Back to Columbus

I've been neglecting to post since we arrived back at Columbus on Tuesday afternoon. We immediately jumped back into the routine of taking Shannon to work and what not.

Loretta has added up part of the fuel information from the trip, but not enough to give us overall mileage yet. The minivan held up very well on the trip except for one incident. One day in Phoenix, it just quit. We pushed it out of the main street with some help from a young man who rode up on his bicycle. As soon as Loretta loosened and re-tightened the gas cap, we were on our way again. This one has happned before, but we haven't found anything to do about it so far.

We are pretty happy with the results of the trip. I will post more later as we sort out our lessons, impressions and ideas. In the meantime, we hab begun to look for a full-size van, even though we have no idea how we'll pay for it.

Calvin

After Quartzsite

So after Quartzsite (see last post), we have a definite leader among our ideas. "Buy some sort of RV and go workamping" sounds pretty wonderful right now.

We have had a difficult time deciding the best way to go home. After several discussions, we took US 95 due south to Yuma, AZ, and turned east in I-8. We got as far as Casa Grande, AZ before running out of daylight and energy. We followed the Interstate signs off the interstate. For some reason I can't remember, we had decided to spend still another night in a motel. Of the three motels on the signs, only one was within five miles of the freeway. We checked at Holiday Inn. The clerk said that a single room would cost us $150.90. We left. Drove several more miles to Best Western. $109.00. Not for us. We made our way to Motel 6 at the I-10 exit. They did not "leave the light on" for us. No rooms.

Obviously, the time had come to spend the night in the minivan. The Motel 6 clerk referred us to an empty lot next door to the motel. Very glad that we had reorganized the minivan, we set up our bed. The curtains that Loretta made for the windows fit very well. We had bought a front sunscreen for the windshield. Loretta hadn't had time to make the curtain for the rear window due to Mom's hospitalization, so she improvised with a black garbage bag and some leftover stick-back Velcro. That worked. We put pillow cases over the door windows and had our privacy.

After a walk across the street to a Love's truck stop for the restroom, we stowed our "stuff" in the side compartments built into the Grand Voyager and settled in. We awoke about 12:30 and Loretta closed the vent window due to the cold. We both woke at 3:30 a.m. and decided we wouldn't be able to go back to sleep. We went to the Arby's at Love's and drove on.

We followed I-10 to El Paso and took US 62, as originally planned, toward home. Today we got as far as Carlsbad, New Mexico. We will go to Lubbock, Texas, tomorrow and decide whether to continue on 62 or go to Amarillo and take the freeways home.

Calvin

Quartzsite

We made it to Quartzsite, Arizona. Quartzsite has a population of about 4,000 in the summer and around 100,000 in the winter. We don't need to look any further for a place to spend winters on the road. Our server at Sweet Darlene's uses an RV park at a cost of $700 for six months. The only other charge is for electricity. Of course, BLM land is cheaper than that. We could use that for $140 for seven months, but it's empty land with no hookups.

There's a lot of work here, too, because most of the 100,000 people are retired. We talked to some people about that. The restaurants and retailers hire a lot, and we could live on that kind of money due to the low rents. Plenty of other works comes open, too.

The temperature now is about 70 and the sun shines brightly. I don't envy anyone, anywhere.

Calvin

Note: Change of plans

In case someone is following our trip, I thought I'd post a note because we have changed our plans. Rather than stay at Apache Junction and make side trips, we will head out tomorrow morning and stay on the road until whenever we return to Ohio. We have organized the minivan and expect to sleep in it most of the time.

Also, after talking to people about summer weather in Arizona and experiencing both the current warm, dry weather here and cold but dry weather at Holbrook, Loretta thinks she could put up with the cold further north more easily than summer here. Plus, as we have talked more, we have begun to move back toward our original plan of living on the road. All of this throws our itinerary into confusion. We probably won't go to Tucson after all, at least not with the idea of living there, and we don't know whether we'll follow US 62 back to Columbus or not.

