If you’ve kept up on our blogs, you know that I (the T in R & T) am a desert rat. I am happy in the desert. My lovely wife is not. She grew up in California, not the Mojave Desert part but the humid, moist part, where there is water everywhere. She craves humidity. She longs for it. For our spring break trip, she wanted to go to the coast, to the ocean, to the water, to the humidity.

 Unfortunately, since we can only travel 5 hours a day and we only had 9 days we didn’t quite make it. But, we did at least make it to some water. Our second stop on our spring break trip was Camp Davis Park in Bullhead City, Arizona (across the Colorado River from Laughlin, Nevada).

The park  sits RIGHT on the river, in the high desert. Even though I am a desert rat, I know a little about rivers. The Rio Grande runs right through Albuquerque and translates The Grand River. Growing up I always thought it was a Grand River (it is NOT in Albuquerque – see photo). In my early teens, my nephew (who was 5 or 6) and I saw a TV special about people floating down the Salt River in Phoenix. It looked like so much fun to us! And we had our own Grand River that we could float down.

Image: Rio Grande Albuquerque, KUNM/Laura Paskus

We begged our parents to let us try floating down the Rio Grande in July in Albuquerque. After many days of them telling us we couldn’t do it/it wouldn’t be fun/it was a bad idea, they finally gave in. (I am nothing if not stubborn and persistent.) We were so excited. We loaded up our tubes, our cooler, water and snacks and were dropped off. We plopped into our tubes and were ready to float down the river! Instead, our buts sank in the water and sank into the mud. Our float down the Rio Grande was nothing like what we saw when the people were floating down the Salt River. We ended up carrying our three tubes and cooler most of a mile, foot-deep in mud, to the pick-up point.

It took us so long to arrive, our parents thought maybe we had drowned, and they were getting ready to call the search and rescue team. Sunburnt, dehydrated and miserable, it was one of the many, many, many times in our young lives that we wished we had listened to our parents… but, we look back with fondness at it now.

Camp Davis Park has primitive and tent camping available along the beach, with no hook-ups, but a great water view and you can fish from your camp site. There is an area with green grass (a rarity in the desert) for the tents. Most sites are pull-through. The sites aren’t as spread out most state parks, but they also aren’t crammed in like sardines, like city RV parks tend to be. There are little houses for rent. The sites are not paved but they are nice and flat and even. This campground is right next to the freeway so there was traffic noise, but it was offset by the lovely setting and being near the river, so it didn’t bother us.