SNOW in the highlands of Prescott

Well, our efforts to avoid the impending snow storm by dropping south from Sedona to Prescott came to nothing. Most of the night we got pelted with rain and when the temperature dropped the rain turned to snow. We awakened this morning to a blanket of white as far as the eye could see. I wish I had taken a photo about five in the morning when I peeped out the rear window, but I preferred to stay huddled under the covers. By the time we did roust ourselves out around 7:00ish the snow in all but the shady sections was rapidly melting. When I had finished breakfast and ventured outside most of the snow had gone. Still, it was darn cold and my fingers were pretty frozen by the time I'd unhooked and stowed all the equipment for our departure.

Our chosen route, south on route 89, turned out to be a CLIMB into the mountains, over a pass, and then a curvy, narrow road towards Wickenburg. At some points I was piloting our rig at 20 to 25 miles an hour and wishing I could go even more slowly. Let me tell you, that road from Prescott to the desert flats near Wickenburg is not for the faint of heart, especially when the road is wet or snow-covered. The view from the road to the valley floor is even more stunning than the twisting drive along the Amalfi Coast in Italy.

For most of the rest of the day it rained off and on and never warmed up enough to make being outside pleasant. When we reached Highway 71 near Congress, Arizona, we jogged to the southwest, then caught route 93 north toward Kingman. Not that we had any reason to go to Kingman, but I decided that if the weather is going to continue to be nasty we might as well move toward our rendezvous in Mesquite where we have some ex-Carson City-ites who now live there we intend to visit.

The upshot of today's journey is that we didn't stop anywhere, see anything noteworthy, or venture out of the motor home for any reason. Hopefully, tomorrow we'll be able to do some exploring around Kingman if the weather warms up a bit. I heard from the KOA guy, Mark, here in Kingman that the next two days are supposed to be warmer. Richard has suggested Seligman on old Route 66 and that sounds like fun. Let's hope the weather cooperates.

It's Museum Day in Prescott, Arizona

Even though the sun barely peeked through the overcast today in downtown Prescott, we didn't care. We had booked an extra night here at the Point of Rocks RV camp in Prescott and today we had the whole day to fritter away on fun stuff. Unlike most people, fun stuff to the Happy Wanderers is most often comprised of antiques hunting, book store prowling, or historic museum wandering. Even though we ran across ample examples of the two former examples, today we intended to spend at least the first half of the day in the Sharlot Hall Museum just down the street from the court house in central Prescott.

Sharlot Hall was a giant in the annals of Arizona history. Here's a bit of her biography courtesy of the web site www.sharlot.org: "Sharlot Hall Museum is named after its founder, Sharlot Mabridth Hall (1870-1943), who became well known as a poet, activist, politician, and Arizona’s first territorial historian. Sharlot Hall was one of the West’s most remarkable women. As early as 1907, Ms. Hall saw the need to save Arizona's history and planned to develop a museum. She began to collect both Native American and pioneer material. In 1927, she began restoring the first Territorial Governor’s residence and offices and moved her extensive collection of artifacts and documents opening it as a museum in 1928."

Concetta and I thought that the museum in total was one of the finest we've yet visited. Everything from the John C. Fremont house, used when he was the (5th) territorial governor, to a frontier print shop, a vintage school house, and a log cabin used by the first territorial Governor, John Noble Goodwin. There's a new building for changing exhibits and comes complete with a very nice movie theater. There's a transportation museum where we got to see some wonderful examples of wooden wheeled bicycles, a stagecoach and other horse-drawn vehicles, as well as a 1920s-era Star automobile owned by Sharlot Hall. I was especially interested in the Star since my mom learned to drive in a Star back in the 1940s.

Also on the property was a very nice 19th century Victorian cottage once owned by one of the richest families in Arizona. The cottage now plays host to a very fine gift shop where you can buy anything from books on the history of the area to a myriad of handmade craft items

The docents at the museum proved to be some of the most knowledgeable and helpful we've encountered on our travels. In fact, they enthusiastically shepherded us from room to room, explaining each and every item on display and answering all of our questions.

Consequently, the morning hours flew by swiftly and before we knew it we'd run well past the lunch hour. Making our escape, we headed back for the RV, parked ever so patiently in a shopping mall parking lot about six blocks away. Then, while Concetta set up our lunch I dashed over to Albertson market and grabbed a few items for our pantry. Then, lunch over, we spent an hour or so driving some of the roads to the west of Prescott just to see the country. It's very, very pretty here and I suspect a tad more pleasant living here than at the lower elevations found in Phoenix and Tuscon. Prescott is just a little higher in elevation than our Carson City altitude of 4,700 feet. Prescott, as I learned today, lies at approximately 5,500 feet.

