I have this strange feeling of turning a corner today. It started when I woke up and realized that I no longer had a sore throat, and the sensation of having been pummeled by a samurai in the recent past was gone. Eleanor and Emma are not fully recovered yet, but I think we are finally getting past that little souvenir of our Hawaiian vacation.

We also got the Airstream washed at long last. The poor thing was starting to look downright abused. There is a 24-hour truck wash near the Spotlight 29 Casino, and although we had to wait nearly an hour, the job was finally done and the aluminum sparkles again. I had forgotten how good the wheels can look when they are shiny. They were lost in a cloud of brake dust smudged with wheel bearing grease.

After the truck wash we pulled the Airstream into the local Albertson’s for grocery restocking. Although there are groceries to be had in Borrego Springs, our next stop, the shopping is better elsewhere.

We picked up the mail at the Post Office in Indio, one box of Business Reply Mail from magazine subscribers, and another box of miscellaneous mail. Despite my best efforts we still get paper mail from various organizations that I don’t care to hear from. I am considering going to a service like Earth Class Mail to eliminate most of the paper before it reaches me. They will scan the envelope and let me simply check off for each piece whether I want it forwarded, recycled, or opened (and the interior pages scanned).

By the way, our last mail pickup will be next week:

Rich Luhr
General Delivery
Borrego Springs, CA 92004

Anything sent to that address must arrive by 12/19. After that, we’ll no longer be full-timers. We’ll be part-time travelers (insert heavy sigh here). We have a few trips planned for January and February, but for the most part we will be parked in Arizona until mid-March. Then we’ll get on the road again for perhaps six months.

So the sensation of turning a corner probably stems from all these “last” activities. Last mail call, last big grocery re-stock, last few nights “¦ The knowledge that our travels are ending, even temporarily, has begun to hang in our subconscious and our daily choices. We bought less at the grocery store because we only need food for another week. We washed the trailer so it will be clean when we store it in the carport. We are picking up things that we would otherwise leave behind; we know they are destined to be unloaded in the house.

But I will not dwell on that prospect. We are in one of our most favorite spots in the world and we have eight days to enjoy it. It was a beautiful drive along the western side of the Salton Sea from Palm Springs to Salton City, with the long blue sea and the reddish mountains framing it.

Once at Salton City, we turned west onto S-22, which leads to Borrego Springs, and I commented to Eleanor that from here on in we’d probably see a lot of great boondocking sites. Just seconds after I said that, we spotted a nice open area with a scattering of picnic shelters and absolutely not a soul around. [Edit: This was a few miles east of the Arroyo Salado Primitive Campground, somewhere in the state OHV area.] We turned off the pavement onto the hard packed desert floor and bumped our way over to the site you see in the photo. It’s the kind of spot that I live for: secluded, quiet, scenic, and still a bit wild. There are no roads, only a few tracks left by ATVs and trucks. We’ll spend a night here and then move to Borrego Springs for a week.