Tuesday, May 1, through Saturday, May 5, 2012: In the Desert:

We headed for Ehrenberg, Arizona, on Tuesday.  It was a 238-mile trek, mostly on two Interstate highways, so it was easy.  We arrived at the Colorado River Oasis RV Resort, a nice place, at noon, and set up in a convenient site.  It is definitely not the high season here; there are few RVs and it's hot.  Ehrenberg is just across the Colorado River from Blythe, California. 

We are here for just two days, mostly trying to avoid the heat (it's supposed to hit 97 on Wednesday), and then we will go to Desert Hot Springs, California, for two days---and more heat. 

Our big event on Wednesday (early morning, before the heat arrived with a vengeance) was to clean the outside of our trailer---for the first time in months.  It's beautiful again.

We can now see out of the windows, and a zillion bugs have been removed from the front.  (Exaggerations, sure, but mostly true.)  After that, we visited Blythe, to get some groceries.  It's not an impressive place.  Ehrenberg, by contrast, is not even a place, judging by what we saw.  It seems to contain only old RV and mobile home parks.  The "old" refers to both the parks and the RVs and mobile homes in them.  There is even a sign at the city entrance announcing that it is a ghost town.  It's not even that nice.

Thursday morning, we left for Desert Hot Springs---only 138 miles away.  It was an easy trip.  DHS is sort of a suburb of Palm Springs, but it is not nearly as nice.  The RV park we are in---Catalina Spa & RV Resort---is very large (420 spaces) and was once very nice, apparently.

Now it could use some maintenance of its asphalt inner roads and concrete pads.  It is also very apparent that high season has gone.  RVs are few and far between here.  But, it's just fine.

We headed to downtown DHS to see what it was about, and ended up having a very nice lunch at the Two Bunch Palms Spa, a place Becky had heard of and always wanted to visit.  We had a very nice lunch in a very nice place.  I was a little concerned that it was too nice for me to get by with just my Pahrump Nugget T-shirt, but we were the only guests not dining in bath robes.  (They are very serious about the "spa" in the name.)

It turns out we couldn't have a glass of wine with lunch because the new owners (said to be "four gentlemen from L.A.") have not yet received their liquor license.  They just bought the place in April from the bank that had foreclosed on it two years ago, and the bank was not willing to sell the license.  The place has been around since the '20s, and legend has it that it was initially built by Al Capone as a hideout and remained mob-connected for some time.  Interesting.

We celebrated Cinco de Mayo on Saturday by having an early dinner at the Casa Blanca restaurant in DHS. 

It had high praise on Yelp, and lived up to the billing.  It's just a small, local place, but I have never had such tasty Mexican food in my life.  Really.  It was terrific, and a nice way to end our stay  in the desert.  (We continued a bit of the tradition by having a few nore margaritas when we returned to the RV park.)