I haven’t seen a good one of these in a while

Foreground, Arizona. Background, California

The Quartzite problem spreads

My main gripe about Quartzsite during snowbird season is clogged cellular bandwidth. The various signals are strong but there are too many people trying to use them at once. The only relief is in the middle of the night.

So there I was, back at my regular campsite in the southeast corner of California, reconnected to Verizon and T-Mobile instead of Telcel, but the web was extremely sluggish, nearly unusable. Because the holiday weekend sand dune users were clogging the bandwidth. Just like in Quartzsite. Sigh.

Did I want to spend the next four days with essentially no useable net access? Hell no! But where could I easily and freely camp in the general area this time if year? What place would be near cell towers but not overflowing with people like me?

Ehrenburg, Arizona. Yes, thats’s a popular public land camping area, but nowhere near as crowded as Quartzsite on the other side of the mountains. And the population of Blythe CA on the other side of the river is fairly constant. No big surge.

This morning I hit the road north. Very little traffic. I imagine most people were already settled into their Thanksgiving locations.

As I turned onto the public land access road I wondered just how crowded or uncrowded the area would be. Had I come for nothing? There were a surprising number of rigs camped along the first quarter mile or so. Was it because the mesa was full, or had they decided they had gone far enough? And the usually well maintained dirt road to the gravel pit was very rough. Had exceptionally heavy use messed it up?

However, when I got up on the mesa I saw it was far less crowded than the other times I’d been there. Plenty of easily accessible room. Nearest neighbors hundreds of yards away. But the big test: how was the cell service? Very good. Yay!

Ehrenburg isn’t one of my favorite places, but it serves a useful purpose. It’s utilitarian. I’m mulling whether I want to continue north to Lake Havasu City after I’m done here. The forecast looks good, but it gets crowded too. Oh, the problems of a picky nomad.

I'm not in Mexico YET

Today I drove to the Calexico-El Centro-Imperial-Brawley metropolis. Mostly for a break in the routine, but also to pick up a couple of things. I usually get there by driving north on State Road 34 (Ogilby Road) to Highway 78 west, over the Imperial Dunes and onward to Brawley. Then I turn south on Highway 86 through Imperial to El Centro. That’s the lazier, more scenic route. But today I was impatient and took I-8 to El Centro. Cruisin’ fast and smooth.

The longer, slower, scenic route

The shorter, faster, boring route

Along the way I-8 gets within 1,600 feet of the border. Despite the number of cell towers along I-8 and in the small farm towns along the way, my phone started believing it was in Mexico, causing it to switch over to the Telcel network. That’s not a problem because I don’t use the phone while driving.

But when I got back to camp, which is eight miles from the border, and where I’ve always had a strong Verizon signal, my phone insisted it was still in Mexico. So I rebooted the phone. Twice. But it still grabbed the Telcel signal. Argh.

After about an hour the phone realized it was in the US and gave me my Verizon connection. Maybe the phone just wanted to be in Mexico, drinking tequila and eating shrimp tacos. Or maybe the Customs & Immigration line was really long.

Oh. Yeah. Thanksgiving.

I didn’t really want to go to town today. I needed a couple of grocery items and thought I could wait a few more days. Then I thought again and remembered it’s Thanksgiving this Thursday. Grocery stores get crazy this week. Tuesday and Wednesday will be worse than today. So I went.

It was not a good sign that the parking lot was very full. It was also not a good sign that shoppers were coming out of the store to get carts from the various corrals. So I snagged one and headed in. The checkout area was clogged.

You know how in Star Wars they plot a course then shoot through the universe without hitting anything? That’s what it was like moving through the aisles. Almost magically my path was unobstructed and the things I needed were in easy reach. Zoom grab zoom grab zoom grab… Also highly unusual: my cart didn’t have wobbly or bumpy wheels.

And when I got to checkout there was an available register waiting for me. Bleep bleep bleep bleep, into the bag and go. In and out in less than ten minutes. Amazing.

As I returned to the open desert I saw more RVs, toy haulers and dust-producing off-roaders than when I had passed earlier. Yeah, it’s going to keep loading up for the holiday weekend. But my campsite is away from most of that. Still I’ll have some neighbors. Guess I shouldn’t be peeing outside for the next few days. At least in daylight.

It's still T-shirt weather in this part of the desert

Almost no peeling paint

GM vans and trucks, as well as pre-Mercedes and pre-Fiat Dodge vans and trucks, are notorious for peeling and flaking white paint. 

The Rolling Steel Tent has been plagued with it the past few years. It got especially bad when I was in wet weather. Water seeps into tiny dings and creates water filled bubbles between the paint and primer coat. A chunk a little larger than my hand came off the sliding door a few months ago. There were also areas on the driver side front wheel arch, the driver window opening, and along the underside of the drip rails.

