New Year in Anza Borrego – take 2

We seem to be following some sort of pattern. First it was Thanksgiving in Las Vegas for the second year, next it was Christmas in San Diego for the second year, and then we ended the year with New Year’s Eve in Anza Borrego for the second year. If we keep this up we run the risk of becoming boring & predictable.

Morning mountain reflection in the desert

Before I tell you about our first week in the desert I want to share some interesting bits of info about our camping habits and costs. Here’s how it all went down this year-
Camping Fees:
Total: $4,416.84
Per month: $368.07
Per day: $12.10
162 free nights / 203 paid nights
Where we stayed: 17 boondocking locations, 8 forest service campgrounds, 8 private campgrounds, 6 national park/recreation areas, 5 state parks, 4 overnights at Walmart, 3 county/regional parks, 1 night at a casino, 1 night at a Cabela’s, 1 private property

$12.10 per night is pretty good, but probably the lowest we’ll have for a few years. We don’t have nearly as much free camping planned next year so I expect that number to go up quite a bit.

Okay, back to the desert. We left San Diego last Sunday and headed to Anza Borrego for a few weeks of boondocking in the desert. The area where we’re staying near the Clark Dry Lake is a very popular RV spot, and I would guess the week of New Year’s is probably the busiest. We arrived to find tons of RVs clogging up the area, including some large groups of RVs arranged in tight circles. One of those groups was a bunch of NüRVrs (It’s a hard group to define, but here is the description from the FB page: A community of like minded fun-loving, location independent entrepreneurs and other self-employed full-time RVers and dreamers). Since we had just come from a month at an RV park and were wanting some space of our own we elected not to join the circle, instead finding a spot close, but not too close.

That’s us on the far left

More people kept trickling in and by the time New Year’s arrived we had grown to a group of 10 RVs and three tents. Since we had previously only met one of the couples in this large group, it has been fun to spend a few nights around the fire getting to know everyone.

The first of many fires

New Year’s Eve turned into a wild party filled with lots of food, drinks, loud music, dancing, and a huge bonfire (which Tim tended to all night). We ended the year with some gigantic sparklers and lots of cheering. I would say it was a good time had by all.

The last day of 2013

Other than that it’s been business as usual this week with work happening during the day. Unfortunately, the internet out here has totally sucked this week with pretty much an unusable Verizon signal. Last year this was not the case, so we suspect is is directly related to the sheer number of people who are in the area right now using the same tower. Hopefully as people begin to leave this weekend it will improve. The good news is that the AT&T signal was updated to 4G so we’ve been using that for our data all week. The bad news is that we only have a small data plan with AT&T which means we will be paying overage fees this month for sure.

Our piece of desert real estate

The weather has been incredible all week with temps in the mid to high 70s. It really doesn’t get much better than this in January. On New Year’s day we took a hike up into the mountains to seek out a cool stone snake that Nina told us about.

You never know what you might come across in the desert

From there we continued a bit farther up the mountain to check out the view.

Love those desert mountains

Hopefully we’ll get in some more hiking this weekend. That’s it for now from the desert. We’re planning to spend a few more weeks here, and are expecting more people to join us, so stay tuned for more desert beauty and adventures.

I leave you with a cool video of some of my Instagram photos from the past year. It’s been an amazing year and we can’t wait to see what 2014 brings.