Unlike last year, we had two bikes and didn’t need to get the scooter out right away. At least, we had two bikes for a couple of hours until Jenn’s pedal came off because it had been put on the wrong side. Back to one bike and two riders, it was time to get the scooter running again.

Just like last year, it had another fuel leak. This time, however, nearly the entire fuel line was dry rotted and I wasn’t able to clip enough from somewhere else to fix the problem. But, like Leonard Knight says, ‘If you go eight miles out in the desert, you can find anything you need.’

By way of introducing myself to our neighbors, I wandered over, dodging a vicious puppy, and said, ‘Hey, you know where I can find a piece of fuel line?’ Now, if you’ve ever been looking for some random part in the middle of nowhere, you realize I didn’t really expect anything from this except, just maybe, directions to the nearest auto parts store. Instead, I got directions to the Slab City mechanic.

Sure enough, when I found him, he was able to scrounge up a bit of vacuum line that was the right size to replace the fuel line on our moped. Sure, it probably won’t last too long, but neither did the cheap rubber on our Chinese moped. The vacuum line, had already survived a car fire, which is more than I can say for the original fuel line.

We have a few other scavenger hunt projects going on. I hope they all work out half as well as the moped. But either way, it’s an interesting way to meet folks when you get tired of scrounging around the desert and decide to ask directions.

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After working the scooter through the loose sand, I hit Cottonwood road and headed into the park. It was a pleasant ride, albeit slow. The first part was all up hill and the scooter was moving between 10 and 15mph. It was during this part of the trip that I realized I didn’t bring a jug of water. Not good. Once I made it up to the visitors center it sped up to about 30mph. From then on, it was smooth sailing. I stopped at all of the various markers and checked out some Ocotillo trees in bloom. I was lucky enough to see a rare purple aster that supposedly only grows in this area. The only wildlife I saw were a few lizards and a rabbit. No sheep for me… sigh. After a long ride in the Colorado desert, I finally made it in to the Mojave. I looked at my fuel gauge, but it hadn’t moved. I decided to go all of the way to White Tank Campground.

When I arrived there I was overcome by the scenery. The giant boulders surrounded by Joshua Trees were an awesome sight. I was so entranced I almost didn’t notice the time or my fuel gauge. I didn’t have a clock, but the sun was pretty low in the sky. The gauge read 3/4 tank. I thought, “Plenty of time and fuel, but I should head back.” I got to see a Joshua Tree! Too bad it took 30 miles.

I headed back home. This is where the fun started. My hands were a little cold, so I stopped to warm them up at a pull out. When I started off again the fuel gauge said 1/2. I started to get concerned. I was still about 27 miles from our campsite and 20 miles from the visitors center. Uh oh! Panic sets in, and I start driving slower to conserve fuel. The scenery had disappeared. All that was left was the gas gauge, the odometer, the road ahead of me and the faint hope that some off-roaders with gas cans would be around the next bend.

The next 20 miles were like that. Slowing down seemed to help. My gauge was moving very slowly. I thought that I might make it. I even chose to pass up stopping at the visitors center, because the gauge still showed fuel. But, it was not to be. As I made it up the hill just past the visitors center, the scooter died. I tried to start it, but it was futile. Grrrr… Most of the rest of the journey back to the campsite would have been down hill. I debated trying to coast down the 7 miles to the campsite. Then, I remembered that I didn’t have water. Seven miles, desert, no water… not good. Had I had water, I think I could have done it. Alas, I coasted back to the visitors center. It was closed. There were three cars in the parking lot. Only one wasn’t a subcompact. It was an SUV. I figured it was my best shot at a fuel can. Nope. He said I was in a good spot though. There was a campground up the road. By then all of the other cars were gone.

I started hoofing it up to the campground a half mile away. As I topped a hill, it looked like I could coast the scooter down the rest of the way to the campground, so I went back and got the scooter. I also figured that people would be more willing to give me a couple ounces of fuel if I was pushing the scooter. Damned heavy scooter. My brilliant idea of coasting down was destroyed. The scooter wouldn’t move on its own. More pushing.

Then the guy I asked for fuel at the visitors center drove back by. Oh joy. Here I am, alone, with a disabled scooter and now I have a stalker. Lovely, buried in the desert… ugh. He said that he thought I said “I could drive a few miles” instead of “I only have a few miles to go, so I only need a few ounces”. He offered me a ride or to try to find me some fuel. I told him that I would be grateful if he brought me fuel, but I am going to continue to the campground. He drove away. Relief. I tried to run beside the scooter to get it rolling down the hill, but when I jumped on, it would crawl to a stop (no fat jokes!). Back he came. Said that no one would answer at the ranger houses and that he would try the campground.

