We're in Yuma!

Vegetable fields coming into Yuma.

We arrived in Yuma early this afternoon after a leisurely 80-mile drive from Quartzsite where we’d spent the last week. After a few weeks of sagebrush and cactus, it was quite pleasant to see flat fields, neatly-tilled rows growing fresh vegetables. They even have grass here! And we have an RV site that is asphalt and not gravel. We plan to spend at least a month here, exploring the area and maybe making a couple of day trips to Mexico, which is just a few miles away.

In the if-anything-can-go-wrong-it-will-happen-to-us department, we apparently averted one disaster. When we arrived in Quartzsite, we had one of our propane tanks refilled. Don’t ask me how this happened, but the attendant managed to stuff 8.4 gallons of propane in a tank that holds only seven gallons, and probably only needed four gallons, the amount we’ve been using each week. The propane went off in the middle of the night, leaving us to freeze in the cool desert nights. OK, so we didn’t freeze, but if we hadn’t had the electric blanket on, we might have. Jon got up in the wee hours and switched tanks so we could have heat.

Chester takes up scooter riding.

When we got to Yuma today, we needed to get the second tank filled. Jon told the attendant what happened with the first tank, and he said we were lucky the tank didn’t go boom! in the middle of the night. He was concerned enough with the threat of explosion that he put on protective gear before draining off the excess propane. And he told us

to never put more than 6.8 gallons in the tank at one time.