Bombay Beach Apocalypse!

Scott wanted to drive all around the Salton Sea. Last year we headed to the east side and saw Bombay Beach and the North Shore Yacht Club. This year we started on the west side. We drove into Salton City and Desert Shores. Patty and I had done that a few weeks ago, but Scott and Terri and not seen those towns yet.

After driving through those towns we stopped at the Red Earth Casino for Scott to fill up his truck with diesel. It is by far the cheapest place in the area at $3.79 a gallon! We continued on through Westmoreland and headed up to the Sonny Bono Salton Sea National Wildlife Refuge.

Of course with the government pinheads being shutdown this HUGE wilderness area that should be just left open was shut down. It was not even gated because there are no gates, it just had barricades up.This is just another case of our president being nasty, trying to prove a point! Like when he had Secretary of Defense Hagle refuse to pay for our brave servicemen funerals!

A lot of anger in our country!

Ok, enough about politics and back to our day!

We continued to the east side of the sea. Scott is a big train fan so we stopped next to the train tracks to have lunch. We got to watch several freight trains as we munched on our sandwiches. Our friend Bill Gehr who some of you know as a friend, and some of you may have read his reviews in Trailer Life or MotorHome magazines or know him as the "Ask the Expert" in RV Journal or "Ask RV Bill" in the Thousand Trails Trail Blazer magazine called just checking up on us while we were stopped.

We will see Bill in December because we will both be Park Hosting along the beach in Ventura. We won't be at the same park but we will be within a few miles of each other overlapping for two months! Wahoo!!

We continued to Bombay Beach and pulled into the community. There are approximately 245 residents "living" in Bombay Beach. It truly reminds you of one of those apocalypse type of movies..

Rubble at Bombay Beach

I saw on Zillow that there is a 1500 square foot house that has been foreclosed on that the bank is asking $9,500.00! Yep, nine thousand five hundred dollars for a house and property! This is a very depressed area!

In the 60's this was becoming a very popular and exclusive place to come vacation. But with the water turning bad and then in the 70's a hurricane from mexico brought heavy weather up here and flooded all this away. With all the salt and toxicity of the water it destroyed everything here. It was never repaired and still sits like it was before the storm.

Luxury trailer

They have built berms around the town which you can see in the background of the above picture to keep it from happening again.

This is what remains from the old dock.

Old Dock

Because all the fish were dying in this horrible water, they stocked it with tilapia, gulf croaker, corvina, and sargo.  The tilapia weigh up to 3.5 pounds, and the corvina have weighed up to 37 pounds and measured 42 inches.

The Salton Sea has a salinity level of over 4.0, way over seawater. Once it reaches 4.4 there is a belief that only the tilapia will be able to survive.

Dead Fish

You can see how bad the water is by this chair that was fished out of the water!

Chair

We continued the loop around the sea. In all it was about 150 miles. We got back and rested a while. We then went to Mario's Italian and had antipasto salad and a large pizza that we shared among the four of us. After that we went to the VillageFest in Palm Springs. It is a weekly event on Thursday nights that is about 6-8 blocks long on Palm Canyon Blvd. They block the street off and venders hock their wares.

It was a great day with great friends!

Tomorrow is more of a rest day...

God Bless,

Brian and Patty

Scott and Terri are here!

Our great friends Scott and Terri Blankenbiller arrived for their vacation on Saturday October the 5th. It was really good to see them! We used to go every year on family vacations with them. I would usually plan the activities. 

Because we are living full time on vacation now, and Scott and Terri are on vacation for just a week, I did not want to dictate their time. If they wanted to just kick back and rest, that would be OK with us. If they wanted to go do alot this week that would be alright also. I asked Scott to plan what he wanted to do.

They decided because they were pretty burnt out from work, they wanted to just wing it. We would figure it out when they got here. Patty and I had already been here for almost 3 weeks, so we are good with whatever they want to do, even if that just means sitting by the pool.

Saturday was just kicking back and catching up with each other. It had been awhile. We are both fairly new grandparents, so that took awhile. :)

Sunday we went to church and when we got back we had some grocery shopping we had to do. Other then that the pool was awesome!

Monday we went to the Augustine Casino in Coachella. They have a great breakfast steak and eggs buffet. On Mondays and Thursdays it is only $4.50 for seniors over 50 years old! Terri and I won some money. Terri kept hers, but Patty lost mine. :(

Tuesday Scott went hiking but it was too hot for us. The girls went shopping.

Wednesday it cooled off and even rained a little. We went to the Big Morongo Canyon Preserve. It is a cooperative between BLM and Morongo County so in spite of the Federal Government shutdown it is still open. 

Big Morongo Canyon

The preserve has several miles of hiking trails.

Trail System Map

The trails are a large mixture of boardwalks over marshes, hilly and rocky, and forestry.

Trails

The terrain is quite diverse in the canyon. Here are some steps in the trail system.

Steps

We walked almost all the trails which was just under 3 miles total.

Rocky trails

Here we are after having hiked up the mountain.

Canyon View

They have a lot of rest areas and decks. You can see one from up on the hill.

Deck

Patty took this picture of Scott, Terri and Brian on one of the decks.

Brian, Terri and Scott

The decks are made of 80% recycled plastic and 20% wood. They have bottle holders that Patty thought was kinda cool. Here is Patty displaying the bottle holders.

Patty and the bottle holder

On our last trail a blue-jay started following us. It was weird. It must have been used to people feeding it. It actually followed us for a couple hundred yard or so.

Blue-Jay

After the hike, Scott and I had appointments to get Swedish massages at the Milan Institute which is a massage school. 50 minute massages which ended up being about an hour for $25.00 and they were very good! Quite a bargain... 

Ended up the night in the Jacuzzi and I'm not sure how I'm writing this blog!!! ;)

With that I MUST say goodnight and God Bless you all!

Love you, 

Brian and Patty