As we once again started driving through the desert, I noticed there were so many more organ pipe cactus in Mexico than I saw while we were driving through the National Monument on the U.S. side. They were all over the place! We also saw signs on the side of the road that were self explanatory. One that I missed had a large rodent, (looked kind of like a beaver or something), don't know what that meant.

Downtown Sonoyta and at the outskirts of town

Normally when crossing the border into Mexico, you don't get stopped on the American side of the border, but, we did this time. Every single one of our rigs was boarded, guess the agents were looking for guns, drugs, plants or stowaways. We had a lot of oohs and aahs as the agent came into our bus, impressed apparently by all the work we had put into building the bus of our dreams. At any rate, it didn't take long and as we all drove through town, we finally found a spot right outside of town where we could all park and wait for the others to join us.

There were a whole bunch of rigs gathered at the Elks lodge in Gila Bend, most of whom were heading to the same place we were going, in fact, the same RV park! Fortunately, by the time we got on the road south, none of the other caravans were anywhere near us. We stopped in Why, briefly, for a break, before heading on down the road towards the border...

Quite a few of us Boomers were getting excited about our upcoming trip to Puerto Penasco, MX. Also known as Rocky Point, it is a town on the Sea of Cortez about 60 or so miles south of Lukeville, AZ, which is south of Ajo. We were going down there on Feb 1 and some were heading straight for Gila Bend, but, some, like us need to make a side trip back to Yuma to drop off our guns, plants. We also decided not to take the Jeep, because we just didn't want to get insurance for that, too. If we go next time, we're taking the Jeep! We felt uncomfortable driving other people's cars, even though Ron had his driver's license insured, allowing him to drive any vehicle. So, even though we would have been covered, it would have made us feel very bad if we had gotten into an accident in a car not our own.

That first week, the weather was a bit unsettled. We kept hearing reports that we were going to have nasty weather on Thursday, worse than we'd ever seen. Now, we've been there during wet weather, so some of us oldtimers were a bit skeptical of all this scare talk of flash floods, etc. Also, as you know, we are totally solar powered, no generator for us! So, we're thinking it's going to be totally cloudy all week. Fortunately, for us and our other friends who also had no generators, the only really bad day was Thursday, with extreme wind, rain & water in the washes. Still, when Saturday morning came, we were 400 amps down and were we ever glad to see the sun again! By Sunday, we were totally caught up on all our amps. While our area did not see any flash floods, the road coming in got badly washed out in places, but, in just a few days, the grader had come out to smooth out the rough spots. We also heard that a tornado came through some of the vendors in town, and a big lake formed in back of where some of our friends were working a vendor stand. So, for awhile, they had lakefront property, ha, ha!