Follow Us In Our Travels

1/07/2013: It's hard to write 2013. We're at John Wayne RV Ranch near Maricopa, Arizona. It's southwest of Phoenix. We'll stay here a week, waiting on mail and, if I get ambitious, I'll do some scanning of 2012 paperwork. This campground has about 125 sites; I'd say more than 3/4 are set up for long-term with full hookups and electricity meters. They accept Passport America and we have full hookups with 50 amp which is working great. They have a large laundry room and a club house with a kitchen and area for puzzles, books, TV, games.  It's right off the highway; I didn't hear anything last night but Curt said he heard a lot of vehicles. When I'm at a campground I usually sleep pretty good.

We were at Gilbert Ray Campground near Tucson for 2 days, a Pima County Park. They are first come first served, 7 day limit.  Ft. Willcox RV Park at Willcox, AZ for is a small park we stayed at for 1 night. We had 30 amp for both of those places and had a lot of problems keeping  things running. Usually we can run our fridge, hot water heater and 2 small heaters with no problem. We weren't able to run the hot water heater, and only 1 small heater along with the fridge. If I needed to use the microwave, I had to unplug the heater. Curt did a lot of checking, wondering if it was our problem, since it happened at 2 places in a row. But after getting here at John Wayne, everything is working fine. Yes, it's 50 amp, and it's great!

Before we got to Arizona, we stopped at Deming, NM Walmart. While we were there, there was a vehicle stop by the police, which turned in to Walmart parking lot not far from us. Another police car came, and another..until there were 5 cars there. Needless to say, we sat and watched. The K9 unit was there. The person was cuffed and put in a car and a tow truck took his pickup away. A little later a security office came and asked us to move to the other side of the lot; there were already 4 campers over there. The weather forecast was for snow coming early tomorrow morning and the next day. It was late already to drive further west, and there isn't much in between Deming and Bowie, AZ, which was about 100 miles away. So we figured we'd see what it was like in the morning. As it got darker, there were more RV's coming in for the night. The next morning most of them had left already and we took off too. There was a little snow on the side of the road, just light blowing, and cloudy, but other than that it was fine.

While at Tucson, we went to the gun show they had there at the fairgrounds. We thought it would be interesting given the latest shootings and politics. I don't know what their regular attendance is, but there were a lot of people there and we had to wait in line to get tickets and get in. It was really interesting to see the guns and ammo that was leaving while we were waiting in line. There were a lot of comments that this was happening because of the politics. After that we stopped at some RV dealers and looked at some motorhomes.

Arizona desert...cactus, flat, with some mountains and rocks thrown in.  The weather has been from upper 40's to upper 60's for highs and lower 20's to upper 30's for lows. We've been able to stay away from the snow so far.

We think these might be pecan trees; there's a lot of places selling pecans

We can't quite figure out what their poor cows eat. There is no grass.

The clouds in Deming the morning we left.

Cotton bales. It took us a while to figure out what it was. 

A few dairy cows.