So now, we're kicking back, enjoying a cocktail, and catching up on the news of the day. Coach is all set up, showers are out of the way, and we're looking forward to dinner in about an hour. I discovered yesterday, at the suggestion of the camp host here at Point of Rocks, that I can pick up television signals in the RV if we have a wind-up antenna. Well, now, I always knew I had one of those, but since I hadn't really received any formal instructions from the previous owner about how to operate it, I'd been content to just ignore it. Of course, the camp host was rather surprised to hear I'd never tried using it and told me to just crank it up, connect the cable, tell the TV to run through the channel search routine, and presto, you're in business, she said.

Naturally, I doubted it would be that easy. But, hey, she was right. All last evening we watched TV via our rooftop antenna and the picture was just as crystal-clear as had we been connected to cable TV. Boy was I surprised. Now, all I have to do is remember to crank the dang thing down again before I drive anywhere.

Sedona, Jerome, and on to Prescott, Arizona

Well, you know what they say about best laid plans, sometimes they never come to fruition. This morning the Arizona weather girl seemed confident that snow was coming to the Arizona highlands. Places like Sedona where we were parked and, more importantly, Flagstaff, where we intended to camp next were definitely, she said, going to get some snow. Now we haven't minded the cooler temperatures we've encountered since we headed north from Carefree, but snow is a different story. I have no idea how this RV is going to react to the white stuff. So, deciding to be better safe than sorry, we turned west this morning out of Sedona instead of continuing north. Instead of Flagstaff we set our course for Prescott.

Right now we're having lunch on the museum grounds in the thriving town of Jerome, a stop which was recommended by a reader of this blog as being a place we shouldn't miss. Blog reader, Richard, was absolutely right. Jerome is charming and the museum here is outstanding. Jerome was a turn-of-the-century mining camp that largely followed the traditional boom and bust lifespan. We're used to that story in our home state of Nevada where gold and silver never seemed to last long enough for a community to become permanent.

In Jerome the miners were searching for copper. Starting with underground shafts, stopes, and galleries, the miners eventually transitioned to open pit mining in search of riches. At the height of the mining boom Jerome was home to some 15,000 people. Once the boom had ended the total population shrank to several hundred. Today, I think that the town sports a population of something like 500 folks.

As with most towns, mother nature exacted a heavy price on the town's residents before she gave up her riches. Fires routinely leveled dozens of houses and businesses. Mine accidents felled the town's sturdy miners. And the constant removing of the lower stratas of earth to recover ore sometimes caused whole sections of the town to simply fall into pits or, in some cases, toboggan down the hillside to end up a couple hundred feet from their original positions.

Concetta and I learned these fascination facts and more at the wonderful museum that sits below the town proper in a converted estate once belonging to one of the town's prominent residents. Everything from intricate models depicting all the underground workings of the various mines, to a fantastic rocks and minerals collection are housed in the museum. Of special interest to me was an outdoor display of rock crushing equipment. A steam-powered stamp mill was displayed right alongside a arrastre, a primitive ore reduction method comprising a circular, rock-lined pit in which broken ore is pulverized by stones, attached to horizontal bars. The bars are often attached to donkeys or mules who travel endlessly around the circle reducing the rock to powdery ore. I know from my reading as a child that the Spanish conquistadors of the fifteen and sixteen centuries used this same method of processing ore.

I asked the museum's ranger employees if they would advise me to try and pilot our thirty-foot RV through the tiny streets of Jerome so we could park somewhere and walk around. The museum is some distance downhill from the town. They told me that they wouldn't recommend me doing that. However I could park just outside the museum's gate and walk the mile or so up the mountain if we wanted to tour the town. Concetta and I elected not to take that on today since we spent much of yesterday doing exactly that same thing. So, for this time, we had to pass on the further adventures to be found in Jerome. We'd like to come back some day and visit again. We're sure that the effort would be amply rewarded.

Since we couldn't drive through town in order to continue on our way to Prescott, we elected to retrace some of our steps down the mountain, catch highway 260 that promised to intersect Highway 17 south of Sedona, and then catch Highway 169 that headed toward Prescott. It was a little bit out of our way, but the drive was wonderful. Along the way we found a market for stocking up our larder, a gas station to fill our tank, and navigate to the one and only RV camp on the outskirts of Prescott that promised full hookups.

So, here we are for the next two nights. Tomorrow we're going to leave camp and drive into downtown Prescott for a fun-filled day of walkabout. The camp hostess told us that there's a great museum in town, a Wally World for our essentials, and a great place to park near the center of town. What more could we want? So, until then, I'll say good night.

