Heading To the Mothership

It's the middle of April in Yuma, and most all of the Snowbirds have headed North. Like the geese, the Canadians and Yankees from places like Nebraska, Michigan, and Ohio, are settling in to their summer routines already. We, on the other hand, are hanging back, knowing from experience that Spring weather can be fickle, and we don't really want to get surprised by something unexpected, left over from Old Man Winter. The town of Yuma is shrinking down like a balloon losing air, so I finally decided that the right course for us would be to just head up I-17 to Flagstaff and hang a left over to The Grand Canyon, one of Mary Ann's favorite places, for her birthday! It's not too far north for bad weather, but just far north enough to get out of the heat that's already revving up it's summer engine in South Arizona. So like late leaving geese, we're on our way. We spent just three nights at The Canyon, long enough for some beautiful sunsets and long walks along the rim. It made M A's day a memorable one.

M A relaxin' on The Rim

 The next stop along our intended route for a punch list visit at Winnebago World Headquarters in Forest City, Iowa, where H2 came off the line a few months earlier, is Gallup, New Mexico. We stopped off there for a quick visit to Perry Null Trading and our friend there, Barry, for a birthday gift. Nothing strikes Mary Ann's fancy more than a piece of fine American Indian jewelry. She walked out this time with a new bracelet and matching earrings (which she'd be happy to show you since she usually has them on!). The route, now along I-40 East takes us to very familiar territory, Albuquerque and Santa Fe. Our stop in Albuquerque is where that fickle spring weather caught up with us. For the few days we were there, the winds peaked to gusts well over 50 miles an hour. We blew up to Santa Fe for about a ten day visit, just long enough for Mary Ann to work on her Yoga practice with her instructors, Tias and Surya Little, and for me to keep up my practice of searching for the best Danishes and Cinnamon Rolls in the country, which in Santa Fe are, in my opinion, at The Chocolate Maven. We did manage to pull me away from those long enough to hit a few of our favorite eating places there like Counter Culture, Joe's Diner, The Tune Up, and one new one for the list in this great Foodie town, Jambo Café. It's a really eclectic place that features African/Caribbean dishes with wonderful spices and very bright flavors. One of their drink offerings is a whole Coconut with the top sliced off, served only with a straw for the milk and a spoon for scraping the sweet coconut meat. 

Chocolate Maven's Danish

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 Our trajectory next is to head right along the old Santa Fe Trail, to Dodge City, Kansas. As we got closer to Dodge City it became clear that some things don't change much with time. In the old days, it was the cattle drives along this ancient route that brought millions of head from Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas into Dodge City for transport East by train. Now, the eighteen wheel drivers are the Cowboys, bringing the cattle along the same road to the feed lots and holding areas in the same places as a hundred and fifty years ago. Dodge City is still a major connecting point for the beef, pork, chicken, and other meat industries, and you see it the closer you get to town. You'd think, as we did, that such an iconic place...Dodge City, why the name itself wreaks of the Old West, would have it's past on display proudly. We figure that somewhere along the line, the city government lost it's way, and there is very little evidence of the old Dodge City we expected to find there. We had to dig around to see what was left of the original part of town and even then discovered that they had actually moved the iconic Boot Hill cemetery to another location! Not much here for the tourist or history buff in you.
 After that disappointing stop, we headed to Wichita, where we caught up with cousins Wayne and Marilyn. They showed us around a town we had very little info on, and we were really very surprised. First, the place has some really good eating places. We weren't around long enough to sample a lot, but Tanya's Soup Kitchen stands out in the memory. Wichita also has a good array of grocery stores, where we were able to reload the rolling stock we like to have on hand. We hit Fresh Market and Natural Grocers, to name a few. Ok, back to that pesky weather situation mentioned earlier. Now we had to hang back for a while longer than expected in Wichita due to heavy SNOW falling in Northern Iowa (we're into the beginning of May!).
 Once the storm finally cleared, we started the last leg of a fifteen hundred mile trek, now through Kansas City and Northwest Missouri and in to Northern Iowa. H2, Smarty, and we reached Forest City the evening before our May 6th appointment. We pulled into the Mothership at the Winnebago headquarters, headed for an empty parking space, hooked up, and waited for the next morning when we walked into the customer service department. What happened next is still astonishing to us. When you take your motorhome back to the manufacturer for service, you hope that the experience will be a positive one. After all, it is a major expenditure and in this case..our home. From the moment we

