Escapees Happy Hour

Tuesday, 15 January 

Rain moved in about dinner time last night.  We heard the pitter patter of light rain throughout the night.  Staying at The Scenic Road RV Park, we had no worries about flooding.

The forecast was for rain until 2pm, so we enjoyed reading books and magazines inside Sprinty.  Surfing on the internet is noticeably slower as cell towers become more and more congested.  Verizon (our cell phones) seems to have degraded the most, while our device on AT&T and a MiFi on T-Mobile have degraded a little less.  We expect this to only get worse in the coming days.

The planned event of the day for us was the Escapees Happy Hour.  The Escapees RV Club (https://www.escapees.com) is an RV club similar to Family Motor Coach Association, except it has always included all types of RVs.  As we were learning about the different RV clubs, we joined to see what it was all about.  One aspect that we liked was their RV advocacy efforts.  We have also enjoyed staying at their rainbow parks in Summerdale, AL; Bushnell, FL; Congress, AZ, and the co-op park in Benson.

Escapees has a number of their chapters gathering in the Quartzsite area, and they host a happy hour on Plomosa Road.  We waited for the rain to almost stop before we ventured out.  Looking at the traffic info on Google Maps, we knew that AZ 95 was passable, but had some slower than normal traffic.  Sure enough, there was a few inches of water flowing across the highway in five of the low areas.  Not enough to worry about, and we were careful to observe other smaller vehicles successfully navigating the before we let Sprinty go across.

After traveling north about five miles, we turned northwest on Plomosa Road, and went 3 miles to the large sign for the Escapees Happy Hour.  When we got there, there were about 60 people gathered, with people arriving every minute.  Just as we were starting to meet people and strike up conversations, it started raining again.  We knew from the Accuweather app that it was going to rain for the next 90 minutes.  We started seeing people leave.  We hung one for a few more minutes, then headed for Sprinty to stay dry.  In the hope the app was wrong, we hung out watching the traffic for about an hour.

Quartzsite is growing by the minute.  Even at the far reach of this BLM area, Class As and fifth wheels were arriving at a rate of one about every two or three minutes the whole time we were there.  Some obviously had been there before and knew where they were going as they quickly picked which of the four branch roads to go down.  Others seemed to be new to the area and stopped at the entrance to read the signs, ask for directions.

As we hope to attend another event later in the week nearby, we looked it up and found it was only a few hundred feet away.  Once the rain lightened up, and after watching two Class As navigate crossing two areas of standing water, we drove back in to check out the area for later in the week.  It also gave the latest rain some time to dissipate before we tried to cross through the low places on the highway on the way back.

On the way back, we stopped off at Hi Jolly Road to check out the Roadtrek gathering.  There were bout 20 Roadtreks gathering to boondock on the BLM area on Hi Jolly Road, located about a mile north of our campground.  Several Roadtrekers we met at Indio were there.  We enjoyed seeing them and sharing what we learned about Quartzsite with the first timers.  Kind of weird to be sharing info when we only arrived here two weeks ago, and spent a week away.

Photos of Roadtrek gathering 

Darrell also showed Danny and Jean some of the mods Sprinty sports, which then turned into some problem solving as Jean also has a 2015 Roadtrek Adventurous CS (like Sprinty) and Danny has a 2012 Roadtrek Adventurous RS.

About sundown, we left so as or not drive through the standing water in the dark.  Sprinty enjoyed another night at The Scenic Road RV Park.