The net result of this is that we will leave for Quartzsite tomorrow morning. We expect to stay somewhere near there tomorrow night, then make further decisions about where to go after that.

Calvin of Calvin and Loretta

Arizona!

[Calvin writing] I didn't get to post last night. We spent Sunday going from Shamrock, Texas, to Holbrook, Arizona. New Mexico and Arizona awed us. We have never seen mountains like these before. People who had been here told us that pictures or even movies don't do them justice, and we agree.

At Holbrook, we decided to stay at Motel 6 rather than Econolodge. The expected low of 17 degrees Farenheit deterred us yet again from sleeping in the van. The worst thing about Motel 6 for me was the lack of internet service. I totally failed to realize that the Denny's next door had free wifi until the next morning when our server told us so. By then, we had done the laundry (Motel 6 has washers and dryers) and couldn't wait to get rolling. It's worth noting that, despite the temperature being 13 degrees, Loretta had little trouble getting up and going about her business despite her arthritis. The difference from Ohio is that the relative humidity here runs about 5% to 15% rather than 40% to 100%.

Rather than stay on freeways, we took state highways southwest to Payson, Arizona and on to the Phoenix area. I can't find words to describe the beauty of Tonto National Forest. This is high country, not the desert found further south. Tall pine trees, high mountains and clear air make views that take our breath away.

We arrived in Mesa, east of Phoenix, and turned east to Apache Junction, where my friend Don lives. Since we got there about noon, Don and his wife, Patricia, were at work. We spent most of the afternoon checking out pagan shops. The layout of the streets here makes more sense to me than that of any other city I've seen. "Major" streets make a simple grid pattern, have interstate exits and move at 40 or 45 miles per hour. The other streets fill in the grid, have lower speed limits and tend to be quiet. I like that. The area does have a lot of traffic, though, especially freeways. Don and Pat tell us that it's a lot quieter when the snowbirds leave town.

We spent the evening talking to Don and Pat, then slept on their living room floor on the futon mattress.

Today, we drove part of the Apache Trail through another part of Tonto National Forest. We turned back after about twenty miles and discovered the campground at Tortilla Flats. They charge $12 a night and provide water and sewer, but not electricity. We don't need that anyhow in the minivan. Then we stopped at Lost Dutchman State Park, close to Apache Junction, and looked over their campground. Also $12 a night, that might be even better. They have no hookups yet, though. By next year, they expect to offer electricity, with water and a dump station available but not plumbed to the campsites. The sites are pretty nice, and many are pull-throughs.

Then we came to the library where I'm writing this. I now have a card good for a month of library computer use. It cost me $1 and I had to show picture ID. Good deal!

More later,

Calvin

Coming to you from Shamrock, Texas

Sunday dawned clear and cold at St. James, Missouri. I awoke at about 3:30 a.m. local time (4:30 back home). Loretta awakened about 4.

With no way to go back to sleep, we went ahead and began the morning routine. Because we started so early, we were nearly ready before the “free continental breakfast” opened at 6 a.m. The free food wasn’t much, but we had our own food to supplement it.

As we packed the van to leave, two dogs came along. One was a brindle pit bull, the other a fawn boxer, and neither had a collar. We had the door open for the loading process, and they just walked right in. The pit bull jumped onto the bed and the boxer tried to go under it. They both appeared very friendly, wagging their tails and not barking or doing anything hostile. When Loretta told them to leave, they did so after playing with her for about half a minute.

We fueled up and drove away. The sun shone all day, but the wind continued to blow steadily from the north. We saw several trucks and RVs swaying, the drivers apparently having trouble controlling their vehicles. Handling in windy conditions will certainly affect our choice if we buy an RV. Fifth wheels seemed to have the worst problems, especially the luxury models that rise higher than any other RVs except gigantic Class A's. Even the big Class A's looked more stable than those tall 5ers. The advantage here would go to Hi-Lo travel trailers, which lower for traveling to about the height of a pickup with a cap.