walked in the doors, the customer service exceeded our expectations! Just think, if you could actually take a new car back to the manufacturer for service...instead of a dealer. This is what we were doing. A really unique idea for most consumer items to begin with (no auto manufacturer allows such a thing, for example). We spent about ten days all together with the service people (at one point, even left and drove up to nearby Minneapolis to visit friends Sol, Sue, and family), and they did everything they could to totally complete our punch list of items and make us feel that all was perfect with our coach...Amazing! What a great experience, and now we were ready to head to Michigan in our upgraded, 100% good to go H2...Winnebago Really Rocks.

The 3:10 to Yuma

When we finally headed east from I-15 in san Diego to I-8, out of the Southern California in mid March 2013, we set our clocks in H2 to arrive in Yuma, Arizona, at about 3:10. We were off by an hour or two, but after all..we weren't coming by train anyway! The drive along I-8 is an up the mountain, down the mountain affair that winds right along the U.S. Mexico border. The most interesting part is that almost the whole way, you see fields of produce like lettuces, asparagus, artichokes, and citrus fruits. I thought Yuma was a sandy border town, and it is once you get away from the agri areas that are visible from both sides of the highway, about as far as you can see! Once you get into town, there are refrigeration warehouses everywhere along the roads, with convoys of 18 wheelers waiting to pick up their loads at all hours of the day and night. It's a major industrial farming hub. We never realized the California produce machine extended this far into Arizona. Yuma is also a major snowbird area and is one of the most RV centric places we've been to. In winter the town swells to two or three times it's usual size. There are dozens of huge motorhome parks all over town which cater to the snowbird crowd, a large percentage from the Western half of Canada. Food wise, Yuma's a blank on our rating scale. The few times we actually tried to get something local were pretty much a disaster. One Saturday night we ventured in to a local pub that we noticed always had a big crowd. We stayed after looking inside at the crowd, even though our instincts told us to run. Lots of overweight, pasty looking folks who usually frequent places like this. Anyway...we stayed! I ordered a Kobe Beef  burger. Yep, that's what it said right on the menu, and they wanted about ten bucks for it, so I fell for the marketing. When it arrived, it looked ok, until I bit into it...FE! It tasted like a cow patty burger! Mary Ann was smarter and stuck to a plain salad. She must have been hoping I'd say "Let's beat it out of here," but when I didn't, she hit her auto pilot and opted for something safe. The salad was a bunch of iceberg lettuce with a few wilted tomatoes and some bottled dressing...FE again. Well, we were hungry again the next day...and stayed close to our own kitchen! Even the local Mexican places were pretty dismal, at least by our standards. Their "Salsa" would best be described as tomato flavored water..yechh again.

What passes for Salsa..Tomato Water!

 When we did finally venture eating out again, it was the local In N Out or Chipotle. If it hadn't been for a decent Frys Grocery and our imported stash from Whole Foods and TJ's, we would have needed to move out faster. As it was, we stayed in Yuma about a month until it began to get hot in April. We visited the old army fort, which was there for settlers moving west toward California in the mid 1800's. The Colorado is at it's narrowest there, so it was an easier place to cross to head west. There is also still a key Navy Air station in Yuma, and it is one active military base! Los Algodones

When not visiting the dentist in Los Algodones

is the little Mexican town on the other side of the border. It's famous because there are hundreds of dentists and pharmacies within a few square blocks in this little town. People come from all over the country, mostly for dental work at very discounted prices. No one we spoke with who had been there complained of shoddy medical care. In fact, most everyone said they'd been coming for years and they all had a "favorite dentist" to recommend.  The best part of staying there were the amazing citrus fruits we ate almost every day. They claim that about 98 percent of our winter lettuces and a great percentage of citrus also come from this area to all parts of the country. We're still in the habit of slicing oranges or grapefruits every day, even though we've been gone from there for months. For you Date lovers, this is also the major source of almost all of the Medjool and other varieties available. A really fascinating place in this amazing country of ours!

             M A among the Artichokes