Wilderness Wandering

April 5, 2025 San Diego

Tim and I began a new adventure. Neither of us has spent a significant amount of time in the Southern part of the United States. We decided to take Calypso and correct that!

We set up a few guidelines before we left. 

* Travel around 65-70 miles per day.

* Try to stay off Interstate Highways. 

In our first week we had some interesting adventures!

Our first few days on the road were extremely warm. Sometimes we had gone as far as we were going by early afternoon. Hanging out in Calypso was like hanging out in a frying pan on high heat! We sought relief in some cute libraries in little towns we were passing through. 

One town we stayed in was so small there wasn’t a bar with a television. We ended up watching the NCAA Men’s Championship game on my phone in a truck stop!

Day 4 we were driving through the most gorgeous sand dunes in southern CA and we saw a cyclist. We pulled over to see if they needed anything and we met Terri Jockerst. Terri is a retired teacher from Australia and enjoys bike packing. She’s calls herself the Footloose Freckle.  She had a very cool bike. It was a pinion geared bike with a rubber chain.  She was cycling from San Diego to The Grand Canyon. Previously, she has cycled through Japan, Taiwan and South Korea. 

Later the same day we were parked on the side of the road discussing our next move and a state trooper pulled in behind us making sure we were OK because it was a remote stretch and was so warm! It turned out him name was Mike Boland. Tim has a college friend with the same name!

That night we had our first nice campground. We found a sweet little BLM campground right on The Colorado River and had a beautiful view of the river and mountains. We also had a very interesting neighbor for the night. He was a retired mason with no family who lived out of his homemade camper van. 

The next day we spent time in Quartzite, AZ. We toured Joanne’s Gum Gallery,  one woman’s gum museum. She collected gum her entire life. She applied to be in the Guinness Book of World Records. Her first request was rejected. She had the most unique types of gum, but another person has more actual pieces of gum. She gets many donations from people around the world after they visit. She is pretty much out of room. Once she figures out either a move to a larger space or a way to display more of her collection, she plans to reapply to The Guinness Book of Records. 

We also visited Hi Jolly’s Tomb in Quartzite. Hi Jolly, originally named Hadji Ali, was a Syrian camel herder. He arrived in the U.S. in 1856 as part of the U.S. Camel Corp, a military experiment to use camels as transportation in the Southwest. Due to Hi Jolly’s popularity with the local people they spent weeks building a pyramid tomb from petrified wood and quartz as a tribute to him. 

We did a day pass at The Jacumba Hot Springs. It was a beautiful respite in the desert!

We like to stay in Calypso when we can. We were concerned about finding a legal place to park in Phoenix. We decided to try something we’ve heard about but not tried before. It is a website called Warm Showers. It’s purpose is mainly to help long distance cyclists find a safe, inexpensive place to stay at night. You download the app and using the map you can see if there are any hosts near where you are. You can see a little bio of the host and request a stay. We found Bob and he said we could park the van in his drive and use his bathroom. Bob also had a couple from The Netherlands staying the night. We all went out for dinner and had a fun time talking cycling and travel. 

The next day we made a visit to a fabulous museum in Phoenix called the MIM or Musical Instrument Museum. It doesn’t sound that exciting, but it is so well done! They have musical instrument displays from every country. They have a lot of historic musical instruments. They have videos of musicians playing songs at each display and you wear an audio player that starts playing when you walk up to each display.  We could have spent a lot more time there! I highly recommend it if you’re ever in Phoenix!

We also went to Tempe and walked around Arizona State University’s campus revisiting Tim’s graduate school days. 

Stay tuned for further adventures!