We left the Yuma area and headed northeast to Phoenix just a 184 mile trip. Between Yuma and Phoenix is the same thing as between San Diego and Yuma, nothing but loads of sand and rocks.
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| Gas and restroom break |
The one thing I found fascinating is the Gila Bend Solana generating Station that we passed on AZ route 8. It is the largest molten salt solar generation plant in the world that just opened in 2013. It is supposed to deliver 280 MW of electricity! That is enough electricity to power 70,000 homes!! The plant is HUGE at 3 square miles!
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| Gila Bend solar power plant |
We arrived at the Royal Palms RV Park around 2pm where we have a confirmed reservation. Good timing we thought because we had made plans to visit friends Don and Roe for dinner at 4pm.
However, the park gave us a sight we could not possibly get into. The sight was supposed to be a pull through but wasn’t; it was a back in for a trailer without slides of about 25 feet long. The next sight they gave us had a shed sitting on it! Patty is arranging all of this on the phone with the office while we are driving around the park. They tell her they will find a site and call her right back. After about 20 minutes Patty has to call back the park to see what was happening with getting us a site. Now the office gives us a back in site that they said was a pull through but we can fit, barely! We are actually sitting on 2 sites and our 5th wheel nose is over the sidewalk. We had at one point 6 people helping to get us into this site, which was pretty frustrating for Patty.
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| And this is with us backed up a foot into the site behind us! |
OK, now we are in and set up and it is 4pm! We head out to the truck and Patty said that it looks like the truck is leaking. I thought it was the AC at first but after we pulled out it became evident real quick that it was not the AC dripping. We are losing antifreeze! The truck is not overheating so we go ahead and get to our friends Roe & Don's house and we make arrangements for a rental car right away. It’s a Friday evening and I know we won’t get anywhere with service until at least Monday and then most likely we won’t see the truck back until Tuesday or Wednesday.
Don drove me to the enterprise rental place and I picked up a Ford Focus. We were back to Don and Roe's house a little before 6pm. We have been through this with the truck before so we knew that we would need a rental car so might as well just get it right away. Now we can relax and have nice social time with friends and not worry about how we are getting around. Patty and I will take the truck to the nearest Ford service center, Bell Ford, in the morning.
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| Our little red Ford Focus (go-kart) |
On Saturday, Patty and I got the truck to Bell Ford about 7:30am. The Ford service agent told me that he probably wouldn’t get to the truck until Monday morning. He has a small crew without a diesel mechanic on Saturdays. I pretty much knew that so it wasn’t a surprise. After that we went back to the RV to finish up our morning routine, check up on the news on the internet and then I did my 3 mile walk intervals routine.
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| Took these while doing my walk intervals in the RV Park |
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| Somebody has a sense of humor! 350 miles to the beach! That would be California |
At noon we went back to Don and Roe's to attend a Cajun Food and Music Festival in Chandler AZ. We went with them and their daughter Erica and a couple of their local friends. This festival is held every year but I believe it was the first time it was held here in Chandler. Chandler is about a 30 minute drive from their house.
It was a nice day outside in the sun listening to live music and eating Cajun food with some beer. What can be bad about that! We really enjoy the dry heat of the desert climate here. It was around 90 with 10% humidity so it felt great. We still needed to be in the shade just because it is very intense without any moisture in the air.
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| The music stage at the Cajun fest |
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| From Left to right: Don, Rosalie, Patty, and me |
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| Patty and her new stretch handle. We each purchased one here at the festival |
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| They had corn hole set up at the festival |
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| And we can't leave out the smoked dog treats! |
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| A fun watermelon eating contest. Winner got $100! |
I made the mistake of ordering from the wrong food vendor. I ordered some fried catfish and waited 45 minutes to get it. They weren’t that busy it was that they were just very unorganized. I think that they had too much on their menu too. Yeah, I became a restaurant efficiency critic because I had so much time to watch how they did things! The fish was great when I finally got it though. They were cooking everything from scratch. I watched them cook my fish so I saw how it was made. It was hand breaded and individually fried in a separate fryer they had for fish. The problem was that they did this individual attention to each of like 30 items on their menu and there was just 2 people doing all of the work.
We ate, drank some beer, and talked until around 4pm and then headed back. Sitting in the heat eating and drinking made us all tired so that basically killed the day. It was fun and we enjoyed it but were ready for some sleep soon.
Sunday we went back to Don and Roe's and we brought lunch. Patty made some sloppy joes before we went over and we had some slider rolls in the fridge we needed to use, perfect! Their granddaughter Sammy was in their care so we got meet her. We didn’t stay too long and headed back to the RV for nap!
Monday Morning just as Bell Ford had promised they called with the diagnosis on our truck. They did a pressure test on the cooling system and found the water pump was bad, which I expected, and the radiator was cracked, which I didn’t expect. Anyway, while in there I agreed to have the belt tensioner and the thermostat replaced too. The truck would be ready for us to pick it up tomorrow, Tuesday afternoon and the cost was $3,600! That is the most expensive repair I have had done on the truck to date. Usually the repairs to this truck are around $2,000 and we usually have one of these repairs each year. Let’s hope this is the only one like this this year! The truck is now 10 years old and we heavily use it!
Now that we know the truck will be back on Tuesday we made plans to leave town heading east on Wednesday. Before we leave though we went out to have dinner at a chain steak house we had never been to before, Black Angus. We went and now we can say that our favorite is still Texas Roadhouse. Actually, the Black Angus was pretty good. We both had the prime rib and it was really good. We just like the atmosphere better at the Roadhouse. The Black Angus tries to be more high end with its atmosphere, less noisy and no peanut shells on the floor type of place. Also, we only had the prime rib, so we don’t know about their steaks.
So that’s it for our Phoenix stay and now we are headed further east toward Florida.
Many thanks to Don and Roe for their hospitality and there help with getting the truck fixed!
Stay tuned!
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