Midnight at the Oasis

We had been planning to go to the rooftop blues club in Old Yuma on Friday night but people were talking about the annual Midnight at the Oasis Party and got us thinking about that instead. One thousand antique and hot rod cars are in town for a parade and show n’ shine. As part of the celebration they also bring in some live music acts. Friday was to be a couple of local bands followed by Tres Hombres, the ZZ Top tribute band. Saturday was Beatlemania, another tribute band, and Johnny Rivers.

We opted for two passes that let us attend as much as we wanted throughout the weekend - cost $40.

We had pizza for lunch at Da Boyz Restaurant. It’s a huge going concern in Old Yuma where prices are modest but portions are generous and tasty. Actually we had a coupon so the two pizzas for $15.99 lasted three meals. It’s the same place that used to be called the California Bakery, where we had Valentine’s Dinner thirteen years ago - the same day Janice got her hair cut short for the first time.

The old car parade was about an hour long and sported some fabulous restorations and customized vehicles, a few of them pictured below. The coppery/gold one is a 1937Hudson.
















After dinner we drove down to the fairgrounds and watched two lousy local warm-up bands. At least I hope they were local because they were horrible. The musicians were okay but the singers in both bands were off key consistently enough to drive us back outside the ball fields, to have a closer look at some of the cars.

Good tribute bands are weird, but captivating. Tres Hombres was no exception. They played, spoke and looked the part, to a Z. That’s the American Z folks. Still, we left about halfway through because the damned sound man kept cranking it up. We were positioned slightly behind him, about a hundred yards from the stage. By halfway through the show we could feel the bass thumping hard against our chests.

Pictured are Tres Ombres.









In the morning we went for a bike ride along the canal path but I picked up a cactus spike, and a flat tire. We walked the bikes back a mile or so and then we went to lounge in the pools. Yes, my back is mending - slower than I’d like though.

In the evening we returned to the fairgrounds where Beatlemania was already underway. That show alone was worth the price of admission. Again, they played the music note for note, beat for beat. Excepting the drummer, who I couldn’t tell at first if he was a girl or a boy, they even looked their parts. Janice says, “That’s because only Ringo looks like Ringo.” They really had the Beatles stuff down. You could close your eyes and transport yourself back forty years.

Pictured are: Beatlemania.








They should have reversed the order of the headline acts because, following Beatlemania, Johnny Rivers was a let-down. His band started playing without an introduction and then he came out without an introduction and hardly spoke a word in the pregnant pauses between songs. Although his band was really hot and he’s a great singer/songwriter, there was just no fizz. They would have been great in a blues club, but they weren’t doing it for the thousands in attendance, of all ages, who started drifting out. Maybe he was ripped or something. The only thing he did say was, “This next song is for the younger people. It’s not a new song at all but you’ll see it’s got that Hip-Hop feel, without the offensive lyrics” They then proceeded to play a Reggae song!

Pictured is Johnny Rivers. You may remember him for hits: Secret Agent Man, Memphis Tennessee, Seventh Sun, and others, from the sixties and seventies.









On Sunday we walked a couple of miles to get groceries, on the way finding the exact table that Janice has been looking high and low for, for months. It’s a wooden fold-up outside eating table that fits in a small tent bag. It was at a garage sale and we took it away for $20.

In the afternoon we took a drive to the quaint and quiet town of Somerton, about twenty miles south, and then spent the rest of the afternoon around the pools. The lazy evening was spent watching: The Amazing Race, Chopped All-Stars and Celebrity Apprentice. Check out Celebrity Apprentice just to get a load of Gary Busey. (Sp?)

We were up in the middle of the night to check for sure that we’d closed the truck windows because we were wakened by high winds and slashing rain.

In the morning it was sunny but still really windy. We took a drive to Bard, California, through all the Date and Lettuce Farms. The Colorado River is dammed in several places along the route. We stopped at the second dam and had lunch, using some palm trees for a wind break. On the way back we stopped in Bard for a Date Shake. A little chunky, but good.

Pictured are: A dammed Colorado River and a Date Palm Farm.









Because the wind continued all day we had the pools mostly to ourselves.

Pictured below is Janice on her first of fifty laps in the pool. She had been doing twenty but a guy from Ontario upped the bar yesterday when he did a mile - 120 laps.




We booked into the park for another week because the weather is good here and the pools are working their magic on my back, which was much better by this morning.
We’re also trying to time a couple of different rendezvous'. We’d like to visit with Robyn and Dale,(from Key West) where they’ll be staying for a month in Desert Springs; catching up with our neighbours, Mike and Ellen, who’ll be on a driving trip around California and Arizona and; possibly, hiking for a few days with Bill Lyle and his girl, Barb - destination as yet unknown…