Quartzsite – a small town in the Arizona desert where thousands upon thousands of RVers come for anything from a few days to several months or more in the winter. This year we are staying with a group of people who own the same brand of RV we do. Most will arrive next week and only stay for 2 to 3 days. No water, electric or sewer, just parking in the rocky desert. Every night easy banter around a fire. It is a special, almost magical place where strangers quickly become friends.
There are many reasons why people hate shopping at Walmart. My pet peeve is shown in the right hand side of the photo. Grab a cart (trolley) and start pushing it inside the store and how many times does it go “thump, thump, thump”. How hard is it for the cart collectors to tell that the rubber tread is worn off a section of the wheel. But I don’t blame them, I blame the managers who fail to inspire the people under them to realize that a happy customer is a repeat customer. I went through two carts before finding one with new wheels, and it was actually a new cart.
In a moment of contemplation regarding the increase in my body weight I was observing each morning when I stepped on the scales, I told my wife I was going to limit myself to one glass of wine a day. Obviously she took me at my word because the next thing I know she has set out the only “glass” we had in the coach. All the other things we drink from are either metal, plastic or paper. In the future I will only make comments like this to myself.
Since leaving the Sacramento area we have been driving through California’s Central Valley which produces more than half of the fruits, vegetables, and nuts grown in the United States. Miles and miles of orchards and vineyards border the highway, interspersed with a number of small towns and some bigger cities. It’s winter and the trees and vines are dormant. But for the enormous irrigation projects undertaken in the past to capture the runoff from the melting snow and releasing that water during the growing seasons, the valley would be a dry desert area.
My wife is a life long coffee drinker, while I prefer a wide variety of loose leaf teas. My usual method of brewing those delectable young leaves and leaf buds of Camellia sinensis is to weigh the tea out and steep them with a Chatsford mug infuser basket. The image below shows one sitting on the lid that comes with it.
In a few days we will be be “boondocking” which is camping without any hookups, i.e. no external electric, water or sewer. Or put another way, we will be relying only on the capacity of of our fresh water and waste water tanks. By using tea bags instead of the infuser I can save the water I would normally use to rinse out the leaves in the infuser. But not one of the many brands and types tea in bags one can buy in the grocery store. Instead I fill my own bags with teas of my choosing. Not as good as using the infuser, but vastly better than any prefilled tea bag I’ve ever tried.
