After a good night’s sleep dispersed camping north of town, we decided to head into Quartzsite proper.

At this point I should mention that Quartzsite is a town of about 3,500 people. Every winter, 300,000 RVs come to stay on BLM land around Quartzsite to visit the rock and mineral shows as well as the hundreds of vendors that set up to support this temporary metropolis.

We’ve arrived about a month early, so there are only a few thousand RVs on public land outside of town.  We dropped by the library to check out some books.  Residency isn’t required to get a card here, and the application includes the question “where are you camping?”

We visited one of the vendor spaces south of town.  Right now there are two rows of vendors on each side of the road, but the side that is depth-limited by the interstate is laid out for rows “A” through “Y”.  I’ve been told that it takes 3 days to see it all when all the vendors have arrived.

Here’s what it looks like when it’s all set up.  This is an empty field for most of the year.  Note the RVs stretching towards the horizon in the top of the image:

The biggest show at Quartzsite is a rock and gem show, so a number of rock vendors were already set up.  Thin sections of rock were backlit by the sun:

The selection is amazing:

In the afternoon, I went for a ride and passed the tomb of Hi Jolly.  His real name was Hadji Ali, but Americans couldn’t be bothered with that so they called him Hi Jolly.  Ali, a camel driver, was brought to the US by the Army in the mid-1800s to test the use of camels as pack animals in the Desert Southwest.  He became famous enough that there’s a folk song about him.  My ride took me by his gravesite in Quartzsite:

There were plenty of great desert views along the ride:

Good Shabbos from Quartzsite!

It was a beautiful morning in Craggy Wash near Lake Havasu City, AZ.  When on a downward slope, the easiest way to level the RV is to drive the back of the SUV up onto some blocks:

I went for a morning ride with my son to explore the wash:

Craggy wash is quite popular.  I climbed the mountain shown in the first photograph and looked to the west:

And back down to our RV.  Our neighbors had a daughter the same age as ours.  They played together a bit.  It sounds like they are on the road permanently, as she has always been home schooled:

The view to the east:

We drove into Lake Havasu City.  In 1968, Robert McCulloch bought the London Bridge and had it reassembled in Lake Havasu City as a tourist attraction.  A block of “English” shops have been built at the foot of the bridge:

Behold, the bridge (yawn):

After lunch we headed south to dispersed camping outside of Quartzsite, AZ, also known as the RVing capital of the world.  More on that tomorrow.    See the trip map for today’s drive and our current location.

It’s an overcast morning here at the Pioneer Casino.  The views aren’t great, but the price is right:

We went to Don Laughlin’s casino to view the two classic car collections on display:

The docent let the kids sit in the Delorean:

They had a collection of antique slot machines as well.  The top row includes a machine that dispensed golf balls as the prize as opposed to coins:

I love the rumble seat:

Poor Edsel, I don’t know much about cars, but its history is interesting:

TripAdvisor showed a set of five labyrinths just out of town, so we poked around until we found them:

I find them tedious and don’t see the point, but the kids had fun doing timed runs through them:

We stopped at a Target on the way out of town and the sunset just happened to be amazing:

We headed south to overnight in Craggy Wash, a swath of BLM land just north of Lake Havasu City, AZ.  I’m very excited to have sunset be an hour later now that we’re in the Mountain time zone!    See the trip map for today’s drive and our current location.