In the Nomadland movie, Swankie talked about bad paint making us van dwellers look like bums. I agree. Gotta make this disrespected lifestyle appear as respectable as possible.

So I got some sandpaper and paint and got to work. Spray cans don’t do the best job — especially outside in a breeze — but the result looks okay from about ten feet and if the light is just right. It looks perfect in the dark. With your eyes closed.

Now I just need to deal with the chips and baked-on bug guts on the bumper.

I’m having those “Where am I?” moments again

Whenever I’m in a period of frequently moving from place to place I sometimes wake up slightly disoriented. “Wait, where am I?” I look out the window. “Oh, right. Okay.”

This is particularly the case when I’ve camped at several similar looking spots. Like the desert.

The past few days I’ve stayed in four places:

Off Sidewinder Road in southeast California

Off Ogilby Road, which is a few miles northwest of Sidewinder Road

In a BLM patch on the edge of Quartzsite Arizona

In a BLM patch on the edge of Ehrenburg, which is a few miles west of Quartzsite.

They are all flat areas covered in “desert pavement,” with mountains nearby. Creosote bushes, mesquite trees and ocotillos in the washes. Almost no one else around. Interchangeable Sonoran Desert locations. 

At night about the only way to determine where I am is by the size, brightness, and orientation of the nearest city’s glow. I usually park nose-north and direction find from there.

The good thing, though, is that these temporary episodes of disorientation don’t matter 99.9% of the time. In fact, a lot of things in my simplified, old man nomad life no longer matter. that has increased my happiness.

I could sue

My mail forwarder is in Quartzsite. So when I’m in the general area I place any needed online orders and have them delivered there. A shipment is supposed to arrive tomorrow so I drove up from Yuma this afternoon. (I could have waited until Monday or Tuesday, but I was ready for a change of scenery.)

As I pulled into town I decided to take a shower at the laundromat. It’s not my favorite place to clean up because the shower rooms have only a shower. No sink, no toilet, no electrical outlets. But it’s convenient. Since I was last there they’ve installed hand-held shower heads, which I prefer. And these had a quick on-off button which was also nice. The water pressure was barely acceptable, but you can’t have everything.

Whereas most shower places provide a terrycloth bathmat, the laundromat offers only a paper one, which immediately sticks to your feet when you step from the shower. So I’ve learned to stand on it while I dry the rest of me, then throw the towel on the floor as a mat.

But this time things did not go as usual. As I stepped out of the shower my back foot slipped on the wet stall floor. As I instinctively tried to shift my weight forward, the paper “mat” slipped under my front foot. I flailed and dodged the glass shower door, landing hard on the top of my left tibia where it sticks out below the knee cap. OW!

The last part of the slip-and-fall could have been prevented if there had been some kind of grab handles instead of just the door and doorjamb. And if there had been an actual bathmat.

If I were the litigious type I could sue the laundromat. Or at least threaten legal action and see if I could get a refund. I thought about asking them how they got away with not having grab handles. And what about grippy strips on the stall floor? Isn’t there some sort of public safety ordinance requiring them? But I let it all slide. No skin was broken, no bone chipped. My knee still worked smoothly. There might be a bruise later, but that’s no biggie. I just won’t be going back there.

UPDATE: No bruising or other damage.

It’s only 11:45?

My sleep pattern has been totally messed up the past couple of weeks — more than I can attribute to shortening daylight hours, switching to Standard Time or straddling time zones.

My typical routine is to turn in at about 10:30, wake up about four hours later to pee, then sleep another four hours. And I usually nap for about an hour in the afternoon.

But now I go to bed an hour earlier, toss and turn for a while, eventually fall into some type of asleep, then wake up feeling like I’ve slept several hours. But it’s still before midnight — a couple of times it was before 11:00. So I struggle to sleep again, imagine I’ve slept for many hours, but wake up only a couple of hours later. I try to go back to sleep again but can’t, so I throw in the towel and get up. Then I go back to bed just as the sky is starting to lighten and sleep another hour or two. 

I have no urge to nap during the day, and when I try to, hoping to compensate for poor sleep the night before, the best I can do is deep relaxation.

Last week I tried knocking myself out with Benadryl. That has always worked before. Not this time.

I wondered whether this was just part of aging. I had heard it said older people sleep less. So I put artificial intelligence on the job of gathering and summarizing info on the matter. Here’s what it reported:

Older adults often get less sleep than they need. This can be due to various factors: 

• Difficulty falling asleep: A study found that 13% of men and 36% of women over 65 take more than 30 minutes to fall asleep.
• Less deep sleep: Older adults tend to spend more time in lighter stages of sleep and less time in deep sleep.
• More frequent awakenings: They often wake up more throughout the night.

