We had a fun trip from the Arizona desert to the shores of the Pacific Ocean this weekend. The winding roads between Borrego Springs and San Diego would have been better in a sports car or a motorcycle than in our RV, but we managed. We drove through the quaint little town of Julian but were unable to pick up a pie at the famous Julian Pie Company because of the lack of parking for an RV, plus there was a long line of customers waiting at the door. Of course, we had to get a shrimp sandwich and some smoked salmon at our favorite San Diego restaurant; Point Loma Seafoods. Temperature-wise, we went from 104° yesterday to 65° today, but it's a nice change from our always-sunny Arizona.
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Beautiful weather and scenery at our go-to camping area to get away from the hot Phoenix summer heat. Pine Flat is about 15 miles south of Williams, Arizona. About half of the drive is on a decent dirt road, which traverses a few normally-dry creek beds that required me to stop and move some rocks out of the way because of the heavy monsoon rains they've had up there recently. We might have to get a 4x4 RV next time!
Click above to play video/slide show.
Wonderful two-week trip from Arizona to Washington via Utah, Idaho and Oregon and back via Oregon and California. Places we stayed:
June 30th through July 6th, 2021 at the now-closed Chula Vista RV Resort.
Pam and I enjoyed a day-trip to Sedona today. We parked and ate lunch at the old Sedona Cultural Center grounds and practically had the entire park to ourselves. Overnight camping isn't allowed there, but the view was spectacular. Along the way, we saw this crazy, out of place looking house barely clinging to a cliff. The view is probably spectacular from there, but it just doesn't look very safe to me!
One reason we bought this Winnebago View RV equipped the way we did it, was to be able to dry camp (no water, electric, sewer). This was our first night out dry-camping, and it exceeded all our expectations. We didn't run out of water, we didn't overflow the gray or black water tanks, and we hardly noticed any discharge of the lithium batteries overnight, thanks to the 200 watts of solar on the roof.
We had a beautiful spot (#F25) in the Lynx Lake Campground, just outside of Prescott, Arizona. It was quite windy with gusts up to 30 mph, but the winds died down enough that could enjoy a nice campfire and roast s'mores. I like the fact that you can reserve spaces in advance in this campground, although, Friday and Saturday nights are already reserved far in advance, so we stayed on a Sunday night which allowed us to miss all the weekend traffic on I-17. Looking forward to coming back to Lynx Lake Campground again. We stayed three nights at the lush, green, Emerald Desert RV Resort in Palm Desert, California March 27-30, 2021 and spent a couple of days exploring the area. We didn't plan on driving as far up the Santa Rosa and San Jacinto Mountains, but once you start up the Pines to Palms Highway 72, there really isn't any room to turn around until you reach the viewpoint near the top of the road. It's an extremely curvy road, but well worth it for the view from the top.
The drive through the main drag in Palm Springs was fun since we usually just drive past on I-10. Even with the Pandemic still going on, there were a lot of people strolling through the shops and restaurants so we just drove through. Maybe next time, we can enjoy some good food at the restaurants. On Monday, we took the advice of the tour websites and did a day trip to the Joshua Tree National Park. We're glad we did, because it was really quite a site to see with the huge boulders and large Joshua trees. Because of the crowds, there wasn't much room to park our RV, so we weren't able to get out and hike the trails except for Skull Rock, which was fun to see. The drive back to Phoenix was very rough because of the high winds all the way through California and Arizona. I was wishing that our high-profile RV was a low-profile Corvette, but we just took it slow and made it home OK. As we've done with each of our new RVs over the years, we made the short trip to Lake Pleasant for our inaugural first camping trip to make sure everything was working correctly before we head out on longer trips. Someone else must have cancelled at the last minute because space #D15 at the Maricopa County Parks Roadrunner campground was available. It was a beautiful campsite overlooking the lake with many people in their sailboats out enjoying the 65+ degree day on Saturday.
I know, I know. I said we were done with RVing a year ago, but the RV-world has dragged us back in again. After toying around with the idea of buying a cabin in the woods in Show Low, Arizona, we ultimately decided that we really like the freedom to go anywhere that an RV gives us, so we placed an order in October, 2020, for the newer version of the Winnebago RV we had before and took delivery of it on January 22, 2021. This one is a 2021 Winnebago View 24D model. We upgraded to lithium batteries for longer dry-camping trips and choose the twin reclining theater seats over the standard booth because we found that the booth just didn't give us a comfortable place to sit. We'll have to put up with making reservations farther in advance because so many people are buying RVs so they can escape the Coronavirus in their own portable houses.
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Pam & Paul Thompson
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