Lake Havasu City, Arizona, founded in 1963, is a youngster as far as towns go. Its Southwest-styled homes and businesses in sun-baked desert colors rise on sandy slopes along Arizona’s Highway 95 and hunker among sand dunes close to the lake. The deep blue waters of Lake Havasu, formed by Parker Dam about 25 miles to the south skirt the reddish-brown Mojave Mountains. For two weeks, we made our home at Colorado River Adventures’ Lake Havasu Resort located near the upper end of the lake on London Bridge Road.

One sunny day stretched into another as we hung out at our motorhome with a view of the lake and mountains over the top of swaying palm trees. We read books, played music, wrote stories, and set no clock for bedtime or breakfast. Spot and I took long walks into the neighboring desert dotted here and there with clumps of yellow brittlebush. Conveniently located about a mile from the Shops at Lake Havasu and Ultra Star Cinema, we went to movies and shopped at Wal-Mart. We browsed a used book store in town and visited the Mohave County Library for speedy Internet connections.

On Sundays, we attended morning worship with local Lake Havasu Baptists. Twice we met friends, Norm and Chris Denton, once for dinner and again for a Sunday lunch. On February 9, we celebrated our 10^th wedding anniversary with dinner at Chili’s. This was not our first anniversary to mark in Lake Havasu City; or our first to dine at Chili’s on our special day.

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On our winter stay in Arizona, we took a day trip from Benson to tour Biosphere 2 in the Santa Catalina Mountains at Oracle, north of Tucson. We arrived in time for an 11:00 “Tour Under the Glass,” which describes the narrated walk-through of the glass dome structure covering 3.14 acres. The tour is approximately an hour and a half walking one way; we did not return to any biome. A caution for those who have health or mobility issues: the tour includes steps.

Originally built between 1987 and 1991 as an artificial, materially-closed ecological system designed to study how the earth’s natural systems work, Biosphere 2, named because our planet earth is considered Biosphere 1, was inhabited by eight individuals from September 26, 1991 to September 26, 1993. Although some touted the closed mission as the most exciting scientific project in the United States since our astronauts launched for the moon, critics called the experiment a complete failure.

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Typically when we spend time in Yuma, Arizona, in the winter, we make at least one trip across the border between the United States and Mexico to shop in Los Algodones, the northernmost town in Mexico, and at its northeastern tip, the northernmost point in Mexico. Located in the Mexican state of Baja California near the borders of both southeastern California and southwestern Arizona, I discovered an interesting geographical distinction as I researched the small Mexican town on Wikipedia: if people  traveled in any of the four cardinal directions from anywhere in Algodones, as most people call the town, (due north, due east, due south, or due west), they would cross a U.S. border.

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We had a vague sense that Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, bordering the line between Arizona and Mexico, is a special place. But its surprising beauty enchanted us. As we drove south off I-10 through 75 miles of scrub desert—shifting sand dunes, salt-covered flats, scraggly creosote bushes, and small to tiny towns that had seen better days—we could not imagine the view framed in our windshield at a turn into the National Monument Visitor Center. We had already determined to park in the Twin Peaks Campground and pictured nondescript, dirt spaces with no hookups. The volunteers at the Visitor Center directed us down a narrow paved road and around a curve to the campground and a choice of several spaces that fit our 40-foot coach. We were pleasantly pleased to find long concrete pads tucked into lush desert landscaping. Although the part about no hookups was correct, we were permitted to run our generator two hours in the morning and two hours in late afternoon. We had access to solar-powered showers and a dump station. We were comfortably at home for four nights.

Every window of our motorhome framed a view of a flourishing desert floor and mountainsides dotted with green organ pipe and saguaro cacti. Although the 300, 669-acre National Monument and United Nations-designated International Biosphere Reserve is named for the organ pipe cactus, which grows only in this one spot in the United States, we noted that saguaro were taller and more mature than in the Saguaro National Park. We soon learned that a total of 28 species of cactus, including prickly pear and the wooly-looking cholla, are preserved in this wilderness kingdom, alongside creosote and bursage bushes, mesquite, and brittlebush. In the canyons and higher elevations of the Ajo Mountain Range, jojoba, agave, rosewood, and palo verde create an evergreen landscape.

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For our winter trip to Arizona, we left our home in Heber Springs, Arkansas, on New Year’s Eve and made our first overnight stop at Firewind Casino in Shawnee, Oklahoma. (The parking with no hookups was level, free, and security men stalked the lot!) Being the party animals that we are, we took advantage of the Casino’s prime rib buffet, and retired to our bed before 10:00. At the stroke of midnight, booms as loud as cannons woke us.  We thought the Civil War had started again.  Fireworks!  Spot moved from his bed to his comfort zone in the bathroom, and we turned over without even opening the curtains.

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On the first full day of our 2012 winter stay in Arizona, we made an afternoon trip to Saguaro National Park, the eastern section, that is. The park encompasses over 91,000 acres in two sections: Saguaro West-Tucson Mountain District and Saguaro East-Rincon Mountain District. The city of Tucson sits between the two parcels of the park. Both have Visitor Centers, and we made the Rincon Mountain Visitor Center our initial stop.

