For the last quarter century, the Frank Sinatra Starkey Hearing Foundation Celebrity Invitational has been held in the California desert. The two day event, held March 1-3 this year, benefits the Barbara Sinatra Children’s Center at Eisenhower Medical Center in the Coachella Valley near Palm Springs.

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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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Children love the RV lifestyle. There is an excitement that comes with packing up for a camping trip that most children never grow tired of. Whether you tow a trailer or have a massive coach, the kids will usually be excited and anxious to get the vehicle packed and head off on the next adventure. However, the time spent on the road and relaxing at the campground doesn’t have to result in them forgetting everything they learned at school. Even though you are on the road and away from home, the trip can still be educational.

Early Readers

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In February’s RV Life, I wrote about Arizona and its centennial year but due to space constraints, there are always things you have to cut.  Although I only rafted a mile of the lower and milder part of the Grand Canyon with a group of my Girl Scout Seniors many years ago, I have always been fascinated by the big GC.  One of the things on my Bucket List is a real two-week rafting trip through the rapids.  I have only done it via the Imax Theatre.  Wanna go?

It boggles my mind that John Wesley Powell, the one-armed Civil War veteran, led the first documented exploration of the Grand Canyon in 1869 with nine men and four wooden boats.  That is a whole story in itself.

Arizona has everything, Hope, Surprise, Nowhere, Somewhere, and Timbuktu.  In 1856, they also had “Ali Haiji and the Camels.”  This was not a contemporary rock group, but an experiment with 74 camels brought into this arid country to use as pack animals in building the 1857 wagon road across Arizona.  Ali, a Syrian camel driver, came with them.  After the project cancellation in 1864, Hi Jolly, as the soldiers nicknamed him, bought camels and started his own freighting business.  The fame of this enterprising fellow is registered for all time on a windblown pyramid tomb that declares it is “The last camp of Hi Jolly.” He was born “somewhere in Syria about 1828.”  He came to this country in February of 1856 and over the next 30 years, was “a faithful aid to the U.S. government.”  He died at Quartzsite December 16, 1902.

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If you have been following my blog over the past three years you know that I include geocaching in most of my RVing adventures. It is a great activity for traveling families and even for us empty nesters that are approaching seniorhood. Geocaching gets you out and about exploring your surroundings, revealing secret places and treasures wherever your RV travels take you.

If you have yet to join this fast growing sport, then be sure to attend the 2012 Seattle RV Show February 9th - 12th at CenturyLink Event Center. Groundspeak Inc, the parent company of geocaching will be exhibiting at the show and will be presenting a seminar at the show currently scheduled for noon Saturday, February 11th.  Groundspeak is headquartered right here in Seattle and the Pacific Northwest was the location of the very first geocache, so living in the Puget Sound region and not geocaching is like living in Seattle and not being a coffee junkie! Come and become a member of the geocaching family at the Seattle RV Show and let the sport of geocaching guide you to some adventures in RVing of your very own.

If you want to bone up on geocaching before the show, visit http://www.geocaching.com

For an up to date Seattle RV Show seminar schedule click here.

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If you like getting up close and personal with history instead of peering at it through a glass case in a museum, you’ll enjoy the Mill Canyon Dinosaur Trail outside of Moab, Utah. Although short, this self-guided trail goes a long way in preserving the bones of dinosaurs that thrived here in swampy conditions 150 million years ago. These fossils are in situ, so you can’t any more authentic than seeing Jurassic-era Allosaurus, Stegosaurus, Camarasaurus, and other bones in their natural surroundings. You’ll also find fossilized wood. To get the whole story, follow the numbered interpretive signs along the trail, which used to be a river channel.

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The PGA Tour recently unveiled a free iPad app available for the 2012 golf season. The PGA Tour app, sponsored by Callaway, is available now in the Apple App Store. The app’s centralized dashboard design provides fans with at-a-glance access to exclusive live coverage information including scoring, player statistics and course statistics. The PGA Tour’s iPad app will offer live streaming video coverage from multiple events in 2012, as well as video highlights from all PGA Tour events this year.

“With the continued success of the iPad and our overarching strategy of reaching PGA Tour fans across multiple platforms, we are very excited about the launch of the official PGA Tour app,” said Tim Finchem, Commissioner of the PGA Tour. “All of our digital platforms are very important to the way we engage our fans, now and into the future, and this is a great step forward.”

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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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You probably know that sunburns are a serious problem. They can cause cancer, leave you looking old before your time and they are just plain miserable. Nothing can ruin an otherwise gorgeous vacation like the misery of severe sunburn. Here are some tips to help you avoid those sunburns and find relief from the pain should you still get stung.
Dressing Routine

When you get dressed in the morning, slather on some sunscreen. It only takes a few minutes, and making it part of your routine will help ensure that you don’t accidentally forget to apply it. Applying it before you get dressed will also ensure that you remember to cover your neck, throat and those sensitive shoulders.
Aerosol

Spray-on sunblock is incredibly easy to use. It allows you to cover your entire back without asking for help. It lets you protect the kids without making them stand still for five minutes. Toss a bottle in your daypack when you head out to explore the area, so you can reapply it often. The one downside of these aerosol cans is that can set off the natural gas alarms in some campers, so you should only use them outdoors.
Hats

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            It has become a habit on the once-a-month hour-long trips I make to Surprise for supplies, that I pull into McDonald’s drive through at the east edge of Wickenburg, for a cup of coffee to keep me alert.  I handed the smiling clerk a dollar and she informed me that a small coffee was free all that week.  It was a nice start to my day although generally 76 cents doesn’t stretch my budget too far.

            Anyone who knows me personally or who has read my stuff over the last 20+ years, would know that cooking is not my forte.  Walking through Wal-Mart, a puzzled looking young man stopped me with this, “You look like you are a good cook so you would probably know where to find the Liquid Smoke.”  I’m not sure how he surmised I looked like a good cook.  Maybe he figured if I had survived to this age, I surely had to know how to cook.  At any rate, my guess was that it might be in the barbecuing section.  A couple of aisles of running into each other later, he raised up the bottle of Liquid Smoke in triumph.  

            My MI sis-in-law Nora, who is in AZ for the winter (Can you blame her?), went to the Home and Garden Show at the AZ State Fairgrounds with me.  After wandering what seemed like forever, we sat at a picnic table with four strangers.  The fellow next to me was gnawing (literally) on a huge turkey leg, one of the show’s specialties.  It wasn’t long before we were all teasing him and he gave back in full measure.  We were soon swapping stories and telling whoppers.  He was a real Arizona native, a rare find these days.  We soon discovered that the other three people, along with Nora and I, were from various parts of Michigan.  A small world after all.

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