Yesterday Miss Terry finished installing the last of the new Levolor window blinds in our motorhome, and this last one came out just as beautifully as the others did! I am so lucky to be married to such a talented woman.

A few readers have written to ask if the blinds rattle going down the road. Since we haven’t been anywhere since Terry installed them, I can’t tell you for sure. But since they have attachments that are screwed to the wall that the bottom of the blinds slide into, they can’t move, so I don’t anticipate any noise from them.

It has gotten very warm here in Show Low, with temperatures in the low 90s predicted for the next few days. It’s even hotter down in the desert, where Phoenix is supposed to hit 110 on Sunday. Now that’s hot! People who live in the desert always say, “Yes, but it’s a dry heat.” Hey, it’s dry inside of an oven too, but I don’t want to live there either! I am a wimp when it comes to weather. I don’t like it too hot or too cold. Somewhere about 72 to 75 degrees is perfect for me.

We can tell its getting hot down in the desert, because the Elks campground is starting to fill up. There are a few RV sites left, and I hope there  is at least one still available when our friends Greg and Jan White come through early next week. Greg called to tell me they want to stop and see us as they head south to Texas for their daughter’s wedding later in the month, and we’re really looking forward to seeing them again.

I have been studying my mapping programs, trying to decide which route we will take from the Thousand Trails preserve in Morgan Hill, California to Vail, Colorado in mid-July for Terry’s son’s wedding. Morgan Hill is just south of San Jose, and I don’t see any good direct route to Colorado. It looks like we will either have to go north to Interstate 80 and take it east to Utah, then drop down to Interstate 70, or else south to Interstate 15, by way of Bakersfield and Barstow, and then Interstate 15 northeast through Nevada and Utah to pick up Interstate 70. This won’t be a sightseeing trip, we just need to get from Point A to Point B, so if anybody is familiar with that part of the country, I’m open to suggestions.

I got a lot of positive responses to Thursday’s blog on Canyon de Chelly, and I wanted to share one more photo from our trip to the canyon. I showed you a close up view of Spider Rock in that blog, but here is a wide shot of that part of the canyon, with Spider Rock near the center. This place took my breath away.

Terry’s folks, Pete and Bess Weber, are going to be up here spending the weekend in their motorhome at the Hon-Dah RV Park, so between visiting with them and working on the new issue of the Gypsy Journal, I’ll be pretty busy. We only have a little over a week left here in Show Low before we hit the road, and a lot to get done before we leave.

Thought For The Day -  Stop living in the past, it was not perfect either.

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I woke up yesterday morning to the sound of far off rain, and then I realized that it wasn’t rain after all, but rather the sound of the wind in the tall pine trees here at the Show Low Elks lodge campground.

Yes, it was windy again in northern Arizona, as it is all too often this time of year. The weather report included a high wind advisory for the entire region until 8 p.m., and  they were monitoring more dust storms along Interstate 40, which has been closed numerous times in the last few weeks. I don’t like driving a motorhome in the wind, so I was glad we drove up from the Phoenix area the previous day!

As I mentioned in yesterday’s blog, we have a nice site here at the Elks campground, but it isn’t very level, and even with our jacks extended all the way, we were still decidedly low in the rear. We weren’t in danger of anything falling off the walls, but we were out of balance enough that our shower wouldn’t drain correctly. We’ve encountered this before and I wanted to do something about it.

So we went to Lowes and bought an eight foot long piece of exterior grade treated 2×12 board, and I had the store cut it into one foot lengths, giving me a total of eight squares.

Back at the motorhome, I pulled in our slide rooms and retracted our HWH leveling jacks, and then we put four of the wooden squares under each rear jack. Then I hit the automatic jack button, and we leveled right up. 

I was wondering how speeds would be on my my iPad here in Show low, as compared to in Apache Junction. While our Verizon phones and air card are on high speed EVDO here, the iPad is on AT&T’s extended network. There is a noticeable reduction in speed, no doubt about it. But it is not as slow as our air card is when we’re away from an EVDO signal and are on Verizon’s slower National Access service. The GPS and all other functions on the iPad work fine here, even on the slower extended network service.

Later on, Tiffany came by with her girls, and we had a nice visit. Here are Hailey and Destiny relaxing on the couch after a hard day at school and preschool. Destiny always looks to her big sister for direction on how to act like a big kid. Hopefully she won’t copy Hailey and break her arm too!

Tiffany’s husband Jim works the night shift, and he was up all day helping Tiffany with her job, so he was home sleeping before his shift started. We took the girls out to dinner, and by the time we left the restaurant, it was getting really chilly. Note to self – keep a jacket or sweater in the van.

Bad Nick was busy yesterday too, posting a new Bad Nick Blog edition of the Dumb A$$ Report. Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – If Barbie is so popular, why do you have to buy her friends?

