The big tent show in Quartzsite opened on Saturday. Donna and I rode over on the scooter. It’s about five miles east of our boondocking location. The traffic was heavy, but the scooter made it easy to get in and park near the entrance.

Our first order of business was to look at induction cooking. This was a topic we had no experience with. When we bought our coach, we were told it had a new induction cooktop. We knew that magnetic induction would only work with pans made from ferrous material. Non-magnetic materials such as aluminum alloy or stainless steel do not respond to induction – and that’s all we had. Before leaving the RV park in Mesa, Donna bought a Lodge 12″ cast-iron skillet* to try her hand at induction cooking. On Saturday morning, she struggled to cook bacon. The pan heated slowly and it took well over an hour to cook 12 strips of bacon! Something was clearly wrong here.

We spent a couple of hours sitting through a demo by Bob Welch of Healthcraft. Healthcraft manufactures cookware optimized for induction cooking. We watched as he boiled water in less than two minutes. He cooked a chicken breast in 13 minutes and made a waterless, greaseless side dish of cabbage, carrots and potatoes. The cookware isn’t cheap; in fact, it’s quite expensive. Healthcraft cookware is very high-quality, made in the USA (Kansas). Most of the production is sent to Japan, where induction cooking is popular. There are Chinese alternatives on the market for less money, but as usual, you get what you pay for.

Induction cooking is suited to RVs because it’s so efficient. It takes very little energy to create a hot pan because the energy is concentrated on the cookware, not radiated to the atmosphere. We couldn’t figure out why our cooktop didn’t work like Bob’s demo. After discussing this with him, he could only offer that either our pan was not pure cast iron or something was wrong with our cooktop. At the end of the day, he lent one of his expensive skillets to us to try out.

From there, we walked through about half of the show. We saw a few things we would return to purchase. We bought new sheets for our bed. When we returned home, we put the cooktop to the test. I put the Healthcraft pan on the cooktop and turned the dial to high. I added a cup of water. Ten minutes later, the water was hot but still not boiling. Something wasn’t right.

I removed the drawer below the cooktop and used a flashlight to find the model number on the bottom. Google led me to the Dometic site where I found the answer. This is not an induction cooktop! It looks like one, but it’s actually an electric radiant heat ceramic cooktop. It’s weak and heats very slowly. Dang, we’ve been hoodwinked! I want to believe that the dealer didn’t know any better and wasn’t trying to fool us. I’ll talk to them when we return to Mesa. The cooktop wasn’t something I could test when I was inspecting the coach because I didn’t have the proper cookware. I wasn’t too worried about it because it was new.

Yesterday, we went back to the big tent. We walked through the rest of the show. I learned something else and this time, it was good news. Our rig has a satellite dome on top. I wasn’t too keen on it, because I’m spoiled by HD programming and didn’t want to get a standard definition receiver. I talked to the guys at the Direct TV booth. They would give me a portable HD dish and receiver if I signed up for a 12-month subscription. This sounded pretty good, but I wanted to check around. The portable dish can be problematic – it has to aimed precisely to pick up the satellite signal.

At the Dish Network booth, the guy told me my satellite dome would receive HD transmission from the Dish Network satellite! This was news to me. I took away some literature and thought I should do more research before committing to anything. At another booth, there was an independent satellite TV installer. They were authorized to install both Direct TV and Dish Network. The woman there gave me the straight scoop.

She told me my dome satellite antenna would receive HD from Dish Network, but could only process one channel at a time. This means the front TV and bedroom TV would be on the same channel, unless I used over-the-air antenna reception for one of the TVs. She told me they would send a tech out to our site, install an HD Dish Network receiver and make sure we had a good signal. All I had to do was sign up for Dish Network through them. She gave me literature and I brought it home with me to do more research.

I looked up our Winegard Roadtrip Minimax dome online. I found out that she was correct. It will function exactly as she said. Today, I’m signing up. I missed the NFL conference playoffs yesterday since we can’t get any over-the-air reception here at Dome Rock. The satellite receiver will change that. Our Winegard dome automatically seeks the proper satellite and locks in.

We bought a new Thermo Shield mattress pad for our bed. We almost passed on it because it was bulky and would be hard to transport on the scooter. The owner of the company, Jay Jensen, told us he would deliver to our location at Dome Rock, no charge!

Our last stop was back at Bob’s booth. Donna ordered the Healthcraft cookware. Later, I ordered a two-burner induction cooktop which I will install in our coach. We’re having the items shipped to a friend’s house in Mesa and will pick them up next week.

While I was researching and ordering online, we had a surprise phone call. Our friends, Keith and Suzanne Gallaway from Phoenix, were in the area and wanted to stop by. They were on their way home from a weekend at Lake Havasu. Keith is the service manager at Lunde’s Peoria Volkswagen. They have a large trailer that is all decked out in VW graphics that they sell VW Driver Gear out of. Last weekend, there was a big VW meet at Lake Havasu called Buses by the Bridge. I think Keith told me there was somewhere around 370 old VW buses there. They attend several VW enthusiast shows each year and sell the VW Driver Gear clothing and accessories.