Sidewalking in Sedona

Today we set out on foot to explore Sedona, Arizona. Fortunately for us, our chosen RV camp site is just a half mile down the road from town. The morning skies looked dark and ominous as we set out and often scattered drops of rain fell on our straw-hatted heads. Only occasionally did the sun poke through the overcast as we walked, making for a pretty gloomy morning. Still, all the Sedona shops were so upbeat and brightly colored that you couldn't help by feel cheerful at all the sparkle and cleverly designed decor.

Most of the shops are pretty repetitious and it was easy to skip the Chinese-made trinkets in favor of the slightly more upscale shops selling some very nice art that we could in no way afford. I enjoyed the art galleries the most. Speaking as a person who was born with a modicum of photographic ability but came away with little or no talent when applying brush to canvas or clay to potter's wheel. Naturally, I have taken art classes in the past but never caught the spark. My paintings looked a lot like my efforts in the third grade. And trying to produce things like Terracotta pots on the spinning potter's wheel always ended in failure. Most times, I start with a vase and end up with something that resembled an ash tray. Might have been okay if I smoked.

We did have a bit of luck today. Friends whom we met at nephew Marc's house this week also planned to tour to Sedona when they left Carefree today. This was lucky for us since Concetta had forgotten her charging unit to her Kindle back at Marc's house. Our plans were to meet up and have lunch sometime at midday. At the time these plans were made I had envisioned the town of Sedona as much smaller than it actually turned out to be. As midday approached I began to be a tad apprehensive that we would never be able to zero in on the same location to make the transfer in an area that none of the participants were familiar with.

Wonder of wonders! Just before lunchtime we got a call and after a bit of filling each other in on our location based on surrounding buildings, it turned out that both couples were standing about 200 feet from each other. Amazing.

Property transfer out of the way, we learned that the couple, Gordon and Rita, intended to take to the back country and burn some calories. That didn't fit with my intention to ADD some calories to my diet. So, as easily as we had met, we parted company and Concetta and I crossed the street to the Oaxaca Mexican restaurant and proceeded to appreciate the grandeur of the surrounding sedimentary rocks through a large, plate glass window.

Now anyone who knows me knows that Mexican food is at the tail end of my preferred culinary interests. I never like the heavy feeling you leave the restaurant with. But in recent years I've been ordering the fish tacos and that seems to fit better with my desire to eat somewhat lighter. Of course, I couldn't pass up the sopapillas, which sounded just great. The last time we had sopapillas we thought were worth telling anyone about we were in Albuquerque and the year was 1976. Now the sopapillas today were still not as good as we'd had in Albuquerque, but they got close, which is reason enough to eat at Oaxaca if you ask me. By the way, the fish tacos were close to the best I've ever had and I heartily recommend them.

Lunch over, we began our leisurely walk back to the RV park accompanied by a light sprinkle of rain. Now and again when the rain would come down harder we'd duck into a handy art gallery or t-shirt shop and spend a few minutes. Eventually we came to the shopping area known as Tlaquepaque. Though I wasn't interested in the wares on sale there, the architecture was fascinating. Though I'm sure the center is not very old, the builders had endeavored to make it look otherwise. The whole center was laid out in narrow streets, alleys, and lanes and the shops were largely Spanish in style. Though the gray skies made photography difficult, I had a great time grabbing a shot here and there as the sun poked through and gave me a fleeting look at the rustic beauty of the place. Concetta consented, after a time, to rest on a nearby bench while I dashed here and there looking for the perfect shop. Not sure I got it but it was lots of fun trying.

After our foray at Tlaquepaque, we headed back to the RV in earnest. Thankfully it wasn't far for the rain seemed intent on getting us wet this time. Our day in Sedona had gone largely contrary to our immediate plans. It would have been interesting to try one of the many jeep tours, but with the skies threatening, the air less than balmy, and the wind blowing like it had somewhere very important to get to, we decided to curtail our exploration to the local city streets. Tomorrow I think we'll be headed up toward the grand canyon. Maybe we can catch some good weather and try a jeep tour up there. I think Sedona might be worth a return visit someday. We'd really like to get back away from the glitz of main street and see some of the countryside. Until then, we just have to be satisfied with our rainy walk today.

