Yuma

Located in the southwestern corner of Arizona, immediately adjacent to both the Mexican and Californian borders, lies the city of Yuma. The metropolitan area has a population of 190,000 people and, 175 huge RV parks. It appears that the main local industry is Canadians!! The RV Park and Golf Resort (where is Gary Becker anyway?) in which we are located has well over 50% Canadian license plates (I was just told it’s 80%). No wonder there are few RV’s in Canada. They’re all here!

On the highway between Phoenix and Yuma the traffic was heavy and composed of at least 25 – 30% RV’s (maybe more) and other mobile habitation. The number of toys being hauled behind these vehicles was amazing. Many RV’s were towing mobile garages which can carry one car and a couple of Harleys (or a whole bunch of Harleys). One such rig had 4 ATV’s on its roof. There were hundreds of big dune buggies with huge supercharged engines being towed. Not one VW bug conversion in the crowd. The desert along the route was criss-crossed with tracks which ran for hundreds of miles from all these off-road vehicles. This is definitely the area for “boys with toys”. Golf shmolf!!

With an average daytime temperature in July of 106.8 F (it’s one degree cooler in August) this place is hot and dry even for a desert. It’s hot enough in February. Get me outta here for the summer. But, it sure makes sitting around the pool in winter enjoyable ;-) We’ve been told that Los Algodones, Mexico is the one Mexican border town that should not be missed (we have systematically missed all the ones along the way so far). It is a few miles south west of us. If there is no new blog posting by this time next week, we had a problem there.