So close. I got to the campground sign but saw no campers. All up hill from there. I pushed a little further. No campers in site. I spotted a tent camper and his son. I asked if I was going the right direction to reach the campers. It was up hill. I was tired. I didn’t want to waste any energy. He said it was his first time there and he had no idea. He asked if I was the “one who ran out of fuel”. Obviously, the creepy longhaired guy in the SUV had been there. Maybe he didn’t want to kill me after all. Then, the tent camper offered to take me to the campers. I declined. He jumped into his jeep, started it, and told me to hop in. I accepted. I pushed the scooter into a parking space and locked the steering.

Being a big believer in self sufficiency, it was pretty hard for me to go around begging folks for help. I was more comfortable pushing the scooter up the sides of mountains than asking for fuel. I was still out of breath when I asked the first person I saw. They said they couldn’t help and asked who the guy that dropped me off was. The next folks, a man and his grandson, were much nicer. They offered me what they had, stove fuel. I asked if they had cell phones, but neither could get a signal. They let me know that if I couldn’t find fuel they would be happy to drive me to my campsite. Nice folks. That trend continued. Then, the stalker pulled back up with a can of gas. Hooray! I hopped in the “serial killer’s” vehicle.

I was happy, but worried that I had killed the battery when I tried to start the scooter earlier. Thankfully, I hadn’t. Greg, probably a nice guy and not a murderer, poured the gas in. I tried to start it. No go. Plenty of battery but no start. The scooter can be a pain to start when its cold. I figured after a couple hours it was probably cold again. I tried again and again. Ok, kickstart. Nope. Greg wanted to try to kick start it. Still nothing. Try the electric start again. And, again. Greg took the gas can back. I finally killed the battery. It was over.

I walked away and asked the tent camper if he had cell signal. Of course not. Greg returned. I told him the bad news. He offered jumper cables. I turned it on and tried to start it again. Omg, the battery recharged itself. Second try and it started. Then, it stalled. OK, I tried again and this time opened the throttle right away. It started, but then stalled in milliseconds. I tried it a few more times and it never started.

I decided to let it rest and Greg and I chatted. Turns out that he is a rock climber who used to work with a team training people. They have all long since moved on, got married, had kids, etc. But, every year they meet up in Joshua Tree on Palm Sunday and climb together. He was on his way home from it when I pestered him. He turned out to be pretty cool. He is now an Earth Science teacher who would rather mountain bike or surf than scramble around on rocks. I wish I would have met him and his lady in better circumstances. Good people.

OK, time to try it a couple more times. It was getting dark. The stupid scooter wouldn’t start again. I asked Greg if he was leaving the park for the night. He was. I decided to take him up on the offer to shuttle me to my camper. So I grabbed my helmet, locked the scooter and left it for dead.

Not much happened after that. Greg and I chatted about adventure sports, environments, and life on our 7 mile ride. I started to feel a little guilty about him sticking around so long to help me. He wouldn’t accept any cash for his trouble.

The scooter is a liar. I almost wanted to leave it at the campground. But, when I got home we packed up and went to rescue it.

Campsites mentioned in this post:
Joshua Tree NP South BLM Land
White Tank Campground

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After we left Quartzsite, our next ‘destination’ was Slab City, just outside of Niland, CA. First though, we really had to do some shopping before I broke into the emergency can of baked beans. So, we hit Brawley, which is about twenty miles south of the Slabs. As long as we were in town, Jenn wanted to get some work done on the freecampsites website, so we endured horribly slow internet for a night, under the assumption that we’d have no internet at all once we hit Slab City.

Go figure. Slab City had the best EVDO connection we’d seen since we left Phoenix. In fact, it’s so good they have an internut connection in the lending library. Speaking of the library, I was really impressed with the selection of books available and found my share very quickly. I rather wish I’d spent more time in the library as I could have dug around for a few gems instead of grabbing the first half dozen titles that looked interesting.

Like Quartzsite, Slab City was quickly emptying out for the summer. However, there were still a few folks around and the area was a bit more active than Quartzsite. Since Ryan and Nicole were joining us the next day in their tent, Jenn kept me driving around the area looking for the perfect campsite longer than I could handle. Her requirements: a nice shade tree (preferably three or four), not too close to the neighbors, close enough to the center of things to be a close walk but not so close that we’re in the middle, and easy to find so Ryan and Nicole wouldn’t have to spend too much time looking.

