Here’s your Alpine SoCal Rally recap for Day 1 of the 27th Annual Western Winter Blast Pyrotechnics Show (←link) which is held at the Special Activities and Recreation Area (SARA) Park Rodeo Grounds.
According to the official website (www.golakehavasu.com) SARA park is an 1100-acre regional park with spectacular mountain views and access to Lake Havasu. The park’s facilities cater to a wide range of recreational activities and also serve as venues for events such as the popular Winter Blast fireworks display, obstacle races and concerts throughout the year. SARA Park has a network of hiking and mountain bike trails, ballfields, dog park, rodeo and fairgrounds. Other activities include BMX and motocross racing, roller hockey, RC plane field and a shooting and archery range.
Last year we attended the same fireworks show and rally, click (HERE) to catch up on last years fun if you missed it.
Here’s our Rally Schedule:
As you can see from the Schedule (above); we are all basically “free” to do whatever we want each day after breakfast because all the activities take place in the afternoon/evening. Today (Thursday) is a Happy Hour at 4 PM and then a Pizza Dinner w/Salad will be delivered to us by 5 PM.
How about a quick tour of our area? Here’s the sign at the entrance to the Rodeo Grounds. I guess they haven’t gotten around to changing it out for the WInter Blast Pyrotechnics Show.
RVs were lined up at the entrance throughout the day to check in to the Rodeo Grounds parking area for the weekend activities.
This is the access road leading to our upper level parking area (below). A couple of the RV parking areas are separated by the rodeo arena and grandstands.
Most of our Alpines are parked in the same area, spread out over at least three separate rows. We ended up in the middle of row D with good friends Mike & Donna Kuper on our left and Ed & Donna Mathews on our right.
We’ve known Ed & Donna since our first Alpine SoCal Rally in St. George, UT back in 2012. It was great to see them again after such a long time 🙂 Mike & Donna we came to know first through Mike’s blog @FlyingtheKoop.com and then we finally met in Portland during the Alpine Coach Pre-Rally to the FMCA Rally in Redmond, OR which we both attended together in 2014.
Here’s some shots of our Rally site taken yesterday and today:
The parking area for the RVs is spread out over the rodeo grounds on at least three different levels which you can somewhat make out from the photos:
Good looking Coaches, eh?
For those of you who have been following the blog, you may recall that we were able find a good home for one of our oldest daughter’s dogs the morning after we arrived here. Little ‘Ember’ went to Alpine Coach owners Ron & Jeanne who live in Las Vegas and we’ve since heard from them that she’s doing just fine 🙂 Jeanne sent us this pic (below).
However, we’ll have to continue dog-sitting our daughter’s other dog ‘Sheba’ (pictured below) since she really belongs to our grandson Kaan and he’d be heartbroken if we gave her away. Although, there’s been some interest shown among our fellow Alpiner’s 😉
It wasn’t very late in the day before folks started congregating between the Coaches for drinks and conversation. Happy Hour starts early around here 🙂 I busied myself during part of the day with some cleaning on the Urban Escape Vehicle exterior while Stilla went shopping with a couple of the girls.
A couple more Alpines are still expected to arrive. We’re supposed to have 25 Coaches once everyone gets in. Here’s Peter & Patricia Huber’s coach pulling in (below). They arrived just in time for the first official dinner of the rally; Pizza night, Yoo Hoo!
Around 4:30 PM everyone started gathering in our designated “get-together” site that our Rally Host(s) and Co-Host(s) set up between their Coaches.
In my new capacity as president of the Alpine SoCal Chapter; I said a few words to welcome everyone to the rally and we thanked our Rally Host(s) Dave & Nicole Guhsé along with our Co-Host(s) Paul & Katie Lisec for setting everything up. So far, so good… but we’ll have to wait until later in the Rally before we can truly rate their performance 🙂 Right?
Come-n-get it! Pizza is served:
Everyone enjoyed the pizza and salad as well as each other’s company:
Good times again with good people 🙂
At dusk, the first fireworks started going off in the park area next to our Rally site. The fireworks were mostly random and sporadic with long lag times between. Probably test shots and some training for the pyrotechnic crews. Many folks went back to their Coaches and didn’t hang out at the “get-together” site for very long after it got dark. There will be plenty more fireworks in the evenings ahead.
Our grandson’s dog ‘Sheba’ didn’t take the noise very well and Stilla left early to comfort her inside the Coach with the radio on to help drown out some of the loud bangs. Hopefully, she gets a little more used to it before tomorrow’s fireworks show which should be pretty spectacular based on our experience last year.
Stay tuned…