A week on junk food and friends

If there is one thing an experienced group of full-timing nomads understand is that your neighbor always moves away, and you do not always get to say goodbye when they do.  Whether it is someone leaving super early one day, or you are out on a walk, or that person just never returning from a shopping trip to Yuma (such is our case), it is widely understood as just part of the package with us shifty nomads. It just happened, that one Saturday we did not return to the group after a trip to town to restock. Instead, our goodbyes had to be done through the cell-waves.

Kerri and I followed Leigh and Brian of Aluminarium to the Kofa Wildlife Refuge an hour north of Yuma. Sure, we had just driven past here just a few days prior, but we were not going to pass up on getting a peaceful week, in a beautiful location (the LTVA wasn’t great), with great friends. We actually returned to the the exact same spot that we were at last year, as we are feeling less adventurous this year and more wanting to just hang out with friends. In fact, we are quickly realizing that our winter van-adventures are nearly over if we want to stick to our sailing schedule for 2020. In just a few weeks we need to start heading north again, making it all the more urgent to cram in visitation with as many friends as we can.

Through out the week Kerri spent her days inside Big Blue, blasting her NPR, and plugging away at her laptop. I, on the other hand, spent most days out on the road with Brian. He and I would run errands, or recon campgrounds for his business, as has become tradition over the years. He is quite the bad influence on me though, as we eat out at all the worst places during these excursions. We even ended up at a Wienerschnitzel – I haven’t been to one since 1991 – and gobbled down five corndogs together. I’m 48 years old! What the heck am I doing eating corndogs? To top it off, later that night we all ate Frito Pies (bag of corn chips, cut it open and add chilli, cheese, and jalapenos then eat) which didn’t help my elderly digestive system. It was like that every day; Pizza, McD’s, Carl’s Jr, breakfast burritos at Jector’s, etc. I do not think I ate a single healthy thing in more than a week.

Evenings were mostly spent sitting around the same fake campfire as last week, talking with new and old friends of the road that pulled in over the week. Evening walks down the long gravel road was a normal occurrence although I wasn’t feeling them myself. It was not a big gathering by any means, which was nice. I’m still getting over the whole AAMCO fiasco.

We left Kofa on Saturday morning and headed into Quartszite for fuel before making a beeline for New Mexico. It was at that fuel station that I ran smack into Bob Wells. We chatted for a minute, unintentionally blocking the door to the building, before wishing each other safe travels and moving along. T’was a nice surprise to close out the Quartszite area seeing Bob.