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The weather forecast has been for rain all week, though it seemed to come in spurts, with periods of blue sky in between. But Wednesday night it began to rain in earnest, and it hasn’t stopped yet.

The rain was accompanied with high winds that whipped the palm trees in our park, and about 4:30 p.m., the National Weather Service issued tornado watches for southwest Arizona, including Yuma, Quartzsite, and Phoenix! That almost never happens. Up in the high country, heavy snow was falling, with accumulations measured in feet.

There were flash flood warnings for the entire state, and weather reports said that Oak Creek, near Sedona, could crest at 20 feet above normal. Yuma got its normal entire year’s rain accumulation in just one day! It was not a good time to be traveling, and while I was glad we were safely parked with full hookups, I was worried about the many friends we have who are boondocking in the desert at Quartzsite.

Since we get the east and west coast network feeds out of New York and San Francisco, I cranked up the rooftop Winegard batwing antenna, and was grateful to Mark Didelot for setting up our converter box so we could tune in the local channels and get more direct weather reports.

Unexpected bad weather is why we always keep our fresh water tank at least half full, and have enough fuel on board to run our generator, even when we are going to be parked for an extended period of time with full hookups. In fact, when we are going to be sitting still for a while, I always fill our fuel tank. I’m not sure about more modern rigs like our Winnebago, but in our old MCI bus conversion, condensation could accumulate in our diesel fuel tank if it was low and we were parked for several weeks. Having had to deal with that once, I don’t want it to happen again.

Because we lived in snow country in northern Arizona (yes, it snows in Arizona), Terry and I always kept enough provisions on hand to last us for a few days if we got snowed in. As RVers, we can’t carry a fully stocked pantry, but we always have food and fresh water on hand, just in case. There are times when living in a self-contained RV can be very nice.

Bad weather is not the only reason to be prepared. A few summers ago we were at the Thousand Trails preserve near Hershey, Pennsylvania for two weeks. During that time it was pretty hot, and they were having power problems. A transformer had to be replaced twice, leaving the campground without electricity.

No problem, we just opened our windows and ran our Fantastic roof vents to create an air flow, and if it got too hot, we buttoned the bus up and fired up our generator to run the rooftop air conditioner. Several of our neighbors came in with nearly empty tanks, and ran so low on fuel that their generators would not work. Most RV generators are set up so that they will stop drawing fuel from the RV’s tank when it drops below a certain level, to prevent you from running out and being stuck somewhere.

It’s been a long time since I was a Boy Scout, but that motto “Be prepared” still comes in handy.

Thought For The Day – If you don’t pick up the bat, you’ll never hit the ball.

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For a week or so now, we have been up early every morning, and that’s a habit we really need to break. It’s ruining my bad reputation. 

We left the Escapees Dreamcatcher RV Park in Deming, New Mexico a little after 9 a.m. and drove west on Interstate 10 to Lordsburg, where we stopped at the Flying J for fuel, and then took U.S. Highway 70, the Old West Highay,  northwest into Arizona. We had never traveled this route before, and it is a nice two lane road that is a more direct route to central Arizona that taking Interstate 10, which dips south first before going north toward Tucson and Phoenix.

There were a few hills, but nothing serious, and we had to slow down through small towns like Safford and Thatcher, but we made good time. When we entered the San Carlos Apache Reservation, it was like going into a Third World country. The small Indian communities we passed through were depressing places where the yards of the houses were littered with trash, and the people we passed didn’t look very friendly.

We had planned to stay at the RV park at the Apache Gold Casino, a few miles east of Globe, which would put us within about a 90 minute drive north to our daughter’s home in Show Low, perfect for a day trip. But when we arrived, the convenience store that is also the office for the RV park was closed for several days, and when I went inside the casino to inquire about an RV site, nobody seemed to know anything, or offer much help.

This attitude of indifference reminded me of what I had come to know as the norm on the White Mountain Apache Reservation, which is the neighbor to our old hometown of Show Low. The Apaches are never rude, they just let you know that you’re welcome to come to their casino and spend your money, or pay to fish in their lakes, but don’t expect much in the way of hospitality.

I finally found a security guard who told me that they were “probably” full, and even if we could find an open site, he had no idea if we could stay or not, or how much it would cost us. He did say we could dry camp a night or two for free out by the highway in several long spaces reserved for eighteen wheelers, but when I asked him about security in the area, he just shrugged. We just did not feel comfortable leaving the motorhome unattended there while we went to Show Low. I guess that’s a holdover from our burglary last month. We have no fear dry camping anywhere within reason, but leaving the rig like that, with no RV neighbors nearby, just didn’t feel good.

We were only about 70 miles from Apache Junction, where Terry’s parents live, and our ultimate destination, so we decided to just drive the rest of the way in and find an RV park where we can get a monthly space, and then drive the van to Show Low in a day or three.