By the way, if you're coming here I definitely recommend reservations no matter what you're planning to do. We just barely found a spot in this RV park. Had we been just moments later all the spots would have been filled. Our friends (who delivered the charging device) told us that they had to stay in Flagstaff, about 25 miles away, as no rooms were available here at a reasonable price. This is a very popular place for the 20-something crowd and people who are interested in back country exploring. They rent 4x4 vehicles of several sorts here to the public and there are a dozen different back country jeep tour companies at your disposal. So, enough said. Come here and have a great time. You just need to plan ahead.

Being Carefree in, where else? Carefree, AZ

After leaving San Diego, we turned our trusty RV toward Arizona. The first night we only drove as far as El Centro, California, where we found a perfectly delightful RV park snuggled in alongside a golf course, itself lying next to a small lake. Since we were about the only transient folks in the park, we saw only a handful of others. The rest had evidently pulled up stakes and headed for cooler climes.

When we left El Centro the next morning we headed slightly east then north toward Quartzite, Arizona, a place we came to realize was a favorite of the off-road crowd who were camped everywhere dunes were to be found. Every passing truck or motor home was pulling a trailer full of "toys" and every distant dune top contained some sort of off road vehicle.

Carefree is located near Scotsdale, though a little higher in elevation and further away from the population center. Marc has just this past month managed to pull off a major coup and purchase a 4-bedroom, 4-bath house in a wonderful neighborhood full of slump stone, ranch-style haciendas, an incredible galaxy of native plants, and carefully yet rustically manicured yards. The temperature while we were there was just as close to perfect as one may find on planet earth, with cool nights and warmish days that just beg you to talk a walk and pick out your future home away from home.

Of course, the Scotsdale environs are only heaven on earth for seven or eight months of the year. After that, it gets blast furnace hot and defies you to venture forth from the confines of your air conditioned quarters. But that's why God created snowbirds. Still, if you wanted a place to escape the unpredictable winters in northern climes you could do no better than to dash right down to Carefree, Arizona, and plant your flag in the front yard of some house with a "for sale" sign and go find the realtor to arrange the sale.

Marc and Nancy, Concetta's nephew and his wife, are in Arizona because Nancy was transferred by her company to the Scotsdale office. Marc, an electrician, is probably going to find ample work since he's so close to urban Phoenix. I suspect that Marc is going to have all the work he can handle once he gets established.

So, for the past couple of days we've been vegging at Marc and Nancy's house, just kicking back, enjoying adult refreshments, and watching a veritable marathon of American Pickers on the tube. Mark gave us a wonderful tour yesterday of downtown Carefree, which, to some extent, has suffered just as much as everywhere else as far as business closings go. Still, we were just very impressed with the little town for its upscale shops, streets free of litter, and remarkable absence of graffiti.


This morning, after a large helping of Mark's famous oatmeal, a terrific slice of home-grown grapefruit courtesy the neighbor across the street, and some downright unforgettable freshly-ground coffee, we unplugged our lifeline from Marc's garage, took the RV off the blocks, and headed down the hill in the direction of the Carefree highway (don't you just love saying that?). After filling the tanks, both gasoline and propane, we set out to find Highway 17 which runs toward Flagstaff.

For most of the early part of the day we just cruised and listened to our David Baldacci murder mystery on the CD player. The closer we got to northern Arizona the redder the dirt became. A few miles south of Flagstaff we caught sight of references to Sedona. Since neither one of us had every been to Sedona we took the off-ramp and began our trek up Highway 179 in search of our quarry.

Wow! We knew Sedona was popular, but we were unprepared for the quantity of fellow vacationers we encountered. Fortunately, we arrived at our AAA-recommended camp site and managed to get a two-day gig. The chap standing just behind me was only able to get a one-day spot. That's how busy this place is.

Tomorrow we'll be seeing just what sights we can take in up the road in town. Hopefully, we'll find some place to experience Sedona without having to climb over other globe trekkers to do it.

Now for the bad news: while maneuvering the rig into position in our camp tonight I "kissed" the cab-over into a inconveniently-located tree limb and crunched the fiberglass. I suspect it's going to take someone very talented to fix it but hopefully if we don't get any downpours I can keep the coach weather tight with some strategically-placed plastic and tape.

Still, you know what they say, no pain no gain. We've already experienced some wear and tear on the coach in the form of a fractured rooftop fridge cover up in Montana last fall. I know I'm going to occasionally bang this truck up a bit since it's so damn long, but anything is fixable with enough time, talent, and money and we'll just have to tough it out and get it fixed when we get home. It's either that, or we can drive it up to the Dakotas and find a oil rig worker who desperately needs a place to live, sell it him, and then fly home. The thought crossed my mind.

Anyway, that's all for now. Take care and don't let the bangs and scrapes of life keep you off the highways. Go out and do it...NOW!





Wow!