SKP Christian Fellowship - Quartzsite, 2025

We did not go out to camp with our friends at the SKP Christian Fellowship gathering (as we have in the past), but we did drive the Jeep out for one day to visit...

We went out for breakfast on the day that the Christian Fellowship gathering would normally host folks from the "Solo's" -- but the Solo's group changed their gathering dates this year, so only a few had yet arrived, but those who were there were still invited over for breakfast...

... and Bob and Nancy Balyeat and friends did a concert.

It was a beautiful morning, and thankfully, the winds had died down. Evidently, the campers in Quartzsite have had a lot of wind during the rally this year.

A video of part of their performance: https://youtu.be/KrYk1qcp44g

We stayed through the day, enjoying visiting with folks, and the afternoon devotions time, as well as "clean out the fridge" potluck in the evening.

This was the picture taken of the group after devotions in the afternoon. Carl and Patti are in the very back (third row), just right of center, Patti has a straw hat on, and Carl has a reddish-maroon cap on.

When we drove back through Quartzsite (the town) on our way back toward Mesa, we saw that the highway (I-10) was totally stopped heading east (the direction we needed to go). We pulled over to see if we could find an alternate route, and it looked like there *might* be a frontage-type road alongside the highway...

as we were on that road, we stopped to take a picture of the beautiful sunset that was happening behind us...

... another view of the sunset in our rearview mirror.

Unfortunately, the road deteriorated into a very rough single-track off-road surface, which for our Jeep was difficult,  as even though our Jeep says it is "Trail Rated", it really is not! We were making a speed of about 3MPH on the rough track, and we had 3 miles yet to go to the road which would take us back to I-10 (and hopefully beyond the traffic tie-up) -- it was getting dark, and we decided we had better turn around and head back to the highway entrance that we had passed in Quartzsite about 30 minutes before.

We got on I-10, and into the line of traffic. It was odd, traffic would start moving well, and then come to a complete stop for 10-15 minutes. The cause was re-paving, and the road construction had all traffic diverted onto the shoulder of the highway. We could only surmise that every once in a while, the construction vehicles would block the shoulder too, and that's when we'd come to a complete stop until they finished whatever they were doing and allowed us to continue onwards on the shoulder.

About 10-15 miles after we finished in the construction  area, we saw folks braking, and saw a bright light on the shoulder -- it was a tractor-trailer with the trailer fully engulfed in flames (the source of the very bright light). There were a couple of other tractor trailers stopped. We called 911 to make sure that they knew about it, and they did, and emergency vehicles were on the way. We continued on toward Mesa.

Our trip in the morning out to Quartzsite took us about 2.5 hours -- even though we hit a little rush hour traffic into Phoenix in the morning. The trip back took a little over 4 hours with our attempted bypass of the construction area and then our encounter with the construction. All in all, we were glad we went and enjoyed our visit with friends!