Monday, January 20
“Just a minute, Les! I need to change. I’ll be right out.” I can see Les climbing out of his red pick-up parked next to the Best Little Trailer. “Okay,” he answers.
Rocky sand next to a wash in the Sidewinder Road area west of Yuma.
It’s mid-morning.
I’m still in my sleeping clothes. I pull myself together and step outside. I don’t see Les.
“I’m over here,” he calls. “I’m admirin’ your solar panel.”
I follow his voice around the Perfect Tow Vehicle.
Les comes down off the stepladder that I keep handy for raising and lowering the panel.
“Two hundred watts, right?” he remarks, looking up at the panel. “You’ve got a real nice set-up here.”
I can tilt the panel at several angles in 5-degree increments along the metal rods. Look at that pretty sky.
We walk around to the camp chairs.
“Gee, am I glad to see you, Les,” I begin. “I drove by your place twice on the way out and you weren’t home. At first, I didn’t think much about it. Then yesterday we walked down that way. I caught sight of your trailer but I didn’t see your truck.”
“Yeah, I went out for a little while yesterday.”
“Well, I’m sitting here thinking, gee, maybe I ought to call the local hospital.”
Les looks at me and smiles.
“That’s nice of you to want to do that.”
In case you don’t recall, I met Les when the crew and I camped here before Christmas. He’s the cowboy lyricist, Les Buffham. He camps in his travel trailer at Sidewinder Road during the winter for about six months. The rest of the year he works as a camp host.
Les is a clever guy.
He’s a tinkerer. You know, the kind of guy who’s always coming up with novel ways to do things, like laying 600 feet of black tubing on the ground in order to heat his water. He also has a pulley he fashioned that extends out the back of his pick-up. I assume it’s to lift and position containers of water. I’ll have to ask him about that.
His trailer has four solar panels angled out from its backside.
He likes to buy dehydrated foods in bulk. It’s interesting to learn how boondockers handle the necessities of living. Especially a clever boondocker like Les.
We never seem to run out of things to talk and laugh about, and then there are the paperbacks to trade.
After Les leaves, I eat some lunch and straighten up the BLT. It’s such a beautiful, warm and sunny day that I find myself reading in the lounger until mid-afternoon. I don’t feel like driving into Yuma. We can go tomorrow.
I don’t know where the days go.
I always seem to have more than enough to do without doing a whole lot. How is that possible? Oh well, I enjoy every single one of my days.
I didn’t take any photos today.
This picture is the result of my experimenting with the settings on my camera a few days ago. I tried the near-focus-but-fuzzy-background setting with the “brilliant” setting and, after cropping, the sunset shot looks like this . . .
Painting a sunset with a camera . . . What fun!
Here’s an experiment with very little color . . .
When I see jets streaking across the sky, I like to guess the cities they took off from and where they will land.
One could do nothing but photograph the sky in the Southwest and never run out of inspiration.
Okay, tomorrow we WILL go to Yuma!
I’ll pick up the stuff I ordered from Amazon. It’ll be fun showing you what I got.
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