Searcher: Feb 16th On the move

First campsite on 16th - BLM land in California????

Awesome wash with flowering cactus and other plants

Should have picked these up the first time I saw them.

Death and life in the desert

Palo Verde in the wash - full of bird nests!

We left our boondocking campsite on Painted Rock Dam Road yesterday - out of water and time to move on. We have a Garmin GPS unit that up until yesterday was working....well let's say in an acceptable manner for a machine that we have humanized, given a name " Garmie" and "she" has a British accent which at times can sound rather snooty! Yesterday, she seemed to have lost her ability to navigate and continued to direct us to our route that we had programmed in three days before. We could not get her,...I mean "it" to find the new route to Yuma.   After an hour of troubleshooting I figured out how to recalibrate the blasted unit and got "her" to do her job once again.   Thank goodness for paper maps! We found our way onto the Interstate, and on the way to Yuma filled up with water at an RV park that was owned by the gas station where we filled the camper with gas.

It was late in the afternoon by the time we got back onto the road after getting supplies in Yuma. We knew we would be passing a Casino just across the border of Arizona into California. We decided to stop and check and see if that particular casino would allow RV's to park in their lot overnight. As we drove up into the parking lot of the casino all we could see were RV's over 10 acres! We looked at each other and said out loud "Yes, I guess they do allow RV's to camp overnight"!. We pulled in next to the last one in a row, got level and set up camp for the night.   We walked into the casino and signed up for their Player's Club and collected our $10 for the slot machines. I walked out with $43.50 from five minutes of hard work on the machine! I think Richard came out with $3.50. We took our winnings and walked back to the camper for dinner. Once again it was not a quiet night in the parking lot. Horns, sirens, generators, diesel motors, car alarms and barking dogs all added to the cacophony of sounds. Since the casino paid us to stay with them we were not going to complain....too loudly.

This morning we joined the caravan of campers headed out of the parking lot and turned our nose north to find another boondocking place that we had found on the maps. We found it; it was beautiful....nestled up to the mountains, no one else in sight. I immediately gathered up my rock hunting supplies, walking stick, cell phone, water and headed out of the camper to check out the rocks in the huge wash that we were parked near. I wandered around, took some pictures, gathered several rocks and headed back to "home". I set the rocks down just outside of the camper (mistake) and went inside just as a pickup with police lights pulled into our campsite.   We were told nicely that we were on Reservation land, not BLM (Bureau of Land Management Land) as we thought, and we were not allowed to camp there. He said the site was too far away from emergency equipment if it was needed and there were drug smugglers and cougars!! He told us of another spot that we were allowed to camp in - reservation land but we could get a permit to camp there. The downside - I couldn't take the rocks I had set outside of the camper - "against the law to remove anything from Reservation land". Poop!

We are now settled into our second campsite of the day - about five miles from the first; isolated, and there are rocks and hopefully no cougars!!!