Crossing the Calif Line

After spending almost three weeks in Arizona, we were finally ready to cross the state line into California. But there is a little more preparation than usual for this state border crossing. Because the price of fuel is higher over that border, we filled our big 100 gallon diesel tank on the Arizona side. We like being able to fill up using the fast diesel pumps, but we don't like the long lines behind all those trucks.

Just a few miles into our journey this day, we crossed into a new state for the motor home. After two years of taking pictures of state border signs, Denisa should be more practiced at this. But today she only got the picture of "Welcome to Calif." She decided she likes that new abbreviation, and it also takes less key strokes to type.

We had an interesting breakfast this morning. Because we had read that we would have to pass through an agricultural inspection upon entering Calif, we have been eating all of our produce with reckless abandon. For breakfast we ate the final grapefruits and the last orange. After choking down five grapefruit this morning, we were a little disappointed when they just waved us through the checkpoint without inspecting our cargo! What?!? We would never want to bring anything in that would harm a state's agriculture, so at least we have a clear conscience to go with our empty refrigerator.

We have also seen a difference in the roads in our new state. We have never seen a highway sign that instructs drivers - "Follow signs and disregard your GPS." Sure enough, our GPS gave us some crazy advice through this section of Interstate 8. But we didn't fall for it--we just followed the signs.

Here's another interesting Calif road sign. They think it's important to let you know that you no longer should drive 40 mph, but they don't have a sign to tell you what the new speed limit is.

We decided to spend our first four Calif days in a resort about an hour down the road, outside the town of El Centro. Rio Bend RV and Golf Resort is built around a very nice 9-hole golf course.

They are a Passport America park, but they don't take that discount during the popular winter months. Instead, they gave us an even better rate, and we wish we could have stayed longer. But we have reservations at our next stop, so we are tied to a schedule. This was just supposed to be a restful stop, since we didn't think there was much to do in this area. So we thought we would have four days of resting up and taking advantage of all the resort amenities. For example, Denisa enjoyed the zumba class at the fitness center. We also got to make use of our pickle ball paddles, as they had four courts near the club house.

We also learned how to play bocce ball. We didn't know any of the rules, but there was an instruction sheet that explained everything to us. The rules aren't too complicated, but we won't explain all of them here. Let's just say that it's not good news that Denisa is throwing a red ball, and all the green balls are closer to the white ball. It looks like Mark has won again.

The resort is in the middle of more agricultural land, and with all our spare time we can watch the broccoli harvest as it happens right across the road from us. We're not sure what was wrong with the heads that were left at the edge of the field, but they must not have passed the buyer's inspection.

We found that over half of the seasonal residents at Rio Bend Resort are from Canada. Then we also found out that Canadians aren't the only ones that go south for the winter. Sheep herds are trucked from the great white north to this area in the fall and winter to clean up the green plants left over from vegetable harvest.

The Rio Bend Resort is beautiful, with lovely flower beds, and flowering bushes between each RV site. It's one of the best landscaped parks we've stayed in during our travels.

To make our experience even better, there is a cafe on site, and we had live music every evening. That means dancing under the portico! The first evening we were greeted with cold temperatures and 40 mph winds, but we wore our coats and danced anyway. That's very unusual weather here, but we heard from several residents that this had been an unusually cold and windy winter in southern Calif.

We enjoyed the nearby town of El Centro, with shopping and restaurants. As we rolled through town, we realized that we're now below sea level. It's interesting that the town's water tank has sea level marked on the side. 

But our favorite part of our new location was its vicinity to the Navy Base. It provides entertainment even when stopped at a red light.

That's because the famous Blue Angel pilots spend January through March stationed at this base, practicing their stunts for their busy spring and summer air shows across the country.

We couldn't go onto the military base, but there is a Blue Angel plane on display at the entrance.

We thought it was fun to park near the landing strips, watching planes of all sizes touch down on the runway and then return to the air for another circle. We later found out that the new pilots fly the white jets. So when you see this airplane, give lots of room to the newbie at the wheel.

Some jets were so loud and so fast that it was hard to track them in the sky. But it was great fun watching them lower their landing gears and come in close for a picture.

We often got fly-overs at the campground, and we could see the jets through our motor home windshield. One of our neighbors told us that instead of roosters, they have jets to wake them up here. We caught a picture of six Blue Angel jets flying in formation in front of Signal Mountain, just south of our campground. We read that the jets are often 18 inches apart flying around mach 1 when they are in tight formations.

Denisa would dash outside to watch every time she heard the jets approaching. She was so hard on the door hinges that Mark finally told her to just leave the door open. Sometimes we caught the military helicopters sharing air space with the local birds.

She had cold eggs for breakfast because she couldn't sit and eat breakfast if there were Blue Angels doing loop-de-loops outside.

But we learned that it wasn't a good idea to try to jump in the car to get a closer view of the jets and their acrobatics. More than once we drove their direction, just in time to watch as they fell out of formation and headed back to the area where we had been earlier. It took us a while, but we finally figured out that these jets are faster than our car. So we are learning to be content with watching them fly over the trees of our RV resort.

We are happy with our decision to stay in the desert for a little longer while we let the rest of California dry out from recent flooding. But instead of several restful days in the desert, our schedule filled up as we visited with neighbors about fun things to do in the area. We'll tell you about those in the next blogs!