There are fully functioning bathrooms, and water and electricity at every site. We brought some electric kitchen equipment (mmm...coffee!) and an electric light, both of which were very handy. Since we were camping with friends on adjoining sites, we put all our tents in one area, and the tables and fire in the other, which helps keep the kids out of trouble (mainly Jackson).
We had a seven-midget tent (They call it a seven-person tent, but really?? These seven people are either really close or really small!) and a pup tent for the girls. They LOVED having their own little tent and had it arranged and personalized within 15 minutes of setting it up. We brought Jackson's pack'n play, which fit nicely in the larger tent..
The California shore was on the opposite side.
There were several nice trails there. We avoided the two old mine shafts, what with the kiddos and all.
This bridge over the road below was built to assist the wild burros in crossing from one side to the other without getting hit. Seriously.
After our two night stay, we traveled an additional 30 minutes north to Lake Havasu City to see the London Bridge and have a delicious lunch at a little spot recommended by our ranger.
We split from our friends after lunch for the drive home. Franz and I decided to drive through another state campground we'd seen on the drive between Buckskin Mountain and Lake Havasu. We stopped to talk to the ranger at the station. What an enlightening conversation that turned out to be!! While the park we stayed at had very little activity in the way of desert creatures (a good question to know the answer to!), this particular park was overrun with them. The ranger had recently been restationed and was not transitioning well, I'd say. He was very, very blunt with us. He believed there was a huge nest of rattlesnacks just off the parking lot. They pulled a baby rattlesnack out of the bathroom about every morning, and there were always snakes lurking in the grass down by the water. Additionally, the walls and other surfaces were always crawling with desert hairy scorpions (the biggest, freakiest looking kind - think almost 6 inches long!) whenever he turned off the lights at the end of the evening shift. We didn't take the informational brochure he kindly offered us after giving us the scoop. Umm, no thanks!!
That led to an interesting conversation on the way home about the desert creatures we had and had not seen in the last 10 years. For living close to the raw desert, I was surprised to really have seen no javelinas except one dead one. I'd seen one desert hairy scorpion, and of course we have had too many bark scorpions in our house for my taste. We regularly see coyotes loping by on the sidewalks and across the road. We love the roadrunners and quail (I rescued a baby quail out of a roadway once). We had some majorly weird Great Horned Owl visitors one night. We have seen wild burros several times, and heard them while camping. We had a large frog in our fountain for one night. The hawks and vultures are always soaring overhead. There is a Bald Eagle nesting area over Lake Pleasant, but we haven't seen them. I ran across a rattling rattlesnake on a hike one time, and we have seen a couple of other snakes, mostly dead or about to be. Little desert rats and ground hogs run around everywhere, along with lizards of various sizes, which the girls have tried in vain to catch. We've seen jack rabbits, and heard rumors of a moutain lion and a bobcat, but never seen either. The bees that live on the mountain behind us love our fountain out front, but we don't love them so much when they congregate in groups of 30-50. We have hummingbirds and butterflies in the backyard. However, we had never, ever seen a tarantula in the wild. That was the most surprising thing to us.
Most of the way home, we pulled into a gas station to refuel. As we were sitting there, Katie pipes up from the back seat, "Mom, what's that giant spider over there that I can see from here?" I looked out my window to where the drive met the street. There were two men standing over an angrily moving tarantula. I didn't need any visual assistance to be sure that was what we were seeing. We all jumped out of the car and ran to a respectful distance to see the thing close up. One of the guys had rescued the spider from the street where it was about to be run over. It didn't seem to appreciate his gesture, and was reared up on its back legs. After some time had passed, it calmed down a bit, and the guy moved it from the drive where he had dropped it in self-preservation to the empty lot beside the gas station. Well, I guess we can cross that one off our list of creatures yet to be seen! Funny timing!
1 comment:
Terrifying! Also, that campground looks Awesome. I want to go sometime.
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