Stop 1: Ehrenberg, AZ

I'm not going to count Hemet as stop 1 since it was essentially a holding place near Murrieta while we tried to complete our sale there. "Tried" is the word for it. Subsequent to our last post, the buyer's lender eventually reported that they'd been able to recover the money that they'd wired to the wrong title company. By that time, it was too late to rewire it to the correct company. They'll be rewiring it first thing Monday morning and the title company will do a special expedited recording of title at that point. The proceeds that were supposed to be wired into our account on Friday, might make it on Tuesday.

We intentionally allowed what we thought would be enough time to see things through but the time came when we had reservations in RV parks all across the country. This morning, it was time to take off. If it comes about that one of us actually needs to be present to straighten out whatever mess the escrow or title companies might make of things, we'll put Kristen on a plane while I continue to move East.

Today's trip was uneventful until we got here. Actually, until we almost got here. When we pulled off the highway into a brand new traffic circle, our GPS went into a recompute loop that it never came out of. We had to call the RV Park for the final directions.

Once we were set up, I went to refill the gas tank. A simple enough process ordinarily. I went back to the highway to fill up at a Flying J station. I should have remembered our previous encounter with Flying J. When you slide your card, they put a $150 hold against your card that hangs around for months. In this case, I slid my card and it said "Please see cashier". I went to see the cashier and saw that the line was a mile long and left. Guess what! That put a lock on my card. I discovered that when I went down the street to the only other station, a Texaco, where I also got a Please see cashier. After several calls to Visa and, finally, putting Visa on the phone with the cashier, we found that there was a problem with the pump. Finally, we got it taken care of. Interestingly enough, the cashier at Texaco used to work at Flying J. She said that one credit card user in 3 gets the "Please see cashier" message in the hope that they'll buy something else while they are inside.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, I left a station in disgust and lost the gas cap that I had failed to replace. Fortunately, I had a spare (who carries a spare gas cap?).

Ehrenberg is on the Arizona side of the Colorado River, directly across from Blythe. This park is right on the river and we've noticed that many of the residents spend their day in lawn chairs that are so deep into the soft mud that their butts are in the river.

Looking downstream towards the I-10.

This is the wonderful "beach" where the chairs were sunk into the mud up to their occupants' butts. Our parting view of California across the river.

-JC-