Adventures of SanTony: QUARTZSITE AGAIN

It's been a few weeks (6 weeks) to be exact....when you're real busy time seems to slip away. We spent extra time at the AZ Paynes over Christmas and with two kids 5 and 8...well you understand the "time thing" But the accommodations in Surprise are very nice with there own mountain in the back yard to play on.

Spending time with relatives over the holidays, watching football (OH THOSE BUCKEYES), eating to much and going for walks in the desert is great but we also like to go to explore and re-explore places while we are out this way.

Our first familiar spot we visited was east of Phoenix about 55 miles from "Mount Payne" in the community of Gold Canyon near Apache Junction with breath taking views of Superstition Mountains.

We stayed at the same park, with mostly fond memories, everything except for Sandy falling off her bike. The park has a lot of organized events and activities that anyone can join in on and everyone at this park is very friendly.

You might ask aren't all RVers friendly...and we would say for the most part, but when you come to a place like Gold Canyon you can tell the people that are there are very happy with the park they are in... and that makes a BIG difference!

Then because Tony needs to get a treatment once a month we stopped in Surprise before going to another place that we have been to before, Quartzsite.

As we have posted in this blog some people love this place and others hate it...we fall in the middle somewhere, liking it for a short time, it's an interesting place with interesting people.

Quartzsite is 20 miles from the California border off I10, a town for the year of about 5,000 people, but come winter, the gem show, the gold show, the RV show, the sell-a-thon in the big tent and massive flea market with over 1,000 venders the population swells to over 1,000,000 between the end of Dec. and the middle of March. Most of which Dry Camp on government land with no water or electric hook ups. Yes a cheep place to spend the winter for a couple dollars or less (some free) per day..."we stayed our usual 3 nights"

The pictures that fallow show a few of the items for sale along with a pic of the big tent for venders of new items like "seen on TV stuff" with estimates that over 110,000 people go through every day for two weeks. We also took advantage of the temporary Drug Store selling with close outs. Of course we had to show some picks of the thousands of RV's camping on government land.