Welcome to Red Dog Adventures

We had a nice lazy day today. No need to get up at dawn and walk Maverick, even though it is bittersweet because we miss our buddy. We ate on Main street at the No Name Saloon. The Saloon provides great brew-pub cuisine. We drove around for a little site seeing, I got a haircut, and rented my skis for Mon through Wed. It should be great fun.

We got up extra early this morning so we could move the coach to storage. We got it parked in a VERY TIGHT spot by about 7am. How tight was it? I forgot to take a picture, but we had 4-6 inches clearance on each side of the coach. I couldn’t get in the spot without rubbing wires that were sticking out about an inch on the semi trailer next to me with my mirror.  I dare anyone to get their 40ft coach into a tighter spot!  It is a 6 1/2 hour drive to Park City so most of the day was taken up by the drive. The temperatures along the way dropped to 14 deg. The drive through the Virgin River Gorge on I-15 was an unexpected scenic surprise. The drive takes us tantalizingly close to Bryce Canyon National Park, Zion National Park, Cedar Break National Monument, and the North-East Grand Canyon. We plan on returning someday with warmer weather.

We arrived in Park City about 3:30 to drop Maverick off at the pet resort. The Wyndham time share does not accept pets. The pet resort looks great but it’s still hard for us to let go of Red Dog for a whole week. The Wyndham is great. It’s located on the slopes of the Canyons ski resort. The resort is a ski-in and ski-out location with on-site ski rental. Pretty awesome. We ate dinner at Maxwells. Maxwells is a very nice Italian restaurant best known for pizza. The pizza was pretty darn good.

 

Today we went to see the Hoover Dam and Lake Mead. We had a great time. When we parked at the dam visitor center the young attendant asked us if Maverick was a service dog (wink-wink). It is against their policy to let pets walk on the dam nor be left in the car. Mav was a great service animal. We saw several other service animals with dubious qualifications. We also went to the Lake Mead National Recreation Area visitor center and scenic overlooks. We had lunch at a local hot spot in Boulder City called the Southwest Diner. It was excellent. It was in the 40’s today and pretty chilly.

Starting Saturday for 7 days we will be in Park City Utah for a ski holiday. Today I worked to get a storage spot for the RV for next week and reserving this same RV park for March 3-6 for our return. I finally found an affordable storage facility but they required an extraordinary amount of paperwork. I met an old friend, Tom “Rags” Ragsdale for lunch in Henderson (a suburb of Las Vegas). Tom and I became good friends while working the Joint Strike Fighter program in the late 90’s. Tom ran the El Segundo targeting FLIR development team for me. Tom retired Raytheon about 11 years ago and we have managed to stay in touch since (a miracle for me). It was great reminiscing and getting caught up after all of these years. This afternoon we saw the Blue Man show at the Luxor. It was great fun.

Today we made the 2 1/2 hour drive to Las Vegas. The drive was pretty desolate.  We booked at Las Vegas RV Resort.  The resort is gated and pretty large.   The dog-walk areas are pretty small for a big guy like Maverick.  We plan on staying here in Las Vegas until Saturday morning. Once settled in here, we cruised the strip and Fremont street. The rest of the evening we just chilled at the coach.

As planned, we moved the coach to overflow parking this morning. It’s just a parking lot without any hookups and became quite crowded. The spot we claimed is directly facing the water/beach. Super nice. We only ran the generator a little in the late afternoon as a courtesy to the many close neighbors. The sunset at the coach was beautiful.

Last night in Quartzsite was very windy, so much so it kept us up some in the night. Today we headed out for Lake Havasu City, AZ and the wind remains super high. The new steering gearbox was really nice under these conditions. As a matter of fact, the longer I drive the coach the more I appreciate what a nice upgrade the new gearbox is.

We were surprised by the scenic mountains along Hwy 95 from Quartzsite to Lake Havasu City. It is really pretty. The road follows the Colorado River much of the way and has beautiful rock formations in the mountains along the way. Lake Havasu was bigger than we expected. We made reservations a few days ago for tonight at Lake Havasu City State Park. The park is very nice and provides 50A electric and water. We waited in line to dump our holding tanks on the way in. We want to stay two nights here but could only get reservations for one. The Park has a large “overflow camping” area that is a paved parking lot with no hook ups. We plan on staying tomorrow night in overflow.

 

Today Mav got me up at 0715 to see the sunrise and pee. I promptly crawled back in bed for an additional hour of sleep. No need to conserve too much water or holding tank since we are only here for 2 nights so I took a nice long shower. We checked out the RV flea markets and even bought a new patio mat. We have a very nice and large patio mat but it’s a bit of a pain to take out and put up. At the flea market we bought a smaller easier to manage mat for $20. I think we will enjoy it, especially for short stays.
Tomorrow we have reservations for Lake Havasu State Park. It is also a big snowbird location. We wanted two nights but could only secure one. We may stay there an extra night in overflow depending on availability. The nice thing about pressing forward to Quartzsite is Lake Havasu is only about 1 1/2 hours away. An easy commute tomorrow.

