Yuma is a very interesting place. It has a history from the old Wild West with the territorial prison (of 3:10 to Yuma fame) located here. There are tours of the place and we have it on our list to do before we leave.

The park we're in is surrounded by citrus groves, which get their water from a complex series of irrigation canals. This place is flat, flat flat, surrounded by mountains. It makes the Holland Marsh look like a postage stamp by comparison and they grown a variety of crops including lettuce, asparagus, peanuts, dates, cauliflower, broccoli and a lot of other things I can't don't recognize. The irony of this is that these are, with the exception of the dates, very water intensive crops and we're in a desert. They draw the water from the Colorado river to irrigate everything and I've been told the river doesn't make it to the Sea of Cortez as it once did because all of the flow is utilized along the way. The canals are higher than that surrounding area and have sand banks with concrete lining the actual ditches.

The year round sun makes it ideal to farm here and the close proximity to the downstreamMexican border means the US doesn't have to worry about having any of its regions without water. Too bad for Mexico! They've been doing a lot of work to modernize the canals here, lining them with concrete, to stop water loss through absorption. Prior to that, they were just sand ditches! They're also looking at other ways to irrigate but some farmers are still flooding their fields so the evaporation rate must be staggering when the temperature goes up. We've seen lots of crops being harvested by hand here so the local economy runs on manual labour. Some comes from Mexico through proper channels, while others are likely aliens. If Trump starts deporting all the illegals, I wonder what his plan is to replace that workforce.

We are also situated close to the Yuma International airport which is a combined facility with the US Marines. We are treated almost daily to low level fly overs by military lets such as F35's, Harriers and some other fighter I can't quite figure out. They're loud but entertaining. This facility was used during WW2 as a training location for many US pilots.

There's a flea market type place a few miles from us as well that caters to all of the winter RV community here. If you want something for your RV, this is the place to go. We're scoping out a few things we need like a vertical screen to fit on the end of our extendable canopy to provide sun and wind relief, as well as new step covers and a large patio carpet to keep the dust down. We have a concrete pad here for a patio but a carpet would make it a bit nicer for sitting out. Finn loves laying out in the sun and luckily for him, we brought the 1 meter square section of AstroTurf we bought him for paper training on the boat (but never used). It's likely 1 of the few plots of grass in all of Yuma so he's pretty lucky! We also found him a dog park that is 3 acres in size with lots of room to run, so he's pretty happy with that after being confined to the leash for the past few weeks.

I mentioned earlier that I had downloaded a lot of shows from Netflix onto my Ipad for times when we don't have cable or internet (like here, we have cable which is pretty basic, but the internet won't support any kind of volume of bandwidth so no streaming or downloading). We've been watching 2 seasons of House of Cards but I discovered 1 day that my downloads all of a sudden had an expiry date on them. Who knew?! So, we binged watched as many as we could each night with most things expiring this week. I guess you've got a month to actually watch what you download. I'll have to go the computer room later in the evening and see if there's a enough capacity to re-download what we've lost.

Aside from that, life is good. We've had some great times with Janet and Doug and we're enjoying the weather. It's not hot but it's not snow, so we'll take it! I've been running in shorts in the mornings which is pretty rare for January.