This was after we decided to give up the roaming lifestyle, sell our RV, and settle down on the rez before my tribe’s government built a second fancier casino called “The Q” along the highway to San Diego and we packed our kids up and left Yuma for good.

When our children were little their Italian immigrant father, Simone, worked at the casino. The Yuma Reservation is as ugly as ever, but it’s still kind of home. Uncle Mick’s yard has two red-and-turquoise domes hovering over a Walmart-size parking lot less than one hundred yards from his fence line. The glare of lights from our tribal casino, The Paradise, is even more egregious than I’d remembered it. We’re exhausted from nearly 2000 miles of highway. It was a nice resort but now there are much nicer ones such as that Yuma Palms, Country Roads or Fortuna Del Oro trailer parks, which are all full five-star resorts.“Paradise looks the same,” I tell the kids as we get out of the rental car at my Uncle Mick’s house. As well the park staff does not follow the rules and does not make most of the patrons follow the rules. And they also allow these kind of dogs to run off leash in the dog park. They now allow pit bulls and Rottweilers in the park which it never did before. There seems to be no preventative maintenance done at all in the park and they cannot seem to keep a manager. There is virtually never anybody at the security gate anymore and most of the electrical and television cables are rotted away in the ground and they seem reluctant to repair them. They have stopped supplying cable TV and expect the patrons to pay for it and have not taken out the money alloyed for tv. All kinds of troubles with water heating in the laundries, pool and hot tub. What started out as a five-star resort is now a three star resort at best. After 14 years we no longer find it attractive to winter there.

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