There was a lot of road construction on U.S. Highway 60 between Globe to Miami that was pretty much stop and go  traffic, but once we got through that it was an easy drive the rest of the way. The Winnebago performed well coming through the mountains, and the 7% climbs and the trip back down into the Valley of the Sun was no problem with our Cummins diesel engine and exhaust brake. We arrived at the Elks lodge in Apache Junction and took a dry camping spot with several other RVs, and a beautiful  view out our windshield of the Superstition Mountains. 

Once we were settled in, we drove over to Terry’s parents’ house and had a nice reunion with them, and I  know they were sure happy to see her. It had been a long day, so when we left them, we stopped for a quick dinner and got back to the RV tired and ready for bed. Before we began our fulltime RV adventure, Arizona was our home, and it’s good to be back.

We have a lot of friends and subscribers who want to get together, and by the time we got back to the Elks lodge, I had eight e-mails from people wanting to get together today or tomorrow. We’ll try to do some visting once we get caught up a bit. But the next few days will be devoted to finding an RV park, washing a couple thousand miles of road grime off our Winnebago and van, and then family time. We’ll be in the Apache Junction area for over a month, and we’re looking forward to some down time.

Thought For The Day – Live in the possibility rather than the probability.

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Yesterday our friend Al Hesselbart from the RV Hall of Fame Museum called to tell me that several vintage RVs from the Tin Can Tourists were visiting the museum and that I was missing a great photo opportunity. So I grabbed my camera and headed over to check things out.

The Tin Can Tourists are a club for owners and fans of vintage trailers and motor coaches. The units on display at the museum included everything from a neat old Travco motorhome to classic travel trailers, and even a couple of really neat homebuilt campers. I really liked this homebuilt camper, with cedar shingles and a back porch, and the old truck pulling it was pretty cool too. I’d have loved to see the inside of it.
Another neat homebuilt is called simply The Shack. Built by John and Dot Flis, the camper built on their 1940 International truck was made from 90% recycled stuff they collected here and there. Don’t let the old truck’s outward appearance fool you, John replaced the original engine with a powerful 350 Chevrolet V-8 engine and beefed up the suspension and drive train to handle the weight of The Shack.

They designed their neat camper to look like a miniature farmhouse, complete with galvanized roof, and tail lights made from old kerosene lanterns. Inside, The Shack has all the comforts of home, including a sink, small refrigerator, microwave, and porta-potty. The Shack has been featured on the Discovery Channel’s RV Crazy episode.

I also liked this beautiful 1950 Spartan trailer, owned by Michael Greene of nearby Bristol, Indiana. As it turns out, Michael is the cousin of our pal Trina Ambris, who runs RV Surplus Salvage, here in Elkhart. Michael told me that he found the 32 foot long trailer decaying in a field one day and tracked down the owner.

The old trailer was in terrible shape, and most sane people probably would not have taken on the task of resurrecting it. But Michael and his wife own a company called Sierra Custom Interiors that builds custom living quarters in horse trailers, and they also build neat retro looking camper trailers called Campfire Campers. Judging by what I saw inside the old Spartan John restored, I think there are some horses that are really traveling in style!

Back at the bus, Michele Henry from Phoenix Commercial Paint stopped over to visit. Both Al Hesselbart from the RV Hall of Fame Museum, and Bob and Gita Patel, owners of Elkhart Campground, had high praise for Michele and her work, and we were glad to get to know her.

For years Michele’s company has painted RVs for some of the local manufacturers, including Four Winds, Forest River, and Phoenix. But with the downturn in the RV industry, Michele, like many companies that support the RV manufacturers, is scrambling to stay alive.

She has painted quite a few coaches for private owners, and it is amazing how much she can transform a dated looking motorhome or fifth wheel. Click on some of the tabs at the top of her webpage, and then click on the individual pictures, and I think you’ll be just as impressed as Terry and I were.

Michele said she much prefers working with individual owners over the big companies, who want to dictate terms and are more concerned with saving a dollar by cutting quality, than the final job.

Michele is a sharp lady, and she has a good business model. Instead of trying to get top dollar from every customer, she charges much less than the competition, and turns out what I feel is work far superior work to some of the other shops. By running a lean operation, and concentrating on quality, she is able to turn out beautiful custom work for around $200 a lineal foot. So if you thought you needed to spend $12,000 to $15,000 for a custom paint job on your RV, think again. Instead of buying a new coach, you can save thousands by refurbishing your present rig inside and out. Check out Michele’s website, she’s good people and she does good work. When Terry and I buy a coach to replace our bus conversion, you can bet we’ll be seeing Michele for a paint job.

Thought For The Day – A truly happy person is one who can enjoy the scenery on a detour.

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