While sleep duration might not necessarily decrease, sleep quality can change:

• Fragmented sleep: Older adults may experience more disrupted sleep patterns.
• Earlier sleep-wake cycles: There's often a shift towards getting sleepy earlier in the evening and waking up earlier in the morning.
• Daytime napping: Due to nighttime sleep disruptions, older adults may nap more during the day.

Several factors can influence sleep in older adults:

• Circadian rhythm changes: The body's internal clock tends to shift, causing phase advances in sleep timing.
• Medical conditions: Health issues more common in older age can affect sleep.
• Medications: Many medications taken by older adults can have side effects that impact sleep.
• Reduced melatonin production: Older adults may produce and secrete less of this sleep-promoting hormone

So, reasons. I hope this is a temporary phase with me, because if this is my life from here on, that totally sucks.

It’s noon right now and I’m feeling a little tired. I’ll see if I can nap this time. I’ll report back.

UPDATE: I slept more like my old pattern last night. Much better. I need to see if it holds.

It’s just me

¿Qué hora es?

For several years I’ve been spending the colder months just inside the southeast corner of California in a BLM area where I have never seen the 14-day camping limit enforced.

Meanwhile, I get my supplies and various services a few miles away in Yuma, with low-cost dental/vision/prescriptions/fresh shrimp available immediately across the border in Mexico.

It has been a good setup for me — with one exception. Arizona is Mountain Time and California is Pacific Time (except during Daylight Saving Time when their clocks match). 

Lou and I used to debate which time we should keep our clocks set to when we camped here. This was particularly critical to him because he always wanted to make his supply runs first thing in the morning to beat the traffic and crowds (or at least feel like he had). So he ran on Mountain Time. 

On the other hand, I didn’t really care when I got to Yuma (except lunch hour traffic is awful) but was more interested in getting in and out of Los Algodones early enough to avoid long lines getting back across the border. Baja California runs on Pacific time.

But now there’s no one to argue with. I can function in whichever time suits me at the moment.

What still freaks me out a little is when you’re in the eastern edge of a time zone the sun sets so early. As if the decreased daylight hours of the season aren’t enough, we have the manmade time grid overlaying it. Sunset at 4:38? And it’ll only get worse over the next six weeks? Sigh. This is why hibernation was invented.

Yesterday afternoon

On my back to see the belly

I store my spare key in a magnetic holder under the van. I needed to use that key a few days ago when I somehow got out of my usual parking rhythm and locked my regular key in the Rolling Steel Tent. I was in a dirty spot at the time and didn’t want to get even dirtier returning the spare key to it’s hiding place. So there was a period when both keys could have ended up locked in the van. I finally re-hid the spare a few minuted ago. I took a look around while I was down there. Any signs of leaks or something falling off? Any vegetation stuck under there? Any rust? No, just dirt and some dried mud. So the van is fine (I guess) and I’m prepared to stupidly lock myself out again.

I’m a shadow of my current self

Personal values vs. desires

I want to spend several months (at least) on the Baja peninsula. Cell service is spotty and net access is iffy and of unreliable quality. Some campgrounds have wifi, but for a fee and for limited hours of operation.  The same for net cafes where they exist. Starlink would be a solution, but I refuse to give any money to Elon Musk. So, it looks like my choices are:

1. Adjust to far less net use
2. Stay in larger towns with better service instead of secluded areas

3. Don’t go to Baja

None of those are appealing at the moment.

It wasn’t a great couple of days

My friend Deni had been struggling for a few years with getting an ailment properly diagnosed and treated. She had been in Washington with a daughter, Missouri with other family, and Colorado to finally get things taken care of. She’s feeling much better but is still weak.

When an online acquaintance in southeastern Arizona offered Deni a pre-fab tiny house on a piece of land shared with a few others she decided it would be a good home for part of the year and a base from which to continue her nomadic wanderings.

Deni put out feelers for people to help load a studio apartment’s furnishings and household items into and onto her minivan, and others to unload them at the destination, I volunteered for the unloading. Others had helped her load in Colorado.

I met up with Deni in Willcox AZ, about 25 miles from the property, which she hadn’t seen yet. We set off with some directions that proved to be vague and incomplete. After phoning one of the people at the property they found us and led us in.

Have you been to Slab City? You know how some “homesteads” are neatly kept and others look like the aftermath of a tornado with crap scattered all over the place? This property was like the latter. And the pre-fab tiny house was filthy inside. Deni decided to pass.

