On Thursday we got a call from fellow Alpine Coach Association member (Tom Polk).  He had left the Rally Site the previous day to join some other friends at a RV Resort in the town of Quartzsite.  He invited us to go on an ATV ride with himself and some other friends that were at the resort.  So, on Friday, we got an early start around 8:30, and rode the ATV into town to meet the group.

For those of you that haven’t spent any time in the desert before, trust me – It can get really cold at night and in the early morning!  We rode the ATV about 10 miles to the designated start point, and it felt like our fingers had frozen, even with our gloves on!  Of course, we were doing about 45 mph or faster at times in order to get there on time.

Once we were in town, I noticed that one of my front tires was really low on air.  I could feel it wallowing around when we took corners on the asphalt streets.  It wasn’t so noticeable when we were still on the dirt and rock trails.  Luckily, one of the riding group members had an air compressor in his casita/garage.  The mini-compressor that I have been carrying around in the back of the ATV all these years didn’t work when I plugged it into the cigarette lighter-type outlet on the dash of the Can-Am ATV.  🙂  Good thing I found out it didn’t work while we were still in civilization – instead of when we were out in the middle of nowhere.

Anyway, we hit the trails with the group without further delay.  Stilla was able to take some pics while we were riding throughout the day:

We had four ATVs in our group for the day.

We had to keep a little distance between vehicles to keep from eating too much dust.

Here we are traveling through a scenic wash.  We did that several times throughout the day.  Good thing it wasn’t raining, eh?

We even did a little boulder hopping.

Here are our ATV’s in a circle, during one of our breaks throughout the day.

The town of Quartzsite is in the background behind that hill in the middle.

Everyone had a side-by-side ATV except for us.  It seems that most folks are trending towards these type of off road vehicles (OHVs) nowadays.  I still like to have the ability to “jump off” the ATV when you get into big trouble… you can’t do that with a side-by-side.  Those side-by-sides are sure cool though… almost makes you wonder why anyone would buy a Jeep anymore.  I said “almost”.

One of our “breaks” during the day was at a lonesome “cabin” in the middle of nowhere.  It even had a name – I believe I was told it’s called “Moe’s Cabin”.  We took time to eat the lunch we had packed with us.  There was even a picnic table and a couple lounge chairs outside the cabin.  Fellow Alpine Coach driver “Steve” is on the left and “Tom Polk” is on the right.

This cabin had all sort of bric-a-brac and memorabilia inside.  It seems that folks leave odd items all the time.  Someone said that there used to be a couple mannequins there, but they probably got swiped.  I added one of our non-business “business cards” to the collection on one of the walls.

The cabin even had a satellite dish 🙂

We ate a lot of dust but had a lot of fun… what a fun day!  Thanks for inviting us along Tom Polk!

We made it back to the starting point in town by 3 PM.  It was about a 45 mile trail ride, but when we add the distance traveled to and from our campsite out in the desert North of town – we had put on 65 miles for the day!

After we said our goodbyes to the group, we headed back out to our campsite in the desert.  We made it back by 4 PM and let our little dog “Coach” out of the Coach.  Boy was he happy to see us!  He did just fine during the day.

By 4:30 or 5 PM, we heard from my brother Steve, his long-time girlfriend Cheryl, along with my Mom and Stepdad, Jim… they were enroute to join us for the weekend!  They had left Casa Grande earlier in the afternoon with their pickup camper towing a trailer full of ATV’s.  They found us without much trouble and we had a happy reunion.

We all piled into my pickup after I emptied the back seat and drove to the Grubstake Restaurant in Quartzsite for dinner.  Almost a big mistake… it was great food, especially the fish dinner.  But it was so crowded that we had to sit outside in the chilly evening air and we waited about 2 hours to get our meals!  We didn’t even get the meals at the same time, they brought them out piece-meal.  Oh well, it was still great to have them join us here in the desert 🙂

We made plans to visit the “big vendor tent” in the morning (Saturday) and decided to save an ATV ride for Sunday… but I’ll put that in my next post.  Stay tuned for more desert fun…