Our boondock stop near Cottonwood over, it was time to find hookups for chores and laundry, the usual dance steps for many boondocking aficionados. Since we had Page, Arizona in our sites for the next stop, we decided to return to the Grand Canyon Railroad RV Park in Williams. We stayed 3 days and during that time we took the opportunity to check out Sycamore Falls on the Sycamore Rim Trail of the Kaibab Nat’l Forest. It was a short ride on dirt road to the trailhead, then a very short walk to the falls area. Our good fortune at least being consistent (insert sarcasm here), with the current drought Arizona has endured Sycamore Falls was non-existent upon our arrival. But we did get to watch some mountain climbers practicing their craft on one of the canyon walls.

While here in Williams, we learned another valuable (read “expensive”) lesson. About 2-3 days prior to getting here the beast took on a nasty star chip just under the passenger windshield wiper blade. Being on the move but looking toward the Tiffin rally in Casa Grande in a few weeks, we fatefully decided to wait until we got settled there to get the star chip repaired. Unfortunately, when we woke the last morning in Williams, the star had morphed into a lengthy crack headed toward the upper corner of the windshield. Oh well, like I always say when the topic of planning our travels comes up, “plans change daily and twice on Sundays!” So good-bye, Page, and hello, Orangewood RV Sales & Service in Surprize, AZ. We found them on the Tiffin website as an authorized repair facility, & Jeanne looked them up on the website rvservicereviews.com and found they received favorable reviews. We drove into the business and found they had 4 electric hookup sites in their front lot for full-timers like us to set up in while getting work done. We stayed a couple of nights there, then found it was supposed to take about a week for the new glass to arrive. We chose to take off and found the Leaf Verde RV Resort in Buckeye to hole up for the week. This is a very nice RV resort and we spent the week lollygagging in the pool and sun. I also used the time to wash the beast and put a coat of wax on it. We returned to Orangewood RV and got fixed up without a glitch. These folks were great to us and I would recommend them for any service on your rig if you happen to be in the area. The lesson we learned here—you can get your star chips fixed (free with our current MH insurance plan, run by the Safelite folks), or wait until it cracks and you gotta dump a truckload of money on your deductible for a couple of thousand bucks worth of new glass.

New windshield in, we decided to move in closer toward Casa Grande with the rally getting nigh. I have heard other full-timing RVers accounts of visiting Picacho Peak State Park, and we have driven by it several times in our travels without stopping by. So it seemed as good a time as ever to check it out. The busy season (bearable temperatures) was just about wound down and we had no problem getting a spot. There is not much other than hiking to do here, but the trails are well worth the effort. We started with the Sunset Trail which winds around to the south of Picacho Peak and up to an intersection with Hunter’s Trail, which takes you all the way to the top. We had Woodrow Wilson (Woody) with us on the Sunset Trail, until we got about 2 miles into it and reached a vertical wall with cables anchored into it for climbing. Since Woody has an absence of opposable thumbs, that was our turnaround point for that day. But the next day we started at the Hunter’s Trail trailhead and climbed without Woody. This was a pretty drastic climb in spots, I guess it is rated as “difficult” as far as hike trails go. But we made it to the very top!

3 days at Picacho Peak State Park and we decided we would treat ourselves and move over to the site of the Allegro Club rally, Palm Creek Golf & RV Resort in Casa Grande, AZ. We were a week early for the rally, but, what the heck, we could indulge ourselves. The resort was very large, a couple or three thousand sites and growing, surrounding an 18-hole par 3 golf course. Outstanding facilities including 3 pools, tennis courts, pickleball courts, shuffleboard, horseshoes, lawn bowling, exercise room, numerous crafts rooms (pottery, quilting, silversmithing, stained glass, lapidary, just to name a few), RC airplane field area, softball field, and a bandstand for outdoor concert events. And it is a very busy snowbird park. So we used the week to enjoy the facilities and count down until the rally, which starts tomorrow.  

I’ll let you know how the rally goes…