WEEKEND GETAWAY: YUMA

A Riverside TRAIN Ride, GOOD FOOD and the Stairway to the EIFFEL TOWER Draw Vacationers to YUMA

SHIRTSLEEVE DAYTIME TEMPERATURES AND light-jacket-nights lure 90,000 winter visitors a year to Yuma. But spend a weekend here and you realize there's more to it than sunshine. The town and its environs also offer a variety of entertainment, such as riding a train along the Colorado River, exploring a Mexican village, even inspecting the steps of Paris' Eiffel Tower. I'll get to that last one shortly. First, let me say a kind word about lettuce, and its ability to make otherwise normal people giddy. I know this because I attended the third Yuma Lettuce Days Festival, held each January to celebrate Yuma's huge agriculture industry, and its title as the world's winter lettuce capital. Last year's bash drew an amazing 25,000 to 30,000 people. "Where else can you see a Mr. Lettuce Head contest?" explained Cristy Thomas of Yuma Main Street, organizer of the event. "Where else can you go cabbage-bowling?" Point taken. I made my way along four downtown streets filled with blaring live music. I had a taste at the wine booth here, a sampling of cactus candy over there. Old West gunfight re-enactments livened the atmosphere, as did the horse-drawn carriage clopping along the hardtop. But most of the hooting and hollering came during the Lettuce Boxcar Derby, in which rigs were required to have a lettuce box incorporated into their design. Tim Kock, a 36-year-old 4-H youth development agent, had one of the sleekest rides around. "Speed is my game," he boasted as he climbed aboard with two large lettuce leaves attached to his headgear. Hard as it was to take seriously a man with roughaverage on his crash helmet, the crowd lining both sides of Second Street roared its approval. Shoppers seemed happy, too, at the offerings along Main Street. The historic area, known as Old Town, contains about 50 businesses, many selling hard-to-find gifts. Dorothy Young's store, Southwest and More, specializes in pine furniture, some with saguaro rib designs. But she also carries a selection of unique crafts. Her hottest items were three-dimensional sculpted-metal wall-hangingsof connected pots, mission scenes and other subjects-created, oddly enough, by Yuma winter visitor Robert Baxter. “They range from $14 to $165, and I can't keep them on the wall,” Young said.

Far from downtown, but just as popular, stands a shop called the Peanut Patch. This retail outlet in a farm setting sells peanut brittle made with home-grown peanuts, hand-dipped candies, fudge and gift boxes. Tours through the peanut processing sheds and candy room are given at 10 A.M. every Tuesday and Friday.

Those interested in a completely different shopping experience should try the Mexican border town of Los Algodones, 15 minutes from Yuma. I parked on the American side and walked a couple hundred yards through the border gates. The bargains can be terrific there on liquor and medicine. Other products sold along the bustling sidewalks range from dime crafts and kitsch to quality woven blankets and handmade belts. So many Yumans flock there on weekends the town takes on a party atmosphere. I recommend stopping for lunch at El Paraiso, a patio restaurant two blocks from the border. It's fun to sip a margarita under the winter sun as you watch shoppers and vendors haggle a few feet away.

As long as I was heading west along Interstate 8, I continued on to the Imperial Sand Dunes, 14 miles west of Yuma across the California line. Although the draw is mostly for those with dune buggies, other visitors can get at least a taste of this vast, waterless beach. I took the Gray's Well exit and followed the ramp as it curled into a buttercup-depression surrounded by high dunes. Tourists find the hilltops above the cul-de-sac a good spot to take pictures, especially when they learn that movies such as Return of the Jedi and Stargate were filmed there.

I spent a pleasant hour watching daredevils tear across the Mars-like terrain, then lift off from the sand peaks and soar through the sky in their buggies.

Don't visit the dunes without stopping on the way at the curious little town of Felicity, California. Even its founder, Jacques-André Istel, a French-born U.S. Marine pilot during the Korean War, can't quite explain his nine-building desert community.

Its attractions include a gift shop and a 25-foothigh section of the original Eiffel Tower stairway, which Istel bought at auction. His wife, Felicia, for whom the town is named, thought he was insane. “But I had to have it,” explained the irrepressible 72-year-old, who owned a successful parachute company in New York. “I told Felicia all we're missing is the remainder of the Eiffel Tower and all of Paris. She was not amused.” Istel's latest project is a massive granite wall engraved with the names of his college classmates (Princeton, 1949), and of Marines and Navy Corpsmen killed in Korea. He also sells wall space to private individuals-families memorializing