They are thinking about buying an RV and traveling the country. They run a business called Cruise Planner where they offer various cruise vacation packages. You can check out their web site at travelthing.com.

It was fun having an unexpected visit. Keith and Suzanne gifted me a cool VW bus T-shirt. While we were checking out the trailer, Jay Jensen drove up in his pick-up truck and delivered our mattress pad.

Last night, we grilled sweet Italian chicken sausage for dinner served with zucchini and tomatoes.

Today, I’ll go back to the big tent and sign up for Dish Network. I also want to pick up a couple of camp chairs we looked at. Fun in the sun here in Arizona.

By the way, the new header photo is courtesy of Suzanne Gallaway.

 

*Just so you know, if you decide to purchase one of these through the Amazon link in this post, I’ll earn a small commission. It’ll go into the beer fund. Thanks!

 

 

 

I spent most of the day Thursday preparing to move to Quartzsite. Donna had a number of errands. She rode the scooter to take a piano lesson from the teacher she had when we lived in Mesa. Then she stopped at Bed, Bath and Beyond. She must have enjoyed shopping there since she spent more than an hour in the store. When she returned and dropped off the goods from Bed, Bath and Beyond, she rode over to Sprouts and bought groceries. She came back from Sprouts with the scooter loaded. The under-seat storage compartment was full, she had a full grocery sack on the hook between her knees and a full backpack – $125 worth of groceries.

Then she walked across the street to WalMart and bought more! From WalMart she stopped at the salon in the strip mall for a mani-pedi. – a treat to herself for getting her edited manuscript back to her publisher. I walked over to the nail shop to retrieve the groceries.

Friday we were up and at it by 8am. I finished packing  a few odds and ends, then dumped and flushed our holding tanks. I put the wheel on the trailer jack. This made hooking the trailer up to the coach really easy. We rolled out of the RV park at 9:30.

While we traveled west on I-10, I was looking at the price of diesel fuel at truck stops. Near Tonopah, I glanced at the fuel gauge. I couldn’t understand why it looked like we had more fuel than when we left. Suddenly I realized this fuel gauge reads opposite of our old coach. I thought the fuel level was nearly full. Not so – it was nearly empty!

We had just passed a truck stop with diesel fuel at $3.71/gallon. The next exit was a couple of miles down the road. I took the exit and backtracked to the truck stop. I put $300 worth of fuel in the tank (80 gallons) and got back on the road. I was panicking about the fuel level because fuel gauges aren’t the most accurate instrument. Having never filled this tank, I didn’t know if we would be out of fuel right when the needle hit “E” or not. Eighty gallons of  fuel in our 100-gallon tank put the gauge near the full mark, so we probably could have gone another 120 miles or so.

About 10 miles east of Quartzsite, we started seeing groups of RVs boondocking in the desert. Some of the groups had signs – they obviously had pre-arranged a meet-up in the desert. Others seemed to just gravitate near each other. This is common. Although people take their RVs to the desert to get away from it all, they seem to still want some sort of association with other RVers out there – maybe there’s a sense of safety in numbers or just a need for social interaction.

Before we knew it, we rolled right through Quartzsite. We saw the big tent on the south side of I-10, near US95. This is where the vendors will be concentrated over the next 10 days. We pulled off of I-10 at the Dome Rock exit, about five miles west of town. We drove slowly back towards Quartzsite on the frontage road on the south side of the freeway.

We saw clusters of RVs and checked the access roads. The roads are just trails in the dirt and rock of the desert. I didn’t want to pull into a road that I couldn’t get turned around on. Backing the trailer onto the frontage road would be a real pain.

We found a likely looking spot and pulled off the road. I temporarily parked and we got out to reconnoiter the area on foot. After hiking around for about 20 minutes, we had a plan. We rolled a few hundred yards south of the road and parked the coach on a fairly level ridge top. We’re situated with the coach facing east, bringing the morning sunrise through the windshield. Our door and awning face to the south. It’s a nice spot. We don’t have anyone within 100 yards of us, but that could change as RVs are still pulling in and looking for a good site.

Donna fixed a chicken wrap with avocado for an afternoon snack, then we rode the scooter to the big tent. Friday was still a set-up day for the vendors – the show starts Saturday. We walked in and looked around. It seemed like we were the only ones previewing the show. It wasn’t completely set up yet, but Donna bought a hand-operated food chopper (salsa maker) from one of the vendors. When we were leaving, a security guy asked if we had vendor badges. He told us we couldn’t be there without them. We thanked him and left.

Last evening, we had cocktails outside and watched the sunset. It was very peaceful. After dinner, we continued with another episode of Breaking Bad. We are so totally hooked on this series.

Today, we’ll head back to the big tent and maybe look around town as well. Other than that, we have no plans.