Now, we’re talking about the desert here. If there was any tree large enough to provide shade that met the rest of her requirements (or even one of them), someone had parked under it. Even more likely to me, was that they had parked next to it and dumped their gray water on it for a few years until it grew into a shade tree. Eventually, I quit listening to things like ‘turn left behind us twenty feet’ and let my own pioneer spirit take over. I found us a spot that met all of the requirements if you considered a more liberal translation of the phrase ’shade tree’. I think it could be a nice little tree in a few more years if only someone would dump their tanks on it for a while.

Once Ryan and Nicole showed up, we all got to demonstrate our cooking abilities for a few days. It turns out Ryan is actually a pretty good chef and Nicole makes a mean chili dog. They even brought along their starving dog, Kay, to handle dish detail. She wanted to play with the cats and Hunter was ready to ‘play’, but cooler heads prevailed and Kay didn’t get any kitty snacks.

Between cooking, I gave Ryan a quickie archery lesson and he proved to be a natural. In fact, I gave him my slingshot as I’d long ago given up actually hitting anything more specific than ‘the ground’ with it. Apparently, Ryan grew up playing with slingshots and hadn’t lost the knack.

Once Jenn saw Ryan and Nicole driving around without their trailer, she started pestering me to work on the moped. That piece of junk had crapped out on me in Phoenix and hadn’t been started since I’d walked home from the police station. Lacking a good excuse, I was forced to unload the scooter and make at least a token effort.

Once I got the fancy sides off, it wasn’t too hard to see one of the problems. One of the fuel lines had dry rotted and was causing a loss of vacuum to supply fuel to the carburetor. Now, I’m far from a mechanic, but I did manage to snip a bit of uncracked line from elsewhere and get it replaced, albeit a bit tighter fit than is normal. I had to recharge the battery a couple of times to get enough fuel in the lines to start it and keep running. The kickstart is worthless on that thing; it probably still has a few small vacuum leaks and definitely needs a new spark plug, but it did finally fire up. Since I couldn’t do anything about the rest of the problems, I declared it ‘fixed for now’.

The first day or so, it seemed most of the neighbors viewed us as transients and would ignore our campsite as they drove past. Once we got the scooter ripped to pieces in the backyard and the hood on the truck up to charge the battery, I guess we were starting to look like locals. The neighbors started waving as they went past and one even stopped to invite us to a party, which we didn’t actually make, as it was the day after we all pulled out.

To stress test the scooter, Jenn and I rode it out to the ‘abandoned’ county park on the Salton Sea while Ryan and Nicole took their truck. It turned out that the park was a bit further than we thought and Ryan and Nicole beat us there by about twenty minutes since we were poking along at twenty-five miles an hour. The sun was pretty brutal, but we were determined to have a picnic, so we utilized some Slab City engineering of our own. We found some random boards scattered along the beach and used them to hold one side of a tarp up to form a shelter. One side was jammed in the truck windows and the other was held up by a broken board tied to a big log and the other half of said board tied to the scooter.

While Nicole, Jenn and I were building a squatters camp, Ryan was frying up yummy quesadillas. Since we had set up in the main parking area of the abandoned park, we shouldn’t have been surprised that a few people came along to check out the area. What was funny, though, was watching how studiously they avoided looking at the crazy people under their makeshift shelter. You could practically hear them chanting “Don’t make eye contact. Don’t make eye contact.”

Knowing how slow we’d be, Jenn and I started back a bit ahead of the rest, after watching Ryan circumnavigate a small sand bar in his inflatable boat. I think we made a bit better time than the inflatable raft would have, but that’s about it. The ride was really a bit too long for two people on a moped on the highway, even if it was pretty lightly traveled and had a nice shoulder to stay on. The scooter did pretty well, all things considered. It lost power a few times for a couple of seconds, but picked right back up with just enough of a hiccup to make us nervous. I think a little more work on the fuel lines and a spark plug will fix it’s major woes. The rest of our time at the Slabs, it cranked within a few attempts and purred along nicely, provided Jenn remembered to curse at it by the third attempt.

So, how do I feel about the Slabs after spending a few days there? I loved it. You’ve got a free place to camp without any real rules except “don’t piss off the neighbors”. Unlike your average HOA, these neighbors are pretty accepting. I mean, one of the old timers, Leonard, has been building a giant, multi-colored monument to God out of adobe, paint and random junk he found in the desert over the past twenty-five years. Maybe it’s only becoming a tourist attraction because people want to see what some crazy old coot has been working on, but some of the neighbors actually come out and help him construct additions to  Salvation Mountain.