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For years, RVing friends told me about the beauty of the Southwest desert. When we passed through, I only saw barren wasteland. Nothing beautiful like the mountains covered with pine and hardwoods, gurgling streams, and winding paths through the woods that surround my home in the Arkansas Ozarks. But then, we began spending winters in Arizona and Mexico. As I walked in the desert—even boondocked there--I began to see the magnetism that my friends had recognized, an alluring landscape all its own.

During our stay in El Golfo, Mexico, we drove to the high desert for a day’s outing. We climbed up mountains of sand, carved in rivulets by the wind. I was reminded of the Badlands in South Dakota.  Stark, brown beauty glistened like diamonds scattered in the sand. The climb in our Jeep was quite steep and the road deep in sand. We stopped once and let air out of our tires to make it to the top. The flat desert atop the mountain stretched to a distant horizon, desolate and so very quiet. As Lee put it, “…miles and miles of miles and miles.” We felt totally alone in a world with no other people, houses, or vehicles.

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During our month-long stay at El Golfo, Mexico, many of our neighboring RVers left almost daily on their ATVs, or “quads,” as they called them, racing for as many as 30 or 40 miles down the beach of the Sea of Cortez. Almost everyone here has one or two "quads" and the beach hummed with their roaring motors. One morning, we decided to venture out on the trace of a road in the sand in our Jeep. We never imagined we would see so many pelicans. They were mixed in with gulls and other birds, but there were hundreds and hundreds of brown pelicans. Mostly, the birds perched on little points of sand jutted out into the Gulf. Approaching, we recognized them by their longer necks, often stretched upward. Their walk is a rather comical waddle. On one point, it looked as though they were lined up to launch—one at a time.  Basically, that’s what they were doing!  Funny how we put human characteristics to animals or foul.

We made a rest stop at what appeared to be a “dump,” although so much of the beach is littered that it was hard to tell what was a long-term dump or what had recently happened. Anyhow, we found several piles of conch shells. Some were even buried and we dug them up. Someone told me later that the Mexicans eat whatever is inside—kind of like escargot—so I’m sure the shells had been dumped. We went about 30 miles before we were halted by water in an inlet too deep for us to cross.  So we ate our lunch and poked along the shoreline for more shells. On one reef, there were thousands of imbedded shells. At one point, we stopped to look at boulders at the base of sandstone cliffs and they, too, were imbedded with shells. It appeared that mud had rolled the shells into a huge rock.

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A few years ago, Lee and I did something we had never done before—spent Christmas away from our families. On December 7, we traveled with a small caravan from Yuma Lakes Resort to a sister resort in El Golfo, Mexico. Although the trip covered a mere 100 miles heading south from Yuma, Arizona, we were four hours en route. The two-lane road was hard-surfaced, but under construction in some places. We detoured on a rutted dirt bypass. The landscape stretched for miles with nothing but sand and scrub. To our right, a mountain range stood in the distance. Our wagon master said it began about San Diego and followed the Baja. As we neared El Golfo, more sand dunes cropped up, and in the distance, we could see tidewater from the Sea of Cortez.

The little town of El Golfo is small and appeared to be working on improvements such as street lights and a city park bordered with trees and a sidewalk. But the houses, for the most part, were hovels or shacks, although some looked more prosperous than others. Trash littered the roadways and streets. The constant wind scatters paper and plastic bags throughout the town and onto the beach. We drove through El Golfo’s main asphalt street connected to a sandy road that took us to the gates of the American-owned resort perched at the top of the Gulf of California (Sea of Cortez). We parked right on the beach, but the sea had no waves—just the continuous ebbing of the tide. I missed the ocean’s roar.

Spot and I took walks morning and evening on the beach. The sand stimulated him to run in circles, romp, leap, and flop to his belly as though stalking a prey. Then he jumped up and dug holes until he tired out. He is an adaptable dog. There were no bushes, so Spot simply "marked" every plastic bag on the beach.

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Singer and songwriter, Ray Stevens, wrote and recorded: “The Haircut Song.” He relates several funny scenarios for getting a haircut out of town: in Montana from a barber who used a Peterbilt™ for his chair and way down South in a shop with a steeple and an organ in the corner. As often as Lee and I travel, sometimes for several months, we must have the inevitable haircut out of town. I’ve had haircuts in Alaska, Mexico, Coffeyville, Kansas, and numerous places in between.

However, the most memorable one happened one summer afternoon as we drove into Kalispell, Montana. Lee spotted a barber shop pole. “I think I need a haircut,” he said as he parallel parked our 40-foot motorhome in front of an old fashioned one-chair barber shop on Main Street. It paled in comparison to the Butte, Montana, shop Ray Stevens sang about on our collection of his songs. I stepped out the door to walk with Spot, and the barber invited me and our dog in his open door to visit as he cut Lee’s hair.

Yet, the notable haircut was among many interesting things we experienced in Kalispell, a town of about 20,000 people in the Flathead Valley of Montana—a gateway to Glacier National Park. We wandered around a local art fair in the downtown area and into the Carnegie Library that has been reinvented as an art gallery.

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