Indio, California

We had a nice drive up to Indio last Friday after spending six weeks in Oceanside. It seemed like forever since we’d hooked up our F-150 to our motorhome for a trip down the highway.

We stayed in Indio for three nights at the Outdoor Resort Indio, a class A motor coach ownership resort. There were many high end motorhomes staying there, mostly from Canada, WA, OR, ID and CA. We had stayed here one time before, about two years ago and were impressed with all the landscaping and very beautiful flowers.

On Saturday night we went to the Events Center at the Fantasy Springs Casino on the edge of Indio to see Bonnie Raitt, our first time to see her. I was impressed with the range of her voice and her guitar playing. 

Sunday, we went for a ride about 65 miles south, along the Salton Sea, to Niland, CA. 

We wanted to see “Salvation Mountain”, an art work made of hay bales and thousands of gallons of lead-free paint. It is about 50-feet high and about 150-feet wide, constructed by Leonard Knight.

He worked on it from 1980 until December 2011, when the 80-year old Knight was placed in a long term care facility in El Cajon for dementia. He passed away in 2014. However, a public Salvation Mountain charity was established to support maintaining Leonard Knight’s artistic endeavor.        

Salvation Mountain is adjacent to “Slab City”, where many permanent and broken-down old RV owners and squatters from across the country live “off-the-grid”. Slab City took its name from the concrete slabs that remained from the abandoned WWI-era Marine Corps Camp Dunlap.

We left Indio on Monday and headed east on I-10, through Quartzsite, Arizona, then north towards Lake Havasu City. We stopped in Parker, AZ at the “Crossroads Café” for lunch (breakfast served all day kind of place). Their home cooked meals are very good.

Steve & Julie Cornelius