At the other end of the spectrum, you’ve got a few folks living inside the old military bunkers. Their idea of fun is burning old tires and shooting at each others bunkers with the biggest guns they’ve got. I’m not all that keen on burning tires, but I’m not about to argue it with a neighborhood full of folks that are hunkered in so deep that they get a kick out of firing off a few rounds at each others houses. We skipped the ‘bunker party’ invite under the rash assumption that alcohol, guns and burning tires might not be the healthiest combination.

And in the middle, you’ve got a lot of just ordinary folks. People are running businesses out of Slab City. Some of them are actively involved in trying to keep a community feel to the area. You can tune into CB channel 23 weeknights at 6pm and hear the daily news, which primarily consists of the TV Guide and a list of goods and services people are selling. I guess there’s just really not that much going on and gossiping about the neighbors over the air may not always be the brightest idea. During the winter months, there is a lot more going on, but even in the Spring, we were invited up to the Range for live music, over to the Oasis for a chili dinner and the infamous bunker party. Your neighbors might have concertina wire strung around their camper or a line of old tires delineating ‘their yard’, but they’re not likely to complain about the pink flamingos stuck in your own yard.

Water might be scarce in the desert, but Slab City has it’s own hot spring and a shower fed from said spring. If nudity offends you though, best to go to the spring when you’re sure no one else is around. I certainly wouldn’t drink the water from the spring, but it’s nice to jump in for a hot soak on a chilly evening. During the day, the shower is quite cool and can be a nice contrast to the desert sun during a warm spell.

If I had to sum Slab City up, I’d say it’s as close as you’re likely to get to an Old West frontier town in the United States today. In the middle of nowhere, you can get away with just about anything you want, but once you bring people together and form a town, you get a lot of rules about what you’re allowed to do or barred from doing. At the Slabs, you’ve got a unique situation where there really aren’t any laws because the state owns the land and doesn’t care enough about it to run folks off. It attracts all kinds of people. Some just want a free place to live. Others want freedom in a truer sense. What most of them have in common, though, is a ‘live and let live’ attitude. If you aren’t bothering your neighbors, they aren’t likely to bother you.

Libertarianism, anarchy, call it whatever you like; but, even in the Slabs you’ll be reminded that you better not get too rowdy by the occasional Sheriff and Immigration patrols as well as the military choppers, hummers and trucks that roll through every day. At least you get to see some of the fancy hardware your tax dollars are paying for!

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I know these prices probably look low to many of you, but we are currently in one of the least expensive ‘fuel zones’ according to this map over at gasbuddy.com. The last I heard, diesel prices in Mexico are about half of the prices here in South Carolina. I guess it pays to be a country that is exporting oil and have state run petroleum companies. Hopefully we’ll make it into Mexico in the next year or two and brush up on some very rusty Spanish.

In the meantime, we have to deal with some pretty exorbitant fuel prices compared to a mere few years back. We can’t save much fuel by driving slower as we’re already trying to stay at the most reasonable speeds for fuel efficiency. This leaves only two choices: increase income to offset rising fuel prices or drive less.

The problem with driving less is you can’t see as much of the places you’re visiting if you drive to a campsite, park there for a week or two and then move on. A quick shopping trip on Jenn’s bike convinced me that if we were to rely on pedal power to explore the surrounding areas, we wouldn’t see too much.

A quick spin around the block on my brother’s scooter renewed my interest in hauling one along. These oversized toys are just plain fun to ride.

Our moped gets somewhere between 85 and 105 mpg, depending on which of us is riding or if we are both aboard. It’s not quite broken in yet, but currently manages about 35 mph with a single rider or 30 mph ridden double.

We’ve put a little over 200 miles on it in under a week. While I won’t claim it’s actually saved us much in the way of diesel expenses, it has certainly enabled us to get out and see the surrounding area far more than we could manage walking or riding bicycles.

We even managed to haul the metal detector and a couple of digging tools 7 miles down the road to Atlantic Beach to look for lost trinkets after Memorial Day. We didn’t find anything but pocket change and a toy car, but the scooter allowed us to choose which beach to hunt on rather than being limited to the one we are parked next to.

As someone that grew up in a ‘car culture’, having the ability to just get out and cruise around aimlessly without it costing an arm and a leg or taking time to break camp first makes this entire lifestyle much more enjoyable.

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