estate and an attitude of “live and let live,” the town of around 4,000 residents swells to over one million in the winter months, mainly due to RVers camping in the desert for free, and rock hounds who have been scouring the place since the 1960s.

Camping at this world-famous locale was in our Top Ten destinations when we were putting together our Blue Sky itinerary for our year on the road. We’d get a nice diesel RV, fit it out with a massive battery bank and a roof full of solar panels, and camp wherever the hell we felt like it, but mostly Quartzsite.

*BLM land doesn’t include a lot of resort-style amenities.*

When Blue Sky met Gas Prices, that idea went straight down the gurgler, but we still planned to spend at least one night in this RVer’s bucket-list destination. We purposely planned to avoid the big January Tent Show that draws massive crowds, and instead would make the most of late October’s balmy weather, when the days are in the 80s and the nights are cool. We’d meet fascinating people, and congratulate ourselves for our reckless abandon.

But this is an El Nino year and climate change is real. Like Lake Havasu City, Quartzsite was seeing a longer summer than usual, and the day we were due to head to the desert for our overnight was forecast to be 107F. That’s the kind of weather in which city people temporarily living in tin cans die when they don’t have electricity to run their air conditioners.

*That time when we still knew what “balmy” felt like.*

We had to make a decision, and the best way to make a decision is to base it on reality. With that in mind, we agreed to drive to Quartzsite in Nippy on a day when the temperature was 103, and we’d sit in the car on BLM land with only the windows rolled down, to see how long we could last.

We were highly motivated. We really wanted the overnight experience. We’d been looking forward to it for four years, and the movie Nomadland, shot partly at Quartzsite, only served to increase our desire to visit that magical place. But we also know first-hand what it feels like to be in 100+ in the rig, with the kind of A/C that simply cannot keep up with extreme heat.

The drive between Lake Havasu City and Parker was gorgeous due to the mountainous pass along State Road 95, before the intermittent torture of 35 miles of teeth-rattling road surface the rest of the way to Quartzsite. We each racked up a few thousand points for facing our personal demons, and were pretty pleased with ourselves.

Plamosa Road’s BLM land was our goal, and it was the first boondocking area we reached. Much to our surprise, there was no one there. Not one single RV in a place where there should have been many. That scenario was far too remote for us, so we moved on to our next choice, which was Hi Jolly BLM land.

Hi Jolly had a small smattering of rigs in various states of nice-lookingness, mostly leaning toward the rustic. Some started leaning that way back in the 1950s. But we’re not RV snobs, and rough-looking rigs have great stories to tell.

Still, there was an air of slight menace about the one parked near the entry to Hi Jolly, and the road further in was made of angry stones, so we kept our distance, which is the polite thing to do when you’re boondocking, anyway.

*Rattlesnakes? Check. Scorpions? Check. Us? Ummmmm…no.*

We grabbed lunch to-go at the friendly Times Three Family Restaurant, then went to sit in the desert to see how long we’d last.

*Nice and air conditioned, but not with a dog.*

After 15 minutes, we knew we might have to switch gears. We didn’t make it a full hour before we agreed we’d take a different route to Mesa and stay at a campground with electrical hookups.

*We split a toasted ham and cheese sandwich with tots. Cold food might have been a smarter choice.*

But it was okay. We drove around town, soaked up the atmosphere, talked to the locals (all of whom said they were surprised by how hot it still was, and mentioned the outdoor vendors hadn’t even shown up yet), and visited the grave of Hi Jolly, to pay our respects.

*This is the Hi Jolly Cemetery. Nearly all of the cemetery, in fact.*

Hi Jolly (whose real name was Hadji Ali) was hired by the U.S. Army in 1857 as a camel herder for the Camel Corps, which was charting a wagon road across New Mexico and Arizona. The outbreak of the Civil War ended that adventure, and Hi Jolly returned to Quartzsite and became an entrepreneur.

Camels are now the town’s “icon,” and its quirky cemetery is named for that good man, who lies buried under the desert’s gravel blanket.

And what of the “naked bookseller” who is a legend in Quartzsite, and who we had hoped to meet? He passed in 2019, having spent his life mostly undressed, performing boogie-woogie piano tunes across the country and, in a way, having been the father of Male Stripping. We assume he was laid to rest in just the little “pouch” he wore for the sake of modesty, and is living his best afterlife under Arizona’s burning sun.

Tag: quartzsite

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