Palm Creek Golf and RV Resort

We have lived here a week in Casa Grande. Palm Creek, our address for the month of February, is overrun with our contemporaries. We did not think about that element when we booked our time here. We were looking for a winter place to avoid snow while in our RV and one that offered some activities including golf for me and some things that would work for Cathy and for us together. And some down time from the go-go-go exploring that will resume as spring warms the Northern Hemisphere up and we get back to rolling along. As it turns out, in my life I have never been immersed in such a concentration of Caucasian couples of my own age group. They are endlessly active, this group at Palm Creek Golf and RV Resort. Many have been coming here for decades, as the resort has offered from the start, the option to purchase a site and use it to park your RV whenever, or to build one of the resort’s offered manufactured housing options. Although the golf course is in beautiful condition and the facilities are quite nice, it is not a luxury development. Older, metal homes start at prices in the $30’s and new wooden ones top out just a little over $100,000.

So, it is a combined community of “us”. Either in RV’s or in manufactured homes, we are all here to escape the chilling travesties of winter and to continue to enjoy our self endowed entitlement to the active senior life. Today, walking over to play golf  on nine holes of the par three 18 hole golf course, I passed by the activity rooms. There were folks line dancing, ballroom dancing, there was a choral group rehearsing, (practicing I Walk The Line, the Johnny Cash classic), There was a silversmithing clinic being held and a lapidary group polishing up some local mineral crystal finds, something Arizona is well known for. While all this was going on the sport courts were full of the popping sound of the Pickleball players and there was likely a softball game populated with folks in knee braces and other accouterments designed to keep the aging body in one piece. It’s crazy. All the guys are named Bill, Tom, Bob, Jim, Mike. All the gals, Judy, Susan, Pat, Cathy, Pam, Betty.  Canadian snowbirds could be as much as 50% of the folks here. Many of the rest have license plates from that u-shaped group of states that sweep around Chicago.  

We are letting ourselves get wrapped up in this. It is a fun diversion from our sightseeing and hiking ways. We’ve prior noted Cathy’s work at and success in a senior olympics swimming event in Tucson. She continues to work out and has another event coming later this month. She’s good. Held a state of New Jersey record in swimming in her youth. This morning, we went over to the lawn bowling court to get ourselves some hands on training. The resort maintains a putting green perfect turf lawn bowling court. Through the beauty of internet research, I found that lawn bowling started around 5000 BC. The British embraced it as part of their royal entertainment venues, and today’s rules are well influenced by them. Southhampton Old Bowling Green Club in the UK started in 1299. It is the world’s oldest continuous lawn bowling club.  Bocce, the Italian game, was an evolution from the ancient lawn game. We played for many years on a town bocce league in St Helena. The game is near religion there. So now, with a bit of game history imbued, we feel the obligation to play and learn more about this, the “original” game and the very welcoming group of “us” that forms the lawn bowling club here at Palm Creek.