The first arrival showed up yesterday! She pulled up in a pickup truck with a camper trailer. It’s weird having another person around.

People keep pulling into our area, so we decided to put a sign up. My new friend was extra happy about making her first paper-plate sign. The quintessential “paper plate sign” is such a group camping thing to do, and yet neither of us had ever had occasion to make one. This was our time, and a damn fine sign it was.

She took her doggies and went out in her truck to explore, and as much as I was enjoying her company, I was glad to have the downtime. I stayed at camp just in case others showed up. Argos and I took a short walk and checked out some pretty desert flora.

On our walk, I saw another pop-up camper parked down the road. Argos and I walked down the road to see if this was one of our group, and to let them know where the group campsite was located. The fellow turned out to not be of our group, but he and his wife had purchased this pop-up camper just the day before, he had driven up to retrieve it, and was on his way back home – with an overnight stop to test it out.

These random meetings of like-minded strangers and learning some about their lives is definitely one of the fun aspects of life on the road. As it turned out, Brad is co-owner of The Wildland Trekking Company in Flagstaff. They do hiking tours, not just of the SouthWest, but all over the world! What a neat job! He had to get back to Flagstaff, so after chatting, he headed out.

My new neighbor returned with tales of challenging dirt roads in her 2WD truck and a couple of happy, tired dogs. That night, we played with my little camera’s various settings to get some star photos. After figuring out how to set the timer, we fixed the camera to look up at the Milky Way and excitedly waited the minute countdown. When we the timer clicked off, we found just a few stars showed up on the picture! We burst into laughter at how big our anticipation was for such a small payout. It was  nice sharing that amusement and hearty night of laughter!