Alpine SoCal Winter Blast Rally – Day 3 (Lake Havasu City, AZ)

Lots of pictures today… consider viewing on your desktop or laptop computer instead of mobile device for the optimum experience 🙂

Today’s schedule for Saturday includes, but is not limited to; Breakfast, Board Meeting, Cowboy Concert & BBQ:

Good morning from “Alpine Row”:

Breakfast was stupendous once again thanks to our “Wagon Master(s) Dave & Nicole Guhsé along with Co-Hosts Paul & Katie Lisec.

The “now famous” Alpine breakfast spread:

I think it’s safe to give our Host(s) and Co-Host(s) an A+ rating for their rally hosting performance so far 🙂 There’s only one more dinner (Chicken) to be served to our group on Sunday. Thanks again, Dave/Nicole and Paul/Katie!!!

After breakfast we held our Alpine SoCal Member Meeting.

Here I am trying to act “presidential”…

For you Alpine Coach Owners… don’t forget to go to the Alpine SoCal website under the “Members Only” section to read the minutes from the (very productive) meeting 🙂

Once we completed our meeting, the guys stuck around our designated “get-together” site to decorate Valentines Day cupcakes…

Our awesome co-host Katie Lisec came up with the idea for the guys to decorate the pre-made cupcakes with different colors of icing squeezed from zip-lock baggies which she expertly applied per each persons requested preference.

Then she had lots of different sprinkles and candies on hand for the guys to get even more creative with…

Of course, some were more creative than others:

Won’t Mary be surprised?…

Hope that icing doesn’t stain Katie 🙂

Most of the guys couldn’t have done it without a little artistic talent to help them out.

We all stored our Valentines Cupcakes in Paul & Katies’s basement. The idea is to bring out the cupcakes after our dinner on Sunday. Won’t those wives be surprised ? AWWW 🙂

After our rigorous morning of meetings and cupcake decorating, some of us decided to go on a hike to “The Crack”. The trailhead starts just outside the entrance to the RV parking area here at the Rodeo Grounds and follows the dry wash through a slot canyon to the Colorado River.

At the beginning of our little (~3 mile) hike we saw signage at the entrance/exit to the Rodeo Grounds RV Park reminding folks to sign up early for next year’s event.

We hit the trailhead with walking sticks and plenty of water. Follow along on our hiking adventure:

Our hiking entourage consisted of Greg & Marcy Vaughan, John & Lorraine Foster, Donna Kuper, and of course, Stilla and I with grand-dog Sheba.

We took “Sheba” off her leash. She did great and always stayed with the group. There were quite a few other hikers on the trail today and many of them also had their dogs off-leash.

I was the first to go down a particularly steep drop in the canyon. Luckily someone put a rope here to help folks get safely down. This rope wasn’t here last year when we did this hike. To read about last year’s blog post on this hike click (HERE).

Stilla handed Sheba down to me. She wasn’t too sure about this drop, but she was fine in all the other areas and turned out to be quite the mountaineer dog.

Donna took a unique approach to the drop.

After everyone negotiated the steep drop, we navigated our way down into the bowels of the canyon. However, Greg & Marcy were smarter than us and turned around at the drop. They were sipping adult beverages long before we finally made it back to the Rodeo Grounds 🙂

I believe we only had one wet shoe casualty getting through the canyon… but I think it’s best they remain unnamed, right Lorraine?

Sheba would often go out ahead and scout out the trail. If we took too long, she’d come running back to see why we were so slow.

Once we successfully navigated the narrow canyon, and came back out into the sunlight, we decided to not continue in the dry wash to the Colorado River and took the high trail back towards home.

Nice view, eh?

You can see the Colorado River (Lake Havasu) in the distance.

We made pretty good time on the return trip since we were above the dry wash on a rocky trail and out of the soft sand most of the time. Although, it was definitely cooler inside the canyon and we were reminded of that as the sun beat down on us. Sheba would often rest in the shade of a bush or rock and wait for us to catch up. Silly humans, she probably thought to herself 😉

When we got back, not too much worse for wear and tear – we found a couple of our members working on some new flagpoles! Ed Mathews and Jack Giddens made a flagpole for the Alpine SoCal club while helping Michael Weitz put one together for himself.

Thanks Jack and Ed! They refused payment for the new flagpole, so I’m probably going to be indebted to them for a while on behalf of the club. I think they like it that way 🙂 We’ll see each other again at the next rally in Phoenix (Goodyear) for baseball training in March where I’m sure they’ll come collecting, right?

Around 4 PM it was time for all of us to head down to the Rodeo arena and barn for the Cowboy Dance & BBQ:

Donna and Stilla in front of the live band.

It was crowded, but everyone got fed after going through the long food line.

The food was excellent and the band played a wide variety of music. Our Alpiners were well-fed and well-entertained 🙂

Back at our designated “get-together” site we all gathered for the evening fireworks again.

Even the Langord’s mascot was in fireworks viewing position at one of our tables 🙂

I had a “Chinese Lantern” that we purchased in Quartzsite last year and have been carrying around in the Coach. It seemed like a good time to set it free. We saw quite a few of these lifting off from the RV Park so we decided to “join the crowd”.