A common theme online is that newbie full timers like us travel too far/hard early on. The rule is 2-2-2. That is no more than 200 miles a day, no driving after 2pm, and stay at least two nights. Also, fulltimers say they hate a schedule because its forces travel decisions and adds stress to the journey. We definitely appreciate both of these idioms. I feel we have pressed harder than we might otherwise due to our breakdown and ski vacation fixed schedule. I really look forward to after the vacation when we don’t have a fixed schedule to meet. That said….. We were going to be back in McKinney in June due to our planned Saint Thomas vacation. That vacation was cancelled due to the Hurricanes last year wrecking havoc. Now we are notionally planning Alaska this year and that could dictate schedule all over again. What wonderful problems to have.

If you were wondering….sitting here at the dining room table, looking at mountains in 70 deg weather is SO MUCH better than working for a living. Hopefully we can keep it up financially.
THIS IS AWESOME!!!!!!!

 

This morning we changed our plans. We were planning on staying in Phoenix but I realized that just outside of Phoenix is a RV Mecca, Quartzsite AZ. I only know about Quartzsite by its online reputation. This area  normally has less than population of 1000-ish during the summer. During the peak of winter the population is as much as 1 million (cue Doctor Evil voice here). I think the peak is during the big RV show that was 1/20-1/28 this year. The cool thing is this is a big BLM free camping site. What is BLM you ask? Bureau of Land Management. BLM camping is federally controlled land typically free to camp up to 14 days in a 28 day period. Quartzsite has many cheap full hook-up RV parks, but if you are willing to go “dry camping” in the desert it is totally free. On the RV forums Quartzsite is famous for friends meeting up in the desert. I just had to check it out. So……

 

Quartzsite is pretty cool. The BLM land is vast and has many places to camp. The BLM sites are in the middle of the rocky desert. We picked a site only hundreds of yards from a nice paved road. Quartzsite is surrounded by desert mountains and is much more picturesque than I expected. In a rig like ours with generator and satellite it’s still not exactly roughing it. The nearest camper is about 100 yards away but we could have easily found a spot with no-one closer than 1000 yards. It’s pretty close to town at about 10 miles. The weather at this time is absolutely perfect. Very dry, high 40’s at night and 75 peak today. The sunsets are awesome as only the desert or ocean can provide. Quartzsite is only here because of RV’rs and everything caters to us. There are 3 or 4 big RV flea markets with all sorts of tools, RV supplies, and curio’s. I was pleasantly surprised. We are staying here 2 nights, totally free.

We got here about 4pm and just ate here in the coach. We watched the sunset with a nice Margarita in hand. We ran the Genset (Generator Set) about 2 hours and watched a movie. Sweet.

 

This morning we took off for Seguaro National Park (East). It is only about 10 miles north of the RV park. There is an 8 mile driving loop that takes you through a lot of the terrain. There are very large and old Sequaro Cacti. Donna read that a Sequaro gets its first arm around 75 years old. Wow. There are many throughout this landscape. Donna also read (Wikipedia) that the Seguaro’s are highly protected and only found in Arizona. They are very cool.

We programmed in the Sonora Desert Museum into google maps and headed that way. That museum combines a desert museum, botanical garden, and zoo. Sounds fun. Oops, on the way we found ourselves driving by Davis Monthan AFB. This is the giant boneyard of aircraft. There were hundreds of old C-130’s and other aircraft visible from the road. Also directly on our route was the PIMA Air and Space Museum. It seemed silly to pass it up on our route so we decided to see it first. Surprise, the museum is Maverick friendly so we put on the leash and headed out. The museum is great. It has 5 hangars full of WWII, and modern aircraft both military and civil. I was pleased to see a Pitts S-1S hanging from the ceiling (that’s what I flew for 17 years). It also has about 300 aircraft over 80 acres in outdoor exhibits that are really great (includes a B-36). But….as we left the first hangar the skies opened up. Did we bring the umbrella, No. Did I bring a rain coat, No, not even in the RV (don’t ask). After a very quick run around the yard we ran into the Space hangar literally dripping wet. Maverick didn’t seem to mind at all. Normally the museum runs trams through the outdoor segment but it was too muddy from recent rain. If there was any disappointment it was in the space segment. It seemed pretty lame. I think the great collection of rare aircraft is probably related to the closeness of the boneyard. IF you make arrangements 10 days in advance you can see the boneyard through a bus tour. We didn’t discover that in time.

After the museum we were hungry and had some good local BBQ for lunch. We reconsidered our plans. The rain simply would not let up, in spite of forecasts, so we decided to go to the (indoor) Mini Time Machine of Miniatures Museum. I opted to stay in the car for this one but Donna really enjoyed it. I spent my time fighting with Net Benefits on the phone over their mess up on my Lump Sum pension payment. Donna had much more fun than Mav and I.

We debated about trying for one more night in the RV park so we could see the Sonora Desert Museum. I pinged the front desk and we were going to have to move if we wanted to stay. In the end we decided to move on. By the way, temperatures during the day remained about mid-60’s, so despite the rain we were pretty comfortable.