Before we headed south, we took a day to visit boating friends in West Seattle, enjoying their great neighborhood and views of downtown Seattle. They also took us on a little driving tour of some hidden gems in town – I loved the Troll under the Fremont bridge…

…and yes, that’s a real VW Bug in his hand! A perfect day.

We started driving south and I remembered that Petersburg friends were also out and about in their RV, so I sent a text to say hello and to let them know where we were… and it turns out that they were heading to the same campground that evening to meet up with their son and his wife (also Petersburg people). We celebrated Jim’s birthday in style! A couple of nights later we ran into our friends again at another campground – we’ve seen more of them outside town than back at home!

Our general destination for this RV trip is Arizona. We stopped for a short visit to see friends in Yuma, and I had to laugh at how many Canadians were there for the winter. We saw the 60s pop band Herman’s Hermits in concert there – what a blast! Peter Noone is the only one of the original Hermits still in the group, but his voice was strong, he had a ton of energy, and he definitely had the moves. We capped off the visit with a trip to nearby date farm for a little date ice cream.

From Yuma we headed to the small town of Gila Bend, AZ – about 75 miles west of Phoenix. The campground there was terrific – very friendly people, and lots of hummingbirds.

They even had a little private nook where you could enjoy a nice view and no interruptions, complete with comfy chair, wind chime and a hummingbird feeder – a perfect place to enjoy my book.

But the reason we came here was to explore some of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) part of the Sonoran Desert National Monument.

This part of the Sonoran is pretty remote – we bounced along a 4WD road for a few miles to get to a trail area – we didn’t want to get lost! I’ll post more about the Sonoran Desert tomorrow – it’s a terrific wilderness.