Quartzsite! Or, maybe not

Quartzsite! Or, maybe not.

January 27th 2017:  Arizona! Strike that.  Actually I'm about five miles West of Parker Arizona on BLM land in California (No!, BLM means "Bureau of Land Managment", my political blogs are elsewhere) .  It's a bit hillier here than most of the places that I dry camped in Arizona, and I certainly have a lot fewer neighbors.  I'm in my camper conversion, and I'm comfortable and relaxed, thank you very much.
 
This is a "short term" BLM campsite, 14-day maximum. I had actually purchased a seasonal pass for the LTVA (Long Term Visitor Areas) in Arizona and California, and had stayed for nearly a week in the South La Posa LTVA area.  But as far as the seasonal pass is concerned: that was one hundred and eighty dollars wasted.

Recommendation #1: Don't bother to buy a seasonal LTVA pass.

(At least not first thing.) The choices are:

1) Stay in "short-term" sites for as much as two weeks, free of charge. 

2) Buy a LTVA pass (for a month, I believe) for forty dollars.  The strongest case for this is if you do have at least gray water storage, but don't have a toilet aboard that you always want to use.  Face it, using a good Thetford Portapotti is better than digging a hole for emergencies, but if you don't have a large dedicated bathroom, you want different options.

3) Buy a seasonal LTVA pass, November(?) through April 15th, for $180.00.

My thought was. 'I can just purchase a seasonal pass, find a decent site close to the vault toilets, and my rent is paid through April 15th' (boy-oh-boy, talk about prime real estate).  There's just one problem with that.  Quartzsite is, well how can I put this politely... simply not where I want to be (I had originally just said "shite" here, but I understand I'm making a strong value judgment).  It is an endless chain of flee-market tents full of cheap, badly used, overly expensive, or cheap-badly-used-overly-expensive items.  I'll never understand why older folk have a preoccupation with flea-markets and buffet dinners, but if you're sane enough, or young enough, or young enough at heart, you'll save yourself from that "scene". 

If you still have the burning desire to experience the Quartzsite "scene" because all the other RVers do it, do the following.  Find a local flee market on a hot cloudless day, and loop through it approaching it from different directions until your feet are tired and you consider buying something just to break the monotony.  Now loop through it another twenty or thirty times.  To make it more realistic, run out in cantankerous, probably deaf and vision impaired, driver in an RV a few times. THERE! You've seen the POSITIVE sides Quartzsite. 

The negative parts are that the whole town is so perpetually clogged by visitors (at least during the peak of the year) that you can't expect anything to work as it should, even for a normal small town.

Want to go to the public library and download something you needed.  Ha ha, joke's on you.  The access that you can squeeze out will be a bare few minutes long, and terribly slow, it's only a tease as to what true WiGi connectivity might be like.

Want to grocery shop in a regular store?  Head on over to the Big Market where you'll be treated to tawdry covers of "Cheri" and "Teeny Bopper" magazine among the miles of Miller and Miller Lite beer cases while trying to scrape some regular provisions together.  Don't get me wrong, sometimes I'm titillated by old style porn too (remember when you only got porn through glossy magazines?), but we're talking about shopping for basics here.  This town is simply not where you want to be.  Oops, I'm projecting again.  This town is definitely not where I want to be.  And it's what most of the LTVA campgrounds are centered around.

So, my recommendation is to take fourteen days in the short-term sites. See if there's enough in the area to keep you interested (there's actually some beautiful desert hiking if you're into it, and some aspect of one of the shows might interest you, but two weeks in a dysfunctional town is a looooong time.).  If you find you want to stay longer than that, the LTVA options are still open.

Post Blog, like a Post Script, but somehow different: If you are interested in desert hikes, I'll probably post some pdf copies of occasional travelogues that I send to my nieces with art etc. as a follow-on.  Maybe you'll like them (very short).

Post Post Blog:  Some RVers seem confused about the whole registry thing for BLM land... Be brave.  Just wonder into the campground.  If there is someone there that has volunteered to register you into the campground, stop and talk to them.  They're generally really nice people, and they can tell you what the options are for staying at their campgrounds and others.  Take the easiest option and relax about it for a while.  There's no need to commit.  If you need something different later, then it's still open to you.