We woke up feeling much better than we had the day before as the mattress topper seems to have provided a lot of relief. We decided it was time to scout around the Quartzsite area and into California. We headed west on Plomosa Road to Highway 95 and South to Quartzsite. On the north end of Quartzsite we turned west on Tyson St. to check out the Arizona Trust land on the north side of Quartzsite which offers relatively free camping if you book a permit through the State website. After we went past this camping area we were heading south again towards I-10 and we came upon the Hi Jolly Memorial.
Hi Jolly was a Syrian born man hired by the US Cavalry in the 1857 to experiment with the use of camels for transport in the Arizona desert. His real name was Hadji Ali but the soldiers quickly named him Hi Jolly. Hi Jolly wound up staying in the area for the rest of his life and was a very popular individual in the community. The cemetery in Quartzsite now has a very large monument to in his memory, and the camping area about 1 mile north of Quartzsite is called the Hi Jolly BLM.
We spent some time driving around Quartzite and past the heavily congested large tent that is famous for all of the markets and trinket dealers that set up shop in the area during the winter. From here we headed west on I-10 to Ehrenberg on the Arizona side of the Colorado River and then over to Blythe, California. North of Blythe is a long-term visitor area called Midland LTVA that we were contemplating staying at after we decide to move from our current spot near Bouse. We found the Midland LTVA site and it is very sparse and a considerable distance from town. Although we received some cell service we decided that it was probably too far off the beaten track to consider for our next campsite.
We did notice along the trip that the warnings about fuel prices in California were true. Fuel at the truck stop at Ehrenberg, AZ was $3.59 per gallon and in Blythe it was $4.59 per gallon. Its hard to believe that gas stations even exist in Blythe when it is only a trip across the river on I-10 to the cheaper gas.
On the way back to Quartzsite we stopped at a BLM area on the south side of I-10 which extends west Quartzsite. It is called Dome Rock Mountain BLM site and we found that it was also quite congested with a large number of RVs, many of them in significant groups. Any areas close to Quartzsite seem to be heavily used at this time of year. After checking out this area we decided it was too congested for our liking. Even though we didn't accomplish a lot this day it seems like we covered lots of territory and didn't really find a site that we would like to move to.