“Find me the closest self-storage place,” she whispered to me before telling the host there was no way she would stay in a sty like that. I found a couple places with available space. We chose the one that was half the price.

I was astounded how much stuff had been packed into that minivan and on a rooftop carrier. I was also astounded by the number of bungee cords holding the load in place. Bed frame and headboard, easy chair, desk chair, tables, pictures… But we got it all transferred in less than an hour.

All that and more in a minivan

Then the question was where to go. Deni wanted to eventually get to Quartzsite, but there was no rush. I said, “Well, we could go back to Las Cienegas National Conservation area where I had camped prior to the lake in Willcox. About an hour and a half west.” Deni was up for that. So off we went.

The next morning (which surprised us with frost on the windows and ground) Deni said she had accidentally left some necessary things in the storage unit. She decided she would drive back there while I continued on to Ironwood Forest northwest of Tucson, then meet up with me there.

Now, when I travel with someone I start feeling I’m responsible for things. That is especially true when I’ve been driving in the lead position at the others’ request, and even more true If I’ve been in the area before and they haven’t. So I felt like I should go back to the storage place with Deni. But she said that wasn’t necessary. I reluctantly relented.

As we drove the dirt road back to the highway, where she would turn east and I would turn west, we came upon some cattle grazing by the road. As I approached, one of them spun toward the road, saw its mistake, and spun away. I continued on at a slow pace. After a few seconds I noticed Deni wasn’t behind me, but in a second she was, and frantically waving for me to stop. We pulled over and she came running to me, very upset. Here is her account of the incident:

I met a large beautiful black cow today. She met me too. I think her name may be 'Too Slow Sally'. Actually, we hit it off right away! 

Now for the traumatic part of our encounter...

I was following a friend, lagging behind as usual. I saw about nine cows cross the road as I was slowly approaching from a distance. I watched them all cross the road happily walking along. Then came Sally! 

Sally walked out from the bushes right in front of my van. I slowed even more without slamming the brakes due to my van being fully loaded. Sally and I gazed into each others eyes both knowing that we were not going to avoid what happens next. I believe Sally could have made it across, but she didn't run straight across the road. We were staring into each other he eyes and she ran across but at an angle towards the car. BAM!!!!

Sally was knocked off her legs impacted by the van around her thigh area. Her body barely lifted to my hood, sealing it shut and she flew off into the grass. I was immediately shaken and concerned for her. The other cows turned back to see what had happened. Sally was just there on the grass not moving. I sped off to catch my camp friend because I didn't know what to do for Sally, plus her family was giving me the evil eye.

I cried like a baby. My friend went back to check on the cow while I continued to cry like a caring person. I didn't know if she was alive, injured, or dead. Apparently, she was only stunned. She had left with her family when he checked. 

No cow laying in the grass, thankfully!

The end. Goodnight. I love you Sally. Stay safe babe!

Honestly, I can't stop seeing her eyes staring into mine. Like I said, she is a beautiful cow and is probably still lagging behind the small herd.

Deni was very traumatized. When I returned to report the news she was bent over dry heaving. I thought it was more important than ever to follow her back to the storage unit. But she insisted she was okay. So… okay.

I had been to the camping spot at Ironwood Forest several times. But now there was a detour because of a washed out bridge. So I had to wander in search of another route. Once I found it I sent Deni detailed turn-by-turn directions. But I failed to notice before sending that auto-correct had changed one of the road names. So Deni overshot the freeway exit and had to double back. Then, since the entry from the dirt road isn’t really marked, she overshot that too. I saw her go by and called to guide her back.

And then there were the election results. I couldn’t sleep all night, even with the aid of some Benadryl. When first light started to show I had the compelling need to just go, to flee, to put myself physically far from the news. I bid Dani goodbye, wished her well, assured her my anxiety and my need to run had nothing to do with her, and said we’d see each other down the road.

So now I’m at my usual winter camping area in the far southeast corner of California. The familiarity, the routine have helped me calm down. A little.

All the cranes

The sandhill cranes congregated at the water in the evening and roosted there for the night. The Internet explains this is for safety from predators, social connections, and conservation of energy.

So there were hundreds of cranes hanging out at the lake this morning. When the sun started cresting the nearby mountains the birds began to fly off to feeding areas. In the meantime they chattered and squawked.

I got out my real camera and a telephoto lens and shot from the warmth of the Rolling Steel Tent, not encroaching on the cranes’ territory.

Oops, I spooked the cranes

I’m camped by a lake on the outskirts of Willcox AZ and wanted to get closer to the sandhill cranes to get a better photo. But they didn’t want me any closer. Okay, so this is the best I could do.