Off to Yuma

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Our next stop after Lake Havasu City was going to be Yuma Arizona. The main reason for heading there was to attend a Geocaching Mega Event the following weekend. So what is a Mega Event?, you ask. It is a large (>500) gathering of geocachers coming together to enjoy games, conversation and of course caching. This would be our ninth Mega Event but our first one this far away from New York State.

The campground we were heading to was Cactus Gardens RV Park. We had taken advantage of a deal at the Quartzsite RV show to stay there for a week for $99. The drive would take us back down US Route 95 right thru Quartzsite. Our timing was pretty good. We haven't had television coverage for almost 3 weeks and our travel day was Super Bowl Sunday. By leaving early enough, we were able to arrive in time to setup and watch what turned out to be a great game.

This campground is nice enough. The sites are a bit tight, but we weren't here for the park's amenities. It is a 55+ age park so we were definitely on the young side of distribution of folks staying here. Based on the license plates, many of the people here are from the western provinces of Canada. Probably half the sites in the campgrounds are park models and as we walked around, there were several for sale. I don't think we are ready to settle down yet and probably not here.

We had a few days before any of the activities were to take place. So we decided to do just a bit of exploring. We managed to get in a bike ride just north of the campground along a well maintained dirt road with plenty of caches. Given we are pretty much in the desert, it was slightly surprising to see how much of an agricultural area this part of the country is. Some of the crops were too small and too far away to identify what they were growing, but the broccoli fields were big enough to harvest. They use irrigation on a massive scale on the farms. There are numerous man made canals crisscrossing the area to feed water to the fields. Some had large sprinkler systems in place while others used some sort of flooding technique to supply the water.

Fields of Green

Irrigation Canal with Date Trees 

One day we headed into town to check out Gateway Park. This is adjacent to the Yuma Territorial Prison. We didn't arrive early enough to make paying the admission to the prison worthwhile but it did look like an interesting place to tour during some future visit.  The park is right next to the Colorado River. There is an old locomotive on display and of course there is a geocache hidden right underneath the thing. Another stop while we were in Yuma was to try out their famous date shakes. Okay, I'll admit I had not heard of them before and they didn't sound all that appealing but Martha's Gardens was just a couple miles from our campsite so on one hot afternoon we gave them a try. Surprisingly we thought they were very tasty. They are made fresh to order and even had smaller pieces of dates in them. If you ever have the opportunity to try one, I would highly recommend it.

Locomotive at Gateway Park

Just a Few Valves to Play With

Horse Sculpture at Martha's Garden

Palms for Sell!

Before we had reserved the deal at Cactus Gardens, we had considered staying at an Escapees park on the south side of Yuma. The KOFA Ko-op Retreat is different than the Escapees park we have stayed at in the past so we headed there to get a feel for the place and see how it might work out for some future visit. We drove around the sites and then went in to talk to the nice couple behind the desk. They were getting ready for some big Valentine's Day dinner in the recreation room, but took the time to explain how the park works and then showed us some of the amenities there. You cannot reserve a site but can stay in the boondocking area until a spot opens up.  The nice thing about this place is the sites are a bit more spacious than most of the other campgrounds in the area.

We got in touch with a couple we met at the Newmar rally in Quartzsite since they were camping in the Yuma area. We headed up to the BLM boondocking area they were up at Imperial Dam about 15 miles north of where we were. We had wanted to check this area out in case we want to stay here in the future so it worked well to visit with them and see the area. Later in the day was the first extra geocaching event associated with the Mega event. It is called a flash mob. These style events are usually in some high visibility area - this one was at a large open air shopping center. They also generally have some unique theme - this one had everybody dance around a large traffic circle waving money in the air while songs were being played over loud speakers. The money was then donated to a local food bank. With a couple hundred geocachers gathered, we far exceeded the rest of the people that just happened to be there. Some were probably not pleased since we stopped traffic for nearly 20 minutes - with the help of mall security. We even managed to meet up with a few cachers that had flown in from New York to go to this event and do caching in the area. It was nice to see familiar faces even if it was only for a brief time.

At the Entrance to Yuma Proving Ground

Ol' War Horse

Everybody Needs One of These

Dancing with Cash for Charity

The following day had an event that was going to take you to 20 different places in the city where you would collect info that would then allow you to get a geocoin upon successful completion. Having done ones like this in the past at other cities, we were expecting each location to have a geocache with a word or phrase hidden inside the container. The night before the event, they gave out a list of coordinates for the 20 places. I decided it made sense to get prepared for the next day by entering them into our handheld GPS. It turned out that one of the locations was only about 600 feet from our campsite. So at 10:45PM, we headed out the door with flashlight in hand and walked  out the campgrounds and up the street just a bit to find a large container hidden underneath a big bush. The log sheet was blank meaning we were the first ones to find it. The next morning, the cache that was hidden there was published and over 200 people came to find it. It felt good to have beaten all of them there.

One of the Twenty Places We Went to Around Town

The actual Mega Event wasn't until Sunday. The day turned out to be a rather cool and breezy day but the sun came out and with all the hundreds of people there at the park, it ended up being a very nice time.  There were several "games" you could participate in. One was a poker run. We walked to five different locations scattered around the park and picked up a card in an envelope. Then bring them back to have a volunteer open all your envelopes and see how good your poker hand was. We actually did reasonably well with 3 threes. In fact our hand was the 9th best of all those playing. Unfortunately they only paid out to the top 8 hands with the 8th place hand getting a whole $1.00.

At the Mega Geocaching Event

Chris Chums it up with Signal the Frog

Another event was to take a small flag and stick it into the ground at a very specific location defined by coordinates. Chris used her GPSr and I used mine and when we both had the "perfect" spot we were about 4 feet apart. Of course there were quite a few flags already place at other folks "perfect" spot. Most of the flags fell within about a 15 foot radius. We did not end up winning and we forgot to go back over to see how far off we were from the designated spot. The "log sheet" for this event was just a big white board. As we were leaving at the end of the event, it looked pretty impressive. See if you can find our geocaching name "rushrutter".

The "Logbook"