CHANGING CAMPGROUNDS AGAIN!
Day 136 – This area seems nice; we think we’ll stay a little while. It looks like a good place to unwind & regroup. We need to catch up on the blog, do our monthly budget (we’re behind on that, too), answer e-mail (we definitely owe people responses), and generally just play catch-up. But this campground, if it really IS a campground, is too close to the highway & not where we’d want to spend several days. Time to find another place to stay.
25 miles
Rob took pictures of the sunrise here, it was a sunny morning, temperature unknown. We unhitched the Honda & drove a short distance along the River to where we saw other RV’s & campers were parked. This was the Oxbow Recreation Area BLM (Bureau of Land Management) Campground near to the Cibola National Wildlife Refuge. We drove through the areas which had various campers, trailers, tents and RV’s parked fairly haphazardly at unmarked campsites, some with a fire pit & picnic table, some without anything. A public restroom was located within each area. People were camping on both sides of the Colorado River, some right by the river, some inland, just kind of wherever they felt like pulling over & stopping. Down the dirt road was a sign for the Wildlife Refuge, no camping allowed.
At one of the camping enclaves we saw some places right on the Oxbow Lake with excellent kayak launches. There was a couple camped nearby & we stopped to ask them some questions. They were from Vancouver Island, she was English & he was Scotch-Irish (a real melting pot), & both had charming accents. They’d stayed here a week (there was a two-week limit), and they said people just come & go, that it was very quiet, & that a campground host was located “across the way in an RV with a canopy over it – just pay them & park”. We said, “okay, then, we’ll be back later” and drove over to the River side & the RV with a canopy over it.
They were indeed the campground hosts & we paid for 3 nights, were told to just pick any empty place & park – $7.50 per night with the senior discount. No water & no dump station, but both were available “at the store in Cibola for $10”. The National Wildlife Refuge was just ten minutes away. Alrighty then, we’d found us a campground, so to speak. Back to the RV to pack up & move.
We asked if they collected money also for the County Park where we’d just spent the night. They said, no, there was no fee to camp there, that the people who’d donated the land did so with the stipulation that the County Park not charge people anything to use it. Nice!
Palo Verde County Park, 520B Ben Hulse Highway, Palo Verde, CA 92266, 442-265-1736, http://www.icpds.com/?pid=2199. There are maybe 20 campsites, most of them by Oxbow Lake, the others near to a public restroom. There is some highway noise. There’s a boat launch. FREE. Some of the campsites are marked with numbers, some are not. We chose site #13. No one was camped there. We would stay there again but would prefer, for safety’s sake, that at least one other camper was staying at the campground.
We packed up the RV, put the kitties back into the travel room (they said, “are you kidding me?”), and drove to “the store in Cibola” to dump & fill the water tank. Took a wrong turn somewhere, these desert/farmland/dike roads all look alike, and got to see lots of the area including where even more people were off-road BLM camping. What should have been a one-mile drive ended up being a 25-mile drive before we found the store in Cibola. Finally took care of business & drove to the Oxbow Recreation Area to nab our campsite. Went first to the area where we’d talked to the Canadian/English/Scotch Irish couple, and found that the desired campsite where we could launch our kayaks had been taken. Oh well. First come, first served. We went across the road to the River side and grabbed a place where no one was parked nearby & it was lovely. (The sites are not numbered but if looking for it again, it was on the Colorado River nestled in some cottonwood trees, private & partly shaded, within walking distance to the wooden bridge crossing the River, and across the water from the boat launch & campground host’s site.) We unpacked and settled in. VERY quiet here; the girls liked it immediately. 62 degrees, few clouds, breezy, we put out the weather thermometer. Huge sigh of relief, we set up the chairs overlooking the water, grabbed a beer & some wine, and let the relaxation begin. As the sun set over the desert, we cooked dinner – a recipe from the Anderson Valley, Lula Wine Cellars we’d never tried before – “Pan-Seared Scallops with Corn & Red Pepper Hash”. So good!