Loretta has seen a total of sixty three hawks on our trip, fifty seven of them today. In the east, most of them were red-tail hawks, but once we crossed into Oklahoma, most of them were another species which has a name I can’t remember. It sounds like a person’s last name and begins with S. Since Loretta uses hawks as a totem, we take this to be a favorable sign. We saw many of the hawks in the part of Oklahoma that is mostly reservations.

Loretta saw her first armadillo today. She had to ask about that to make sure that “I was seeing what I was seeing.” That’s understandable; nothing else looks quite like an armadillo.

We have decided that we must change the mattress on our bed. The futon mattress that we are using now weighs too much, and we have trouble getting under it to use the milk crates. We are looking at the type of couch-cushion mattresses used in RV dinettes, but we will probably ask for ideas on the VanDwellers group.

As we had already guessed, the minivan is too small for the two of us to use for an extended time. We are already spending another night in a motel, not only because of the cold but also because we don’t want to go through the effort required to put every thing in its place. In a larger van, we would not need to do so much arranging.

We covered two thirds of Missouri and all of Oklahoma today, over 600 miles in all. It made a long day, but neither of us felt especially tired until about the last 50 miles. We had another good day.

[Calvin writing] Here we are in Missouri, a few miles short of Rolla. The last 36 hours have been even more "interesting" than we expected.

I got a call from my sister yesterday morning, telling me that Mom was in the hospital again. We were due to leave for Arizona this morning, but we went up there. Mom had had a heart attack, not due to a heart condition, but from being dehydrated yet again. We got there late yesterday after packing everything and setting up the bed. They had Mom in the ICU, hooked up to machinery. She did not awaken while we sat there for about forty minutes, but the readings on the machines looked pretty stable and good. I went to call my sister and one of my brothers. The doctor came in while I was on the phone. He found me, and I talked to him about our situation. He told me that Mom had a "better than 50/50 chance" of recovering and said, "If I were in your situation and I had a plan, I would go ahead with it." We did.

Not thinking through our situation thoroughly enough, we spent last night in the cheapest motel in the town. Looking back, we would have done better to stay in the minvan as originally planned. The motel room didn't have warm water, so we didn't get showers. Had we stayed in the hospital parking lot, we would have had access to restrooms. We have curtains for the van, and the temperture last night stayed warm enough that we really would not have needed the heater. We could have used it, though.

So we woke up this morning (at 5 a.m., as usual) and realized we couldn't take showers. We carry a product called No-Rinse; the time had come to try it. Nursing homes use No-Rinse shampoo for bed-bound patients' hair and the body wash to clean up diapers and like that. The procedure is to spray it on and wipe it off; it doesn't need water. We don't have the shampoo with us. The body wash works just fine. We will be looking for a source for the shampoo.

We ate from our supplies and took off. The trip is going well so far. The minivan gets just under 20 miles a gallon, mostly driving at 70 mph, which has been the speed limit since we left Ohio. We have been in windy weather all day, and she's remarkably steady.

Weather Channel promised us a storm in Ohio and Indiana and Mother Nature delivered. We drove on through rain all through Ohio and snow through most of Indiana. None of it stopped traffic, though. After that, we had cloudy skies, strong winds and dropping temperatures. By the time we reached Effingham, Illinois, the temperature was around 26 Farenheit. The skies began to clear after we left Saint Louis, which will make for a very cold night.

We decided to spend tonight in another motel. The Econolodge where I'm writing this only cost $6 more than the cruddy motel last night, which includes a very nice shower, internet service included in the price, and free breakfast. Cool!

Blessed be!

T - 35 hours and counting

We are still getting ready for our big trip. I don't know if I've mentioned this, but we're headed for Arizona. We'll take about three weeks and see some country. The plan is to stay mostly with a friend of mine in Apache Junction, sleeping in the minivan, We'll do a side trip to Quartzsite and visit Albuquerque and/or Sedona on the way out and Tucson on the way back. Then we'll go to El Paso and take US 62 all the way back.

We tested our idea of making a bed in the van with plywood and milk crates. Works fine. Now we're scrambling around trying to tie up loos ends. The next post on this will come from somewhere down the road.