We had been at my mother’s for about a week.  We have helped her transition, actually Roxie did 90%+ of the work, to a life of recovery at home.  We cleaned out her pantry, 4 hour job, but got rid of 80% of it.  Went through her shoes and purses, put them on an organizer but only got rid of 10% of those.  We decided we would leave in the mid to late evening so we could beat some of the heat, much like we did on the way over.  We were able to tolerate the heat there with the 30amp connection and we got to test out our A/C units too!

We got out of Sun City West around 7:30.  We weren’t quite sure of the goal for the night but we wanted somewhere cooler.  Going back on I10 was not going to make ‘cool’ easy.  I was thinking of possibly staying at the Flying J truck stop in Ehrenberg, AZ.  We did so in our February trip to AZ.  But February weather is much different that July!  As we came into Quartzsite Roxie asked about staying at one of the BLM areas we have done so before.  With further thought that seemed like a very good idea.  My thinking was it was not going to be very crowded and it might be a bit cooler since there is no asphalt near.

We got to the Hi Jolly BLM site around 11pm and it was 93°.  Better than Barstow on the way out at least.  We could see another vehicle or two way in the distance but that was all that we saw.  We didn’t go too far in, checked we were level and stopped.  Put down the tongue jack a bit, set the truck parking brake, disconnected the umbilical and we were set.  We turned on the fantastic fan, opened all the windows and let the breeze go.  It did start cooling down but slowly.  We didn’t much care as we were tired.  I slept very soundly and I think Roxie did too.

Here we are in the AM:

It started getting hot right away.  Time to leave!  We had a quick breakfast at Steaks and Cakes in Blythe and continued west.  It wasn’t getting much cooler!

As we kept on trekking we came across Chiriaco Summit.  Roxie wanted to look at the dry camping spots that they had behind the General Patton museum.  We looked at the spots and it is nice to have such free spots for travellers.  We also decided to stop and check out the General Patton museum itself.  It is something that we always say we should do sometime so this was ‘sometime’.  We found it to be a very interesting stop.  Not just Patton memorabilia but all branches of the service.  It shows a relief map of the area with all the camps that were in use for the summer training.  Patton chose this area of California, Arizona and Nevada for training troops to fight in Africa.  This was very good preparation for what they were going to encounter.  If you remember another post, they used the Salton Sea for amphibious training and that is what introduced the barnacles to the Salton Sea.  Time to stream Patton from Netflix.

Here are some shots.  Something you don’t see every day, a propeller on a vehicle with wheels:

Then a statue of the man himself:

We got back in the Air Conditioned truck and headed down the hot road.  We started looking for lunch around Indio but ended up eating at Ruby’s Diner in Cabazon as we did in an earlier trip.  We filled up on diesel at Morongo and headed to our RV spot for the night.  We had to be there by 6pm or we would be in the overflow area.  We didn’t want to do that.  The GPS said 2 hours but this was going through LA and we had 4 hours available.  Did we make it, find out on the next entry…